Joseph Foster Barham I

Joseph Foster Barham I (1729–1789) was the English owner of the Mesopotamia plantation in Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica.[1] Originally Joseph Foster, he took Barham as an additional surname (1750) for Henry Barham M.D., son of Henry Barham F.R.S., in order to inherit his sugar plantations in the Colony of Jamaica.[2][3][4]

Life

He was the son of Colonel John Foster (1681–1731) of Elim, Jamaica and Egham House, Surrey, and his wife Elizabeth Smith. After John Foster died in 1731, Elizabeth took two more husbands, John Ayscough, like Foster an owner of Jamaican plantations with sugar and slaves, and after Ayscough's death around 1735, Dr. Henry Barham. Barham settled in England as stepfather to the Foster family of five sons and two daughters; he died in 1746.[5][6][7][8] The eldest of the Fosters was Thomas who was Member of Parliament for Dorchester. The other sons were: John, William, Samuel, and Joseph. Of the two daughters, Margaret married Colin Campbell, and Sarah married William Mathew Burt.[7][9]

Joseph Foster was educated at Eton College, and went on a Grand Tour.[10] The change of his surname to Foster-Barham was a condition of his stepfather Henry Barham's will. It was carried out by Act of Parliament, around 1749.[2][8] He visited the Mesopotamia estate in Jamaica, and returned to England in 1751. There his religious views were affected by the preaching of John Cennick. He also met Dorothy Vaughan, and they were married in 1754.[11]

Foster Barham settled in Bedford, and was a Moravian from 1756 (as was his brother William, also living in Bedford). An evangelical Christian, his friends included John Newton from 1773, in his days as a curate at Olney.[10][12][13]

After his first wife died, in 1781, Foster Barham moved away from the Moravians. He married again, in a Church of England ceremony in 1785; and moved to his new wife's home, Hardwick Hall in Shropshire.[14]

Mesopotamia estate

The Mesopotamia plantation dated from the beginning of the 18th century. It passed by marriage from the Stephenson family to the younger Henry Barham; and then to Foster Barham. Ephraim Stephenson died in 1726; his widow Mary shortly married a Mr. Heith, who soon died, and she married Henry Barham in early 1728. She died in 1735.[15]

In 1750, Joseph was old enough to inherit the estate, and he became sole operator in 1756 when his mother died. His estates at Mesopotamia and Island produced enough sugar and rum to grant him annual profits of more than £7,000 a year, which enabled him to live in comfort in their English estate in Bedford.[16]

Joseph Foster Barham I and his son of the same name ran a Moravian mission for the slaves, and required accurate record-keeping of the slave population. Extensive archives exist.[17] The mission station existed from 1760 to 1835.[18]

However, Joseph's religious convictions did not extend to granting his slaves their freedom. Over half of the slaves inventoried by his step-father Dr Henry Barham in 1736 had died by the time Joseph visited Mesopotamia in 1750. A year later, Joseph paid his attorney, Dr James Paterson, to purchase 21 more African slaves to bolster the workforce. In 1751, Mesopotamia had 285 slaves, but the death rate continued to be high on that estate. So, between 1763 and 1774, Joseph authorised the purchase of another 83 African slaves.[19]

During the American War of Independence, supplies from North America to the British Caribbean were cut off, and combined with a series of hurricanes, resulted in food shortages and famine in western Jamaica. More than a score of slaves at Mesopotamia died as a result, and Joseph's son, also named Joseph, had to purchase a dozen replacement slaves. Between 1774-83, the slave population of Mesopotamia shrank from 278 to 243, so Joseph purchased another 65 slaves to reinforce the workforce. With the slave population at over 300, Joseph now benefited from an income of over £9,000 per annum.[20]

Family

Foster Barham married, first, Dorothy Vaughan, a Welsh heiress. They had three sons and three daughters:[21]

The sons were tutored by Aulay Macaulay.[31] In a second marriage, Foster Barham wed Lady Mary Hill, the widow of Sir Rowland Hill, 1st Baronet.[7]

Death and Legacy

On 21 July 1789, Joseph died of a paralytic stroke at the age of 59. He willed the Mesopotamia estate and its 299 slaves to his son and namesake, Joseph. The conditions at Mesopotamia were so poor that only 14% of the 102 slaves over the age of 35 were "able" to work.[32]

Notes
  1. "Joseph Foster Barham (was Foster) 1729–1789, Legacies of British Slave-ownership". Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  2. Deed Poll Office: Private Act of Parliament 1748 (22 Geo. 2). c. 14
  3. "Joseph Foster Barham II, 1st Jan 1759 – 28th Sep 1832, Legacies of British Slave-ownership". Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  4. Richard Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 29.
  5. "Barham family, of Trecŵn, Pembs., Dictionary of Welsh Biography". Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  6. Richard S. Dunn (4 November 2014). A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia. Harvard University Press. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-674-73536-1.
  7. "Dr. Henry Barham ???? –1746, Legacies of British Slave-ownership". Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  8. "Clarendon Papers (Interim catalogue of the papers of George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon, 1820–70, with papers of related families, 17th–19th cent.), Bodleian Library". University of Oxford. Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  9. "Burt, William Mathew (d.1781), of Maiden Erleigh, nr. Reading, Berks., History of Parliament Online". Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  10. J. C. S. Mason (2001). The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England, 1760–1800. Boydell & Brewer. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-86193-251-1.
  11. Richard S. Dunn (4 November 2014). A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia. Harvard University Press. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-674-73536-1.
  12. D. Bruce Hindmarsh (2001). John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition: Between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. 207. ISBN 978-0-8028-4741-6.
  13. John Newton; Josiah Bull (1869). Letters by The Rev. John Newton: Of Olney and St. Mary Woolnoth. Including Several Never Before Published, with Biographical Sketches and Illustrative Notes. Religious Tract Society. p. 209.
  14. Richard S. Dunn (4 November 2014). A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia. Harvard University Press. pp. 36–7. ISBN 978-0-674-73536-1.
  15. Richard S. Dunn (4 November 2014). A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia. Harvard University Press. pp. 26–8. ISBN 978-0-674-73536-1.
  16. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations, pp. 29-31.
  17. Richard B. Sheridan; Roderick Alexander McDonald (1996). West Indies Accounts: Essays on the History of the British Caribbean and the Atlantic Economy in Honour of Richard Sheridan. Press, University of the West Indies. pp. 188–9. ISBN 978-976-640-022-4.
  18. Pratik Chakrabarti (13 December 2013). Medicine and Empire: 1600-1960. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 28. ISBN 978-1-137-37480-6.
  19. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations, pp. 29-36.
  20. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations, pp. 36-7.
  21. John Burke (1838). A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland. p. 550.
  22. The Gentleman's Magazine. R. Newton. 1837. p. 212.
  23. "Portrait of Mary Livius (1757–1837), Attributed to Mather Brown, Sotheby's". Sotheby's. Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  24. J. C. S. Mason (2001). The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England, 1760–1800. Boydell & Brewer. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-86193-251-1.
  25. Mills, Rebecca. "Johnson, John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14899. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  26. "Foster Barham, Joseph (1759–1832), of Trecwn, Pemb., History of Parliament Online". Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  27. "Jamaican Monumental Inscriptions in England". Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  28. The Gentleman's Magazine. A. Dodd and A. Smith. 1838. p. 323.
  29. Agnew, Sinéad. "Grinfield, Edward William". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/11646. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  30. James Waylen (1854). A History, Military and Municipal, of the Town (otherwise Called the City) of Marlborough: And More Generally of the Entire Hundred of Selkley. John Russell Smith. p. 507.
  31. Alexander's East India and Colonial Magazine. 1835. p. 430.
  32. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations, pp. 37-8.
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