The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation

Introduction

INTRODUCTION On August 2, 1838, one day after the act that ended slavery in the British Caribbean came into effect, “a large and respectable party of . . . gentlemen” dined at the Bible Depository of the Barbados Auxiliary Bible Society of the Free People of Color in the island’s capital city, Bridgetown. They came to celebrate the arrival of “full” emancipation and the end of apprenticeship—the period of transition from slavery to freedom that commenced on August 1, 1834, and ended on August 1, 1838. The newspaper report of this dinner provides a rich vignette of the expectations and hopes, social and ideological transformations, and socioeconomic and political tensions that slave emancipation in the anglophone Caribbean entailed. One Thomas Harris Jr., co-owner of the Liberal, a newspaper owned and edited by men of color, organized the gathering. His newspaper carried the only report of the event on August 4. Only men of color free before emancipation were invited to attend. According to the Liberal’s anonymous journalist, the island’s “former free [!] people . . . with scarcely an exception, have greeted the first of August, as a day that brings them as well as their brethren liberty.” If whites, women, or any of the island’s more than eighty thousand recently emancipated people were present, their attendance was not acknowledged in the newspaper report. The Liberal ’s other owner, Samuel Jackman Prescod, chaired the meeting, and Harris Jr. delivered the keynote address. Harris viewed British slave emancipation as a harbinger of better things to come for his “class” of society—Afro-Barbadians free before general emancipation: I rise with a heart uplifted with gratitude to a merciful Creator, for the inestimable blessing this day vouchsafed me, of meeting to celebrate our Emancipation . I say our Emancipation, gentlemen, because I do assert, and that too, without the fear of contradiction, that this day in which . . . the legislature of this Island has granted freedom to the slave—also made us free indeed. For I feel quite certain, that every one present will agree with me 2 the children of africa in the colonies when I assert that we were heretofore only nominally free. . . . Gentlemen, by one Queen, the stain, that disgraceful stain of slavery and its horrors, . . . has been removed from the escutcheon of Britain. Long may she reign to witness the good effects of the blessing she has conferred upon a grateful though calumniated people. . . . Gentlemen . . . we must admit, to use the language embodied in an admirable resolution of the coloured people of America, “That [the late emancipated class] are our brethren by the lieu [sic] of consanguinity, of suffering, and of wrong. Harris expressed his hope that emancipation would bring the “advancement of our class . . . the colored body,” and that “the other class” (namely, whites) would reform the island’s laws and grant people of colour equal “rights and privileges.”1 Despite these lofty sentiments, biographical information about the men who addressed this dinner raises troubling questions regarding why they suddenly and publicly embraced former slaves as their “brethren” and adopted emancipation as the moment of their freedom. Four of the men were Afro-Barbadians who had been very active in the civil rights struggle for free people of color during slavery, but none of them appears to have been an active abolitionist before 1834. Three of them—Thomas Harris Jr., William Nunes, and Joseph Kennedy—actually had been slave owners.2 Although he had not himself owned slaves, Samuel Jackman Prescod’s wife, Katherine (née Cruden), was a slave owner who had also been executor of the estate of a deceased female relative, which included more than twenty slaves.3 The only man whose abolitionist credentials predated emancipation was an Afro-Antiguan named Henry Loving, the editor of Antigua’s Weekly Register, a newspaper that had promoted the causes of greater civil rights for Afro1 . Liberal, 4 August 1838. 2. Barbadian slave owners had to register their slaves every three years between 1817 and 1832. Afro-Barbadian slave owners were denoted by the abbreviations “fm” and “fn,” for “free mulatto” and “free negro,” respectively, or less frequently with some variation of “fbw,” “fbm,” “fcw,” or “fcm,” for “free black woman [man]” and “free colored woman [man].” In 1817–1829, Thomas Harris Jr. is listed as owning one slave. However, in 1832 the name is listed twice, possibly referring to Harris Jr. and his father Harris Sr. One Thomas Harris owned twelve slaves and the other nine. T 71/520...