Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract, page 36
IT WAS ESPECIALLY HARD on Nathaniel Clayton, as an unflagging writer of letters, that the use of his right hand would be badly hampered in his later years by gout. Nathaniel’s poor health was a constant source of anxiety to Dorothy; but it was she who would die first, on 3 August 1827, after a combination of medicine and leeches failed to ease a bowel complaint from which she had been suffering.
I found myself moved quite unexpectedly by Dorothy’s death. Early on during my family research, I went up to Northumberland to explore the Atkinson–Clayton correspondence in the county archives; over three exhilarating days, I read my way through six boxes filled with hundreds of letters, and met many family members for the first time. On the afternoon of my last day at the archives, as closing time approached, I had almost finished going through the final box. Right at the bottom, I found a small roll of paper, the size of a cigar, on which I noticed that Nathaniel had inscribed, in the shaky handwriting of his old age, these words: ‘A lock of my beloved wife’s hair.’[22] I unrolled it, taking care to disturb the contents as little as possible. The hair was mousy brown, very fine, with just a glint of silver. I fought to hold back the tears when I realized what was happening. I was reaching across five generations and touching – yes, actually touching – my great-great-great-great-aunt.
Dorothy’s death was the first of a run of family bereavements over the next few years. I feel bad that Ann hasn’t been a more conspicuous presence in these pages, especially given that she is my direct ancestor, but this is due to none of her letters having survived. One morning in October 1828 she was pacing up and down the breakfast room at Carr Hill, talking with her son George, when suddenly she grabbed the chimneypiece, murmuring, ‘I feel very queer almost as if I was tipsy.’[23] Matt was called in from the garden, and he took her up to her room. She had suffered a massive stroke; soon she was unable to speak, and paralysed down her left side. Aunt Wordsworth rushed across country from Cheshire and found her sister ‘still living tho’ totally insensible to every thing’.[24] Within three days, Ann was dead.
At the time the younger Atkinson boys, Isaac and Dick, were in Liverpool, where they were apprenticed to the merchant house of J. & A. Gilfillan (an arrangement made through their well-connected Littledale uncles). George, in the meantime, was being groomed for a managing role at the Tyne Iron Company, while also acquiring a local reputation as an upstanding young man. On 24 January 1829, the Newcastle Courant ran the story of a boy who was skating on the pond at Carr Hill late one afternoon when he fell through the ice; he would have drowned but for George, who ‘threw himself in, and by great personal exertion, and at the greatest risk of his own life, succeeded in rescuing his friend’.[25] In the summer of that year, aged twenty-one, George was elected to the committee of the newly founded Natural History Society of Northumberland, his first gift to its collection a ‘very beautiful specimen of the Stormy Petrel’ which he had shot over the Tyne.[26] As the society’s curator for ornithology, George was responsible for soliciting donations from far and wide. The celebrated naturalist John James Audubon contributed the ‘Skins of thirty Birds’ in August 1830; he had visited Thomas Bewick at Gateshead three years earlier, while raising money for his own magnum opus, The Birds of America.[27]
Following Ann’s death, Matt cut a shadowy, shambling figure, and his failing eyesight meant that he could barely read or write; he died on 24 December 1830. I couldn’t locate a copy of his will in the usual public archives, and it took me a while to track one down to Durham University Library.[28] I was curious to find out whether Matt had in the slightest way acknowledged his ‘other’ family – but this would prove wishful thinking on my part. Whatever happened in Jamaica, stayed there.
‘WHO KNOWS BUT that emancipation, like a beautiful plant, may, in its due season, rise out of the ashes of the abolition of the Slave-trade,’ Thomas Clarkson had written in 1808, the year the landmark act came into force.[29] His optimism had not been entirely misplaced, for the institution of slavery showed signs of crumbling; in the early 1820s, though, its collapse still seemed some way off. The inaugural meeting of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery took place on 31 January 1823; abolitionists now set out to present themselves as pragmatists, not seeking immediate emancipation, instead hoping to ‘improve, gradually’ the lives of the enslaved population by giving them greater protection under the law, and conferring upon them ‘one civil privilege after another’, until one day they would rise ‘insensibly to the rank of free peasantry’.[30] William Wilberforce, who was too infirm to lead the parliamentary campaign, passed the baton to Thomas Fowell Buxton, the MP for Weymouth.
On 15 May, in the House of Commons, Buxton moved a resolution that slavery was ‘repugnant’ to both the British constitution and the Christian religion, and ‘ought to be gradually abolished’.[31] Alexander Baring – Sir Francis’ second son – warned that should abolition take place, the sugar islands would be of no further value to Britain. He also insisted that the hardships endured by the enslaved population had been much exaggerated: ‘The name of slave is a harsh one; but their real condition is undoubtedly, in many respects, superior to that of most of the peasantry of Europe.’[32]
This mischievous argument – that the enslaved people of the West Indies were ‘as well, or perhaps even better’ off than European labourers – was one to which pro-slavery lobbyists resorted with such frequency that Thomas Clarkson set out to debunk it in a polemic using adverts drawn from the Jamaica Gazette.[33] The first example he gave was as follows: ‘Kingston, June 14th, 1823. For Sale: Darliston-Pen, in Westmoreland (Parish), with 112 prime Negroes, and 448 head of stock.’ (Darliston was a cattle ranch owned by the Kingston house – thirty-eight of its enslaved population had taken the surname Atkinson when they were baptized three years earlier.)[34] ‘I stop now to make a few remarks,’ Clarkson wrote. ‘First, it appears that the slaves in the British colonies can be sold. Can any man, woman, or child be sold in Britain? It appears, secondly, that these slaves are considered in no other light than as cattle, or as inanimate property. Now, do we think or speak of our British labourers or servants in the same way?’[35]
Over the next few years, the government attempted to straddle two diametrically opposed viewpoints through the policy known as ‘amelioration’, by which the enslaved population would be gradually prepared for their liberty. The Colonial Secretary Lord Bathurst, in consultation with the Society of West India Planters and Merchants, drew up a programme of measures that the legislative bodies on the individual islands were then pressed to adopt. Religious instruction would be given to enslaved people, and marriages between them would be encouraged; families could not be separated by sale; enslaved women could no longer be punished by flogging; enslaved men could receive no more than twenty-five lashes.
The lot of ‘the happy free labourers of England’ is contrasted with that of ‘the wretched slaves in the West Indies’.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Cousin George Atkinson was elected to the Jamaican House of Assembly in 1826 as one of Kingston’s three representatives. The members for the town were seen as radicals: ‘They are strenuous opponents to the Saints and Lord Bathurst, and all attempts at legislating for the Island.’[36] The Assembly saw Bathurst’s ‘ameliorative’ measures as outrageously meddlesome, of course, but nodded them through nonetheless; believing emancipation to be inevitable, they were now focusing their energies on capitulating to the will of Westminster under the best possible financial terms. ‘Compensation’ had become the planters’ watchword.
By the start of the 1830s, however, many abolitionists had lost patience with the government’s softly-softly approach to their cause. On 15 May 1830, at a rowdy meeting of more than two thousand activists at the Freemasons’ Hall in London, a resolution passed to demand that parliament set a date after which all newborn babies would automatically be free. ‘They ought to aim at the extinction of slavery, by taking off the supply of children,’ declared Thomas Fowell Buxton.[37]
But first, before it was ready to liberate the enslaved population of the colonies, parliament would need to put its own house in order. The system by which the British electorate picked their representatives was indefensibly archaic, with most of the swelling middle classes still excluded from the franchise. The constituency map portrayed a bygone age, where tiny rotten and pocket boroughs such as Old Sarum and New Romney continued to return two MPs, while the booming northern industrial city of Manchester – an abolitionist heartland – lacked even one representative.
The summer of 1830 saw the eruption of the ‘Swing riots’, as disaffected agricultural labourers rallied under the battle cry ‘Bread or Blood’ and set about torching haystacks, barns and farms. The unrest soon spread from Kent, where it had started, across much of England. Many among the ruling class accepted that electoral reform was overdue. ‘The state of England is truly grievous but there is no remedy except by the aristocracy holding together to preserve the Peace,’ Bertie Cator, who was close to the action at Mount Mascal, wrote to Jane Atkinson at Temple Sowerby. ‘Tho I speak of Aristocracy holding together I don’t mean we ought not to yield to public opinion. I am anxious for Reform because it appears requisite. I mean that people who enjoy wealth should exert themselves to preserve Peace and good order.’[38] (In spite of all the unpleasantness which had gone before, cordial relations now existed between the Cators and the rest of the family.)
On 22 November, following the defeat of the hidebound Duke of Wellington in a motion of no confidence, Earl Grey pledged his new Whig ministry to pushing through the necessary legislation. Three months later, Lord John Russell placed a reform bill before the House of Commons; it scraped through its second reading by one vote, but was sabotaged by a wrecking amendment during the committee stage. Grey immediately took the risk of forcing another general election, and in July 1831 he won the thumping landslide that would pave the way for change.
JAMES LINDSAY, the seventh Earl of Balcarres, viewed the management of his recently inherited Jamaican plantations with considerable distrust. Following his father’s death in 1825, he had gone through the old estate accounts, as submitted by the Kingston house, and was shocked to find that they had barely turned a profit in seven years. It was true that the coffee estate in St George Parish, plagued as it was by frequent landslides and a ‘turbulent’ workforce, had been failing for a long time; but the poor performance of the adjoining Martin’s Hill and Marshall’s Pen properties, in Manchester Parish, was harder to swallow.[39] For here, under George Atkinson’s direction, and at vast cost, 140 acres of woodland had been felled and planted with coffee; a works had been built, a pulper installed and extensive patios laid on which to dry the beans; and three hundred acres of guinea grass pasture had been added, enclosed by three miles of dry-stone walls.
The new Lord Balcarres was far from reassured by a private letter from Edward Adams, who, as a former partner of the Kingston house, knew the estates well. With startling candour, Adams warned that he had never known West India properties to be ‘ultimately profitable’ to absentee proprietors. ‘Subject to Hurricanes, Rebellion, Emancipation, Contagion among Slaves, at best their returns are precarious,’ he wrote. ‘You always are at the mercy of your local Agent, and each of them in turn, speciously and with glittering anticipations may undo the act of his Predecessor by an idle Expense of Thousands. You cannot sell it but on credit, and to recover the amount, you must wade thro’ Chancery; and on selling, if you get the value of the Slaves and Cattle, your Land and Works you are well contented to sacrifice!!’[40]
George’s letters to Lord Balcarres brimmed with his high hopes for the estates, but less rosy reports reached their owner by other channels. The overseer at Martin’s Hill disclosed that the Kingston house, which held the contract to supply the navy’s beef, regularly used the pasture there to fatten up ‘their own Cattle’.[41] On one occasion, only a small proportion of a cattle shipment from Puerto Rico had been safely delivered to Martin’s Hill; and George’s explanation that the rest had died in transit had failed to satisfy their purchaser. ‘The whole transaction about these Spanish Cattle is most disgraceful, & almost dishonest,’ wrote Balcarres. ‘I have no doubt he has made a pretty penny of the transaction, & pandered upon me what is not worth any thing like the value charged.’[42]
Jamaican attorneys were notorious for their chicanery, and it is not hard to reach the conclusion that George was plotting to seize these estates for himself, by saddling them with so much debt that their owner would consider it almost an act of mercy to be relieved of them. Lord Balcarres certainly believed this to be the case, but he faced a ‘very delicate’ predicament – for were he to appoint a new attorney to manage the estates, George would no doubt do his damnedest to cut him out of his one-third stake in the lucrative pioneer business.[43]
On 1 January 1830, cousin George wrote to inform Lord Balcarres that his partner Robert Robertson would soon be retiring. He would continue to run the house in Jamaica, while James Hosier, who had previously managed the dry goods branch of the business, would now represent its interests in England; and he trusted that his Lordship would show the partnership of Atkinson & Hosier the same ‘confidence’ that he and his father had been pleased to confer upon its predecessors.[44] At this point, Balcarres contemplated cutting loose, but Edward Adams offered one clear nugget of advice – on no account should the earl jeopardize his interest in the pioneer business. ‘Consider the immense returns on the amount of their Investment that they regularly yield,’ Adams wrote. ‘What would you get for them, if sold? Depend on it, not a Fraction more than the intrinsic worth of the men, and nothing in consideration of the productiveness of the Contract.’[45]
And so, for the time being, Lord Balcarres’ estates languished under the management of the Kingston house. ‘They hope that I shall be satisfied with the improved state of Martins Pen, having 95 head of Cattle more than the last year, but they here omit to state, that most of these Cattle have been purchased and a debt incurred,’ Balcarres observed to his London agent on 6 February 1831. ‘It is like congratulating me that my servants have not robbed my house a second time.’[46] But on 16 May, his mind made up, Balcarres wrote to George Atkinson: ‘It is now upwards of six years since I succeeded to my West India property. It is unnecessary for me to state how much I have been disappointed in the expectations held out to me.’ Having read some recent comments by George about the ‘dreadful state of Jamaica property’, he explained, he no longer believed his own plantations could prosper under the care of an attorney who so evidently thought they ‘must shortly and inevitably be reduced to actual Ruin’; and thus, ‘as Drowning Men will catch at straws’, he had recently dispatched a new power of attorney to a gentleman living close by the Manchester estates.[47]
George reacted with predictable fury to his discharge, firing off a letter listing the great strides taken at Martin’s Hill and Marshall’s Pen under his command: ‘The unprofitable drudgery of getting the property into condition to be profitable has been performed by us, and your new Attorney only reaps the fruit of our exertions.’[48] Afterwards he submitted the estates’ final accounts, of which Balcarres would observe: ‘A more Rascally set of Closing Accounts were never delivered in.’[49]
Meanwhile, the two parties were locked in a bitter dispute over the pioneers. In March 1830, Lord Balcarres had demanded that an ‘absolute conveyance be made out in my own name without loss of time, of my undivided third of the contract, & of the whole of the Pioneers, each Pioneer to be named therein’.[50] But George refused to comply, arguing that since Atkinson & Hosier held the majority stake in the business, they needed shielding against anyone representing the minority interest who might choose to withdraw a proportion of the pioneers, or even terminate the contract: ‘Our object is merely to protect from all possibility of prejudice our own larger interest.’[51] Edward Adams, when shown George’s letter, dismissed these grounds as ‘utter sophistry’.[52]
POLITICAL TENSIONS had long been simmering in Jamaica, where the planter class continued to cling on to every scrap of power; although free people of colour now outnumbered whites by two to one, they were still disbarred from voting in elections or giving evidence in criminal cases, and disqualified from serving in the House of Assembly or holding a commission in the island militia. But finally, in December 1830, the Assembly passed an act declaring that ‘all the free brown and black population’ would be ‘entitled to have and enjoy all the rights, privileges, immunities and advantages whatsoever to which they would have been entitled if born of and descended from white ancestors’ – a milestone in the social and political evolution of the colony.[53]
The island elite had always tried to shield their enslaved workforce from news of outside events. ‘So completely has all intercourse with Hayti been heretofore guarded against,’ wrote one planter in the 1820s, ‘that the slaves of Jamaica know no more of the events which have been passing there for the last thirty years than the inhabitants of China.’[54] But it was impossible to prevent whispers of abolition from circulating round the island. In late 1831, the rumour arose that parliament had voted to end slavery, and that the king had sent papers ordering the liberation of the slaves – but that the masters were conspiring to keep them in chains.
As the story spread, Samuel Sharpe, an enslaved man who was also the charismatic deacon of a Baptist chapel at Montego Bay, convinced his brethren to mount a show of resistance; they would refuse to cut the ripe sugar cane on their estates unless granted their liberty and paid for their labour. Local white missionaries soon heard about the planned strike. ‘I learn that some wicked persons have persuaded you that the king has made you free,’ preached the Baptist minister William Knibb in his sermon on 27 December. ‘What you have been told is false – false as hell can make it.’[55] Kensington Pen in St James Parish was the first of dozens of estates to be set on fire that night, turning the dark sky a sinister shade of orange. The insurrection quickly gathered pace, with perhaps sixty thousand enslaved men and women coming out in support.
