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95 6 FROM REVOLUTION TO ABOLITION The Trinidad Question B ritain’s capture of Trinidad in 1797, its defeat in St. Domingue, and the success of West Indian gradualism were pivotal events in the countdown to abolition. Metropolitan civil society involvement was unquestionably intrinsic to the politics of abolitionism, but the larger undercurrent of change in parliamentary abolitionism flowed from events and developments in the colonies. Implementation of the final phase of the 1792 resolutions earmarked for 1796 was overtaken by the exigency of black military conscription. One year a$er the proposed Abolition Day, Parliament’s endorsement of amelioration struck a crippling blow to the abolitionist party, effectively shi$ing the captaincy of colonial reconstruction to the West India Interest.1 Led by Charles Ellis, the West Indians sold amelioration to Parliament as the panacea for arresting demographic arition of the enslaved; thus, they proposed an unmapped gradualism as the best formula for abolition. William Wilberforce was well aware that Parliament’s support of the motion “would do away its own solemn pledge” of 1792.2 Equally important , the success of Ellis’s motion ensured that the original deadline for total abolition in 1800 as well as Denmark’s promise to abolish the trade in 1803 would not provide new political fuel for immediate abolition.3 The loss of support for immediatism was underscored by the contentious Trinidad Question. Imperial strategy demanded capture of the island long recognized as a serious threat to Britain’s southern colonies.4 In the early 1790s the island was linked to the presence of immigrants (white and free colored republicans and enslaved people) from St. Domingue; the “dangerous principles of equality” they imported warranted the destruction of the island if it could not be conquered.5 Notwithstanding these allegations, Abercrom- revolutionary emancipation 96 by’s pretext for aacking Trinidad was that it had dispatched reinforcements to assist the Fédon insurrectionists in Grenada.6 Capitalists welcomed the capture of Trinidad as adequate compensation for the loss of St. Domingue. Yet within a few years the former Spanish possession would become a new nightmare for abolitionists. The island’s economic potential pivoted the colony to center stage on two of the most pressing questions of the day: the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and the future of colonialism. The debate on the island’s future spawned new life within the abolition movement; abolitionists skillfully refashioned a common war trophy into the principal nursery for experiments in a new colonial paradigm central to which was abolition of the slave trade.7 Conquest was followed immediately by intense propaganda to sell the island to British investors as the new jewel in the English Crown. In one of his early reports governor Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Picton commented, “The Island itself a$er Cuba and Hispaniola is incontestably the finest in all the West Indies whether the general fertility of the soil or the extent of cultivable lands be considered.”8 Trinidad was a late starter in plantation economy, having its first sugar mill only in 1787. Ten years later a plantation revolution was in full swing, with 159 sugar estates in addition to 130 estates under coffee, 60 under cocoa, and 103 under coon.9 By 1802 the number of sugar estates had increased to almost 200, of which Picton himself owned several.10 The island’s exaggerated economic prospects alarmed abolitionists. A contemporary labor estimate of at least one million deepened the specter of another St. Domingue in the making.11 As early as 1800, three fourths of Britain ’s slave trade was already going to the newly conquered colonies of Demerara , Suriname, and Trinidad.12 Trinidad’s share amounted to 5,861 imported between 1798 and 1801; of this number 4,409 came directly from Africa.13 The formal cession of the island triggered a sharp rise in labor imports into the colony, motivated by Addington’s support of land grants to new colonists. In the two-year period from 5 January 1802 to 5 January 1804, the island received 10,270 African captives.14 Against this backdrop the alarm raised by abolitionists prioritized the Trinidad Question as a crisis of first importance to the future of the British West Indies. The cession of Trinidad was the clarion call for the dramatic entry of Henry Brougham, George Canning, and James Stephen to the center stage of abolitionism . For several months Canning overshadowed Wilberforce as chief parliamentary spokesman on abolition...

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