British Slavery and its Abolition, 1823-1838

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BRITISH SLAVERY AND ITS ABOLITION

1823-1838

BY

WILLIAM LAW MATHIESON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

PREFACE 4

INTRODUCTION 5

CHAPTER I—SLAVERY 22

CHAPTER II—AMELIORATION, 1823–1826 68

CHAPTER III—ABOLITION, 1826–1833 105

CHAPTER IV—THE APPRENTICESHIP, 1833–1838 138

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 177

PREFACE

THIS is a study of British slavery and a narrative of the movement for its abolition, which began in 1823, succeeded partially in 1833, when slavery was said to have been abolished, and completely in 1838; and I hope the work may suffice in some measure to fill a gap in our historical literature.

Greater interest has naturally been taken in American than in British slavery, for it was far more extensive, lasted some thirty years longer, and culminated in a great civil war. Nevertheless, it is surprising that no adequate account of slavery in our West Indian colonies has been published—so far as I know—since its abolition. The subject is treated by Sir Harry Johnston in The Negro in the New World; but only a small part of his comprehensive survey is given to the British negro, at all events as a slave, and much of that is occupied with illustrations. A detailed examination may, therefore, be welcome. The materials are ample; but, with one or two exceptions, they are the work of partisans, and consequently are most difficult to reconcile. It is significant that a Committee of the House of Lords, which was appointed in 1832 to inquire into the actual condition and treatment of the slaves, found the evidence of the most contradictory description, and did not venture to submit to the House any definitive opinion. The chapter on slavery was composed three years ago, and has since been enlarged and almost wholly rewritten. One result of this revision has been the introduction of foreign systems, and especially the Spanish system, as a standard of comparison.

In tracing the movement which always aimed at abolition, but the immediate object of which was at first amelioration, I have relied mainly on the despatches and reports which were printed from year to year as Parliamentary Papers. These are cited in the notes as P.P., with the date and number of the volume. A slight extension of the work has been deemed advisable in order to bring to a conclusion the controversy between the Jamaica Assembly and Parliament. In these last few pages the reader will see something of the effects of emancipation; but I hope to deal with that subject in another book.

The inquiry is confined to the West Indian group of colonies, including British Guiana and British Honduras. There were two other slave-holding colonies, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope; but to have dealt with these—remote in situation and the latter also in character—would, I think, have impaired the unity and coherence of the work.

Acknowledgment is due to Mr. Travers Buxton, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, for the loan of an important volume.

To the Carnegie Trustees for the Scottish Universities, who have assisted me in publishing, I tender my cordial thanks.

EDINBURGH,

September 1926.

INTRODUCTION

SLAVE labour in the West Indies was employed mainly in the production of sugar; and, before we examine the condition of the British slaves, it will be well to review the development of an industry in which about two-thirds of them were engaged.

The colonial system which was established or consolidated by the English Navigation Act of 1660 was based on the principle that dependencies must contribute to the cost of their defence, partly by employing only British ships and seamen, and partly by confining their commerce to British ports. The latter method could be applied only with obvious limitations to most of the North American colonies, which, with a European population and a temperate climate, were capable of being rivals as well as customers; and it was only in the West Indies that the parent State could venture to go the whole length of its double monopoly, engrossing commodities which she did not herself produce and exchanging for them the products of her own furnaces and looms. Slavery, recruited from Africa and devoted exclusively to the cultivation of tropical plants, was lauded by a writer of 1745 as the great pillar and support of the British plantation trade, because it enriched the mother country without exposing it to the drain of emigration or the stress of competition, and was the means of maintaining a large portion of the mercantile marine.{1} In the seventeenth century Sir Josiah Child had computed that every Englishman who went to the West Indian colonies employed on an average eight or ten negroes and that the feeding, clothing, and equipping of this group employed four men at home, whereas, if ten Englishmen emigrated to New England, their addition to exports and imports would not employ one man.{2} By far the greatest export of these colonies was sugar, the value exported in 1787 being over £2,600,000, whilst that of cotton, which came next on the list, was only about £327,000.{3} The planter had not only to send all his sugar to Great Britain, but, in consequence of a prohibitory duty on refined sugar, had to send it raw; and this was a great hardship, because the buildings and apparatus required for the making of raw sugar would, with a trifling addition, have sufficed for the process of refining; and sugar, when shipped raw, had to be drained on the voyage at a loss which was estimated at one-seventh or one-eighth of the cargo.{4} Indigo and cocoa had once been cultivated with great success in Jamaica; but, not being in accord with our commercial policy, they were ruthlessly discouraged; and coffee languished under a similar proscription till 1783.{5}

An equivalent was indeed allowed for these restraints, protection under this system being the reward of subjection; but it was more specious than solid. British plantation sugar had a monopoly of the home market; and this would have been a valuable concession if the demand had been equal to the supply. The consumption of sugar, expanding with the use of tea—which rose from 800,000 lbs. in 1730 to 4,400,000 lbs. in 1774—enormously increased throughout the eighteenth century; but it failed to keep pace with the extension of British rule in the West Indies. If Barbados, Jamaica, and the other islands we held before the peace of 1763 had not been added to then and later, the consumption and the supply would have balanced at 140,000 tons in 1823{6}; but in point of fact there was always a surplus for exportation; and, as foreigners would not have come to us for sugar if they could have got it cheaper elsewhere, the planter had no real protection—his profit being determined in the open and not in the exclusive market.

The financial condition of the colonies linked them even more closely than their commerce to the mother country. Sugar-planting was an attractive but extremely hazardous speculation; and it was said that of those who engaged in the West Indian lottery not one in fifty drew a prize. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, conflagrations, insects, and epidemics upset the best laid plans{7}; and the quality of sugar varied greatly, not only with the fertility of the soil, which was said to range in value from £5 to £150, but with the degree of care and skill in its manufacture. We are told indeed that under bad management the fairest fruits of a cane-field might be rendered a mass of thick, slimy, dark, sour, cloddy, unprofitable, unmarketable substance.{8} A good many of the proprietors had inherited their estates, and some of these were men of great wealth, such as Lords Darlington, Romney, Harewood, and Holland; but most of the plantations were owned by those who had purchased or formed them. In either case the average outlay was estimated at about £30,000; and a new plantation, or one which had been allowed to fall into decay, did not become remunerative in less than seven years.{9} A large proportion of the capital was usually advanced by the merchant who was to dispose of the sugar, to purchase supplies and manage the freight and insurance, and the great fortunes amassed in the West Indian trade were the fruits of this practice, which yielded a profit, including both interest and commission, of 12 to 20 per cent.{10} Almost all our sugar colonies, wrote a planter in 1733, are over head and ears in debt and the merest slaves imaginable to their creditors.{11} It frequently happened that, when a stage of cultivation had been reached which promised large returns, the merchant, on the pretext of some emergency, called up his loan and, by forcing the property into the market when still undeveloped, secured it for himself at a low price; or the planter was unskilful or unfortunate, and the creditor had to take over an unprofitable estate. {12}In no part of the earth, said a writer of 1830, is the transition from opulence to indigence and ruin a twentieth part so common as it confessedly is among the proprietors of the sugar colonies.{13} It appears from a report of the Assembly that in 1791 there were 769 sugar plantations in Jamaica. Of these 47 had been recently established, but of the remainder only 451 were retained by those, or their descendants, who had held them in 1772. During the same period of twenty years 177 estates had been sold in payment of debts, 92 were still in the hands of creditors, and 55 had been abandoned. A speaker in the House of Commons in 1824 said that the state of the West Indian colonies was more deplorable than that of the most wretched and inhospitable parts of the world. Everywhere else, even in Lapland, prosperity was the rule and distress the exception.{14}

The greatest difficulty experienced by the planters was that of foreign competition, and not till nearly the end of the eighteenth century, and then only by a stroke of good fortune, was it temporarily overcome. The Spaniards, who had discovered and appropriated the West Indies, were of little account in this industry, and our only serious rivals were the French. Martinique and Guadeloupe, their oldest islands, came into their possession in 1635, some ten years after Sir Thomas Warner had occupied Barbados;{15} they acquired Grenada about the time of Cromwell’s conquest of Jamaica in 1655; and their settlement in western Santo Domingo was recognised by Spain at the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. From this period, or a little later, their output of sugar rapidly increased; and there were reasons why this development should be resented as well as envied in Britain. The syrup drained from raw sugar and known as molasses had once been almost useless to the French planter; for the rum that might have been made of it was excluded from France as prejudicial to the consumption of brandy. He now exported his molasses to New England, selling for something what was formerly worth nothing;{16} and this something was the lumber, provisions, and horses which ought to have been reserved for our own sugar islands and which, it was said, he could not have obtained elsewhere. Good wholesome rum was of course to be had only from the British planter. French rum was bad; American rum, made from French molasses and popularly known as Kill-Devil, was worse; and to prohibit both would save the lives of many hundreds of poor wretches.{17} Attention was drawn to the matter in a sheaf of pamphlets published in London, but some of them written in the West Indies. To debar our rivals from the American market would be to touch their vitals, or at the least to take off their chariot wheels and make them drive heavily; and such was their present rate of progress that they were cutting us out from all foreign markets.{18}

Parliament was easily induced to restrict the foreign trade of New England; but neither the Molasses Act of 1733 nor the acquisition by Great Britain of new islands in 1763 had any effect in crippling the sugar trade of France. It expanded on all sides, but nowhere so rapidly as in St. Domingue,{19} which became the garden of the West Indies, and the richest sugar colony in the world. In the short space of ten years, 1782–1792, the number of slaves employed on its plantations was believed to have almost doubled.{20} Historians dwell with enthusiasm on its vast warehouses and crowded harbours; and a British army doctor who visited the colony in 1797 thus describes its appearance at the time of the French Revolution: The plains were loaded with sugar, rows of limes and citrons forming the fences of the canes; the sides of the hills were clothed with coffee;{21} canals and other well-constructed aqueducts brought bounteous streams to the estates; excellent roads led to the towns and dwellings; plantations of provisions, of cotton and indigo; elegant houses and substantial sugar-works; orange groves and orchards of other delicious fruits; neatly enclosed gardens, ornamental hedges and improved grounds appeared on every quarter to grace the magnificent scenery.{22} In 1787 the total value of West Indian produce exported to Europe was £14,000,000; and of this sum the French islands contributed a half and the British islands only from a quarter to a third.{23}

It has often been remarked that cultivation by slaves is wasteful, because, owing to their lack of intelligence, and interest and the difficulty of teaching them anything new, it must dispense with a rotation of crops, and consequently exhausts the soil. The smaller British islands having reached this stage, their planters had no new land to exploit. In Jamaica the best, or at least the most accessible, lands were fully occupied; and, as compared with this island, St. Domingue was not only much more fertile but derived prodigious benefit from a system of irrigation which was rarely practicable in our colonies. It appears from evidence submitted to a committee of the Privy Council in 1789 that the average yield of an acre of sugar-canes in St. Domingue was 38 cwts., whilst the best lands in Jamaica yielded only 12.{24} But industry, thrift, and foresight had co-operated with nature. A writer of the period refers to our sugar colonies as rapid settlements precipitately pushed forward by the force of British capital;{25} and Smith compares them unfavourably with the sugar colonies of France which had developed through surplus wealth accumulated by good management and employed in raising a still greater produce.{26} The French planters had the reputation of being more frugal and hard-working than the British; and, as the Government encouraged new settlers by offering land, implements, and even loans of money, they could muster twice the number of European hands.{27} Lighter customs duties, and especially the permission to manufacture and export refined sugar, were also advantageous to the French colonists; and since 1726 they had had—what our people greatly coveted—a direct trade to southern Europe.{28}

In 1787 St. Domingue alone employed more shipping and produced more sugar—not to mention coffee—than the whole group of British islands; and, except for one flaw in its social structure, there was nothing to foreshadow its impending collapse. There were 30,000 Europeans in the colony and about 24,000 free people of colour; but the slave population had increased to nearly half a million; and all these three classes, but especially the last, had reason to welcome the French Revolution with its gospel of the Rights of Man. First the planters rose against the Royalist Government; then the coloured people, when the Assembly at Paris had decreed their admission to full citizenship, rose against the whites; and finally the negroes, called in by one or other of the two parties, overwhelmed both. In less than two months, 2000 Europeans had been massacred; hundreds of plantations had been laid waste; and the world’s supply of sugar was suddenly reduced by over a million hundredweights.{29}

The naval supremacy of Great Britain completed the advantage she had gained from the destruction of St. Domingue; for the effect of the war which broke out in 1793 was to cut off from Europe the remaining French colonies. During this year and the next the price of sugar in Mark Lane rose from 32s. a cwt. to 58s., and it then steadily advanced till at the end of 1798 it touched the unprecedented level of 87s.{30} No efforts were spared to overtake the growing demand. Jamaica increased its output by nearly a half, partly by the hiring of additional slave labour, but mainly owing to the introduction of the Bourbon or Otaheite cane, which yielded, not indeed the best quality of sugar, but a quality which was better adapted to inferior or exhausted land.{31} Several sugar islands were captured and so rapidly cleared and planted that in two years the annual British importation of negroes rose from 25,000 to 57,000. If this activity had been confined to the British dominions, it might not have overshot the mark; but Cuba, had entered the lists as a sugar producer since 1789, when its ports were opened to the foreign slave trade; and in 1805 its exportation equalled that of St. Domingue before the French Revolution.{32} Moreover, the Americans were importing the colonial produce of our enemies, France, Spain, and Holland, and re-exporting it under cover of their neutral flag to Europe, where it undersold the produce of our colonies on account of its immunity from war obstacles and risks. Their own shipping would have been quite inadequate for this purpose; but all French and Dutch and nearly all Spanish merchantmen, not required as coasters or privateers, had been sold for the duration of the war to American owners.{33}

At the close of the eighteenth century the cultivation of sugar throughout the West Indies had been pushed to an extent which far exceeded the level of consumption in Europe; and about the middle of 1799 the market collapsed, the maximum price for 1800–1801 being no more than 50s. and the minimum as low as 28s. In Hamburg, which was the principal mart for British sugar, no fewer than eighty-three houses failed in four months; and their correspondents in this country were so hard hit that Parliament voted a loan of half a million to the West Indian merchants of Liverpool.{34}

The prosperity so long hoped for by the planters had gone almost as suddenly as it came. For several years before 1800 they had been making an average profit of 10 per cent. Now many of them were working at a loss. In 1804 a committee of the Jamaica Assembly reported in reference to the distress then prevalent in the island that a faithful detail would have the character of a frightful caricature. Three years later, they declared that about a fourth of the sugar estates had been either abandoned or compulsorily sold; and in 1813 a prominent West Indian remarked that during the previous twenty years there were few sugar estates which had not changed hands.{35}

Lower duties, a bounty on exportation, and a blockade of hostile colonies were the remedies most favoured by the planters; but friends and critics were at one in exhorting them to restrict their cultivation of sugar and, by breeding cattle and growing more food, to withdraw as much as possible from a falling market. The same advice had been tendered to them during one of their periodical crises in 1748; and the objections then made to it had lost none of their force: that seven-eighths of the planters were not only in debt but dependent on credit: that the merchants, if not reimbursed by the usual consignments of sugar, would sell them up or at least cut off supplies; that any scheme of restriction could be enforced only by general agreement, and that this was impossible, most of the islands being far apart, and some not even in communication with each other, except through Great Britain.{36} All the witnesses examined by a Committee of the House of Commons in 1807 agreed that the scrapping of sugar-works and the necessity, where the negroes did not grow their own food, of supporting them during the process of transition, were insuperable obstacles to the diversion of canelands, which were not suited to other tropical products, and, if turned into pasture, would yield only a small supply of very bad grass; and one witness declared that the planters would probably be ruined if they continued the production of sugar and inevitably if they gave it up.{37}

The cloud of perennial ruin which encompassed the British sugar industry was intensified by the slave trade, the destructive character of which had become apparent to some even of the planters. The purchase of slaves was a highly speculative business, and the risks were greater in the West Indian than in the African market; for, whilst the importer lost on an average about 17 per cent. of his stock before sale, the planter had to reckon with a loss of 33 per cent. in the process of what was called seasoning. The negroes had never been accustomed to such regular and protracted toil as was exacted on sugar plantations; and their ability to stand the training was usually impaired by mental depression and the effects of their hardships before embarkation and during the voyage. Most of them suffered from some form of venereal disease which, owing to the means adopted for a temporary cure, often proved fatal. Even the jobber, who purchased with a view to forming a picked gang for hiring out to planters, and who, it seems, was frequently a medical man, lost many of his hands. When a slave-ship came into port, its occupants were made up for sale, which meant that their skins were rubbed with oil and their sores, cuts, and bruises closed with mercurial ointments and repellent drugs; and these precautions must have proved ample when, as often happened, they were disposed of by scramble. According to this method, the slaves were lined up for inspection—males on the main-deck, females on the quarter-deck; and, the vessel having previously been darkened by awnings, a gun was fired to intimate that the market was open. A crowd of people then rushed frantically on board, and each buyer, having seized upon the objects of his choice, encircled them with cords or handkerchiefs bearing his name. This violent onslaught in a confined space proved so terrifying to its victims that they had been known to jump overboard; and it became more usual to land the slaves and expose them in a yard. The refuse. consisting of the old and unfit, were put up to auction or allowed to die in the streets. Sometimes, of course, the planter was fortunate enough to get good value for his money; but in that case he was confronted with a new series of risks. Negroes torn from the African jungle were a less tractable and more superstitious race than those known as creoles, who had been born in the West Indies. The mutinies and revolts, not infrequent in our colonies, invariably originated in this class, which was also peculiarly susceptible to the influence of obeah-men or sorcerers. Vast numbers, it was said, languish and die when they believe themselves bewitched. If the victim did not succumb to terror, the sorcerer, in order to save his reputation, frequently resorted to poison;{38} and a Jamaica planter declared that the practice of obeah had deprived him of about a hundred slaves in fifteen years.

Under such conditions it may be supposed that the planters promoted to the utmost the natural increase of their slaves and availed themselves as little as possible of African recruits; but breeding could not be attractive where estates so frequently changed hands; and those who adopted this policy found it very difficult to carry out. Of the negroes imported two-thirds were always males; and the women, being mostly prostitutes, were little disposed to rear or indeed—if they could prevent it—to have children. The ignorance of negro midwives often proved fatal to both mother and child; and the loss of infants, especially within two weeks after birth, was great beyond what can be imagined. Thus the average planter was never long out of the slave-market, particularly as he was encouraged to purchase on a credit of twelve or eighteen months; and the scramble bore witness to the urgency of his needs. Long declared in 1774 that the buying of slaves was the most chargeable Article on estates, and that the debts incurred to make these inconsiderate purchases were mainly responsible for financial distress; and he even suggested that the landing of negroes, except for re-exportation, should be stopped by a prohibitive duty for four or five years. The same proposal was made in 1790 by Beckford, also a planter, who said he was convinced that, of the astonishing numbers of judgments obtained by creditors in Jamaica, at least six out of seven originated in a hasty and improvident purchase of slaves. Finally, the slave trade was the main cause of that over-production which was at all times the undoing of the planter; and, as the British traffic was not by any means confined to our own colonies,{39} it injured him in yet another way by stimulating the competition of foreign-grown sugar.{40}

Without the slave trade, there could, of course, have been no negro slavery in the West Indies; but the English slave trade was older than English slavery, and with such zeal was it prosecuted that before long we were not only supplying the foreign market but glutting our own. This aspect of the case was forcibly presented by the Council and Assembly of Antigua in a protest to Parliament against the malignant feelings which had been excited against the slave-owners by demagogues and interested persons in coalition with the canting pretenders of the day to religion. They pointed out that, when Queen Elizabeth permitted her subjects to engage in the slave trade, and personally took a share in it, no English transatlantic settlement had yet been formed; and they showed that the colonial legislatures had more than once tried to check excessive and indiscriminate importation. South Carolina did so in 1760; but the Act was annulled, the Governor reprimanded, and his indiscretion exposed in a circular despatch. In 1765 a Bill to limit the bringing in of Africans was read twice in the Assembly of Jamaica and was dropped only when the Governor intimated that he would be unable to give it his assent. In 1774 two Bills for this purpose were actually passed. Bristol and Liverpool petitioned against them; and Lord Dartmouth, the President of the Board of Trade, declared in answer to a remonstrance from the agent for Jamaica, We cannot allow the colonies to check or discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation.{41} Dartmouth, it may be added, was a prominent Evangelical, nicknamed The Psalm-Singer, and extolled by the poet Cowper as one who wears a coronet and prays.

Mischievous, however, as was the operation of the slave trade, there was an argument for its continuance more plausible than any that could be urged against it; for there had always been more deaths than births amongst the negroes, and, but for importation, the planters would have been unable to keep up, much less to increase, their supply of labour. Wilberforce, who in 1787 opened his campaign for abolition, had of course to meet this objection; and he met it by asserting that the vacuum filled by the slave trade was of its own making; that the negroes were ill-treated and over-worked just because they could so easily be replaced; that, if this resource were cut off, they would rise in the social as well as in the numerical scale; and he looked forward to a time, however distant, when the abolition of the slave trade would be followed by the abolition of slavery.{42} It was no part of his policy to complicate the former question by anticipating the latter; but tactics more comprehensive, though at the same time more dilatory and cautious, were advocated by a statesman in sympathy with his views. Burke, who supported the movement till it was vitiated in his eyes by the influence of the French Revolution, would have preferred not to dissociate the two questions, and thought that a policy, not indeed of abolition but of restriction, should be applied to both. He held what proved to be the mistaken idea that the British trade could not be wholly suppressed so long as slavery existed, and consequently that its real source was not in the place it was begun at but at the place of its final destination; and, as the negroes were obviously not ripe for emancipation, he was fully convinced that the cause of humanity would be far more benefited by the continuance of the trade and servitude, regulated and reformed, than by the total destruction of both or either. It appeared that he had gone into the question long before it attracted public attention; and, when immediate abolition was defeated in 1792, he published a scheme which he had drawn up nearly twelve years earlier. Slave traders were to be licensed; the dimensions of their ships and the proportion of negroes to tonnage were to be registered; and the seeds of industry and civilisation were to be sown in Africa. Churches, schools, and hospitals were to be built; European artisans were to take apprentices from the natives; and no negro was to be purchased who was seriously ill or over thirty-five years of age or able to read. In the West Indies the Attorney-General of each colony was to be appointed Protector of the Negroes; he was to be assisted by local inspectors; and a record of his proceedings was to be transmitted by the Governor to the Secretary of State. Districts were to be formed, each with a church and school. Negroes were to be secured in the possession of their property and as fully protected as whites in life and limb; they were not to work on Saturday afternoon or Sunday; flogging, if it exceeded thirteen stripes, was to be inflicted only by order of a magistrate; marriage for those in good health, and church-going, were to be compulsory; no negro, if he was married or had lived for twelve months on a plantation, was to be sold apart from the estate; married couples of a certain age and service were to have first one day, and then two days, in the week to themselves; every slave of thirty years and over, who had three lawful children and whose character was attested by a clergyman or other religious teacher, was to be entitled to purchase his freedom and that of his wife and family at rates fixed by two Justices of the Peace; and the Protector was to be empowered to redeem any negro whom he considered to be of more than ordinary intelligence and technical skill, and to sell to another master any negro whom he knew to be ill-used.{43}

Burke published