Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Will

  • Chapter
The Disputatious Caribbean

  • 118 Accesses

Abstract

The first colonial governor of Carolina, William Sayle, was a veteran of traveling around, settling, and exercising authority in the West Indies. His first post was as governor of Bermuda in 1643. Four years later, he led 70 Bermudans to the Bahamas, subsequently obtaining the charter to settle the island of Segatoo, which was renamed Eleutheria, from the Greek to mean “liberty.”1 The 1647 founders noted that all attempts to impose uniformity and conformity caused dispute and discord, and “[t]hat there are both babes and strongmen in Christ: And that every Member who holds the head is of the body of Jesus Christ, hath not the same place and office, nor the same measure of light, who yet desire and endeavour daily to increase in knowledge.” Sayle and his fellows framed a charter of respect: “no names of distinction or reproach” or “difference in judgement”; instead, the jurisdiction of the magistracy—here termed the “Officers of the Republike”—would extend only “to men as men.” No person would be reprimanded for holding an opinion, nor for the “opinion it self.”2 For the next 20 years Sayle traveled between Bermuda, Eleutheria, and, in 1669, to Carolina, on a Bermudan ship that bore the new colony’s name.3 By this time Sayle was in his eighties; frail, and responding poorly to the humors of the Carolina low country and struggled “for severall reasons” to exercise authority. He “Inclyn[ed] much to the lettergie dropsie and other deseases, that what small reason he had is almost taken from him in soe much that … he is hardly Compas montes.”

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. Abbreviated to Eleuthera. W. Hubert Miller, “The Colonization of the Bahamas, 1647–1670,” WMQ 3rd ser., 2.1 (1945): 33–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Michael Craton, A History of the Bahamas (Waterloo, ON: San Salvador Press, 3rd edn, 1986), pp. 54–61.

    Google Scholar 

  3. L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662–1729 (London: Macmillan, 2004), pp. 41–45.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  4. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958);

    Google Scholar 

  5. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, 2008);

    Google Scholar 

  6. Jimmy Casas Kalusen, “Room Enough: America, Natural Liberty, and Consent in Locke’s Second Treatise,” Journal of Politics 69.3 (2007): 760–769.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, The newe boke of Iustices of the peas (1538), f. 127b; Sir Edward Coke, The first Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, part II. x. §170; David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32.5 (2004): 602–627.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Christopher Tomlins, “The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement: English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century,” Law and Social Inquiry 26.2 (2001): 315–372.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Sarah Barber, “Power in the English Caribbean: The Proprietorship of Lord Willoughby of Parham,” in L. H. Roper and B. Van Ruymbeke (eds.), Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 189–212; TCD, MS 736 pp. 40–41.

    Google Scholar 

  10. James Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English political Thought (Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 1979);

    Google Scholar 

  11. R. W. K. Hinton, “Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors,” Political Studies 15.3 (1967): 291–300.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Genesis 9:20. The focus here is on Noah the husbandman, and not on the representations and long line of misinterpretations of the misnamed “curse of Ham,” the three sons of Noah representing European, Semitic, and Hamitic peoples, or that this was the pretext for slavery or racism: Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early-Modern Periods,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 54.1 (1997): pp. 103–142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings (edited by Johann Sommerville, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991]), Patriarcha, p. 14; Observations concerning the Originall of Government, p. 187.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  14. John Cordy Jeaffreson, A Young Squire of the Seventeenth Century (2 vols.) (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1878), i, pp. 4–5.

    Google Scholar 

  15. This Sir Robert Harley was a fellow royalist conspirator in Barbados, the brother of Sir Edward Harley and uncle to the future first Earl of Oxford of the same name. It is claimed that Harley was established at the plantation in Surinam called St. John’s Hill, which is where, in Oroonoko, Aphra Behn claimed she lived: Harrison Gray Platt Jr., “Astrea and Celadon: An Untouched Portrait of Aphra Behn,” PMLA 49.2 (1934): 544–559.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. David Dobson, Directory of Scots Banished to the American Plantations, 1650–1775 (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing, 1983); Smith, Natural History, pp. 77–79.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 336–337; Herman Lebovics, “The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government,” JHI 47.4 (1986): pp. 567–581;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Barbara Arneil, “Trade, Plantations, and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of Colonialism,” JHI 55.4 (1994): pp. 591–609;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Jimmy Casas Klausen, “Room Enough: America, Natural Liberty, and Consent in Locke’s Second Treatise,” Journal of Politics 69.3 (2007): 760–769.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. William Bennett Munro, The Seigniorial System in Canada: A Study in French Colonial Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1906);

    Google Scholar 

  21. Munro, The Seigneurs of Old Canada: A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism (Glasgow, 1920); Roper, Conceiving Carolina, pp. 29–49, p. 31.

    Google Scholar 

  22. H[erman] Moll, A New Map of the North Parts of America Claimed by France (London: John King, 1720); Donald W. Large, “The Land Law of Scotland—A Comparison with American and English concepts,” Environmental Law 17.1 (1986–1987): 1–42.

    Google Scholar 

  23. D. J. A. Clines, “The Image of God in Man,” Tyndale Bulletin 19 (1968): 53–103.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Michael McGiffert, “From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Covenant of Works,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19.2 (1998): 131–155; J. B. Ames, “Law and Morals,” Harvard Law Review (1908);

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Adam Gifford Jr., “The Evolution of the Social Contract,” Constitutional Political Economy 13 (2002): 361–379; Idem., “Being and Time: On the Nature of the Evolution of Institutions,” Journal of Bioeconomics 1 (1999): 127–149.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. G. E. Aylmer, “The Meaning and Definition of ‘property’ in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 86 (1980): 87–97.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Claire Priest, “Creating an American Property Law: Alienability and Its Limits in American History,” Harvard Law Review 120.2 (2006): 385–458.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in seventeenth-Century Maryland,” WMQ 34.4 (1977): 542–571.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Cara Anzilotti, In the Affairs of the World: Women, Patriarchy, and Power in Colonial South Carolina (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  30. Anzilotti, “Autonomy and the Female Planter,” pp. 244–245; Edward McCrady, An Historic Church, the Westminster Abbey of South Carolina: A Sketch of St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, S.C (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans and Cogswll, 1901), p. 10; Nancy C. Wooten, “Beautiful Faces without Names,” Times and Democrat, SC, March 3, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Linda Sturtz, “Review of In the Affairs of the World: Women, Patriarchy, and Power in Colonial South Carolina,” Journal of American History 90.3 (2003): 995–996.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Terri L. Snyder, “Review: Ordinary People,” WMQ, 3rd. series, 60.1 (2003): 225–229; Anzilotti, Affairs of the World, pp. 58–60; [Mary Astell], An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London, 1696), p. 22; TNA, CO 1/53, no. 102.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Robert D. Mitchell, “American Origins and Regional Institutions: The Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73.3 (1983): 404–420;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Philippe Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 61.4 (2004): 609–642.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Susan Staves, “Chattel Property Rules and the Construction of Englishness, 1660–1800,” Law and History Review 12.1 (1994): 123–153;

    Google Scholar 

  36. John Brewer and Susan Staves (eds.), Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1995).

    Google Scholar 

  37. Sir Josiah Child, A Discourse about Trade ([London], 1690), pp. 169–172; David Souden, “‘Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds’? Indentured Servant Emigrants to North America, and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Bristol,” Social History 3.1 (1978): 23–41;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. John Wareing, “Preventative and Punitive Regulation in Seventeenth-Century Social Policy: Conflicts of Interest and the Failure to Make ‘Stealing and Transporting Children, and Other Persons’ a Felony, 1645–73,” Social History 27.3 (2002): 288–308.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. BL, Lansdowne MSS vol. 256, f. 265: Aubrey Gwynne (ed.), “Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies,” Analecta Hibernica 4 (1932): 157–158; Jill Sheppard, The “Redlegs” of Barbados (New York: kto press, 1977); TNA, CO 1/21, no. 170;

    Google Scholar 

  40. Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 47.4 (1990): 503–522.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Richard Tuck, “Power and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 17.1 (1974): 43–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Job Hartop, The Rare Trauailes of Iob Hortop (2nd expanded ed., for William Wright, London, 1591), 24pp, C3v; Daniel J. Vitkus (ed.), Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001);

    Google Scholar 

  43. Anna Suranyi, The Genius of the English Nation: Travel Writing and National Identity in Early Modern England (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2008).

    Google Scholar 

  44. Shaunnagh Dorsett, “‘Since Time Immemorial’: A Story of Common Law Jurisdiction, Native Title and the Case of Tanistry,” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 32–59.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Burnard, “Slave Naming Patterns,” pp. 328, 330–331; Jerome S. Handler and JoAnn Jacoby, “Slave Names and Naming in Barbados, 1650–1830,” WMQ liii (1996): 692–697.

    Google Scholar 

  46. SHC, DD\CM 3; Frederick Brown and Raymond Gorges, The Story of a Family … Being a History of the Family of Gorges (Boston, MA, 1944); NAJm, wills vol. iii, f. 127; The Continuation of the Laws of Jamaica … Being the Second Volume (London, 1698), p. 65.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 238–241; Hilary Beckles, General History of the Caribbean, vol. iii (London: unesco/Macmillan, 1997), p. 201. It is phenomenally difficult to find any text of the “Barbados Slave Code” of 1661: Act 94 of An abridgement of the laws in force and use in Her Majesty’s plantations; (viz.) of Virginia, Jamaica, Barbadoes, Maryland, New-England, New-York (London, 1704) gives only one Act, and does not specify a date. The previous codification of Barbados laws was that made by Searle in the 1650s: Of the Island of barbados.

    Google Scholar 

  48. “An act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes,” September 27, 1661, TNA, CO 30/2, pp. 16–26; Anthony McFarlane, The British in the Americas, 1480–1815 (London: Longman, 1994), p. 135; Rawlin, Laws of Barbados: Act no. 329, August 8, 1688, pp. 156–164;

    Google Scholar 

  49. Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 442–451;

    Book  Google Scholar 

  50. Edward B. Rugemer, “The Development of Master and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” WMQ 70.3 (2013): 429–458.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Rosenberg, “Tryon and Antislavery,” p. 613; Timothy Morton, “Plantation in Wrath,” in Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (eds.), Radicalism in British literary Culture, 1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 70–88.

    Google Scholar 

  52. A. J. Williams-Myers, “Slavery, Rebellion, and Revolution in the Americas: A Historiographical Scenario on the Theses of Genovese and Others,” Journal of Black Studies 26.4 (1996): 381–400, 388;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  53. Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave revolts in the Making of the Wider World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

    Google Scholar 

  54. Mervyn C. Alleyne, “Continuity versus Creativity in Afro-American Language and Culture,” in Salikoko S. Mufwene (ed.), Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 167–181.

    Google Scholar 

  55. Norman Klein, “The Two Asantes: Competing Interpretations of ‘Slavery’ in Akan-Asante Culture and Society,” Institute of African Studies Research Review 12.1 (1980): 37–50.

    Google Scholar 

  56. Alfred Caldecott, The Church in the West Indies (London: Frank Cass, 1898), p. 65; Ligon, History, p. 50.

    Google Scholar 

  57. Carter G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks,” Journal of Negro History iii.4 (1918): 335–353; Virginia Bernhard, “Bermuda and Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparative View,” Journal of Social History 19.1 (1985); Steve Martinot, “The Racialized Construction of Class in the United States,” Social Justice 27.1 (79) (2000): 49–60.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. Carter G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks,” Journal of Negro History iii.4 (1918): 335–353; Virginia Bernhard, “Bermuda and Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparative View,” Journal of Social History 19.1 (1985); Steve Martinot, “The Racialized Construction of Class in the United States,” Social Justice 27.1(79) (2000): 49–60.

    Google Scholar 

  59. The “surname,” Cornsoe, does not appear anywhere in the records of Barbados except for a freed slave, John: Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, p. 255; St. Michael’s parish register, pp. 320, 327; “Mingo A Negro Slave,” St. Philip’s baptisms, p. 69, January 14, 1701(2); St. Philip’s baptisms, p. 80, 9 (September) 1711, “Charles Akinboy a negro Slave”; Trevor Burnard, “Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.3 (2001): 325–346.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  60. TNA, CO 124/1, pp. 12–18; E. O. Winzerling, The Beginning of British Honduras, 1506–1765 (New York: North River Press, 1946), pp. 32–38.

    Google Scholar 

  61. C[harles] W[oodmason]], Journal of C.W. Clerk, Itinerant Minister in South Carolina, 1766, 1767, 1768, in Richard J Hooker (ed.), The Carolina Back-country on the Eve of the Revolution (Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 60–61.

    Google Scholar 

  62. BL, Eg.3662; Charles Gehring and Jacob Schiltkamp (eds.), Curaçao Papers, 1640–1665 (New York: New Netherland Research Center and the New Netherland Institute, 2011), pp. 125–126, 187–189; Robert Sanford, Surinam Justice (London, 1662); William Byam, “Exact Narrative”: Oxf. Bodl.Lib. Rawlinson MSS A 175; Byam, Exact Relation; JCB Library, Cabinet Gm667 Di Ms.

    Google Scholar 

  63. Frank M. Coleman, Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations (Toronto/Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 66;

    Google Scholar 

  64. Thomas Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society (translation by Hobbes of “De Cive: Or the Citizen”), in Bernard Gert (ed.), Man and Citizen: Thomas Hobbes (Harvester/Humanities Press, 1972), pp. 87–386.

    Google Scholar 

  65. Barbara Arneil, “Women as Wives, Servants and Slaves: Rethinking the Public/Private Division,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 34.1 (2001): 29–54.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  66. Matthew W. Binney, “Milton, Locke and the Early Modern Framework of Cosmopolitan Right,” Modern Language Review 105.1 (2010): pp. 31–52;

    Google Scholar 

  67. Mary Nyquist, “Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke,” in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (eds.), Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 356–400.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Sarah Barber
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2014 Sarah Barber

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Barber, S. (2014). Will. In: The Disputatious Caribbean. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137480019_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137480019_6

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50259-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-48001-9

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation