Lesson video

Hi, and welcome to our final lesson on who lived in British America.

I'm Miss Cusworth, nice to see you again.

And today, we're going to be looking at the experienced of enslaved people, particularly in Barbados.

Now you remember that across British America, we've been looking at several different groups and we began with Native Americans and Pocahontas.

We then have looked in our previous lesson and then the second lesson, at colonists, especially people that we called planters, who owned those big plantations in Virginia, growing tobacco, in Barbados, growing sugar.

We've also had a look at the experience of indentured servants, particularly Richard Frethorne, but also the indentured servants who worked in Barbados, we looked at them very briefly, this idea that in across British America, often it began with hiring indentured servants to work for a period of time, but increasingly enslaved labour was brought over and they were the people who worked on the plantations, whether it was growing tobacco or sugar.

We touched very briefly on the experience of enslaved people, such as John Punch in Virginia.

But today, the focus of our lesson really is on the experiences of enslaved peoples, particularly in Barbados.

So British America, now I wanted to pause here for one moment because we've been talking about British America, but actually, part way through this time period we're looking at, the 13 colonies, which were in North America, they fought a war against Britain for their independence.

And there is actually another Oak series of lessons on American independence, if you're particularly interested in this topic, you can find out much more about it.

For our purposes, we just need to note that independence was confirmed in 1783, by a thing called the Treaty of Paris, after the long war of independence against Britain.

So these then became what we know now is the United States of America, and were free, they weren't part of British America anymore.

But Britain still controlled its colonies in Canada, and then also in the Caribbean.

So while this chunk was independent, lots of other places in British America were still under British control, including Barbados.

So for a little bit of a recap on Barbados, you might want to pause the video here, write down as much as you can, and then I will see you in one second.

Okay, so perhaps you wrote down a couple of things like this Caribbean island, you can see here a kind of zoomed in map of the Caribbean and those islands in red were part of British America, Jamaica, Antigua, which is where my family are originally from, and the native population of Barbados was affected by the Spanish.

So that once the English arrived there, there wasn't a big native population, like there was in Virginia.

It was colonised by Britain in 1627.

And it's pretty small, Barbados is pretty small, about third of the size of London, so a little bit bigger than the Isle of Wight.

But it made Britain exceptionally wealthy, both the country, but also individual families.

And you remember last time, we looked at the Codrington family.

Barbados has been described by professor Sir Hilary Beckles, who we learned about last time as the first Black slave society, because enslavement was so central to Barbados, a huge proportion of the Barbadian population were Black enslaved people.

And they did a huge amount of the work on the island, created a huge amount of the wealth.

So we know from last time that, unlike maybe the planters, enslaved people didn't have a choice to travel to Barbados.

They weren't going there for a better life or because they wanted to make money.

They were going there because they had no choice.

So what I'd like you to do before we begin today's lesson, is just take a moment to write down what you think the lives were like for these enslaved people who were working in Barbados, living and working in Barbados.

So if you could pause the video for me, and answer this question, maybe in bullet points, maybe in a full sentence, I don't mind too much.

What do you think the lives of enslaved people in Barbados might have been like? I'll give you a few moments to pause the video.

Okay, welcome back.

So you might have written things like they have no freedom, give yourself a tick if you've put that.

That their lives were very difficult.

They suffered a lot of violence, that they worked on sugar plantations.

Those were all things that were part and features of their lives.

And today we're going to be taking kind of what you know already, and expanding out by looking at one particular enslaved person.

And then more generally, at the experience of enslaved people in Barbados.

And we're going to go back to Robert Cooper Ashby, one of the kind of sugar barons that we were taught last lesson.

He was a plantation owner towards the end of the time of slavery in British America.

And I would like you to write down for me, on a piece of paper, on your exercise, but what can you remember about him? We looked at him last lesson.

Is there anything that you can remember? Maybe what he did, what he grew, like what was grown on his plantation.

I'm going to ask you to pause the video, write down anything you can remember about this guy, Robert Cooper Ashby, and then un-pause when you're ready to begin again.

Okay.

So he was a wealthy plantation owner, and he had many children with enslaved women on his plantation.

He had one child by his wife, Mary, but he had many, many children with enslaved women on his plantation.

And some of the women were very young when they first had his children.

You might have also written down that he got compensation, he got money, when slavery was abolished by the British government, they gave him money to kind of compensate him for his loss of property, the property being the enslaved people that were on his plantation.

And in total, he owned about 250.

So you might have written that down.

So you are going to put your notes from today's lesson into this table.

And so I'd like you to make a copy of this into your exercise book or onto a piece of paper.

Put some of these notes or all of these notes onto your table 'cause it will help you make comparisons as we go through the lesson, because remember we're looking, not only at people's experiences, but also trying to look at similarities and differences.

So I'm going to ask you to pause the video for me.

Make this table.

And then when you're done, un-pause, and we'll get started with the rest of the lesson.

Okay, welcome back.

So table's done.

Let's go.

So if we're thinking about enslaved people in Barbados, I think it's important to think about, well, where did many of those people come from? Or where were their ancestors from? So you probably know that people who were enslaved in the Caribbean, but not just in the Caribbean, but also actually, in quite a lot of South America, and to a smaller extent in North America.

I think roughly only about 4% of enslaved people who were taken from Africa, ended up in North America, and the vast majority were in the Caribbean or in South America.

And if we're thinking about Barbados in particular, enslaved people were mostly originally from West Africa, from the Bight of Biafra, which is around here in West Africa, from the Gold Coast, and then from the Bight of Benin.

So that's around countries such as they're called today, Ghana or Nigeria, and they were taken across the Atlantic Ocean on a journey known as the Middle Passage.

Now I think it's basically impossible for us today to be able to really understand how traumatic and horrible the journey called the Middle Passage was.

People were, like the enslaved people, were kept often underneath the hold of the ship, were chained and shackled.

They weren't really able to move.

There would be people who were dying around them.

It would have been incredibly dramatic.

It would've been incredibly hot, incredibly smelly.

And we think about 15% of people died on the journey, but that varied over time.

And in some cases, huge numbers of people who were on the ship didn't make it to the Caribbean.

But by the 1800s, very few enslaved people in Barbados had actually been born in Africa.

Some had, but the vast majority of people, by the time you get into sort of the 1800s, the time of Robert Cooper Ashby, most of the enslaved people in Barbados, had been born in Barbados, had been born in plantations into slavery in Barbados.

And we're going to have a look at one of those enslaved people, who was related in fact, to Robert Cooper Ashby, and his name was John Stephen Ashby.

Now this isn't a picture of him.

I couldn't find a drawing or a picture, an illustration of him.

In fact, this is a illustration of a man called William Davidson, who was living in Britain and actually rebelled against the government, which is why we know a bit about him.

But he had some similarities with John Stephen Ashby, in that he had a powerful white father and an enslaved Black mother.

And so there's a similarity there between the two of them, but this isn't an illustration of John Stephen Ashby.

Now John Stephen Ashby was born, he was the child of Robert Cooper Ashby and an enslaved woman whose name we don't know, on Buck's Plantation, so on the sugar plantation that was owned by Robert Cooper Ashby.

And his life would have been a little bit different to the majority of the enslaved people on Buck's Plantation because as he was growing up, instead of going out to work in the fields, he was given a trade, so he became a carpenter.

Now this was something that often happened to mixed-race enslaved people, they often were given, I suppose you could call it like extra opportunities, in comparison to other Black slaves.

And often that was because their fathers were white people in positions of power, who had the ability to give them these sorts of positions.

So he was born into slavery in 1803, but then he became a carpenter, and that gave him access to a skilled trade.

It meant he didn't have to work in the fields, which was really, really hard, difficult, quite dangerous work.

And it also gave him more freedom to move around Barbados, to go to potentially other plantations and do work for them.

Maybe he would have even been paid wages for that, which meant he might have been able to save up money potentially to buy himself then out of slavery.

So although he was the child of Robert Cooper Ashby, Robert Cooper Ashby didn't free him, he kept him in slavery, but he did give him, we think, this kind of opportunity to become a carpenter.

Now, mixed-race enslaved people were pretty common in some senses.

This woman here, Dido Belle, she is maybe one of the most famous examples of a mixed-race person who was born into slavery.

She had a white father who was a Naval officer, and her mother was an enslaved woman.

And her father who was the Naval officer, brought her back to England, and she grew up in relative wealth, and kind of grew up as like a gentle woman.

And you can see her here, you have a look at the kind of clothes that she's wearing, the kind of jewellery that she's wearing.

And so there are lots of kind of different stories and experiences.

So she grew up relatively wealthy in childhood.

And that's maybe why we have this image of her, this kind of beautiful painting.

But like art historians have said, you can kind of still see that she is being treated a little bit differently from, I think it's a family member, who's a family member here.

You can see she's kind of holding fruit, so she's kind of being made to look a bit exotic.

She's kind of doing this pose.

She's wearing something on a head like a kind of turban.

And so although some mixed-race enslaved people, she was actually freed, had more opportunities.

They weren't seen as completely equal to either white family members or other white people in society.

And then this is a painting that's called The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, and mulatto is a word we don't use anymore, but it means mixed-race.

And you can see here, she's dressed in, well, I'll give you a moment to have a look at the painting.

So you can see she's kind of dressed in these clothes that look finer than the two women around her.

She's got quite a lot of jewellery on, and that's like quite contrasted with the woman who's in front of her, who isn't wearing a top.

She looks almost kind of much more like advantaged, has more status than those two women.

And so there were some groups of people, they were sometimes described as coloured mixed-race, who lived in Barbados, who had more status, and more opportunities and more privilege, than other Black enslaved people.

And many of them were actually gained their freedom, and they were called the kind of free coloured population.

So some mixed-race people were free, some were enslaved, some were recognised by their fathers.

So some of the white fathers acknowledged that they'd have these children, and treated them as their own children.

And especially like, if you think about the case of Dido Belle, her father brought her to England, placed her with his family.

She was brought up as member of the family.

But some were not, some were not recognised.

The fathers pretended that they had nothing to do with them, and pretended that they had nothing to do with them.

Some travelled to Britain, many stayed in the Caribbean.

And their experiences was quite different to other enslaved people.

So the experiences of a lot of enslaved people in Barbados was working in the fields, growing the sugar, which made Barbados and Britain rich.

And this was incredibly hard work, backbreaking work.

And many people were worked to death because they were not given enough food.

They were not given enough rest.

They were not looked after.

And they would die from overwork, sometimes within only a few years.

The strongest enslaved people, both men and women, would be working in the fields, would be doing this work of growing the sugar cane.

Another place where enslaved people would work would be in the boiling house.

And this was incredibly hard work.

It was incredibly hot, it was dangerous.

And why do you need a boiling house? Because the sugar cane grows like this.

And then you have to get the juice that you boil, so you put into these kinds of vats, and you boil it, and then that's when you get the sugar.

If you were the head boiler, that was a very highly skilled role, very technical, you needed a lot of technical expertise.

But these people were still often enslaved.

Working in the boiling house or in the crushing part was often very dangerous.

We have lots of accounts of people losing limbs when they went into, got stuck into the kind of thing that crushed the sugar cane.

And so danger was all around when you were in the boiling house.

Life for enslaved people was incredibly tough.

But an opportunity or a kind of place where maybe they felt a little bit of kind of freedom, was at the market.

So these kind of market traders, who were called hucksters, which I think is just an excellent word, they were mostly women.

It was mostly women who did the kind of trading and working at the market.

And the market was an opportunity to make a little bit of money, to grow things on your little patch of land that was given to you by the plantation owner, maybe to grow some vegetables or something.

Then you would take it to market and you would sell it.

The market was also an opportunity for socialising, for hanging out with other people, who you might not get to see during the week when you were working really hard.

And enslaved people really fiercely protected their time at the market.

And there were quite a few rebellions when white leaders of an island tried to stop the market or shut it down.

That's sometimes when rebellions happened, for example, this happened in Antigua.

Now this isn't, I couldn't find an image of a market in the Caribbean, so this is actually from North America, But I wanted to show it, so you can kind of get an idea of what it might've looked like.

So as well as being in the market, often enslaved people were in rebellion.

And what I mean by that, rebellion is like kind of fighting back.

This is something my students were often really interested in.

Thinking about like why didn't they ask me like, miss, why didn't these enslaved people fight back? Why didn't they rebel? If there were more of them on a plantation than there were white people, why didn't they fight back? And the answer is they did constantly.

So from the moment that they would be taken from Africa, they would rebel on ships.

We have examples of enslaved people on ships rising up and taking over the ship, and trying to turn the ship around.

We have so many different examples of resistance, of enslaved people fighting back, either in kind of violent resistance or in more passive forms of resistance.

So not doing their work very well, refusing to turn up, or pretending to be sick, refusing to eat.

And then some more kind of heartbreaking examples of resistance, so of enslaved people committing suicide to get away from their life of enslavement.

And I think we know we can tell that enslaved people rebelled a lot because we can see that they were treated with a lot of violence.

Now that maybe doesn't make sense at first, but if enslaved people didn't fight back, then there wouldn't have been violence shown towards them, right? If they were just accepting their enslavement, maybe there wouldn't be any need for the people who were enslaving them, to be violent towards them.

Now we have lots of examples of really horrible levels of violence and torture that were used by plantation owners, people who work, white people who worked on plantations, of the different kind of horrible things that they did to keep enslaved people in line, and the punishments that they exacted on them, that were incredibly violent and incredibly cruel.

I'm not going to go into those now, but the life of an enslaved person was one that was continually marked by violence, by violence and cruelty.

So resistance took many forms. And an example in Barbados was a a rebellion led by a man called Bussa, and it was in 1816.

And this was like a big uprising.

So this isn't like a small bit of passive resistance, this is a big uprising where they were trying to take control of the whole of Barbados.

And here you can see a sketch of a flag that was used by the rebels.

And it looks like they were sort of appealing to the British Monarchy to protect them against what was kind of going on in Barbados.

That rebellion wasn't successful.

And 214 enslaved people were killed, were executed as a result of taking part in that rebellion.

So rebellion could be very dangerous, although resistance happened continually.

So coming back now to John Stephen Ashby, the carpenter, the child of Robert Cooper Ashby.

Abolition, so slavery was abolished, was got rid of officially in 1834, but change didn't happen straight away.

So I would like you to pause the video.

And I would like you to write down if abolition, if slavery was abolished, how would you expect John Stephen Ashby's life to change? How would you expect his life to change if he was no longer a slave, if slavery was abolished? I'd like to pause the video and write something down.

Okay, so you might have said he had his freedom, he wouldn't have to live on the plantation anymore, he wouldn't have to necessarily do work for Robert Cooper Ashby.

And some of those things did eventually happen, but not straight away.

So we have a record of John Stephen Ashby's baptism, so when he was baptised, accepted into the church.

And on that record, so that's from 1835, so one year after abolition, it still says that he is an adult owned by Robert Cooper Ashby.

So even after abolition, slavery was officially abolished, it continued for a number of years.

It was like supposed to be this transition period.

And so things didn't change straight away.

But John Stephen Ashby was eventually free.

He married another mixed-race enslaved woman called Mary Fitzpatrick.

She was also the child of a plantation owner.

And they got married, and eventually they received their freedom, and they have two children who were born free.

So while slavery ended, Britain's control of places like Barbados continued for over another 100 years.

But the people who lived there on the island, all of them by this point, were officially free.

So we've been talking for quite awhile now about enslaved people and their experiences in Barbados.

So what I would like you to do is to pause the video, take some notes.

You might want to use the worksheets on the website.

You might want to go back and check parts of the video.

And I'm going to give you some time to take some notes on the lives of enslaved people in Barbados.

Okay, so perhaps you talked about John Stephen Ashby, you talked about the fact that enslaved people in Barbados were either African or after sort of the beginning of the 1800s, mostly you're descended from African, so had been born in Barbados rather than in Africa, they were owned by planters, and they worked on plantations.

They did different types of work, field work, working in the boiling house, they had trades.

And another thing I haven't really talked to you about, but it was like an important kind of role was working in the house doing like domestic work, cooking, cleaning, looking after children.

Enslaved people in Barbados continued to experience violence, but still resisted, even though it was potentially very dangerous for them to do so.

Mixed race enslaved people tended to have access to opportunities, such as learning a trade, like being a carpenter, had maybe more access to freedom than Black enslaved people.

And then we've got any other kind of things that we've talked about all in this video, so you can pop down onto your table, too.

So well done for getting that done.

Now, in terms of the questions, we're going to start off by thinking about right at the beginning of the video, some time ago now, so which part of British America gained its independence in 1783? Where did enslaved Barbadians, who weren't born on the island, mostly come from? Why did enslaved people travel to America? Who was John Stephen Ashby's father? And what opportunities were mixed-race enslaved people more likely to have access to? So as usual, you can pause the video and answer those questions, ideally in full sentences with as much detail as you can remember.

Okay, welcome back.

In which part of British America gained its independence? 13 colonies.

You might have been just a bit more detailed about that.

But anything to do with 13 colonies, give yourself a tick.

Where did enslaved Barbadians who weren't born on the island mostly come from? Acceptable answer, Africa.

You might have been a bit more detailed and talked about the specific places, or have been more detailed and talked about West Africa.

Put it in a full sentence, give yourself a tick.

Why did enslaved people travelled to America? They were taken there.

So unlike people, such as the Codringtons or George Ashby, they didn't choose to go there.

They were forcibly taken from Africa, and they had to endure the Middle Passage, that horrible journey from West Africa to the Americas that we talked about.

Who was John Stephen Ashby's father? Well it was Robert Cooper Ashby, the plantation owner.

And we can be relatively sure about that.

And for the reasons which I put in the work pack, so you might've added a bit more detail about that.

And what opportunities were mixed-race enslaved people more likely to have access to? A trade, opportunities to earn money, and freedom.

So while most Black enslaved people worked in the fields doing that really hard, backbreaking work, growing sugar.

Often mixed-race people had opportunities to do things like learn a trade.

And often that was because their white father gave them the access to these opportunities.

We're not talking about everybody here, there's like a diversity of experience.

But it's interesting to look at the different experiences because I think it gives us more of an insight into what life would have been like.

So the extension activity for this lesson, is trying to bring everything we've been learning about together.

So here's the map that we've seen a couple of different times of British America.

And up here, I've got the four different groups that we've been looking at together.

And if you are a particularly confident drawer, then you can draw a detailed version of this map.

Otherwise, just do like a really quick one because it's not how important, how beautiful the map looks, what's important is that you kind of add in lots of detail to your labels.

And if you happen to have access to a printer, then you can print a copy of this map, which will be on the website, and you can write it onto this slide effectively.

So you remember that we looked at Native Americans, in particular, the Powhatan peoples, and they were living here.

So you could write down Native Americans, or you could be more specific about the particular group, and you could give some information.

What did we learn about them? Then you might want to talk about what type of British colonists ended up here, in what we know is New England, and give some information about them.

When I say information, I'm thinking about like, why did they travel to British America? What did they do there? Who did they live with? So when we're thinking about British colonists in Barbados, we're thinking about them growing sugar, we're thinking about them travelling to Barbados really to make money.

So as much detail as possible about these four places and these different groups.

And that kind of acts as the summary task, bringing all of your information together.

Now, I would love all of you to have a go at doing that.

Looking back over these four lessons.

But even if you don't, it's really important that you do the end of lesson quiz to check your understanding about this lesson.

It's been an absolute privilege for me to teach you some of these things about who lived in British America.

I've really enjoyed it.

Thanks for tuning into these four lessons.

And I hope to see you soon.

Bye.