The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (49 page)

As one planter pointed out, only one-third of the slaves had really been “operative” at one time, since planters had to support the nonworking children and the elderly, the infirm, the sick, and those who shammed illness. Paid-wage labor by freedpeople was thus “incalculably cheaper,” according to the Speaker at the Antiguan assembly. Planters had a savings of at least 30 percent when every man, black and white, was thrown upon his own exertions, and the “cooperation” of employer and employee enhanced the community’s wealth. No less important,
emancipation had brought an increase in black marriage and a decrease in black crime, along with other evidence of a striking “moral improvement of the Negro population.”
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Like Thome and Kimball, Gurney struggled to reconcile some deeply disturbing facts in Jamaica with the premises of free labor ideology and the wholly positive expectations derived especially from Antigua. Indeed, Gurney’s letters to
Clay, coupled with a brief introductory letter to
Buxton and a letter at the end of the book addressed to Jamaican planters, contain an embarrassing contradiction. On
the one hand, Gurney repeatedly gives optimistic assurances that
Jamaica was on the “road to prosperity” and could not, “when duly inspected and fairly estimated, furnish any exception” to the highly positive results of slave emancipation. On the other hand, he continues to express deep concern over signs of economic failure.
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These signs of trouble are scattered throughout the letters, separated by reassuring arguments, and thus have less collective impact. Worst of all, according to Gurney, Jamaica suffered from the fact that the great majority of estates belonged to absentee proprietors and were thus under the care of young attorneys, often of “immoral character,” who often managed numerous estates at one time and who merged the payment of wages with the blacks’ payment of rent in a highly exploitive way. Gurney repeatedly emphasizes that when the workers, or “peasants,” are fairly and humanely treated, and paid weekly in cash—which promotes everyone’s best economic interest—they happily continue working on the property of their old masters, which is most familiar to them and nearest their homes.
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Unfortunately, immediately after the end of
apprenticeship and the award of full freedom in 1838, workers throughout the island faced a payment of rent, which was often doubled or tripled and extracted from expected wages. When workers protested or complained, there were threats of ejection, some cottages were demolished, and family provision grounds were despoiled, all of which amounted, according to Gurney, to “a new form of slavery.” This oppression explained why many of the freedpeople, who were conscious of their rights and interests, began deserting the estates on which they had been unfairly treated and succeeded in establishing their own small freeholds near or on Jamaica’s mountains—an option not available on the smaller islands.
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Gurney noted that the “impolitic attempts to force the labor of freemen” had angered the peasants and led to the desertion of many estates and thus to the decline in the labor force. He was deeply troubled by some of the resulting new penal laws against vagrancy and indebtedness, similar to those in the postwar American South, that restricted freedom and endangered the “peace and prosperity of the colony.” But he tended to downplay the decline in sugar and coffee exports and affirmed that evidence of improved understandings between planters and workers gave reason to expect increased production in the near future.
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Moreover, the freed slaves who had left the estates were by no means idle. Gurney happily asserted that the old notion that blacks were inherently lazy and would work only by compulsion was “now for ever exploded.” The freed
Jamaican blacks were now busy cultivating their own grounds and building stone walls, houses, roads, ditches, and even villages that would have been inconceivable before emancipation. Many were also engaged in fishing or producing handicrafts. And the employers of blacks were now freed from the necessity of paying for their clothing, bedding, food, and medicines, to say nothing of whips, a fact that helped explain the increase in imports, land values, and urban trade. Gurney stressed that even if some planters had been deprived of their profits, emancipation had brought a marked increase in black schools, literacy, marriages, church attendance, and a decrease in crime. And his firm faith in the natural laws of progress confirmed his belief that the ultimate prosperity of the proprietors “is linked by an indissoluble tie to justice, mercy, and wisdom, which ensures well-being of the population at large.”
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As we have seen, Gurney was very confident of his ability to interact successfully with American slaveholders and
West Indian former slaveholders—he informed
Clay that he had had “much satisfaction” in relating the story of West Indian emancipation to “a political rival of thine,”
John C. Calhoun, for whom he had “sincere personal esteem,” and who “listened with the greatest attention to the narrative.” According to Gurney, Calhoun then “admitted his belief not only in the accuracy of the relation itself,” but in the pecuniary, physical, and moral points Gurney made regarding “the favorable working of freedom.”

Of course Calhoun then felt compelled, with an “eagle eye” fixed on Gurney, to argue that in America, which lacked the strong military arm of Britain, abolition would lead to Haitian-like racial
violence and war. Gurney refrained from countering this fallacy, but assured Clay that Britain’s military arm had been needed only under slavery and that the freed blacks harbored no desire for revenge or antipathy for whites. And it was with similar confidence that he addressed the urgent letter to Jamaican planters on the theme of racial reconciliation.
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Having dined with Jamaican planters as well as with the governor and other officials, Gurney knew that it was crucial to address issues of self-interest to “persons habituated to slaveholding throughout
their lives.” He assured the planters that by 1840 the eyes of such slavery-supporting nations as
France,
Denmark, Spain,
Portugal,
Brazil, and the United States were fixed on the
British
West Indies, and especially Jamaica. These regions should now prove that
free labor was more economical and productive than slave labor, and that the just and equal liberty of all citizens of a state had “an unfailing tendency to increase its wealth.” But this goal required all Jamaicans to unite in promoting the island’s prosperity. And such unity, Gurney stressed, could be achieved only by “reconciliation,” by overcoming misunderstandings between planters and workers, especially concerning fair work for fair wages. Fortunately, he noted, as in
Antigua and Dominica, task or piece work, as opposed to day wages, was becoming more prevalent even in Jamaica, and the decline in production was supposedly easing.
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But the most central and urgent point, as Gurney also made clear in his letter to Buxton, was the need for British and West Indian unity on the threatening issue of a proposed equalization of duties on
sugar.
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By 1840, free-trade ideology was gaining much strength in Britain as representatives of the consumer public called for a repeal of the
Corn Laws and other measures that created high monopolistic prices for wheat, sugar, and other commodities by maintaining protective tariffs that cut off free-market imports. In general, the kind of liberals who believed in the superiority of free labor also favored free trade.

But Britain’s emancipation of colonial slaves in 1834 and 1838 created a new conflict between advocates of free trade and many defenders of free labor. The abolition of Britain’s slave trade in 1807 had put Britain’s plantation colonies at a great disadvantage in competing with such booming slave-importing regions as
Cuba and Brazil. In virtually all parts of the New World, except the United States, slave societies depended on slave imports to maintain population growth. While the British colonies were slowly weakened by a declining slave population, they also suffered when the abolition movement frightened domestic investors and creditors. By 1833, as
Seymour Drescher notes, a parliamentary committee found that the British West Indies “were in severe distress. Large portions of the sugar plantations were currently turning little or no profit, and many were running multiyear losses.” Moreover, “the share of the British slave colonies in the trade and income of the metropolis had been measurably declining
for more than fifteen years.” Accordingly, despite the faith of some MPs in the superiority of free labor, the emancipation law of 1833 strongly raised the duties on imports of foreign
sugar, in part to protect planters, freed workers, and what Colonial Secretary
Stanley termed the “mighty experiment.” The import duties also provided funds for compensating slave owners.
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Nevertheless, the British colonies were still producing enough sugar to supply the domestic market and also sell a small surplus in the Atlantic market. In 1836, the price of sugar sold in
Britain was still equal to the world price. But, as even Gurney acknowledged, slave emancipation led to a decline in production, especially in colonies like
Jamaica. By 1841—three years after the end of apprenticeship—domestic demand had risen and the supply had fallen. Londoners who yearned for sugar in their tea now paid twice the price they would have paid in Paris. Not surprisingly, it became necessary that year for MPs who were concerned over the fate of the emancipation experiment to join the West India interest and vote down a fervently debated bill to equalize duties and promote the importation of slave-grown sugar.
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The
parliamentary debates in 1841 also reflected an important transformation in the British abolitionist movement. Having achieved emancipation in most British colonies (but not in India, where slavery was an indigenous institution),
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British abolitionists now focused on the goal of a universal, global ending of slavery. They strongly supported the prohibitive levy on foreign sugar, despite the high price of sugar for the British poor, since importing duty-free sugar from Cuba and Brazil would greatly stimulate the Atlantic slave trade and increase the exploitation of slaves in those regions. When charged by
free traders with inconsistency regarding the importation of slave-grown American cotton, they lamely replied that there was no alternative to American cotton, unlike the sugar from the now free British colonies.
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Given the powerful free-trade movement that led to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, it is not surprising that Parliament passed a
Sugar Duties Act the same year, equalizing duties on British colonial and foreign sugar and initiating a gradual process of removing all protections by the early 1850s. Given the state of public opinion, abolitionists did not dare to make an appeal to the people on behalf of the freed slaves. But they privately feared that “free trade” would
lead to the expansion of the slave trade and the failure of Britain’s great experiment. Despite the optimistic predictions of free traders concerning the “union of prosperity and morality,” the new
Sugar Duties Act had a devastating effect on the British Caribbean colonies. They could not compete with slaveholding Cuba and Brazil and also faced the rise of European beet sugar as a cheap alternative to sugarcane. The sharp decline in British sugar prices wiped out dozens of merchant houses in the West Indies and Britain. A European economic depression in 1847–48 also contributed to the failure of the
West India Bank and to the growing inability of planters to pay their debts or provide adequate wages for their workers.
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In 1848, a “select” parliamentary committee gathered a vast amount of data on the crisis of the British colonies and the production of sugar from China to Peru. Given the evaporation of credit and the fact that the price of sugar had fallen below the cost of production, the manager of one of Jamaica’s most profitable and efficient estates now reported that his plantation was operating at a loss. Even
Antigua, once the model of emancipation’s economic success, now expressed doubt about the island’s ability to continue commercial cultivation. According to
Seymour Drescher, the media’s widespread publication of such dramatic examples of failure gave a Tory like
Benjamin Disraeli a strong “stick” with which to beat the free-trade
Whigs: “The great experiment, the greatest blunder in the history of the English people, had simultaneously ruined the British colonies, encouraged the African slave trade, and revealed ‘the quackery of economic science.’ ”
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Even well before the impact of the Sugar Duties Act, the growing shortage of productive West Indian labor had been signified by British efforts to transport “free” black contract labor from West Africa to the Caribbean, efforts abolitionists successfully countered as a disguised revival of the slave trade. Then, in 1843, the British government sent a minister,
Edward Fox, to meet secretly in Washington with Secretary of State
Abel Upshur to convey the conservative
Peel ministry’s startling proposal to recruit and pay transportation costs for large numbers of American free blacks to migrate to the British West Indies, where they would do the contract work that former slaves were now either unable or refusing to do. Upshur, an ardently proslavery Virginian, rejected Fox’s proposal on grounds of states’ rights (at a time when the
Underground Railroad was aiding slaves to
escape to British Canada, he could hardly imagine allowing British agents to recruit free blacks in the South). Still, because of the labor shortage from 1839 to 1845,
Trinidad did import some 1,300 subsidized free blacks from the United States.
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Fox’s admission that the British colonies were “suffering severely” from “a dearth of agricultural laborers” had a decisive impact on Upshur and especially on
John C. Calhoun, who replaced Upshur as secretary of state immediately after Upshur was killed by the explosion of a cannon on a warship. Upshur had ordered
Robert Monroe Harrison, the American consul in Jamaica, to present a comprehensive report on the results of British emancipation. Harrison sent back material to support his conclusion that “England has ruined her own colonies, and like an unchaste female wishes to see
other
countries, where slavery exists, in a similar state.” Southerners could claim that
Lord Aberdeen, the Tory foreign secretary, confirmed the latter point when he declared in 1843 that “Great Britain desires, and is constantly exerting herself to procure, the general abolition of slavery throughout the world.” Upshur’s
State Department substantiated the first point by publishing Harrison’s statistics claiming that by 1843 the price of freeholds in Jamaica had declined by half,
coffee and
sugar production had declined by as much as 50 percent, and some large plantations were worth less than 10 percent of their preemancipation value.
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