“Master Said He Was Over All the Magistrates”: Amelioration, the Law, and Two Enslaved Women’s Struggle for Justice

In discussing the amelioration of slavery, scholars have often focused more on the shifts in treatment and living/working conditions of enslaved people on individual estates and accorded somewhat less attention to the transformation of colonial state policies and institutions. This paper emerges from a broader project considering the impact of amelioration on the Jamaican legal system and on the ways enslaved people use, engage with, and mobilize against the courts as part of their politics of survival.

In June 1831, Catherine Whitfield and Ann King, an enslaved mother and daughter, sought the intervention of local magistrates against their owners, the Jackson family, including John Rawleigh Jackson, lead custos of the parish of Port Royal. For daring to speak back to orders and defend each other, Whitfield and King had been confined nightly to the stocks for six months, brutally whipped, and otherwise maltreated. In this presentation, I describe and analyze the complex consequences when enslaved women tried to hold the most powerful family in the parish to account. Further, I situate the Jackson case within a long history of enslaved people in the British empire turning to the law to protect themselves against owners and overseers. I suggest how this history complicates our understanding of enslaved people's engagement with the colonial state. And, I unpack the work these stories do in a trans-Atlantic battle about the possibility of constructing "a more humane" slavery, the defensibility of gradual abolitionism, or the imperative to immediately end slavery by any means necessary.