5 - Resettlement in the European West Indies, to 1865

Summary

Few historians have noticed that, from the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies (1834) to the same milestone in the United States (1865), the planters of the British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guiana made repeated attempts to entice over the black Americans whose white rulers seemed so eager to expel them. The planters’ offer divided abolitionists, who heard echoes of the prejudicial premise of Liberian colonization, but who also saw an opportunity to boost the free-labor British Caribbean. The 2,000 black Americans and Canadians who immigrated to the British West Indies at the turn of the 1840s found many things to commend in their new home – and many things to condemn. Such ambivalence about the entire venture was shared by the British government, which forever feared that colonial canvassers would jeopardize Anglo-American relations by accepting fugitive slaves. Latterly joined by the other European powers with West Indian colonies, namely, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark, Britain approached the matter gingerly during the American Civil War, when the prospect of benefiting from wholesale emancipation, but under the fraught auspices of the US military, offered unimaginable risk and reward.