Peter Espeut | More history around Emancipation

At this time of year when we recall the events of 1834/1838, I would like to continue to share some historical details surrounding Emancipation that I find interesting and instructive.

The Emancipation Act was passed by the British Parliament in August 1833, but the Jamaica House of Assembly (JHA) was required to pass local enabling legislation. The legislature consisted mostly of planters and merchants who had only their own interests at heart (has anything changed?).

The JHA did pass a local act in December 1833, which was forwarded to the Colonial Office (CO); but the CO found it “extremely deficient” because of the omission of clauses to bind the former slave masters. The Jamaican law left many matters vague, including the masters’ specific obligations to the apprentices. For example, the food, clothing, and medicine to be supplied were merely required to be “customary” or “sufficient”. There was no protection against improper punishment.

During this period, the CO played an important role in protecting the enslaved labour force from the planters who wished to continue to exploit it. The CO sent back the JHA legislation for amendments.

On July 4, 1834, the JHA amended the earlier legislation, but the new version provided that these amendments would expire on December 31, 1835, while the original act would continue until 1840.

The CO again sent this legislation back for amendments, and Emancipation, which came on August 1, 1834, was without approved enabling legislation.

On December 22, 1834, the JHA passed yet a second Act-in-Aid of the Abolition Act but, having experienced five months of apprenticeship, the planters tried to regain as much local control as the British government could be forced to concede. This time, they had gone too far, and this act was disallowed. For the CO, the intent of this law was not to implement the imperial act, but to supersede it by concentrating authority in local hands.

The Jamaican legislature would have to be forced, kicking and screaming, to do what was right and, thankfully, the British government was there to overrule the Jamaican politicians. Ultimately, the British parliament passed an act empowering the governor to amend the Jamaican act unilaterally by proclamation, to ensure the welfare of the apprentices.

In plantocratic Jamaica, all the posts in the legal system, including those of lawyers, notaries, JPs, magistrates and juries, were reserved for planters, merchants and other whites. Knowing this, and that the slaves-turned-apprentices would likely find no justice from that quarter, the British government provided that stipendiary magistrates be sent from Britain to provide some sort of impartiality. The power to punish was taken from the planters and overseers and given to these magistrates. This caused resentment, but there was no other way in a racially stratified society to transition from slavery to freedom without some mechanism to check the power of the planter-politicians.

On February 18, 1824, The Colonist, a newspaper in British Guiana, printed the following:

“We have no desire to treat the Africans with undue rigor, but we cannot be ignorant that our power over them can exist only so long as we are the highly educated ... It is not a matter of surprise that a negro slave who is taught that all men are equal in a religious point of view, should wish the same principle to prevail in politics. The obvious conclusion is this – SLAVERY MUST EXIST AS IT IS NOW, OR IT WILL NOT EXIST AT ALL”.

Very early on, the planters perceived that slavery would only remain if carefully buttressed by ignorance. They understood with frightful clarity that slavery depended upon a system in which one group of privileged men had a monopoly, not only on power and wealth but also on education. [Perhaps this view lingers among today’s politicians, which might explain the failure of Jamaican governments up to the present to deliver quality education to the black population].

It was clear to Sir Henry Taylor KCMG (1800-1886), head of the West India Department in the UK Colonial Office, who designed the apprenticeship system, that the JHA “was totally prejudiced against the blacks and not disposed to undertake the steps necessary to encourage their civilization and development”.

Taylor wrote: “To force this social change, and yet to leave the political framework of the totally different society the same as it was, would seem even in a mere theoretical view to be in the nature of a political solecism”. Given their character, the West Indian planters were “eminently disqualified for the great task of educating and improving a people newly born into freedom as it were” [Taylor (19 January 1839), Memorandum on the Course to be Taken with the West Indian Assemblies, CO 884/II].

Taylor recommended to the British government in 1839 that the JHA be abolished and that Jamaica be administered by the governor with an appointed Legislative Council, but his superiors were too indecisive to carry out his recommendation.

In his memoirs, Taylor wrote:

“We knew what we were about. We had established protectors of slaves in the few colonies in which we had legislative power; they made their half-yearly reports in which every outrage and enormity perpetrated on the slaves was duly detailed. ... We wrote despatches in answer ... distinctly marking each atrocity, and bringing its salient points into the light; we laid the reports and despatches before Parliament as fast as they were received and written; Zachary Macaulay forthwith transferred them to the pages of his ‘Monthly Anti-Slavery Reporter’, by which they were circulated far and wide through the country”.

But still the British parliament would not act.

As a matter of interest, Sir Henry Taylor was still in office in 1865 and, after the Morant Bay Rebellion, he again recommended that the JHA be abolished. This time, it would be implemented.

One is left to wonder how things would have turned out if the JHA had been abolished before 1840!

Peter Espeut is former vice-president of the Jamaica Historical Society. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com