Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies

10. Constitutional Militancy

161 10 CONSTITUTIONAL MILITANCY Justice on Trial I n accordance with the amelioration ordinance, legal bales between enslavers and enslaved were fought at three levels. Minor domestic offenses were decided by the protector or his assistants.1 Complaints of serious infringements of the law, including capital offenses, were adjudicated in the criminal courts.2 An intermediate jurisdiction was created by the proclamation of 23 June 1824. This amendment was expressly designed to satisfy proprietors’ demand that enslaved laborers receive greater punishment than what was authorized under proprietary authority.3 The amending ordinance widened the magisterial net over amelioration. In Port of Spain this new authority was vested in the alcaldes ordinarios, the alcaldes de barrio , and the chief of police. No change was made to rural jurisdiction. The protector of slaves also retained jurisdiction over the whole island. The new code noir inadvertently preserved Britain’s reputation as the most brutal slave system. The Cédula Real of 1789 reduced to twenty-five the maximum strokes permissible under an enslaver’s authority; Picton’s ordinance reverted to the Mosaic prescription of thirty-nine strokes. Curiously, the model amelioration ordinance empowered proprietors to inflict a maximum of forty stripes on male laborers or confine them to the public stocks, in addition to subjecting them to the humiliation of wearing a “distinguishing dress or mark.”4 Female laborers were subject to imprisonment in the royal jail with or without hard labor in the treadmill for a maximum of one month. The principle of returning enslaved persons to resident plantations for punishment commensurate with the nature of the accusation was incorporated in this tier of jurisdiction to eliminate malicious persecution of proprietors by the newly enfranchised laboring class. The ordinance also gave enslaved persons revolutionary emancipation 162 the right of appeal against their enslavers, a feature of Spanish slave laws. Of particular interest was the obligation of judicial officers to hear complaints of enslaved laborers ex parte, without regard to extenuation.5 This condition altered considerably a measure that otherwise might have greatly modified the potential of the enslaved class to radicalize the amelioration experiment. Judgments were summary in the three tiers of arbitration. Appeals were only allowed against decisions of the criminal courts but subject to the colony ’s constitution. To offset delays consistent with appeals from these jurisdictions to the Crown, the Colonial Office reviewed all serious cases even when no appeals or complaints were lodged. This practice imposed on the protector of slaves and the local courts an obligation to be guided by basic principles of British jurisprudence. In addition, it made justice cheap and accessible to the most unprivileged persons and expedited or preempted appeals to the Privy Council.6 The amelioration ordinance only tacitly acknowledged the right of the enslaved to complain against their enslavers. Nothing in the legislation provided a mechanism for pursuing this right without obstruction. Instead, the benefits of amelioration depended on the Spanish principle of external intervention . The protector of slaves was obliged to investigate every complaint and to rule only a$er summoning all parties concerned as well as all necessary material witnesses. In cases of alleged misdemeanors by proprietors the protector was bound to refer them to a “judicial authority,” meaning, the criminal courts. Misdemeanors were offenses such as punishing an enslaved person for a second time within twenty-four hours, carrying a whip in the field, and willfully making false entries in the plantation record book. Free persons guilty of misdemeanors under the amelioration ordinance were liable to a fine not less than fi$y pounds sterling or more than five hundred pounds, but the records show that fines were almost always far less than the legal minimum. Although members of the enslaved class were not officially educated about their rights under the amelioration, they were determined to put the system to the test. Many proprietors were no beer informed. Thus, both enslaved and enslavers, locked in a bale of opposing interests, defined their responses according to their cultural values and traditions. The enslaved’s apparent reverence for Buxton and King George as “massa” was symbolic and significant; the adoption of these imperial icons demonstrated that no gratitude or loyalty was owed to plantation enslavers for specific relaxations of the terrors of slavery. So long as their enslavers chose to defy Buxton or the king, 163 constitutional militancy the enslaved...