Benjamin David Weber has brilliantly compared Thome’s massive handwritten manuscript with the published book, showing that Theodore Dwight Weld edited the work in a way that deemphasized religion and moral suasion and focused on the economic superiority of free labor within a context of laissez-faire individualism and harmony of interests. With Southern slaveholding readers clearly in mind, Weld welcomed the passages that demonstrated “the safety and profitability for the masters and the new mechanisms of discipline focused on inculcating inward self-control and industriousness.” The issue of the freed slaves’ incentives to work had been especially crucial in Britain. But, given Weld’s pragmatism, this also meant the deletion of Thome’s paragraphs noting the great desire of some workers to escape field labor and describing the way Antigua restricted the blacks’ employment options in order to keep sufficient field labor on the estates. Since Kimball, an antislavery editor from New England, became seriously ill during their West Indian tour and died soon thereafter, it was Thome who really reported on their interviews and discoveries.45
In their introduction, Thome and Kimball summarized the “established facts,” the crucial points “beyond the power of dispute or cavil” that emerged from their investigation of British emancipation in Antigua, Jamaica, and Barbados. First, that the immediate emancipation in Antigua “was not attended with any disorder whatever.” Second, that the emancipated slaves “have readily, faithfully, and efficiently worked for wages from the first” (elsewhere they stressed that free labor was less expensive and more productive, and that land values had risen). Third, that apprenticeship, which planters had never wanted as a “preparation” for freedom, was the source of the only serious difficulties, and that any “disturbance in the working of apprenticeship” was “invariably” the fault of the masters or officers charged with administering it. Fourth, that “the prejudice of caste” was “fast disappearing in the emancipated islands.” Fifth, that the planters “who have fairly made the ‘experiment,’ now greatly prefer the new system to the old.” And sixth, that the emancipated people “are perceptibly rising in the scale of civilization, morals, and religion.”46
This glowing vision of the British precedent, of life after slavery, becomes darker when Thome and Kimball actually turn to Jamaica, a “half-way house between slavery and freedom.” In Kingston, where Kimball would become confined because of illness, the attorney general gave them letters of introduction to influential planters. They also interviewed the solicitor general, merchants, and newspaper editors, and concluded that despite the failures of apprenticeship, there had been no sign of revolt, defiance of law, or increase in crime. Thome and Kimball later found that planters differed on the industriousness of the apprentices.47 Yet the apprentice system perpetuated or even magnified the cruelties of slavery, as when an apprentice would be sent to a house of correction and tortured on a treadmill for the crime of being late to work. In discussing the complexities of this partial dismantling of the slave system, Thome and Kimball could only predict that Jamaica would move toward the Antiguan model once apprenticeship was abolished.48
FROM JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY TO THE ISSUE OF FAILURE
While Weber shows that Thome and Kimball’s work helped change the meaning of immediatism for American abolitionists—and some nonabolitionist Northerners like Governor Edward Everett of Massachusetts wrote that Thome and Kimball’s evidence “sealed the fate of slavery throughout the civilized world”49—it was British Quaker Joseph John Gurney who directly conveyed a positive view of British emancipation to America’s most prominent leaders in Washington, in 1840.50
A member of a famous and prosperous Quaker banking and philanthropic family, Gurney was the brother-in-law of Thomas Fowell Buxton (not a Quaker) and the brother of the eminent reformer Elizabeth (Gurney) Fry. Gurney was a banker, reformer, philanthropist, and evangelical Quaker minister (his preaching in the United States contributed to a schism in the Society of Friends), and his three-year mission to America in 1837–40 enabled him to travel throughout the country, visiting colleges, prisons, and asylums, and even conducting a religious service in January 1838 in the House of Representatives, which was attended by President Martin Van Buren, Senator Henry Clay, and Congressman John Quincy Adams, all of whom Gurney had previously interviewed.
Though committed to abolitionist principles, Gurney had an incredible network of connections that made it possible, after his later tour of the West Indies, to have a private audience concerning the effects of British emancipation not only with Secretary of State John Forsyth, but with President Van Buren (whom he visited at least four times), John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and the British ambassador Henry Fox. Hardly less amazing, when Gurney stopped in Savannah, Georgia, on his way from the Caribbean to Washington, he succeeded in addressing nearly two thousand people, in two public meetings, despite the diffusion of reports that he was an “anti-slavery spy.” By 1840 the Lower South was becoming notorious for its often violent suppression of antislavery writings and speeches. Yet Gurney left Savannah “under feelings of sincere regard and affection towards many of its inhabitants,” and also reported that “we are bound to acknowledge that they treated us with great civility and kindness.”51
Given the Southerners’ intense hostility to Northern abolitionists, Gurney’s warm reception in Savannah and especially by slaveholders like Clay and Calhoun in Washington is difficult to understand. He was one of the most remarkable of all the advocates of slave emancipation, in part because his approach differed so strikingly from that of the most prominent American abolitionists. Said to be tall, handsome, and cordial, he was clearly at age fifty a very agreeable and appealing man, capable of establishing close ties not only with a moderate opponent of slavery like William Ellery Channing but also with a moderate slaveholder like Henry Clay, the president of the American Colonization Society who had argued for gradual emancipation in Kentucky in the late 1790s.
Scrupulous in avoiding any public censure of slaveholders (he was well aware that another English “foreign” abolitionist, George Thompson, had been vilified, mobbed, and threatened with death), Gurney succeeded in presenting some of the clearest and most concise critiques of racial slavery in the American South, Cuba, and the other slaveholding colonies he visited.
It is also important to note that even by 1840 and later, some antislavery views persisted in the Upper South, and many Southerners still expressed some ambivalence and internal misgivings over the institution, in part because of their deep devotion to the ideal of “liberty.”52 Many slaveholders still believed that slavery, like medieval serfdom, was doomed by history to disappear. They were eager to hear a report on the consequences of British emancipation, even from a strong advocate of freedom, if he embodied the prestige and reputation of Joseph John Gurney. Gurney himself emphasized, in a later published letter to his “brother” Buxton, that many American slaveholders were “increasingly disposed to enter upon a fair consideration of the subject.” Expressing his deep-rooted optimism, he added that if such slaveholders were “wisely dealt with” (he condemned the use of “harsh epithets and violent language” toward slaveholders), they could hardly fail to arrive at conclusions that would lead them “to openly support the cause of emancipation.”53
As a Quaker evangelist, Gurney saw “preaching the gospel” as the main purpose of his travels in America and the West Indies. But in England he had also been an ardent reformer, like his sister Elizabeth Fry, and had engaged in various causes, including the improvement of prison discipline and criminal codes, and of course the abolition of British colonial slavery. As a young man, Gurney had worked with Wilberforce and Clarkson, and had then helped his brother-in-law Buxton by writing, speaking, and offering funds to promote the final emancipation act. In America, he continued his efforts regarding the treatment of criminals and the insane, and since his visit coincided with the massive westward “removal” of Indians, he addressed many political leaders regarding this crue
l act of oppression, which he regarded as “one of the foulest blots on the character of the nations of Christendom.”54
In Quaker meetings, Gurney spoke out more openly against the immense immorality of slavery, especially the laws banning the education of slaves and the cruelty of the internal slave trade. He felt free to present the Friends’ views on “the oppressed negro population” to the governor of Virginia, who responded by attacking the Northern abolitionists for barring progress toward emancipation.55 Gurney also felt free to publish a “friendly” response to a major speech Clay gave to the U.S. Senate, defending the legal rights of slaveholders. Gurney pointed out that aside from its other faults, Clay’s colonization scheme diverted attention from the need to abolish slavery by constitutional means, and from the need for the civil and moral improvement of the blacks. Gurney must have been pleased and surprised when Clay later told him that this widely read piece was the best of all the reviews of his speech.56
Although Gurney saw his West Indian trip as primarily a religious mission that might additionally improve his health, he also planned to study and record the effects of British slave emancipation. Before leaving he took the time to visit the office of the American Anti-Slavery Society, where he conversed about the West Indies with abolitionists James G. Birney and Joshua Leavitt. (He also gave them $200 to finance an uncut version of Buxton’s The African Slave Trade, which documented America’s continuing complicity with the illegal trade to Cuba and Brazil, a subject Gurney would investigate further in Cuba.) In late November 1839, Gurney and a young Quaker companion set sail for a five-month tour of the islands. Since Henry Clay had urged him to publish the results of his inquiries and observations in the West Indies, Gurney later drew on his diaries and wrote and published in 1840 an account of his trip as a series of “familiar letters” addressed to “Henry Clay, of Kentucky,” with Clay’s permission. Since the book is especially directed to the self-interest of Southern slaveholders, Gurney’s emphasis on the economic superiority of free labor is notable.57
Gurney’s first letters compare the situation in the slaveholding Danish Virgin Islands with British Dominica, St. Christopher’s, and especially Antigua, where he more than confirms the buoyant views of Thome and Kimball. In the Danish colonies he is repeatedly struck by the “dead weight” of the slave system, as evidenced by land exhaustion, the decline in sugar exports, and the transfer of heavily mortgaged estates from the hands of original owners to managers. Despite Danish efforts at amelioration, Gurney is shocked by the “low physical, intellectual, and moral condition of the slaves,” especially when compared with the liberated blacks he would later see in the British islands.58
Like the governor of Antigua, a high official in St. Christopher’s assured Gurney that not a single person on the island wished that slavery would be restored. As Gurney held large religious gatherings for whites and blacks in Methodist and Moravian meetinghouses, he also learned that on both islands imports and land values had vastly increased and that black workers were performing a far greater quantity of work in a given time than under slavery. In Antigua he was told that in the first five years of freedom, exports of sugar and molasses had significantly increased, despite two years of drought, and that in the sixth year, 1839, exports of sugar were almost double the average during the last five years of slavery.59
As one planter pointed out, only one-third of the slaves had really been “operative” at one time, since planters had to support the nonworking children and the elderly, the infirm, the sick, and those who shammed illness. Paid-wage labor by freedpeople was thus “incalculably cheaper,” according to the Speaker at the Antiguan assembly. Planters had a savings of at least 30 percent when every man, black and white, was thrown upon his own exertions, and the “cooperation” of employer and employee enhanced the community’s wealth. No less important, emancipation had brought an increase in black marriage and a decrease in black crime, along with other evidence of a striking “moral improvement of the Negro population.”60
Like Thome and Kimball, Gurney struggled to reconcile some deeply disturbing facts in Jamaica with the premises of free labor ideology and the wholly positive expectations derived especially from Antigua. Indeed, Gurney’s letters to Clay, coupled with a brief introductory letter to Buxton and a letter at the end of the book addressed to Jamaican planters, contain an embarrassing contradiction. On the one hand, Gurney repeatedly gives optimistic assurances that Jamaica was on the “road to prosperity” and could not, “when duly inspected and fairly estimated, furnish any exception” to the highly positive results of slave emancipation. On the other hand, he continues to express deep concern over signs of economic failure.61
These signs of trouble are scattered throughout the letters, separated by reassuring arguments, and thus have less collective impact. Worst of all, according to Gurney, Jamaica suffered from the fact that the great majority of estates belonged to absentee proprietors and were thus under the care of young attorneys, often of “immoral character,” who often managed numerous estates at one time and who merged the payment of wages with the blacks’ payment of rent in a highly exploitive way. Gurney repeatedly emphasizes that when the workers, or “peasants,” are fairly and humanely treated, and paid weekly in cash—which promotes everyone’s best economic interest—they happily continue working on the property of their old masters, which is most familiar to them and nearest their homes.62
Unfortunately, immediately after the end of apprenticeship and the award of full freedom in 1838, workers throughout the island faced a payment of rent, which was often doubled or tripled and extracted from expected wages. When workers protested or complained, there were threats of ejection, some cottages were demolished, and family provision grounds were despoiled, all of which amounted, according to Gurney, to “a new form of slavery.” This oppression explained why many of the freedpeople, who were conscious of their rights and interests, began deserting the estates on which they had been unfairly treated and succeeded in establishing their own small freeholds near or on Jamaica’s mountains—an option not available on the smaller islands.63
Gurney noted that the “impolitic attempts to force the labor of freemen” had angered the peasants and led to the desertion of many estates and thus to the decline in the labor force. He was deeply troubled by some of the resulting new penal laws against vagrancy and indebtedness, similar to those in the postwar American South, that restricted freedom and endangered the “peace and prosperity of the colony.” But he tended to downplay the decline in sugar and coffee exports and affirmed that evidence of improved understandings between planters and workers gave reason to expect increased production in the near future.64
Moreover, the freed slaves who had left the estates were by no means idle. Gurney happily asserted that the old notion that blacks were inherently lazy and would work only by compulsion was “now for ever exploded.” The freed Jamaican blacks were now busy cultivating their own grounds and building stone walls, houses, roads, ditches, and even villages that would have been inconceivable before emancipation. Many were also engaged in fishing or producing handicrafts. And the employers of blacks were now freed from the necessity of paying for their clothing, bedding, food, and medicines, to say nothing of whips, a fact that helped explain the increase in imports, land values, and urban trade. Gurney stressed that even if some planters had been deprived of their profits, emancipation had brought a marked increase in black schools, literacy, marriages, church attendance, and a decrease in crime. And his firm faith in the natural laws of progress confirmed his belief that the ultimate prosperity of the proprietors “is linked by an indissoluble tie to justice, mercy, and wisdom, which ensures well-being of the population at large.”65
As we have seen, Gurney was very confident of his ability to interact successfully with American slaveholders and West Indian former slaveholders—he informed Clay that he had had “much satisfaction” in relating the story of West Indian emancipation to “a political rival of thi
ne,” John C. Calhoun, for whom he had “sincere personal esteem,” and who “listened with the greatest attention to the narrative.” According to Gurney, Calhoun then “admitted his belief not only in the accuracy of the relation itself,” but in the pecuniary, physical, and moral points Gurney made regarding “the favorable working of freedom.”
Of course Calhoun then felt compelled, with an “eagle eye” fixed on Gurney, to argue that in America, which lacked the strong military arm of Britain, abolition would lead to Haitian-like racial violence and war. Gurney refrained from countering this fallacy, but assured Clay that Britain’s military arm had been needed only under slavery and that the freed blacks harbored no desire for revenge or antipathy for whites. And it was with similar confidence that he addressed the urgent letter to Jamaican planters on the theme of racial reconciliation.66
Having dined with Jamaican planters as well as with the governor and other officials, Gurney knew that it was crucial to address issues of self-interest to “persons habituated to slaveholding throughout their lives.” He assured the planters that by 1840 the eyes of such slavery-supporting nations as France, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States were fixed on the British West Indies, and especially Jamaica. These regions should now prove that free labor was more economical and productive than slave labor, and that the just and equal liberty of all citizens of a state had “an unfailing tendency to increase its wealth.” But this goal required all Jamaicans to unite in promoting the island’s prosperity. And such unity, Gurney stressed, could be achieved only by “reconciliation,” by overcoming misunderstandings between planters and workers, especially concerning fair work for fair wages. Fortunately, he noted, as in Antigua and Dominica, task or piece work, as opposed to day wages, was becoming more prevalent even in Jamaica, and the decline in production was supposedly easing.67
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