Revolutionary Emancipation

Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies

Claudius K. Fergus

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780807149904
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Skillfully weaving an African worldview into the conventional historiography of British abolitionism, Claudius K. Fergus presents new insights into one of the most intriguing and momentous episodes of Atlantic history. In Revolutionary Emancipation, Fergus argues that the 1760 rebellion in Jamaica, Tacky's War -- the largest and most destructive rebellion of enslaved peoples in the Americas prior to the Haitian Revolution -- provided the rationale for abolition and reform of the colonial system.
Fergus shows that following Tacky's War, British colonies in the West Indies sought political preservation under state-regulated amelioration of slavery. He further contends that abolitionists' successes -- from partial to general prohibition of the slave trade -- hinged more on the economic benefits of creolizing slave labor and the costs of preserving the colonies from destructive emancipation rebellions than on a conviction of justice and humanity for Africans.
In the end, Fergus maintains, slaves' commitment to revolutionary emancipation kept colonial focus on reforming the slave system. His study carefully dissects new evidence and reinterprets previously held beliefs, offering historians the most compelling arguments for African agency in abolitionism.

1

EXPLICATING THE “GRAND EVILS”
OF COLONIALISM

The Supreme Evil

When the French National Assembly legislated the general abolition of slavery in 1794, the slave trade was also abolished ipso facto. On the contrary, British abolitionists doggedly justified distinguishing slavery from the slave trade on the teleological premise that no other evil “was comparable to that of the African Slave Trade.” ¹ Contemporary voices explicitly acknowledged two evils of the colonial system: the barbarism of African enslavement and the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. Most were predisposed to consider them “distinct from each other” or else perfunctorily dismissed them as necessary evils.² Unquestionably, the evidence adduced at the parliamentary inquiries into the slave trade between 1788 and 1791 was more than adequate to condemn the commoditization and enslavement of Africans as crimes against humanity, even by the standards of the day.

Although some philanthropically minded, colonial-based Quakers had begun to rail against both evils since the seventeenth century,³ the politicization of abolition had more to do with the slave trade as a feeder for an even greater evil than slavery itself, often captioned as “internal commotion,” “internal violence,” or “internal insurrection” and appropriately embodied in the term revolutionary emancipationism. Abolitionist luminary Henry Brougham implicitly included revolutionary emancipation as the greatest of the “grand evils” confronting colonial security.⁴ Indeed, ranked by vested interest, slavery was the least problematic of the grand evils, insurrection the greatest. Contemporary logic on the cause of this threat informed the prioritizing of ending the trade over emancipation. Paradoxically, to revolutionary emancipators the military option was the most viable physic to the evil of slavery.

A standard question posed to witnesses at the parliamentary inquiry was whether an African was less “susceptible of the sentiment of liberty as a free peasant in England.” It is to England’s credit that a minority of white contemporaries had sufficient confidence in their conviction of the natural rights of humanity to condemn the racism implicit in such an assumption. One senior naval officer contended that there was “no comparison between a set of free men in a land of liberty and protection, and a set of people who were treated in many respects like cattle.” ⁵ Even fewer whites, however, dared to admit that rebellions were not motivated by African savagery but rather by desperation to recover or secure their liberty. One exception was Barbados-born Reverend Robert Nicholls, who informed the parliamentary committee of 1790–91 that freedom was the motive behind the “two great rebellions mentioned by Long,” referring to Tacky’s War in 1760 and its Hanover sequel six years later.⁶ Refusing to be railroaded, he affirmed, “I consider liberty as the first comfort in life, as well as an inalienable right. I consider the want of it as lessening the comforts of life.” ⁷ Africans were not invited to testify before the committee, although the abolitionist Sons of Africa successfully tabled at least one memorandum.⁸

The Sons of Africa was a seminal abolition society in England, founded in 1786, one year before the better-known Society for Effecting the Gradual Abolition of the Slave Trade. Among the well-known names of the Sons of Africa were Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano.⁹ Many Africans, including Equiano and Cugoano, penned (or dictated) poignant declarations of their rights to liberty, happiness, and justice in autobiographies that to a large degree are also biographies of slavery, the slave trade, and emancipation. Trained in the art of combat before his capture, Equiano explained why the conditions of West Indian slavery thrust the enslaved into a perpetual struggle for freedom: “When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war.” ¹⁰ Much more explicitly than any other metropolitan-based abolitionists, Cugoano justified revolutionary violence as a tool of emancipation and even anticipated the Haitian Revolution.¹¹ Decades later Mary Prince added her voice to the still relevant question. Toward the end of her graphic narrative about her multiple experiences of enslavement, she contended that Africans’ right to freedom and happiness could be no less than that of English subjects. Accordingly, she asked rhetorically, “How can slaves be happy when they have the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back?”¹²

Not surprisingly, one of the enduring clichés of the slavery era was the notion that Africans were natural enemies of the plantocracy and, by extension, the colonial system: from quintessential religious foe to quintessential political and military foe. The doctrine of slaves as natural enemies dates back to the classical period in Western thought.¹³ The sentiment was inherited by colonizers of the New World. From the earliest phase of the Sugar Revolution colonists manifested a psychopathological unease about the Africans they enslaved. Richard Ligon and John Oldmixton have given us some of the earliest dimensions of this self-inflicted paranoia. When Ligon visited Barbados in the late 1640s, whites were already outnumbered by Africans two to one. He saw this as an ominous development because Africans were “accounted a bloody people where they think they have power or advantages; and the more bloody, by how much they are more fearful than others.” ¹⁴ Planters’ phobia intensified as the ratio of whites to blacks diminished. By the early 1700s the plantation revolution, fueled by sugar and African enslavement, had spread from Barbados to several other colonies, including those of other European nations. Against this background John Oldmixton considered “revolutionary blacks” as the “common enemies” of all Christian nations.¹⁵ The natural enemy cliché reappeared in late-eighteenth-century debates on the right to liberty; ironically, it also resonated among those who proudly distinguished themselves as “Friends of the Negro.” ¹⁶

Afrophobia was bolstered by pseudoscientific racism, to which Edward Long was a major contributor. Long was one of Jamaica’s wealthiest planters, a legislator, and a man of letters, thus one of the colony’s ablest spokesmen. In quoting Montesquieu, he iterated, “Such people as these are the natural enemies of the society; and their number must be dangerous.” ¹⁷ James Ramsay was influenced by Long on many issues relating to slavery. A resident Kittitian cleric and surgeon for nineteen years, Ramsay had held substantial property in Africans. His description of Africans as enemies echoed Long as well as his personal experience: “Masters and slaves are in every respect opposite terms; the persons to whom they are applied are natural enemies to each other.” ¹⁸ Brougham, one of Britain’s leading abolitionists, never visited the West Indies, but up to the very end of slavery lived in mortal dread of African insurrection. With impetuosity and imperious pride, he penned the most poignant images of racial antagonism: “The negroes… are the enemies most to be dreaded in America by all Europeans, they are the natural enemies of white men, who are distinguished by indelible marks in body, and by marks almost indelible in mind.” ¹⁹ The backdrop was Napoleon’s invasion to reinstate slavery in Haiti with England’s secret backing of the enterprise made public.

Enslaved Africans also considered European enslavers their mutual enemy but restricted the indictment to enemies of liberty and humanity. This distinction was succinctly expressed by Toussaint L’Ouverture and is important to an understanding of the boundaries of retribution that African insurgents and other emancipated people imposed on themselves;²⁰ it also explains the peaceful response to Emancipation Day in the British Caribbean, which baffled contemporary Europeans and many modern scholars. In the true “spirit of ubuntu,” a southern African concept affirming the interconnectedness of all human beings, African antislavery struggles were not intended to destroy the enslavers but, rather, to win respect for the enslaved people’s own humanity and create secure spaces of freedom for themselves. Ubuntu has recently become a subject of African ethics and moral philosophy, but it is deeply rooted in the worldview of traditional African communalism. Before its recent appearance as a major topic in the academy, ubuntu was “illustrated in songs and stories… traditional customs and instructions, and in the whole ethos or lifestyle.” ²¹ The spirit of ubuntu is central to “the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships”; it is “the very essence of being human.” ²²

African antislavery was the antithesis of the nightmare of enslavement: from capture in Africa, in the holding bays on the coasts, aboard slavers of the Middle Passage, and in the Caribbean beginning with the very first cohort of forced migrants. It took various forms of “resistance,” the most feared being shipboard mutinies and colonial insurrections or revolts. Slave ships were the first theaters of emancipationist uprisings beyond the “doors of no return.” ²³ The very first revolt on Caribbean soil may have occurred as early as 1502 in Cuba but certainly by 1522 in Hispaniola and 1527 in Puerto Rico; in Barbados planters preempted a plot to set fire to destroy the factories of a sugar plantation as early as the 1640s, the foundation phase of the Sugar Revolution.²⁴ From that time colonial regimes maintained a favorable balance of power by constantly mustering troops and conducting regular armed exercises in the presence of the enslaved to warn them of the ruthless consequences of insurgency.²⁵ Antiguan planters also experienced a significant uprising relatively early in their transition to a sugar economy.²⁶ By the 1710s the English colonies had experienced at least seven insurgencies and six aborted ones.²⁷ During Jamaica’s transition from invasion in 1655 to formal cession by Spain in 1670, the island experienced its first “serious revolt” on an English plantation.²⁸ Up until emancipation it remained the colony most tormented by revolutionary upheavals. The eighty-year Anglo-Maroon wars in Jamaica (1660–1739) fueled a culture of insurrectionist emancipationism. Jamaican planters came to view the Maroons as “a plague on the body politic,” while the response of whites in general was one “bordering on paranoia.” ²⁹ White Jamaicans avoided perpetual war against the Maroons by timely resort to the Cudjoe-Trelawney treaties.³⁰ Maroon oral tradition commemorates the event as a decisive victory.³¹ Freedmen and Maroons everywhere remained protagonists of revolutionary emancipationism because many of their wives, children, and other close relations remained in slavery. They also clearly understood that they could never be truly free so long as slavery persisted.

The Cudjoe-Trelawney emancipation treaties did not guarantee security. Twenty years later an enslaved Akan speaker named Tacky led a major insurgency against the plantocracy. Long was an eyewitness; his analysis of events and recommendations for preempting a recurrence made an indelible impact on advocates of colonial reform. His History of Jamaica inscribed the name Tacky as the pivotal subaltern agent in colonial reform. Tacky’s War sharpened awareness that enslaved labor was an economic gamble. Post-Tacky Jamaica was rife with revolutionary turmoil as well as new ideas for reconstructing the colonial paradigm. Long found a receptive audience for his notion that the chief actors of seditions and mutinies were “imported Africans,” and he swayed reform-friendly contemporaries with his advocacy of creolization as the best counterpoise to insurrections. His ideas were mistakenly fashioned on the myth that the African-born were less predictable and potentially more rebellious than Creoles.³² These ideas were not completely new. The perception that the principal protagonists of revolutionary emancipationism were unassimilated Africans had delayed Spain’s first issue of the Asiento by almost two decades. Long is important to the history of colonial reformism because of his intellectual leadership in establishing creolization as the pragmatic rationale for abolishing the English slave trade. The positive balance from measuring the economic benefits of creolization against economic distress from emancipation wars fertilized the embryo of abolitionism and, in many respects, spurred the genesis of reform of the colonial system.

The Atlantic Traffic in African Captives

British participation in transatlantic trafficking in enslaved Africans began surreptitiously almost a century before the launch of its sugar revolution. By the end of the eighteenth century the British were by far the single largest carrier of African captives in an enterprise best described as big business.³³ Altogether British ships delivered some three million Africans to their own colonies as well as those of their imperial rivals. Captains of slavers included men of high status in English society. Many investors and participants in the tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• 1. Explicating the “Grand Evils” of Colonialism
• 2. Humanity Enchained
• 3. Pragmatizing Amelioration and Abolition
• 4. Abolitionism and Empire
• 5. The Haitian Revolution and Other Emancipation Wars
• 6. From Revolution to Abolition
• 7. Imperatives of Creole Colonization
• 8. New-Modeling in Action
• 9. The Launch of Imperial Amelioration
• 10. Constitutional Militancy
• 11. Breaking the Chains
• 12. Conclusion
• NOTES
• GLOSSARY
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX