In 1711 the St Kitts Assembly passed a law stating that if any "slave oppose, struggle or strike any white person . . . the said Negro shall be publicly whipped; but in case such white person be hurt, the slave shall be sentenced to death". The penalty for the murder of a slave by a white was a nominal fine, paid to the owner of the murdered slave. As the African majority increased, and fear of revolt intensified, the laws increased in draconian severity of punishment. In 1722 Scottish planter William McDowall and two other St Kitts planters feared their workforce would run away to the mountains. The leading plotter was one of McDowall’s most valuable Africans, ‘Christopher’. To resolve the issue, McDowall became personally involved in setting up a new law, which claimed that the mutilation and torture which had been legally sanctioned had ‘proved too mild and gentle to curb and restrain’ the slaves. The proposed law preferred that the escapees should suffer "the pains of death" when captured, allowing planters to kill suspected escapees out of hand, without trial, and be rewarded for doing so. McDowall’s Law was put into practice in the summer of 1725, when two slaves involved in an attempted escape were captured, hanged and burned alive before a trial could be arranged.

McDowall built up further slave gangs to work a second plantation on higher ground. He and fellow Scot, James Milliken also became responsible for many more, as they took on additional roles as ‘attorneys’, with overall responsibility for adjacent plantations, whose owners had returned to Britain. McDowall acted as attorney for the Stapleton plantation on St Kitts (1717–22) and was followed in this role by Milliken (1722–9). McDowall and Milliken were also joint attorneys for the Mead plantation (1722–8) and McDowall continued in this role with another Scottish planter, James Gordon (1728–33). Thus, at any one time, between their own plantations and in the role of attorney, McDowall and Milliken were directly responsible for around a thousand African slaves.

Enslaved Africans were the planters’ most expensive asset and so their deliberate maltreatment would be foolish. On the one hand, William McDowall wrote of taking "great care" of his enslaved and directly attributed deaths to a "want of care". The enslaved depended entirely on the planters and their overseers for sustenance, but saving costs meant that supplies of food and clothing shipped from home were minimised.

In early eighteenth-century St Kitts, the intensity of sugar cultivation meant that little land was spared for either the planters or the labour force to grow food. Later visitors still described every acre of the island entirely planted with the sugar crop. A large part of the plantation budget was spent in providing food rations for the enslaved, and profits could be maximised by the overseer or planter by shrewd budgeting, including minimising the spend on food.

William McDowall’s character conformed to what is often considered a stereotype of the eighteenth-century colonial Scot on the make, mixing toughness and frugality with extreme ambition. His partner Milliken, older and perhaps even more ambitious, was also known for his ruthlessness.

At the French invasion in 1706, Milliken had been among those who accepted the surrender, and he was later favoured to recapture escaped slaves and punish them. Such qualities made good planters, but harsh managers of their workforce. These Scots may have operated their plantations on a fine line, between providing barely enough food to sustain hard work and starvation rations. For instance, during Milliken’s term as attorney for a plantation owned by the Stapleton family on St Kitts, the enslaved were described as being "sickly and very bare of cloaths, and pinch’d in their bellies". Despite all the tropical diseases and ailments in the Caribbean, the biggest problem for the workforce was deliberate underfeeding, leading to malnutrition and starvation. Economic frugalism was a stronger motivation than the desire to care for the enslaved. Such a harsh policy may have increased profits in the short term, but was risky on tropical islands with a volatile climate. Any delay in the shipping of food from home through war or hurricane resulted quickly in increased mortality. In 1701 McDowall had to cope with a severe drought, when no canes were planted. In another, in 1726, the situation on St Kitts and Nevis again descended into crisis. Cattle began to die and it was not long before slaves inevitably followed. Although deliberate cruelty is absent from McDowall’s correspondence, deaths were often recorded and new slaves had therefore to be purchased. In

addition to his own plantation, James Milliken managed another at the same time, as attorney, and wrote to the owner, "I am sorry to tell your ladyship I never see the Island in so bad a condition as it is now in, dry weather has destroyed the next crops, and no canes planted as yet." A few months later, thirty to forty enslaved were sick and Milliken wrote, "there is several of your negroes dead here, we must buy others".

From Early Scottish Sugar Planters in the Leeward Islands, by Stuart M Nisbet, taken from Recovering Scotland's Slavery Past