The ‘invisible child’ in British West Indian slavery

Abstract

This article deals with the socialisation, value, treatment, mortality and responsibilities of slave children in the British West Indian colonies. An absence or incomplete statistics have contributed to difficulties in accurately assessing the presence and number of child slaves. The incidence of deaths among children was due to poor diets, an absence of proper hygiene during childbirth and inadequate sanitation. On most estates the crucial role of child slaves was evident from the composition of the second and third gangs. It was largely due to the obsession of planters with profit maximization that contributed to low female slave fertility rates and a relatively high number of deaths among child slaves. The abolition of the slave trade resulted in planters becoming more concerned about the survival of infant children and care for pregnant women.

Life and death on a Barbadian sugar plantation: historic and bioarchaeological views of infection and mortality at Newton Plantation

“…Contrary to earlier evidence of syphilis from the dental sample at the cemetery, no treponematosis was present either archivally or from entire skeletons. Possibly the archival sample is an accurate predictor of the cemetery, with the notable exception of the children who are under represented and/or socially invisible (Teelucksingh, 2006). Stigma against the disease probably skewed textual reporting as infected children suggest infected mothers (and fathers).…”

“…Combining consumption and scrofula implicates tuberculosis as outweighing other reported illnesses. Historic mortality from infection was higher among adults than children with infants rarely reported, but historic undernumeration and ‘social invisibility’ has been noted for slave children (Teelucksingh, 2006). Different illnesses impacted adults and children.…”

“…fits or fever), rather than underlying disease etiologies (Ubelaker, 1995). Further complicating interpretations, the enslaved (especially women and children) were marginalised and/or invisible historically (Teelucksingh, 2006), and the only textual accounts were written by enslavers and those seeking to treat and care for their human commodities, certainly adding the potential for biased views. Multidisciplinary approaches are thus invaluable for reconstructing the lives of marginalised and invisible groups, and for the past few decades, bioarchaeology has contributed a complementary avenue for assessing quality of life in the African Diaspora.…”

Children in European systems of slavery: Introduction

“…Teelucksingh identifies dysentery also as a major killer of child slaves in the West Indies. 31 He notes that on one estate in Trinidad from 1813 to 1816, over one third of slave children perished before their first birthday, and over half of the survivors died before they reached the age of five. Moreover, in general terms, children aged from one to five years received one third of adult slave rations, those from five to ten a half ration, and those aged ten to fifteen years twothirds, which, in Demerara (or British Guiana), comprised two pounds of salt fish and 45 pounds of plantains per week.…”

“…27 However, the plantation environment of deficient diet, excessive hard labour, minimal and ineffective care for pregnant women and their newborns and wholly unsanitary accommodations for slaves offered so many challenges to successful delivery and survival of infants that isolated instances like these could not have been major contributors to the demographic failures of slave populations in the West Indies. 28 Slave-owners alleged that much slave infant mortality was due to mothers 'smothering' their babies -accidentally or purposefully -a claim that Kenneth Morgan considers to have been a highly dubious and dismissive characterization of the much more serious challenges of slavery itself to slave natality that mothers themselves could have created.…”