Description

Patrick CONINGHAM.

[Mss. Contract for the Sale of 35 Named Slaves for £1800 by Patrick Coningham of Union Island, St Vincent to Walter Coningham of the Colonarie Vale estate, St. Vincent].
“To all to whom those present shall come Patrick Coningham of the Union Island, one of the dependencies of the island of St. Vincent, Esquire…”

Manuscript, St. Vincent, W.I., October 26, 1803.

At the beginning of the 19th century St. Vincent and the Grenadines were experiencing the last golden period of the sugar economy. From the early days of the Haitian Revolution to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the global sugar price remained sky high. Planters in the West Indies were making a mint, albeit cruelly on the backs of their enslaved workforces.

During this time, the intra-island trade in slaves on the British West Indian isles was one of the greatest and most profitable sectors of commerce, as major planters sought to augment their workforces, to increase of their sugar production. This was especially so, as while the Transatlantic slave trade would not be banned by Britain until 1807, it was already falling out of fashion in the British colonies, while the ongoing wars made long-distance slaving journeys especially perilous and costly.

Notable contemporary players in the sugar-slavery economy were the brothers Patrick and Walter Coningham, originally from Londonderry, Ireland, who made their fortunes as planters in St. Vincent and its dependencies. Walter Coningham (d. 1830) was from 1802 until his death, the proprietor of the Colonarie Vale estate, a large sugar plantation of 407 acres on the west coast of St. Vincent that engaged over 300 slaves at any one time. He is listed as one of the subscribers to Charles Shephard’s An Historical Account of the Island of Saint Vincent (1832), even though the work was published after his death.

Patrick Coningham was a successful planter, albeit of more modest means than his brother Walter. He was based on Union Island, one of the Grenadines, a dependency of St. Vincent, located about 65 km south of St. Vincent proper, and also had some interests in Carriacou, a nearby Grenadine island (a dependency of Grenada). Patrick and Walter had a well-known brother, Robert Coningham of Gower Street (d. 1809), who worked for a time in St. Vincent as co-owner of the mercantile firm of Coningham & Tatham, although he eventually moved to London.

The Present Manuscript in Focus

This present original manuscript is a contract for the sale of 35 named slaves for the price of £1800 by Patrick Coningham to Walter Coningham, dated 1803 in St. Vincent. While drafted in formal legal language and properly witnessed and registered, this artefact of the intra-island slave trade maintains a rather ‘rustic’ and ‘authentic’ form, drafted on plain laid paper, in line with how such documents were usually made in the less-populous British West Indian islands, like St. Vincent. By contrast many of the Caribbean slave sale contracts made in Britain were drafted on vellum, featuring elaborate seals and ribbons, while even those made on the major islands (ex. Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, etc.) tended to be drafted on fancier paper with more elaborate adornment. The survival rate of the rustic/small island contracts is very low, such that they are rarer than the British-made documents, making the present manuscript a special find.

The salient elements of the contract read:

“To all to whom those present shall come Patrick Coningham of the Union Island, one of the dependencies of the island of St. Vincent, Esquire sends greetings – Know ye that for and in consideration of the sum of one thousand eight hundred pounds sterling money of Great Britain… confirm unto Walter Coningham [and] his heirs… for ever and all those thirty five negros and other slaves whose names and sexes are as follows, that is to say, Cain, Samy, Hamlet, Chance, Adam, Robin, Trim, Ned, Torn, Toby, Bucker, Peter, David, Roger, Cudjoe, Will, Sunday, Frank and George, being males, and Patty, Maria, Peggy, Kitty, Mary, Betsy, Hanna, Phillis, Nancy, Chloe, Lucinda, Sylvia, Tabatha, Molly and Rose being females together with the… increase of the said female slaves.”

At the end, the contract is signed and sealed in red wax by Patrick Coningham at St. Vincent, on October 26, 1803, witnessed by Joseph Durham (signed), under the supervision of M. Reilly, Registrar (signed).

References: N/A – Manuscript seemingly unrecorded.