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Family continuity and female independence in Jamaica, 1665–1734

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

ENDNOTES

1 For the struggle for married women's property rights, see Basch, Norma, In the eyes of the law: marriage and property in nineteenth-century New York (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982)Google Scholar, and Chused, Richard, ‘Married women's property law, 1800–1850’, Georgetown Law Journal 71 (1983), 1329–425.Google Scholar

2 For women, of course, another important event was marriage, when under English law they effectively lost all rights to what property they had, that property devolving to husbands. Marriage settlements were very important at the highest level of English society, though not, apparently, in colonial society. See Bonfield, Lloyd, ‘Marriage settlements, 1660–1740: the adoption of the strict settlement in Kent and Northamptonshire’, in Outhwaite, R. B. ed, Marriage and society: studies in the social history of marriage (London, 1981), 106–8Google Scholar, and Salmon, Marylynn, ‘Women and property in South Carolina: the evidence from marriage settlements, 1730–1830’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXXIX (1982), 655–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Smith, Daniel Blake, Inside the Great House: planter family life in eighteenth century Chesapeake society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 231.Google Scholar

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7 Salmon, Marylynn, ‘The legal status of women in early America: a reappraisal’, Law and History Review 1 (1983), 129–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Norton, Mary Beth, ‘The evolution of white women's experience in early America’, American Historical Review 89 (1984), 593619.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Carr, Lois Green, ‘Inheritance in the colonial Chesapeake’, in Hoffman, Ronald and Albert, Peter J., Women in the age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1989), 158–62.Google Scholar

9 Carr, Lois Green and Walsh, Lorena S., ‘The planter's wife: the experience of white women in seventeenth-century Maryland’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXXIV (1977), 542–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Burnard, Trevor, ‘Inheritance and independence: women's status in early colonial Jamaica’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XLVIII (1991), 93114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Earle, Peter, The making of the English middle class: business, society, and family life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989), 315, 392.Google Scholar

12 These wills have been abstracted from the first 19 volumes of ‘Wills’, held at the Island Record Office, Spanish Town, Jamaica. Changes in settlement patterns in early St Andrew's are examined in Claypole, W. A., ‘Land settlement and agricultural development on the Ligunea Plains, 1655–1700’, (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of the West Indies, 1973)Google Scholar. The switch to a mature plantation society was swift: by 1730 92.9 per cent of the population of 19,704 were black slaves. Whites accounted for just 6.6 per cent of the population; Wells, Robert V., The population of the British colonies in America before 1776: a survey of census data (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 198.Google Scholar

13 Dunn, Richard S., ‘The Barbados census of 1680: profile of the richest colony in English America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXVI (1969), 330CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Dunn's, Sugar and slaves: the rise of the planter class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972)Google Scholar, and Sheridan, Richard B., ‘The wealth of Jamaica in the eighteenth century’, Economic History Review’, XVIII (1965), 292311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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16 Dunn, , Sugar and slaves, 334.Google Scholar

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18 For a useful introduction to the development of inheritance laws in England and the colonies, see Shammas, Carole, ‘English inheritance law and its transfer to the Colonies’, American Journal of Legal History XXXI (1987), 145–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 ‘The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing’ (Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford, 17651759), vol. I, 430).Google Scholar

20 Salmon, Marylynn, Women and the law of property in early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 1518Google Scholar, and Narrett, David E., ‘Men's wills and women's property rights in colonial New York’, in Hoffman, and Albert, eds, Women in the age of the American Revolution, 103–7.Google Scholar

21 Salmon, Women and the law of property, 1518, 81119Google Scholar; see also her ‘Women and property in South Carolina’. Marriage settlements did have some adverse effects. One disadvantage was the virtual destruction of dower. Jointures could circumvent this problem although these were not entirely satisfactory because of a lack of common-law remedies in jointure disputes. See Blackstone, , Commentaries, vol. II, 138–9Google Scholar; Bonfield, , ‘Marriage settlements, 1660–1740’, in Outhwaite, ed., Marriage and society, 106–8Google Scholar; and Salmon, , Women and the law of property, 86.Google Scholar

22 Sex ratios for St Andrew's show a continual surplus of men over women; Burnard, ‘Inheritance and independence’, 98.

23 Salmon, , Women and the law of property, 35, 9, 156–7Google Scholar. See also Carr, , ‘Inheritance in the colonial Chesapeake’, in Hoffman, and Albert, eds, Women in the age of the American Revolution, 155–7Google Scholar, and Shammas, Carole, Salmon, Marylynn, and Dahlin, Michel, Inheritance in America from colonial times to the present (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987), 2339.Google Scholar

24 Narrett, , ‘Men's wills and women's property rights’, 121.Google Scholar

25 In colonial Connecticut, on the other hand, between 44 and 61 per cent of adult sons of landholders received all or part of their inheritance from inter vivos transfers; Ditz, Toby, Property and kinship: inheritance in early Connecticut, 1750–1820 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 111–12.Google Scholar

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27 Long, Edward, The history of Jamaica…, 3 vols. (London, 1774; repr. 1970), vol. II, 281Google Scholar; Hall, Douglas, In miserable slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (London, 1989).Google Scholar

28 Most wills were written within a few weeks of the testator's death.

29 Wills, 4/61 (1683).Google Scholar

30 Carr, Lois Green, ‘The development of the Orphan's Court, 16541715Google Scholar, in Land, Aubrey C., Carr, Lois Green and Papenfuse, Edward C., Law, society, and politics in early Maryland (Baltimore, 1977), 4161Google Scholar; Carr, and Walsh, , ‘Planter's wife’, 559–60Google Scholar; Burnard, , ‘Inheritance and independence’, 101–3.Google Scholar

31 Lee, Jean Butenhoff, ‘Land and labor: parental bequest practices in Charles County, Maryland, 1732–1783’, in Carr, Lois Green, Morgan, Philip D. and Russo, Jean B., Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 335.Google Scholar

32 Edward Long calculated in 1774 that realty accounted for over half the value of a medium-sized sugar plantation; Long, History of Jamaica, vol. I, 456–63.Google Scholar

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34 After 1680 the number of applications for land patents ìn St Andrews trailed off, with only a few patents being issued, invariably for mountainous land unsuitable for cultivation; Land Patents, St Andrews, Island Record Office.

35 Lee, Jean, ‘Land and labor’, 308–9, 331–41Google Scholar. See also Crowley, John E., ‘Family relations and inheritance in early South Carolina’, Histoire Sociale – Social History XVII (1984), 51–7.Google Scholar

36 This is now a commonplace of slave historiography; see Dunn, Richard, ‘A tale of two plantations: slave life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799–1828’, William and Mary Quarterly XXXIV (1977), 3265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Carr, , ‘Inheritance in the Chesapeake’, 169–70Google Scholar. For elite indebtedness in the Chesapeake, see Burnard, Trevor G., ‘A colonial elite: wealthy Marylanders, 1691–1776’, (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1988), 98149.Google Scholar For the meaning of debt for colonial planters, see Breen, T. H., Tobacco culture: the mentality of the great Tidewater planters on the eve of Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 91118.Google Scholar

38 Carr, , ‘Inheritance in the Colonial Chesapeake’, 170.Google Scholar Margaret Spufford finds that in seventeenth-century Cambridgeshire many inheriting sons had to sell land to provide for cash portions to siblings; Spufford, Margaret, ‘Peasant inheritance customs and land distribution in Cambridgeshire from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries’, in Goody, Jack, Thirsk, Joan and Thompson, E. P. eds, Family and inheritance: rural society in Western Europe, 1200–1800 (Cambridge, 1976), 156–76.Google Scholar For a nuanced discussion of how the landed. elite attempted to balance the competing interests of family members with family continuity, see Bonfield, Lloyd, ‘Affective families, open elites, and strict family settlements in early modern England’, Economic History Review XXXIX (1986), 341–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Cash settlements were common among middle-class families in Augustan London but the efficacy of such arrangements may have been hindered by the relative scarcity of cash in London compared to Jamaica; see Earle, , Making of the English middle class, 115–23, 314–23.Google Scholar See also Cooper, J. F, ‘Patterns of inheritance and settlement by great landowners from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries’, in Thirsk, Goody and Thompson, eds, Family and inheritance, 212.Google Scholar

40 Wills, 14/197 (1715)Google Scholar; Wills, 10/26 (1703)Google Scholar; Wills, 2/176 (1675).Google Scholar

41 Roebuck, Peter, Yorkshire baronets, 1640–1760 (Oxford, 1980), 93102, 107–8, 151–2, 257–60.Google Scholar

42 Salmon, , Women and the law of property, 86, 8990, 122–4.Google Scholar

43 See Hall, , In miserable slavery.Google Scholar

44 Burnard, , ‘Inheritance and independence’, 109–12.Google Scholar

45 Long, , History of Jamaica, vol. II, 278–9.Google Scholar

46 For a skilful analysis of the relationship between paternalism, capitalism and slavery in the American South, see Oakes, James, Slavery and freedom: an interpretation of the Old South (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

47 Dunn, , ‘A tale of two plantations’, 3265.Google Scholar

48 Lee, , ‘Land and labor’, 341.Google Scholar