Sugar in the Blood (36 page)

As Robert Cooper rode off into the haunted Caribbean night dressed in his braided officer’s uniform, his mind must have been swirling. He too would have worried about his wife and heir. They were either barricaded on the plantation or part of the white flight to the capital, desperate to avoid being butchered in their beds. He was probably concerned too about his other family, that multi-hued network of women and children he had spawned on the plantation. Would they suffer as a result of their connection to him? Or were they, his flesh and blood, part of this conspiracy? And what of his beloved Burkes? His mind must have raced with images of rebels breaking down the doors and climbing though its windows, burning his furniture and destroying his
valuables, leaving everything he had worked for and built nothing but a pile of smoking wood and ash.

After Robert Cooper met up with his troops, similarly armed with their shining swords and their brown muskets, all was action. The night was alive with torches, the whinnying of horses and the barking of dogs. The officers considered reports from the field; news circulated of nearby skirmishes and armed rebels who attacked and melted into the darkness after it was over. Strategies were considered and plans made. The sense of urgency only increased when news arrived at headquarters that the insurrection had spread to other parts of the island. One of Robert Cooper’s fellow officers recollected the first battle: “
It was about twelve o’clock that we met a large body of the insurgent slaves in the yard of Lowthers plantation, several of whom were armed with muskets, who displayed the colours of the St. Philip Battalion which they had stolen and who, upon seeing the division cheered, and cried out to us, ‘Come on!’ ” Among their banners exhorting other slaves to join them, one provocateur was carrying an eye-catching red flag that depicted a white woman and a black man making love, the ultimate taboo in plantation society.

The sight of the insurgents roaring abuse, shrouded in a haze of smoke against the backdrop of leaping flames and collapsing buildings, inevitably terrified the white colonists. But the slaves were poorly equipped, armed only with machetes and billhooks, cudgels and axes, that they had looted from a hardware store. Therefore they “
were quickly dispersed, upon being fired upon.” Under Colonel John Rycroft Best’s command the militia regrouped. “We pursued and killed some; their rapid flight however saved numbers. We had to march from estate to estate to quell the insurgents for they were all set to plunder and destroy the dwelling houses. We killed about 30 men!” There was only one militia casualty, who was slightly wounded by a pistol shot. “The villain was shot down immediately.”

The victory at Lowthers was greatly facilitated, according to Best, by the “intrepid courage” of the free coloured men who belonged to the militia, who dashed “singly into a house full of rebels without looking behind for support and dug out the fellows.” Their behaviour must have dismayed the slaves, who might have hoped that they would make common cause with them as had happened in Haiti; but the free
coloureds had other ideas. They had been struggling to ameliorate their situation for a long time through constitutional lobbying, and saw this as an opportunity to prove their loyalty. They were rewarded the following year, when they were given the right to give testimony in court against whites, a much-longed-for objective in their fight for civil rights.

After the success at Lowthers, the militia engaged in a mopping-up expedition in which they killed another ten blacks. In retaliation, the slaves resorted to widespread arson. Best reported:

This early defeat was a terrible disappointment for the rebels, who had been counting on victory to pursue their full strategy. Their fortunes continued to decline when the British troops on the island tardily joined the conflict. Cannily, however, the commander of the garrison included among his force 150 black men from the West India Regiment, who were to fight alongside 250 other soldiers.

The black troops of the West India Regiment arrived outside Bayleys plantation on Monday evening at sunset. The battle started at dawn. On spotting the black soldiers, some of the slaves were disorientated. As one officer wrote: “
The insurgents did not think our men would fight against black men, but thank God they were deceived … The conduct of our Bourbons Blacks, particularly the light Company under Captain Smith, has been the admiration of everybody and deservedly.” But these men had their own agenda, too. The army had given them special privileges, they had never been part of the general slave population and they had no allegiance to the rebels. Put on the back foot by the soldiers, the slaves hesitated, and in the firefight that followed, forty rebels were killed and seventy taken prisoner. A large group fled north and reassembled at Golden Grove plantation just under a mile away, where they took over the great house.

Despite their successes, the planters could not yet relax. Other groups of rebels were causing havoc in St. John and Bridgetown. Various contingents were dispatched to deal with these problems and by Tuesday night, according to Colonel Codd, “
conflagrations had ceased and the dismay and alarm which had seized the colonists in a great degree subsided.” By midday on Wednesday the 18th, the revolt was all but contained, the arson had stopped and so had the fighting. At least 150 blacks had been slaughtered and 400 had been arrested. Bussa had been killed in the battle at Bayleys and many of the other ringleaders were dead.

After four days of pandemonium, the most “momentous crisis in the annals of the country was finally over.” Robert Cooper returned to Burkes in a cloud of heat and dust to discover that his family were safe, his plantation had survived virtually unscathed and the slave he had entrusted with his money had buried it safely under a tree. Whether this was out of loyalty or judicious forethought we will never know. But he was rewarded and Robert Cooper claimed that his faith in his slaves was reaffirmed.

In the chaotic and violent aftermath of the rebellion, Burkes became a friendly outpost for militia contingents, whose horses thundered across the countryside, policing the island’s still-smoking landscape to search for runaway rebels and sympathizers as well as to intimidate the general slave population. The atmosphere across the island was one of profound paranoia. The smoke from the fires lingered for weeks alongside the sickly smell of burnt cane and rotting livestock. Refugees were still in the capital, reluctant to return to their plantations, while armed parties of militiamen patrolled ceaselessly. The planters couldn’t understand how the slaves had managed to keep this conspiracy a secret for so long or to plot so extensively. After all, Barbados was small and the rewards for informing on conspiracies lucrative.

In their febrile state the colonists nervously rehashed tales of suspicious slave conversations, or secret slave ceremonies that were alleged to have taken place, or recalled obeah tokens spotted around their plantations such as decapitated roosters, hatchets impaled in doors or marks painted in blood. Their fear made them implement even more brutal methods of domination to control their slaves, and discipline on the plantations became even more draconian. The slave quarters were searched and re-searched, while innocent slaves were roused from their
daily routines, questioned and frequently beaten. There were other, more terrible stories of female slaves being violated and children being tortured.

Unsurprisingly, retaliations by the military were speedy and cruel. Even before official judicial measures were put in place, some British troops were involved in the random executions of rebellious captives and other unlucky slaves. The rebels who were taken alive arguably suffered even more: the methods for extracting information in the sugar islands rivalled those of the Spanish Inquisition and few victims could withstand their torturers’ efforts. Since a slave society functions on fear, trials were as public and as brutal as possible, and often took place at local plantations, where slaves were encouraged or even compelled to attend.

One of the primary “contrivers” of the rebellion, Johnny, the cooper from Bayleys plantation, was transported to the parish of St. Peter and hanged on Trent’s Hill “for the sake of an example to the blacks in that part of Island.” His swift and public execution would be followed by several others: some slaves were shot, others were hanged, while the unlucky ones were tied to wooden poles and burned by slow fire. These unfortunate souls sometimes took three days to burn with no opportunity to pass out or die quickly. “
By these means the planters hoped to imprint indelibly upon the consciousness of the blacks through out the island, the full reality of the consequences of armed rebellion.”

Over the next couple of months hundreds of captives were tried for insurrection, others for inciting blacks to revolt; a few were acquitted, some were sentenced to transportation, some were flogged or maimed. A large proportion, however, were executed. Soon the island’s highways were festooned with the bodies of hanged slaves decomposing in the heat: a feast for the buzzards.

In June 1816 a white Barbadian described the post-rebellion feelings among the blacks and outlined the dangers they posed for colonial society:

Long after martial law was lifted on 12 July, the planters were still not convinced that the rebels were fully rooted out. Inevitably some innocent slaves were convicted, and though a number of their masters interceded on their behalf, it was usually to no avail. In the fervid and pitiless atmosphere that prevailed immediately after the revolt, justice was a mere detail.

In September a small group of blacks was arrested for planning another insurrection. “
Murder was to have been the order of the day,” declared Colonel Best, who acted as judge in their trial. “As on the former occasion, the drivers, rangers, carpenters, and watchmen were chiefly concerned and a few field labourers … I am under no apprehension as to the consequences … It is no longer delusion amongst the slaves … They convinced themselves to be sufficiently numerous to become the masters … of the island.” The desperate rebels had lost the battle, but they did not accept that the war was over. The struggle against slavery continued though at a less organized level.

In fact, although it failed in its immediate aim, the uprising was the beginning of the end of Barbados slave society. The Barbadian colonists realized that no one on the island, white or black, was free from fear. But even though they could never truly feel secure while slavery existed, they couldn’t imagine a world without it.

BUSSA
’
S REBELLION WAS
a profound shock to both the Barbadians and the British. The oldest and apparently most settled of the sugar colonies had suffered a major revolt. If the Barbadian slaves, inhabitants of the cradle of the Empire’s sugar production and prosperity, could erupt into violence, what hope was there for the rest of the region? And yet, for the enslaved population of the island, the aftermath of Bussa’s Rebellion was a profoundly depressing time. Not only were they still slaves, but their hopes and dreams for a better life seemed further away than ever. Ironically, this was in part because of their rebellion. When sensationalized accounts of the uprising had crossed the Atlantic, the British oligarchy was so shaken that even the man whom the slaves believed was their “champion,” William Wilberforce, was forced to back away from the abolitionist cause. The extent of his volte-face was made clear when he sponsored a Parliamentary Address which formally declared that “
there existed no plan for introducing emancipation into the West Indies.”

Locally too, the picture for the slaves seemed bleak. The planters stepped up efforts to consolidate their power, developing better surveillance and more sophisticated political networks to maintain their supremacy. It was no surprise then that Robert Cooper reached the zenith of his career as a planter during this period, expanding his holdings and increasing his wealth, and becoming in the process both socially and politically influential across the colony. Now firmly established as part of the planter elite, he was Robert Cooper Esquire in all his official dealings, but more widely referred to as “the Colonel” because of his exalted position in the island’s militia.

Throughout the 1810s and 1820s, my ancestor proved himself a gleeful capitalist, throwing himself into the pastime that so captivated his Creole contemporaries: the buying and selling of land and slaves. Of the documents that Robert Cooper left behind, the vast majority concerned contracts for sale or purchase. Slaves passed between family and friends with impressive regularity, as did equipment, property and horses. His speculations were further enabled by a legacy from his father, who had died in 1811, leaving him the bulk of his fortune. He was so successful that he managed to generate the funds to acquire another estate entirely: a 100-acre property called Brittons. Situated in the parish of St. Michael, this plantation had been in existence since at least 1766. It proved a good investment. When his estate was sold in 1844 to the Drayton family, the down payment amounted to £2,000.

The scope of Robert Cooper’s ambition can be most clearly demonstrated by the changes he made to Burkes. Originally only sixty-two acres, Burkes had first been extended by a further 150 acres in 1803. Over the subsequent years, Robert Cooper bought up parcel after parcel of adjacent land until he had extended Burkes by another 100 acres. Alongside this, his slave holdings also grew considerably as he required more and more souls to farm his extended property. This burgeoning slave population was achieved largely through natural increase, supplemented by the odd purchase from the regional market of slaves which still thrived after the abolition of the slave trade. A detailed picture of Robert Cooper’s expanding empire is revealed by the yearly slave returns that planters were forced to submit after 1816. These accounts, which the abolitionists demanded in order to keep track of slaves’ movements and prevent illegal trading, provide a detailed picture of life at Burkes plantation in the decades before emancipation.