ABSTRACT
The roughly 10 million Africans transported forcibly to the Americas between 1500 and 1850 were thrust headlong into a bewildering variety of different environments. Some cleared the jungles of South America, others grew sugar on small Caribbean islands, while a smaller number laboured in rice fields and tobacco farms, or on the wharves of ports on the North American mainland. In all these locations, enslaved Africans added to a pre-existing mix of Native Americans, immigrant Europeans and their descendants. Enslaved Africans were never completely isolated from these other populations, although in several Caribbean islands and in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia nine out of ten individuals were enslaved (Goveia, 1965: 203). Historians writing on slavery have scrutinised the lives of the enslaved in detail, carefully documenting, amongst other things, religious experiences, family formation, cultural expression and resistance. Where historians have studied how slaves interacted with other people, they have concentrated on the master/mistress-slave relationship, exploring themes such as paternalism, hegemony and capitalism. The importance of the interaction between owners and the enslaved cannot be underestimated, since the master determined the amount of work required from slaves, the amounts of food and clothing dispensed, and how punishment would be determined and delivered. Trevor Burnard, in Chapter 11 of this volume, explores this relationship in depth. Yet such approaches make it easy to overlook the encounters that enslaved people
throughout the Americas had with people who were neither fellow slaves nor owners. The number of non-slaveholding whites was particularly large in North America, and even in the southern states they outnumbered slaveholders by three to one. Elsewhere in the Americas, Kingston, Havana, Bridgetown and Rio de Janeiro all had an artisanal class that encountered slaves on a daily basis. The 1834 census of Rio de Janeiro, for instance, documented c. 8000 white men of “lower status”, including c. 4000 artisans, 900 street sellers and 1000 servants. A further 500 white women with low-status occupations were recorded in the Rio census. In Savannah, Georgia, more than 1500 white women were recorded as working in the 1860 census, including nearly 300 servants and 45 washerwomen, occupations they shared with free black and enslaved women (Karasch, 1987, 69-73; Lockley, 2002: 102-120). Poorer whites were often concentrated in urban environments since port cities were not only the point of arrival for new European immigrants. Ports also had the critical mass of population required for
artisans to find sufficient work, as well as being favoured locations for factories and shipyards that offered employment. Outside towns, a small number of whites continued to work their own farms on a
subsistence basis. George Pinkard, visiting Barbados in the early nineteenth century, documented the existence of white farmers “who obtain a scanty livelihood by cultivating a small patch of earth, and breeding up poultry, or what they term stock for the markets”.1 These white Barbadians were also known as “Redlegs” and were descendants of the original indentured settlers of the island in the seventeenth century. By the time of the abolition of slavery in 1834 an estimated 8000 “Redlegs” lived in Barbados, working as servants or artisans or on small subsistence farms. In Antigua, by contrast, one visitor in 1774 noted that “everybody in town is on a level as to station”, while in Jamaica the number of poor white farmers was very small since the strong demand for white overseers resulted in high wages that enabled most overseers to purchase their own slaves fairly quickly. Not without reason was it known as the “best poor man’s country” (Goveia, 1965: 213; Burnard, 2004: 247-48). In Brazil, non-slaveholders constituted more than half of the white rural population, and on the North American mainland nonslaveholding farmers dominated certain parts of the southern United States, especially in the mountainous regions of western North Carolina and Virginia and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. In these parts, only about 10 per cent of whites owned slaves. Yet even in the coastal lowcountry of the American South, where some wealthy planters counted their enslaved property in the hundreds, poor whites continued to subsist “on other men’s land, or government districts – always the swamp or the pine barren”, eking out a miserable subsistence on poor-quality lands (Klein and Luna, 2000: 937; Inscoe, 1989; Lockley, 2001: 26-27). In areas with large slave populations, such as coastal areas of North and South America, and the larger Caribbean islands, these poorer whites had numerous opportunities to interact with enslaved people. This chapter examines the significance and importance of these unofficial, and often clandestine, interactions.
