Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834–1866 (review)

Historians are only now beginning to recognize what American abolitionists long understood, that the end of slavery outside the United States had an important effect on the movement to secure its end inside the United States. American abolitionists watched carefully as slavery disappeared from Haiti, Mexico, and other colonies and nations throughout the Atlantic world in the first half of the nineteenth century. British emancipation in the West Indies was of special import, as the mighty experiment in free labor provided a unique laboratory to test abolitionists' growing faith in the ability of recently freed people to adopt European-American customs and values. In Contentious Liberties, Gale L. Kenny illuminates the difficulties American missionaries faced trying to convert former bondspeople to Anglo-American religion and culture in postemancipation Jamaica.

The story begins at the Oberlin Institute in Ohio, "a hotbed of radicalism" (2) where abolitionists created a racially integrated, coeducational college and community that strove for the immediate abolition of slavery. This utopian society was not without a conservative streak, however; its radical Christian vision encouraged a gendered hierarchy in which men dominated the school's submissive female population. The arrangement would have powerful ramifications after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica, where Oberlin's students traveled as missionaries to spread a "gendered ideology of evangelical manhood based in strict morality, manual labor and self-sufficiency, and economic and intellectual independence" (27).

Imparting Christian perfectionism to freedpeople in a foreign land was an impossible task. Many black Jamaicans who were already practicing Christians suspected the motives of white men and women from a nation that still sanctioned slavery. Furthermore, many potential converts practiced Myal, a native faith that drew from traditional African beliefs as well as Protestantism, which British missionaries and black Loyalists had brought to the island decades earlier. This eclectic faith led to a pluralistic religious community that received all Jamaicans regardless of social rank or individual character. The inclusive nature of Jamaican Christianity proved one of the greatest obstacles to the civilizing mission of the American radicals. Placing great emphasis on moral rectitude, they punished church members for various transgressions, such as premarital sex and spousal abuse, by expelling them from the mission. An uncompromising stance, it cost the mission dearly in both credibility and church and school membership. Still, Kenny points to a number of accommodations freedpeople forced missionaries to make.

Not all of the compromises were the result of black resistance. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges to the entire project was the behavior of the missionaries themselves. The book's most interesting passages concern the intense and idiosyncratic John Hyde. A missionary sent to Jamaica by the newly formed American Missionary Association, Hyde and his wife arrived at midcentury and immediately put into practice extreme ideas that had become common among radical Christians during the Second Great Awakening. From his refusal to say grace before meals to taking as his mistress and impregnating the wife of another missionary, Hyde's "antipathy to authority" (104) led him to reject rituals and discipline familiar to his contemporaries. Like the exploits of infamous religious charlatan Robert Matthews in New York City, Hyde's erratic behavior culminated in his possible involvement in the murder of at least one of his acquaintances. Yet missionary leaders defended his actions on gendered grounds. That Hyde's loudest critic was a woman assured his ability to act immorally with impunity.

Ultimately, the American mission in postemancipation Jamaica failed for various reasons. The end of the American Civil War coincided with the Morant Bay Rebellion, in which black rebels reputedly tortured and murdered white ministers, and brought the remaining American missionaries back home, leaving their various churches, farms, and schools in the hands of native black preachers. Kenny finds that while the missionaries went to Jamaica with good intentions, the endeavor was doomed from the start, for they failed to take "the thoughts and feelings of...