By Barbara Arrindell
We make the shift this Sunday August 4 on the Big Issues, from our conversation last weekend concerning an historic event that took place on August 1, 1834, to a discussion about the why and how of Reparations.
Understanding clearly what happened prior to the historic day may aid our understanding about the call for reparations.
The following excerpt is taken from Brian Dyde’s book, A History of Antigua, the 2023 edition. Pages 137-139:
In order for owners in Antigua, like those in other self-governing colonies, to receive their share of the compensation money, the island had first to pass its own version of the Emancipation Act.
On September 11, a meeting of planters and other slaveowners took place in the courthouse in St John’s, called to protest against the British Act and to prepare a petition for transmission to London arguing against abolition. Many of the plantation owners were in financial trouble, no longer able to meet their debts, and in some cases not even able to obtain credit to buy enough food for their slaves – of whom it was now generally recognised there were too many. Among those attending, and one of the few planters who still had his head above water, was Samuel Otto Baijer; a man who besides being a member of the Assembly, a judge, and adjutant-general of the militia, was also one of the men Loving had singled out by name for abuse in his London epistle. His address to the meeting, far from endorsing the general attitude towards Emancipation, took a totally unexpected and completely different view:
Gentlemen, my previous sentiments on this subject are well known to you all: be not surprised to learn that they have undergone an entire change. I have not altered my views without mature deliberation. For several days past, I have been making calculations with regard to the probable results of Emancipation, and I have ascertained beyond a doubt that I can cultivate my estate at least one-third cheaper by free labour, than by slave labour.
His reasoning was very simple. Because the island was small and virtually all the land was taken up with sugar estates, there would be little that free labourers would be able to do but continue to work for the planters if they wanted to survive. As slaves, they were fed, clothed and housed whether they worked or not, and once their working lives were over they remained the responsibility of their owners. On the other hand, free labourers – of whom as there were already too many slaves there would be a surplus – would be entirely responsible for themselves, could be paid the lowest wages, and given employment only when work was available. As well as being simple, Baijer’s reasoning was also persuasive: all thoughts of protesting emancipation were forgotten, and instead the meeting adopted an entirely different set of resolutions with which to petition the Legislature. Chief among these resolutions were that apprenticeship would serve no useful purpose, that freedom should not be granted before the owners had been compensated, and that once slavery had ended, there should be nothing ‘to force upon the Colonists the necessity of employing labourers, over whose conduct they would have no control.’ In addition the owners wanted compensation to be fixed at £30 for each slave, and the much-hated 4½ percent sugar tax removed.
Once suitable petitions had been presented to the Council and the House of Assembly – and some of those who had attended the courthouse meeting were members of one or the other – no time was lost in forming a joint committee to consider the island’s own Emancipation Bill. Not surprisingly, in its report the committee found itself in favour of immediate Emancipation in order to ‘prevent future agitation’, and because of ‘apprehension that the apprenticeship system would take away the authority of the master over the slave, without supplying in its place adequate means of controlling him.’ It also objected to the introduction ‘from abroad’ of the stipendiary magistrates who would be needed to supervise an apprenticeship period, and also to the distinction made ‘between the praedial and non-praedial classes, as being founded in injustice and bad policy.’ In the end, after much waffle about ‘The peculiar preparation on the part of both planters and the slaves for immediate Emancipation’ and ‘The comparatively high degree of intelligence and moral principle which existed among the slaves’, the report finally stated the real reason why apprenticeship was considered unnecessary; a reason later transmitted by the Legislature to the Governor as: The all-important and paramount one of an utter dependence, from peculiarity of climate and the absence of unoccupied lands, except those of absolute sterility, of the labourer or proprietor and capitalist for the means of procuring food; and that a large proportion of the population, whether bond or free, could not hope for the means of subsistence except by some laborious occupation in one of those frequent periods of long drought especially to which we are almost annually subject.
Governor Sir Evan McGregor, who had taken over from the planters’ friend, Ross, the previous year, and was ‘a man of the strictest political principles, and of a most enlightened mind’, accepted the Legislature’s reasoning and immediate Emancipation was included in the Act passed in February 1834. After some amendment by the Colonial Office it became law on 4 June, and Friday 1 August was ordered to be held as a day of thanksgiving for the ‘happy termination’ of slavery. Although the decision to dispense with the apprenticeship period can now be seen for what it was – a cynical move by Antigua’s plantocracy to take advantage of the fact that the physical characteristics of the island and its use ruled out peasant farming, and that free labourers would still be bound to the estates but under, as far as the planters were concerned, more advantageous conditions – this was not always so.
In the immediate aftermath of Emancipation, the decision was widely hailed as reflecting ‘much honour’ on men ‘who have ever been distinguished by their desire to mitigate the horrors of slavery’; men who ‘graciously and generously granted [the slaves] their liberty’ and who could pride themselves on knowing that ‘nowhere in our West Indian possessions were the negroes treated with more humanity.’ If, as the historian Eric Williams recorded: ‘The British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced negro slavery for the satisfaction of abolishing it’, reading such mid-Victorian encomiums might make one believe Antiguan planters only put up with slavery for the approbation they received for their manner of bringing it to an end.
Be that as it may, the months leading up to Emancipation day were, in the words of one of these same commentators, ‘fraught with hope and bright expectation on one hand, and fear and anxious foreboding on the other.’ In October 1833 McGregor had written to the Colonial Secretary about the possible need to increase the size of the garrison: “Previously to the next First of August it may be advisable in any case to solicit a reinforcement for Antigua, not so much on account of the free inhabitants, whom the King’s troops present, and the militia, are sufficient to protect, as for the sake of the newly-liberated slaves themselves, in order to over-awe them by a show of force, and thereby guard against the consequence of excesses, in which they might otherwise be tempted to indulge, on the first introduction of a great change in the nature of their social condition.”
