“An Increasing Capital in an Increasing Gang”

Christian missionaries and clerics played an important, if difficult, role in the political campaign to promote monogamy and fertility in the Caribbean. Sex was big business in the Caribbean, where a hotel/prostitution industry catered to military men and island residents alike. Moreover, interracial liaisons provided opportunities for social advancement to women of African descent. Although Methodist missionaries at first tolerated polygamy among their enslaved converts, as the demographic problems in the region became politically urgent they sought increasingly to promote Christian marriage and discourage fertility control. Free women of color who resented the constraints of concubinage found Methodism particularly appealing. Evolving management strategies on the Anglican-owned Codrington plantation illustrate the pressure that Afro-Caribbean mothers faced to abandon matrifocal patterns of residence. Incentives such as land and provisions that had once been given to mothers gave way, by the 1830s, to rewards directed toward either couples or fathers.