The Women of the Rendezvous Plantation on Barbados in the 17th Century

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. On the easternmost edge of the Caribbean Sea is a small island, less than 170 square miles in area. Portuguese explorers were familiar with the island which they passed en route to Brazil, and in the 16th century, they had named it los Barbados, meaning the bearded ones, possibly referring to the bearded fig trees on the island. The first English ships arrived on the island in 1625, and two years later, in 1627, Captain Henry Powell arrived on the island with a party of settlers and enslaved people to claim the island for the English. After struggling with other crops, the colonists discovered that they could successfully grow sugar on the island, albeit only with the sugar refining knowledge that enslaved Africans brought to the island from Brazil. In the late 17th century, Barbados, England's first slave society, was more profitable than all of England's other American colonies combined. It was in this world that the five women of today's story lived on a plantation called Rendezvous. By the 1660s, Rendezvous was 600 acres in size, in the south of Barbados, on a hilltop in Christ Church parish. At the time of the 1680 census, there were around a dozen white inhabitants of the plantation and 180 enslaved laborers. The women on whom we're focusing today came from both groups. Hester and Frances were both, in turn, white mistresses of the manor. Dorothy was a white servant at Rendezvous, and Susannah and Elizabeth were Black enslaved workers. What the five women had in common was that they all bore children to John Peers, a prominent Barbados politician who had inherited the Rendezvous plantation from his father in 1661. Hester Tomkyns, the daughter of a Knight of the Realm and member of Parliament, married John Peers in England around 1664. Their first child, a daughter named Mary, was born in England and stayed there to be raised by her aunt and uncle when Hester and John set sail to Barbados in 1666. In Barbados, Hester gave birth to Richard, Elizabeth, John, Elizabeth, and Thomas. Sadly, neither Elizabeth would survive infancy. Hester herself died in 1678, having never returned to England. Around four years later, John remarried to Frances Knights nee Atkins, a young English widow who had been living on Barbados with her late husband. Frances, was the wealthy daughter of the former governor of Barbados, and bore John three daughters: Elizabeth, Frances and Anne. Two weeks after she gave birth to Anne in 1685, Frances, like Hester before her, died. John Peers never married again, but he had children with three other women, mainly between his two marriages, although at least two of his illegitimate children were born during his first marriage. Susannah Mingo was an enslaved Black laborer on the Rendezvous plantation. It's possible she had been born in West Africa and transported to Barbados. Like both Elizabeth and Dorothy, she worked as a domestic, likely living in the mansion house, and performing tasks like laundry and cooking. To John, Susannah bore Judith, Richard, and Hester. Her final daughter's name is intriguing. Was she named after her father's recently deceased wife? Per English law, at the time, the children of an enslaved mother would also be enslaved, so Judith, Richard, and Hester were, like Susannah, enslaved to John Peers. Like Susannah, Elizabeth Ashcroft was an enslaved Black domestic laborer at Rendezvous, and had probably also been transported to Barbados from West Africa. She had five children altogether. The youngest three, Richard, Elizabeth, and Edward, were certainly John's, and it's likely that Susannah and John, both born before 1675, were also fathered by John. If so, that would make four illegitimate or natural born children of John's, fathered while he was still married to Hester. Dorothy Spendlove was one of the few white domestic servants at Rendezvous, and had likely been born on Barbados, a relative of small landowners. The names of her three children will all sound familiar in this repetitious family tree, Frances, who was born in 1677, before John married a woman of the same name; Anne; and John born in 1681, just before John senior remarried. On August 13, 1683, during John's marriage to Frances, nine children were baptized in Christ Church parish. The nine children were John's natural born children with Dorothy and Susannah, and the youngest three children with Elizabeth. Not only did he baptize the children, but in the record, they are clearly identified as the children of John Peers. In 1686, a year after Frances died, John Peers, all his living children who were then in Barbados, and Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Atkins, and Dorothy Spendlove, boarded a ship and headed to England. They lived briefly in London, and then settled in a manor house in the village of Streatham, five miles south of London. In March of 1689, John Peers died in Streatham, having written his will just the day before. In that will, he, of course, left property to his legitimate heirs; but more surprisingly, he also left money to Dorothy, Elizabeth, Susannah, and their children. To Dorothy and her younger children, whom he granted use of his house, as long as Dorothy remained unmarried, he willed 100 pounds per year. To her older daughter, Frances, he left 25 pounds per year, along with 40 pounds per year to bind her apprentice. Elizabeth and her children received 20 pounds per year, and Susannah and her children, 10 pounds per year. Sometime after 1724, John's grandson, John, son of Hester's Richard, sold the Barbados estates out of the Peers family. The Rendezvous plantation no longer exists. Barbados gained its independence from Britain on November 30, 1966, but remained part of the Commonwealth of Nations as a constitutional monarchy. On November 30, 2021, Barbados declared itself a republic and removed the queen as its head of state, instead swearing in, as president Sandra Mason, whose ancestors had been enslaved on the island. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Jenny Shaw, Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama, and author of, "The Women of Rendezvous: A Trans Atlantic Story of Family and Slavery. "

Hi, Jenny, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Jenny Shaw  11:50  
Thank you for having me, Kelly, it's a real pleasure. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:53  
So I want to start by asking, this is your second book. I want to hear a little bit about why you decided to write this book, what the inspiration for this was? 

Dr. Jenny Shaw  12:02  
Well, it's actually a really good question, because it is my second book, but I found the sources when I was finishing up research for my first book. In May of 2011, I was in Barbados. I was in the Department of Archives, and I was essentially there to do a bunch of cleanup research, which included identifying and counting every free or enslaved person of color who had been baptized between roughly around 1650 and 1700. And there were four parish baptism registers that were still extant, still there and available to look at. And so I was just going through and counting, and I was looking through the Christ Church parish baptism record. Now, if I tell you that between 1650 and 1700 there were roughly 4000 baptisms, only 57 were of people of color, free or enslaved. So it was very unusual. And I'm going through and I get to the 13th of August, 1683. The 13th of August happens to be my birthday, which doesn't really mean anything except that when we see dates of significance in the archive, my brain just does a little Oh. And I saw Susannah, and three children begotten of John Peers, with their ages listed. And then I saw Elizabeth underneath her, same date, three children, different ages, begotten of John Peers. And then I realized that right above them was a woman called Dorothy Spendlove, who was presumably white (the other two were very clearly enslaved,) three children, their ages listed, begotten of John Peers. And I just thought, "What is going on?" Because I had been working on Barbados at that point for not quite a decade, but I had been, I first went to the island in 2002 and, you know, I felt pretty familiar with the main movers and shakers, I thought. I had never heard of John Peers, and so I started going back to see if I had missed references to him or people on his plantation before, and indeed, I had. I found Elizabeth and Susannah's own baptism records as adult enslaved women. And then I found a handful of other people from the what I then later came to understand was the Rendezvous plantation. I also found his white legitimate children with his first wife and his legitimate children with his second wife. And at this point, I mean, I had just forgotten what I'm there to do, which is to finish the first book. And Barbados also has a will register. And I thought, what are the chances that there's a will for this guy? Sure enough, there was a will for this guy. And in the will, I could see the women and their children being left money. And I just I had to stop. I had to go back and do what I was there to do. And so I that's what I did. I went back and I began counting free and enslaved people of color who had undergone baptism in the four parishes in Barbados from which we still have records, but I could not shake that story. And so I immediately, as soon as I could, returned to it. I will say the other thing, because that was 2011, so it took a long time to write this book, in some ways. In the intervening years, I also became quite uncomfortable about the way that enslaved women, who birthed children fathered by their enslavers, were treated in scholarship, especially scholarship written by men, quite frankly. And so that was something else that I thought, "Well, I don't know what's going on here, but this seems like an opportunity to investigate and develop some research on that," because it had been something that had been bugging me for a number of years at that point, and this seemed like an opportunity to really think about those women and what their experiences were.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:51  
 So it would have been a lot easier, of course, to tell the story from John Peers' perspective, but you chose to flip it on its head and tell the story from the perspective of the five women who birthed his children. So tell me about the challenges of doing that. 

Dr. Jenny Shaw  16:08  
Yes, well, you should know that there are several chapters in files on my computer that do indeed center John, because I thought, "Well, I'm going to have to start with him, because how do I tell the rest of the story if I don't begin with him?" And I was deeply dissatisfied. I think I wrote four completely different versions of chapter one, and each time, either I was dissatisfied or people I shared it with were like, "No, this is not it," and I really have to give great appreciation to my PhD advisor, Karen Kupperman, who still reads for me. And you know, she basically just said, "That's not it. That's this is not the voice. This is not you've," she actually, effectively said, "You've sucked all of the story out of this. This is dry. It is boring. You're not doing anything." And while one always wants to hear that, you know, what was written is good, it was actually amazing to be given that gift of this is not just not great. This is terrible. And so I ripped it all up. And I thought so I was at a conference, and I started just playing with the idea, but I never knew how to describe what I was doing in this book. And this is about 2018 and I started saying, "Well, I'm sort of writing a serial biography of five women who all had children with the same Barbados politician and enslaver." And the more I said it, the more I thought, "Okay, then how does that work?" And so then I wrote the chapter that is, "A Place Called Rendezvous," which is the opening chapter, which centers on Hester, not exclusively her, but she's sort of the main guide to the plantation itself. And from the moment I did that, that's when it clicked. But it was, it was painful. There were many iterations before because I thought I needed to lay a foundation, and then I realized, "No, I don't, because the women are who matter. He's still in there in places. Of course he is. But there's no rule that says that he has to be in charge of his own chapter. There's no rule that says that I've got to talk about him first before I talk about everyone else." And I think part of the reason it didn't work was that he just didn't really interest me. You know, he wasn't the one who fascinated me. So I couldn't write engagingly. Somebody else probably could, but I could not, and I will forever be grateful for the fact that I was told that it wasn't just not great, that it was terrible because it was and I'm so much happier however it's received. I'm so much happier that I prefer this version of the book, this voice. I never would have found a voice for the book if it hadn't been for that rewriting of chapter one.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:49  
One of the things I think that we get from this version is obviously there are levels of freedom, and Elizabeth and Susannah are much less free. But it it is clear in this version that Hester and Frances, although they are white, although they are not enslaved, still do not have full freedom, that that there is some level in which their lives are are still not completely their own. Could could you talk a little bit about what, what their lives are like? So these are John's wives. He has legitimate children with them. He he marries them, but, but their lives are still not completely their own to live.

Dr. Jenny Shaw  19:38  
No. I mean, as for most elite women in the 17th century, their lives weren't their own to live. What's interesting about both Hester and Frances is that they were really quite powerful in their own right, despite the fact that their lives were not necessarily their own to live. And what I mean by that is that fathers and husbands are going to be making a lot of decisions about what they get to do. Having said that, though the amount of money each of them brought into that marriage sequentially was no small thing. Hester was the daughter of a Member of Parliament, a Knight of the Realm. She her family lands in Herefordshire are pretty significant, as best I can tell, she brought the kind of money from later records we know, to really turn what was a pretty ramshackle sort of plantation house, at least, and into something really opulent and amazing. And it was partly her injection of cash that allowed a real purchase of enslaved people, that allowed the sort of importation of fine goods and China and all of those kinds of things to really turn the house into something befitting someone of John Peers' status, or at least the status that John Peers wanted to express himself as having, and so but having said that, Hester has six children. I'm not sure of the birth date of the very first child that she has before she leaves England, but she has six children in a little bit over a decade. I think, as best I can tell, she dies not desperately long after the birth, a couple of years after the birth of the sixth. She buries two daughters who die in very young infancy, and she would have been relatively isolated at the Rendezvous plantation. Barbaros in this part of the 17th century, certainly has a lot of movers and shakers, but it's not high society, and so her choices about having children, when to have children, whether she had any control over her fertility, were presumably pretty restricted, in the ways that they were for all of the women. And so in that sense, I've often wondered about what it meant to be a wife of someone like John Peers, in the sense that for all we know, she may have welcomed sex, she may have enjoyed it, she may have liked having children. She also may have felt completely the opposite about all of those things. And there's no way for a man to rape his wife in this period for centuries, and so there's no pushback. And Frances Atkins actually is very similar. She's even more elite in some ways. She was the daughter of a former governor of Barbados, and she had married before, and her husband pre deceased her, but within under a year of her first husband dying, she was married and had given birth to her first child with John, and then she goes on to have another two kids in the next couple of years, and she dies just a couple of weeks after the birth of her third child. So her experience with him was basically being pregnant or recovering from childbirth, as best I can tell if you if you time it out, she had very little time when one of those two things wasn't in operation. And again, the match that is made between her and John, as with her first husband, is one that is arranged between fathers and husbands, and she doesn't get to decide how that goes down. And so just like Hester, there is a limit on what she can do. At the same time, she is bringing so much money into that household, and like Hester, she's birthing white legitimate children. And because of how race operates in Barbados, that is what is really undergirding everything about society in Barbados. That is no small thing. The fact that each of them, Hester has four children survive to adulthood, Frances has, well three. One of her daughters dies, probably in her teens. But the fact that she has that next generation produced, that's no small thing. And that, I think, is where this line about freedom and and where one can put it, you can never discount the fact that those women had a lot of money and way more sway, one would imagine, over their position in the households, because that's the other thing they get to do, right? They get to control everyone in those households. They run those households. They get to decide the fates of Susannah and Elizabeth and Dorothy the servant in ways that the other three women have very little control whatsoever.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:05  
Maybe we should go to Elizabeth and Susannah and then come back to Dorothy, because Dorothy is the most complicated in many ways. So Elizabeth and Susannah are enslaved. Anyone who has listened to this podcast for any amount of time will not be at all surprised to hear the story of an enslaver who impregnates his enslaved workers. This is a common story. It is uncommon, however, as you noted at the beginning, that he recognizes the children, that he baptizes the children. What is going on here? Do we have any sense of why he acknowledges the children?

Dr. Jenny Shaw  24:44  
This is a question that I have wrestled with, and I still don't feel I've got a good answer for. Right around the time that he is certainly around the time these children are being born, the Barbaros Assembly is relatively frequently debating whether or not enslaved people should be baptized. There's a fair amount of pressure coming from England that they should do this and but in Barbados itself, enslavers are fairly unanimous, absolutely not. They are worried that it will lead to freedom, that if you baptize someone, that that leads to freedom. That is why those numbers are so so small. So the assembly debates it. The council in Barbaros also then discusses what the assembly does. John sits on that council, so he's right there looking at all of these different kinds of debates and things going on, whether he's actually contributing to them. There's no evidence, one way or the other, for any of the contributions to these debates, but what you have is essentially a pretty unanimous across the board, "No, we're not baptizing enslaved people because we don't want a path to freedom." On the flip side of that, there is evidence, it's small, but it is there, that people of color made the connection between baptism and freedom, or at least thought that it might be worth getting baptized as insurance. So you see a number in the 1670s, 1680s, 1690s, of people of color who were manumitted. And these numbers are also extremely small, so freed by their owners, usually in a will, who then subsequently a few weeks or months later appear in a baptism record in a parish. And they seem to be underscoring their freedom right. So they have the right for freedom in the manumission, but it seems that there's something else going on there, and that's pretty consistent, actually, across time and place. But what this means for John, or what he's doing, I have no idea. My idea, mostly, is that he was so wealthy, he's the largest landowner. He's one of the biggest enslavers. He sits on the council. He seems to have been very excited to be involved in different factional arguments among and between different groups. He seems a bit contrary, perhaps, and part of me just thinks he thought, "Well, who's going to tell me I can't?" Of course, it's equally conceivable, and I think I think I hold this out a little bit in the book, that perhaps Frances is the one he's married to. Hester has long since died, but Frances is who he's married to when this event takes place. Perhaps she is the one who says this should happen. Having said that, he baptized Susannah and Elizabeth when they were probably in their adolescence, back in 1670, and that's when Hester is around. So perhaps this is something he does with the people with whom he decides he is going to court sex. I don't know. I don't know where the pressure is being brought to bear. There is even, it's even conceivable that Susannah and Elizabeth petitioned for it, that they asked, because we know that enslaved people, some of at least made that kind of connection. And they may not have known what the future held, but they might have thought this may be some insurance for our children. So it is, there is. There's no smoking gun. There's no piece of evidence that says. It is contrary to everything. I told you at the beginning that 57 people of color, between 1650 and 1700, were baptized in Christ Church parish, which is where the Rendezvous plantation was. 11 of them are from the Rendezvous plantation. So there definitely is an anomaly on that plantation, but it also there's 180 enslaved people in that plantation. So it's an absolute infinitesimal fraction of the whole, so it's not as though he's baptizing everybody, and that makes it stand out. He's not.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:27  
So the other people who are baptized that same day as Elizabeth and Susannah's children are Dorothy's children. Now Dorothy is not enslaved. She is a servant. She is a white servant who is also bearing children, illegitimate children, to John Peers. What is going on with Dorothy? This is such an interesting story.

Dr. Jenny Shaw  28:50  
I mean, again, her second name in the records is Spendlove. So you really couldn't make up the names of the plantation and the people and everything else in this. But there are some Spendloves or Speedloves in that Christ Church parish area of Barbados, in the same time period. There are even a few deeds that are witnessed by a man called John Spendlove or Speedlove. It just depends on which signature, the name, the precision with names actually really doesn't matter in this period at all. It's pretty confident that it's him, and so it seems likely that that's the family that Dorothy comes from. The 1680 census tells us that on Rendezvous, or at least in among John's property, there were eight white servants, and she presumably is counted among that eight. So not a huge number, but she's presumably one of them. How she ends up in that house, though, is it a business relationship that he has with her father, who, by the way, if that is the family, they are absolutely nowhere. I mean, they're very, very small, and minor, small amount of land, best I can tell. I don't think they were enslavers themselves, so just relatively were working white in Barbados. And so it's almost impossible to know what the precise connection is, but she's in that house in the period between when Hester dies in 1678, and when Frances marries John sometime in 1682, early in 1682 probably. She is the white woman in the Rendezvous plantation house. Having said that, though, of course, we know from the baptism records, her children weren't baptized, which, frankly, given sort of the mores of the day and general patterns in Barbados, it's actually not hugely surprising that they weren't, that they got baptized later. That's kind of fine. But what's so interesting about it is that I've thought a lot about what Dorothy might have wondered about. I've wondered, did she think she could be the second or maybe even the third Mrs. John Peers? In some ways, there's absolutely no evidence for that, right? Because, you know, she had children with him. Hester dies. He does not marry her. He marries someone, arguably even more elite. Then she dies. He still doesn't marry Dorothy. You know, there's really nothing to say that, that she'll be part of this, but yes, Dorothy is in that space. And then that also, of course, brings up what her relationship may have been like with Susannah and Elizabeth, and of course, Susannah and Elizabeth's relationship with each other. And something I tried to do in the book was to be quite careful about not trying to assume too much solidarity or actually animosity among them, between each of the women, but rather to allow for all of the possibilities of those relationships to play out. But Dorothy is fascinating in the sense that in some ways she fits the there was a Cromwellian era idea that bawds would go over to Barbados, and if they were handsome, they marry well and sort of move up. There's this anxiety right about lower class women sort of moving up the hierarchy, and in some ways Dorothy could have fit that bill, except she never married John, so she's just there in that household bearing his children, and that's almost all we know about her. In some ways, she's the hardest one to find anything out about.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:17  
After Frances dies, they go back to England. They go to London for a while, and then they are in Streatham. So can you talk some about the ways that race plays out differently on Barbados, and then when they're in England, the ways that that they might have seen themselves? So the way the half siblings all see each other, because John takes everyone back with him, all his his children and the remaining women with whom he has had children with him back. 

Dr. Jenny Shaw  32:57  
This is also something really unusual, sending your children, your natural born children, home, even in this period, was relatively rare, much more common in the 18th century, bringing the women almost completely unheard of. And the records describe this whole sort of conglomeration as the great and numerous family that's coming from Barbados. And yes, I think things, one of the things that I was really interested to research and get into in this book was how race and gender were sort of playing out in England at this time. I had a pretty good handle from earlier work on Barbados, but despite the fact that I've worked on this period for a fair while, I'm no expert, still am no expert in England in this period. And so it was kind of fascinating to me, the way that we so often think about, sort of the colonies coming home, and that I realized that actually, no, there's a whole gender and racial hierarchy already present in England in this period. It doesn't look the same as Barbaros. It's not as rigid in the sense that there's not a huge and overwhelming number of enslaved people and people racialized as Black against a very small white population. It's actually basically more or less the flip of that. So demographically, it looks very different. But that doesn't mean that the racism that is expressed or the hierarchies themselves are any less insidious or controlling. And so one of the things that I have found useful to think about is the way in which, in Barbados, if Dorothy was walking into Bridgetown, which is the capital, and if she had Susannah and Elizabeth with her attending her and, you know, we're sort of making Dorothy the person here, because she's going to be on both sides of the ocean, the very fact of Dorothy's whiteness is accentuated by Susannah and Elizabeth's Blackness, right? The fact that she sort of juxtaposes against there's lots and lots and lots of both novels and plays, but also just commentary by people living in Barbados and Jamaica in this period talking about this sort of juxtaposition of even relatively middling kind of white women really elevating themselves because they have a Black female attendant, If, however, we flip that to London and Dorothy's walking down the street there, well, first of all, I've got to assume that, because she has spent decades in Barbados that her skin is more weathered and perhaps more sun damaged, than the average person in London at the time. I could be wrong about this, but one might assume that. In this scenario, if she has Susannah and Elizabeth with her, their presence actually does the opposite thing. It sort of calls Dorothy's whiteness into question, because it's associating her with somewhere overseas. It's associating her with a colonial space. And it doesn't mean that it's better in one place and worse than the other. It just means that it's different in each center of power. And I've thought about that a lot, and what that might mean for how Susannah and Elizabeth and Dorothy experienced London, and as you say, the children, because the children are mixed race. So Dorothy's children are white, Susannah and Elizabeth's children are mixed race, and they're going to be seeing a London that is absolutely teeming with children and children working. Now that's not unusual, probably for any of these kids, because they're seeing kids working on plantations in Barbados. So the idea that six and seven year olds are running around in the streets and doing work, that's not neither here nor there, but I also can imagine that some of the things that the women and the children, especially those who are old enough, are noticing are the kinds of work that children are doing and the kinds of ways children are dressed, and in the case particularly of the of the young boys who are in the group, the Black boys in the group, who are both called Richard, that they may be seeing young Black boys running around the streets of London in fine livery, carrying messages and so on, and sometimes with the markers of enslavement around their necks in the form of collars. And this is something that is really a British born thing. In the early 18th century, Barbados stores pass a law introducing these collars, but it has to explain what they are and how they're different from the ones that would have been used for punishment. And so this is not as something imported from the colonies that the, you know, Londoners pick up in the 17th century. This is something generated in London and then exported out to the colonies, and so in terms of sort of the demography looks very different. So certainly they're seeing lots of people racialized as Black, doing labor, but also doing it alongside white people, right? So it's not that only Black people do labor and white people don't, but it's also a scenario in which they can see that there is a lot of similar kinds of work, I imagine, particularly at the docks. When they left Bridgetown and they arrived in London, there will have been a difference in demography to a degree. But in terms of who's doing the loading and unloading, there's going to be a lot of commonality there as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:56  
So I think that perhaps John Peers would have been rather surprised with the way that his different lines played out, almost the flip of what you might imagine, in some ways. I just wonder if you could talk a little bit through that, and what kind of happens as the various lines of legitimate and illegitimate. I guess they're not all Peers, because the illegitimate lines all keep the names of their their mothers.

Dr. Jenny Shaw  38:25  
Yeah, it's really fascinating. And one of the one of the things that allowed me to actually write the book was when I came across a series of Chancery court records in 2015 that essentially ran all the way up to 1724. They actually go beyond, but 1724, the ones that really deal with Rendezvous, and it is John Peer's sons and then grandson who are basically fighting to try and get their due from the legacy that John originally left them. And effectively, to cut a very long, complicated story short, there are a bunch of plantation managers who are put in charge. They invest in the plantations, and they say, "We need our money back before we give you anything." And so this is what the fight is over decades and decades and decades. But as a result of those Chancery cases, these children and grandchildren of John were having to lay out where all of the legatees of the will were and what had happened to them. And so in 1719, John's grandson knows that Richard Mingo, Susannah's son had died as a sailor, and he knew that he sailed on the HMS Montague. He knows that Judith has recently, Susannah's other daughter, has recently gotten married. He knew where at least some of the Ashcroft children were. He was always most dicey on Dorothy and her children. There was, it was almost the vaguest sort of instance. They were still in there, but not as much as one might hope. But that was not unusual. And as I went back and forth and identified more and more of these really voluminous Chancery records, that's what allowed me to sort of begin to see what was going on with the various groups. And so because the main line, if you like the legitimate children, because they are really holding out for their legacies, they, in many ways, don't seem to do that well for themselves, though, effectively, John's sons with Hester all take something of a step down the social ladder. His oldest son, his primary heir, kind of pulls a bit of the same move as his father, and marries a servant, against the wishes of fairly much most people in the family, and certainly the people in charge of handling out disbursements from the will. The second son goes back to Barbados. He has some property when he dies, but he doesn't appear to ever have married. He had no children. He bequeaths one enslaved man to a business partner, but that appears to be the only property that he claimed at the time of his death. And the youngest son, I think, died, basically ran up a ton of debts and died in poverty, as best I can tell, probably in London, sometime before 1745. And then on the other side the daughters, Frances' daughters, they also, one of them dies in her teens, and a second daughter marries. I really tried to figure out who the man was that she married, but he seems to have been some sort of army captain, probably. And that's about all I know. And then they vanish from the record, and the only one who really makes anything of herself is Frances' daughter, Frances, who remains single, who basically appears to be ingratiated by possibly distantly related to a couple who are extremely wealthy. The man in that couple dies and leaves everything to his much, much younger third wife, and the third wife who is best friends with Frances, as best we can tell, then bequeaths everything to Frances. And so she's the only one who ends and is only that's why she has money. It is not because of her father. It is because of this other kind of set of relationships that she built. So on that side of things, I'm sure John would have been shocked to realize that they all took a pretty tumble, I mean, a pretty big tumble down the social strata, with the possible exception of Frances. On the other side, the other children, they do all kinds of different things. Elizabeth's boys all seem to be apprenticed, and her oldest son Richard becomes a goldsmith, and does very well for himself, and even ends up traveling back to Barbados also to try and get the money out of the will. And Elizabeth herself actually traveled back to Barbados to try and get some money out of the will. Susannah's son, Richard, seems to have been a relatively successful sailor. He died maybe at sea, it's unclear, by sort of the end of the first decade of the 18th century. Her younger daughter Hester died in 1700, but then Judith went on to marry, to have a child of her own. She vanishes from the records at that point. So they certainly find ways to make something of themselves, spinning, weaving, working in shipping, various apprenticeships and skilled trades that are the things that kept London going at the time. And those children, most of them, at least, seem to have done some element in that kind of work.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:33  
And they were free despite having not been explicitly freed. 

Dr. Jenny Shaw  43:39  
This is the other question that I think about a lot. There is nothing in John's will that suggests that those children or their mothers indeed are enslaved. But there's also nothing in the will that suggests that they are freed. Now he wrote the will in England, and he may have decided that by bringing them there and by leaving them money that would support them, different amounts of money, but nonetheless, money that would support them, that he was effectively saying, "You are free." I don't know why he did. He was I know he wrote the will the day before he died. So I know that he may not have gone through every last thing that he wanted to include in there, or it may have been that he just decided that they had been living as free in London, and there was no need to make any kind of statement about it. But yes, they all appear to have lived as free and in that period, although there are plenty of people who are enslaved in England in the first decades of the 18th century, there are also plenty of people of color who never were enslaved, and there are also people who were formerly enslaved and are now free. The actual status of enslaved people is sort of a constantly shifting, moving, almost case by case basis. So there was no at this period, at least in, up until the late 1720s there was no law that was going to define what the women or their children were legally and yeah, they appear to have lived as free. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  45:10  
Well, it is a fascinating story. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy of the book?

Dr. Jenny Shaw  45:15  
Yes. Thank you very much. The easiest way is probably to go to UNCPress.org where you can find out more about the book. And there is a link there to the bookseller.org page, where you can pick your own local place to purchase a book from, and that I think works in both the US and the UK. So for anyone who's across the pond and who is interested in the book, half of it does take place in England, so certainly you should be able to pick it up there. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  45:43  
Well, Jenny, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really enjoyed the book, and I've enjoyed speaking with you. 

Dr. Jenny Shaw  45:50  
Well, thank you so much for saying so. Really I appreciate because obviously it's not been out very long. So you're one of the first people that I know who's actually read it. So thank you for saying so. I really appreciate that. And this has been really fun. Really enjoyed it.

Teddy  46:11  
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