Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies

12. Conclusion

199 12 CONCLUSION T he problem of security created by insurrectionism of the enslaved across the British colonies from the mid-eighteenth century arrested the aention of key spokesmen of empire, leading to the imperial adoption of amelioration as the flagship policy to validate and cushion the abolition of the slave trade. The dramatic failure of amelioration as a system of social control compelled metropolitans to concede general emancipation as a new security strategy. Unquestionably, the popular metropolitan movement in England was indispensable to the politics of abolitionism , goading Crown and Parliament into action. The chief parliamentary representatives of popular abolitionism were also critical, serving as links between the colonial dynamics of transformation and legislative reaction in the metropolis. But the primary social forces of abolition and emancipation must be sought among the colonies’ free and enslaved populations. In exploring the pragmatic rationale for metropolitan intervention, this study has assiduously divorced the rhetoric of conscience from the economics of public security and has sought to reconcile a common ground in their deployment. Abolitionist leaders were motivated by an awareness that a viable colonial structure needed a politically stable environment, which could best be achieved by standardizing the management of colonial slavery toward the creation of a Christianized, Creole labor force. Creolization had its own momentum , providing fodder for abolitionists’ activism and a palliative to planters, but Christianization was a bier pill for the planters to swallow. Abolition of the slave trade was a mechanism for standardizing amelioration with a fully Creole labor force while leaving emancipation to the forces of history. Yet the theory of security through amelioration and slave trade abolition proved to be a fallacy, and emancipation was won, instead, by revolution. Abolitionists revolutionary emancipation 200 had not reckoned with the possibility of an enslaved insurgency as a whole and misread the lessons of the early Creole insurgencies; they also did not anticipate the expansion of emancipationist insurgencies under Christianized Creole leadership. Decoding the dread of revolutionary emancipationism is key to understanding the reform strategies of colonials and metropolitan abolitionists, secular and religious. The most incontrovertible evidence of this foreboding is the official policy adopted for Trinidad. Eric Williams and C. L. R. James argue that if Britain had captured St. Domingue, abolitionism would have been abandoned indefinitely. Trinidad was captured in the time it would have taken to consolidate the conquest of St. Domingue. Yet the slave trade to Trinidad was halted and every effort made to arrest the growth of the native African population in the colony, a clear case of surrender to the hysteria of black soldiery. Even though the fear of Haitian expansionism beyond the island of Hispaniola was unfounded, we cannot discredit with hindsight what was commonly thought to be true, or we discredit the forces of history. Certainly, Henry Brougham could admit of no direct connection between Haiti and the British colonies, yet he feared that “the neighbourhood of a negro state will prepare our slaves for ideas of independence.”1 It certainly did so in dramatic revolutionary style for Santo Domingo. David Brion Davis affirms that “the sanest minds found excuses for Negro slavery.”2 The same ought not to be said of the most self-righteous, to whom slavery was anathema. The aempts by historians to make a special case for the toleration of slavery by the “saints” are unrealistic. Anstey affirms, “For the saved, slavery stood particularly condemned precisely because the concept of Redemption was central for him.”3 Yet metropolitan reformers, basking in the transcendence of personal salvation, opted for slavery over emancipation. They studiously avoided condemning the plantocracy in spite of efforts by a few to expose the futility of pursuing moral enlightenment of the enslaved under the existing immorality of the enslavers. Evangelical and Quaker reformers set back, rather than promoted, African emancipation. To sum up this aspect, the words of Canning are appropriate; in his reply to Buxton’s proposals to emancipate slave children while leaving their parents in slavery, he argued: “The name of Christianity ought not to be thus used unless we are prepared to act in a much more summary manner than the honourable member now proposes. If the existence of Slavery be repugnant to the principles of the British Constitution and the Christian Religion, how 201 conclusion can the honourable gentleman himself consent to pause even for an instant, or to...