In May 1788 Taylor continued his defence of Jamaican slavery in response to the upsurge of abolitionist activity in Britain. He told Arcedeckne his opinions about the treatment of enslaved people and the prospect of a rebellion. He also promised to send his friend a detailed plan of Golden Grove sugar estate, which suggests that Arcedeckne was interested to know how his property was being arranged and managed, particularly with regard to innovations in pasturage and provision grounds. These were features of the estate that Taylor developed in response to needs for increased self-sufficiency and more reliable food sources following the disruption of trade with North America and famine conditions created during the early 1780s by bad weather and poor planning.
[…] As for cruelty there is no such thing practiced on estates, I do not believe that the mad men at home wish to hurt themselves, but they should endeavour to regulate their own police, and shew humanity to their own poor, before they think of making regulations for our slaves, who think themselves well of as matters are at present situation, and do not wish for their interference. God knows if they were treated as the miscreants report, they would have cutt all our throats allready, from what they have allready heard from home. There is a man now at Golden Grove doing the views, and I will gett a plan of the estate made out to send you home by him, or another good one, who can do it, and mark all you want, but as for wood land you have none but brush, but he shall mark out where the guinea grass pastures are to be, which will be hilly land, and where your provisions are. […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1788/10, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Kingston, 29 May 1788)
Category Archives: The Letters
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 19 April 1788
In common with other planters in Jamaica (and across the West Indies) Taylor was taken aback by the popularity and success of the incipient abolition movement in Britain. He contemplated its effects in Jamaica and strongly asserted that he thought an end to the slave trade would result in the economic ruin of the colonies in the West Indies and have negative ramifications for the metropole. He was unsurprised by the involvement of the famous Whig politician Charles James Fox but could not believe that the prime minister, William Pitt, gave his backing to the idea, and he predicted that the proslavery lobby would pick up the support of several prominent spokesmen.
[…] Respecting negroes, I really do not know what to say or write on that subject. If the motion is carried, and a bill passed to prohibit the African Trade, there is an end to the colonies and all concerned with them, for it is impossible to carry them on without them, and I think they will draw on themselves the same destruction as they mean to bring on us, that Mr Fox should do it, is not surprising, but that Mr Pitt should have such an idea excites my utmost astonishment. How are they to replace the revenue at present gott from the colonies, what are they to do with between four and five hundred sail of ships employed in the African trade and to the West Indies, what are to become of the sailors, the manufacturers, the tradesmen the merchants (who have such large debts due them by the colonies) and their wives and families. As for us, they do not seem to think we are the least to be considered in the matter. Butt I suppose there are many people of distinction at home, as the Duke of Chandos, Lord Onslow, Lord Romney and others that will not tamely suffer themselves to be robbed of their property in this most unheard or unthought of before manner. […] Will any man stay in a country where this property is to be arbiraly [sic] taken from him. In case of an invasion by a foreign enemy will any man take up arms to defend that country. The more I consider the matter, the more I am amazed at the madness of it, and the folly and wickedness of the attempt. Things are at present quiet, how long they will continue so, God only knows. but it would have been better had it never been agitated. […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1788/6, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Kingston, 19 April 1788)
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 7 April 1788
In April 1788 Taylor gave Chaloner Arcedeckne his early reactions to two phenomena that would define the remaining 25 years of his life: the French Revolution and the abolition movement. Political tensions in Paris were apparent throughout the Atlantic world by this time, and Taylor appears simultaneously to have relished the prospect of French weakness while hinting that Jamaica could invoke French support in a future struggle between the colony and the British metropole over the question slavery. Taylor wrote at the beginning of mass-petitioning in Britain against the slave trade and offered an early proslavery critique of the campaign, arguing that enslaved people were well treated and that a unilateral reform of the British-Atlantic slave system would be commercially damaging.
[…] I was exceeding happy when I found that we were to have no warr & have not the least objection that France should be distracted and torn to pieces by faction for half a dozen centurys, it is the only thing that can keep us out of hott water, I hope that the humanity of the Quakers Universities & people who want to abolish the African trade will extend itself to the colonists & buy our estates & slaves & then they may make them free if they please, but for to stop it now, will occasion more mischief than they are aware of, and people will not tamely see themselves stripped of their property, and what they have acquired under severall acts of the legislature for 100 years past, the French are near enough to us to take us under their protection, and armaments to the West Indies would be as fatall a to North America. As for the plea that the negoes are cruelly used, and more so than in any other island, is false. Your negroes at Golden Grove and in short all over the island live infinitely better than the lower class of white people at home, eat more meat and fish than they do, are better lodged and cloathed, and when sick, have doctors and people to attend them, whereas when a poor labouring man at home falls sick, he has no person to attend him, and during the time he is sick, his family are starving, and if he dies, his family is maintained by the parish, a maintenance a tolerable good negro would not accept of. […] Were all the different nations of Europe to enter into a combination not to buy any more negroes, it would be different, but neither the French, the Danes, the Portuguese, nor the Dutch have that respect for the humanity of the Universities, Quakers, and fools that know not what they are about, as to putt a stop to it, for their reveries, and what is it to a negroe who at any rate will be sold from the coast of Guinea, if any man of their nations buy him, or an Englishman. In short the peoples heads seem to be all turned, and they do not know what they are about. […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1788/3, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Kingston, 7 April 1788)
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 6 December 1787
At the end of 1787, Taylor commented on proposals by Matthew Boulton, the British entrepreneur and manufacture of steam engines, to adapt steam power to sugar mills in Jamaica. He was not fully convinced by them.
[…] Respecting Mr Bolton, untill he sends out modell, & letts people know the premium he expects for his machines, and convinces them they will answer, he will gett no encouragement here, I should think if he was so certain of the success, that he would wish to have one erected on an estate even at his own expence, to be reimbursed should it answer, or leave to take his materials away if it did not, and that would convince people of its utility, for at present we here have only his own ipse dixit [i.e. unproven assertion]. As you justly observe sending out only one man is nothing, we want nothing new from him, but his mode of applying the steam to the turning the mill, the method of hanging his boiler to the most advantage to save coal, for machinery work and making the mill we know more about it than he does, or can be expected to know, and if once any person steals that mode from him, all his expectation from this island is at an end, as there is not patent that does, or can extend to this country. […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1787/20, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Kingston, 6 December 1787)
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 1 May 1787
Taylor’s discussion of breadfruit relates to the infamous 1787 expedition of the HMS Bounty, commanded by Captain William Bligh, to collect plants in Tahiti and introduce them to the West Indies, where it was anticipated that they would help provided food for the enslaved people on sugar estates and other properties. Taylor’s discussion on this point leads into a discussion of his continuing mistrust of the British government’s policies towards the British-Caribbean colonies and speculation about the degree to which Jamaica might achieve self-sufficiency in food and clothing.
[…] The bread fruit would certainly be an addition to our negroe provisions, but a hurricane would certainly blow of [sic] the fruit, as well as either break the trees, or blow them up by the roots, but tho they are liable to that, they still would be of very essential service to us, tho I do not believe Mr Pitt cares a farthing if all Jamaica the Windward Islands and the inhabitants of them were annihilated so that he could but gett a revenue from them. […] [I] am afraid to buy any new negroes untill the hurricane months are over and we see how the blast affects the young canes and sprouts. […] there seems to be a system adopted by the British legislature to extirpate the cultivation of the cane in the British West India colonies, and consequently to force us to live upon our internall resources, and have recourse to the manufacturing our own cloathing from our cotton, and to have no connexion with the mother country at all, if it is so, the late hurricanes have cooperated wonderfull well with its plan, and they will in the course of the next seven years see their scheme so farr carried into execution that this island will hardly be able to be considered as a sugar colony, as the proprietors will not be able to carry that manufacture on, and the iron foundries copper smiths and manufacturers whose dependence is on the trade to the West Indies and the coast of Africa will have leisure to employ themselves otherwise. […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1787/5, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Kingston, 1 May 1787)
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 14 December 1786
Here Taylor discusses the quality of sugar shipped to England from Chaloner Arcedeckne’s estate, Golden Grove, and discusses the poor health of enslaved people, particularly in western Jamaican parishes, linking this to the unusually bad weather and restrictions on trading with the United States. Taylor provides some detail on his strategies for providing sustenance for enslaved people on Golden Grove, indicating that ground provisions (such as yams and cassava – or cassada) were more resilient to hurricanes and therefore a more secure option than plantains. He has also sent food to Arcedeckne in England, including turtles, a Jamaican delicacy.
[…] I am pleased the quality of the sugar pleased you the thing that made it tolerable was the dry weather in March April & May there is no year or season that does not bring some calamity to us, very great numbers of negroes especially in Trelawney St James’s Hanover & Westmoreland perished for real want they are very dry there now & if they do not get rains soon there will be another famine there again as soon as the miserable crops the will make there are over for in crop they chew canes & drink the hot liquor which helps to fill their bellies but after that is over I believe they will be very bad off indeed, if the Governor even should dare to open the ports in case of a famine the miscreants of custom house officers would seize the vessels and in case of a warr, we must starve. The pease were of great service, but the coco piece of much more. I have inclosed [sic] 60 acres, 20 of which I have planted in young cocos, I have some old ones to serve after crop. I shall putt in 20 acres a year untill the whole of the sixty acres are in, if we have no storm for three years to come, so as to have the whole in, it would maintain double the number of negroes that you have, for after they are six months old, and have had their cleanings, they ought to be suffered to run into a ruinate, and in that case will keep 10 or 15 years in the ground. I will also putt in 8 or 10 acres of seed yams, which after the first digging with little trouble will last many years, and give many rattoons. I have a good deal of cassada also planted, so that I am not very apprehensive you will ever in future want if we can but have a cessation of storms for a very few years, as I will not ever again depend on plantains, but on ground provisions, but these storms coming so fast one on the back of the other, does not give us time to have a years stock before hand. I am glad the sweet meats arrived safe, as well as the castor oil, it does not keep good very long here after it is opened, and if you cannot use it, your friends can. I am very sorry you gott none of the turtle I sent you, there was one by Capt. Watt, and two by Ayton. I have spoke to some from the Port Royall people to lett me know when they have any good ones. […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1784/23, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Kingston, 14 December 1786)
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 11 October 1786
Taylor’s brother died of a fever, although the evidence available in Taylor’s letters does not allow for a more precise diagnosis of his illness. Here, Taylor reflects on the medical treatment that his brother received, on his own health, and on the preponderance of sickliness among whites in Jamaica. He also discusses the debts of Sir Charles Price, an extraordinarily wealthy and influential local sugar magnate, who died in 1772, leaving his heirs with a heavily indebted estate.
[…] I apprehend his doctor mistook his [Sir John Taylor, Simon Taylor’s brother] case, and gave him gouty medicines, when I believe the medicine he wanted ought to have been to expell bile which is the greatest and almost sole disorder of this country. We have both of us lived so long as to see very good numbers of our old friends and acquaintances drop off. I hardly know now twenty people in the island, that I knew when I first came here. […] I do not believe Sir Charles Prices debt will be recovered, he owes me upwards of two thousand pounds which I look on to be lost I am pretty well again after a slight fever I have had a few days ago, by getting cold, indeed almost every person in this part of the island have been sick, from the excessive heat of the weather in the middle of the day, with cold mornings & evenings, the weather is also drier about this town than I ever remember it in my life in October, which used to be constantly wett […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1784/19, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Kingston, 11 October 1786)
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 1 June 1786
The 1780s were a transformative decade in Taylor’s life. The American War and its aftermath transformed his political outlook towards a distrust of the British government in London, a perspective that became more entrenched with the advent of the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade in 1788. His sugar estates were adversely affected by the several hurricanes that hit Jamaica in the first half of the 1780s, and a fire devastated the works of his estate at Lyssons in 1784. His elder brother, Sir John Taylor, died on a visit to Jamaica from England in May 1786. Thereafter, Taylor assumed the role of head of the Taylor family, managing the plantation that belonged to his late brother’s wife, Lady Elizabeth Taylor, in western Jamaican, and making his brother’s son, Sir Simon Richard Brissett Taylor, his principal heir.
[…] I have had the misfortune to have lost my poor brother, who was taken ill at his estate down to leeward, and I believe by some mismanagement of his doctors thrown into a dropsy, on which I advised him to come up in a man of warr that was at Lucea to this town which he did but was so far gone that his life could not be saved, and he died on the 6th of last month. His death has been a very severe stroke on me, as well as his little family, which I must now take all the care of that I can, indeed they are so very young just now, that they will be for some years but with their mother, and I must endeavour to settle my matters so as to go home three or 4 years hence, when I have gott rid of the effects of the fire, the hurricane, and dry weather and other calamities that have pursued me for these three years past, and can make an arrangement of my brothers affairs, which will give me a great deal of trouble and fatigue. His wifes estate lying 150 miles from this town, I have been obliged to go there since his death, I must go there again the middle of this month, and must visitt them twice a year for there is really no person in that part of the country that there is the least dependance to be putt in, and that added to my other business will give me enough to do God knows. […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1786/9, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Kingston, 1 June 1786)
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 10 October 1783
By the end of 1783, Taylor expressed his satisfaction with work at Golden Grove, under the supervision of the overseer, Madden. Taylor described his plans for improving the cultivation and productivity of Golden Grove, which included the purchase of more enslaved workers and the avoidance of ‘jumping crops’, which were years of heightened productivity created by managers and overseers who overworked enslaved people more than Taylor thought was advisable in order to impress absentee proprietors with a large and lucrative crop.
[…] Madden seems to me to go on very well, you have as industrious, and good sett of white people there as at any estate in the island, and your negroes are healthy and well and abounding in provisions, there are 40 acres in cocos untouched, which I reserve for new negroes, and in case of a hurricane, the next thing I must begin on is to fence off some land next Hampton Court to put into guinea grass as a beginning to keep up your cattle & by & bye [sic] when I have enough to keep what steers I shall reserve for the plough to hole your land with that instrument shall begin that method, and do away with jobbing, the new negroes I have lately bought for you are well, after buying one more lott of men, I must then think of buying some Eboe women, the estate is now coming on into its proper train, and I think that it will hardly in future make less than 600 hdds provided that no jumping crops are made, which by distressing, and harassing both negroes and stock, as well as throwing the estate back, takes three years again to bring matters into their proper channell again […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1783/38, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Lyssons, 10 October 1783)
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 10 October 1783
In 1784, James Ramsay published his famous and influential Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. Ramsay had lived as an Anglican clergyman in the British-Caribbean colony of St Kitts (hence Taylor’s comment here about the Windward Islands in the eastern Caribbean) and drew on his experience there to condemn the licentious violence and abuses of the British slave system. Although he did not advocate the abolition of slavery, Ramsay did publish plans for the abolition of the slave trade, and his work inspired the early abolition movement. In this letter it is clear that Taylor has learned of Ramsay’s proposals, probably from Chaloner Arcedeckne, months before the publication of the Essay, suggesting either that Ramsay’s ideas were well known by the end of 1783 or that one of Taylor’s correspondents was a close associate of the abolitionist. Taylor’s initial reaction to Ramsay’s critique seeks to paint a rosy picture of slave life on the plantations and foreshadows the proslavery arguments that planters developed in the years to follow, during their disputes with abolitionists.
[…] I do not apprehend that Mr Ramsays schemes will be of any effect many of the best negroes on almost all estates are Christened, and no one opposes it whenever they deserve it neither do we find them the worse for it, but in general better, & I remember hearing formerly a good deal of the Code Noir of the French I procured the book, & on examination of it with the negroe laws of this island found very little difference how their laws are in our Windward Islands I do not know, but upon all the well regulated estates in this island, the negroes live infinitely better than the poor people in many parts of England, they have no care for tomorrow, if sick have a doctor & maintainance [sic] from their masters are clothed by them, and in times of scarcity are fed, they breed as much small stock & hoggs as they please, & sell them to whom they please, as also plantains, yams, cocos, &c […]
(Vanneck-Arc/3A/1783/38, Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, Lyssons, 10 October 1783)