What about the People John Tharp Enslaved?

Content warning: violence, sexual violence, exploitation

My x6 great grandfather, John Tharp owned ten sugar plantations in Jamaica, called Good Hope, Covey, Lansquinet, Wales, Potosi, Pantrepant, Windsor Pen, Merry Wood, Chippenham Park Pen and Top Hill Pen. He died before slavery was abolished, but in 1837 claims were made on behalf of his heir for  compensation for the value of 2319 individuals who'd been freed.

There are various surviving lists of the people who John Tharp enslaved, dating from 1795 to 1832 and these name 4039 individuals, of whom about a quarter died before abolition. I do discuss these people as individuals elsewhere, but in this post I'm mostly analysing the stats based on the slave lists. I hope it doesn't come across as impersonal, but it helped me to grasp the brutality of the institution of slavery.

For 814 individuals, the place of birth is given as Africa. Making allowance for a death rate of about 14% on the voyage across the Atlantic, they would have been the survivors from among about 930 individuals who were put on board ship in Africa. 

A further 3214 individuals are listed as having been born in Jamaica, ten are inconsistently listed and one of the enslaved women, known as American Bess, was born in the United States.

Nine per cent of the babies born on John Tharp's estates had a white father, which is 380 babies born from rape or (at the very best) sexual exploitation. Since not every act of rape would have resulted in pregnancy, there can be no doubt that it was commonplace.

Twenty seven per cent of children died before the age of ten, and another 9% before the age of twenty. That means that a woman who gave birth to three children was likely, on average, to lose one of them before they reached adulthood.

The average age of enslaved people whose death date was not recorded was 21, and only about 8% died after the age of fifty. This doesn't tally with the average ages of those whose deaths were recorded, which was 36 years old, but there are good reasons to think that these ages were over-estimated.

For example, a man called Hector who died on the Lansquinet estate in 1823 had an estimated age of 104. The lists for John Tharp's estates include another five people who survived into their 90s, seventeen into their 80s and sixty-three into their 70s. Although some individuals may have survived into old age, it's probable that many of them were considerably younger than their estimated ages.

Many enslaved people died young through overwork and disease, but some of their short lives were cut even shorter. Under the column ‘Decrease, and cause thereof’, the overseers generally wrote ‘Death’ without any further explanation, but sometimes more information was given. For example, it was noted in 1832 that Jane Wallace, also known as Polly (aged 20), was ‘killed by accident’ in Chippenham Park Pen. The death of King (aged 63) of Good Hope Estate, was noted in the same year: ‘verdict, accidental’.

For Margaret (aged 58) whose death on the Covey Estate was recorded in 1832, the annotation reads ‘verdict, visitation God’, as also for Patience Grey (aged 3) on the Pantrepant Estate in the same year. More mysterious still is the death of Scotland on the Wales Estate, for whom the annotation reads: ‘Death (unknown)’.

More often, there is no mystery. Harry (aged 47) of the Good Hope Estate was ‘hanged for rebellious conspiracy’ sometime between 1823 and 1826. Bacchus (aged 27) of the Pantrepant Estate was ‘hung by sentence of the Constable Martial’ between 1826 and 1832, and several more executions were recorded in the 1832 list, including Robert Gallimore aka Sussex (aged 34), Cupid (aged 27), Cudjoe (aged 31) and Richard (aged 23), all of Pantrepant. 

The executions recorded in 1832 may have been associated with events of the previous year which are known variously as the Baptist War, the Sam Sharp Rebellion, the Christmas Uprising and the Jamaican Revolt. Believing that William IV had approved their emancipation, enslaved people across the island, and particularly in Trelawny parish (where John Tharp's estates were situated), refused to work if their conditions weren’t improved. Plantations were set on fire and when martial law was declared, white militia and regular troops acted forcefully and brutally to suppress the rebellion. Over 200 enslaved people were killed in military action and between 310 and 340 were condemned to death in the following weeks. 

In this context, it may have felt merciful to record in 1832 that James Blair of the Covey Estate had been transported for horse-stealing. An 1817 list notes that Jemmy (aged 24) of Good Hope had also been transported for life, though his crime wasn’t noted. Presumably for lesser offences, John Bernard, aka Bristol (aged 20) of Pantrepant had been sentenced to the workhouse for life by 1817. By 1832, he'd been joined by Humphrey (aged 36) from the Covey Estate and Tryall aka John Shaw (aged 40) of Pantrepant. For the workhouse to have functioned as a deterrent, it must have been worse than continued slavery.

To discourage others, runaways were punished harshly, at the discretion of their owners. Even so, John Tharp’s slaves did try to escape. The 1803 list from Merrywood includes five runaways: Cicero and Potter in 1790, Cork and January in 1801 and Brutus in 1802. No other information is given, and these names do not appear in later lists. Enslaved people were also involved in rounding up those who tried to escape, and John Harwood (aged 25) of Good Hope was 'killed by a shot from a runaway' in 1825. 

Later on, The Royal Gazette of Jamaica published requests for the return of runaways called Joe and Marina (aka Flavia) who’d absconded from the Tharp estates in 1813 and 1814. I haven’t been able to identify either with any confidence in the 1817 lists, so it's possible that these escapes succeeded.

If they were caught, these individuals would have been subject to brutal punishments, imprisoned or executed. If the trustees were feeling merciful, they might have been separated from their families and friends and sold to another estate -- although the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed, it was still legal to buy and sell enslaved people within and between slave colonies. 

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