Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement

A Memoir

Gelien Matthews

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807148914
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

In this illuminating study, Gelien Matthews demonstrates how slave rebellions in the British West Indies influenced the tactics of abolitionists in England and how the rhetoric and actions of the abolitionists emboldened slaves. Moving between the world of the British Parliament and the realm of Caribbean plantations, Matthews reveals a transatlantic dialectic of antislavery agitation and slave insurrection that eventually influenced the dismantling of slavery in British-held territories.
Focusing on slave revolts that took place in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, and in Jamaica in 1831--32, Matthews identifies four key aspects in British abolitionist propaganda regarding Caribbean slavery: the denial that antislavery activism prompted slave revolts, the attempt to understand and recount slave uprisings from the slaves' perspectives, the portrayal of slave rebels as victims of armed suppressors and as agents of the antislavery movement, and the presentation of revolts as a rationale against the continuance of slavery. She makes shrewd use of previously overlooked publications of British abolitionists to prove that their language changed over time in response to slave uprisings.
Historians previously have examined the economic, religious, and political bases for slavery's abolishment in the Caribbean, but Matthews here emphasizes the agency of slaves in the march toward freedom. Her compelling work is a valuable analytical tool in the interpretation of abolition in North America, uncovering the important connections between rebellious slaves on one side of the Atlantic and abolitionists on the other side.

1

INTRODUCTION

This book analyzes four aspects of the British antislavery discourse on the slave rebellions that erupted in the British West Indies in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 focuses on the abolitionists’ denial that antislavery agitation prompted slave revolts and their attempts to understand revolt from the slaves’ perspectives. Chapter 3 discusses how British abolitionists interpreted and described the suppression of these revolts, portraying slaves as both victims of slavery and agents of antislavery. Chapter 4 shows how abolitionists validated slave rebels as instruments advancing the antislavery campaign, for the slaves’ suffering following crushed rebellions revealed some of the corruption of colonial society. Finally, chapter 5 shows how abolitionists presented continual servile warfare as a threat to the survival of the plantation empire and how they used slave revolts as a rationale for extensive imperial intervention in a slave colonial system that made revolt almost inevitable.

Each chapter furnishes a fresh abolitionist perspective on the significance of various aspects of the slave revolts in Barbados (1816), Demerara (1823), and Jamaica (1831–1832). While there are repeated references to these revolts, a measure of repetition is unavoidable in a study of this nature. This approach provides a clear identification of the nature and composition of a discourse that has for too long been shielded from history and makes it possible to illustrate that the abolitionists were sharp in perceiving the diverse significance of the slaves’ revolts to their antislavery struggle. The book’s methodology also produces a sense of the progression over time of the abolitionists’ intellectual handling of the slave rebellion issue. This strand of their debate spanned roughly from 1816 to 1832 and moved from a defensive posture to an aggressive justification for demanding slave emancipation.

Eric Williams provided one of the earliest indications that the historiography of British West Indian slavery is faulty in its discussion of the British antislavery movement. Williams has commented that “most writers on the period of slavery have ignored the slaves.”¹ He, however, does not explore in depth the role that the slaves played, but his brief observations have added fuel to the current controversy among historians regarding the appropriateness of widening the discussion of the British antislavery movement to include slave rebellions. The most telling of Williams’s comments on this subject is, “In 1833 … the alternatives were clear: emancipation from above, or emancipation from below. But emancipation.”² Williams’s interpretation of the thesis of “emancipation from below” has its shortcomings. It gives credit to the fact that slaves were active agents of their own emancipation but ignores the crucial point that abolitionists were the ones who converted servile warfare into antislavery propaganda. The thesis needs to be expanded to explore how the actions of rebel slaves impacted upon and interacted with the intellectual battle that abolitionists waged against slavery in the British West Indies.

Historian Michael Craton has written extensively on slave resistance and esteems slave revolts as a dynamic force in the local plantation scene. He confidently asserts that “one of my basic assumptions is that the slave system was shaped largely by the slaves. But one must not underestimate the complexity of that shaping.”³ While Craton postulates that slaves shaped the slave system in the colonies, he cannot reconcile himself to the notion that the rebel slaves helped shape abolitionist commentary on slavery in Britain. Craton objects to Williams’s suggestion that emancipation may very well have come from below: “It would be perverse to claim that slaves actually achieved their own emancipation by resistance.”⁴ Craton claims that “slave rebellions were counter productive to the anti-slavery cause.”⁵ With each fresh outbreak up to 1823, “no one dared to defend in public the action of the slaves.”⁶ Craton also highlights antislavery’s abhorrence of revolutionary methods when he observes that “slave rebellion was never to be condoned, least of all by the emancipationists and the missionaries.”⁷ Consequently, Craton notes that after the 1816 Barbados rebellion, the “saints” thought it best to “rest on their oars.”⁸ The merit of Craton’s interpretation is that it underscores the denunciatory dimension of the abolitionist response to the slaves’ violent attempts at self-liberation. It also draws attention to the British government’s tendency to withdraw its support from the abolitionists whenever slaves revolted. Craton gives the misleading impression, however, that the revolts retarded the abolitionists’ commitment to the antislavery cause. Abolitionists’ attitude to slave revolts was far more complex than Craton seems to appreciate. It was a double-edged attitude of fear and denunciation as well as a renewed and expanded attack on the servile regime. It is interesting to note how Craton interprets the 1831–1832 Jamaican slave revolt, which almost coincided with the abolitionists’ adoption of immediate slave emancipation: “In the early phase of British anti-slavery, slave resistance was intentionally resisted by humanitarians … in the latter phase, slave resistance and emancipation were clearly intertwined.”⁹ Craton’s general analysis of the two themes suggests that the abolitionists succeeded in ignoring the rebels for the greater period of the struggle against slavery. This book presents the alternative interpretation that while abolitionists were discomforted by the slaves’ rebellion, from the outset they had little choice but to accommodate it in their campaign.

The idea that the abolitionists were discomforted by evidence of slave agency and were thus incapable of providing a discourse to counter the planter’s negative depiction of slave insurrection is emphasized in the work of Clare Midgley. She insists that Elizabeth Heyrick from Leicester was the earliest and lone delineator of an alternative antislavery vision of slave rebellion. Midgley comments that while other abolitionists shrank back from the violence and destruction of revolts, Heyrick boldly portrayed slave rising as “self-defence from the most degrading, intolerable oppression.”¹⁰ As early as 1824 Heyrick distinguished herself in stoutly opposing the conservative policy of amelioration and gradual emancipation espoused by the vanguard of the “saints.”¹¹ Heyrick offended the leading male abolitionists in two ways; she was female, and she was openly radical. Among the abolitionists, however, Heyrick was not alone in challenging the “Negrophobic” planter commentary on slave rebellions. In fact, the male leaders of the British antislavery movement did Heyrick the injustice of adopting the very views on slave rebellions that she had expressed in her book, which they had banned among their circulation of antislavery pamphlets, without acknowledging her contribution. As shall become evident, some leading male abolitionists also adopted Heyrick’s positive portrayal of slave rebellion.

A panoramic survey of the secondary literature reveals the common perception that revolts were of no value or were only a nuisance to the emancipation cause.¹² Lowell Ragatz believes that “slave revolts were minor setbacks to be expected, though nevertheless, severely suppressed.”¹³

While he admits that later outbreaks were questioned in the motherland, he does not examine the nature or value of that questioning. His account of slavery in Fall of the Planter Class focuses on the economic and social factors that led to the decline in wealth, influence, and power of the “West India Interest.” For him, as for several historians of the British antislavery movement, the subject of slave revolts is a passing concern. Ronald Kent Richardson makes a statement that epitomizes the marginal role of revolts vis-à-vis the attack on slavery: “The British humanitarians did not step forward to implement a social programme put forward by the AfroCaribbean slaves; nor did they consult black people when formulating their anti-slavery programme.”¹⁴ This might be true, but had it not been for the slaves and their experiences, the British antislavery campaign would have been nonexistent. The divergence in the methods and objectives of black and British antislavery do not justify dismissing the impact revolts had on the movement. The revolts of the slaves arrested the attention of the abolitionists and were described in antislavery speeches. Richardson later mentions, “It was the slaves who by their behaviour created the problems of slavery with which the abolitionists grappled.”¹⁵ If Richardson is suggesting that slave rebellions impeded the pace of the abolitionist program, then he has missed the fact that the conservative nature of British abolitionism was primarily a direct reflection of British political and social culture. The general tone of the British antislavery movement would not have been less gradualist had slaves not revolted. Indeed, had slaves not revolted, the pace of the antislavery program might have been even slower than it was. Like Ragatz, however, the bulk of Richardson’s work on slavery history is not concerned with revolt; rather, it focuses on the antagonism that existed between the colonial legislature and the British parliament.

James Walvin, Andrew Lewis, Richard Hart, and Hilary Beckles have made partial inroads into the skepticism of the critics who have rejected Williams’s construct of emancipation from below and into the narrow context in which slave revolts have been traditionally considered. Walvin and others have emphasized how the self-determining slaves made themselves allies of the humanitarians.¹⁶ In one sense, Walvin takes the examination a little further. He is certain that planter hostility to the rebel strengthened the humanitarian argument of the moral evils of the system. Walvin concludes that “slave revolts with their tales of persecution, reasonable slave claims and savage planter repression were grist to the abolitionist mill.”¹⁷ He also explains that “anti-slavery became the most popular political issue in these years.”¹⁸ Abolitionists held thousands of lectures throughout Britain between 1787 and 1833, and crowds thronged to the “town halls, guild halls, music halls, chapels, churches and the Leeds Coloured Cloth Hall.”¹⁹ William Wilberforce was the first to take the lead in the British antislavery movement, which attracted “forces which Wilberforce did not like, could not control and of which he would not approve.”²⁰ Walvin denies that the movement’s leaders established a direct and crucial link between antislavery and slave revolts. He argues that the antislavery struggle was sustained by a vast number of Britons who came to view slavery as an unacceptable evil in an age of social reform.²¹ This focus snatches the initiative from the leaders and establishes a more direct connection between revolts, their outrageous suppression, and the British public. Walvin is convinced that “the slaves themselves were effectively ignored by Wilberforce and other humanitarians.”²² He distrusts the efforts to lodge the slaves’ rebellion in the parliamentary campaign against slavery because, like Richardson, he realizes that the rebels’ radical antislavery methods were contrary to the respectable conservatism of the leading “saints.” What Walvin has perhaps overlooked, however, is that timing and expediency, not policy and principles, were the factors that bound the campaigners and the rebels together. The slaves’ rebellion forced itself upon the attention of the abolitionists. Antislavery campaigners did not enthusiastically champion the rising of the slaves. Walvin believes that “there is a powerful case for arguing that the conduct of the slaves from the late eighteenth century helped shape and direct the debate about black freedom.”²³ He admits, however, that “it is difficult to know what priority to give to black resistance.”²⁴ Walvin’s suggestion for further investigation in this area echoes other claims that a more thorough analysis of slave resistance history is needed, paying particular attention to the dialectic between slave rebellions and antislavery in Britain.”²⁵

A few historians have undertaken to assess slave rebellion within the broader context of the British antislavery movement but have restricted their discussions to chapters or paragraphs within works with other foci or to articles in historical journals. Almost invariably, these brief commentaries have also been limited to the Jamaican slave revolt of 1831–1832. Barry Higman, for example, has commented that “in the political arena in which the legislative decision to abolish slavery was made … the rebellion [the Baptist War] strengthened the hand of the humanitarians and their supporters.”²⁶ Pointing less directly to the abolitionists themselves, Philip Curtin makes a similar but more general observation: “The slave revolt impressed Britons and Jamaicans alike with the difficulty of keeping a people subject against their will.”²⁷ Gad Heuman notes that the Jamaican rebellion has also been called the Christmas Rebellion or Baptist War. It “was a crucial event in the abolition of slavery.”²⁸ W. L. Green makes the bold assertion that “it was the Jamaican rebellion, not the new vigour of the anti-slavery movement that proved a decisive factor in precipitating emancipation.”²⁹ Mary Turner is also convinced that the fear of rebellion fueled abolitionist conviction of the need for immediate abolition but that this conviction was cushioned by the persecution of sectarian missionaries.³⁰ While these observations are useful, abolitionists’ extensive commentary upon and utilization of slave revolts makes it mandatory to devote more than cursory attention to the subject.

The polemical nature of the state of the debate concerning the connection between slave revolts and British antislavery is aggravated by the separate esteem that has been reserved for the persecution of the missionaries and the relative value of that persecution to antislavery. The angle from which missionary persecution has been assessed diminishes the influence of slave revolts on antislavery. Philip Wright calls the elevation of the missionary factor the act of “stealing the martyr’s crown”³¹ but makes no attempt at reconsidering this one-sided view. Northcott reinforces abolitionist Henry Brougham’s opinion that there is no fault in christening John Smith the martyr of Demerara.³² Indeed, the abolitionists did make deliberate and generous use of the persecution of missionaries in the West Indian slave plantations. It must not be overlooked, however, that the abolitionists saw missionary persecution as one part of a much larger question. Brougham himself declared in 1824 that “no man can cast his eye upon this trial [The Trial of the Reverend John Smith] without perceiving that it was intended to bring an issue between the system of the slave law and the instruction of the Negroes.”³³ The abolitionists’ perception of the missionaries’ role in the slave rebellions needs to be reassessed and is examined to some extent in this book.

The major problem with the efforts made to date to integrate slave revolts and the British antislavery movement is that the angles from which these efforts have been made have been faulty. The focus has been oriented too narrowly toward assessing the value of slave revolts in the achievement of emancipation. This objective, while useful, has limited the historical research and squandered the opportunity to assess how the abolitionists’ slave rebellion discussions emerged and reflected various dimensions. It was not until 1830 that abolitionists called for the immediate emancipation of slave children and not until 1832 that they first moved for general, complete, and immediate abolition of slavery. Obviously, straining the research in this direction would be productive of very little in the way of integrating the themes of slave revolt and the British antislavery movement. Yet, there is some merit in this approach, and it should not be discarded altogether. When activists finally came to the decision that slavery ought to be abolished, rebellions acted to strengthen their resolve. Still, it is necessary to trace and investigate not merely the final outcome of the association between antislavery in Britain and slave rebellion in the colonies but also the form of that association itself. Historical explorations tracing cause and effect relationships are indeed interesting and often rewarding. It is equally the task of the historian, however, to investigate and analyze historical discourses shaped in less dramatic modes by those who have made history.

Another hindrance to understanding the relationship between antislavery in Britain and slave revolts in the colonies has been the attention given to the incongruent conservative reform methods of the former and the violent, destructive activities of the latter. This fundamental difference between the “saints” and the rebels should be regarded not as a stumbling block but as one of the factors that abolitionists absorbed despite their aversion to mass popular rising. Abolitionists denounced and lamented slave revolts but could not wash their hands clean of the rebels. The slaves seemed to make a point of identifying their overt resistance with the debates taking place in Britain on their behalf by timing their risings to follow each wave of abolitionist activity. Abolitionists succumbed to the pressure that rebellious slaves exerted on the metropolitan campaign in ways that were most advantageous to their movement. Renouncing violence as a means of effecting social change in the plantation societies was neither the final nor the most significant abolitionist pronouncement on slave rebellions. In fact, rebels forced British abolitionists to adopt some of the very revolutionary ideas that repulsed them. The image of the suppliant slave featured on a ceramic medallion by Josiah Wedgwood also promotes the notion that abolitionists essentially saw slaves as suffering objects to be pitied rather than individuals from whom they could draw materials for their attack on slavery.³⁴ Consequently, it seems impossible that activists could have ever contemplated a campaign against slavery in which they could ad...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: AGITATING THE QUESTION
• 3: THE OTHER SIDE OF SLAVE REVOLTS
• 4: LOADED WITH DEADLY EVIDENCE
• 5: APOCALYPTIC WARNING
• 6: CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY