Our Slaves Are Black

Nicholas Guyatt

• Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis
  Oxford, 440 pp, £17.99, May 2006, ISBN 0 19 514073 7
• BuyThe Trader, the Owner, the Slave by James Walvin
  Cape, 297 pp, £17.99, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 224 06144 5
• The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 by Colin Kidd
  Cambridge, 309 pp, £16.99, September 2006, ISBN 0 521 79324 6
• BuyThe Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese
  Cambridge, 828 pp, £18.99, December 2005, ISBN 0 521 85065 7

In 1659, during the last months of the Commonwealth, 72 slaves from Barbados managed to escape to London. They complained to Parliament that they had been living in ‘unsupportable Captivity’, working at the furnaces and sugar mills, and ‘digging in this scorching Island’ with only roots and water to sustain them. They had been ‘bought and sold still from one Planter to another, or attached as horses or beasts for the debts of their masters’. Many had been badly beaten. Having fled from the ‘disconsolate vault’ of Barbados, they were terrified that they might be recognised and returned to the Caribbean. ‘I am escaped,’ one said in a letter to an MP, ‘I cannot say free, but rather, as one brought over in a Coffin, out of which I may not peep, until the protection of this Parliament unlock it, and say, Arise Freeman and walk.’ This petitioner and his desperate associates were not confident that they would be vindicated in their appeals, even though they had one trump card up their sleeves: they were white.