The McDowall’s and Harvey’s combined ownership of Castle Semple spanned 181 years from 1727 to 1908, the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. Both families made their fortunes through the sugar industry of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. Such trade in the 18th and 19th century was entirely dependent on slaves. In particular, chattel slavery where the person is the personal property (chattel) of the owner and can be bought and sold as a commodity. Prior to its abolition chattel slavery was replaced (for a short while) with indentured labour. In this case the person is not owned by another but is an employee within a system of unfree labour who is bound by a signed or forced contract for a fixed time.

 

Slaves were not restricted to the far off and unseen Caribbean. In 1727 McDowall “ordered” two negro boys from St Kitts to be delivered to Scotland, one as a servant and the other as playmate to his son William.

 

Andrew Crawfurd’s “Cairn of Lochwinnoch Matters” has an interesting entry under Colonel McDowall:-

 

“The old Colonel (McDowall) brought home from St Kitts a negro as a flunkie

or footman. This blackamore was not suitable to the refined taste of the

Jacobitical lady McDowall. She kept a constant war with her husband about

this black. She advised the laird to 'put the Negro away'. One day he ordered

his carriage to be prepared for a long journey. She asked him what was his

business. He replied he could not live without his favourite Negro and he was

determined to separate from her. She was obliged to be content with the black

colour of the Negro skin"

 

Perhaps this is one of the boys referred to above.

 

The grandson of Colonel McDowall placed the following advert in the Caledonian Mercury on 30th January 1784:-

 

“Gone from Castle-Semple, twelve Miles from Glasgow, on Saturday the 30th January,
A NEGRO LAD, named CATO, the Property of Colonel McDowall of Castle-Semple. Whoever secures him, so as to be returned to Colonel McDowall the Owner, or sends notice of his being in Custody to Alexander Houston Merchant in Glasgow, or Andrew Wallace Writer to the Signet at Edinburgh, shall be sufficiently rewarded: And it is earnestly desired that no Person may entertain him, as he has left his Master’s Service without any just Cause.”

 

When I read this it reminded me of an address in the village mentioned in another part of the website – “Black Boy Close” located somewhere off Main Street. Was this perhaps a reference to an earlier link with slaves brought over to Scotland by the owners of Castle Semple?

 

During his first ten years in the Caribbean Colonel McDowall was a trainee planter and slave overseer. This would put him in the centre of the cruel and harsh regime that controlled the slave population. In addition to later owning several hundred slaves on his plantations, McDowall actively participated in the transportation and sale of Africans. There was a high death rate on slave ships crossing the Atlantic. In 1719 on one of McDowall’s ships out of 134 captured slaves a quarter died during the crossing. Once across, it is thought up to 40% of slaves died within the first year on the Leeward islands. In Glasgow, the Colonel was regarded as a gentleman of fine character and the most notable figure in the city. He was also described as “the darling of the city, and did much to shape its social and human qualities.” A recent TV program on Scotland’s links to slavery described Scotland as having selective amnesia with respect to our involvement in this trade.

 

The wills of both John and Robert Harvey refer to their ownership of slaves as you would of any other personal possession. John Harvey’s will makes provision for three “mulatto” (one white and one black parent) children. Presumably his illegitimate children. Was this through love or sexual favour between slave and master much like the sexual exploitation scandal which engulfed Oxfam aid workers in Haiti. A granddaughter, Sarah, of their older brother Alexander married a lawyer in England, Robert Wilburforce, and the two became involved in the abolitionist movement.

 

The value of the sugar crop meant little land was set aside to grow food. The slaves were entirely dependant on imports of food and clothes by their masters e.g. salted herring from Scotland. As this was expensive it was minimised. By the middle of the 18th century, the islands of the Caribbean were the most valuable parts of the British empire, and the large island of Jamaica, with its huge sugar plantations and brutal slave regime, was the jewel in the imperial crown.

 

There was no room for kindness in slavery, the law also penalised lenient white masters who were a threat to the security of the majority. Minor theft or a careless glance resulted in the loss of a limb or life. One of the cruellest and most disgusting punishments was Derby’s Dose. The slave would be beaten, and salt pickle, lime juice, and bird pepper would be rubbed into his or her open wounds. Another slave would defecate into the mouth of the miscreant, who would then be gagged for four to five hours.

 

But physical abuse alone could not keep the lucrative plantations of the British Caribbean productive. It is impossible to get large groups of people to perform sustained labour effectively and consistently for years on end simply through doling out pain and raw terror. Even the most brutal of slaveholders were therefore compelled to develop a sophisticated system of management that exploited the most human aspirations and fears of the people they dominated.

 

Creating divisions between slaves was essential to this. Enslaved people outnumbered free whites in the British Caribbean. Managers needed to divide slaves in order to rule over them. The slave trade from Africa provided them with one opportunity. It was a general policy to ‘have the Negroes on an estate a mixture of nations to balance one set against another, to be sure of having two-thirds join the whites’ (in the event of an uprising). The theory behind this was that enslaved people from one African ‘nation’ would refuse to join rebellions plotted by those from others, or by creole (locally born) slaves, choosing instead to serve their white masters in the hope of rewards for loyal service.

 

Privileging some enslaved people above others was another effective means of sowing discord. Slaveholders encouraged complex social hierarchies on the plantations that amounted to something like a system of ‘class’. At the top of plantation slave communities in the sugar colonies of the Caribbean were skilled men, trained up at the behest of white managers to become sugar boilers, blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, masons and drivers. Such men were, in general, materially better-off than field slaves (most of whom were women), and they tended to live longer.

 

Slavery was as complex as it was cruel. Negotiating its grim realities required determination and skill, even selfishness; and it was next to impossible to endure without making compromises of one kind or other. All enslaved people responded to their predicaments in ordinary ways, albeit under extraordinary pressures. They did what they could to keep alive and, if possible, to capitalise on scant opportunities within the system in which they were trapped.

 

In 1772, a legal ruling in the Somerset case – where James Somerset, a runaway slave, challenged the right of his former owner to forcibly return him to Jamaica – effectively established that the state of slavery did not exist in English law. This judgement emancipated between 10-14,000 slaves in England and also ruled that slavery contracted in other jurisdictions, including the American colonies, could not be enforced in England.

 

In Scotland, a similar ruling was reached in 1777 when Joseph Knight, having read about the Somerset case, left his master John Wedderburn. The full panel of the Court of Session, including Lord Kames (an important legal and social historian and a prominent figure in the Scottish Enlightenment), reached the decision that the state of chattel slavery (where one person is directly owned by another) did not exist in Scottish Law. Although Knight was freed, he was still legally bound to his master as an indentured apprentice for perpetual servitude. The case for Knight was partly prepared by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, under the premise that ‘no man is by nature the property of another’ and that, since there was no proof that Knight had voluntary given up his freedom, he should be emancipated.

 

While trading in slaves was outlawed in the British Empire in 1807, and the Royal Navy deployed to prevent it, slaves could still be held in the colonies. In 1827, Britain declared that participation in the slave trade was piracy and therefore punishable by death. Britain could not have become the most powerful economic force on earth by the turn of the 19th century without commanding the largest slave plantation economies on earth, with more than 800,000 people enslaved.

 

Slaves were eventually freed in the colonies by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, although most remained bound to their masters through an ‘apprenticeship’ system that was not outlawed until 1838. A substantial amount of compensation was paid to plantation owners for their loss, while the former slaves received nothing. Even in Scotland during the 18th century a system of indentured labour existed by which workers – particularly miners – were bound to perpetual service in a state of serfdom. These Scottish ‘slaves’ were not freed until 1799.

 

Parliament established a system of indentured servitude or "apprenticeship" that required slaves to continue to labour for their former owners as apprentices. The gradual emancipation measure was implemented to ease the transition from slavery to freedom for slaves but it was in large part a result of British concerns about emancipation's effect on West Indian sugar production. As stipulated in the emancipation act, field hands were apprenticed for a period of six years, household labourers were to work for four, and children under the age of six were immediately freed. All apprentices' names were to be placed on a registry that served as documentation of their required service. Apprentices, were required to work no more than forty-five hours per week without compensation but were paid for any additional labour performed. Policy makers reasoned that the opportunity for some paid labour would teach slaves how to be industrious. In return for unpaid labour, ex slaves received food, housing, clothing and medical treatment from their employers though the Act did not specify precise quantities. Apprentices were prohibited from working on Sundays. If financially able to pay the remaining years of their service, an apprentice could purchase his or her own freedom.