Abolition and Its Aftermath

The Historical Context 1790-1916

David Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780714632612
• eBook ISBN: 9781136283789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1987. With the exception of Barbara Bush's contribution, all the papers and commentaries contained in this volume were presented at a conference at Thwaite Hall, University of Hull, 26-29 July 1983. The conference was organised to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, and was attended by over eighty scholars from Britain, Western Europe, the USA and the Caribbean.

PART D

Caribbean Adjustments to
Slave Emancipation

9

Was British Emancipation a Success? The Abolitionist Perspective

W. A. GREEN

I

A week before the Emancipation Act received the royal assent, Thomas Fowell Buxton wrote to Thomas Clarkson: ‘It is a mighty experiment at best; but we must trust that it will answer to the full…’ Answering to the full, in Buxton’s view, meant ‘pulling away the cornerstone of slavery throughout the world’.¹ For him, as for most people involved with the slavery problem, the success or failure of emancipation was a complex issue. Considering its many dimensions, did the free labour experiment succeed? Few historians have asked that question – fewer still have tried to answer it. It must not be confused with the much simpler question: was emancipation morally right? The most vitriolic pro-slavery spokesmen of the 1820s willingly conceded that point.² Retrospective judgment on the degree to which British emancipation succeeded must depend on the extent to which it fulfilled the goals of its proponents and served the general welfare in societies affected by it.³ Within the British community, three groups strongly advocated emancipation: the permanent staff of the Colonial Office, the anti-slavery party, and the slaves themselves. This paper assesses the results of emancipation in terms of the hopes and expectations of the abolitionists.

British anti-slavery combined several overlapping but complementary strains of thought. A Painite tradition, dating from the 1790s, emphasised the fundamental rights of man. Exponents of popular political economy challenged slavery because it failed to meet their standards of utility. Both views merged with and were enveloped by humanitarian evangelicalism which, for thirty years, dominated the movement.⁴ Abolitionists took their cause to the people, creating a national anti-slavery crusade. Despite resentment expressed by English ‘wage slaves’ that the employing classes were blinkered and hypocritical in their special solicitousness for colonial slaves,⁵ the ‘Saints’ achieved their legislative victory by virtue of deep-lying public support at all levels of British society.⁶ Continuing support of this kind was needed if abolitionists were to pursue further humanitarian objectives in the former slave colonies. After emancipation, however, strains of anti-slavery thought which had combined in triumph during 1833 exhibited increasing incompatibility. By 1850 the movement had become deeply fragmented and politically ineffectual, victimised by its own standards of conduct and the misleading nature of its propaganda.

The standards of conduct in question were fundamental to evangelicalism. Wilberforce confided in his diary in October 1787 that God had set before him two great objects, suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.⁷ Like other evangelicals, he was not aggrieved by social hierarchy or pervasive poverty, conditions ‘ordained by God’,⁸ but he lamented poverty in the human soul and set out to redeem society through the moral regeneration of its individual members. Brutality appalled evangelicals. They attacked duelling, cruel sports, the abuse of pauper children and chimney sweeps, flogging, and capital punishment as well as the trading and owning of slaves.⁹ Their creed was more a way of life than a theology, though it called its converts to an intense personal encounter with God. Above all, evangelicals were serious: seriousness was a sign of conversion; abstemiousness, hard work, and self denial were hallmarks of the evangelical life.¹⁰ Censorious of indecency, evangelicals plunged headlong into the affairs of this world invading the slums of darkest London¹¹ and the forests of darkest Africa, bearing the torch of Christian salvation while admonishing all whose rules of conduct did not meet the standards of respectability demanded by born-again Christians.

G. M. Young opened his Victorian England: Portrait of an Age with an assessment of evangelicalism, calling it ‘the strongest binding force’ in the nation.¹² Similarly, Elie Halévy considered it ‘the moral cement of English society’, attributing to evangelicals the reform of a loose-living, free thinking upper class.¹³ Writing of British approaches to India, Eric Stokes declared evangelicalism ‘the moral agency responsible for Victorian ‘respectability’, the power which tamed and disciplined the anarchic individualism of the Industrial Revolution’.¹⁴ In India, southern and western Africa, and the West Indies, hundreds of evangelicals, representatives of metropolitan missionary societies, built their chapels and set about transforming alien cultures – some primitive, others infinitely complex – in their own God-fearing, sober, and eminently European image. The zeal of missionary endeavour paralleled the rise of anti-slavery.¹⁵ Both expressed absolute certainty of conviction; both peaked in the 1830s; and both required positive responses from the oppressed and benighted objects of their philanthropy in order to sustain the intense level of their own commitments as well as the credibility of their endeavours among fellow Englishmen.

Where evangelicalism intersected with the reforming currents of utilitarianism, each influenced the other, and together they established standards of conduct calculated to enhance individual self-reliance and respectability. Thrift, sobriety, industry, and the intelligent exercise of ‘moral restraint’ were deemed essential personal qualities for success in this world and salvation in the next.

II

Did the reformers have a vision for the slave colonies after emancipation, or were their mental and physical energies entirely absorbed by the fight to abolish slavery? Historians have been remarkably reticent on this question. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mathieson,¹⁶ Klingberg,¹⁷ and Coupland¹⁸ provided narrative accounts of the anti-slavery campaign in England but gave no indication that abolitionists might have had longterm expectations for the free Caribbean. L.J. Ragatz was also silent on the question.¹⁹ Excellent studies of the postemancipation Caribbean by a new generation of historians – Hall,²⁰ Adamson,²¹ Wood,²² and Levy²³ – have not addressed the point. Curtin remarked only that British abolitionists seemed to hope the slaves would be ‘transformed overnight’ into English agricultural labourers.²⁴ Eric Williams, on the other hand, had much to say on the point: ‘The emancipation Act’, he declared, ‘marked the end of the abolitionist efforts’, adding that it did not occur to the ‘Saints’ that the ‘Negro’s freedom could be only nominal if the sugar plantation was allowed to endure’.²⁵

Williams’ verdict was mistaken all round. British emancipation was not the end of abolitionists’ efforts;²⁶ moreover, the ‘Saints’ deliberately advocated retaining the plantation system and the hierarchical order of colonial society. British abolitionists were themselves products of a paternal and hierarchical social system, and as we have noted they had precise ideas about religious truth and proper personal decorum. Their responsibilities extended beyond merely freeing the slaves: they intended to enlighten them, to Christianise them, and to liberate them from ‘degraded’ habits and superstitions. In cultural terms, the success of the emancipation experiment would be determined by the extent to which Christian religion and British habits of behaviour were adopted by freedmen. Economically, it would be judged in terms of the ability of emancipated labour to preserve and enhance existing plantation economies.

Realistically, the cultural aims of emancipationists hinged on the success of export economies in the free Caribbean. Schools, chapels, roads, bridges, and the human resources requited to administer what the British in the nineteenth century uniformly considered a progressive society could not have been achieved without a strong export sector. The changing terms of international trade had rendered the West Indies increasingly dependent on their major staple, sugar.²⁷ There appeared no ready alternative to plantation production except scattered peasant agriculture of an essentially subsistence variety, and no broad body of reforming British abolitionists in the 1830s was inclined to argue that tropically situated peasant societies, comprising transplanted Africans brutalised by slavery, could secure a fertile social environment for their moral and redemptive work.²⁸ Furthermore, British abolitionists had a worldwide mission for which the West Indies constituted a decisive test case. If developments in those colonies could demonstrate to slave-owners throughout the Americas that emancipation could be undertaken without threat to the social order or destruction to private property, then the rational defences of the slaveocracies would be breached and bondage might quickly give way to freedom throughout the Atlantic basin.

Abolitionist propaganda gave firm assurances that Caribbean freedmen would pass the test. It condemned slavery for its inefficiency as well as its cruelty. Men worked best, abolitionists declared, when they worked in their own interest, and slavery precluded self-interested labour. Because slave-masters used people as brute beasts, they had no incentive to employ labour-saving, cost-efficient machinery or techniques. It was clear: free labour was cheaper than slave labour.²⁹ Only malignant perversity could have induced planters to persist so long in a system manifestly opposed to their own economic interests. Abolitionists thought it intolerable that British tariff regulations should give preference to West Indian sugar since such tariffs obliged the whole nation to subsidise a brutal and inefficient slaveowning class.³⁰

After years of repetition, the slogans of anti-slavery became tenets of faith. The most zealous abolitionists seemed unaware that they were laying for themselves a political minefield; nor did they anticipate the contradictions which would arise between their strong advocacy of the superior merits of free labour and their determination to achieve full civil liberty for ex-slaves. Some of the conflicts abiding in these views derived from the special nature of the sugar industry and the deep-seated resistance of emancipated people to full-time dependency on estate labour. Sugar production was both seasonal and labour intensive. Regularity in the performance of agricultural and industrial tasks was critical to the efficient operation of a plantation, and estates could not function efficiently – and in some cases not at all – unless they could depend in advance on a sufficient body of workmen. Planters were convinced that freedmen would not provide the consistent labour they needed in critical seasons of the agricultural year unless they were coerced by law or obliged to work on estates because of the absence of an alternative source of livelihood. In the larger Caribbean colonies and throughout the Windward Islands there was abundant land available for peasant cultivation; in fact, slaves had already become proto-peasants through their cultivation of provision grounds allotted them by the planters.³¹ Women and children were certain to leave plantation service in large numbers after emancipation. If men could earn their living, albeit a meagre one, beyond the estates, why should they endure the agonising labour of cane fields and boiling houses? Because the estates paid money wages, they could induce even the most independent freedmen to supplement their private earnings with occasional estate labour, but sugar properties could not hope to remain profitable in a competitive commercial environment without reliable work crews.

Abolitionists were not ignorant of these problems. All anti-slavery witnesses before the 1832 Parliamentary Select ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• PART A. Introduction
• PART B. Slaves as Agents of Their Own Emancipation
• PART C. Connections Between the British and Continental Abolitionist Movements
• PART D. Caribbean Adjustments to Slave Emancipation
• Index