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Slaves and Peasants in the Era of Emancipation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2020

Padraic X. Scanlan Open the ORCID record for Padraic X. Scanlan [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

From the middle of the eighteenth century until the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as “peasants” was a commonplace among both antislavery and proslavery writers and activists in Britain. Slaveholders, faced with antislavery attacks, argued that the people they claimed to own were not an exploited labor force but a contented peasantry. Abolitionists expressed the hope that after emancipation, freedpeople would become peasants. Yet the “peasants” invoked in these debates were not smallholders or tenant farmers but plantation laborers, either held in bondage or paid low wages. British abolitionists promoted institutions and ideas invented by slaveholders to defend the plantation system. The idea of a servile and grateful “peasant” plantation labor force became, for British abolitionists, a justification for the “civilization” and subordination of freedpeople.

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Journal of British Studies , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 495 - 520
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2020

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References

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14 See Thomas C. Holt, “The Essence of the Contract: The Articulation of Race, Gender, and Political Economy in British Emancipation Policy, 1838–1866,” in Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, by Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott (Chapel Hill, 2000), 33–59; Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, 1992).

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17 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. For a more nuanced account of the relationship between emerging capitalism and antislavery, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975). For a survey of this rich historiography, see Padraic X. Scanlan, “Blood, Money and Endless Paper: Slavery and Capital in British Imperial History,” History Compass 14, no. 5 (2016): 218–30.

18 For a discussion of this phenomenon in the context the ideology of race in the United States, see Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 1, no. 181 (1990): 95–118.

19 See, notably, Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, 2016); John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Joseph Yannielli, “Mo Tappan: Transnational Abolitionism and the Making of a Mende-American Town,” Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 2 (2018): 190–214; Manisha Sinha, “Guest Editor's Introduction: The Future of Abolition Studies,” Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 2 (2018): 187–89; Manisha Sinha, “The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism: The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, by David Brion Davis,” American Historical Review 124, no. 1 (2019): 144–63. Mia Bay's review of Stauffer's work has helped to put my own arguments into focus. See Mia Bay, “Abolition and the Color Line,” American Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2003): 103–12.

20 Sinha, Slave's Cause, 3.

21 Sinha, “The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism,” 160.

22 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 4th ed. (Dublin, 1791), 357.

23 Christopher L. Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 273–306; Padraic X. Scanlan, Freedom's Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (New Haven, 2017); Padraic X. Scanlan, “The Colonial Rebirth of British Anti-Slavery: The Liberated African Villages of Sierra Leone, 1815–1824,” American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (2016): 1085–1113.

24 House of Commons Debates, 28 February 1805, vol. 3, col. 673.

25 Charles Buxton, ed., Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Baronet: With Selections from His Correspondence (London, 1848), 104–5.

26 “Mr. Burge's Speech, at a General Meeting of the West-India Body,” in The Speeches of Mr. Barrett and Mr. Burge at a General Meeting of Planters, Merchants, and Others, Interested in the West-India Colonies, Assembled at the Thatched-House Tavern on the 18th of May, 1833 (London, 1833), 67–114, at 97.

27 See Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, 2000).

28 Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807 (Cambridge, 2013); Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 9–84.

29 On the era of amelioration, see Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834; Robert E. Luster, The Amelioration of the Slaves in the British Empire, 1790–1833 (New York, 1995); Melanie J. Newton, “The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape: Inequality, Gender, and British Slave Amelioration, 1823–1834,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no. 3 (2005): 583–610; Christa Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Charlottesville, 2014); Caroline Quarrier Spence, “Ameliorating Empire: Slavery and Protection in the British Colonies, 1783–1865” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014); Trevor Burnard and Kit Candlin, “Sir John Gladstone and the Debate over the Amelioration of Slavery in the British West Indies in the 1820s,” Journal of British Studies 57, no. 4 (2018): 760–82.

30 On amelioration, gender, and, childbearing, see especially Katherine Paugh, “The Politics of Childbearing in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World during the Age of Abolition, 1776–1838,” Past and Present, no. 221 (2013): 119–60.

31 Samuel Martin, An Essay upon Plantership, 4th ed. (Antigua, 1765), viii.

32 Martin, An Essay upon Plantership, 3–4.

33 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1986), 48.

34 James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, a Poem: In Four Books (London, 1764). The poem has perhaps had a larger impact in studies of eighteenth-century Caribbean literature. See John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (London, 2000); Cristobal Silva, “Georgic Fantasies: James Grainger and the Poetry of Colonial Dislocation,” ELH 83, no. 1 (2016): 127–56.

35 Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 23.

36 Clare Midgley, “Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic Base of British Anti-slavery Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 17, no. 3 (1996): 137–62, at 141.

37 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica: Or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island, With Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, vol. 1 (London, 1774), 402.

38 Long, The History of Jamaica, vol. 1, 436.

39 Matthew Wyman-McCarthy, “Perceptions of French and Spanish Slave Law in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of British Studies 57, no. 1 (2018): 29–52; Christopher L. Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 273–306.

40 Spence, “Ameliorating Empire,” 138–92.

41 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, with d'Alembert's Analysis of the Work, trans. Thomas Nugent, new ed., vol. 1 (London, 1878), 240.

42 Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 51.

43 Climatological thinking also applied to schemes for free black settlers across the British Empire and in the United States. See Ikuko Asaka, Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation (Durham, 2017).

44 Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland, 1776–1779, ed. Henry Morley (London, 1897), 181.

45 Young, 165–66.

46 See Brown, “Empire without Slaves”; Christopher L. Brown, “From Slaves to Subjects: Envisioning an Empire without Slavery, 1772–1834,” in Black Experience and the Empire, ed. Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins (Oxford, 2004), 111–40.

47 James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London, 1784), 290.

48 Ramsay, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, 292–93.

49 Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 4th ed., 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1806), 2:391.

50 See Padraic X. Scanlan, “The Rewards of Their Exertions: Prize Money and British Abolitionism in Sierra Leone, 1808–1823,” Past and Present, no. 225 (2014): 113–42; Padraic X. Scanlan, Freedom's Debtors.

51 J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834; Robert E. Luster, The Amelioration of the Slaves; Paugh, “Politics of Childbearing,” 119–60.

52 James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (London, 1825); William Clark, Ten Views in the Island of Antigua: In Which Are Represented the Process of Sugar Making, and the Employment of the Negroes in the Field, Boiling-House, and Distillery (London, 1823).

53 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire (Oxford, 2018), 61.

54 Sarah Thomas, “Envisaging a Future for Slavery: Agostino Brunias and the Imperial Politics of Labor and Reproduction,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 52, no. 1 (2018): 115–33, at 115–16; See also Paugh, “Politics of Childbearing”; Burnard and Candlin, “Sir John Gladstone and the Debate.”

55 Thomas Clarkson, A Summary View of the Slave Trade and of the Probable Consequences of Its Abolition (London, 1787).

56 Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council Appointed for the Consideration of All Matters Relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations; Submitting to His Majesty's Consideration the Evidence and Information They Have Collected in Consequence of His Majesty's Order in Council, Dated the 11th of February 1788, Concerning the Present State of the Trade to Africa, and Particularly the Trade in Slaves; and Concerning the Effects and Consequences of This Trade, as Well in Africa and the West Indies, as to the General Commerce of This Kingdom (London, 1789), pts. III, Montserrat, A. no. 39.

57 Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council […] [1789], pt. III, Barbados, A. No. 2.

58 Grainger, Sugar-Cane, 169–70.

59 Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, 2:369–70.

60 Edwards, 4:15.

61 Edwards, 2:237.

62 Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York, 2001), 468.

63 George Crabbe, The Village: A Poem. In Two Books (London, 1783), 13–14.

64 James Norris Brewer, Some Thoughts on the Present State of the English Peasantry: Written in Consequence of Mr. Whitbread's Motion, in the House of Commons, Feb. 19, 1807; Relative to an Amendment of the Poor Laws (London, 1807), 3, 7.

65 Robert Montgomery, Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Montgomery, with Intr. Remarks and an Appendix (London, 1835), 296–97.

66 Henry Bolingbroke, A Voyage to the Demerary: Containing a Statistical Account of the Settlements There, and of Those on the Essequebo, the Berbice, and Other Contiguous Rivers of Guyana (London, 1809), 48.

67 See Christopher M. Florio, “From Poverty to Slavery: Abolitionists, Overseers, and the Global Struggle for Labor in India,” Journal of American History 102, no. 4 (2016): 1005–24.

68 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).

69 Long, History of Jamaica, 25.

70 John Riland, Memoirs of a West-India Planter (London, 1827), 80.

71 David Brion Davis, “Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (1987): 797–812, at 803.

72 The Brookes print was reproduced as a plate in Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, vol. 2 (London, 1808). The Wedgwood cameo was widely reproduced; see comments on its origins in Eliza Meteyard, Wedgwood and His Works: A Selection of His Plaques, Cameos, Medallions, Vases, Etc. from the Design of Flaxman and Others (London, 1873), 64–65.

73 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997).

74 William Beckford, Remarks Upon the Situation of Negroes in Jamaica: Impartially Made from a Local Experience of Nearly Thirteen Years in That Island (London, 1788), 56.

75 Thomas Clarkson, Negro Slavery: The Argument “That the Colonial Slaves Are Better Off than the British Peasantry,” Answered, From the Jamaica Royal Gazette of June 21, 1823 (London, 1823), 99.

76 Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 147.

77 Henry Whiteley, Three Months in Jamaica, in 1832: Comprising a Residence of Seven Weeks on a Sugar Plantation (London, 1833), 22.

78 Richard Oastler, “Slavery in Yorkshire,” Leeds Mercury, 30 October 1830.

79 Davis, Problem of Slavery, 357–85; Davis, “Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony.”

80 James Kirke Paulding, Slavery in the United States (New York, 1836), 265.

81 Henry Nelson Coleridge, Six Months in the West Indies, in 1825 (London, 1826), 313.

82 Coleridge, 319.

83 Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (London, 1834), 62, http://archive.org/details/journalofwestind00lewiuoft.

84 William Wilberforce, An Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies (London, 1823), 26.

85 Mintz, “Jamaican Internal Marketing Pattern”; Mintz and Hall, Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System; Craton, “Proto-Peasant Revolts?”

86 For a broad discussion, see Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana, 1996).

87 Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, 3:66.

88 Hilary Beckles, “An Economic Life of Their Own: Slaves as Commodity Producers and Distributors in Barbados,” in The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (London, 1991), 31–47.

89 Tony Weis, “The Rise, Fall and Future of the Jamaican Peasantry,” Journal of Peasant Studies 33, no. 1 (2006): 61–88, at 61.

90 Testimony of William Taylor, 6 June 1832, Great Britain, House of Commons, 1831–32 (721), Report from Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery throughout the British Dominions: With the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, Reports of Committees (London, 1833), 8.

91 Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, 2:162.

92 Henry Brougham, An Inquiry Into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers: In Two Volumes (Edinburgh, 1803), 2:414.

93 Report from Retreat Estate, Henry Blake, Special Magistrate, 17 March 1835, Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, 1835 (278–II), Papers Presented to Parliament, by His Majesty's Command, in Explanation of the Measures Adopted by His Majesty's Government, for Giving Effect to the Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies. Part II, Accounts and Papers (London, 1835), 31.

94 Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, 2:347.

95 Beckford, Remarks Upon the Situation of Negroes in Jamaica, 27.

96 Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 83.

97 Brougham, Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, 2:409.

98 Brougham, 2:449.

99 Ramsay, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, 123.

100 Brougham, Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, 2:515.

101 Joshua Steele and William Dickson, Mitigation of Slavery: In Two Parts (London, 1814), 50.

102 Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, The Slave Colonies of Great Britain; or A Picture of Negro Slavery Drawn by the Colonists Themselves; Being an Abstract of the Various Papers Recently Laid before Parliament on That Subject (London, 1826), 71.

103 Frederic William Naylor Bayley, Four Years’ Residence in the West Indies (London, 1830), 378.

104 Bayley, Four Years’ Residence in the West Indies, 399.

105 Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, 2:163.

106 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 2nd series (1820–30), 11 May 1824, vol. 11, cols. 710–11.

107 Sir Gilbert Blane, Inquiry Into the Causes and Remedies of the Late and Present Scarcity and High Price of Provisions: In a Letter to the Right Hon. Earl Spencer […] Dated 8th November, 1800, with Observations on the Distresses of Agriculture and Commerce Which Have Prevailed for the Last Three Years, 2nd ed. (London, 1817), 292.

108 Examination of William Taylor, 6 June 1832, Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery, 4.

109 Examination of William Taylor, 6 June 1832, Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery, 6–7.

110 Examination of Wiltshire Stanton Austin, 2 July 1832, Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery, 170.

111 Quoted in Henry Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery: Being a Narrative of Facts and Incidents, Which Occurred in a British Colony, during the Two Years Immediately Preceding Negro Emancipation […], 3rd ed. (London, 1868), 135.

112 The Debates in Parliament, Session 1833—on the Resolutions and Bill for the Abolition of Slavery in the British Colonies. With a Copy of the Act of Parliament (London, 1834), 33.

113 “Mr. Barrett's Speech, at a General Meeting of the West-India Body,” in The Speeches of Mr. Barrett and Mr. Burge, 1–66, at 33. For another contemporary example, see The Voice of the West Indies, and the Cry of England; Or, Compensation Or Separation Considered (London, 1832).

114 On the failures of apprenticeship, see William A. Green, “The Apprenticeship,” chap. 5 in British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford, 1991); Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, 2004); Holt, Problem of Freedom; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002).

115 Report from J. Kennet Dawson, Manchioneal, St. Thomas-in-the-East, 17 March 1835, 1835 (278–II) Abolition of Slavery, Papers in Explanation, Part I, 30.

116 Report from Henry Blake, Retreat Estate, 17 March 1835, 1835 (278–II) Abolition of Slavery, Papers in Explanation, Part I, 31.

117 Letter from E. D. Baynes to Lord Sligo, 1 July 1835, 1835 (278–II) Abolition of Slavery, Papers in Explanation, Part I, 247. The magistrate Edward Davis Baynes seems to have been a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who retired in 1821 from the Royal Artillery, a relatively typical background for the special magistracy. See A List of the Officers of the Army and of the Corps of Royal Marines (London, 1821), 322.

118 Enclosures No. 189: E. D. Baynes to Sligo, Aylmers, St. John's, 30 December 1835, 1835 (278–II) Abolition of Slavery, Papers in Explanation, Part I, 165.

119 A Report from the Inspector General of Police up to the 31st December 1835, containing Extracts from the County Inspectors’ and Sub-Inspectors’ Reports, 1835 (278–II) Abolition of Slavery, Papers in Explanation, Part I, 212.

120 Paton, No Bond but the Law; Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (2001): 923–54.

121 Lord Glenelg to Colonial Governors, Circular Despatch P, 30 January 1836, Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, 1836 (166–I), Papers Presented to Parliament, by His Majesty's Command, in Explanation of the Measures Adopted by His Majesty's Government, for Giving Effect to the Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies, Part III, Accounts and Papers (London 1836), 10–11.

122 Sturge and Harvey, West Indies in 1837, 71.

123 Sturge and Harvey, 71.

124 Sturge and Harvey, 377.

125 Sturge and Harvey, 51.

126 Catherine Hall, “White Visions, Black Lives: The Free Villages of Jamaica,” History Workshop, no. 36 (1993): 103–32, at 110; Hall, Civilising Subjects.

127 “The Right Honourable Lord Brougham, on the Immediate Emancipation of the Negro Apprentices,” in Speeches of Eminent British Statesmen During the Thirty-Nine Years’ Peace: From the Passing of the Reform Bill to the Commencement of the Russian War, 2nd ser. (1857), 83–129, at 129.

128 Phillippo, James Mursell, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London, 1843), 184Google Scholar.

129 On the era of indentured labor, see Saunders, Kay, Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834–1920 (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Northrup, David, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar; Kale, Madhavi, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2010)Google Scholar; Bischof, Christopher, “Chinese Labourers, Free Blacks, and Social Engineering in the Post-Emancipation British West Indies,” Past and Present, no. 231 (2016): 129–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

130 Du Bois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1935), 15–16Google Scholar. See also recent work on the proliferation of the “plantation” after the end of slavery: Manjapra, Kris, “Plantation Dispossessions: The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism,” in American Capitalism: New Histories, ed. Beckert, Sven and Desan, Christine (New York, 2018), 361–87Google Scholar.

131 Thomas Carlyle, “The Present Time” [1850], in Latter-Day Pamphlets, vol. 19 of Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works (London, 1870), 29–64, at 33.

132 Fitzhugh, George, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond, 1857), 29Google Scholar.