The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (46 page)

The British movement against slavery itself began around 1814 in a very reserved, conservative way, exemplified by the amelioration acts of 1823 and 1826, and then changed dramatically by 1830 with demands for “
immediate” emancipation. We have already examined the role of free blacks in steering the American movement toward immediatism by 1830. While
Quaker reformers maintained connections between the British and American movements—the American
Benjamin Lundy, for example, reprinted in his
Genius of Universal Emancipation
Elizabeth Heyrick’s 1824 radical British pamphlet,
Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition
—it is still remarkable that the two movements, facing entirely different situations, developed along parallel lines and reached a crucial turning point by 1830.
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When it became clear that ending the slave trade in 1807 was not encouraging planters to reform and “ameliorate” the institution, Wilberforce led a parliamentary campaign for his brother-in-law James
Stephen’s ideal of a central Registry of all British colonial slaves, which would not only reveal illegal importations but also provide data on mortality rates and thus serve as an entering wedge for British reform legislation.
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In 1816, the parliamentary debates helped trigger a major slave uprising in Barbados, which, unlike the Jamaican revolt of 1831–32, set back further significant discussions of slavery for some years.

Following the lead of Liverpool’s wealthy Quaker merchant
James Cropper, the London abolitionists formed in 1823 the
Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery. The word “mitigation”
reflected the earlier hope and expectation that ending the
slave trade would induce
West Indian planters to improve the treatment of slaves and begin to transform them into a self-reproducing peasantry, thereby obtaining the supposed economic advantages of free labor. The abolitionists confronted the powerful
Society of West Indian Planters and Merchants, which claimed that much moral progress had already transformed British colonial slavery into a humane and highly paternalistic institution. The owners of the majority of West Indian estates lived as absentee landlords in England, where, united with wealthy merchants, they purported to favor their own ameliorative measures, including the religious instruction of slaves, something strongly resisted in the colonies.

In 1823, Thomas Fowell Buxton, who replaced the aging
Wilberforce as the abolitionist leader in
Parliament, presented resolutions that included freeing all slave children born after a fixed date and measures to prepare the other slaves for freedom by slow degrees. To the delight of the planters and merchants, who had conferred with the government,
George Canning, leader of the
House of Commons, then seized the initiative and presented the government’s own ameliorative resolutions, which were adopted without opposition. While Canning vaguely committed the government to future emancipation, he made it clear that planters themselves would be the agents for slow, step-by-step change. And by 1830 it was clear that planters had successfully resisted any major amelioration, and, by castigating even gradual abolitionism as a dangerous threat to security, had begun convincing many reformers that
Elizabeth Heyrick had been right in proclaiming in her subtitle that
immediate emancipation was
The Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery.
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The efforts of the abolitionists’ new
Agency Committee of paid lecturers, who beginning in the summer of 1831 adopted the methods of religious revivalists as they circulated petitions and traveled from town to town elaborating on the sins of slavery, were immensely enhanced by a great slave insurrection in Jamaica, soon known as the
Baptist War.
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On the night of December 27, 1831, a white Presbyterian missionary described the clusters of fire as estates were consumed and “then the sky became a sheet of flame, as if the whole country had become a vast furnace.” Yet he added that “amid the wild excitement
of the night, not one freeman’s life was taken, not one freewoman molested by the insurgent slaves.”

As some sixty thousand Jamaican slaves joined the monthlong rebellion—led by a slave elite including drivers, carpenters, coopers, and blacksmiths—planters and Jamaican legislators agreed that English missionaries and their slave converts, especially
Baptists, were the cause of the upheaval. While the missionaries opposed such violence and insisted that they had coupled their campaign to Christianize and uplift the blacks with admonitions against disobedience, a large number of the rebel leaders were Christian converts who were well aware of the political agitation over slavery in Britain. Many domestic slaves had even concluded from the overheard ranting and raving of Jamaican whites that the English king or government wished to free them.
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It was doubtless this consciousness of an English antislavery public, along with the influence of missionaries, that explains the slaves’ extraordinary determination to prevent the slaughter of whites, both in Jamaica and in the earlier 1823 three-day uprising in Demerara (part of later British
Guiana). In the latter colony, where missionary John Smith was sentenced to be hanged after being wrongly tried for inciting the slaves to rebel, many of the ten to twelve thousand rebels carried guns, cutlasses, or knives, and more than 255 blacks were killed or wounded by colonial troops in the confrontations. Yet the slaves, who slapped and whipped some captured masters and overseers, killed no more than two or three white men. This amazing self-discipline helped British missionaries to defend the slaves and dramatize Demerara as a godless colony where Christian missionaries were violently persecuted. (Smith, who died in jail of consumption, was soon celebrated in Britain as the “Demerara Martyr.”) In the much larger and longer (by more than a factor of ten) Jamaican war, slaves burned hundreds of plantation houses, destroyed fields of sugarcane and other crops, and engaged in virtual battles that led to a final death toll of some 540 blacks. But throughout the month, no more than fourteen whites were killed.
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If Jamaican blacks had killed hundreds of whites, preaching abolition to thousands of Britons would have been much more difficult for
William Knibb and other refugee missionaries in 1832 and 1833. The issue of religious persecution greatly strengthened abolitionism
as missionaries testified before the Select Committee of the
House of Commons, and played a central role in depicting the cruelty of godless planters and the virtues and victimization of slaves.
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Following the Jamaican rebellion, about a dozen refugee missionaries returned to England, where they were hailed as heroes. In response to the strict rules of the established Anglican Church, the English public had long struggled for the rights of nonconformist sects, such as the
Baptists and
Methodists, who had greatly expanded their memberships. By 1832, religious dissenters, who were strongly inclined toward abolitionism, represented about 21 percent of the English electorate. Large crowds listened to missionaries’ accounts of being jailed, tarred and feathered, and threatened with death as Jamaican mobs destroyed dozens of chapels. One missionary, Henry Whitely, published an account of his persecution and of the brutal treatment of slaves, excerpts of which
Thomas Fowell Buxton read to a very receptive audience. Hatchard’s bookstore in Piccadilly sold 200,000 copies of the work within two weeks.
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The missionaries were careful to underscore their own innocence with respect to any instigation of the rebellion and even to wrongly insist that most black Christians had tried to protect their masters’ property and had refused to participate in the rebellion. Their vivid descriptions of the evils of slavery had an immense impact on British public opinion.

In America, the news of a massive Jamaican slave rebellion had a very different and alarming meaning. The seeming connection between British abolitionist activity and the Jamaican slave insurrection greatly enhanced Southern fears and the argument that even news of antislavery agitation would almost certainly lead to slave uprisings. Yet the Northern religious press, traditionally sensitive to Southern opinion, now disregarded past boundaries in depicting the Jamaican persecution of missionaries. The
Boston Recorder
frankly reported, in 1831, “the [British] religious newspapers and magazines that we receive are unanimous in favor of immediate adoption of [abolitionist] measures by Parliament.… the treatment of the Jamaica Missionaries … has awakened a spirit throughout the kingdom, that will not soon sleep.”
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The issue of immediate slave emancipation arose in Britain at a time of protracted public struggle for a wide range of political and social rights. It was the parliamentary
Reform Act of 1832 that revolutionized the prospects of slave emancipation, which would not have
been possible under the traditional system of political representation. Proposed by the
Whigs and led by Prime Minister
Lord Grey, the reform granted seats in the House of Commons to the large cities that had grown during the early
Industrial Revolution, and cut representation from the so-called rotten boroughs, where Tories had benefited from very small electorates. Despite a significant increase in the size of the electorate, voting was still limited to less than 17 percent of adult males. But the
West India interest lost many seats in the House of Commons. Following the next election, they could count on only thirty-five MP Representatives, as opposed to well over one hundred who had pledged in the campaign to support immediate
emancipation. In the fall of 1832, Buxton joyfully concluded that “things are ripe for obtaining nearly the full extent of our wishes.” Confident that the Whig administration would introduce a satisfactory bill, he even cautioned abolitionists to avoid militant agitation that might alarm conservatives, especially in the House of Lords.
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But the British cabinet faced a complex problem. By 1833, the ratio of British petition signatures calling for immediate emancipation, compared to those in opposition, came to more than 250 to 1. The abolitionists’ extraordinary mobilization led some 20 percent of all British men, many religious dissenters, to sign antislavery petitions that year. Yet concessions would have to be won from the West Indians, who had the active sympathy of the king and of powerful Tories (and some Whigs), who were above all worried about the violation of established rights to private property. Since a defining feature of chattel slavery was the inheritable and transferable claim of ownership in human beings and their offspring, how could such claims be challenged without challenging the very principle of hereditary private property? Lord Grey, the prime minister, made it clear that no measure for emancipation could be proposed without first obtaining the West Indians’ consent.
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By late March, Buxton changed his mind and saw the need to encourage the militant public crusade for immediate emancipation. Even the elderly
Wilberforce, who had opposed inciting public agitation, was persuaded to publicly initiate a petition to Parliament. In 1833, Parliament received more than five thousand antislavery petitions, containing some 1.3 million signatures (roughly 30 percent signed by women). Most notable, perhaps, was a monstrous document, the largest single antislavery petition in British history, sewn
and pasted together by a team including
Buxton’s daughter Priscilla, and signed by 187,000 women. Buxton expressed temporary despair when he first read the plan drafted by the colonial secretary,
Edward Stanley, which included compensation to slaveholders and a long
apprenticeship for slaves. But after Stanley presented the plan to the
House of Commons, Buxton exclaimed to Priscilla that “Emancipation is effected, the thing is done.”
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Young Viscount
Howick, who had devoted intensive study to the issue of slave emancipation, had a far less optimistic view regarding the ability of Parliament to delete or significantly modify objectionable provisions like apprenticeship, which was intended to provide continuity and prepare slaves for freedom. In a speech on May 14, he asked the MPs to imagine the effect on the mind of the slave “when he is told that he is free, but finds that, for so long a period [twelve years], his freedom is to make no difference whatever in his condition—that he is to go on laboring as before, without any remuneration for his toil, beyond his accustomed and scanty supply of necessaries?” Howick shrewdly added that masters, with no investment in human property, would want for twelve years to extract the maximum amount of labor from apprentices, without any regard for mortality.
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Ironically, at a meeting on May 10, the
Standing Committee of West India Planters and Merchants professed “a loss for adequate terms to express their feelings of disappointment and dismay” over Stanley’s plan. They saw “nothing in the measure now submitted to them, but the confiscation of property, and the prospect of all those calamities which must result from a dissolution of the ties which connect the Colonies with the British Empire.” The West India Committee was especially troubled by the provision that an apprentice would need to work for his master only three-fourths of his time and could then “employ himself elsewhere” or receive wages for this extra time. This clause, according to the West Indians, would for twelve years deprive the master of “at least one-fourth of the gross production of his property” and would give the Negro the choice of working in periods when labor would be lightest and leaving when his services would be most valuable.

No less troubling was the provision that compensation should be in the form of a loan, and in the “quite inadequate” amount of £15 million. After many pages of specific complaints, the Committee concluded that the proposed measure “involves an unparalleled violation
of the rights of property—of spoliation of the weaker by the stronger party,” that “it is not even calculated to advance the comforts and well-being of the negro,” and that it “utterly destroys the possibility of productive cultivation.” Moreover, the destruction of the British colonies “will have the direct effect of giving an irresistible impulse to the
Slave Trade
to supply this deficiency from foreign countries.”
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