Reading the 1789 Census: Loyalist Planters and the Slave Population of Cat Island
A student is given a transcription of a 1789 colonial return for a Bahamian island settled mainly by American Loyalists. The return lists 41 white inhabitants, of whom 12 are adult men, and 168 enslaved people of African descent. It also lists 9 free people of colour, 3 of them adult men. A second column records 640 acres 'in cotton' and 210 acres 'exhausted and abandoned'. The student's essay claims: 'The Loyalists were a small minority who did not really change the Bahamas; the colony remained essentially a subsistence society.' A classmate counters that the numbers prove the island was a plantation society dominated by a planter class. Neither student has consulted any other source, and the return's heading describes the island as 'Cat Island, including the settlement of Arthur's Town'.
1. Which student's interpretation is better supported by the return as described, and what specific features of the document limit how far either claim can be pushed?
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Neither claim is fully supported, and the better answer explains why. The first student is wrong to call this a subsistence society: 168 enslaved people against 41 whites, with 640 acres under cotton, describes export agriculture worked by enslaved labour, not subsistence farming. The second student overreaches differently. A planter class is a social group, not a headcount; the return shows only 12 adult white men, and we cannot tell how land and enslaved people were distributed among them. If 3 men held most of the 168, a planter elite existed; if holdings were spread across all 12, the picture is closer to modest yeoman farming with a few slaves each.
The document itself limits both claims. It is a single-year snapshot, so the 210 'exhausted' acres hint at decline but cannot show a trend. The unit of enumeration is ambiguous: the heading conflates the whole island with one settlement, so we do not know whether the figures cover Cat Island entirely or only Arthur's Town. The 9 free people of colour are counted but not described, so their economic role is invisible. Finally, a return compiled for colonial administration may have fiscal or military purposes that shape what was recorded. The defensible conclusion is narrow: this was a slave-labour economy with cotton as its export crop, already showing signs of soil exhaustion, but the return alone cannot establish the size or dominance of a planter class.
2. Suppose a second document shows that 4 men owned 130 of the 168 enslaved people. How would that change the analysis, and what further evidence would you want before writing about class in this settlement?
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That fact would substantially strengthen the planter-class reading while making the first student's claim untenable. If 4 of 12 adult white men held roughly 77 per cent of the enslaved population, the settlement had a sharply unequal distribution of the main form of productive property. The remaining 8 men would then hold about 38 enslaved people between them, an average of under 5 each, which looks like smallholding rather than plantation ownership. The society would be best described as dominated by a small elite but numerically composed mostly of smallholders, plus the 9 free people of colour whose position the return does not explain.
Before writing about class, I would want: (1) land distribution to match the slaveholding pattern, since a man might own many slaves and little cotton acreage, or the reverse; (2) occupational data such as wills, inventories, or tax lists, to see whether the smaller holders grew cotton for export or raised provisions; (3) evidence of the free people of colour, whose landholding, trades, or kinship ties to enslaved people would complicate any two-class model; (4) a run of returns across several years to test whether concentration increased as the 210 exhausted acres suggest; and (5) some check on how the return was compiled, since a tax on slaves would encourage under-reporting by exactly the large holders whose dominance is at issue. The judgement to defend is not 'planter society' or 'subsistence society' but a qualified one about concentration of ownership within a small and fragile export economy.