by Alec Waugh
The first signs of doubt had come from the country that had accepted the necessity for the trade with the greatest readiness. The Spanish had never felt happy about it. The French had consoled themselves with the belief that they were giving to the heathen the opportunity of redemption, but the English, as the Danes and Dutch, had accepted the need for human machinery in the cane fields. Yet it was from Englishmen that the first effective protests against the slave trade came. As early as 1727, the Quakers had declared that it was a practice ‘not commendable or allowed’; thirty-four years later, they excluded from membership of their society all who should be found concerned with it; in 1783 they formed an association ‘for the relief and liberation of the Negro slaves in the West Indies and for the discouragement of the slave trade on the coast of Africa’. The Quakers in Pennsylvania had taken similar action a little earlier. But Quakers might have been expected to promulgate such a point of view, and public opinion would not be heavily influenced by their opinion, deep though the respect might be in which their way of life was held. In other more influential quarters objections were now being raised.
The legal status of slavery had been first raised in England in 1729, when the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General then in office ruled that a slave did not become free by landing in the United Kingdom, and that he might be forced by his master to return to the plantations. This decision was questioned by other jurists, and in 1772 Lord Mansfield decided in the name of the whole bench that as soon as a slave set his foot on the soil of the British Isles he became free. This was a most important ruling, and four years later David Hartley, whose father had written Observations on Man, moved in the House of Commons that ‘the slave trade was contrary to the laws of God and the rights of man’. The motion failed, as first motions usually do, but the subject had been aired at last. The world had been forced to realize that there was a problem.
Liberal ideas were in the open. Dr Johnson had a Negro servant before whom he would give as a toast ‘a speedy rebellion to the Negroes in Jamaica and success to them’. The vice-chancellor of Cambridge University proposed in 1785, as a subject for a Latin essay, a dissertation on the subject. The prize was won by Thomas Clarkson, who translated his essay into English and published it in an enlarged form under the title Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. A year later a committee was formed for the abolition of the slave trade. The driving force behind these reformers was definitely Christian ethics. Public feeling became so strong and so many petitions were presented to Parliament that in 1788 a committee of the Privy Council was appointed by the Crown to inquire into the conditions of the slave trade, and Pitt moved that the House of Commons should consider the matter during the next session. He appointed William Wilberforce as the protagonist of the debate.
The name of William Wilberforce is the one that occurs first in connection with the antislavery campaign, and Wilberforce was an unusual man. Born in Yorkshire in the city of Hull, he came of a long line of Yorkshire-men, his family having held the manor of Wilberfoss in the East Riding from the reign of Henry II into the middle of the eighteenth century. He inherited from his mother an acute brain and a weak physical constitution. As a young schoolboy his tutors were impressed both by his idleness and his powers of elocution. Later, at what would be called now a public school, his taste for social pleasures interfered with his advancement as a scholar; yet, even so, he managed to pass into St John’s College, Cambridge. Much later, in retrospect, he said that ‘he could not look back without unfeigned regret on the opportunities that he had wasted’. Luckily, however, he was always at his best in the examination room; and he was extremely popular, both because of his personal charm and his generosity. He was a lavish host. So popular was he, indeed, that at the age of twenty-one he was elected to represent his native town in the House of Commons, where he promptly found his way into the most profligate political set in London. It was there that he met Pitt, and an acquaintanceship that had begun at Cambridge ripened into a close friendship. His eloquence was of the greatest value to his friend when Pitt was opposed by the majority of the Commons.
A year later, Wilberforce went to Nice – which was not then a part of France – with a former schoolmaster who converted him to an Evangelical Christianity. It was a case of ‘the reformed rake’, and within a few weeks Wilberforce was busying himself with the establishment of a society for the reformation of the church; at the same time he met Thomas Clarkson and decided that the curtailment and eventual stopping of the slave trade was a cause worth his espousal. Pitt strongly recommended Wilberforce to throw himself into this particular campaign.
As a first step, in 1788 an act was passed restricting, according to the size of its tonnage, the number of slaves that any one ship might carry. By this time the conditions of the ‘middle passage’ had, in fact, been considerably improved. Between November 1789 and July 1791, thirty-eight ships transported to Montego Bay 9,993 slaves. Of these, 746 died during the voyage. This is a loss of 7½ per cent. But of those 746 deaths, 328 occurred in four ships, all of them from the Bight of Benin; it is therefore reasonable to assume that the slaves had brought a disease aboard. The loss of slaves in harbour had by now been reduced to ¾ per cent. In 1792 Sir William Young visited a slaver in Barbados, which in three trips had lost only eight seamen and one slave. He reported that there were a number of children on board who had no relations and had presumably been stolen or sold into slavery by their parents. The height below decks was six feet, and there were no shelves or double tiers.
The rules for the treatment of the slaves in the British islands had also become more lenient. Ten slaves were entitled to one acre between them for their private use. They were not to be given more than ten lashes, unless the owner was present, and even in his presence floggings were limited to thirty-nine lashes. Iron collars round the neck were forbidden. Slaves were allowed one free day a fortnight, apart from public holidays and Sundays. Their hours of work were limited to the hours between 5 am and 7 pm, and there had to be a half hour for breakfast and two hours for a midday dinner. To encourage childbearing, the mothers of six children did not have to work.
Strenuous efforts were being made to maintain the system, but even now a slave could not give evidence against a white man in a court of law. Death was the penalty for striking at a white man. There could be no assemblies. Funerals must take place by day. Obeah men were punished by death or transportation. There were many regulations against slaves owning horses.
In the following May, Wilberforce again presented to the House the case for abolition; the planters had a strong lobby in Westminster and the discussion was deferred; before it could be reopened the Bastille had fallen, and Europe was on the brink of a quarter of a century of war.
That quarter of a century is the most important in the history of the West Indies, and the present condition of each individual island has been determined by the extent to which it was affected during it.
9 After the Bastille
Louis XVI summoned the States General in the spring of 1789, and within four years France was at war with Britain. Except for a few months between 1801. and 1803, the state of war was to be continued until the Battle of Waterloo. Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, and the forty-five months between the convocation of the States General and his death are as crowded as any in French history, one plot succeeding another, one act of treason following another. The oath of the tennis court was followed by the night of August 4. One group of royalists intrigued against another. There were the Fouillants, there were the Girondists. There was Marat; there was Robespierre; there was war on the Belgian frontier; there were the Prussians at Verdun; there was Louis attempting to escape to Austria. If it was a confused story to the Chanceries of Europe, it was a still more confused story to the planters and officials of the French Antilles. They had no idea what was happening.
In France there had been a movement equivalent to, but very different from, Wilberforce’s society
in London. The English movement had been entirely instigated by British Christians, but in France the movement was largely inspired by mulattoes from St Domingue, a class for which there was no equivalent in England. It was at their instigation that in 1788 the Société des Amis des Noirs was formed. It proposed to abolish not only the slave trade but slavery itself. It numbered among its members the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Abbé Gregoire, Brissot, Lafayette. Mirabeau was not a member, but a warm sympathizer. These men were not inspired, as Wilberforce’s followers had been, by Christian feeling, but by the general feeling of humanity on which the revolutionary movement was based.
The States General opened its proceedings with a philosophical declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, based on Rousseau’s social contract. The various ideas that it expressed have come to be accepted as axioms – law by general consent, the sovereign right of the nation, the equality and dignity of man; that all men born upon French soil were free. It was presented as the philosophical base on which the assembly would found the new constitution.
The news of its promulgation reached Port-au-Prince through the mouths of sailors. It caused an immediate and intense excitement. The petits blancs were exuberant. There were to be no rich, there were to be no poor. The land would no longer be the property of the few. There would be an end to the arrogance and insolence of the planters. All men would share equally in the soil’s abundance. The mulattoes welcomed with equal fervour this end of tyranny. A man was to be judged by his intrinsic quality and not by birth. ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was to be the watchword of the New World. Into the sluggish minds of the black slaves the idea filtered slowly that soon they would be able to knock off work. Each party saw the dawn of liberty in a different light. The petits blancs saw themselves as the equal of the aristocrats, but did not picture the mulattoes as being equal to themselves. The mulattoes took freedom to mean a state of equality that did not include full-black Africans. To the slaves it was a question of working or not working. The stage was set, half for melodrama, half for harlequinade.
It was a tangled play.
History, watching from the stalls, with the perspective of a century and a half, can tell how scene followed upon scene. But the actual actors in the drama, hurried breathlessly from the wings, with their lines half learned, unaware of the role that they are playing; rushed back to the dressing room at the very instant they have begun to feel themselves at home upon the stage, then hurried back again, ignorant of what has been happening in their absence; the actors themselves know little of the play. They can only guess how great is their part in it, whether they are the play itself or merely the attendants who prepare an entrance, who divert the audience while the main characters are resting.
In Paris there was a government that changed its mind only less often than it changed its leaders; that sent out commissioners, then recalled them; that imprisoned colonial representatives as traitors; that one month passed an act abolishing slavery and the next repealed it. Les Amis des Noirs were demanding that white and brown and black should be placed on a basis of equality. There was the Club Massiac, composed largely of absentee planters, asserting that only on the old colour basis could the allegiance of the colonies be maintained; there was Robespierre thundering back that it was better to lose a colony than a principle. In London there were Clarkson and Wilberforce financing a mulatto insurrection. In St Domingue there were the planters terrified at the thought that everything they had believed in was to be taken from them – the constitution, the King of France, the tradition of colonial rule, the bar of colour. There were the revolutionary bureaucrats sent out from France, distrustful of everyone who sympathized with the old régime. There were the petits blancs, crafty and worthless, with nothing to lose, trusting that any commotion could be turned to their advantage. There were the mulattoes, uncertain with whom to side. There were the slaves, ignorant, misinformed and ready to revolt. It was a tangled play.
One name out of that chaotic period has left its mark oil history. A number of mulatto delegates had come from St Domingue to press their claims. One of these was a young mulatto called Vincent Ogé. His mother had a plantation near Cap Français. His father had been dead some while. His mother supported him. He had visited New England and been made a lieutenant-colonel in the army of one of the German electors through the influence of Les Amis des Noirs, He was disgusted on his arrival in Paris to learn that the assembly had denied that its assertion of liberty and equality applied to the colonies. He returned promptly to St Domingue and informed the governor in a letter that if the wrongs of the mulattoes were not redressed he would have to resort to arms.
It was a stupid little revolt; or rather, it seemed stupid because it was ineffectual. His small band of followers was routed, and he fled for safety to the Spanish section of the island. The Spaniards handed him over to the French. He was tried, found guilty and broken on the wheel.
This sentence, in view of the general standard of the times, brutal though it was, does not astonish us. Ogé was a traitor; the country was in an inflammable condition; an example was needed. Far worse things happened in England during Elizabeth’s reign. Ogé’s death, however, caused in Paris a violent reaction against the planters; a tragedy on his death was performed on the public stage, and Abbé Gregoire succeeded in getting passed by the assembly a motion that ‘the people of colour, resident in the French colonies, born of free parents, were entitled to as of right and should be allowed the enjoyment of all the privileges of French citizens and among those of being eligible to seats both in the parochial and colonial assemblies.’
Ogé is venerated today as the first of the martyrs. But it was a short-lived victory; as soon as a rebellion broke out in St Domingue, the French assembly rescinded its own law, and chaos followed. There was pillage, there was slaughter. The blacks marched into battle with the impaled body of a dead child as their standard. Houses were burned, sugar mills gutted; young women raped and disembowelled. White men were placed between planks and sawn in half. If a man was considered too tall his ankles were lopped away. If too short he was lengthened by a dislocation of his joints. Within two months, 2,000 whites were massacred, 180 sugar and 900 coffee plantations destroyed, and 1,200 Christian families were destitute. The revolt was put down with appropriate reprisals – 10,000 slaves were killed, 400 executed. But the spirit of revolt was in the land.
A commissioner came out from France, resolved to break the power of the planters. They were aristocrats in his opinion. He fancied that it was through the blacks that his interests could best be served. ‘It is with the real inhabitants of the country, the Africans,’ he wrote back to Paris, ‘that we will save for France the possession of St Domingue.’ The planters, in their desperation, offered their allegiance to the British.
When the wind is high, the lowest branches of a tree may touch the highest. In France, private soldiers were rising within a year’s space to the rank of general. In St Domingue it was by a released slave, a little old coachman called Toussaint l’Ouverture, that the invading armies of Spain and England were flung upon the coast in chaos; that the Spanish section of the island was annexed for France; that after ten years of civil war the island was restored to industry; that the Negroes, though technically free, were sent back to the fields to work under a system more rigorous than the old régime had known; that the white planters were encouraged to return to the management of their estates.
Situations not too dissimilar were being created in the other French islands. In Martinique, at the beginning of the French Revolution there was an outbreak of the slaves that considerably strengthened in London the arguments of the planter lobby and delayed the discussion of Wilberforce’s proposals for several sessions; it was suppressed, but the island remained in a highly disturbed condition. In 1792, when Britain was still at peace with France, Sir William Young, an Englishman with estates in the West Indies, paused at Martinique on a trip between Barbados and St Vincent. ‘All was calm,’
he wrote, ‘but it was such a calm as generally precedes a hurricane. The free mulattoes and gens de couleur, who are twice as numerous as the white inhabitants, are awaiting the results of the ascendant parties in old France. . . . The whites generally are friends of the old government. . . . Commerce has lost its activity. Credit has gone. There is money in plenty, but no trade. There were only nine small ships in the harbour,. . . trade being virtually extinguished there, but the embers of what it has been glimmer in the shops; the jewellers and silversmiths are as brilliant as any in London.’
On the outbreak of war between France and Britain in February 1793, the British government, in pursuance of its habitual policy, decided to recapture all of the West Indian islands which had been restored to France in 1763 and 1782. An attack on Tobago having been successful, and one on Martinique repulsed, a substantial expedition was commissioned to capture the entire French heritage in the eastern Caribbean. At the last moment the authorities in Whitehall reduced the size of the expedition because the intelligence department had been informed that the French colonists were so incensed against the Republican government in Paris that a British force would be most welcome, and that ‘a body of 800 regular troops would be more than sufficient to overcome all possible resistance’. This information was, in fact, correct. Martinique was captured with seventy-one men killed and 193 wounded; St Lucia was captured within fourteen hours of landing, and Guadeloupe, which was reputed to have a garrison of nearly six thousand men, cost the British only seventeen deaths and fifty walking wounded. Until this point, Whitehall’s estimate of her general’s requirements had been fully justified. But Whitehall had failed to realize that the mosquitoes of the mangrove swamps were more lethal than the bayonets of the French grenadiers. Sickness became a pestilence to which the British governor, General Dundas, succumbed. And at this point there appeared upon the scene one of the most remarkable of the men who have spread terror through the Caribbean.