Ritual time in British Plantation Colonies, 1650-1780

Church History, Sept, 2007 by Nicholas M. Beasley

Four thousand miles of ocean divided the plantation colonies of the first British Empire from the English metropole, a great physical distance that was augmented by the cultural divergence that divided those slave societies from England. Colonists in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina thus made the re-creation of English ritual ways central to their ordering of the colonial experience. In particular, the preservation of the English liturgical year and its ritual enactment offered opportunities to connect colonial experience to metropolitan ideal. Confronted with seasons and crops that did not square meteorologically with English experience, colonists sought the comfort of maintaining English calendrical norms as much as possible. Within parish boundaries, colonists built churches in which the parish community could gather for the carefully scheduled, well-ordered worship of the English national church. The English Sabbath was central to the passage of time in weekly units, a day set apart for the church's liturgy, rest from labor, and social gatherings. The great and minor festivals of the Christian year and the daily office offered similar opportunities for Christian teaching and social fellowship, just as the celebration of state holidays connected these distant outposts of the empire to the Protestant national narrative that held an increasingly British people together. These ways of ordering time lent meaning to days that otherwise slipped by amid the routines of agricultural, commercial, and domestic life.1

In slave societies with majority populations of Africans and their descendents, the keeping of important English days and seasons marked a difference between those who claimed the rights of British subjects and their slaves. The free white men who processed to church on St. George's Day claimed that worship in the most public manner, so that even the ephemeral nature of the event could be overcome in the records of their newspapers. Slaves and even free people of color had little access to any public event related to the passage of time. Their ritual lives were rendered private or domestic by the white elite that sought to restrict the public gatherings of slaves that they strangely called "caballing," something usually done in private. At the same time, the ritual calendar of English Christians created moments of unintended increased personal freedom for slaves on Sunday and at feasts during the year. The master class sensed the danger of Sundays and feast days and responded with an increased vigilance meant to reduce slaves' appropriation of these days for their own purposes. Thus ritual proved, as it often does, to be an indeterminate and ambiguous field of action, one that provided resources to both Europeans and Africans struggling for power in the British plantation world.

I. SEASONS AND THE CALENDAR

To be sure, calendars based on the seasons and their weather structured time's passage in the plantation colonies, though almanacs used by merchants and planters transcend modern distinctions in their attention to both secular and religious calendars. (2) Colonists were immediately aware of how far the tropical and subtropical climates of the Caribbean and Carolina diverged from English meteorological experience. Early Carolinians advised English readers that "the Heats of Carolina are indeed troublesome to Strangers in June, July, and August" and compared Carolina's February and March to April and May in England and Carolina's April and May to England's June and July. (3) Yet the English in Carolina complained about extreme weather generally, including winter's chill. (4) Some concluded that the best time for a new colonist to arrive "is September; for then they have eight Months moderate Weather, before the Heat comes, in which Time the Climate will become agreeable." (5) That first summer might still lead some to agree with a low-country woman who found the summer of 1711 comparable to being "baked in an Oven." The hearty Eliza Lucas

Pinckney permitted herself to complain that "4 months in the year is extreamly disagreeable, excessive hott." (6) Relief came in winter when the colony was "invigorated with purifying cold winds from the Cherokee Mountains, which recovers us from the languid habit acquired in the warm months." (7) Thus Carolina's climate offered greater seasonality than Pinckney's native Antigua, which shared in the seemingly unvarying tropical climate that many colonists understood to be enervating. (8) Careful observers did note the relative cool and lesser humidity of a Caribbean winter, as well as the rise in temperature and precipitation that characterized much of the second half of the year, the season in which hurricanes might make their fearful appearance, both in the Caribbean and Carolina.

Those great storms hovered over a quarter of the year in the minds of many colonists. By the end of the seventeenth century, some years' experience in the hurricane zone taught the English to expect and prepare for hurricanes within a well-defined season, including the months of September, October, and November. On the island of Nevis in the 1670s, people packed up their goods in the stormy season to minimize their losses. Sugar planters too removed parts of their mills in advance of the season, hoping to reduce wind damage to their capital improvements. (10) Ships' captains hoped to clear Caribbean ports no later than August, in advance of what one early slave trader called "the Michaelmas storms," locating the storms in the season around Michaelmas (the feast of St. Michael and All Angels) on September 29. (11) Indeed, wise seafaring men realized that leaving southern ports in advance of the hurricanes also allowed them to arrive in England before the North Atlantic gales threatened shipping in winter. (12) Some ships that missed the window of safety took their chances, but many who found themselves in the sugar ports in late fall would spend a pleasant Caribbean winter there, waiting to load the new sugar crop sometime in the first quarter of the year. (13)