Burns and Black Lives E-Book

Clark McGinn

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 812

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Would Burns 'Take the Knee' today? How could our Burns, the people's poet, look to become an instrument in what many now call 'The Black Holocaust'? Did Burns intend to travel knowing he would become a slavedriver, and broadly what that meant in terms of imposing suffering on others? Did this knowledge change his mind on emigrating to Jamaica? What would Burns have done had he actually gone? In the last decade of his life, as the debate for Abolition grew louder in Scotland, to what extent did this campaigning tide of information change his mindset? How was Burns used after his death in the fights for Abolition and Emancipation, particularly in the USA – in its Civil War and its Civil Rights movement? Through meticulous research and a compelling narrative, Clark McGinn examines Burns' connections to the transatlantic slave trade, highlighting the paradoxes and moral conflicts during the poet's time. He does not shy away from uncomfortable truths, presenting a nuanced portrait that challenges readers to reconcile Burns' literary genius with the ethical ambiguities of his time. Burns and Black Lives is an essential read for those interested in the intersections of literature, history and social justice, offering a profoundre-examination of one of Scotland's most iconic figures.

Leseprobe

CLARK McGINN was born in Ayr and talked so much as an infant his granny claimed he’d been vaccinated with a gramophone needle. Educated at Ayr Academy and University of Glasgow, he clocked up enough exams (in between speeches and debates) to embark on a banking career that would take him to London and New York and establish him as a specialist advisor to the global mission-critical helicopter industry. Burns has been a key joy since addressing his first Haggis in 1975 and he has toasted the ‘Immortal Memory’ every year since 1977, with nearly 250 speeches performed in 35 towns and cities across 16 countries, travelling the equivalent of 12 times around the globe. He was awarded a PhD by the University of Glasgow for his research on the history of the Burns Supper and is an honorary research fellow in its award-winning Centre for Robert Burns Studies. He is a Past President of the Burns Club of London (No 1) and of the Dublin Burns Club. In 2009, he gave the Eulogy at Burns’s 250th Anniversary service in Westminster Abbey. He is an honorary fellow of the University of Glasgow, a Fellow of the Chartered Banking Institute and an Arkansas Traveler (Honorary Ambassador of Arkansas). He and his wife Ann live in Harrow-on-the-Hill, near their three daughters and two grandchildren, and in Fowey in Cornwall.

By the same author:

The Burns Supper: A Comprehensive History, Luath Press, 2019

The Burns Supper: A Concise History, 2019

Out of Pocket: How Collective Amnesia Lost the World its Wealth, Again, Luath Press, 2009

The Ultimate Burns Supper Book, Luath Press, 2006, 2024

The Ultimate Guide to Being Scottish, Luath Press, 2008, 2024

First published 2025

ISBN: 978-1-80425-215-4

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 11.5 point Sabon by

Main Point Books, Edinburgh

© Clark McGinn 2025

Everything I do or have is thanks to Ann, and this is no exception.

If she doesn’t mind sharing a bit on this one occasion, I hope this book can be seen as part of my alma mater’s, University of Glasgow’s, courageous and vital process of reparation. And I sincerely hope that by the continued efforts of us all to understand and to change, our grandchildren, Lucy and Alfred, will grow in a world where ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ has declined to the point that we can hope to see ‘man to man, the world o’er’ as our brothers and sisters regardless of skin colour, or any other accident of our humanity, as hoped for, prayed for and prophesied by Robert Burns.

‘That man to man, the world o’erShall brothers be, for a’ that.’

‘Man’s inhumanity to ManMakes countless thousands mourn.’

[Burns] was the first white man I read who seemed to understand that a human being was a human being and that we are more alike than unalike.—Nobel Prizewinner, Dr Maya Angelou1

Burns has also been described as a poet of the poor, an advocate of social and political change, and an opponent of slavery, pomposity and greed. —Former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan2

Burns […] was a great outsider who […] made it fun to look through and poke at the veneer of white skin and have our day laughing at their wrong and distorted assumptions and perceptions of us. Like him, and with him, we craved to be most human.—Former High Commissioner, Republic of South Africa, Dr Lindiwe Mabuza3

[Burns is] the first national poet of people’s hearts, and still arguably our national bard in many ways, […] Interestingly, Burns, like Shakespeare, is a poet that still speaks to our times – his work rings across the centuries, fresh as anything.—Former Scots Makar, Jackie Kay4

I locate myself near Robbie Burns – the Scottish vernacular and the folk qualities of his verse in particular.—poet and activist, Linton Kwesi Johnson5

1 Dr Maya Angelou in Angelou on Burns, BBC documentary directed/produced by Elly M Taylor, transmitted 21 August 1996.

2 Kofi Annan, ‘Inaugural Robert Burns Memorial Lecture’, United Nations Building, New York, 13 January 2004. Text from UN Information services: www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2004/sgsm9112.html (accessed 1 September 2024).

3 Dr Lindiwe Mabuza, in Andy Hall, ed, Touched by Burns: Images and Insights (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008), p.136.

4 Jackie Kay, ‘Let Poetry Raise Our Spirits, Let Poetry Give Us Hope,’ Sunday Post, 22 March 2020.

5 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, ‘LKJ: As Good as His Words,’ The Independent [London], 19 June 2003.

Contents

Contextual Notes

INTRODUCTIONWould Burns ‘Take the Knee’ Today?

CHAPTER ONESlavery in Burns’s Ayrshire and in the Wider Scotland of His Time

CHAPTER TWOSlavery in Burns’s Life

CHAPTER THREESlavery in Burns’s ‘Annus Horribilis,’ of 1786

CHAPTER FOURSlavery in Burns’s Writings

CHAPTER FIVESlavery in Burns’s Reading

CHAPTER SIXSlavery in Burns’s Counterfactual Caribbean

CHAPTER SEVENSlavery in Burns’s Afterlife

CHAPTER EIGHTConclusion: Should Burns ‘Fall’?

APPENDIX I

Original Article: ‘Burns and Slavery’ [2006]

APPENDIX II

Frederick Douglass

A)Burns Anniversary Festival [1849]

B)A Fugitive Slave visiting the Birthplace of Robert Burns [1846]

C)Self-made Men [1859]

Bibliography

Tables

Table 1:Arguments of the 12 Judges in Knight v Wedderburn

Table 2:Burns’s Life and the British Abolition Movement: Key Timelines

Table 3:Burns and Jamaica – Timeline

Table 4:Incomes From the Jamaican Economy, Around 1774

Table 5:Burns’s Uses of the Word ‘Slavery’

Table 5a:‘Metaphorical Slavery’

Table 5b:‘Political Slavery’

Table 5c:‘Coward Slavery’

Table 6:Comparison of Sentiments: ‘The Slave’s Lament’ and ‘The Farewell’

Table 7:Transcription of the Dumfries Menagerie Handbill

Table 8:Burns’s Writings on Slavery – Summary

Table 8a:Burns’s Writings on Slavery – Evaluation By Period

Table 8b:Burns’s Writings on Slavery – Adjusted Evaluation by Period

Table 9:Burns in a Counterfactual Caribbean – Process Chart

Table 9a:Percentage Evaluation of Counterfactual Outcomes

Table 9b:Ranked Evaluation of Counterfactual Outcomes

Table 10:‘A Man’s a Man’ in the Rhetorical Lexicon of Abolition, 1836–1866

Table 11:Burns Centenary Celebrations Across the Antebellum USA, 1859

Table 12:Further Rhetorical Use of ‘A Man’s a Man’, 1871–1920

Table 13:Frequency of Use of ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr

CONTEXTUAL NOTES

It is easy, childish even, to judge yesterday with the wisdom of today when the wisdom of today will become tomorrow’s ignorance. —Andrea Marcolongo (2024)1

CONTEXTUAL NOTE ONE: Language

ONE OF THE consequences of increased interest and objective research into the question of Scottish participation in the industrial complex of chattel enslavement has been an appropriate move to humanise the terms used in academic discussion to reflect that those who had been enslaved were in fact people and not chattels as claimed. In this study of Robert Burns, I have endeavoured to use language which accords due respect to the memories of those who endured that repression, avoiding the euphemisms mainly employed by pro-enslavement participants. In this work ‘enslaved’ is used as the adjective denoting the victim of slavery. Many now use ‘enslaver’ instead of ‘slave owner’ or ‘slave master’, but I believe this not to be granular enough, and so here ‘enslaver’ will be used for those who make the initial enslavement on the African continent, ‘trafficker’ for those involved in the ‘triangular trade’ and the ‘auctions’, ‘slave-holder’ for the owner of the plantation which relied on forced enslaved labour, and ‘enforcer’ for the ‘overseers’ and ‘gang masters.’

There are several compound words that are not easily or simply modernised, such as ‘slave trade’, ‘slave-driver’, ‘slave economy’, ‘slave ship’, ‘slave surgeon’, ‘slave code’, ‘slave market’ and ‘slave plantation’. These are used here without intending disrespect.

Please note and be aware that racialist epithets, including ‘the N-word’ (and variants), are not elided in quotations from contemporary documents and that use does not reflect my language, or that of the publisher.

However, the language around race and slavery continues to evolve and develop: the introduction and later removal of the term ‘BAME’ being a good example of that lexical and political process. If, by chance today, or in future readings, a word or phrase of mine appears infelicitous, I ask the Reader to excuse my failing, recognising the honest intent behind my choice of words today.

CONTEXTUAL NOTE TWO: Colonialism

This study focuses on Burns and Black chattel enslavement. Believing that it is a category error to combine ‘slavery’ and ‘colonialism’ as a single study, this study focuses on the ‘plantocrats’ of the West Indies and their maintenance of the enforced/enslaved model of production, and not the ‘nabobs’ of the East Indies who adopted a colonising economic model without needing industrial levels of enslavement. Similarly, there is no space to debate extirpation policies in regard to native inhabitants. (Also Burns had relatively little engagement with those nabobs, though, of course, his two younger sons rose to field officer positions in India in the service of the monopoly coloniser, The Honourable East India Company.)

CONTEXTUAL NOTE THREE: Personal Historical Responsibility

It must be remembered that enslavement was condoned by law and practice for many centuries before the 18th-century Abolition movement (and after). In reviewing that past, one must be careful not to judge everyone there by the moral and social conventions we expect as standard today. This is particularly true of the period of Burns’s later life when the Abolition movement was gaining traction (say 1787–1793) but did not yet hold a sufficient majority to change the law. While there are historical figures who gloried and gained in the traffic and exploitation of Black chattel slaves, it is also true that virtually all of that society used commodities produced through enslaved labour, be it sugar, rum or cotton, or provided goods and services to the owners of enslaved plantations. This is summed up by Vincent P Gillen, the noted Greenock museum curator and local historian:

Virtually every person named in this book has some connection to slavery through their genealogy or direct involvement. It is pointless to pick names out and mak[e] examples of them purely because their names are more historically visible. Let us remember the times they lived in.2

1 From Andrea Marcolongo, trans Will Schutt, Shifting the Moon from its Orbit: A Night at the Acropolis Museum (London: Europa Editions UK, 2024), p.120.

2 Vincent P Gillen, Sugar, Ships & Slavery: An Illustrated History of Georgian & Victorian Greenock, 2 vols (Greenock: Cartsburn Publishing, 2022), vol.I, p.497.

INTRODUCTION

Would Burns ‘Take the Knee’ Today?

ROBERT BURNS, SCOTLAND’S national poet, is loved the world over as the bard of freedom, of liberty and of the common good of humankind. Through performing and hearing his poems and songs we share his understanding of mankind, of nature and ecology and of society; we feel his passion, his love and his loss; we become aware of our national pride and the need to fight for our rights; and we come to appreciate the unity of humanity: politically, economically and, above all, convivially.

Almost 20 years ago, in late 2006, I was asked by the Scottish Executive to write a blog essay on ‘Robert Burns and Slavery’ to launch its bicentennial celebrations marking the abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain in 1807. I had known, of course, that Burns had accepted a job as a ‘bookkeeper’ in Jamaica, a plan which was set aside following his successful first publication, and I also recalled that his poems like ‘Scots Wha Hae’, ‘Honest Poverty’ and ‘The Slave’s Lament’ railed against slavery and stood up for individual human rights. However, when I started to explore this part of Burns’s life and legacy in depth, while watching the growing understanding of the much more prominent role that Scots in general played in the Black chattel slave trade, I found a significantly darker story, and a less than rosy picture of our Bard’s feelings, actions and, most importantly, writings when it comes to his interface with slavery.

It was no secret that Burns had accepted a job on a Jamaican slave plantation in 1786 – in fact, James Currie’s 1800 biography Life and Works of Burns, opens with the fact:

Robert Burns was, as is well known, the son of a farmer in Ayrshire, and afterwards himself a farmer there; but having been unsuccessful, he was about to emigrate to Jamaica.1

However, of all the complexities of Burns’s life, this episode had received comparatively little critical interest. Since those celebrations in 2007, a number of writers have sought to explore Burns’s attitudes to, and engagement with, what Burns had once called ‘the infernal traffic’.2 It is not a straightforward task (candidly, little is straightforward when it comes to analysing such a complex man and skilful wordsmith as Robert Burns). Black slavery and its abolition is hardly touched on except in one of his letters and is the direct subject of but a single poem: ‘The Slave’s Lament’, a song which many commentators place at the weaker end of his creative output, although there are other references in his prose and poetry which will be teased out in these pages. Despite Burns’s friendships with leading Abolitionists and the Abolitionist prose and verse found on his bookcase, his near silence raises questions about whether the poet who was famed for his humanity failed to register the human cost of chattel slavery and, therefore, its fundamental immorality.

It is a contentious topic (at least for some people). Gerry Carruthers writes of being called ‘nae freend’ for ‘questioning Burns and slavery’, and this strength of feeling can be seen in this formal complaint to the UK’S Press Complaints Commission (PCC): Mr Andrew Morgan v The Sun (2012):

Mr Andrew Morgan complained […] that an article reporting on Burns Night inaccurately reported that the poet Robert Burns lived and worked in the West Indies in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code.

Resolution: The complaint was resolved when the PCC negotiated the publication of the following correction: Rod Liddle’s column of January 25 claimed that Robert Burns had lived and worked in the West Indies. In fact, this was not the case as Mr Burns accepted a post in Jamaica but changed his mind after successfully publishing his poetry. We are happy to set the record straight.3

Changing literary tone and century, one wants to remind these critics that for every hard-working, respectable Dr Jekyll in the Scottish national tale, there is an equal and darker Mr Hyde lurking just out of view. As the umquhile Scots Makar Jackie Kay tells us:

Most British people think of slavery as something that happened in America and perhaps the Caribbean. [...]. Being African and Scottish, I’d taken comfort in the notion that Scotland was not nearly as implicated in the horrors of the slave trade as England. Scotland’s self image is one of a hard-done-to wee nation, yet bonny and blithe. I once heard a Scottish woman proudly say: ‘We don’t have racism up here, that’s an English thing, that’s down south.’ Scotland is a canny nation when it comes to remembering and forgetting. The plantation owner is never wearing a kilt.4

This is seen time and again in the ‘ya-boo’ world of Burns legend which was famously captured by Byron’s summation of Burns’s ‘antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness, delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and groveling [sic], dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!’5 The temptation is, on one hand, to gild ‘THE BARD’S’ icon (hoping that further gold leaf will distract the critical eye from some of the darker or shabbier corners of that portrait) or, on the other, to add another dollop of January ‘click-bait’ demonising ‘RABBIE’ specifically to create a wave of dyspepsia through the serried ranks of haggis-eaters and a consequent rise in readership. The first of those approaches can be seen in the Scottish Executive’s larger work commemorating Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807: Burns features prominently in the narrative and is described as one of the ‘Leading Abolitionists’ in the following exaggerated terms:

Robert Burns, the celebrated Scottish poet, was born into humble beginnings. In 1783 [sic] he was almost penniless and decided to accept an offer to go to Jamaica as a bookkeeper on an estate. To raise the fare to get from Greenock to Jamaica on the Nancy he was persuaded to raise a subscription to publish some of his poems. The publication and success of the Kilmarnock edition changed his mind about leaving.

He became affected by the abolitionist cause. The circles he mixed in, especially after the publication of his first book of poetry, would have opened him to abolitionist messages. A number of writers refer to Burns’ personal dislike of anyone being treated in a servile manner, and his interest in social injustice issues. In 1792 he published ‘The Slave’s Lament’, based on the stories he heard coming from the Scottish estates in Virginia.6

The poor grasp of chronology in the first paragraph – it was 1786, not 1783 – should warn the reader of the significant weaknesses of interpretation in the second, which will be looked at in depth in the following chapters, but this passage serves as a ‘stock’ description of that period of Burns’s life, seen through the rose-tinted lens of the typical positive reader.

On the other hand, as January comes round, we find the annual dose of ‘knock ’em down’ tabloid journalese attacks on some aspect or other of Burns’s colourful life. In 2008, Gerry Carruthers’s sober investigation was introduced in one newspaper as ‘[n]otorious for fornication and exploiting women, Burns had a fantasy to emigrate to Jamaica and become a slave driver before making his fortune and returning to Scotland.’7 Michael Fry went much further in the attack the following year, denouncing the choice of Burns as the icon of the 2009 ‘Homecoming’ on his thesis that the great poet was ‘a racist, misogynist drunk,’ so while marking ‘Burns’ 250th anniversary in a literary sense,’ was understandable, ‘in 2009, his example, in a practical sense, could well send Scotland straight down the tubes.’8 The negative view of Burns’s morality was echoed in a review of Robert Crawford’s The Bard that same year:

Throughout this book, we do not see a single example of Robert Burns acting with moral courage when his character was tested.9

Similarly, in 2018 the noted poet and former Scots Makar Liz Lochhead drew a post-#MeToo comparison of Burns to a ‘Weinsteinian sex pest’, generating much heat (but little light) in the press for a fortnight.10 Or in 2022 when the Scottish Poetry Library commissioned a group of four Scots female poets (‘The Trysting Thorns’) to write new poems on Burns and reflect on his legacy (both poetic and social). Their output was driven by a common perception that Burns was a misogynist:

•‘a guid poet but an awfy man for the women’ (Susi Briggs).

•‘I struggle to understand the ongoing appetite for Burns’ (Morag Anderson).

•‘Maybe it’s time for another poet to take the throne’ (Janette Ayachi).

•‘There are aspects of Burns’ life and his personal behaviours that I’m uncomfortable celebrating’ (Victoria McNulty).

(Although McNulty tempered her remarks saying that ‘[d]espite all my reservations about his work and his legacy I was surprised how connected I became to the humanity of his writing.’)11

Neither approach, the co-optive nor the dismissive, gets us close to understanding the complexity of Robert Burns’s thought. I have continued to plough this field since writing that first article over 15 years ago, as have others who have contributed to a new paradigm understanding of Scotland and slavery, and while I was (fractionally) too kind to Burns in 2006, it is still a shock to ask ourselves the key questions: (a) how could our Burns, the people’s poet, look to become an instrument in what many now call ‘The Black Holocaust’? and (b) in the last decade of his life, as the debate for Abolition grew louder in Scotland, to what extent did this campaigning tide of information change his mindset?

This book follows the various threads that slavery wove in the warp and weft of Burns’s checkered life. In Chapter One, the economic, legal and social position of slavery in Burns’s Scotland is set out, with Chapter Two looking closer at slavery’s direct (and indirect) touchpoints in Burns’s short life. Chapter Three starts by defining some of the confusion over how Burns used the word ‘slave’ and then uses that to analyse the 27 (or potentially 28) of his poems, songs and letters that have some connection with Black chattel slavery. Chapter Four performs a similar task by going through Burns’s library to capture what he read from others (in fiction, non-fiction and in verse) about the increasingly contested space around Abolition and Slavery. This is a comprehensive list of passages, and the Reader might well be excused from reading each quotation in this chapter line-byline. Next, Chapter Five performs a slight digression by seeking to answer the oft-posited question, ‘what would Burns have done had he actually gone?’ It does this in four counterfactual approaches: assessing the risk of death through tropical disease, looking at Andrew O Lindsay’s novel Illustrious Exile, then Shara McCallum’s poem cycle No Ruined Stone and lastly using the near-contemporary Scots slaver-turned-Abolitionist Zachary Macaulay’s experiences and awakening. Chapter Six presents how Burns was used after his death in the fights for Abolition and Emancipation, particularly in the United States of America, and its Civil War and its Civil Rights movement (with some thought on his poetic influence and legacy in Black poetry and the Harlem Renaissance.)

Unfortunately, the detailed research that will be laid out in this book, and which leads to its final ‘verdict’, does not support an entirely positive ‘spin’. On the negative side of this new history, it will be seen that the ‘bookkeeper’ was a role that used the lash more than the pen, that Burns did intend to travel knowing he would become a slave-driver (and broadly what that meant in terms of imposing suffering on others) and that this knowledge did not actively change his mind on emigrating to Jamaica. It also shows that – with some important exceptions – he was relatively unaffected by the Abolitionist cause until it was in full swing and, even then, was but tangentially engaged with one of the biggest moral, social and political movements of his lifetime. While he was no active supporter of slavery, he evinced hardly any activity (in words or deeds) for Abolition, although it should be remembered that the progressive decline in his health occurred at the very same time that the Abolitionist movement picked up its stride. Had he another decade to live, it seems a fair assumption that we would, in all likelihood, have seen this branch of his poetry produce greater fruit.

That being said, his ‘redemption’ comes from how his poetry and its philosophy were used posthumously as a core part of the rhetoric of Abolition, Emancipation and Civil Rights: truly inching our way forward to that day when, as Burns had prayed for, ‘man to man, the world o’er, shall brothers be for a’ that.’ Today, where at long last there is a greater awareness across the board of the issues around race and society, Burns’s innate humanity has an important place in teaching us about our relationships with others.

Yes, Burns could have done more in his lifetime to advance the emancipation of enslaved people: but then, could each of us not say that of ourselves? As William Wilberforce said in his first great speech on Abolition to the House of Commons: ‘We are all guilty – we ought all to plead guilty, and not seek to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others.’12 So be it with Burns, whose words have stood as a beacon of humanity, equality and freedom, and that absolves his all-too-human frailties.

1 [Dr James Currie, ed], The Works of Burns. With an Account of His Life, and a Criticism of His Writings, To Which Are Prefixed, Some Observations on the Character and Conditions of Scottish Peasantry, 4 vols (Liverpool, London and Edinburgh: McCreedy, Cadell and Davies, Creech, 1800), vol.I, p.1. [Currie Edition.] It is notable that Currie, a sincerely committed Abolitionist, makes no criticism of his subject on this score.

2 J De Lancey Ferguson and G Ross Roy, eds, The Letters of Robert Burns (Second Edition), 2 vols (Oxford: OUP, 1985) [‘Letters’]: to Helen Maria Williams, dated [late July or early August] 1789, [L.353B].

3 Gerry Carruthers, ‘Robert Burns and Slavery’, in Fickle Man: Robert Burns in the 21st Century, ed by Johnny Rodger and Gerard Carruthers (Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2009), p.172; Morgan v The Sun: www.pcc.org.uk/cases/adjudicated.html (accessed 1 September 2024). Rod Liddell had written ‘The Scots like Burns because he was a champion of social equality and human rights — overlooking the fact that he worked as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation.’ The Sun, 25 January 2012. On the other side of the political press, Roy Greenslade said ‘Liddle […] wrote an anti-Burns diatribe about the “joke poet” […] but its good to see that the P[ress] C[omplaints] C[ommission] entertained a third-party complaint about a man who has been dead for over 200 years.’ The Guardian, 30 March 2012.

4 Jackie Kay, The Guardian, 24 March 2007.

5 Lord Byron, Works of Lord Byron, 6 vols, ed by RE Protheroe (London, John Murray; 1898), ‘Journal, 13 December 1813,’ vol.II, p.357.

6 Paula Kitching, Scotland and the Slave Trade: 2007 Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (Edinburgh: Scottish Executive, 2007), p.32 [the ‘The Slave’s Lament’ text is at p.56]. The original researchers/authors (Iain Whyte and Eric J Graham, who are heavily quoted in this book) had their contracts terminated for refusing to adopt editorial changes which they believed ‘compromised historical accuracy and our professional integrity’. See TM Devine, ‘Lost to History’, in Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection, ed by TM Devine (Edinburgh: EUP, 2015), pp.21–40, at p.26. Please note that the author’s commission (see Appendix 1) was not subject to editorial pressure.

7The Herald [Glasgow], 19 January 2008.

8 ‘Robert Burns: A Racist, Sexist Drunk?’ The Scotsman, 4 January 2009.

9 Daniel Ritchie, ‘[Review] “The Bard: Robert Burns a Biography,” by Robert Crawford, Christianity and Literature (Summer 2011), p.668.

10 ‘Robert Burns’, The Guardian, 24 January 2018.

11www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/the-trysting-thorns/ (accessed 1 September 2024).

12 William Wilberforce, Speech 12 May 1789, Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, Volume XXVIII, [1789–1791] (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown [and others], 1816), p.42.

CHAPTER ONE

Slavery in Burns’s Ayrshire and in the Wider Scotland of His Time

Town and County

THE AYRSHIRE OF Burns’s day was a county engaged in social and economic development. Agricultural improvements had started in the county some years before and that process, plus an increase in trade and the first steps of industrialisation, accelerated after the notorious collapse in 1772 of Messrs Douglas, Heron & Co (known widely as the ‘Ayr Bank’). This debacle ruined many of the old landed lairds and so created opportunities for the nouveau wealth arising from the colonialism of the East Indies (‘the nabobs’) and from the Black chattel slave economy of the West Indies (‘the plantocrats’) to repatriate.1 This ‘county interest’ was exemplified by both the number of local peers whose estates led the county’s social and political life and by the number of parliamentary electors for Ayrshire. Although the number of them seems embarrassingly low by our standards, with 205 voters, the county of Ayrshire had the largest electorate in Scotland at the time, as an anonymous commentator said in 1786: ‘[t]he county of Ayr is perhaps superior to any in Scotland in the number of its Peers, Nabobs, and wealthy Commoners.’2

It was also a period of change within the Royal Burgh of Ayr. The economic shock caused by the loss of the town’s Virginia trade on the back of American independence, following on from the depression caused by the Ayr Bank’s failure, had hit the town hard. Daniel Defoe, on his national tour, described it as follows:

Over the River Aire is a Bridge of Four Arches, […]; and South

of the Bridge stands the old Town of Aire or Erigena, famous for its Antiquity and Privileges […] It is now like an old Beauty, and shews the ruins of a good Face, but is still decaying every Day […] from having been the fifth best town in Scotland.3

The burgh’s oligarchic merchant families supported Provost John Ballantine’s introduction of urban enlightenment into the ‘old Beauty.’4 The money raised by feuing (selling on long leaseholds) the burgh lands of Alloway was channelled through private acts of Parliament allowing major redesign of the town harbour and the building of his New Bridge over the River Ayr. This benefited the town through improved trading patterns to Ireland and to Glasgow respectively, while the trading businesses which had operated into Virginia (and other ports on the Chesapeake) pivoted to the Caribbean instead.5 Not every plan reached fruition: an attempt to capture a percentage of the refining capacity for Caribbean sugar from the Clyde ports came to nothing, despite significant investment.6 Socially, Ballantine’s reconstitution of the ancient burgh or grammar school into Ayr Academy, his support for the burgeoning Air Library Society and the building of the Ayr Racecourse under his sponsorship would lead, in time, to his successors laying out the new Georgian Streets around what would become Wellington Square with its imposing County Buildings. The town’s redevelopment was continued after Ballantine’s death and was completed in 1827 by the town hall and its impressive 225ft steeple.7

In terms of religion, the burgh was appreciably more liberal than the rest of the county. For most of Burns’s life, the ministers of Ayr’s Auld Kirk (Ayr and Alloway being a single parish with two ministers) were Revd Dr William Dalrymple (1723–1814) from 1746 and Revd Dr William McGill (1732–1807) from 1760. Both divines were leading ‘New Lichts’ in the Church of Scotland, the theological school which sought to moderate the traditional severity of strict Calvinism, as promoted by the conservative school of ‘Auld Lichts.’ They experienced rather different careers, with Dalrymple serving as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1781 while McGill suffered under the shadow of a formal interrogation over potential heresy in his writings by his rural Auld Licht antagonists a few years later.8 As Burns described it, ‘one of the worthiest as well as one of the ablest, of the whole priesthood of the Kirk of Scotland,’ was on trial ‘for the blasphemous heresies of squaring Religion by the rules of Common Sense, and attempting to give a decent character to Almighty God and a rational account of his proceedings with the Sons of Men.’9 Thanks in part to robust support from the Ayr Town Council (led by Provost David Kennedy, Ballantine’s brother-in-law) an armistice was brokered following a carefully constructed apology by McGill. However, we know from Burns’s continuing clerical satires that there had been no resolution of the underlying, doctrinal differences.

Slavery in the Ayrshire Economy and the Supply Chain for the Plantations

The understanding of how Scotland participated in the slave trade has developed in the last decade from a bien pensant belief that it was an English problem, to remembering individual invidious Scots who were personally active in buying and selling slaves on the coast of Africa or in Western slave markets, to a wider class of those who profited through developing the economic system dependent on enslaved labour on Britain’s sugar islands in the Caribbean.10 Recent research has disproved that idyllic misremembrance:

There was no single ‘Scottish’ response to enslavement. A strong sense of abolitionism belied a national ambivalence: although many Scots at home denounced enslavement, there were plenty more who happily profited from it in the colonies. There was no major difference between Scottish planters and those of other nationalities in their dealings with the enslaved.11

However, that needs to be taken further, for while the number of direct actors might be relatively small and there was no visible trade in enslaved people in Scottish ports, the chain of supply and demand reached right into the core of Scottish and Ayrshire society. The National Trust for Scotland’s commendable 2021 interim report, Facing Our Past, uses a helpful model to categorise connection with slavery:

DIRECT: consisting of the traffickers in, managers of, medics to, and holders of enslaved people (and in the latter case including absentee plantation owners and those with Black domestic servants);12

INDIRECT: the merchants who traded in the commodities imported from the West Indies and who manufactured and exported goods and services to those colonies, along with the financiers of those trades (and of West Indian plantations, properties and businesses), and the services underpinning them (such as shipping, legal work and insurance);13

INTERGENERATIONAL: the wives, families, heirs and descendants of the above two classes, who were not personally managing enslaving businesses, but whose financial privilege was based on the historical profits earned from the labour of the enslaved workers and typically re-invested in British land or enterprise;14 and

ABOLITIONIST: those men and women active (to a greater or lesser extent) in the long movement to secure freedom for the enslaved. (Noting that several Abolitionists could, earlier in their lives, have been classified in one of the three previous categories.)

To which should be added a final class (not in the NTS model): that of the retail consumers of West Indian produce: obviously sugar, but also rum, cotton, dyestuffs and other produce, being a much larger group of people ranging across all ranks of British society.15

It is easy to condemn the wealthy plantocrats, or their heirs, or their enforcing minions whose income was wrung from the labour of enslaved workers. However, those direct investors, managers and agents could not function alone, as each of the island economies in the Caribbean needed most of the necessities of life to be shipped in – tea, teapots and teaspoons, guns, bullets and gunpowder, bibles, books and writing paper – as British policy was to limit manufacture in its colonies, imposing two monopolies: the colonies’ trade of raw materials into the British Isles, and a reciprocal flow of finished goods and luxuries from Britain back across the Atlantic.16 These colonies were as dependent on British exports for their day-to-day living as they were on the patrols of the Royal Navy for their independence from foreign powers. This became particularly true after trade from the closer North American ports was interrupted by the struggle for independence. Whyte calculates that, for the Caribbean overall, ‘[a]fter the American War, imports more than doubled by 1790, exports rose by 60%.’17

Exporters shipped their goods not knowing to whom or how they would be used, but without those exports, Caribbean society would collapse. With the growing home demand for sugar and cotton in particular, the plantocrats were wealthy customers and many British merchants made a fortune on this side of the Atlantic by shipping mundane goods which nevertheless propped up the plantations. The nail manufacturer has no idea whether his product is for the church or school roof, or to build the gallows or nail the ear of an enslaved person to a tree. Yet, upon closer thought, many product lines such as these could be clearly seen to contribute to the efficiency of chattel slavery, as abolitionist William Dickson showed on his 1792 tours, where he presented shackles, whips and instruments of torture to the gaze of his audiences.18 It was (and to an extent remains) easy to forget to condemn the ironmasters in Britain, such as at the Muirkirk Ironworks in Ayrshire, who manufactured manacles, leg-irons, thumbscrews and chains, or the leather workers crafting ruthless bullwhips, belts and straps. The community of investors in and owners of Caribbean plantations (known as the ‘West Indian Interest’) was not slow to remind people of this. A pamphlet of 1789 is a good example: ‘There is not a manufacturing town in Britain which does not furnish articles to the islands [of the Caribbean]. Shall these industrious workmen and their families be left to starve?’19

Similarly, while Ayrshire ports (and those in the wider Scotland) were not physically involved in the ‘middle passage’, the county earned good money by supporting both of the other legs of the ‘triangular trade,’ providing the trading stock (cloth, spirits and manufactured goods) that were the currency of exchange in the slave markets of West Africa, as well as the necessities of plantation life in the West Indies.20 Similarly, Ayrshire homes (of all classes) and businesses happily bought up the inward passage’s exports of sugar, rum and other commodities with never a thought on their method of production (until late in the century).

The slave economy, therefore, surreptitiously reached into the heart of British industry and the industry of the British hearth, with Scotland being no exception. A good example is in cloth and clothing. Plainly, the plantocrat and his wife ordering fine fashionable garments were paying their costumier in cash generated by enslaved labour, so the costumier’s business is but one step removed from the physical cruelty of chattel slavery. Similarly at the other end of the market, there was a need for robust but cheap fabric to clothe the slaves. A number of Scottish communities, including Irvine to the north of Ayr, experimented in raising flax and then ‘heckling’ it to weave linen. These growth opportunities arose from the increasing demand for Osnaburgh cloth, a coarse linen specifically developed for sale to plantation owners to clothe their enslaved workers.21 Another example was the cotton mill at Catrine in Ayrshire, built by Claude Alexander of Ballochmyle (1752–1809) in partnership with the famous industrialist David Dale (1739–1806).22 Here raw cotton shipped from the West Indies was picked at home by women and then sent to the mill for carding and spinning. By 1796, their 445 employees were producing 2,660lbs of spun cotton from raw material grown on plantations by enslaved labourers.23 To stress the point, without this trade, the plantation economy could not maintain itself, and while that must have become increasingly apparent during the 20 years leading up to Abolition in 1807, a modern phrase comes to mind: ‘don’t ask and don’t tell.’

Given that the plantations (and hence the enslaved population) grew on the back of home demand for West Indian exports, it can truthfully be said that, at one level, slavery was embedded in the ordinary working and family lives of almost everyone in Burns’s Ayrshire: partly invisible and partly simply not mentioned.24 It was only as the Abolition movement achieved momentum from 1788 that silence became increasingly difficult in the midst of polarised debate. Over time, particularly from 1792, the wider society became aware of the human cost of their consumer goods, one indicator of that being the campaign of sugar abstinence amongst ‘[t]he heaven-born daughters of our isle’ who declined to ‘enjoy those sweets, which they supposed to be the price of blood.’25 Such that the leading Abolitionist Thomas Clarkson reported (in a modest exaggeration) that:

there was no town, through which I passed, in which there was not some one individual who had left off the use of sugar. In the smaller towns there were from ten to fifty by estimation, and in the larger from two to five hundred, who made this sacrifice to virtue. These were of all ranks and parties. Rich and poor, churchmen and dissenters, had adopted the measure. Even grocers had left off trading in the article, in some places. In gentlemen’s families, where the master had set the example, the servants had often voluntarily followed it; and even children, who were capable of understanding the history of the sufferings of the Africans, excluded, with the most virtuous resolution, the sweets, to which they had been accustomed, from their lips.26

However, while some few disavowed sugars, the overall consumption of sugar and rum continued to grow, for as Walter Scott’s character, the Glaswegian Bailie Nicol Jarvie, put it, ‘good ware has aften come frae a wicked market.’27 In 1704 the average British sugar consumption per head per annum was 4lbs (or 1.8kg); by 1800 it had jumped to 18lbs (8.2kg), while in 2020 the United Kingdom’s per capita consumption stood at 96lbs (or 43.3kg) leading poet Kate Tough to mark the history and present use of sugar and tobacco in her poem, ‘People made Glasgow’: ‘What we murdered them for/ We kill ourselves with.’28 It now appears ironic that the early Burns Suppers would toast ‘a man’s a man for a’ that’ while consuming punch made from sugar, rum, citrus fruits and spices all harvested by enslaved labour. The more sugar consumed, the greater the number of enslaved labourers were needed to be bought in and it may be that growth in the enslaved population helped bring the cause of Abolition to the fore of other minds.

The Ayrshire plantocrats and the wider British ‘West Indian Interest’ were equally dogged in holding to what they saw as their constitutionally guaranteed property rights.29 They constructed a political lobby which fought a consistent (and one must say with grudging respect, effective) rear-guard action, playing both to public ignorance and to a governmental fearful of losing the wealth of the Caribbean islands in the same way as the 13 American colonies were lost to the Crown. The 19-year gap between the first anti-slavery legislation (‘Dolben’s Act’) in 1788 and Abolition of the Trade in 1807 was appalling, but can be partly explained by the eruption of the first phases of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in April 1792. As Nigel Leask rightly says:

In the 1790s Tory abolitionists had to work hard to disassociate their humanitarian cause from French revolutionary politics, a move which inevitably alienated more radical abolitionists, for whom the end of slavery was inseparable from the cause of political reform.30

When Abolition was debated in the Lords in 1793, the case against was led by the Earl of Abingdon who was explicit about this purported connection:

What does the abolition of the slave trade mean more or less in effect than liberty and equality? what, more or less than the rights of man? and what is liberty and equality, and what are the rights of man, but the foolish fundamentals of this new [French Revolutionary] philosophy.31

This effectively boxed in the Abolitionists, for while Admiral Rodney’s 1782 naval victory over the fleets of France and Spain at ‘The Battle of the Saintes’ had given Britain superiority in European waters, in the Atlantic and Caribbean it was not unchallenged by the French and Spanish navies seeking to blockade or capture Britain’s West Indian colonies. It was only after Nelson defeated the combined French and Spanish navies at Trafalgar in 1805 that Britain’s mastery of the seas effectively removed that risk, allowing Abolition to follow close behind in 1807. However, even then, the West Indian Interest had sufficient power to delay full Emancipation for a further quarter of a century (and then to garner the benefits of ‘Apprenticeship’ and cash compensation, as will be discussed later).

Master and Servant

There is also an argument that can be made that most people at home failed to differentiate between the oppression of Black enslaved people (across the Atlantic and out of sight) and the grinding lot of the poor peasantry and workers of Scotland (across the road and in plain view). There were many in Ayrshire suffering from what we would certainly call injustice today in the relations between employer and employed, or landlord and tenant (or even husband and wife, or parent and child). Poorer folk felt tied to the meagre land they worked, or the trade they plied: those families bore the risk of a poor crop or a trade depression personally, with no ‘social safety net’ to protect them (in fact, the limited poor relief that existed was widely seen as a final degradation rather than any social last resort).32 ‘The factor’s snash’ in Burns’s ‘The Twa Dogs’ is both painfully autobiographical and depressingly general at the same time. The slave-holders often used this argument: that economic self-interest naturally led them to care for their enslaved workforce as that ‘stock’ was their mechanism of production. Just as one maintains a piece of machinery – a gun, a steam-engine, a blade – so the slave-holder (they claimed) provided food, clothing and health-care to maintain their investment in these human ‘machines’ – all staples which the free poor at home could not count upon.

Of course, the lot of the cottar or the mill-worker or the coal miner was in no way as harsh as the death sentence of enslavement. It is important, however, to remember that the legal structures of what was then known as the ‘Law of Master and Servant’ (now called ‘Employment Law’) gave the employee basic rights, but was heavily weighted in the employer’s economic favour (although the standard hiring was typically for a twelvemonth, giving the servant an option to leave freely at the anniversary). Aitcheson summarises it:

Seventeenth century legislation gave the justices of the peace the power at their quarter sessions in August and February, ‘to fix the ordinary wages of workmen, labourers and servants, to imprison such as refuse to serve for the appointed hire, and to compel payment by the masters.’33

She gives a 1767 example of John Hamilton of Sundrum (1731–1829), one of Ayr’s leading plantocrats, obtaining a sheriff’s warrant to incarcerate his cook, David Kaithness (dates unknown), who had attempted to break his contract: but that was a matter of enforcing a contract entered into without coercion (albeit one struck with unequal economic bargaining power – remembering that ‘combination’ or trades unionism was at that time explicitly illegal).34 The servant under a Scots Law contract was ‘free’, unlike the slave, unless he (or she) was ‘indentured’ under a stricter form of voluntary contract (or one imposed by a judicial sentence) which committed the servant to working for a fixed period of years for a fixed annual payment. (As Scots Law developed, the notion that bonded service for life without payment, even if entered into ‘voluntarily’, was equivalent to enslavement and so became impermissible). This was not chattel slavery, for the servant retained his/her legal persona but his/her individual rights were prescribed by the specific terms of the indenture contract enforceable to the letter by the master, with a lesser degree of legal protection for the servant. As the Court of Session ruled in 1747: ‘There is no state of slavery with us; and a man’s dependence as a servant, will not take from him a right otherwise compliant.’35

Apprenticeship was an analogous contract, where a young person would be indentured to a ‘master’ in the field for a period of sufficient duration (typically seven years) for him/her to become fully trained as a ‘journeyman’ in the trade, craft or profession. Here, too, the master was firmly in charge of the apprentice (as employer, skill-teacher and substitute parent). However, in all these forms of employment, no master could maim any servant, let alone kill them, a protection not extended to the enslaved.36

The most extreme form of employment contract covered workmen in Scotland’s salt and coal industries whose workers (men, women and children) from 1606 to 1798 suffered under an effective form of serfdom which TC Smout has characterised as:

a degradation without parallel in the history of labour in Scotland. […] a man accepting employment in a colliery or saltpans thereby made himself a serf for life: he became a piece of mining equipment that could be bought, sold and inherited by his master, with the sole proviso that he might not be separated from the works at which he started his bondage.37

The initial act of 1606 (ratified and amended in 1641 and 1661) gave the masters certain rights of physical chastisement, while in 1701 – when the concept of Habeus Corpus was introduced into Scots Law by statute – that right was ‘not to be extended to colliers or salters.’38

To make matters worse, this servitude was inter-generational. The custom of ‘arling’ allowed the coal- or salt-master to give a gift to his miners’ children at their Christening which was deemed to tie that child into its father’s servitude during its own life. (Although this process was not enshrined in the legislation, it was habitually enforced as if it were.) Oddly, despite the legal oppression of their servitude, colliers during this period commanded wages ‘two or three times as high as farm servants […] [at] fifteen shillings or more by 1790.’39 However, the salters’ wages were much less, at around six shillings a week.40

These men and women were not legally ‘slaves’ although occasionally so denominated in legal contexts. For example the Ayrshire colliers’ lot was described as ‘the only remaining vestige of slavery amongst us,’ by the Court of Session in 1708, or in the wording of the first relatively feeble Emancipation Act, 1775 which described its subjects as ‘colliers, coal-bearers and salters [who] are in a state of slavery and bondage,’ inasmuch as they retained legal personality, including the rights to receive due wages, to own chattels, to marry and bear children and to worship.41 Their final emancipation, which commenced in 1799, was brought about as much by a shortage of mineworkers, as the coal industry grew to fuel the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution, as by any humanitarianism.42

There appears to have been very little concern over this particular tyranny in wider Scots society. The coal miners working Ayrshire’s pits (such as Mungo Smith’s at Drongan, or Newton-on-Ayr’s) or the salters around Saltcoats, Ardrossan and Kilburnie toiled in their antediluvian contracts without attracting popular distress.43 It is not absolution, but the fact that these inequalities inflicted locally on Ayrshire men and women were not called out partially explains the absence of criticism over Black chattel slavery across the seas from Scotland before the Abolition movement gained traction in the 1780s.

White Emigration From Ayrshire to the Colonies

The growing British Empire provided billets for many young Scotsmen in the West Indies, both in wealthy multi-generational family businesses, such as Ayrshire’s prosperous Hamiltons (or the struggling Douglas brothers), and with younger, poorer men taking their chance of rising up the hierarchy of slave-driving (through merit or mere survival) to become manager for an absentee plantocrat. As AM Kinghorn (who was teaching at the University of the West Indies at the time) described the idea: ‘[t]he lure of a tropical island as a means of avoiding responsibilities piling up at home is not an unusual manifestation of “cultural primitivism.”’44

The importance of those Scottish emigrants in the Caribbean cannot be underestimated. Writing in 1774, Edward Long estimated that nearly one third of the White residents of Jamaica were Scots or of Scottish heritage.

Jamaica, indeed, is greatly indebted to North Britain [SC: Scotland], as very nearly one third of the inhabitants are either natives of that country, or descendants from those who were. Many have come from the same quarter every year, less in quest of fame, than of fortunes; and such is their industry and address, that few of them have been disappointed in their aim. To say the truth, they are so clever and prudent in general, as, by an obliging behaviour, good sense, and zealous services to gain esteem, and make their way through every obstacle. 45

This percentage was validated by the research of Alan Karras in 1992 through identifying Scottish names of owners on several maps of Jamaican parishes, and extrapolating that to the whole island. The maps from (a) 1763, gave a figure of 19.0 per cent and (b) from 1804, gave 29.6 per cent.46

Recently, Mullen and Newman have challenged those numbers as too high given that ‘[t]he six parishes identified by Karras remained the most heavily Scottish ones on the island’ and that, in the compensation records at abolition, by their calculation some 11 per cent of claims were paid to ‘residents of Scotland.’47 This analysis appears to suffer from two defects. The first (also a problem for Karras) is that the resident Scottish population was greater than just plantation owners; the ‘clannishness’ described elsewhere meant that for every Douglas there was a Burns beneath him. The second, as admitted by Mullen and Newman, is that ‘resident in Scotland’ does not define being a Scot (who could be living in and operating out of, say, Liverpool or London) and, in other research, Draper estimates the total paid to Scots (wherever resident) was 15–16 per cent of the total pool.48 While there is insufficient hard data to be conclusive, Karras’s calculations chime with Long’s contemporary, albeit broad-brush, number.

Certainly, the philosophy of Scottish self-advancement in the colonies was widespread: Gilbert Burns later recalled a story told by John Murdoch, who taught him and Robert:

When Mr Murdoch left Alloway, he went to teach and reside in the family of an opulent farmer capable of observation, who had a number of sons. A neighbour coming on a visit, in the course of conversation, asked the father how he meant to dispose of his sons. The father replied that he had not determined. The visitor said that were he in his place he would give them all good education and send them abroad, without, perhaps, having a precise idea where. The father objected that many young men lost their health in foreign countries, and many their lives. True, replied the visitor, but, as you have a number of sons, it will be strange if some one of them does not live and make a fortune.

Let any person who has the feelings of a father comment on this story; but though few will avow, even to themselves, that such views govern their conduct, yet do we not daily see people shipping off their sons (and who would their daughters also, if there were any demand for them), that they may be rich or perish?49

The climate and conditions of the Caribbean were harsh for the uninitiated White Scot. Unlike the colonies and former colonies in North America, few men came to the West Indies with the intent of spending the rest of their lives there (though many did, by dying of tropical diseases). This was a sojourner community: programmed for the lucky minority to prosper and return home in wealth, or die sooner or later from tropical disease. Yellow Fever, or the vomito negro, constituted the greatest health risk. Ironically brought from West Africa by immune enslaved people, the deforestation and water pools arising out of the sugar business proved an ideal habitat for the Aedes aegypti mosquito. In creating the economic conditions for the sugar economy, the planter community created its nemesis, too. Trevor Burnard points out the physical risk:

white susceptibility to disease, especially yellow fever, led to appalling white mortality [which] accentuated whites’ penchant for fast living, for fatalism, and contributed to slaveowners’ callous disregard for the welfare of their slaves. White life chances were not helped by inappropriate medical attention. Although Jamaican doctors’ explanations of high white mortality were occasionally correct, their adherence to humoral and miasmic theories of medicine led them to promote remedies that were at best ineffectual, at worst detrimental.50

Dr Jonathan Troup (ca 1770–1800), an Aberdonian physician, described the commercial risks in his West Indian journal in 1789:

One man only makes a fortune in the W[est] Indies out of 500 — It is long before he gets into business & when he is in business he risques much by bad pay[men]ts [and] loss of Negroes — that in space of 20 years he will not be able w[ithou]t great frugality to make more than £3–4,000. […] Doctors and managers of estates die more than any set of people.51

Yet, despite those odds, Burnard calculates that around 1774 across the British West Indies the ‘average wealth was £1,000 per white person, over ten times as much as’ at Home or in the 13 American Colonies, and of that pool of wealth Devine uses the statistic that ‘in the period 1771–[177]5 Scots accounted for nearly 45% of all inventories at death above £1,000.’52 So for every scion of a family like the Ayrshire Hamiltons, there were multiple adventurers, but all participating in the economy of cruelty. Many felt convinced that their lot was not much worse than that of the Black enslaved, and studies certainly show that White mortality rates were higher than Black rates in the first two years after landing in Jamaica. As Burnard stated above, this fact effectively defined the whole structure of Jamaican society.

There were some plantations where the slave-holders believed themselves ‘kind masters’ in a form of self-delusion. Even the noted Scottish philosopher and poet James Beattie (1735–1803), who was a renowned and early Abolitionist, could say (in 1789) that ‘many of my pupils have gone to the West Indies; and, I trust, have carried my principles along with them, and exemplified those principles in their conduct to their unfortunate Brethren [sc: the enslaved]’.53 However, the view of even many of those ameliorists was that the ‘stock’ of enslaved people, if they were not a different (and lower) species of the genus homo, were at least socially and culturally inferior and incapable of rational self-government at a personal, social or national level. West Indian society was not only morally bankrupt, but socially too.

Those whites set in immediate authority [over the enslaved] were an isolated and beleaguered minority, non-gentlemen of limited education, dissolute and shiftless for the most part, outnumbered fifty to one by their charges, tied by contract and the requirement to make a profit, with only the parlous rewards of power to offset unpleasant work in a harsh climate, the ever-present threat of lethal or crippling disease, and the perils of insurrection.54

This milieu was felt to be completely unsuited for the European female and, as the economy grew, the number of White women present in the colonies declined, with that trend being greater in Scotsowned estates.55 Through the White chain of command this led to the extravagant ‘fast living’ exhibited in vast alcohol consumption and (often coerced) inter-racial sexual activity.

Bookkeepers were not expected to marry, and were often forbidden to do so, but were encouraged to take ‘housekeepers’ from amongst the slave women.56

With a daily cycle of cruelty, danger, death and rape, it is in no way surprising that the veneers of Enlightenment Scotland cracked in Jamaican life. As the century progressed, the ‘West India Interest’ gained a reputation for wealth and a coarseness of manners. Zachary Macaulay, a bookkeeper who became a leading Abolitionist, described how, on returning home after two years of Jamaican life, he ‘had contracted a boorishness of manner, arising doubtless from the nature of my employment and associations.’57 This character was captured sarcastically by John Galt later in his Annals of the Parish where ‘Mr Cayenne,’ his wealth and his Black enslaved servant return to Ayrshire from the West Indies and have difficulty in fitting into genteel society due to his peppery temperament.58

The significant community of sojourning Scots in the Caribbean, notably in Jamaica, exemplified an almost Punch cartoon display of Scottishness, being clannish, ‘canny’ and fond of the bottle. In the 1850s, the Abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward, a fugitive slave himself, praised his Abolitionist hosts in Scotland, but recalled that

Scotchmen, in the West Indies, became slave-holders. They were severely exacting and oppressive. It was just like them to demand, and, if possible to receive, the last ‘baubee’ [sic