Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies

1. Explicating the “Grand Evils” of Colonialism

1 1 EXPLICATING THE “GRAND EVILS” OF COLONIALISM The Supreme Evil W hen the French National Assembly legislated the general abolition of slavery in 1794, the slave trade was also abolished ipso facto. On the contrary, British abolitionists doggedly justified distinguishing slavery from the slave trade on the teleological premise that no other evil “was comparable to that of the African Slave Trade.” 1 Contemporary voices explicitly acknowledged two evils of the colonial system: the barbarism of African enslavement and the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. Most were predisposed to consider them “distinct from each other” or else perfunctorily dismissed them as necessary evils.2 Unquestionably, the evidence adduced at the parliamentary inquiries into the slave trade between 1788 and 1791 was more than adequate to condemn the commoditization and enslavement of Africans as crimes against humanity, even by the standards of the day. Although some philanthropically minded, colonial-based Quakers had begun to rail against both evils since the seventeenth century,3 the politicization of abolition had more to do with the slave trade as a feeder for an even greater evil than slavery itself, o$en captioned as “internal commotion,” “internal violence,” or “internal insurrection” and appropriately embodied in the term revolutionary emancipationism. Abolitionist luminary Henry Brougham implicitly included revolutionary emancipation as the greatest of the “grand evils” confronting colonial security.4 Indeed, ranked by vested interest , slavery was the least problematic of the grand evils, insurrection the greatest. Contemporary logic on the cause of this threat informed the prioritizing of ending the trade over emancipation. Paradoxically, to revolution- revolutionary emancipation 2 ary emancipators the military option was the most viable physic to the evil of slavery. A standard question posed to witnesses at the parliamentary inquiry was whether an African was less “susceptible of the sentiment of liberty as a free peasant in England.” It is to England’s credit that a minority of white contemporaries had sufficient confidence in their conviction of the natural rights of humanity to condemn the racism implicit in such an assumption. One senior naval officer contended that there was “no comparison between a set of free men in a land of liberty and protection, and a set of people who were treated in many respects like cale.”5 Even fewer whites, however, dared to admit that rebellions were not motivated by African savagery but rather by desperation to recover or secure their liberty. One exception was Barbadosborn Reverend Robert Nicholls, who informed the parliamentary commiee of 1790–91 that freedom was the motive behind the “two great rebellions mentioned by Long,” referring to Tacky’s War in 1760 and its Hanover sequel six years later.6 Refusing to be railroaded, he affirmed, “I consider liberty as the first comfort in life, as well as an inalienable right. I consider the want of it as lessening the comforts of life.”7 Africans were not invited to testify before the commiee, although the abolitionist Sons of Africa successfully tabled at least one memorandum.8 The Sons of Africa was a seminal abolition society in England, founded in 1786, one year before the beer-known Society for Effecting the Gradual Abolition of the Slave Trade. Among the well-known names of the Sons of Africa were Olaudah Equiano and Oobah Cugoano.9 Many Africans, including Equiano and Cugoano, penned (or dictated) poignant declarations of their rights to liberty, happiness, and justice in autobiographies that to a large degree are also biographies of slavery, the slave trade, and emancipation . Trained in the art of combat before his capture, Equiano explained why the conditions of West Indian slavery thrust the enslaved into a perpetual struggle for freedom: “When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war.”10 Much more explicitly than any other metropolitan-based abolitionists, Cugoano justified revolutionary violence as a tool of emancipation and even anticipated the Haitian Revolution.11 Decades later Mary Prince added her voice to the still relevant question. Toward the end of her graphic narrative about her multiple experiences of enslavement, she contended that Africans’ right to freedom explicating the “grand evils” of colonialism 3 and happiness could be no less than that of English subjects. Accordingly, she asked...