The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (48 page)

Backing up such confidence was the book’s recorded testimony of numerous former slaveholding planters and political leaders in the Caribbean, “island authorities [who] are as unchallengeable on the score of previous leaning towards abolitionism as Mr. [George]
McDuffie, or Mr. [John C.]
Calhoun would be two years hence, if slavery were to be abolished throughout the United States to-morrow.” As Thome and Kimball interviewed countless authorities and common
people, especially in Antigua, and dined with members of the Antiguan assembly, proprietors, managers of estates, and missionaries, they only rarely encountered someone who retained “some old prejudices of slavery.” The governor, who stressed that “he had never found such a peaceable, orderly, and law-abiding people as those [the freed slaves] of Antigua,” also affirmed that “the planters all conceded that emancipation had been a great blessing to the island, and he did not know of a single individual who wished to return to the old system.”
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By concentrating on the effects of immediate emancipation in Antigua, as opposed to their briefer treatment of
apprenticeship in
Jamaica and
Barbados, Thome and Kimball tried to prove that “the bad reports of the newspapers, spiritless as they have been compared with the [alarming] predictions, have been traceable, on the slightest inspection, not to emancipation, but to the illegal continuance of slavery, under the cover of its legal substitute [apprenticeship].”
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James A. Thome, the son of a Kentucky slaveholder, had a genuine understanding of slaveholding culture. Like James G. Birney and a number of other Southerners, he was converted to abolitionism in 1834 by the famous debates at the
Lane Theological Seminary, near
Cincinnati, led by
Theodore Dwight Weld. Thome became an agent of the
American Anti-Slavery Society and in 1836 convinced his father to manumit the family’s slaves, an achievement that enhanced his faith in “moral suasion,” the abolitionists’ early belief that following the model of religious conversion, Southern Christians could be peacefully persuaded to recognize the sin of slaveholding.
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Benjamin David Weber has brilliantly compared Thome’s massive handwritten manuscript with the published book, showing that Theodore Dwight Weld edited the work in a way that deemphasized religion and moral suasion and focused on the economic superiority of free labor within a context of laissez-faire individualism and harmony of interests. With Southern slaveholding readers clearly in mind, Weld welcomed the passages that demonstrated “the safety and profitability for the masters and the new mechanisms of discipline focused on inculcating inward self-control and industriousness.” The issue of the freed slaves’ incentives to work had been especially crucial in Britain. But, given Weld’s pragmatism, this also meant the deletion of Thome’s paragraphs noting the great desire of some workers to escape field labor and describing the way Antigua restricted the
blacks’ employment options in order to keep sufficient field labor on the estates. Since Kimball, an antislavery editor from New England, became seriously ill during their West Indian tour and died soon thereafter, it was Thome who really reported on their interviews and discoveries.
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In their introduction, Thome and Kimball summarized the “established facts,” the crucial points “beyond the power of dispute or cavil” that emerged from their investigation of British emancipation in Antigua, Jamaica, and Barbados. First, that the immediate emancipation in Antigua “was not attended with any disorder whatever.” Second, that the emancipated slaves “have readily, faithfully, and efficiently worked for wages from the first” (elsewhere they stressed that free labor was less expensive and more productive, and that land values had risen). Third, that apprenticeship, which planters had never wanted as a “preparation” for freedom, was the source of the only serious difficulties, and that any “disturbance in the working of apprenticeship” was “invariably” the fault of the masters or officers charged with administering it. Fourth, that “the prejudice of caste” was “fast disappearing in the emancipated islands.” Fifth, that the planters “who have fairly made the ‘experiment,’ now greatly prefer the new system to the old.” And sixth, that the emancipated people “are perceptibly rising in the scale of civilization, morals, and religion.”
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This glowing vision of the British precedent, of life after slavery, becomes darker when Thome and Kimball actually turn to Jamaica, a “half-way house between slavery and freedom.” In
Kingston, where Kimball would become confined because of illness, the attorney general gave them letters of introduction to influential planters. They also interviewed the solicitor general, merchants, and newspaper editors, and concluded that despite the failures of apprenticeship, there had been no sign of revolt, defiance of law, or increase in crime. Thome and Kimball later found that planters differed on the industriousness of the apprentices.
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Yet the apprentice system perpetuated or even magnified the cruelties of slavery, as when an apprentice would be sent to a house of correction and tortured on a treadmill for the crime of being late to work. In discussing the complexities of this partial dismantling of the slave system, Thome and Kimball could only predict that Jamaica would move toward the Antiguan model once apprenticeship was abolished.
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While Weber shows that
Thome and
Kimball’s work helped change the meaning of immediatism for American abolitionists—and some nonabolitionist Northerners like Governor
Edward Everett of Massachusetts wrote that Thome and Kimball’s evidence “
sealed the fate of slavery throughout the civilized world
”
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—it was British Quaker Joseph John Gurney who directly conveyed a positive view of British
emancipation to America’s most prominent leaders in Washington, in 1840.
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A member of a famous and prosperous Quaker banking and philanthropic family, Gurney was the brother-in-law of
Thomas Fowell Buxton (not a Quaker) and the brother of the eminent reformer Elizabeth (Gurney)
Fry. Gurney was a banker, reformer, philanthropist, and evangelical Quaker minister (his preaching in the United States contributed to a schism in the Society of Friends), and his three-year mission to America in 1837–40 enabled him to travel throughout the country, visiting colleges, prisons, and asylums, and even conducting a religious service in January 1838 in the House of Representatives, which was attended by President
Martin Van Buren, Senator
Henry Clay, and Congressman
John Quincy Adams, all of whom Gurney had previously interviewed.

Though committed to abolitionist principles, Gurney had an incredible network of connections that made it possible, after his later tour of the West Indies, to have a private audience concerning the effects of British emancipation not only with Secretary of State John Forsyth, but with President Van Buren (whom he visited at least four times), John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay,
Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and the British ambassador
Henry Fox. Hardly less amazing, when Gurney stopped in
Savannah, Georgia, on his way from the Caribbean to Washington, he succeeded in addressing nearly two thousand people, in two public meetings, despite the diffusion of reports that he was an “anti-slavery spy.” By 1840 the Lower South was becoming notorious for its often violent suppression of antislavery writings and speeches. Yet Gurney left Savannah “under feelings of sincere regard and affection towards many of its inhabitants,” and also reported that “we are bound to acknowledge that they treated us with great civility and kindness.”
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Given the Southerners’ intense hostility to Northern abolitionists, Gurney’s warm reception in Savannah and especially by slaveholders
like Clay and
Calhoun in Washington is difficult to understand. He was one of the most remarkable of all the advocates of slave emancipation, in part because his approach differed so strikingly from that of the most prominent
American abolitionists. Said to be tall, handsome, and cordial, he was clearly at age fifty a very agreeable and appealing man, capable of establishing close ties not only with a moderate opponent of slavery like
William Ellery Channing but also with a moderate slaveholder like
Henry Clay, the president of the American Colonization Society who had argued for gradual emancipation in
Kentucky in the late 1790s.

Scrupulous in avoiding any public censure of slaveholders (he was well aware that another English “foreign” abolitionist,
George Thompson, had been vilified, mobbed, and threatened with death), Gurney succeeded in presenting some of the clearest and most concise critiques of racial slavery in the American South, Cuba, and the other slaveholding colonies he visited.

It is also important to note that even by 1840 and later, some antislavery views persisted in the Upper South, and many Southerners still expressed some ambivalence and internal misgivings over the institution, in part because of their deep devotion to the ideal of “liberty.”
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Many slaveholders still believed that slavery, like medieval serfdom, was doomed by history to disappear. They were eager to hear a report on the consequences of British emancipation, even from a strong advocate of freedom, if he embodied the prestige and reputation of Joseph John Gurney. Gurney himself emphasized, in a later published letter to his “brother” Buxton, that many American slaveholders were “increasingly disposed to enter upon a fair consideration of the subject.” Expressing his deep-rooted optimism, he added that if such slaveholders were “wisely dealt with” (he condemned the use of “harsh epithets and violent language” toward slaveholders), they could hardly fail to arrive at conclusions that would lead them “to openly support the cause of emancipation.”
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As a Quaker evangelist, Gurney saw “preaching the gospel” as the main purpose of his travels in America and the West Indies. But in England he had also been an ardent reformer, like his sister
Elizabeth Fry, and had engaged in various causes, including the improvement of prison discipline and criminal codes, and of course the abolition of British colonial slavery. As a young man, Gurney had worked with
Wilberforce and
Clarkson, and had then helped his brother-in-law
Buxton by writing, speaking, and offering funds to promote the final emancipation act. In America, he continued his efforts regarding the treatment of criminals and the insane, and since his visit coincided with the massive westward “removal” of Indians, he addressed many political leaders regarding this cruel act of oppression, which he regarded as “one of the foulest blots on the character of the nations of Christendom.”
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In
Quaker meetings, Gurney spoke out more openly against the immense immorality of slavery, especially the laws banning the education of slaves and the cruelty of the internal
slave trade. He felt free to present the Friends’ views on “the oppressed negro population” to the governor of Virginia, who responded by attacking the Northern abolitionists for barring progress toward emancipation.
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Gurney also felt free to publish a “friendly” response to a major speech Clay gave to the
U.S. Senate, defending the legal rights of slaveholders. Gurney pointed out that aside from its other faults, Clay’s colonization scheme diverted attention from the need to abolish slavery by constitutional means, and from the need for the civil and moral improvement of the blacks. Gurney must have been pleased and surprised when Clay later told him that this widely read piece was the best of all the reviews of his speech.
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Although Gurney saw his West Indian trip as primarily a religious mission that might additionally improve his health, he also planned to study and record the effects of British slave emancipation. Before leaving he took the time to visit the office of the
American Anti-Slavery Society, where he conversed about the
West Indies with abolitionists James G.
Birney and
Joshua Leavitt. (He also gave them $200 to finance an uncut version of Buxton’s
The
African Slave Trade,
which documented America’s continuing complicity with the illegal trade to
Cuba and
Brazil, a subject Gurney would investigate further in Cuba.) In late November 1839, Gurney and a young Quaker companion set sail for a five-month tour of the islands. Since
Henry Clay had urged him to publish the results of his inquiries and observations in the West Indies, Gurney later drew on his diaries and wrote and published in 1840 an account of his trip as a series of “familiar letters” addressed to “Henry Clay, of Kentucky,” with Clay’s permission. Since the book is especially directed to the self-interest of Southern slaveholders, Gurney’s emphasis on the economic superiority of free labor is notable.
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Gurney’s first letters compare the situation in the slaveholding Danish
Virgin Islands with
British Dominica,
St. Christopher’s, and especially
Antigua, where he more than confirms the buoyant views of
Thome and
Kimball. In the Danish colonies he is repeatedly struck by the “dead weight” of the slave system, as evidenced by land exhaustion, the decline in
sugar exports, and the transfer of heavily mortgaged estates from the hands of original owners to managers. Despite Danish efforts at amelioration, Gurney is shocked by the “low physical, intellectual, and moral condition of the slaves,” especially when compared with the liberated blacks he would later see in the British islands.
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Like the governor of Antigua, a high official in St. Christopher’s assured Gurney that not a single person on the island wished that slavery would be restored. As Gurney held large religious gatherings for whites and blacks in
Methodist and
Moravian meetinghouses, he also learned that on both islands imports and land values had vastly increased and that black workers were performing a far greater quantity of work in a given time than under slavery. In Antigua he was told that in the first five years of freedom, exports of sugar and
molasses had significantly increased, despite two years of drought, and that in the sixth year, 1839, exports of sugar were almost double the average during the last five years of slavery.
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