Abstract
Like most of her white contemporaries, Emma Carmichael, a planter’s wife who resided in Trinidad and St Vincent between 1821 and 1826, thought very little of the intrinsic qualities of native Africans. But she set great store by the process of ‘creolisation’ whereby Africans and their descendants adapted to the New World, and the ‘civilising’ effects of what she regarded as the sounder forms of Christianity. She was therefore as puzzled and disappointed as anyone that a crescendo of slave unrest occurred during the period between the ending of the Napoleonic wars and 1832, while the proportion of Creole (or island-born) slaves rose above 80 per cent and perhaps a quarter of all slaves became at least nominally Christian. This included the three largest and widest-ranging of all British West Indian slave rebellions: in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and, climactically, Jamaica in 1831–2. Yet even in other colonies where the plantation system had decayed or never been firmly established, slaves proved more confident and assertive of their rights the more their conditions seemed to have improved.
The negroes … believed that Massa King George had said they were all to be free — a term very differently understood by the negroes and by their advocates on this side of the water. By free, a Briton means that the negro is no longer to be the property of his master, but situated as labourers are in England; that is, he is to work for his own and his family’s support, or starve. But the word free means quite another thing in the negro sense; for they tell me that it means ‘there is to be no masters at all, and Massa King George is to buy all the estates and gie them to we to live upon’. (Mrs A. C. Carmichael, 1834)1
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Notes and References
The debate over abolition and emancipation alone accounts for 170 pages of the monumental bibliography by Lowell J. Ragatz, A Guide for the Study of British Caribbean History, 1763–1834 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932; Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1930) pp. 405–573. The key works were probably Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Salvery …. (1769); Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea …. (Philadelphia, 1771; reissued 1787); Rev. John Wesley, Thoughts on Slavery (1774; reissued, 1784); John Ady et al.The Case of Our Fellow Creatures, the Oppressed Africans …. (1783); Rev. James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784); Rev. John Newton, Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade (1788); Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (1788); William Wilberforce, The Speech on Wednesday, May 13, 1789, on the Question of the Abolition of the Slave Trade …. (1789); Henry, Lord Brougham, A Concise Statement of the Question Regarding the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1804); Zachary Macaulay, Negro Slavery (London, 1823); Rev. Thomas Cooper, Facts Illustrative of the Condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica (1824); James Stephen, The Slavery of the British West India Colonies Delineated, 2 vols (1824, 1830); James Cropper, The Support of Slavery Investigated (1824).
Thomas Coke, A History of the West Indies, 3 vols (Liverpool, 1808–11) as quoted in Madeline Grant, ‘Enemies to Caesar? Sectarian Missionaries in British West Indian Slave Society, 1754–1834’ (University of Waterloo, unpublished MA thesis, 1976) p. 79.
Rev. Hope Masterton Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa (Nelson, 1863) p. 37.
J. E. Hutton, A History of the Moravian Missions (Moravian Publications Office, 1872).
Michael Craton, A History of the Bahamas (Collins, 1962) pp. 183 and 222;
Rev. Edwin Angel Wallbridge, The Demerara Martyr; Memoirs of the Rev. John Smith …. (1848).
F. A. Cox, History of the Baptist Missionary Society from 1792 to 1842 (1842);
R. Lovell, History of the London Missionary Society, 2 vols (1899).
Quoted by Peter Duncan, A Narrative of the Wesleyan Mission to Jamaica (1849) p. 312.
One thinks, in contrast, of the initial failure of the missionaries to make converts in Africa. For example, Livingstone, though usually regarded as the greatest of African missionaries, apparently made only one convert during his career, who later backslid. Tim Jeal, Livingstone (1973).
See, for example, the witty interrogation of the missionaries by the village elders in Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Fawcett Premier ed., 1958) pp. 134–7 and 164–7.
Peter J. Wilson, Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).
For example, see the way in which the Bahamian Baptist churches founded by the blacks Prince Williams and Sharper Morris divided on the coming of white missionaries in 1833–4. Michael Symonette and Antonia Canzonari, Baptists in the Bahamas; An Historical Review (Nassau, 1977) pp. 1–27.
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1972) p. 7.
C. F. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the SPG, 1701–1900 (1901).
Rev. John Clarke, Memorials of Baptist Missions to Jamaica (1869) pp. 9–31.
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium; Revolutionary Millenarianism and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957) pp. 13–16.
Sidney Mintz and Douglas Hall, ‘The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System’, Yale University Publications in Anthropology, LVII (1960) pp. 1–26.
Cecil Northcott, Slavery’s Martyr; John Smith of Demerara and the Emancipation Movement, 1817–1824 (Epworth Press, 1976) pp. 110–12;
Edwin Angel Wallbridge, The Demerara Martyr; Memoirs of the Rev. John Smith, Missionary to Demerara (1848 and Georgetown, 1943) Appendix V, pp. 257–309.
Craton, Testing the Chains, ch. 21; Philip Wright, Knibb ‘The Notorious,’ Slaves’ Missionary, 1803–1845 (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973) pp. 56–133.
Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire; A short History of British Slavery (New York: Doubleday; Temple Smith, 1974) pp. 276–80.
Henry Bleby, The Death Struggles of Slavery (1853) p. 129.
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© 1982 Michael Craton, Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, Betty Fladeland, David Geggus, B. W. Higman, C. Duncan Rice, James Walvin
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Craton, M. (1982). Slave Culture, Resistance and the Achievement of Emancipation in the British West Indies, 1783–1838. In: Walvin, J. (eds) Slavery and British Society 1776–1846. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16775-3_5
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