Hello. My name is Philippa Hellawell, and I’m the 18th century record specialist at The National Archives. Today we’re going to look at a document from our Treasury collection, which runs from 1547 to 2020.
The Treasury is the department that deals with public spending and economic policy. So what kind of material can we find in this collection? The material is wide ranging, including letters both to the Treasury and from the Treasury, minutes of meetings, accounts, warrants, reports, circulars, records of different panels and commissions and all relate in some way to the Treasury’s core function: managing the revenue of government.
Now let’s take a closer look at our document and work out what it is about. This is a register of the names and number of enslaved people working on plantations in Jamaica in the early 19th century. The registers are printed forms that have been filled in by hand and compiled into hardbound volumes, which have worn over the years. This particular document is from 1826, but registers with the enslaved run from 1813 to 1834. The document was produced by the office of the Registrar of Colonial Slaves, which was set up in 1819. Copies of slave registers kept by the colonies were sent to this office.
This is the register of enslaved people at Spring Garden Estate in the parish of Saint George in Jamaica. The owner of the plantation and the enslaved people listed was a man called John Rock Crossett, who was the MP of Chippenham. His two attorneys, his lawyers filled out the return on his behalf. The document lists a total of 572 enslaved people who worked on the plantation, 264 men and 308 women. It also has a column to explain the increase and decrease of enslaved people on the plantation, which was normally due to birth or death. There were 22 fewer enslaved people in 1826 than in the previous return. In 1823, some of the enslaved were even emitted, meaning they legally acquired their freedom. This included more women than men, including a group of four young girls with the same surname Rebecca, Jane, Mary and Nancy Gail, from ages 7 to 12, who could have been sisters.
Generally, surnames do not appear in the lists, but were sometimes acquired with freedom or baptism. Following the Act of Parliament of 1807 that made the trade of enslaved people from Africa to the British colonies illegal, many British colonies instituted registers of people who they deemed to be lawfully enslaved. Registers were used to monitor the changing number of the enslaved at each state, to ensure that plantation owners had not illegally imported more enslaved people to their plantation.
Since the ban on the trade, registration generally occurred once every three years. These registers are incredibly important in understanding the history of transatlantic slavery. Most importantly, they present some of the personal details of the Africans forced into slavery. The information is limited, but we see their names and ages and where they worked. We also have some information on when infants were born and when other enslaved people sadly died. The youngest enslaved person on Spring Garden estate at the time of the register was a ten month baby boy called Monday and the oldest person on the register was a man called Morris, who sadly died two years earlier at 67 years old. The Register also asks if each enslaved person was African or Creole, referring to whether an enslaved person was African or Caribbean born. It also asks about the skin colour of the men and women. Most are listed as Black though some are listed as being mixed race, normally using outdated and offensive terms, which we wouldn’t use today.
Secondly, we also get an insight into the scale of plantation slavery. Spring Garden Estate was one of two plantations in Saint George, Jamaica, which had over 500 enslaved people, though there were dozens of plantations with smaller number of enslaved people working on the land. This was just a small part of Jamaica, too, with over a hundred other plantations on the island with plantations of over 500.
This brings me to a related document in the Treasury Department, as well as registers of the enslaved. The Treasury records also contain the compensation records for enslavers when slavery was abolished in the colonies. The Slavery Abolition Act provided for some of 20 million pounds to compensate enslavers. It’s difficult to approximate, but this is equivalent to at least 2 billion pounds.
The distribution of compensation was entrusted to a slave compensation commission. The Slave Compensation Commission used the registers as the basis to calculate how much compensation was owed to enslavers. When the enslaved were freed in November of 1835, John Roch Rosset, who owned Spring Garden Estate, was compensated 8,429 pounds in compensation for the 483 enslaved persons who were listed on his plantation. In the most recent registers, this is the equivalent of over 800,000 pounds in today’s money.
The National Archives holds the records of central government. And this is just one of millions of government records we have in our collection. Once information had been collected from the registers of the enslaved, the Treasury issued a payment warrant for each individual enslaver to be paid by the National Debt Office. If it involved money, then it often involved the Treasury, which is why these records are present in the department archive.
Don’t forget, we’ve only looked at two documents on this period of history. And remember, our records are not really going to offer the perspective of the enslaved themselves, but rather the people that enslaved them. These are considerations we must bear in mind when we are trying to evaluate their significance. So this is just two of the many documents to be found in our Treasury collection, which can be used to find out more about transatlantic slavery.