This story traces the multi-generational history of the Allard family in Grenada from the mid-eighteenth century through emancipation and into the late nineteenth century, using them as a case study to show how slavery, freedom, race, property, and inheritance were deeply entangled in colonial society.
It begins with Jean Baptiste (Baptiste) Allard, a French Creole settler present in Grenada before British rule in 1763. Although little survives about him personally, his appearance on the 1763 British tax roll establishes the Allards as part of the early colonial property-owning class. From this foundation emerged a narrative that would become racially mixed and socially complex, spanning white planters, free-coloured artisans, formerly enslaved entrepreneurs, and enslaved people whose lives were meticulously recorded but rarely narrated in their own terms.
Central to the story is Marie Jean Saint Germaine Allard, Baptiste’s widow. Her life captures the contradictions of slavery: in 1792 she manumitted an enslaved man, Jean Louis Allard, with the formal support of her son Jean Michel Allard, yet she continued to enslave others and later bequeathed them by name in her 1833 will. She identified herself as a “planter” and ensured the smooth transfer of property, enslaved labour, and social position to her daughter Elizabeth Allard. Through Marie, the document shows how women could be powerful economic actors who both mitigated and perpetuated slavery.
Jean Michel Allard, a carpenter, represents the middling white artisan class. His role in the 1792 manumission demonstrates how freedom could be granted through carefully managed family decisions rather than ideological opposition to slavery. His absence from later inheritance suggests an early death, but his legal participation remains significant.
Elizabeth Allard, Marie’s daughter, inherited property, enslaved people, and authority. She never married but had a long-term relationship with John Baptiste Gay, with whom she had a son, John Michael Gay. Elizabeth became a substantial enslaver in her own right and later filed an uncontested compensation claim in 1835 for nineteen enslaved people, receiving over £500. Her life illustrates how wealth derived from slavery was preserved through abolition and converted into post-emancipation security, enabling her son’s later prominence.
Running parallel is the remarkable trajectory of Jean Louis Allard, formerly enslaved and manumitted in 1792. He became a maritime entrepreneur known as “the Boat Man,” accumulated property, married Isabella Madelaine Allard, and acquired enslaved people himself. His life exposes a central paradox: freedom did not necessarily mean rejection of slavery. Instead, for some formerly enslaved people, participation in slavery became a route to economic survival, respectability, and protection within a rigid colonial system. The registers show high mortality, frequent sale, and little evidence of manumission among those he enslaved.
Following Jean Louis’s death, his son John Elley Allard acted as executor and estate manager and became a compensation claimant himself. His case highlights the existence of a small but established class of free Black and free-coloured slaveholders in Grenada and underscores how deeply slavery structured colonial life across racial lines.
The story gives sustained attention to the enslaved people associated with each family member. Through slave registers, it reconstructs patterns of birth, death, illness, sale, and occasional manumission. Mothers repeatedly lost children to disease; African-born individuals bore physical scars catalogued as identifying marks; causes of death such as “dropsy,” fever, worms, and consumption reveal chronic neglect and overwork rather than sudden illness. Family separations were routine, though rare moments of collective manumission stand out as exceptional.
The study concludes that the Allard family exemplifies how slavery in Grenada was not sustained solely by large white plantation elites. It was upheld through households, family networks, inheritance, and survival strategies that drew in women, artisans, free-coloured families, and even formerly enslaved people. Emancipation further directed benefits toward owners through compensation, leaving the formerly enslaved to navigate freedom without material redress.
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