The Economics of Emancipation

Jamaica and Barbados, 1823-1843

Kathleen Mary Butler

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807845011, 9780807821947
• eBook ISBN: 9781469639796
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The British Slavery Abolition Act of 1834 provided a grant of u20 million to compensate the owners of West Indian slaves for the loss of their human 'property.' In this first comparative analysis of the impact of the award on the colonies, Mary Butler focuses on Jamaica and Barbados, two of Britain's premier sugar islands. The Economics of Emancipation examines the effect of compensated emancipation on colonial credit, landownership, plantation land values, and the broader spheres of international trade and finance. Butler also brings the role and status of women as creditors and plantation owners into focus for the first time. Through her analysis of rarely used chancery court records, attorneys' letters, and compensation returns, Butler underscores the fragility of the colonial economies of Jamaica and Barbados, illustrates the changing relationship between planters and merchants, and offers new insights into the social and political history of the West Indies and Britain.

1 The West India Lobby, 1823–1833

In 1823 Thomas Fowell Buxton led British abolitionists in a renewed attack on West Indian slavery and demanded the emancipation of all slaves held in British colonies. Anxious to maintain control of the issue, the British government agreed to emancipation in principle but argued that the slaves could only be freed when their well-being and the security of the colonies could be assured and “with a fair and equitable consideration for the interests of private property.”¹

The reopening of the slavery question gave West India merchants and the heavily indebted planters the scapegoat they needed. Both planters and merchants quickly blamed the antislavery movement for all their economic problems and immediately intensified the campaign for compensation that they had first undertaken some fifty years earlier, when abolitionists had called for the ending of the slave trade. Over the course of the next ten years, until the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, representatives of the West India “Interest” lobbied vigorously for that “consideration.”²

The Interest concentrated on two extremely effective arguments. First, it emphasized the depressed state of the colonial economies, the adverse effect of the abolition movement on West India property values, and the difficulty planters faced when trying to obtain credit secured against their estates. Second, it argued that the same laws protecting inanimate property also protected property in slaves. Therefore it would be both immoral and unconstitutional to emancipate the slaves without paying their owners adequate compensation. Such an action would set a dangerous precedent and endanger all British-owned property. Though the planters were not formally represented at Westminster, they could rely on the absentee proprietors who held seats in Parliament and on the lobbying efforts of their trade associations to protect and further their interests. The most influential of these organizations were the Society of West India Merchants, founded in 1750, and the Society of West India Planters and Merchants formed in 1780 to combine the agricultural and commercial aspects of sugar production and bring together the metropolitan and colonial interests of the slave-based monoculture. The membership of this interest group fell into three broad categories: the British sugar merchants, the absentee planters, and the colonial agents appointed by the respective legislatures to represent the various colonies in England.³

The merchants who controlled the British sugar market lived mainly in London, Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Dublin. They accepted shipments of sugar on consignment and arranged for its sale to refiners and grocers. The merchants deducted their commission, brokerage fees, insurance, and interest from the proceeds of the sales and credited the remainder to the planters’ accounts. Against these accounts they charged the cost of the plantation supplies and luxury items that they shipped to the colonies. In the absence of colonial banks, they honored bills of exchange and extended credit to cover the slave purchases, annuity payments, and production costs that beset every estate owner. In times of recession they provided mortgages, secured against plantations and slaves, to enable the proprietors to continue production. By the early nineteenth century, this cycle of credit and indebtedness had engulfed the profits of countless estates. As colonial indebtedness increased and British consignees expanded their influence, the composition of the Interest became steadily more commercial, as merchants became mortgagees and even proprietors of plantations.⁴

The political influence of the absentee planters reinforced the financial prominence of the Interest. Many substantial proprietors lived in England and coupled their colonial investments with the ownership of British country estates. As landed gentry they often served as members of Parliament and supported the conservative aims of their sugar-producing colleagues. At the time of Buxton’s motion for abolition, thirty-nine members of Parliament identified with the West India cause. Eleven West India merchants, including John Gladstone and Joseph Marryat, represented London and the outports, while the remaining twenty-eight members were the absentee owners of colonial estates.⁵

The Interest’s mercantile sector included Sir John Rae Reid, a financier and merchant; John Gladstone, a Liverpool merchant, and Joseph Marryat, a London consignee. All three men linked their political and trading activities to their positions as members of Parliament and absentee proprietors. Reid had financial interests in Jamaica, Trinidad, St. Kitts, and the Virgin Islands. Joseph Marryat was involved with estates in Jamaica, Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia, and British Guiana, while John Gladstone had interests in seven properties in British Guiana and another six in Jamaica. Moreover, as an active member of the Liverpool West India Association, Gladstone exerted considerable influence over George Canning, the foreign minister and member of Parliament for Liverpool.⁶

The West Indian plantocracy also had several parliamentary representatives. Neill Malcolm, the member for Boston, owned nine estates and over 2,000 slaves in Jamaica. George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, the M.P. for New Romney, controlled four estates and nearly 800 slaves. Lord Seaford, the acknowledged leader of the West India Interest in the House of Commons, owned five Jamaican plantations. The Marquis of Chandos, the chairman of the Society of West India Planters and Merchants, owned two Jamaican plantations, served as the M.P. for Buckinghamshire, and further underscored the West Indians’ involvement at Westminster.⁷

Moreover, the Interest could also count on the sympathetic support of many members of the House of Lords. Among the peers who owned colonial properties were the Earl of Harewood, with three estates in Barbados, two in Jamaica, and over 1,250 slaves; the Marquis of Sligo, later governor of Jamaica, with two Jamaican estates, and the Duke of Cleveland, who owned one estate and 230 slaves in Barbados.⁸ At the same time other peers identified with the Interest’s campaign for compensation by virtue of their common belief in the inalienable right to private property.

Additional political support came from the colonial agents who acted as parliamentary lobbyists for their West Indian constituents.⁹ Among the most prominent agents were William Burge of Jamaica and John Pollard Mayers of Barbados. Mayers, in particular, worked tirelessly to obtain the highest possible indemnity for Barbados when it became clear that emancipation was inevitable.

Despite its impressive political and financial prestige, the Interest was not a completely cohesive group. Differences existed between planters and merchants, between London merchants and those of the outports, and among absentee planters and the agents of the crown and legislative colonies. Moreover, after 1827, a variety of financial and political events steadily reduced the number of M.P.s sympathetic to the West Indian cause. The continuing decline of the sugar economy and the Reform Act of 1832 removed the financial and structural base of at least twenty-seven of the Interest’s traditional supporters. Some withdrew from Parliament when their backers declared bankruptcy, while others lost their seats as a result of the realignment of electoral boundaries.¹⁰ Nevertheless, the issue of compensation appealed to a broad cross section of the population on the basis of the nature of private property.

When the Commons debated Buxton’s proposal in 1823 the subject of compensation created a split among the members. William Smith, the M.P. for Norwich, spoke for many of his colleagues when he expressed his indignation that men could be defined as property. As long as people held this belief he argued that “the march of amelioration of the Negroes will be slow indeed.” His words proved to be prophetic, for the condition of the slaves had scarcely improved when emancipation became a reality more than ten years later. Other members expressed their abhorrence of the slave system but continued to insist that slaves were the legal property of their masters. If the British government intended to abolish slavery, it should pay the slave owners adequate compensation for the loss of their property.¹¹ The broad-based agreement brought the debate to an end without a vote on Canning’s resolution.

The consensus, however, was largely contrived. When the West India Interest learnt that Buxton intended to propose abolition, its members met with government representatives to discuss strategy. Eager to maintain control of the emancipation question rather than allow the abolitionists to take the initiative, the government drew up a program of amelioration with the aid of the Interest. To win the cooperation of the West Indians, the ministers agreed to amend Buxton’s original proposal. The addition of the vital phrase “with a fair and equitable consideration for the interests of private property,” ensured the Interest’s approval and Canning’s resolution passed unopposed.¹²

Nevertheless, the Interest urged its members to stay alert and to focus their attention on the two objectives it deemed “paramount to all other considerations”: their right to property and their claim to compensation.¹³ The Interest and its sympathizers continually reminded the public of the importance of protecting property rights. In petitions to Parliament and editorials in the conservative press they reminded all property owners of the dangerous precedent that uncompensated abolition could set.

In addition, the Interest argued that successive British governments had condoned and encouraged slave holding. Slavery had become a national sin, which could be absolved only by a national remedy: compensation for the injured proprietors. Newspapers, journals, petitions, and pamphlets frequently expressed this clever argument. On several occasions the Quarterly Review pointed out that various acts of Parliament had encouraged slave owners to spend vast sums of money to buy land and slaves. To deny them compensation, the Review believed, constituted a “flagrant breach of faith.”¹⁴ The proplanter Glasgow Courier put the point more forcefully when it declared that “the wrong was committed by the nation; by the wrong the nation has profited for a long series of years.” If the entire country was guilty then it would be the grossly unfair to punish only the slave owners by withholding their just indemnity.¹⁵

These views were not confined solely to the Interest’s metropolitan supporters. In a pamphlet published shortly after the abolition question was reopened, Augustus Hardin Beaumont, editor of the Jamaican Courant, explained the basis for the proprietors’ claims. The crime of slave holding, he claimed, had originated with the British nation and had increased in direct opposition to “the interests, desires, and laws” of the West Indian colonies. The British people, he contended, should bear the expense of correcting this national wrong by providing slave owners with substantial compensation.¹⁶

Many of the free people of color who owned slaves also shared these views. In 1831, in St Ann’s parish, Jamaica, the large community of color met to discuss the problems of abolition, property, and compensation. Benjamin Scott Moncrieffe, a wealthy estate owner and the recognized leader of the community, acted as chairman for the evening. Moncrieffe owned 400 slaves and three estates of his own and acted as the attorney for several other proprietors. Those attending the meeting objected strongly to comments that Stephen Lushington, the British abolitionist, had allegedly made to the effect that in Jamaica the free people of color had authorized him to emancipate their slaves. The members categorically denied giving any such authorization and stressed their determination to defend their property and to surrender it only for “the most full and ample compensation.” They instructed Moncrieffe to send their resolutions to the Jamaican newspapers and to forward them to England for publication in The Times and in two of Britain’s most rabidly proslavery newspapers, John Bull and the Glasgow Courier.¹⁷

The Interest complained about the commercial and financial distress so often and so effectively that in 1831 the British government appointed a select committee to investigate the economic condition of the colonies. When called on to present their case, members of the Interest catalogued the economic problems which beset the sugar colonies. They stressed the effects of the government’s restrictive policies on West India trade and complained that increased production costs offset any advantage derived from their monopoly of the sugar market. They insisted that the continual discussion of the slavery question had led to a complete loss of confidence in the stability of colonial property with the result that since 1823 it had become virtually impossible to obtain credit secured against the estates.¹⁸

This argument was designed primarily to elicit higher compensation, for there is little evidence that the abolition movement adversely affected the amount of credit available to proprietors. Between 1823 and 1836, for example, British merchants provided over £150,645 worth of mortgages to planters in Barbados alone. These mortgages were unrelated to the sale of property and were only part of the overall picture. As merchant credit declined after 1823, loans from private investors filled the vacuum. For the entire twenty-year period between 1823 and 1843, credit from British merchants accounted for only 20 percent of the total value of new Barbadian mortgages.¹⁹ The credit argument clearly did not apply to private investment.

Planters also complained of the high costs of production and demanded a reduction in the duties on goods imported from Europe. Before the American Revolution, West Indian planters had bought many of their essential supplies from their mainland neighbors and paid for them with rum and molasses. After the war North American merchants were excluded from West Indian markets. In retaliation they raised their prices and demanded payment in specie or bills of exchange. Consequently the planters lost their cheapest suppliers of lumber, cattle, and clothing for their slaves and were forced to turn to the more expensive British and European markets. Fish and lumber, previously bought from the North American colonies, had to be imported from Canada and the Balkans. British merchants naturally passed the additional costs of freight and duty on to their clients in the form of higher prices. The planters, therefore, felt justified in complaining of the hidden costs of importing provisions from Europe and in seeking a reduction in the duties.²⁰

Witnesses conceded that planters could buy most of their essential supplies in the alternative European markets. They could not, however, replace the convenient American markets for their rum and molasses. The improvement in Anglo-American relations in the 1830s did little to relieve the situation. The Americans refused to accept rum and molasses as barter for their goods and continued to demand payment in hard currency or bills of exchange. In 1817 the United States had imported an estimated 1,380,000 gallons of rum and over 1,120,000 gallons of molasses from the West Indies, but by 1831 American imports had virtually stopped. Moreover, between 1823 and 1831 the United States government encouraged sugar planters in Louisiana to increase production. In 1823 Louisiana had produced a little under 16,000 metric tons of sugar; by 1831 it had more than doubled its output. Since the United States was also the major importer of Cuban sugar and molasses and imported over 70 percent of the sugar produced in Puerto Rico, there was little likelihood of an American market reopening for West Indian produce.²¹

The Interest begged the select committee to recommend the removal of the restrictions on molasses and a reduction of the duties imposed on sugar. If brewers and distillers used molasses instead of grain in the manufacture of beer and spirits, it claimed, an extensive new market would soon replace the one lost in the United States. West Indian proprietors valued their rum at one-fourth the value of their sugar and used the profits from rum and molasses to pay production costs incurred in the islands.²² Without a new market the profits from these by-products would be entirely lost. The creation of a British market for molasses, together with the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The West India Lobby, 1823–1833
• 2 Commissioners and Financiers
• 3 Debt Reduction, 1833–1843
• 4 Credit and Creditors
• 5 Expansion and Speculation
• 6 White Women in the Plantation Economy
• 7 Decline and Partition
• 8 International Trade and Finance
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index