Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery

ONE. Slavery, Emancipation, and Reproducing the Race

16 c h a p t e r o n e Slavery, Emancipation, and Reproducing the Race Whatever then may be said for West Indian slavery, this damning thing must be said against it, that the slaves were dying of it. —Charles Buxton, Slavery and Freedom in the British West Indies, 1860 in 1860, a little more than twenty-fiveyearsaftertheendofslavery in the British Caribbean, Charles Buxton published a passionate defense of emancipation. The son of Thomas Fowell Buxton, a leading antislavery activist in Great Britain, the younger Buxton summarized some of the reasons his father’s generation of abolitionists had advanced to support emancipation. It was brutal and immoral as well as being an inefficient use of labor. It was also a killer. To abolitionists, the demographic consequences of slavery were clear and inexorable and could only be reversed if the system was brought to a speedy end. From the perspective of 1860, it was apparent to Charles Buxton that the growing awareness of slavery’s demographic cost had convinced the British Parliament to pass legislation ending slavery; the “population returns” constituted a “death-blow.”1 For Charles Buxton, emancipation was a moral, economic, and most of all, demographic success.2 To many of his contemporaries, population growth in the Caribbean after slavery’s end was a measure of the “mighty experiment.” Ironically, Buxton published his assessment at the very moment when growing numbers of Britons were condemning emancipation as a failure. As former slaves demonstrated their willingness to construct their lives in opposition to British-defined ideas, imperial officials and the British public expressed growing disenchantment with the results of emancipation.3 Much of this disillusionment was rooted in the gap between the goals of British policy makers and those of Caribbean men and women. Former slaves had their own ideas about what freedom would reproducing the race 17 bring. They wanted control over their working lives, access to land, fair wages and working conditions, freedom of movement, and reunification of the families that slavery had torn apart. Imperial officials had their own goals, the most pressing of which was ensuring economic viability and social stability. To them, the survival of plantations worked by reliable workers was the key to achieving both.4 Imperial officials’ increasingly negative views about the results of emancipation were also tied to assessments of population growth, which was to be one of freedom’s great accomplishments. The initial optimistic assessments that the end of slavery would naturally result in population growth were replaced gradually with much gloomier views. The high death rates consequent upon the mid-nineteenth-century cholera epidemics helped crystallize these views. To many imperial officials and representatives of the colonial elites, former slaves were unable to cope with the challenges of freedom, and their “savage” responses to the epidemics condemned them and their families to premature death. This view of former slaves was part of a hardening racialized rhetoric in this period that represented people of African descent as immoral and undisciplined and incapable of freedom. Slave Populations As the quotation by Charles Buxton that introduced this chapter demonstrates , questions about population size lay at the heart of the abolition debates that roiled Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 In marshaling their arguments against the slave trade and slavery, British abolitionists pointed to the immorality and inefficiency of this labor control system. Written and oral accounts by missionaries and by slaves themselves testified to its brutality and corrupting effects on masters and slaves alike. Adam Smith’s arguments had served to convince many that slave labor was less productive and more expensive than that of free workers .6 But demographic arguments were central to the case against slavery. In the early nineteenth century, in their efforts to convince the British government to pass legislation ending British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, abolitionists and like-minded government ministers drew on contemporary ideas that populations “naturally” grew and represented the British Caribbean as reflecting this “normal” pattern. This argument had the merit of undermining concerns about the impact of ending the slave trade.7 The abolitionist and member of the British House of Lords Lord Grenville, for example, calculated that Jamaica’s “excess reproducing the race 18 of deaths over births” had declined consistently over the past century and that therefore its population was able to reproduce without the slave trade.8 As the future prime...