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The Sugar Adventurers of Glasgow - Part 2

Stuart Nisbet 01/26/2010 11:43 AM

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Folly on Kenmuir Hill, Castle Semple & Castle Semple Loch

The two young Scots arrived on Nevis during the peak of its rise in enslaved Africans. To facilitate control, legislation was passed for increasingly brutal punishment for the most trivial offences. Minor theft or a careless glance resulted in mutilation and death. The life of the earlier white indentured servants had been hard, but was nothing compared to the plight of the enslaved Africans, who were beyond the protection of the law.

William McDowall's letters reveal his tough and ambitious nature. He wrote that during his apprenticeship he had been the only white man on the plantation, and that the slaves under his control were ‘indifferent'. To maximise production amidst such apathy, the full system of control and violent suppression was on hand. Later when he became an influential planter, he lobbied for the death penalty for escaped slaves, including his own slave ‘Christopher' who led a revolt in 1722. They literally had the power of life and death over their workforce, with no fear for the consequences of maltreatment or abuse.

The young Scots rose gradually in status, not simply as successful managers, but as trusted equals amidst the traditional English elite. Milliken married the widow of one of the largest planters on Nevis, owning more than a hundred enslaved Africans. McDowall began developing a modest plantation of his own on the adjacent island of St Kitts. For this, he had personally purchased a dozen enslaved Africans. These were the first of many thousands who would be the hidden source of their family fortunes in Glasgow.

From 1711, persistent war between Britain and France came to an end. Half of the island of St Kitts, which had been in French hands, was shared out amongst British planters. McDowall and Milliken were granted plantations known as Canada Hills and Monkey Hill. These would form their families' core holdings for the following centuries. Each estate contained 200 acres of prime cane land, and needed the hard labour of 200 enslaved Africans. Half the main estates went to a wider group of their associates from the West of Scotland, who had matured in this key period of Glasgow's colonial history.

Their correspondence reveals great personal detail of a Glasgow sugar planter's life and his treatment of the enslaved. Each plantation cleared up to £5,000 profit per annum, an immense sum in the 1720s. Although McDowall's estate had 200 acres of cane land, he had the potential to develop an extra 600 acres by the labour of his unfortunate slaves. He set about doubling his sugar output, adding a second slave village, a new sugar works and windmill. His overall policy was to keep ‘a sufficient stock of negroes, to make sufficient sugar to send home'. Despite the prominence of the Scots merchants, their enslaved labour force remains invisible. On arrival in the Leewards they lost not only their freedom, but their identities, and were renamed by the planters. Perhaps the deepest symbol of Glasgow's involvement is that each Scots planter owned an enslaved African named ‘Glasgow'.

The key to a profitable sugar plantation was a strict policy of frugalism in the care of the enslaved. The nursing of the sick or dying was an avoidable expense. At one point, despite losing many negroes, McDowall still avoided paying for a doctor. His minimalist policy extended to accommodation. McDowall's managers continually suggested upgrades, but he strenuously opposed any improvements.

Back in the 1640s, St Kitts had supported an exotic variety of produce, including potatoes, oranges, lemons, bananas and grapes. Gradually the intensity of sugar cultivation meant that little soil was spared for the enslaved to grow their own food. They were largely at the mercy of imports of food and clothing by their Scots masters. During his own apprenticeship, McDowall recalled that he fed his negroes nothing but an ounce of salt rations, herrings or some salted beef. Herrings are a celebrated part of the trade of the Clyde estuary, exported by the earliest sugar merchants, including Walter Gibson and Daniel Campbell. Thenceforth herring exports from the Clyde to the Caribbean increased greatly, in tandem with the rising slave numbers, but the end use is rarely admitted.

The most successful estates were those where the economic balance between life and death was kept on a knife edge. The impression from the Glasgow correspondence is that plantation life was akin to a concentration camp. The active policy of frugalism kept health very finely in the balance. Food was dependent entirely on imports, and deaths escalated due to delays in supply, droughts or hurricanes. Cattle began to die and it was not long before the enslaved followed. James Milliken wrote, ‘several of the negroes are dead, we must buy others'. Conditions were so bad that the enslaved risked escape and torture on recapture, rather than starvation. It is deeply ironic that men, women and children could starve to death on one of the most fertile islands in the world. The Glasgow planters literally had the power of life and death over their workforce, with no fear of legal consequence for lack of care. Amongst the buying and selling of African men and women for their plantations, they also ordered batches of Negro children, to replace the ongoing dead. McDowall's accounts record his purchases, such as ‘ten negro boys at £23 sterling each' (Picture: Slave Market, St Kitts). Various children were also sent home, as playthings for friends and relatives.

The Scots continued to rise in influence. Milliken was elected onto the Nevis Assembly in 1707, and McDowall to the St Kitts Assembly a decade later. By the time they came back to Glasgow, they were not simply rich, but wealthy almost beyond belief. Their income extended well beyond their own estates, and they used their growing influence to run various estates belonging to absent English planters.

Following the extensive imports of slaves to Nevis in the 1690s, the numbers continued to escalate. During McDowall and Milliken's heyday (c.1710-1730) the number of enslaved on St Kitts increased by a factor of more than five, to 17,000. The stark inference from the records is that the career success for each Glasgow planter cost the lives of several hundred African men, women and children.

Once successful, their plantation empires were run entirely on a kinship basis. Following the example of Glasgow's pioneers such as Gibson and Campbell, both McDowall and Milliken brought out their brothers to captain their ships. Nephews were also favoured as trainee overseers and managers. McDowall also brought out his cousin Alexander Houston, who later fronted Glasgow's largest merchant house. Family involvement extended to grooming their own sons to become plantation managers. In 1728, Milliken's son Jamey sailed for St Kitts to manage McDowall's plantations. It is often suggested that Scots planters ran their estates indirectly from home, as ‘absent' owners. However in the early stages this is a myth which has permeated an impression of secondary involvement.

The Scots planters had risen from overseers, to managers, to planters, to island councillors. McDowall's next move was as a political negotiator. After working their former French estates for many years, the lands were repossessed by the new Governor. The situation was of such grave concern that McDowall sailed for England in the spring of 1724 to personally petition Parliament and the King. He befriended John Scrope, Baron to the Court of Exchequer, an influential figure in Scottish politics around the Union. McDowall proved to be a negotiator at the highest level of government. Over the next two years he travelled between London, Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh, developing contact with relatives, friends and the nobility.

The overriding ambition of the Scots planters was to create a landed legacy for their eldest sons. Once home, McDowall managed the education of planters' children, including the schooling of Milliken's son Jamey, at Eton. The contrast is acute between Jamey dancing and fencing amongst London society, while his father built the family fortune by overworking and underfeeding enslaved Africans. Later, McDowall's daughter attended Chelsea boarding school, while the enslaved on her father's plantations died of hunger.

The wealth of the Glasgow Sugar Adventurers extended far beyond what was evident from sugar imports to Glasgow. In the late 17th century only a few sugar ships per year returned to the Clyde. However, through most of their careers, Glasgow's Leeward merchants sent all their sugar to London. In the early 1720s for example they sent their sugar to the capital in more than fifty separate ships. This included their own ships, the McDowall, St Andrew, and Mary.

By the time McDowall's St Kitts plantations were legally secured in the summer of 1728, he was fifty years old and considering retirement. He had profited immensely within the English plantation system and the London sugar trade. He decided that, ‘sugars will sell as well at Glasgow as in any other part of Britain'. In late 1726 he purchased a share of Daniel Campbells' South Sugar house in Glasgow and the St. Kitts Sugar Warehouse in Edinburgh. He then began diverting some of his sugar ships from London to the Clyde.

On his return to Glasgow in 1726, McDowall also bought Daniel Campbell's Shawfield mansion, and Lord Semple's Castle Semple estate in Renfrewshire (Picture: Castle Semple Estate). His total outlay was more than £25,000, a vast sum at the time. Despite this lavish spending, money could not purchase the status to go with it. Like many of Glasgow's most celebrated merchants, McDowall and Milliken originated from well outside the city, and from modest landed stock, having little claim to fame. The most they could do was to rely heavily on their ranks of Colonel and Major. The irony is that these ‘ranks' were simply in the militia, and were a direct measure of their plantation size and slave ownership. Given the prominent place which these supposedly ‘gallant and romantic' soldiers hold in Glasgow folklore, this may be one of the biggest deceptions in the city's history.

Colonel William McDowall and Major James Milliken died in the 1740s, both in their early seventies. Their sons and grandsons became partners in Glasgow's largest merchant house, Alexander Houston & Company. By the end of the 18th century the family empire had expanded to sugar plantations on many other Caribbean islands, including Antigua, St Vincent, Tobago and Jamaica. Based on all the Caribbean estates which the three William McDowalls worked (father, son and grandson) through the 18th century, this one family were responsible for the enslavement, maltreatment and fate of many thousands of African men, women and children.

Young Glasgow men continued to be sent out to St Kitts and Nevis well into the subsequent tobacco period. In 1728 McDowall shipped a young man, Robert Colquhoun, from the Clyde to St Kitts as his plantation manager. Colquhoun rose quickly to become a successful slave master and St Kitts planter in his own right. His daughter Frances married the son of a Glasgow family with a much older landed tradition, the Maxwells of Pollok. James Maxwell was sent out to St Kitts as an apprentice and married Frances Colquhoun, the daughter of McDowall's slave manager in 1764. James Maxwell succeeded to Nether Pollok, becoming the 7th Baronet. His wife Frances Colquhoun reigned as Lady Pollok until her husband's death in 1785. By this time St Kitts and Nevis slave money had permeated not only the merchant class, but the highest echelons of old Glasgow society.

Glasgow connections with St Kitts and Nevis continued into the Victorian period and beyond, and are still very evident today. Abandoned sugar works are scattered all over the islands, with rusting machinery stamped ‘Made in Glasgow'. Most poignantly, in the very heart of Basseterre, capital of St Kitts is a green clock tower (Photo). Looking around the back is a plate stamped ‘Sun Foundry, Made in Glasgow'.

Conclusion
Today, Glasgow's Sugar Adventurers continue to be celebrated as being amongst the elite of 18th century Scotland. However, like their lost architecture, their countless enslaved Africans remain invisible. In today's multi-cultural city, the fact that the enslaved were of a distant race is no longer an excuse to conceal the truth. They were simply the men, women and children whose lives funded Glasgow's Renaissance. The legacy is a deep cultural bond with St Kitts and Nevis, and a desire on both sides of the Atlantic to learn from this link. This extends even further back, across the Atlantic from St Kitts to Africa, to the birthplace of the enslaved named ‘Glasgow'.

Dr Stuart Nisbet is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Dundee.

Further Reading
S. Nisbet, ‘A Sufficient Stock of Negroes - The Secret Lives of Wm. McDowall & Jas. Milliken', in Renfrewshire Local History Forum Journal, 14, (2007/8).

 Article courtesy of History Scotland ( www.historyscotland.com )