Since the history of enslavement has been a major topic of political discussion recently in the U.S., due to the Florida Board of Education and Ron “DeKlantis” spewing racist disinformation willy-nilly about slavery’s “benefits,” it’s worth exploring both enslavement and emancipation in the Caribbean. Emancipation Day is celebrated during the first week of August in the British Caribbean, though the official end of slavery in British colonies did not automatically result in “freedom.”
We also should not forget that the
intra-American slave trade supplied the U.S with many thousands of enslaved people from the Caribbean. The end of the British slave trade in 1807, followed by a U.S. trade ban in 1808, was not the end of slavery. Instead, it fostered an ugly period of
“slave breeding,” due to a lack of supply of fresh victims.
RELATED STORY: Florida tries to defend its revisionist history on slavery Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean. As a professor, I taught the history of enslavement and emancipation in the Caribbean to college students. One reading I required in the course was “
The History of Mary Prince.” I wanted my students to hear the words of someone who had been enslaved, and it was especially important that they hear from a Black woman.
Mary Prince, an enslaved Bermudian—and, thus, a British subject—is the first known Black woman to relate a slave narrative. She was the storyteller of an abolitionist collaborative writing team that brought her story to print.
Susanna Strickland was the compiler. She listened to Mary tell her story, and then she wrote it down.
Thomas Pringle, the secretary of London’s Anti-Slavery Society, was the editor, and he was also the financial backer of the project.
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself was first published in the latter part of February, 1831 at the height of Britain’s Abolition movement. Abolition was (and still is) a movement to end slavery.
The History of Mary Prince went to print three times that year. It was a successful strategy that aided in bringing about Emancipation. Historically, Emancipation was when enslaved people were made free. In the British Empire, this was 1 August 1834.
Slavery and Remembrance provides more (very violent) details.
Mary Prince was born in Brackish Pond, Devonshire Parish, Bermuda, around 1788. Not long after her birth, Mary and her mother were sold to Captain Darrel Williams. Williams then gave Mary as a gift to his granddaughter, Betsey Williams, while Mary’s mother was given to Betsey’s mother, Sarah, as a domestic slave.
Sarah Williams died in 1798 and two years later, her husband was about to remarry. In order to raise funds for his impending wedding, Mr. Williams sold Mary, then twelve, to Captain John Ingham. Ingham and his wife were cruel and abusive masters.
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Mary continued to be abused by the Inghams for the next five years. In 1805, she was sold to a master only known as “Mr. D--,” who took her to Turks Island where he forced her and others in his charge to extract salt from the sea. Years of such harsh labor took its toll on Mary’s health. She was plagued with rheumatism and St. Anthony’s fire. In 1810, her owner left the business of salt mining and moved back to Bermuda, taking Mary with him to work for his daughter. During this time Mary’s tasks were lightened, however, she suffered sexual abuse from her owner.
In 1816, Mary was relieved of Mr. D’s abuse only to be delivered into greater despair when she was sold to John Wood.
The entire narrative can be read at
Documenting the American South.
Here’s Prince’s description of the treatment of Hetty, her closest (and most overworked) friend while enslaved in the cruel Ingham household:
Poor Hetty, my fellow slave, was very kind to me, and I used to call her my Aunt; but she led a most miserable life, and her death was hastened (at least the slaves all believed and said so,) by the dreadful chastisement she received from my master during her pregnancy. It happened as follows. One of the cows had dragged the rope away from the stake to which Hetty had fastened it, and got loose. My master flew into a terrible passion, and ordered the poor creature to be stripped quite naked, notwithstanding her pregnancy, and to be tied up to a tree in the yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both with the whip and cow-skin, till she was all over streaming with blood. He rested, and then beat her again and again. Her shrieks were terrible. The consequence was that poor Hetty was brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after severe labour of a dead child. She appeared to recover after her confinement, so far that she was repeatedly flogged by both master and mistress afterwards; but her former strength never returned to her. Ere long her body and limbs swelled to a great size; and she lay on a mat in the kitchen, till the water burst out of her body and she died. All the slaves said that death was a good thing for poor Hetty; but I cried very much for her death. The manner of it filled me with horror. I could not bear to think about it; yet it was always present to my mind for many a day.
After Hetty died all her labours fell upon me, in addition to my own. I had now to milk eleven cows every morning before sunrise, sitting among the damp weeds; to take care of the cattle as well as the children; and to do the work of the house. There was no end to my toils--no end to my blows. I lay down at night and rose up in the morning in fear and sorrow; and often wished that like poor Hetty I could escape from this cruel bondage and be at rest in the grave.
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In telling my own sorrows, I cannot pass by those of my fellow-slaves--for when I think of my own griefs, I remember theirs.
An audiobook of the complete narrative is also available.
YouTube Video Aug. 1 is celebrated as Emancipation Day throughout much of the English-speaking Caribbean. But again, the “official” end of British slavery didn’t mean freedom.
Padraic X. Scanlan, assistant professor at the University of Toronto and author of "Slave Empire: How Slavery Made Modern Britain," wrote for The Washington Post in 2021 that “
the British conception of emancipation cemented imperialism and vast exploitation instead of ending it.”
Antislavery leaders in Britain argued that without the slave trade, colonial legislatures in the Caribbean would work to improve living and working conditions for enslaved people, opening a long and gradual path to emancipation.
As an antislavery leader put it in the House of Commons, emancipation would come “in a course of years, first fitting and qualifying the Slave for the enjoyment of freedom … nothing rash, nothing rapid, nothing abrupt.”
But conditions for enslaved workers did not improve. And enslaved people — aware of colonial and imperial politics — imagined that London was ready to grant emancipation against the wishes of furious colonial legislators. They sometimes timed rebellions to take advantage of what seemed like head winds of metropolitan support for their cause.
However, to the elite of the antislavery movement in Britain, gradual emancipation was supposed to suppress, not encourage, revolution.
In an 1824 speech to the House of Commons, a leading politician compared Black freedom to Frankenstein’s monster, a creature “possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child.” Imperial antislavery foreclosed on an emancipation shaped from below.
Morgan Hollie, a senior associate in the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, wrote for the Jamaica Gleaner in August 2020 that Emancipation Day was a “
Reminder That Caribbean Still Needs Justice, Repair.”
On August 1, Anglophone Caribbean nations commemorate Emancipation Day, marking the 1834 abolition of slavery in the British Empire and the 1838 abolition of
apprenticeship, a system which forced formerly enslaved people to continue to work uncompensated for their former masters. Emancipation was
not a gift. The Slavery Abolition Act, which banned slavery in the British colonies, followed a shift in the British Empire’s economic interests and sustained resistance by enslaved people through massive slave revolts, like
Bussa’s Rebellion in Barbados, and
guerilla warfare, as in the case of
Jamaica’s Maroons.
While resistance helped pave the way for emancipation in the 1800s, the Caribbean was not free from British colonial rule for another century. For centuries, Caribbean people fought for liberation from slavery and colonization. Today, amid
new calls for the UK to tackle systemic racism and reckon with the crimes of the British Empire, Caribbean people are still fighting for justice and repair.
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Black populations in the Caribbean were also denied political and economic autonomy. Under British colonial law (as in the United Kingdom until the early twentieth century), the right to vote was predicated on a man’s wealth and land ownership. In the Caribbean this effectively excluded the poorer, landless Black majority from voting for more than a century after emancipation. Without the right to vote in elections, Black populations were subjected to the legislative whims of the white upper classes and denied representation in government without the ability to hold political authorities accountable. Universal Adult Suffrage in the Caribbean was not achieved until 1944, first in Jamaica, and then spreading to other Caribbean islands
between then and 1962.
Educator Dr. Rohan Jowallah explains, in a video from his “Learning Journey” YouTube series. why emancipation was an illusion.
YouTube Video Though a majority of former British colonies celebrate Emancipation Day on the first of August, some nations
choose to celebrate it on different dates. Bahamas, Aug 7
Belize, Jul 31
Bermuda, Aug 3
Dominica, Aug 7
Grenada, Aug 7
Guyana, Aug 1
Jamaica, Aug 1
Montserrat, Mon, Aug 7
Saint Kitts and Nevis, Aug 7
Saint Lucia, Aug 1
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Aug 1
Trinidad and Tobago, Aug 1
Turks and Caicos Islands, Aug 1
In 2007, Reuters published
a list of other significant abolition dates. 1846 - Danish governor proclaims emancipation of slaves in Danish West Indies, abolishing slavery
1851 - Brazil abolishes slave trading
1858 - Portugal abolishes slavery in its colonies, although all slaves are subject to a 20-year apprenticeship
1861 - Netherlands abolishes slavery in Dutch Caribbean colonies
1862 - U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaims emancipation of slaves with effect from January 1, 1863; 13th Amendment of U.S. Constitution follows in 1865 banning slavery
1886 - Slavery is abolished in Cuba
1888 - Brazil abolishes slavery
1926 - League of Nations adopts Slavery Convention abolishing slavery
1948 - United Nations General Assembly adopts Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including article stating “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”
RELATED STORY: Caribbean Matters: Danish history, slavery, resistance, and colonialism in the U.S. Virgin Islands The French colonial Caribbean has a somewhat different history, as
journalist Sonia Phalnikar wrote for DW in 2021.
As France marks the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte on May 5, his role in reinstating slavery after it was abolished prompts a renewed look at his legacy.
Amid 150 exhibits embodying the dazzling imperial grandeur of the former French emperor — "a figure who is at once fascinating and controversial," as the show's trailer says — one section of the exhibition focuses on a darker side of his legacy.
It features the original copies of laws signed by Napoleon in 1802, which reversed the abolition of slavery that had been declared eight years previously, in the wake of the French Revolution. It made France the only country to have brought back slavery after outlawing it.
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[Louis-Georges] Tin, who is from Martinique, a former colony and now an overseas French department, said these aspects of Napoleon's policies need to be taught more in France. "As somebody whose ancestors were enslaved, I can't understand why we continue to celebrate Napoleon's memory as if nothing happened," he said.
As historian Joseph la Hausse de Lalouvière
wrote for the Economic History Review in 2021: The French National Convention abolished slavery in 1794 in response to slave uprisings in France’s Caribbean colonies and the French Revolution. This radical act made France the first imperial nation to universally outlaw slavery. Yet, just eight years later, France became the only state in the history of the Atlantic world to comprehensively re-establish slavery in its empire. While black citizens resisting the return of slavery established Haiti as the Caribbean’s first postcolonial nation in 1804, colonists in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana, orchestrated the mass enslavement of free people of African descent who claimed French citizenship. The imperial authorities reinstated slavery and the slave trade and empowered colonial settlers to hold freed people as property until 1848.
[...]
Unsurprisingly, the re-establishment of slavery encountered mass opposition, not just among the revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue/Haiti, but also in the French Antilles and Guiana. The possibilities for resistance varied according to local conditions in each colony and depended significantly on freed people’s access to kin networks, money, arms, property, and land. Captives from Africa, recently arrived in the colonies and liberated during the Revolution, were most vulnerable to being taken as slaves. Poor field workers were similarly exposed to the predations of slave-hungry planters. By contrast, black families fortunate enough to have acquired some cultivable land were better positioned to resist colonists’ efforts to enslave them. Surprisingly, some black and ‘mixed-race’ people also enslaved others – including members of their own extended families — to assert their legal freedom. Inspection of a diverse range of sources, including notarial documents, civil registers, court records, and administrative papers, on three continents, provided a detailed perspective on these local and household struggles, and allowed me to delineate the social processes underlying the categories of ‘free’ and ‘slave’.
Jamaican high school teacher Hughmore Williams has a YouTube channel called
“Teach Dem.” Five years ago, Willams made a brief slide show of emancipation monuments throughout the Caribbean—including the one depicted at the top of today’s story.
YouTube Video There are many celebrations of Emancipation Day being held this week across the Caribbean, and in the Caribbean diaspora. Yet it must always be made clear: Just as slavery had no upside, emancipation did not bring freedom.
Join me in the comments for more on the many Emancipation Day events across the region, as well as the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.
