Bittersweet (17 page)

One of the first real breaks for the slaves came at sea, off Trafalgar in 1805, when Nelson broke French sea power once and for all. Now Britannia ruled the waves, and what Britannia said, others did, or else—and Britain said it was time to stop shipping slaves. The war had stopped all the world's slaving ships sailing for some years, and planters had been forced to look after their slaves better, knowing there were no replacements. Clearly, the practical men of Parliament said, it would be a good thing to ban the trade forever, so the slaves would continue to be treated with kindness.

It would be a better thing to stop the trade now, they said, because there would be no slave traders demanding compensation for the ending of their trade. Denmark, a minor player in the trade, had already banned the slave trade, and so had the United States in 1800, when American ships were forbidden to carry slaves to foreign countries. That was extended when the slave trade in general was abolished by the US Congress just three weeks before the British bill was given assent by the king. That left only France, which had no sea power in any case. But knowing that the West Indies faction had enough members to make and break government majorities, the government did not free the West Indies slaves. England needed slavery—or, at least, the British government needed the votes of the British MPs controlled by the West Indies slave owners.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the new-breed entrepreneurs were moving into canals and turnpikes—railways were still some time away but steam engines were becoming common. The first steam-powered mill in Jamaica was as early as 1768, but now steam was powering breweries in London, mines in Cornwall and many other ventures. England's rich and powerful were finding new investments, and new ways of controlling labour.

In 1799, even as he was working to free the slaves on the plantations in the sugar colonies, William Wilberforce obtained the passage of a bill that forbade working people in England from forming combinations to defend themselves against the tyranny of the masters, thus reducing miners, textile workers and agricultural labourers to the status and conditions of industrial slaves. He seemed not to see the inconsistency of his position.

Over the next ten years, a number of European powers limited or renounced slavery, and slowly the trade was rolled back. In 1816 the slave owners of Ceylon voted voluntarily that the children of slaves born after 12 August in that year would be free born.

While slavery remained in force, the Consolidated Slave Law enacted in Jamaica in 1816 improved living conditions somewhat, and we can take this as a good indication of the practices applied on the other British sugar islands. The law set down that slaves should have Sundays off and one other day off each fortnight to work on their own produce grounds, except during harvest time. The minimum of free days was not to be less than 26 per year, and there was to be no milling of cane between 7 pm Saturday and 5 am Monday. Field work was restricted to the period from 5 am to 7 pm, with half an hour for breakfast, and a two-hour break in the middle of the day.

In 1823 the emancipation movement was renamed as the ‘Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions'. There were still pockets of slaving, and the various powers took umbrage at their ships being stopped and searched by naval vessels from foreign anti-slaving nations. In any case, a slave ship could always be ‘foreign', presenting different papers as necessary. Unless several nations' navies were to operate together, the Middle Passage would still be sailed, and more ‘black ivory' would be delivered to the Americas. Slaves even reached the United States, where slaves were landed for many more years in the non-state of Texas, and marched across the country.

Most of the opponents of slavery recognised that it still existed, but the state of slavery, they believed, was less harmful than the trade in slaves. Besides, if the slave trade was stopped, those few bad masters would have to take better care of their slaves, because the supply of replacements had dried up when the slave ships were stopped from sailing. Like modern economic rationalists, they saw market forces as the best way of doing good.

It is worth noting that for all their limitations, the dissenters and evangelicals did one thing for slaves that nobody had done before: they welcomed them as Christians. In the early days of sugar slavery in the Mediterranean, slaves controlled by Muslims could not enter a mosque, and Christian-owned slaves were generally unwelcome in a church—even though Muslim slaves built many churches and Christian slaves built many of the mosques.

In the more civilised and genteel climate of the nineteenth century, Baptists and Wesleyans moved in to preach to their black brothers and sisters, who might still be slaves but whose souls would eventually be set free. This gave the planters the cheap labour they needed, while satisfying the urge of the missionaries to give their charges the promise of a better afterlife. Of course, Edward John Eyre, who found most of the unrest coming from within the Baptist churches, may have had a different view.

CHRISTMAS CAKE

5 teacupfuls of flour, 1 teacupful of melted butter, 1 teacupful of cream, 1 teacupful of treacle, 1 teacupful of moist sugar, 2 eggs, 1/2 oz. of powdered ginger, 1/2 lb. of raisins, 1 teaspoonful of carbonate of soda, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. Make the butter sufficiently warm to melt it, but do not allow it to oil [sic]; put the flour into a basin; add to it the sugar, ginger, and raisins, which should be stoned and cut into small pieces. When these dry ingredients are thoroughly mixed, stir in the butter, cream, treacle, and well-whisked eggs, and beat the mixture for a few minutes. Dissolve the soda in the vinegar, add it to the dough, and be particular that these latter ingredients are well incorporated with the others; put the cake into a buttered mould or tin, place it in a moderate oven immediately, and bake it from 13/4 to 21/4 hours.

Mrs Beeton's recipe number 1754

9
EMANCIPATION'S
HARVEST

S
lavery was finally abolished in the British Empire in 1833, through a deal in which slave owners throughout the Empire received around £20 million in compensation, and were allowed to keep their slaves for an ‘apprenticeship' period of twelve years. This ‘apprenticeship' turned out to be a sham, and most owners made no attempt to use it as a period of transition leading to freedom, instead setting out to ensure that their slaves remained dependent. The slaves, understandably, could see no reason why they should not be freed immediately.

In 1837 a revised deal was cut, involving the termination of ‘apprenticeship', immediate liberation and the imposition of a tariff on sugar not produced in British possessions. Even that did not satisfy the slave owners, who found many ways of using arbitrary local laws and high rents to force the freed slaves back into effective slavery. There were occasional burnings of black settlements that were ‘too distant' from the plantations, aimed at bringing the slaves back under tight control. The English were doing exactly the same thing in Ireland at the same time, something that Thomas Carlyle obviously had in mind when he likened Ireland and the sugar islands:

Our own white or sallow Ireland, sluttishly starving from age to age on its act-of-parliament ‘freedom,' was hitherto the flower of mismanagement among the nations; but what will this be to a Negro Ireland, with pumpkins themselves fallen scarce like potatoes?

This and the other selections quoted in the next few pages are taken from Carlyle's pamphlet, first published in 1849 and revised in 1853 (the selections are from the 1849 original). It came with the unfortunate title
Occasional Discourse on the Nigger
Question
. Carlyle was setting out to be offensive, but his title was far and away the least of his offences.

Assisted in part by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (the BFASS, referred to by Carlyle as ‘Exeter Hall', after the place where the emancipists met), the freed slaves began a mass exodus from the plantations to ‘free villages' and their own small farms in the hills of Jamaica and other West Indian islands. Settled on their ‘pumpkin' farms, as Carlyle called them (he meant melons when he wrote pumpkins), they became subsistence farmers, creating a sudden labour shortage that was only partly remedied by the introduction of Indian indentured labourers. Soon, though, things got worse.

TAXATION POLICY

At the same time as the slaves were ‘freed', Britain's Parliament, having repealed the Corn Laws, which lowered the price of the workers' bread, decided also to reduce the price of the workers' sugar, because by now, everybody needed sugar. To this end Parliament equalised all sugar duties in 1845. Cuban sugar—still grown by slaves—entered Britain at the same duty as sugar grown by free workers. The plantation owners in the British West Indies knew their sugar could not compete with the slave-grown products of Cuba and Brazil. As they saw it, they had been betrayed.

In two other British colonies on the other side of the world, duties and tariffs imposed by London were also to cause distress a generation later. English novelist Anthony Trollope noted how the potential for a preserved fruit industry in Tasmania in the 1870s was blocked by the requirement that sugar from Queensland, another Australian colony, be taxed as though it came from a foreign land, taking away the opportunity for profitable commerce in both colonies.

Taxation policy seems to have been a problem for successive English governments. They were slow to learn from the harm they had done to both their American colonies and themselves by their taxes and duties, and continued to make laws for their colonies that did active harm (aside from giving Cuban slave-grown sugar some handy assistance).

Curiously, the Cuban sugar trade had been created by England, whose military forces occupied the island in 1762, towards the end of the Seven Years' War, so opening it to English trade. More than 10 000 slaves were brought in, some say in anticipation of England holding the island thereafter. Others believe that they were brought in as porters for the army, though the army might also have had in mind that a handsome profit might later be made on their ‘army surplus'. Whatever the truth of the matter, Cuba was returned to Spain, the slaves remained on Cuba, and by 1865 as many as 2 million more had been landed there.

The BFASS was at first satisfied with the new indentured labour system, the system of ‘apprenticeship'—which was to be condemned in the Pacific Islands by the London Missionary Society 40 years later as poorly disguised slavery. The BFASS tacticians in London felt that if free (though indentured) workers could be shown to grow sugar successfully, then slavery in the United States might also be abolished. Exploitation was a lesser evil than slavery, they seem to have thought, though this belief later changed.

At the same time, a battle was being fought between Free Trade and Protectionism. The laws of supply and demand, the notions that we would today call economics, the notions Carlyle in his pamphlet called ‘the dismal science', won out. Sugar and slavery were so interconnected that any support for sugar would also be support for slavery, the Free Traders said. This rather specious claim took hold and led to Cuban sugar being allowed into Britain on the same tariff as sugar grown by freed workers. Soon after, the British Caribbean sugar industry went into a decline, and Carlyle's indignation soared. He wrote of the ungrateful blacks:

. . . with their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; the grinder and incisor teeth ready for every new work, and the pumpkins cheap as grass in those rich climates, while the sugar-crops rot round them uncut, because labour cannot be hired, so cheap are the pumpkins; and at home we are required but to rasp from the breakfast loaves of our own English labourers some slight ‘differential sugar-duties,' and lend a poor half million, or a few poor millions now and then, to keep that beautiful state of matters . . .

The economic decline affected all whites in the West Indies— not only the plantation owners, but also the associated clerks, foremen and others who gained their income from sugar. The freed slaves, happy to live a subsistence lifestyle, had no problems, Carlyle wrote:

. . . the less fortunate white man of those tropical localities . . . himself cannot work; and his black neighbour, rich in pumpkin, is in no haste to help him. Sunk to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at his ease in the creation, he can listen to the less fortunate white man's ‘demand,' and take his own time in supplying it. Higher wages, massa; higher, for your cane-crop cannot wait; still higher, till no conceivable opulence of cane-crop will cover such wages.

This, of course, was tied to the much-repeated claim that people of European origin could not work in the tropics—even though they had done so on Barbados, 200 years earlier, as indentured labourers. (The same line was later used to justify the Australian Kanaka trade.) Carlyle's main assumption was that the feudal form of life was far more satisfying for all. While he might be seen as advocating a return to slavery, he really favoured serfdom, as these two excerpts reveal:

If quashee [the black man] will not honestly aid in bringing out those sugars, cinnamons, and nobler products of the West India Islands, for the benefit of all mankind, then I say neither will the powers permit quashee to continue growing pumpkins there for his own lazy benefit; but will sheer him out, by and by, like a lazy gourd overshadowing rich ground; him and all that partake with him—perhaps in a very terrible manner.

Lest that was not clear enough, Carlyle goes back over his case:

Not a square inch of soil in these fruitful isles, purchased by British blood, shall any black man hold to grow pumpkins for him, except on terms that are fair towards Britain. Fair; see that they be not unfair, not toward ourselves, and still more not towards him. For injustice is for ever accursed: and precisely our unfairness towards the enslaved black man has, by inevitable revulsion and fated revulsion of the wheel, brought about these present confusions. Fair towards Britain it will be, that quashee give work for privilege to grow pumpkins. Not a pumpkin, quashee, not a square yard of soil, till you agree to do the State so many days of service. Annually that soil will grow you pumpkins; but annually also without fail, shall you, for the owner thereof do your appointed days of labour. The State has plenty of waste soil; but the State will religiously give you none of it on other terms. The State wants sugar from these islands, and means to have it; wants virtuous industry in these islands, and must have it. The State demands of you such service as will bring these results, this latter result, which includes all.