William Matson Barrow

Resident slave-owner on Barbados, awarded the compensation for an estate unnamed in the compensation records but tentatively identified as Ayshford [or Ashford], which Wm Matson Barrow had purchased for £35,000 December 1817 from John Hothersal Pinder.

1. 'The Codrington plantations terminated apprenticeship on May 30, 1838, under an agreement signed by Bishop Coleridge and the estate attorney; shortly thereafter, the laborers were discharged from apprenticeship on Stirling plantation, owned by William Matson Barrow.....Barrow was among the more liberal planters; a manifestation of this liberalism was that by 1837 he employed, as his estate agent, "Mr. Cummins, a colored gentleman, a merchant of Bridgetown" It was highly unusual for a white planter to employ a colored man in this capacity at this time.'

James C. Brandow, Genealogies of Barbados Families: from Caribbeana and the Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (1983), p. 451.

1. David L. Golbert and Jerome S. Handler, 'Barbados in the post-Apprenticeship period', Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society Volume XXXV 4 (1978) fn. 12 p. 263, which cites 'JBMHS vii [1940] p. 186; cf. J. Harry Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington Plantations of Barbados 1710-1838 [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1958] ,pp. 133-135); J. A. Thome and J. H. Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies [New York, 1838], p. 65.