John James Amory, debt, and the “seizure” of the enslaved on his estate

Following up on the aftermath of the dueling story of John James Amory in St Kitts, I’ve looked further into the mysterious notation on the island’s 1834 slave registry listing for the West Farm sugar estate owned by Amory. In the final count of the enslaved inhabitants of St Kitts, there were 15 individuals who were noted as gone from his estate, with the explanation “Condemned by Court of Vice Admiralty”. Their minimal details were given as:

1. Nanny Payne, 22 years old, house servant
2. Joan, 8 years old, field laborer
3. March, 27 years old, field laborer
4. Holt, 26 years old, house servant
5. John Brown, 18 years old, house servant
6. George Newton, 31 years old, field laborer
7. Johnny, 41 years old, carpenter
8. Kitty, 41 years old, house servant
9. Franky, 35 years old, house servant
10. Peggy, 20 years old, field laborer
11. Matsey, 2 years old
12. Angelina, 6 years old, field laborer
13. Jack, 5 years old
14. Josias, 9 months old
15. Zacharias, months old

The smallest children and infants weren’t shown with an occupation, but the fact that Angelina, all of 6, was working as a field laborer is particularly poignant.

The Vice Admiralty court dealt with legal issues involving shipping and trade in the British empire. The enslaved people on West Farm weren’t condemned to death in this case – they would have been removed by the government from their current enslaver. One reason that an enslaved person might be taken from an owner by the Vice Admiralty was if they had been brought to a British colony illegally, after the international slave trade had been abolished by Great Britain in 1807. But all fifteen were listed as born in St Kitts, so that wouldn’t apply to the West Farm people. It’s possible to step back in time through the slave registries, and trace their origins, as many of them appear connected to West Farm but under different estate owners before John James Amory purchased the property.

So if these fifteen people had been born in St Kitts and were held at West Farm for many years, what was the basis of the court action taken in 1834, just months before they would have been freed by the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies?

Another reason for a condemnation action regarding enslaved people involved the process begun in 1834 of compensation given to enslavers by the British government. Using the 1834 slave registry, the government was able to get an accurate count of how many slaves were owned by each “proprietor” on St Kitts. Through some sort of formula, monetary values were assigned to each enslaved person, based on characteristic like age, gender, health, and work skills. The total values would in theory be paid to an owner (not to the enslaved) as compensation for their financial loss. A major problem in this process occurred when claims were made by other parties who felt they deserved the compensation. A common occurrence at the time was that estate owners (and the British mercantile businesses that catered to them) had fallen into debt due to the decline of the cane sugar market. In the case of John James Amory, this situation led to more than one claim on compensation money for both his West Farm and Clay Hill estates.

According to compensation records, there were three claimants to the Clay Farm funds, which amounted to £2216 12s 7d. One claimant was John James Amory. Another was the firm of Philip Protheroe and Charles Savage, a banking and commerce concern that did business with the sugar trade in the West Indies. Amory was apparently in debt to Protheroe and Savage. The third involved party was a married couple from Ireland, named Charles and Maria Bellenden Hunt, who held Amory’s Clay Hill mortgage. Charles Hunt was an Irish lawyer and magistrate, and his wife was was linked to the West Indies through her father, who had served as a customs official in Tobago. In the end, the compensation was given to the Hunts.

As to the West Farm estate, a counter claim was made by Charles Pinney, a major slave holder in St Kitts and Nevis who became the mayor of Bristol, UK in 1831. Pinney held Amory’s mortgage for the estate, and again John James Amory lost a bid for economic assistance, as Pinney was awarded the compensation for 74 enslaved people, totaling £1270 4s 5d.

Sources

1. Former British Colonial Dependencies, Slave Registers, 1813-1834, ancestry.com 2007
2. University of Bristol, Bristol, Capital and Enslavement project, The Bristol Claxton family and slavery, Ruth Hecht, 2026
3. University of Bristol, Unravelling Dublin’s Memoryscape: The Legacy of Slavery in the Contemporary City, Lily O’Riordan Jude, 2024
4. PROTHEROE, Edward (1774-1856), from The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1790-1820, ed. R. Thorne, 1986
5. University College of London, Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, slave compensation database, 2026
6. Port Cities Bristol, Bristol City Council, John Pinney / Charles Pinney