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  Most disruptive of all (and most worrying for the authorities) was the rapid emergence of slave preachers. A charismatic black preacher, steeped in biblical language and imagery, able to captivate an enslaved congregation with promises of salvation and a better life to come . . . this was exactly what planters feared and what they sought to prevent. Yet this is just what transformed British slavery, and the entire politics of emancipation, by 1831.

  The slaves’ newfound Christianity provided a stout defence against the slavery that oppressed them. It created a community of friends away from the plantation or other enslaved workplace. Slaves now met and mingled with people from other properties and locations, and there they could speak and behave relatively freely. It also provided hope – the prospect of better things. Churches with black preachers were even more attractive to slave congregations – for a host of obvious reasons. Black preachers spliced the voice of outraged experience with biblical support and were, from the first, a troublesome presence. Their activities and services developed a social momentum, which slaveholders disliked and which they sought to prevent or contain. Consciously or not, slave preachers were leading their enslaved congregations in the direction of freedom.

  All this took place in Caribbean colonies at the very time slave emancipation was becoming a major political issue in Britain itself. Missionaries departed for the slave colonies armed with the latest news of that debate. Throughout, planters and their allies in the colonies fulminated about the news from Britain, usually in the presence of their domestic slaves – who promptly relayed the gossip to relatives and friends in the slave quarters. Thus did the question of freedom flow quickly and easily, back and forth between Britain and the slave colonies – and thence into the slaves’ quarters. Slaves knew that they had friends in distant Britain and, much closer to hand, in the persons of the missionaries. But they also realised that their traditional enemies remained unbowed: intransigent planters with their terrifying denunciations of black freedom, ever willing to pronounce on the violence and bloodshed that was likely to follow emancipation. As proof, they continued to point in the direction of Haiti. Who, asked the planters, was going to compensate them for the potential loss of their valuable enslaved property?

  This world of emergent black Christianity in the slave colonies was shaken by major slave revolts. Rebellions were built into the fabric of slave history, but what happened after 1815 was different. For a start, Africans were no longer arriving on slave ships, and the slave populations were, slowly but steadily, become increasingly local born. Previous revolts had tended to be Africa-inspired or African-led (as indeed they continued to be in Brazil and Cuba). Against the backcloth of heightened missionary activity, and intense debate in Britain about slave emancipation, major slave revolts severely shook the British colonies. Most perplexing of all, to slave owners, it started in Barbados.

  For some time that island had experienced a growing slave population. It also had the largest proportion of whites in the British islands and seemed the most peaceable and settled of all Britain’s slave possessions. But at Easter 1816, news reached the slaves of Wilberforce’s bill to register slaves. This was promptly interpreted as freedom being thwarted by local planters. A major slave uprising, led by Bussa, an African-born slave, and featuring around four hundred mostly creole slaves-turned-freedom-fighters, quickly destroyed seventy plantations and their crops. Revenge was prompt and ruthless, with widespread executions and displays of body parts to intimidate survivors. The revolt shook the confidence of those who believed that Barbados was proof of slavery’s value and stability, and that slavery was weathering the storm of hostility gathering in Britain. Much worse was to follow, in 1823, in the recently acquired South American colony of Demerara.

  The slaves in Demerara were overwhelmingly African, and subject to an extremely brutal labouring system on raw frontier lands. They, too, were soon alert to the discussion taking place in London about their future, and they were also aware that local officials and planters were blocking measures aimed at local amelioration. In August 1823 they revolted. Upwards of 12,000 slaves were involved and a handful of whites were killed – but about 250 slaves were killed in the fighting or following trials. The savagery of this repression (and the death from tuberculosis in jail of the missionary, the Revd Smith – accused of fomenting the revolt) was massively counter-productive to the planters’ aims. When news reached Britain of mutilated slave bodies rotting in the tropical sun, the public was horrified. Compounding the shock was the knowledge that, in many cases, the dead slaves were their co-religionists. Slaves from the missionaries’ churches were being put to death for asking for freedom: the very thing being promoted by British abolitionists. What possible justification could be offered for savagery on such a scale? Was cheap sugar a sufficient reason? This seemed especially troubling when it was becoming obvious that sugar – cultivated by free labour – could be acquired more cheaply from other regions of the world.[3]

  Planters took a very different view. Events in Barbados and now in Demerara confirmed their worst predictions. Careless talk about slave registration, amelioration, education and conversion merely encouraged slaves to revolt. It had happened in Haiti only thirty years before, and the same sequence of events was now unfolding in the British slave colonies. After a fashion, of course, the planters were right. But the tide was running against them – especially in Britain.

  The violence in Demerara caused a political scandal in Britain, and pushed the question of black freedom centre-stage. By then, Thomas Clarkson was already – fifty years after his first epic abolitionist treks – once again stomping the country on the slaves’ behalf. He was a marked man, vilified and denounced by planters and their friends wherever he spoke. But news of the Demerara repression came to his rescue and rallied support to the slave cause. The news was more alarming because it told of physical attacks on missionaries and their churches. The Revd Smith died of consumption in prison, a martyr (to many British eyes) and his enslaved followers were being persecuted. To the huge numbers of British dissenters, this smacked not merely of racial oppression, but of religious persecution. By the mid-1820s, huge numbers of British people had added their voice to the outcry against the Demerara outrages – and against slavery in general. Before 1823, planters and colonial officials had usually got away with their repressive violence against rebellious slaves with little outrage in Britain. Now, a much-changed Britain was enraged by their violence. British Christians were appalled to hear of the fate of enslaved Christians in the colonies.

  There followed a massive campaign, led by dissenting churches, demanding an end to slavery. In the election of 1826, slavery was a major electoral issue. The question of slavery was re-established as a pressing matter for Parliament. And, like abolition sixty years before, emancipation was hugely popular. Petitioning took on a life of its own, shaped and directed by local chapels, churches and their crowded congregations, drumming up tens of thousands of signatures from all corners of the country and from men and women of all social groups. In the six months following the Revd Smith’s death, 600 petitions were garnered – all of them bearing many thousands of names. Throughout, women were the key players in their locality, writing and distributing emancipist literature and, in what was a highly effective innovation, leading an influential boycott of sugar and slave-grown products.[4]

  In seeking to generate sympathy for the slaves, some British commentators – notably evangelical Anglicans – portrayed the Demerara revolt as if it were a labour dispute: a clash between disgruntled labourers and harsh employers. The reality was altogether bleaker and most savage. The analogy, however, was to surface again, a decade later, when early critics of British factory conditions talked about ‘factory slavery’. What was happening in the 1820s and 1830s was a crossover – a transfer of experiences: slave resistance was supported by many because it seemed a reasonable reaction of exploited labour. And, later, the exploitation of British factory labour (especially chil
d labour) was denounced because it carried the shadows of slavery.

  Here, then, is stark evidence of the degree to which the problem of slavery had come to permeate British life by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Not long before, slavery had been a distant issue, which yielded bountiful wellbeing to the metropolis. Now it was an issue of widespread domestic moral and political concern and indignation. It was also a matter of pressing political concern, regularly discussed in both the Commons and Lords. It had become the stuff of popular politics and was an electoral question whenever general elections took place. Parliamentary candidates were forced to declare their position: for or against slavery? And almost invariably, those who defended slavery lost. The popular voice had become the voice of emancipation, but it had also become a voice demanding reform on a wide front. These were the years that echoed with demands for Catholic emancipation, an extension of the franchise and the reform of Parliament. Thus, from the mid-1820s onwards, freeing the slaves became part of the warp and weft of British reforming politics. What made this unusual was that the ebb and flow of domestic British politics was shaped, to a degree, by events 5,000 miles away in the Caribbean. This was underlined in 1831 when slaves once again took matters in their own hands.

  The revived push for the reform of Parliament between 1830 and 1831 was paralleled by an unprecedented 5,000 emancipation petitions cascading onto Parliament in the same timeframe. Then, over the Christmas period of 1831–2, in the space of a month, slaves in Jamaica’s western parishes revolted. Jamaica’s slaves, like those in Demerara, were aware that their fate was under discussion in Britain and their actions were clearly inspired, to some degree, by events there. Something like 60,000 slaves joined the uprising.[5] What became known as the Baptist War was the most massive and destructive slave revolt in the history of British slavery, prompting memories, among older folks, of what had happened fifty years before in neighbouring Haiti. Once again, and like at Demerara, local churches were at the heart of the trouble.

  The influence of Baptist chapels and their preachers had spread widely across Jamaica, especially in the west. They had powerful, charismatic black preachers: men who preached wherever slaves gathered. Like dissenting preachers in Britain in the eighteenth century, they did not require formal chapels or churches, speaking instead – normally with dramatic effect – wherever knots and gangs of slaves gathered together to listen to them. The most prominent was Sam Sharpe (today, a member of the Order of National Hero in Jamaica, with a statue in Montego Bay), whose aim was the protection of slaves’ labouring interests. The anger of the insurgents quickly spilled over into widespread destruction and killings. Fourteen whites were killed, and plantation properties were torched across the west of the island. For a while, the planters and colonial authorities lost control. But when the governor applied both martial law and the unrestrained power of the local militia and the military, a savage repression imposed a resentful peace. Planters destroyed the missionaries’ chapels and sent the terrified preachers packing, back to Britain. More savage still was the onslaught on the rebels. Some two hundred slaves died by the sword and perhaps three hundred more were executed following hasty trials. It was a reprise, on an even more brutal scale, of what had happened in Demerara almost a decade earlier. It was also the latest spasm of a recurring theme in the history of British slavery: slave unrest followed by massive and savage reprisals. When news reached Britain, the emancipation movement turned the planters’ frequent assertion against them: where did savagery reside in the slave colonies? Among the slaves or in the planters’ great houses?

  Missionaries, fresh from the Jamaican rebellion, criss-crossed Britain explaining what they had seen. It was an uncanny repeat of what happened in the build-up to the abolition of the slave trade. The fate of the slaves, their efforts to secure freedom and their continuing oppression by slave owners became the stuff of British popular politics. Large crowds listened to missionaries describing the violence of slaves’ daily life and the brutality of the planters’ repression. All this was confirmed in evidence submitted to Parliament. It was as if the anti-slavery lobby had caught the slave system in a pincer movement.

  Jamaican planters had feared that the Baptist War would be their Haitian moment: violence would bring the entire slave edifice crashing down around them. In the event, the revolt was suppressed (though at the time it seemed a close-run thing). Even so, the Baptist War revealed slaves loosening their own shackles. More than that, their rebellious actions, and the violence of their owners and colonial officials, proved the final straw in Britain itself. An agitated and vociferous British people, and an increasingly sympathetic Parliament, came together, after 1832, to usher emancipation through Parliament. The Reform Act in 1832 sealed the matter. Under pressure from the Anti-Slavery Society, the general election (obligatory after the Reform Act) saw the return of some 200 MPs who were sworn to emancipation. That was immediately followed by yet another massive flood of petitions – this time containing 1.3 million signatures demanding an end to slavery. After the reform of Parliament, under the shadow of Jamaica’s slave rebellion and amid an unprecedented public clamour for black freedom, slave emancipation was now inevitable. Yet it was to come at a price. A staggeringly high price, paid in compensation to the slave owners.

  From its inception, the Atlantic slave system had been based on the idea that the slave was an item of property. At every point of the slavery system, slaves were treated, in practice and in law, as chattels; items to be bought, sold and exchanged. Each one had a price on his/her head (hence the need to insure African slaves on board the Atlantic slave ships). For British slave owners, emancipation meant surrendering or losing a valuable commodity. The value of slaves was an ingrained, unchallenged feature of the entire slave system. (Why else did abolitionists need to assert their contrary mantra: Am I not a Man and a Brother/Sister?’) Not surprisingly then, when abolitionists and politicians began to discuss freeing the slaves, slave owners asked some obvious economic questions. Who would compensate them for the loss of such valuable property? How much would they receive? And who should calculate how much their slaves were worth? In the protracted public and parliamentary discussion in the 1820s and 1830s about emancipation, spokesmen for the slave owners insisted that freedom for the slaves involved a tampering with the principle of property. At its bluntest, freeing the slaves meant removing the slave owners’ property, and what right did Parliament – or anyone else for that matter – have to trample on the principle of property ownership?

  There were many contentious issues at play in the general election of 1832, but slave emancipation loomed large, not least because the prospects of further slave revolt continued to cast a long shadow. Abolitionists were determined not to lose the political momentum by allowing the issue to become bogged down in political and procedural infighting, in Parliament and in government. On the other hand, the West India lobby (that enormously powerful body of planters and merchants which had, for more than a century, exercised such decisive influence over British Caribbean policy) was not about to relinquish slavery without a fight. There was a prolonged debate about the exact form emancipation might take, with all sides negotiating the principles and practicalities. One central concern lay at the heart of the argument: how could freedom be achieved without harming the planters’ economic interests, and without removing their source of labour for the plantation? Britain’s leading statesmen were themselves major property owners, and they were not about to violate the principle of the property rights of the planters.

  The resulting Emancipation Bill, put before Parliament in May 1833, created a system of ‘Apprenticeship’: it freed all slaves aged under six: adults would become apprentices’ for a number of years before being accorded full freedom. A large team of new magistrates would supervise the entire system – and a loan of £15 million would cushion the planters from any subsequent labour losses. Not surprisingly, Apprenticeship outraged many: it seemed like slavery under another gu
ise – even if only for a few more years. Planters, on the other hand, were equally outraged by the idea of a repayable loan for the loss of their enslaved property. Negotiations finally persuaded the government to change the loan of £15 million into an outright grant of £20 million compensation. Apprenticeship was to last for six years, with ex-slaves working forty to forty-five hours a week unpaid for their former owners.[6]

  A month after the death of Wilberforce, the Act enshrining these conditions passed through both Houses of Parliament. Slavery ended at midnight on 31 July 1834. But the fight was promptly renewed, to bring Apprenticeship itself to an end. It lasted until 1838, with some places conceding freedom earlier. The slave lobby – once perhaps the most powerful pressure group in London – had been defeated, and slaves were freed.

  For all the gnashing of planters’ teeth, it is hard to feel sorry for their plight. In return for emancipation, British slave owners found themselves amply rewarded from the massive government grant of £20 million (with the money to be derived from sugar duties), in a deal brokered by the Rothschilds. Slave owners could claim for their loss of human property to special commissioners, who computed their awards on the basis of 40 per cent of the market values of the slaves.

  Recent analysis of the slave compensation papers has proved astonishingly revealing, not only about the nature of slave ownership in Britain itself as well as in the slave colonies, but also about what happened to the compensation paid to the former slave owners. Slave ownership was much more widely diffused throughout British society than previously thought. Slaves were owned not merely by major Caribbean interests, but by a range of people, many of them resident in Britain. They had acquired slaves via marriage, death and inheritance, many without having stepped foot in a slave colony. Indeed, more than half of the compensation was paid to people living in Britain. Compensation was an indispensable element in bringing British slavery to an end and it seems unlikely that slavery could have ended – peacefully – without the financial arrangements it entailed.