Why I’ve written about my ancestors the slavers
Edited version of article in The Times, 3 May 2021
Alex Renton knew that, like many other Scottish families, his had been involved in transatlantic slavery. It wasn’t until he dug deeper that he learnt how bad it really was
What do you do when skeletons fall out of the family cupboard? It’s not easy to stuff them back in. When they’re 150 years old, and more, you might think they represent what police drama calls a cold case. But often the old crimes turn out to have much more relevance today than first appears.
My family’s cupboard was an archive store-room in the old house in Scotland where my grandparents lived. My grandfather was a historian, in charge of Scotland’s national archive for 20 years. At home he carefully curated the family’s own papers, which went back to the 17th century. Several of his books on Scottish history were based on them. But in the great mass of letters, diaries and accounts was a story that he never got around to telling, or that he decided was best left untold.
Like many old families in Britain, we grew up with a legend of our ancestors’ essential goodness. The men whose pictures hung on the walls of the old house had played their role in the management of the best empire the world had ever known, we learnt: a benevolent machine for civilising the greater part of the globe. They did not seem so remote. When I was a child the adults talked of them as though they had only recently departed. They were members of parliament, an admiral, much-medalled soldiers, governors of far-off countries. We could be proud of them: they were what made us.
But there was another, less pride-inducing side of the story. The first I knew of it was seeing, in my grandfather’s catalogue of the papers, the words “Tobago” and “Jamaica”, again and again. I asked my mother what she knew. Yes, she said, like many other Scottish families, we had briefly been involved in “the slave trade”. My grandfather had once shown her a list of names, which she’d found very upsetting. But he had reassured her: we hadn’t done it for long, and we had made very little money.
It didn’t take long to find one of those lists, an inventory drawn up in Tobago in 1777, after the death there of one of my far-back great-uncles, James Fergusson. It listed what he owned on a plantation that he had, with the help of enslaved Africans, hacked out of the jungle. There were 300 acres, some of it planted with cotton, indigo and crops to feed his workforce. There were lists of the little things — wine glasses, a teapot, an armchair — shipped out from Scotland to make James’s life at the edge of the world more comfortable.
Then came the lists of human beings: watchmen, a housekeeper, washerwoman, cook, drivers and field hands. Every name had a price attached. The healthy adults were valued at an average £70 — the equivalent today of an estate car. The children, all under six years old, were worth less: Billy has a value of £25, Colin just £8 and the others £10. The next list shows how a child’s life in that world was measured. It is of the plantation’s animals: “1 horse — £40, 2 mules — £58, 2 cows — £30, 3 calves – £12”.
I felt sick when I read this, but what I went on to find was more complicated and more shocking. Great-uncle (times six) James was only 30 when he died, the youngest of the family. He had gone out to the Caribbean only four years earlier, bankrolled by his older brothers, one of whom was my great-grandfather (times five). He wrote regular letters back to them, telling them what he’d seen and how their investment — several millions, in today’s money — was being spent.
The letters are full of hopes and fears, jokes and observations about the weird society he has arrived in, pleas for help and understanding. He details how he thinks it a good idea to treat the Africans he buys “with humanity and kindness” — they will respond better, and may live longer. He must protect the investment.
Though James died nearly 250 years ago, I could empathise with him, his drive, his determination to do right by his family, his moral qualms, his loneliness and his self-doubt. I could have liked him; I am not unlike him. When he expressed notions of humanity, it was a relief: I wanted him to be good.
But then, like a cold shower, details emerge that make clear the intrinsic horror of the enterprise. James writes a letter telling how he enjoys working alongside the Africans, and how they trust him to heal their ailments. Yet in the next paragraph he sketches his design for a logo made of his and his brother’s initials entwined — JF & AF. When the design is approved back at home in Scotland, he orders from Barbados a silver branding iron to burn the initials into the skin of the workers.
The papers in the old room turned out to contain far worse. When James dies, suddenly, of dysentery, the 78 African people he’d bought are sentenced to an even grimmer existence as the cotton plantation fails. Five years later nearly half are dead: of the children, only Colin has survived. Meanwhile, in Jamaica, James’s brothers — one an influential MP — have taken a half-share of a 1,250-acre sugar estate, with nearly 200 enslaved people on it. They never go there — like so much of Britain’s slavery industry, the enterprise is kept at arm’s length.
Over the next 70 years, however, at their and their descendants’ behest hundreds of people are bought. Most die long before their time: the average lifespan is five years. Their children suffer the same lives or are sold: indeed, from 1790 onwards the managers in Jamaica are instructed to buy as many young fertile women as possible. With abolition of the slave trade with Africa looming, breeding more slaves at the plantation is deemed a wise business strategy
-—-
My wife, my daughter and I went to Tobago in 2017. There all these facts left the yellowed old pages of the family archive, and became real life. We walked round Bloody Bay, the site of the plantation my ancestors owned, and talked to the small-holder farmers who live there now. I met dozens of people, young and old: I used DNA tests to try and find if James had left any descendants. In all the conversations I had, in Tobago and also Jamaica, my vast ignorance floored and shamed me again and again.
Five years ago, as I started this research, I knew embarrassingly little about the 250 years of British commercial slavery. (Try answering these questions — none of which I could have tackled: In what year did it end? How many enslaved Africans were shipped across the Atlantic? What proportion died on the sea journey? How important were the slavery industries to Britain’s 19th-century economy?*).
I knew even less about what happened after we “gave the slaves their freedom”. On many of the Caribbean colonies in the next decades tens of thousands of the emancipated and their children — officially with the rights of British subjects — were denied land, and education? Thousands starved. By the end of the 19th century, poverty had made the Caribbean colonies “the Empire’s darkest slum”, as one foreign secretary put it.
In the 20th century the Caribbean people were neglected, except when encouraged to come to fight in our wars, or do our most menial jobs. Our gratitude was not enough to help them develop economically. At independence in 1962 — another freedom for which we thought ourselves generous — up to 50 per cent of Jamaicans were illiterate, and many children had little schooling at all. But, most important of all, I — the heir of the wealth and privilege of the enslavers — had no concept of how the toxic legacy of slavery continues to affect the descendants of the enslaved today.
After the end of slavery in 1834, the family got a bonus after 70 years of slave ownership. The British government spent £20 million — perhaps £17 billion today — compensating the 46,000 slave owners. My family were paid for their share of the 198 people in Jamaica, getting the modern equivalent of £1.5 million. We don’t know how it was spent — on paying off debts, most likely. But while Sir Charles Dalrymple Fergusson, my three-times great-grandfather, was admired as a Christian philanthropist, busy building churches and schools for the poor in early Victorian Scotland, he did not spend a penny to educate or help the newly freed black people at his plantation in Jamaica.
—
More skeletons emerged. I’d thought the Rentons, my father’s family, were the good guys in the story: my four-times grandmother, Agnes Renton, was a campaigner in 1820s Edinburgh for the abolition of slavery. But her grandsons were tea merchants in Ceylon. They bought land there and worked it with indentured labour imported from Tamil India, laying the ground for racial conflict that continues in Sri Lanka today. Another Renton-side ancestor, a Liverpool merchant, appears to have had an African grandmother who herself was born enslaved in Jamaica. He was named a “quadroon” (one quarter black) when baptised. But he owned two enslaved people at abolition.
Such are the complexities of race and history: if you’re a citizen of a nation that owned other nations, other peoples, that’s what you get. The multicultural Britain we live in today is the direct result of that empire, perhaps the best legacy of it. But another legacy is racism. It was a key tool of the empire builders, used to rule the red bits of the map, and all the evidence I can see says it still toxifies our society now.
Among my many siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces there are teachers, environmentalists, farmers, journalists and charity workers, a soldier, a diplomat, farmers. We are a loving, disparate, disputatious family. No one was happy to hear what emerged from the family papers: none of the younger generations had had any inkling of the story. I know several old families with similar stories who have been challenged about them since Black Lives Matter opened up this debate last year. Some in the older generation feel something intrinsic to their identities, the family honour, is under attack; that they are entitled to decide which bit of their proud history is publicly available.
Some of my family felt it unfair that the story should be exposed “just because we happened to keep good records”. Why unearth all this ancient stuff? Not so ancient, though: my family still owned slaves when my grandfather’s grandfather was a child. And was the history really done and dusted? We are no longer rich because of slavery, but the power and wealth that came from that era still marks many of us, me included. And for the descendants of those on the other end of slavery, the story is clearly not over.
These debates were difficult. But most of my family felt that it was right to acknowledge what had happened and the legacy it left behind. Others have done the same: I know a senior member of one clan famous in the Scottish history of slavery who has decided to “sell all the family silver” and give it to educational causes in the Caribbean and here. My mother and my son rolled up their sleeves and helped in the year-long job of transcribing the old documents. “I don’t feel guilt about it,” one cousin said. “though of course I am ashamed.” But that, she went on, is an empty emotion unless you do something with it.
My slaver ancestors were “Enlightenment Scots”, educated in history and philosophy, liberal-minded people admired by their peers. They were not monsters — I can see that from their writings and their lives. But I can also see that the monstrous things they did were possible only because of how they considered the people whose lives they used. My ancestors were Christians: they could not treat fellow humans like farm animals. So they decided the black people were something less than human. The continuing effects of that conscious decision are not the fault of the hundreds of thousands of Britons like me who share this history. (It’s not hard to trace that, if you try.) But we do have reason to address the continuing consequences of it. Isn’t that the best way forward with skeletons?
*Answers — The Act abolishing slavery in the British Caribbean came into force on August 1, 1834, but most people were not fully free until 1838. 3.25 million enslaved Africans were transported; only the Portuguese shipped more. 14 per cent died on the voyage. Slavery and related industries accounted for 12 per cent of British GDP in 1800.
Sources
Transatlantic data from slavevoyages.org and others. Economic impact of slavery-dependent industries on the British economy - Guthrie, Jonathan. ‘Lex in depth: Economics of the slave trade – “Britain has a debt to repay”’, Financial Times, 27 June 2020. Also: Rönnbäck, Klas. ‘On the economic importance of the slave plantation complex to the British economy during the eighteenth century: a value-added approach’. Journal of Global History, 13(03), November 2018, pp. 309–327. Also University College, London’s Legacies of British Slavery website. Education in 20th century Caribbean - Meditz, Sandra W. and Dennis M. Hanratty (eds). Islands of the Commonwealth Caribbean Islands: a regional study. Washington, DC: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1987; World Illiteracy at Mid-century: A Statistical Study, Unesco, 1957.
Full references and bibliography appear in my Blood Legacy: reckoning with a family’s slavery history Canongate Books (2021).
Engraving produced for abolitionists when the Act ending slavery in the British Caribbean came into force, 1 August 1834. More