Janet Schaw and the complexions of empire

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 169-193

  Coleman, Deirdre ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

^b University's Post Graduate Arts Research Centre

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950714219     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2003.0010     Document Type: Review

References (123)

1. "His Ldship remarked that there had been no determination that they were free, the judgment (meaning the case of Somerset) went no further than to determine the Master had no right to compel the slave to go into a foreign country, &c" (original parenthesis). See Thomas Hutchinson, The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, ed. Peter Orlando Hutchinson (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883-6), 2:277
2. There have been many interpretations of Lord Mansfield's decision; see, for instance, William R. Cotter, "The Somerset Case and the Abolition of Slavery in England," History 79:255 (1994), 31-56
3. Jerome Nadelhaft, "The Somersett Case and Slavery: Myth, Reality, and Repercussions," Journal of Negro History 1 (1966): 193-208
4. For the wider context of the decision, see Teresa Michals, '"That Sole and Despotic Dominion': Slaves, Wives, and Game in Blackstone's Commentaries," Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1993-4): 195-216
5. See James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London: Fontana Press, 1993), 15
6. A Planter [Edward Long], Candid Reflections upon the Judgement lately awarded by the Court of the King's Bench, in Westminster-Hall, on what is commonly called the Negroe-cause (London, T. Lowndes, 1772)
7. Long, Candid Reflections, iii
8. "Washing the blackamoor white" was an ancient proverb expressing impossibility and fruitless labor. The expression was a commonplace of the Jacobean stage; see Karen Newman, "'And Wash the Ethiop White': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, eds. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 142-62
9. [Edward Long], The History of Jamaica. Or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island, 3 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1774); references to this text will follow the sequence of volume number, followed by book, chapter, and page numbers
10. John Singleton, A General Description of the West-Indian Islands (1767), in Thomas W. Krise, ed., Carihbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657-1777 (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 262-314
11. Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality; being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the Years 1774 to 1776, eds. E. W. Walker and C. M. Andrews (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1921). This work will subsequently be identified as "Journal" in the text
12. For the colonial context of Long's writings, and the extent to which his extreme racism was somewhat atypical in the period, see Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 138-47
13. Recent commentators on Schaw include Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 46-65
14. and Warren Montag, "The Universalization of Whiteness: Racism and Enlightenment," in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York and London: New York Univ. Press, 1997), 281-93
15. Thomas DiPiero, "Missing Links: Whiteness and the Color of Reason in the Eighteenth Century," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 40:2 (1999), 155-74; this reference, 166
16. For the current explosion of interest in the field or matter of "whiteness," see David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London: Routledge, 1994)
17. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997)
18. Hill, Whiteness
19. and more recently, in an Australian context, Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998)
20. Felicity Nussbaum, "Women and Race: 'A Difference of Complexion,'" in Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 69-88
21. The Watchman (1796), in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Lewis Patton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 136
22. For these pamphlets, see my "Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest Writing in the 1790s," ELH 61 (1994), 341-62
23. and Charlotte Sussman, "Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792," Representations 48 (1994): 48-69
24. The term "'other' woman of empire" is taken from Felicity Nussbaum's Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), 1
25. See "Freed Blacks and Mulattos" in Long, History of Jamaica, II. 2. 13, 320ff
26. For the planter who incestuously washed his progeny white over four generations before the age of 60, see The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, Loyal American Refugee. Written by Himself (London, 1787), ed. N. Perrin (Boston: Godine, 1976), 72-3
27. The author was probably a Royal Navy officer. The sexual connotations of the proverb can also be seen in the comic opera, The Black-a-moor Wash'd White (1776), which caused a riot at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, when the white Christian hero was about to be cuckolded by a "Negar"; Gretchen Gerzina describes the play's tumultuous reception in her Black England: Life before Emancipation (1995; reprint, London: Allison and Busby, 1999), 15-16
28. See Walvin, Black Ivory, 15
29. and Gerzina, Black England, 121
30. Nocturnal Revels: or, The History of King's Place, and other Modern Nunneries. Containing their Mysteries, Devotions, and Sacrifices. Comprising Also, The Ancient and Present State of Promiscuous Gallantry, 2d ed. (London: M. Goadby, 1779), 1:220-4
31. For recent concern about West Indian blacks' use of dangerous steroid whiteners, see Serge F. Kovaleski, "In Jamaica, Shades of an Identity Crisis," Guardian Weekly, 19-25 August 1999, 29
32. and Verene Shepherd, "Image, Representation, and the Project of Emancipation: History and Identity in the Commonwealth Caribbean," in Contending with Destiny: The Caribbean in the 21st Century, eds. Kenneth Hall and Denis Benn (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), 53-79
33. James Grainger, The Sugar Cane: A Poem (1764), in Krise, Caribbeana, 242
34. See Patrick Browne's The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (London: Printed for the Author, 1756; reissued B. White and Son, 1789), 227
35. In his speech counseling conciliation with the American rebels, Burke warned that the slave-holding colonists of Virginia and the Carolinas were "by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing . . . may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, Liberty looks amongst them like something that is more noble and liberal"; see Edmund Burke, Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. Ian Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 224
36. For Edwards's deployment of Burke's arguments, see The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (Dublin: Luke White, 1793), II. 4. 1, 9. References to this text will follow the sequence of volume number, book, chapter, and page numbers
37. Baron de Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811)
38. translated by Mr Black, quoted in The Monthly Review 67 (January, 1812): 38
39. For the case of Cuba in the nineteenth century, see Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (London, 1974); reprint as Verena Stolcke (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1989)
40. The phrase "aristocracy of skin" was coined by T. B. Macaulay in a speech before the House of Commons in 1831; quoted in Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London: Verso, 1988; reprint, 1998), 448
41. For the consolidation of the idea of a white aristocracy in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, see Hilary Beckles, "White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean," History Workshop Journal 36 (1993): 69
42. At the time of Schaw's visit to Antigua there were just under 2,600 whites and 37,500 blacks. For the demographics of Jamaica in the eighteenth century, where white numbers declined while the number of mulattos rose, see Mavis Christine Campbell, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloreds of Jamaica, 1800-1865 (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1976), 44-45
43. For a careful analysis of the extent to which the free "colored" group dissociated themselves from slaves in order to pursue identity with whites, see Arnold A. Sio, "Marginality and Free Coloured Identity in Caribbean Slave Society," in Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (New York: The New Press, 1991), 150-9
44. for a discussion of similar issues in Grenada and St. Kitts, see Edward L. Cox, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763-1833 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1984), 150 ff
45. For a full account of the gradual rise of polygenesis, see Wheeler, The Complexion of Race
46. Long, History of Jamaica, II. 2. 13, 274
47. Peter Hulme, "Travel, Ethnography, Transculturation: St. Vincent in the 1790s," paper presented at the conference, "Contextualizing the Caribbean: New Approaches in an Era of Globalization," University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, September 2000; see http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/ ∼phulme/
48. By Long's definition, "real" Quinterons are those "who are above three steps removed in the lineal digression from the Negroe venter exclusive" (History of Jamaica, II. 2. 13, 332, 320-1)
49. See Letters to Jane from Jamaica, 1788-1796, ed. Geraldine Nutt Mozley, (London: Published for the Institute of Jamaica by the West India Committee, [1938]), 18, 20
50. A century later, the preoccupations of West Indian parents had not changed. In order to enhance their daughters' chances in marriage, the elite sent them to England "to acquire that poise and complexion, that cachet" which would put them ahead of their competitors. Within a few months of return to the West Indies, however, the sallowness would return, necessitating "whitening" with French chalk and gin and the rouging of too pale cheeks. Only then could they compete at the Debutantes' Ball with the girls most recently returned from England; see Yseult Bridges's memoir of Trinidad, Child of the Tropics: Victorian Memoirs (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1980), 160-1
51. Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, II. 4. 1, 11
52. See Tassie Gwilliam, "Cosmetic Poetics: Coloring Faces in the Eighteenth Century," in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 144-59
53. In his History of Jamaica, Long referred to Browne as an "audacious slanderer" (II. 2. 13, 284)
54. Long, History of Jamaica, II. 2. 13, 279, 276-7
55. I take the term "negroefied" from J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (London: J. Parsons, W Richardson, H. Gardner, J. Walter, 1793), 105
56. Krise, Caribbeana, 308-9
57. On the link between witchcraft and child-killing, see Jonathan Dalby, "Women and Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Rural France," in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, eds. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1995), 337-68
58. Browne, Civil and Natural History of Jamaica, 227
59. For abortion and infanticide among slave women, see Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1990), 137-42
60. The use of dyes and astringents in fabricating hymens in the Middle Ages is discussed by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, "Virginities Now and Then: A Respnose to Medieval Virginities," in Medieval Virginities, eds. Sarah Salih, Anke Bernau and Ruth Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, forthcoming)
61. see also Kathleen Coyne Kelly, "Hymenologies," in Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
62. Edward Ward, A Trip to Jamaica (1698)
63. reprinted in Krise, Caribheana, 89
64. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), 30
65. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (Har-mondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 171
66. For woman as "an animal delighting in finery," see Vicesimus Knox, Winter Evenings: or Lucubrations on Life and Letters (London: Charles Dilly, 1788), 3:254
67. For details of Schaw and her well-connected family, see Editors' Introduction, Journal, 9-12
68. Burke to Charles O'Hara, quoted in Edmund Burke, Pre-Revolutionary Writings, 205
69. Baron de Montesquieu, "Of Laws in Relation to the Nature of the Climate," The Spirit of the Laws, Book 14, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York and London: Hafner, 1949), 221
70. Bryan Edwards was later to argue that the "hot and oppressive atmosphere" of the islands inflicted on the white women in particular "a lax fibre, and a complexion in which the lily predominates over the rose. To a stranger newly arrived, the ladies appear as just risen from the bed of sickness" (History, Civil and Commercial, II. 4. 1, 12)
71. "In cold countries they have very little sensibility for pleasure; in temperate countries, they have more; in warm countries, their sensibility is exquisite. . . . From this delicacy of organs peculiar to warm climates it follows that the soul is most sensibly moved by whatever relates to the union of the two sexes: here everything leads to this object" (Montesquieu, "Of Laws," 223)
72. [William Pittis, attrib.], The Jamaica Lady: or, the Life of Bavia. Containing an account of her intrigues . . . With the diverting humours of Capt. Fustian, etc (London: Thomas Bickerton, 1720), 35-36
73. The differences between Schaw's positive evaluations of Creole life and those of other female-authored accounts of West Indian life can be clearly seen in Bridget Brereton, "Text, Testimony, and Gender: An Examination of Some Texts by Women on the English-Speaking Caribbean from the 1770s to the 1920s," in Shepherd et al., Engendering History, 63-93
74. Teresa Constantia Williams, who survived five husbands, was a notorious midcentury instance of this; see The Gentleman's Magazine 36 (February 1766): 83-4
75. See Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)
76. quoted in Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 8
77. As will be clear in what follows, I disagree with Keith Sandiford's claim that Schaw, in deploying an idealizing myth of Scottish national identity, presents the West Indian plantocracy as "inoculated from the moral and cultural mutations of Creole experience"; see Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 100. Sandiford's overemphasis on Schaw's "ethnic particularism" as the sole explanation of her partisanship for the West Indian planters arises from his failure to place her experience of the islands within the larger context of the American Revolution
78. Many other writers commented on the wearing of these masks. In 1790 an anonymous visitor remarked, "the ladies wore white and green hats, under which white handkerchiefs were pinned round their faces, meeting over their noses - this is the usual precaution for preventing the sun from blistering the skin.... At last the procession arrives before the piazza, all puffing for breath and half stifled with their handkerchiefs"; A Short journey in the West Indies, 2 vols. (London, 1790)
79. quoted in Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 118
80. "As to your humble Servant, I have always set my face to the weather; wherever I have been. I hope you have no quarrel at brown beauty" (Journal, 115)
81. It was estimated that in the mid-eighteenth century, "about one third of those of European birth [in Jamaica] were natives of Scotland"; see W. J. Gardner, A History of Jamaica from its discovery ... to the year 1872 (1873; reprint London: Cass, 1971), 164
82. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Act 2, Scene 1
83. There were even poems in praise of "brown beauty" as the desirable halfway point between "[t]hat whitely raw and unconcocted hiew" beloved of Northern nations, and "that adust aspect" prized by Moors and Indians. See Edward Herbert's poem, "The Brown Beauty," reprinted in Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), 277-8
84. The term "pet" for a black attendant was common in the eighteenth century. See David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Mundelstrup, Denmark: Dangaroo Press, 1985), 21-30
85. For a fascinating article on "real" as opposed to artificial whiteness in literature concerned with passing, see Harryette Mullen, "Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness," Diacritics 24 (1994): 71-89
86. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 123
87. For some reflections on racial, as opposed to cultural, identity, see Walter Benn Michaels, "Critical Response II: The No-Drop Rule," in Identities, eds. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 401-12
88. Beckles, "White Women and Slavery," 69
89. Martha Hodes mounts a similar case for the American South, as white servitude gave way to black slavery in the eighteenth century, in her White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1997)
90. See Brereton, "Text, Testimony and Gender," in Shepherd et al., Engendering History, 63-93
91. Similarly, Edwards boasted that their lives and manners were "sequestered, domestic, and unobtrusive" and that "no women on earth make better wives or better mothers" (History, Civil and Commercial, II. 4. 1, 13)
92. A yellow complexion commonly indicated Creoles of mixed-race origin. In The Jamaica Lady, the mustee Holmesia is introduced as follows: "She herself was a Creole, and consequently of a pale yellow Complexion" (8)
93. Thomas Atwood, The History of the Island of Domenica, containing a Description of its Situation, Extent, Climate, Mountains, Rivers, natural Productions etc. etc. (London: J. Johnson, 1791; new impression, London: Cass, 1971), 212
94. The metropolitan imagining of interracial sex encompassed by William Austin's racy cartoon of the Duchess of Queensberry fencing with her black servant Soubise, published 1773, was becoming inconceivable in the West Indian context; see Mary Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires . . . in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1935), 5:120 (cat. no. 5120)
95. According to Schaw, the revolutionaries had made a bad tactical error when they proclaimed that the King had promised "every Negro that would murder his Master and family that he should have his Master's plantation." The "Negroes," believing the "Artifice" to be true, were ready to try the experiment, she wrote, adding bitterly, "and in that case friends and foes will be all one" (Journal, 199). The self-imposed restriction on private talk practiced by white West Indian women has collapsed into dangerously loose public speech in America
96. For more about Wilmington in the early days of the Revolution, see Jeffrey J. Crow, "Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802," William and Mary Quarterly 37 (1980): 79-102
97. Henry Home, Lord Karnes, Elements of Criticism, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1762), 2:55
98. In Women Travel Writers, 46-65, Elizabeth Bohls discusses the role of aesthetics in Schaw's journal, but she narrows its role to a beautifying gloss on the horrors of slave society
99. Thomas Hutchinson's diary includes the following contemporary (1772) American account of a Customs House Officer: "[T]hey stripped him, tarred, feathered, and haltered him; carried him to the gallows, and whipped him with great barbarity in the presence of thousands" (Diary and Letters, 2:101)
100. A New Method of Macarony Making, as practised at Boston in North America, print published 12 October, 1774
101. see George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, 5:168-9 (cat. no. 5232)
102. For another cartoon depicting tarring and feathering, see The Congress or the Necessary Politicians, 5:204 (cat. no. 5297)
103. For Neilson's "liberal, flowing, unrestrained Correspondence" with the patriot James Iredell, see The Papers of James Iredell, ed. Don Higginbotham (Raleigh, N.C.: Division of Archives and History, Department of Cultural Resources, 1976- ), 1:248-326
104. Howe's shifting allegiance between patriots and loyalists is discussed by Philip Ranlet, "Loyalty in the Revolutionary War: General Robert Howe of North Carolina," The Historian 53 (1991): 721-42
105. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (Manchester, Manchester Univ. Press, 2000)
106. and Mary Favret, "Flogging: The Anti-Slavery Movement Writes Pornography," Romanticism and Gender (Essays and Studies 51), ed. A. Janowitz (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 20-43
107. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. K. Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-1990), 2:2604 (June 1805)
108. Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825), 5:434-44
109. For Wall's trial and execution, see The European Magazine 41 (January and February 1802), 74-7, 154-7
110. and The Gentleman's Magazine 72 (January 1802): 81, 180, 220
111. There is also an entry on Wall in the Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967-8), 20:551-2
112. Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African; translated from a Latin Dissertation (London: J. Phillips, 1788), 136
113. Clarkson, An Essay, 134
114. Clarkson here paraphrases John Mitchell, who had argued that "the primitive and original Complexion of Mankind, in Noah and his Sons" was "a dark swarthy, a Medium betwixt Black and White: from which primitive colour the Europeans degenerated as much on one hand, as the Africans did on the other." See John Mitchell, "An Essay upon the Causes of the Different Colours of People in Different Climates," Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775) 43.474 (1744-5): 102-50; this reference, 146
115. See Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations made during a Voyage round the World (1778), eds. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest, and Michael Dettelbach (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai'i Press 1996), 176-7
116. For an account of these experiments, see the essay "On the complexion of the natives of hot countries, and the varieties of the human race," appended to Beddoes's poem, Alexander's Expedition down the Hydaspes and the Indus to the Indian Ocean (Madeley, Shropshire: printed privately, 1792), 77-82
117. See The Golden Age, A Poetical Epistle from Erasmus D - n, M. D. to Thomas Beddoes, M. D. (Tondon: Rivington, 1794), 10
118. For the experiment behind this parody, see Beddoes's A Letter to Dr Erasmus Darwin, on a new method of treating pulmonary consumption (Bristol: Bulgin and Rosser, 1793), 50-55
119. Beddoes's interest in the work of German philosophy and (racial) anatomy can be seen in his contributions to the Monthly Review in the mid 1790s, where he reviewed works by the anatomists Soemmerring, Blumenbach, and Camper. For Beddoes's life and works, see Dorothy A. Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes M.D., 1760-1808, Chemist, Physician, Democrat (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984)
120. Nussbaum, "Women and Race," 76-77
121. Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I (no. 80, June 1, 1711), 342-4
122. "The Discovery" (c. 1743?) is reproduced in Ronald Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works: First Complete Edition, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), as Plate 173 in vol. 2. Also refer to cat. no. 161 in vol. 1. The print (British Museum, Satires no. 2600) was swiftly suppressed, and the plate destroyed
123. The Spectator (no. 11, March 13, 1711), 47-51