Was John Tharp from a Different World?

My x6 great grandfather, John Tharp, was born in Hanover parish in Jamaica in about 1744. His father owned a few small sugar plantations that were worked by enslaved people, and John Tharp built on this inheritance by acquiring neighbouring plantations, harnessing water power to drive his sugar mills, and building his own quay in Falmouth to control the shipping as well as the production of his sugar. Many of his investments were funded by his business partner, William Miles, who one of the leading sugar importers in Bristol. Letters between them are preserved in the Cambridgeshire County Archives and excepts are available here.

Tharp enslaved over 3000 people at a time on his ten plantations, though there were fewer by the time compensation was claimed. In addition to five legitimate children born of his first marriage, he fathered at least two children on enslaved women. He also financed slave-trading expeditions to Africa and became wealthy beyond imagining from the misery and pain he imposed on his victims. To modern eyes, he was guilty of kidnap, violent assaults upon adults and children, child neglect, rape, murder and crimes against humanity, but to his contemporaries he was a successful businessman and a sought-after friend and patron. 

Despite his unfortunate association with business (commerce was more offensive than slavery), John Tharp's fortune opened doors. In his later years, he bought a country estate called Chippenham Park, in Cambridgeshire, and a town house in London, and joined the landed gentry of England. His eldest son married one of the daughters of the Earl of Dunmore and his second son was friends with the future George IV.  

When I first mentioned John Tharp to a local family history group, it took less than a minute for a consensus to be reached: we shouldn't judge him by contemporary standards because things were different then. This is in marked contrast to the way that slave-owners and overseers are represented in literature and film, where they're usually unfeeling monsters, but both of these approaches distance us from them and prevent our engagement with the nuances, contradictions and continuities of slavery. 

John Tharp, 1736 - 1804, National Library of Jamaica
Digital Collection, accessed July 20, 2023, 
https://nljdigital.nlj.gov.jm/items/show/1018

John Tharp was a product of his culture and society. His actions were condoned by widely accepted racist attitudes and assumptions at the time, but he considered himself liberal. He believed that the people he had enslaved loved him because he was kind to them. He left his slave-born children substantial legacies in his will, though less than he left to his legitimate white children. Although he was a caring father by the standards of his time, putting his daughter's happiness above his own, he could also be unforgiving. It's only by seeing him as a human being that I have been able to think through how he managed to live with himself. That process has been much more personally challenging than just dismissing him as a monster, and I'll explore it more in other posts.

John Tharp didn't just enrich himself, but also his business partners and lawyers, and the other professionals and tradespeople he had dealings with. Many of his British descendants, who included a lord and several baronets, were still living 'on own means' as late as 1939. He had more than seventy great grandchildren by that time, and the ones who weren't rich enough not to work were members of the respectable professions like the army, the church, medicine and banking. While they may have worked hard to earn their salaries, their entry to these professions depended upon inherited wealth generated by slavery, and with limited social mobility since then, their descendants are probably still benefitting from it two, three or four generations on. Like Laura Trevelyan, they won't realise the source of their social advantage unless they research their family tree.

Meanwhile, the descendants of the people who John Tharp enslaved and who remained in Jamaica may still be exposed to poverty, limited educational and employment opportunities, high crime rates and extreme weather events. Because Jamaica's economy depends, to a great extent, on tourism, Covid hit it really badly. Some of the descendants of the people John Tharp enslaved will have come to Britain as part of the Windrush Generation and became subject to new forms of prejudice and exploitation, including the loss of employment and unlawful deportation. These individuals probably take their links with slavery for granted but their family history is much harder to research.

Contemporary British culture and society is a product of its past. We'll never come to terms with Britain's involvement in slavery until we understand the continuities. Seeing John Tharp not as a monster, but as a human being who did monstrous things, is part of that process.

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