Former British Colonial Dependencies · Slave Registers 1813–1834

List of enslaved people at MacKinnon's Estate — Antigua, 1832

Rachel Mackinnon was an unsuccessful claimant for compensation connected to Mackinnon’s Estate, Antigua. She was probably Rachel Mackinnon, née Yeamans, the widow of Daniel Mackinnon, who died in 1830. The same record lists Daniel Mackinnon as her spouse and records her children as William Henry, Edmund Vernon, Louisa Rose, and Daniel Henry Loudoun. Her son Edmund Vernon Mackinnon also appears as an unsuccessful claimant for compensation for Mackinnon’s Estate.

She should not be identified as the wife of Dr Daniel Mackinnon, the early plantation founder figure who died in 1720. Rachel’s claim belongs to the 19th-century legal aftermath of slavery, when members of Dr Daniel Mackinnon's family and connected heirs contested compensation money attached to the people enslaved on Mackinnon’s Estate. She was not one of the successful awardees listed for the estate.

The list connected to Rachel Mackinnon’s compensation claim should not be read as an exhaustive list of every enslaved person who lived, laboured and died on Mackinnon’s Estate across its full existence. The estate existed across multiple generations, and other enslaved people connected to Mackinnon’s are known from separate accounts but do not appear in this particular compensation-linked register. One example is Juncho, an enslaved woman formerly held on McKinnon’s Estate, whose testimony survives in later written accounts. Her child is also part of that account, but neither Juncho nor the child appear in Rachel Mackinnon’s compensation list.

This list is best understood as the surviving register group tied to the compensation claim in which Rachel Mackinnon was involved, rather than as a complete population history of the estate. Within that register, the listed ages include children as young as 1 year old. That detail gives a raw view of the violence of the system: babies, children, adults, and elderly people were reduced to names, ages, categories, tight cursive entries, and monetary valuations. The compensation process did not compensate the people who had been enslaved. It converted their forced labour, bodies, family relations, and stolen lives into claims measured in pounds, shillings, and pence for enslavers, heirs, executors, and counterclaimants.