Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866

Introduction

{ 1 } Introduction On August 1, 1838, Americans looked south to the West Indies with great anticipation as they waited to see how Britain’s great experiment of emancipation would proceed. Five years before, Britain had passed the Abolition Act, and the first stages of the gradual abolition of colonial slavery took effect in August 1834. While Antigua proceeded to emancipate all slaves, Jamaica and Barbados reclassified most enslaved people as apprentices . American and British abolitionists alike had condemned the apprenticeship system as a useless half-measure, and Parliament eventually agreed, bringing apprenticeship to an early end in 1838. For many observers, full emancipation began a test of free-labor ideology and the efficacy of the civilizing mission: would ex-slaves work for wages? Would black people adopt “civilized”—that is, English—Christianity? Over the ensuing years, scholars, politicians, philanthropists, and journalists presented their views on the subject. With its declining sugar exports, increasing indebtedness, { 2 } introduction and its white and black inhabitants’ notorious licentiousness, Jamaica became the example of emancipation gone wrong. While abolitionists attributed Jamaica’s problems to the obstinate and greedy proprietors of sugar estates who had a stranglehold on the colonial government, proslavery writers blamed lazy and ungovernable blacks.1 By the late 1840s, the latter perspective had triumphed in Thomas Carlyle’s caustic article, “Occasional Discourses on the Negro Question.” His depiction of indolent blacks eating pumpkins while refusing to work more than a few hours a week represented the attitudes of many whites in Britain and the United States who believed that the experiment of emancipation had proved that blacks were inferior to whites. A similar shift in public opinion would happen in the United States in the 1880s. After emancipation in 1863 and the Union’s defeat of the South in 1865, radical abolitionists in Congress passed a number of remarkable legislative acts and constitutional amendments that instituted an interracial democracy for the first time in American history. By the 1890s, however, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, black codes passed in state legislatures, and the cultural climate promoting reconciliation between white northerners and southerners had rolled back Reconstruction, and black Americans became second-class citizens.2 This book approaches this familiar motif in both American and British imperial history from a different perspective: an American abolitionist mission to freed people in post-emancipation Jamaica. Beginning in 183, the American missionaries to Jamaica came from Oberlin College in northern Ohio, a hotbed of radicalism. At Oberlin, the future missionaries learned Christian perfectionism and worked to do away with all sinfulness, including the evils of slavery and racial prejudice. Oberlin also aimed to educate self-sufficient and independent men along with pious and morally righteous women. As radical abolitionists, the white missionaries had African American classmates, co-religionists, and organizational allies, and once in Jamaica, the missionaries expected black Jamaicans to fill a similar role in the mission’s churches and schools. In 184, the Jamaica Mission became a part of the American Missionary Association (ama) an abolitionist society based in New York City. The missionaries promoted “Christian liberty,” to balance freedom and manly independence with strict adherence to evangelical Christian morality. They did so in the hopes that they could save souls and improve Jamaican society while providing to the abolitionist press in the United States a useful test case for emancipation. introduction { 3 } For their part, black Jamaicans saw the American missionaries as frustrating allies. Just as the missionaries’ articulation of freedom grew out of their experiences as evangelicals and abolitionists in the antebellum North, the meaning of freedom to enslaved Jamaicans derived from a very different set of social and cultural conditions. Many black Jamaican Christians practiced a creole religion inflected with African, European, and African American beliefs and practices and shaped by the experience of Jamaican slave culture. Freed people also had their own ideas about what constituted freedom when it came to landownership and family practices. The freedom for mothers and fathers, rather than former masters, to control the division of labor in their families ranked first in importance. The American missionaries, on the other hand, looked for signs of “pure” Christianity, the middle-class family, and the gender ideology of domesticity as indicators that black people understood the proper use of freedom. Although the American missionaries provided resources and political advocacy for education and land rights, they only rarely...