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5 / discipline and (dis)order Apprenticeship and the Meaning of Freedom On May 14, 1833, Edward Stanley, the new secretary of state for the colonies, presented the slave emancipation bill to the imperial Parliament , and three months later the bill became law, scheduled to take effect on August 1, 1834. The Barbadian legislature was among the last colonial governments to pass a version of the bill in April 1834. With the exception of Antigua, the emancipation acts passed in Britain and the Caribbean established an “apprenticeship ” period to allow former slaves and slave owners to “adjust” to freedom. The act granted slave owners twenty million pounds as compensation for the loss of their human property. The second phase of emancipation began with apprenticeship ’s early end in 1838, two years before the stipulated time.1 Apprenticeship’s intricate system of categorizing former slaves and complicated manumission provisions created marginal groups of free people of color between 1834 and 1838. Former slave owners manipulated the system to prevent apprentices from gaining freedom, disrupting relations between slaves and their free kin in the process. For landless or smallholding slave owners, including a number of Afro-Barbadian women, who had survived by hiring out their slaves’ labor, emancipation represented a loss of livelihood and social status. While ownership of land was highly prized by the newly freed as a means of securing real independence from estate dominance, in Barbados, where the possibilities for an independent peasant livelihood were limited, mobility had always been central to former slaves’ ability to exercise freedom.2 Former slaves’ alterna1 . See “An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the Manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves,” The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 and 4 William IV (London: Parliament Commons, 1833); Holt, Problem of Freedom, 48–49. 2. On the importance and difficulties of acquiring land in emancipation-era Barbados, see Woodville Marshall, “Rock Hall, St. Thomas: A Free Village in Barbados,” Journal of Caribbean History 41, nos. 1 and 2 (2007): 1–50; onmobilityand theexerciseof freedom intheCaribbeanseeSheller, Democracy after Slavery, 92. 142 the children of africa in the colonies tives to field labor and rural poverty were usually the more mobile or urban occupations of free people of color and skilled slaves. For Afro-Barbadians free before 1834, apprenticeship brought the freedom of enslaved kin, but it also entailed increased job competition from former slaves, particularly in cities. As increased numbers of former slaves migrated to towns, the government responded with repressive regulatory measures. These measures, designed to control former slaves’ social and economic activities, impinged upon the lives of free people of color. Ultimately , government regulations did little to stop the flow of rural-urban migration , and working-class urban residents organized to protest the most offensive anti-immigration laws. Emancipation also unleashed a sense of panic among whites and elite AfroBarbadians about the social, economic, and moral order. Former slaves and laboring-class free people of color were the subjects of intense debates about morality . Local elites, both white and Afro-Barbadian, continued their struggles over racial segregation on this new terrain of public morality, competing to display their Christian respectability. Elite free people of color used their own counterinterpretations of respectability as a tool to challenge white supremacy, but they helped to disseminate an elitist concept of “respectable” behavior against which former slaves’ cultural practices were dismissed as inferior and that preserved class and gender hierarchies. Plebian Afro-Barbadians refused to accept elite definitions of Christianity and respectability, converting en masse but retaining their own definitions of respectable worship, community, and family life. the institutional framework of apprenticeship The apprenticeship system was based on a system for classifications of former slaves, the stipendiary magistracy and committees of appraisal for manumissions . Former slaves were divided into three categories with different dates at which full freedom would be granted. Children under six years old on August 1, 1834, were declared completely free on that date and could only be apprenticed with their mothers’ consent. Slaves over that age were divided into “nonpraedial” apprentices—those who had not performed work directly related to agricultural production—and “praedial” apprentices or agricultural laborers, by far the largest category. Nonpraedials were to be freed on August 1, 1838, while praedials would remain apprentices until August 1, 1840. Praedials were further subdivided into “praedials attached...

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