The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  Young Viscount Howick, who had devoted intensive study to the issue of slave emancipation, had a far less optimistic view regarding the ability of Parliament to delete or significantly modify objectionable provisions like apprenticeship, which was intended to provide continuity and prepare slaves for freedom. In a speech on May 14, he asked the MPs to imagine the effect on the mind of the slave “when he is told that he is free, but finds that, for so long a period [twelve years], his freedom is to make no difference whatever in his condition—that he is to go on laboring as before, without any remuneration for his toil, beyond his accustomed and scanty supply of necessaries?” Howick shrewdly added that masters, with no investment in human property, would want for twelve years to extract the maximum amount of labor from apprentices, without any regard for mortality.27

  Ironically, at a meeting on May 10, the Standing Committee of West India Planters and Merchants professed “a loss for adequate terms to express their feelings of disappointment and dismay” over Stanley’s plan. They saw “nothing in the measure now submitted to them, but the confiscation of property, and the prospect of all those calamities which must result from a dissolution of the ties which connect the Colonies with the British Empire.” The West India Committee was especially troubled by the provision that an apprentice would need to work for his master only three-fourths of his time and could then “employ himself elsewhere” or receive wages for this extra time. This clause, according to the West Indians, would for twelve years deprive the master of “at least one-fourth of the gross production of his property” and would give the Negro the choice of working in periods when labor would be lightest and leaving when his services would be most valuable.

  No less troubling was the provision that compensation should be in the form of a loan, and in the “quite inadequate” amount of £15 million. After many pages of specific complaints, the Committee concluded that the proposed measure “involves an unparalleled violation of the rights of property—of spoliation of the weaker by the stronger party,” that “it is not even calculated to advance the comforts and well-being of the negro,” and that it “utterly destroys the possibility of productive cultivation.” Moreover, the destruction of the British colonies “will have the direct effect of giving an irresistible impulse to the Slave Trade to supply this deficiency from foreign countries.”28

  Despite the struggles and revisions of the next three months, George Stephen was prescient in late May when he told Daniel O’Connell, the pro-abolitionist popular champion of Irish rights, that if Stanley succeeded in committing the Commons to his broad resolutions, “no dexterity in committee will mend his odious scheme.”29 The West India representatives won most of the major concessions and revisions, above all raising a £15 million loan into a direct grant of £20 million compensation for the loss of slave property. Equal to roughly 40 percent of the national budget, this enormous payment pleased British financial interests, since the absentee owners of a large percentage of plantations lived in Britain and many plantations were mortgaged and their London creditors ultimately received much of the money.30 In contrast to this generosity, an allowance of only £300 per person a year was to be paid to the absurdly small corps of 130 special magistrates, who were supposed to enforce the law and protect the apprentices from being treated like slaves, but who would now be especially dependent on planter hospitality. Moreover, the final law gave colonial legislatures the power to define the duties of the special magistrates as well as the details regarding the apprentices’ labor, discipline, maintenance, and contractual obligations. The House of Lords even empowered colonial authorities to punish any so-called willful absence of an apprentice by requiring additional work for a period as long as seven years after the end of apprenticeship.31

  The abolitionists succeeded with great difficulty in reducing the term of apprenticeship from twelve to seven years for agricultural workers and from six to five years for nonagricultural workers. They also persuaded Stanley to abandon one extremely unfair idea of compensation. While apprentices were obliged to devote three-quarters of their time to work for their former masters, they were to be paid a fixed rate of wages for any work done in the remaining quarter, and in theory could use some of that money to achieve full freedom. But the original plan required them to make a direct monetary contribution to the fund for slaveholders’ compensation—when many abolitionists argued that it was the slaves who deserved compensation. In actuality, the apprentices’ years of uncompensated labor were a form of compensation and the apprentices were therefore required to subsidize a large share of the cost of their own emancipation.32

  William Lloyd Garrison, who had arrived in England in late May on a mission to raise money and expose the evils of the American Colonization Society, was elated to learn that “slavery has received its death-blow.” But he was outraged that leading British abolitionists had accepted the “heresy” of monetary compensation to planters, rewarding those who for years had been “whipping, starving, plundering, brutalizing, and trafficking their own species,” those who deserved only “punishment proportionate to their crimes.” “The slaves,” Garrison affirmed, “and the slaves only, are entitled to remuneration.” Some abolitionists later tried to reassure Garrison that the measure “excites universal reprobation among the people.” But except for a few radical members of the Agency Committee, British abolitionists, including even Thomas Clarkson, realized that emancipation without some form of compensation was politically inconceivable.33

  The government had essentially disarmed its opponents by endorsing and absorbing two ideologies. First, the abolitionist ideology that called for the total eradication of an ancient and deeply implanted institution, for a wholly new dispensation attuned to moral principles revealed by the collective voice of the Christian public. Second, the proprietor ideology, which insisted on gradual change, minimal interference with local self-government, and compensation for pecuniary losses. This unstable mixture inevitably led to continuing conflict, notably the abolitionists’ final major crusade, in the mid-1830s, against the barbarities of apprenticeship. By 1835, Buxton had compiled a volume of evidence against apprenticeship, documenting instances of murder, torture, overwork, and the infliction of more corporal punishment than in the days of slavery.34 But it was the more radical Quaker and Agency Committee member Joseph Sturge who took the lead in the campaign against apprenticeship, who traveled to the West Indies and compiled and then published much evidence that helped move the public and government toward abolishing the system. Convinced that this was soon inevitable, the colonial legislatures avoided further parliamentary interference and ended apprenticeship on their own in 1838. Still, some abolitionists continued to protest police and vagrancy acts—similar to those in America’s post–Civil War South—designed to curtail the freedom and movement of black workers. But, as we have already seen, this need for renewed agitation in no way diminished the heroic public image of slave emancipation in 1833.

  SOME AMERICAN RESPONSES TO BRITISH EMANCIPATION

  News of Britain’s nearly “immediate” emancipation hit slaveholding America like a political and social tsunami. While Britons saw the abolition of the slave trade as a first step toward an eventual eroding of slavery, British abolitionists had not worked for even a very gradual ending of the institution until 1822. People still spoke of the way Christianity had supposedly taken centuries to wear away slavery and serfdom in medieval western Europe. Despite the commitment to emancipation by Northern American states during or following the American Revolution, slavery was still legal in Connecticut until 1848, and a form of involuntary apprenticeship survived in New Jersey until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. The unexpected British law not only became a precedent but focused attention, like the Haitian Revolution, on the consequences of emancipation—on what happens after slaves are freed. For some abolitionists this meant an emphasis on free labor ideology—on stressing the moral virtues and productivity of physical labor when wages replaced the las
h, and when both workers and employers supposedly profited from a natural harmony of interests. But since white Americans lived in a biracial society and most of them regarded blacks as in some way “less than human,” Britain’s sudden freeing of 800,000 black slaves evoked a good bit of alarm.

  In April 1833, both the New Orleans Bee and Baltimore’s Niles’ Register printed an article from a London paper on the “intention” of the British government to introduce a bill for the immediate emancipation of slaves, noting that the government was prepared to send “an imposing force” of fifteen thousand troops to protect white colonists from the “probable consequence” if the intentions of Parliament were “prematurely announced.” The Southern press had given limited coverage to the Jamaican slave rebellion, out of fear that such news could spread rebellious tendencies by word of mouth among their own slaves. But the three major slave revolts in the British Caribbean, coupled with the uproar over the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in South Carolina and Nat Turner’s slaughter of whites in Virginia, had greatly reinforced the conviction, originally disseminated by Bryan Edwards’s argument on the antislavery origins of the Haitian Revolution, that abolitionist agitation or legislative debates over slavery would inevitably lead otherwise docile and contented slaves to insurrection. And it is true that in all five of the Anglo-American events, one could point to the slaves’ and free blacks’ almost certain awareness of antislavery protest.

  In late July 1833, after covering the parliamentary debates, the New Orleans Bee made a direct allusion to the Haitian Revolution: “in agitating the question of emancipation,” Britain’s ministers “must have forgotten the consequences to a neighboring nation produced by similar measures adopted with equal imprudence.” Some weeks later the paper reprinted a letter from a Barbadian planter who not only prayed that Providence would protect the islands from “the scenes of horror” that had devastated Saint-Domingue, but warned Southerners to take serious steps with respect to their own safety, since proximity and shared interests doomed the United States to “participate … in the deep and fatal results” of the British colonies’ imminent destruction.35

  These very thoughts were uppermost in the minds of Southern journalists like Duff Green, whose United States Telegraph became the Washington news voice for Senator John C. Calhoun. Green not only covered the British parliamentary debates over slave emancipation, but linked this detailed news with the way it inspired and encouraged the emerging abolition movement in the North. Like other Southern editors, Green greatly exaggerated the strength and influence of American abolitionism—the American Anti-Slavery Society would not even be formed until December 1833, partly in response to British emancipation. And, according to Green’s “spy” in New York, American abolitionists were convinced that British abolition would help them overcome the “strong barriers” that protected slavery in the United States. Green dramatized a possible consequence of such an abolitionist victory by reprinting a letter from the U.S. consul in Jamaica, who reported that the white population lived in fear for their lives, since the slaves were dissatisfied with the British plan and threatened to “emancipate themselves, the effect of which would be the destruction of every white inhabitant.”36

  As historian Edward Bartlett Rugemer points out, in his comprehensive study of the subject, “Americans of every political stripe looked to the West Indies, making press descriptions of emancipation an essential factor in the development of public opinion on slavery in the United States.” Virginians, who had recently considered and debated gradual emancipation, could now view the actual results of such a measure. Abolitionists, inspired by the political success of their British counterparts, awaited news of continuing progress, and defenders of slavery eagerly seized on the exaggerated early news of violence and rebellion that dominated the American press. But, as Rugemer makes clear, newspapers throughout the country, representing diverse political and sectional perspectives, portrayed a decidedly negative view of British emancipation: “Of the forty-six newspaper reports examined from the moment of emancipation through 1835, only seven characterized emancipation as a success.”37

  Initially this interpretation focused on black violence in the form of arson, riots, and the need for martial law. Reports dwelled upon a rebellion on the north coast of Jamaica and on a mob of a thousand apprentices tearing down a jail in Trinidad and rescuing a prisoner. When the expected major insurrections failed to appear, attention turned to the failure of apprentices to work as well as slaves. Drawing on free labor ideology, many British abolitionists had assured the public that, despite the common view that blacks were somewhat lazy because they were still “savages,” freed blacks would quickly develop proper work incentives and produce more sugar and other products than slaves had done. This expectation was reinforced by the conviction that divine Providence rewards virtue and punishes evil. However, by October 1834, two and a half months after emancipation, even a Boston newspaper reprinted a report that apprentices in Jamaica were performing only “one fourth of their former labor,” and that the Special Magistrates from Britain showed undue favor to the workers. Even though some papers carried reports from British journals attacking the harshness of the apprenticeship system, with its savage “military flogging” of workers, readers throughout the country encountered repeated examples of “lazy and indolent” apprentices who resisted orders and refused to work long hours. By the spring of 1835, estates in Grenada were supposedly producing only half the hogsheads of sugar they had produced under slavery.38

  This negative view of British emancipation was strongly disputed, especially by American abolitionists and their supporters like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Eminent economist Robert William Fogel has pointed to a great moral paradox that persists to this day: the belief “that ‘events’ reward virtue and punish evil,” the theory that “immoral economic systems cannot be productive, for that would reward evil, and moral systems cannot be unproductive, for that would punish virtue.” It was only in the mid-1960s that scholars began to discover that “slavery was profitable, efficient, and economically viable in both the United States and the West Indies when it was destroyed…[that] its death was an act of ‘econocide,’ a political execution of an immoral system at its peak of economic success.” But while American reformers were extremely reluctant to accept mounting empirical evidence that West Indian productivity had deteriorated after emancipation, Southerners seized on that evidence as proof that abolitionists posed a fatal threat to their increasingly prosperous and expanding society.39

  It is true that in the first years after British emancipation, there were legitimate arguments over the temporary effects of apprenticeship and the sharp differences between a small island like Antigua, which rejected apprenticeship and where the immediately freed slaves faced hardly any opportunities besides plantation field work, and large islands like Jamaica and Trinidad, where many of the eventually freed apprentices could find land for their own subsistence agriculture.40

  By 1837, the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society decided it was time to obtain a detailed and authoritative report on the effects of emancipation in the British Caribbean. They commissioned James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball to gather “facts and testimony” to prove the safety, efficiency, and profitability of immediate emancipation, by exposing “the truth.” As Thome and Kimball make clear in the introduction to their 1838 book, Emancipation in the West Indies. A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, the ultimate goal was to “present the work to our countrymen who yet hold slaves, with the utmost confidence that its perusal will not leave in their minds a doubt, either of the duty or perfect safety of immediate emancipation, however it may fail to persuade their hearts—which God grant it may not!”41

  Backing up such confidence was the book’s recorded testimony of numerous former slaveholding planters and political leaders in the Caribbean, “island authorities [who] are as unchallengeable on the score of previous leaning towards abolitionism as Mr. [George]
McDuffie, or Mr. [John C.] Calhoun would be two years hence, if slavery were to be abolished throughout the United States to-morrow.” As Thome and Kimball interviewed countless authorities and common people, especially in Antigua, and dined with members of the Antiguan assembly, proprietors, managers of estates, and missionaries, they only rarely encountered someone who retained “some old prejudices of slavery.” The governor, who stressed that “he had never found such a peaceable, orderly, and law-abiding people as those [the freed slaves] of Antigua,” also affirmed that “the planters all conceded that emancipation had been a great blessing to the island, and he did not know of a single individual who wished to return to the old system.”42

  By concentrating on the effects of immediate emancipation in Antigua, as opposed to their briefer treatment of apprenticeship in Jamaica and Barbados, Thome and Kimball tried to prove that “the bad reports of the newspapers, spiritless as they have been compared with the [alarming] predictions, have been traceable, on the slightest inspection, not to emancipation, but to the illegal continuance of slavery, under the cover of its legal substitute [apprenticeship].”43

  James A. Thome, the son of a Kentucky slaveholder, had a genuine understanding of slaveholding culture. Like James G. Birney and a number of other Southerners, he was converted to abolitionism in 1834 by the famous debates at the Lane Theological Seminary, near Cincinnati, led by Theodore Dwight Weld. Thome became an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society and in 1836 convinced his father to manumit the family’s slaves, an achievement that enhanced his faith in “moral suasion,” the abolitionists’ early belief that following the model of religious conversion, Southern Christians could be peacefully persuaded to recognize the sin of slaveholding.44