Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834–1866 (review)

In this well-researched and concisely written work, Gale L. Kenny traces how between 1834 and 1866 American abolitionists, as representatives of the Oberlin College mission and, after 1846, the American Missionary Association (AMA), attempted to replace a “culture of slavery” with Anglo understandings of gender, family, and religion. Drawing on the rich correspondence of men and women involved in the Jamaica Mission, Kenny reveals how the tenets of radical abolitionism and evangelical Christianity informed their project and how those ideologies shifted over time. To do so, she focuses on “how white and black individuals [in Jamaica] engaged with one another on a daily basis within households, churches, and schools,” dividing her argument into three parts (4).

Part 1 considers how religion, gender, and race in the 1830s and 1840s influenced the meaning of freedom in the United States and Jamaica. The Second Great Awakening and the early stages of racial abolitionism in the antebellum North, Kenny argues in chapter 1, shaped Oberlin College and its students, including those who became important members of the Jamaica Mission. There, future missionaries came to value manual labor education, a patriarchal family model that pitted what Kenny calls “manly independence” against “womanly submission” and sexual purity and a model of Christian perfectionism grounded in strict moral discipline. These doctrines influenced missionaries’ definitions of freedom, assumptions about its practice by newly enfranchised people, and served as the foundational ideology for their evangelization program. Chapter 2 explores black Jamaicans’ ideas of freedom through their approaches to labor, families, and churches. Black Jamaicans who had known slavery, Kenny argues, looked not for rigid rules and hierarchies but rather flexibility and adaptability in the post-emancipation period. Consequently, few of them embraced the Jamaica Mission’s guiding ideologies, opting instead for a blending of male wage labor and female-generated income from “family lands,” and a “flight from the estates” strategy common in many post-emancipation societies. Likewise, many crafted their own ideas of respectability that allowed for sex outside of marriage and made motherhood, rather than marriage, the center of black womanhood and gravitated toward an African-inflected creole religion, Myal, and native-led Baptist churches.

In part 2, Kenny explores how these different understandings of freedom affected island relationships during the Jamaica Mission’s first decade. In chapter 3, Kenny argues the Oberlin ministers’ 1846 decision to join the American Missionary Association required close adherence to strict church discipline. Although some black Jamaicans, primarily older married couples and women, did embrace the ideology, ultimately, the doctrine’s precepts, especially those related to sexuality, cast many black as Jamaicans unworthy of church membership and limited their participation. Chapter 4 considers the tensions between Christian perfectionism and antiauthoritarian strains of radical abolitionism revealed by the Jamaica Mission’s failure to successfully instill Victorian mores in black Jamaicans. Through a nuanced reading of the scandal created by missionary John Hyde’s shift from supporting the mission’s perfectionist doctrine to rejecting its social, racial, and gender hierarchies (including conducting a public adulterous relationship with another minister’s wife), Kenny argues that disagreements over the role of white women, especially single ones, and religious theology, ultimately provided opportunities for black Jamaican church members in the mission’s governing structure and schools. In chapter 5, she traces American missionaries’ efforts to reaffirm the importance of a patriarchal family structure in the wake of the Hyde sex scandal. While missionaries first championed land ownership as the way to transform black families, when that strategy failed they established Richmond Estate, a sugar estate where black families could purchase small parcels of land and earn educations in exchange for work and strict adherence to missionary terms and rules, a step away from their belief in the value of manly independence.

In Part 3, Kenny examines how the arrival of a younger generation of missionaries influenced daily life in the schools and households that provided the...