But the most central and urgent point, as Gurney also made clear in his letter to Buxton, was the need for British and West Indian unity on the threatening issue of a proposed equalization of duties on sugar.68 By 1840, free-trade ideology was gaining much strength in Britain as representatives of the consumer public called for a repeal of the Corn Laws and other measures that created high monopolistic prices for wheat, sugar, and other commodities by maintaining protective tariffs that cut off free-market imports. In general, the kind of liberals who believed in the superiority of free labor also favored free trade.
But Britain’s emancipation of colonial slaves in 1834 and 1838 created a new conflict between advocates of free trade and many defenders of free labor. The abolition of Britain’s slave trade in 1807 had put Britain’s plantation colonies at a great disadvantage in competing with such booming slave-importing regions as Cuba and Brazil. In virtually all parts of the New World, except the United States, slave societies depended on slave imports to maintain population growth. While the British colonies were slowly weakened by a declining slave population, they also suffered when the abolition movement frightened domestic investors and creditors. By 1833, as Seymour Drescher notes, a parliamentary committee found that the British West Indies “were in severe distress. Large portions of the sugar plantations were currently turning little or no profit, and many were running multiyear losses.” Moreover, “the share of the British slave colonies in the trade and income of the metropolis had been measurably declining for more than fifteen years.” Accordingly, despite the faith of some MPs in the superiority of free labor, the emancipation law of 1833 strongly raised the duties on imports of foreign sugar, in part to protect planters, freed workers, and what Colonial Secretary Stanley termed the “mighty experiment.” The import duties also provided funds for compensating slave owners.69
Nevertheless, the British colonies were still producing enough sugar to supply the domestic market and also sell a small surplus in the Atlantic market. In 1836, the price of sugar sold in Britain was still equal to the world price. But, as even Gurney acknowledged, slave emancipation led to a decline in production, especially in colonies like Jamaica. By 1841—three years after the end of apprenticeship—domestic demand had risen and the supply had fallen. Londoners who yearned for sugar in their tea now paid twice the price they would have paid in Paris. Not surprisingly, it became necessary that year for MPs who were concerned over the fate of the emancipation experiment to join the West India interest and vote down a fervently debated bill to equalize duties and promote the importation of slave-grown sugar.70
The parliamentary debates in 1841 also reflected an important transformation in the British abolitionist movement. Having achieved emancipation in most British colonies (but not in India, where slavery was an indigenous institution),71 British abolitionists now focused on the goal of a universal, global ending of slavery. They strongly supported the prohibitive levy on foreign sugar, despite the high price of sugar for the British poor, since importing duty-free sugar from Cuba and Brazil would greatly stimulate the Atlantic slave trade and increase the exploitation of slaves in those regions. When charged by free traders with inconsistency regarding the importation of slave-grown American cotton, they lamely replied that there was no alternative to American cotton, unlike the sugar from the now free British colonies.72
Given the powerful free-trade movement that led to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, it is not surprising that Parliament passed a Sugar Duties Act the same year, equalizing duties on British colonial and foreign sugar and initiating a gradual process of removing all protections by the early 1850s. Given the state of public opinion, abolitionists did not dare to make an appeal to the people on behalf of the freed slaves. But they privately feared that “free trade” would lead to the expansion of the slave trade and the failure of Britain’s great experiment. Despite the optimistic predictions of free traders concerning the “union of prosperity and morality,” the new Sugar Duties Act had a devastating effect on the British Caribbean colonies. They could not compete with slaveholding Cuba and Brazil and also faced the rise of European beet sugar as a cheap alternative to sugarcane. The sharp decline in British sugar prices wiped out dozens of merchant houses in the West Indies and Britain. A European economic depression in 1847–48 also contributed to the failure of the West India Bank and to the growing inability of planters to pay their debts or provide adequate wages for their workers.73
In 1848, a “select” parliamentary committee gathered a vast amount of data on the crisis of the British colonies and the production of sugar from China to Peru. Given the evaporation of credit and the fact that the price of sugar had fallen below the cost of production, the manager of one of Jamaica’s most profitable and efficient estates now reported that his plantation was operating at a loss. Even Antigua, once the model of emancipation’s economic success, now expressed doubt about the island’s ability to continue commercial cultivation. According to Seymour Drescher, the media’s widespread publication of such dramatic examples of failure gave a Tory like Benjamin Disraeli a strong “stick” with which to beat the free-trade Whigs: “The great experiment, the greatest blunder in the history of the English people, had simultaneously ruined the British colonies, encouraged the African slave trade, and revealed ‘the quackery of economic science.’ ”74
Even well before the impact of the Sugar Duties Act, the growing shortage of productive West Indian labor had been signified by British efforts to transport “free” black contract labor from West Africa to the Caribbean, efforts abolitionists successfully countered as a disguised revival of the slave trade. Then, in 1843, the British government sent a minister, Edward Fox, to meet secretly in Washington with Secretary of State Abel Upshur to convey the conservative Peel ministry’s startling proposal to recruit and pay transportation costs for large numbers of American free blacks to migrate to the British West Indies, where they would do the contract work that former slaves were now either unable or refusing to do. Upshur, an ardently proslavery Virginian, rejected Fox’s proposal on grounds of states’ rights (at a time when the Underground Railroad was aiding slaves to escape to British Canada, he could hardly imagine allowing British agents to recruit free blacks in the South). Still, because of the labor shortage from 1839 to 1845, Trinidad did import some 1,300 subsidized free blacks from the United States.75
Fox’s admission that the British colonies were “suffering severely” from “a dearth of agricultural laborers” had a decisive impact on Upshur and especially on John C. Calhoun, who replaced Upshur as secretary of state immediately after Upshur was killed by the explosion of a cannon on a warship. Upshur had ordered Robert Monroe Harrison, the American consul in Jamaica, to present a comprehensive report on the results of British emancipation. Harrison sent back material to support his conclusion that “England has ruined her own colonies, and like an unchaste female wishes to see other countries, where slavery exists, in a similar state.” Southerners could claim that Lord Aberdeen, the Tory foreign secretary, confirmed the latter point when he declared in 1843 that “Great Britain desires, and is constantly exerting herself to procure, the general abolition of slavery throughout the world.” Upshur’s State Department substantiated the first point by publishing Harrison’s statistics claiming that by 1843 the price of freeholds in Jamaica had declined by half, coffee and sugar production had declined by as much as 50 percent, and some large plantations were worth less than 10 percent of their preemancipation value.76
It is doubtful that Calhoun had ever been really convinced by Gurney’s reports on the success of British emancipation. In any event, he and other Southern leaders would now interpret British policy as an effort to undermine successful foreign slavery, as a means of counteracting the disastrous failure of their own experiment with emancipation. Calhoun rightly predicted that Britain would try to restore plantation production in the Caribbean by importing huge numbers of only nominally free “coolie” labor from India. Yet he
affirmed that such investment could never succeed unless Britain also destroyed the rival slave societies that “have refused to follow her suicidal policy” and that could therefore keep the prices of tropical staples “so low as to prevent their cultivation with profit, in the possessions of Great Britain, by what she is pleased to call free labor.” Examples of Lord Aberdeen’s professed antislavery policy could be seen in Britain’s interference in Cuba (which expelled the British consul and abolitionist David Turnbull for supposedly plotting a slave insurrection) and most alarmingly in the new Republic of Texas, a site Britons feared could promote the reestablishment of the African slave trade. Calhoun’s deep concern over Britain’s antislavery pressures on Texas helped lead to America’s annexation of the slaveholding republic in 1845 and thus to the Mexican-American War and the extraordinary expansion of the American West.77
With slavery expanding in the United States and thousands of African slaves being imported into Cuba each year, the prospects seemed increasingly dim that the world would follow the example of British emancipation, as abolitionists and statesmen had hoped in 1833. As the London Times put it in 1857,
Our own colonies are impoverished, but the sum of slavery is not diminished, it has only been transferred from us to more grasping pitiless and unscrupulous hands. Never was the prospect of emancipation more distant than now that foreign slave-owners are establishing a monopoly of all the great staples of tropical produce. [The old islands]…are going out of cultivation, while Cuba, the United States, and Brazil are every day extending the area of their cultivation and the number of their slaves.
The views of academic social scientists were no more hopeful. In the words of Nassau W. Senior, one of Britain’s most venerable political economists, noting in 1855 that American slaveholders were now coveting Cuba and thinking of annexing Jamaica, “We do not venture to hope that we or our sons or grandsons, will see American slavery extirpated from the earth.”78
On the other hand, the importation of thousands of indentured Indian coolie laborers into Trinidad, British Guiana, and Mauritius (in the Indian Ocean) helped to restore some levels of sugar production and prevent a total collapse of free produce imports into Britain. In the decade following the 1846 Sugar Duties Act, British consumption of slave-grown sugar rose from virtually nothing to 40 percent of British supply, but it could have been much more. Similarly, from 1831 to 1857, British sugar imports from the British West Indies dropped from 4 million to only 3 million hundredweight. That British emancipation was not a total economic failure can be seen in the fact that it served as a model for the Dutch in 1863 (reinforced by the American Civil War). Having ended their slave trade in 1814, the conservative Dutch now established an apprenticeship system that lasted more than twice as long as the British system. They also paid much more compensation to colonial planters and introduced Asian indentured labor immediately after the end of apprenticeship, so that in the West Indian colony of Suriname, laborers from India and Java outnumbered ex-slaves within a decade. And none of these measures prevented a postemancipation decline in Dutch sugar exports.79
By the 1850s, even the British proponents of free labor ideology had revised their assumptions to take account of the supposedly temporary success of slave economies when competing with newly freed plantation labor. But, as Seymour Drescher imaginatively argues, a rather sudden upsurge of racial ideology beginning in the late 1840s served as the most important way of reconciling—for white people—the West Indian economic failure with belief in the superiority of free labor. This is all the more remarkable in view of the relative absence of racist arguments in the earlier British debates over the slave trade and slave emancipation. But Thomas Carlyle’s notorious 1849 essay, Occasional Discourses on the Negro [later Nigger] Question, coincided with the blossoming of scientific racism in Europe and especially America. The rise of British resentment against abolitionists’ “privileging” West Indian blacks carried over to the widespread but by no means universal view that blacks were so inherently lazy and lacking in ambition and incentive that they would never do much work unless compelled to do so. As the Times put it in 1848:
[A] day’s work is seldom done except the African ambition has been stimulated by recollections of rum or roused by the attractions of some outrageously red piece of calico. One day’s labour in a week will supply the necessities which negro nature owns.… they squat and vegetate in groups, working only lazily, and at rare intervals, till their condition becomes far more brutish than it was on their landing.80
But despite much talk of “inferior races” and agreement that it was “the slow, indolent temperament of the African race,” as The Economist put it, that explained the economic failure of British emancipation, there were no calls for reenslavement. The immense popularity in the 1850s of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold a million copies in Britain, pointed to the limits of racist ideology. And as we have seen, when Frederick Douglass spoke at an American celebration of British emancipation in 1858, he responded to the widespread belief in West Indian economic failure by celebrating black achievement and the “failure” of whites to keep free blacks “in their place”:
It [emancipation] has failed to keep Slavery in the West Indies under the name of Liberty. It has failed to change the name without changing the character of the thing. The negroes have really been emancipated, and are no longer slaves. Herein is the real failure. Emancipation has failed to keep negroes out of civil office, it has failed to keep them out of the jury box, off the judge’s bench, and out of the Colonial Legislature, for colored men have risen to all these stations since Emancipation. It has failed to keep the lands of Jamaica in the hands of the few and out of the hands of the many. It has failed to make men work for a planter at small wages, when they can work for themselves for larger wages.… You cannot get men to work on plantations for a lordly proprietor when they can do as well, and better, for themselves in other ways. I will not assume that Yankees are a lazy, good-for-nothing set, because we are compelled to import Irishmen to dig our canals and grade our railroads.81
It is important to stress that Britain remained the world’s leading supporter of antislavery policies—from the nation’s success in finally stopping the slave trade to Brazil in 1850 to Europe’s often Machiavellian embrace of antislavery in the 1880s’ Scramble for Africa. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has shown, much of this central moral commitment emerged as a matter of Britain’s national honor, regardless of expense and ordinary self-interest. And, as Drescher and others have made clear, the expense of Britain’s emancipation of slaves and of its prolonged efforts to abolish oceanic slave trading was prodigious.82
Yet, when judging the expense of slave emancipations—and America’s emancipation as the result of a civil war was doubtless the costliest of all—one must consider the prolonged human costs of exploitive slave regimes. It would be difficult to calculate that expense if Britain’s 800,000 slaves or America’s 4 million slaves had not been freed for one or two or three more generations. In some respects there was an element of “failure” in all the emancipations, from Haiti to the Northern American states, the British and French colonies, the American Civil War, and on to Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. In no case did emancipation lead to a prosperous, racially egalitarian society. Yet as Gurney observed in 1840 and as Frederick Douglass argued eighteen years later, the freed slaves in the British colonies were immensely better off than under slavery.
As the British celebrated and redefined their great historical event, as at the Jubilee meeting on August 1, 1884, they radically divorced the moral achievement from any economic issues. Their goal, as expressed by the Prince of Wales, was “to carry on this civilizing torch of freedom until its beneficent light shall shed abroad over all the earth.” As Drescher concludes, “The great experiment was in fact a great improvisation. The true taproot of antislavery lay in its successful mass political mobilization around a fundamental uneconomic proposition.”83 Drescher and
Appiah both note that this antislavery commitment helped prevent Britain from following its best economic interest and recognizing the Confederacy in the American Civil War. One should add that it was the Civil War, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment that transformed the global meaning of Britain’s “mighty experiment.” While a war costing 750,000 military lives signified an opposite “solution” to the problem of slavery, it helped redefine Britain’s parliamentary act of 1833 as the launching of what W. E. H. Lecky termed an “unwearied, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade” to exterminate slavery from the earth.84
11
The British Mystique: Black Abolitionists in Britain—the Leader of the Industrial Revolution and Center of “Wage Slavery”
FREDERICK DOUGLASS CONFRONTS THE WORLD
On August 16, 1845, some three months after the publication of his best-selling and highly acclaimed Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, the twenty-seven-year-old Frederick Douglass boarded the Cambria, a Cunard paddle steamer, and sailed from Boston toward Liverpool. During his antislavery lecture tours, Douglass had long been absent from his wife, Anna, and four children, but his ongoing decision to spend nearly two years in Britain represented a drastic tradeoff in values. While reluctant to leave his family, Douglass became increasingly aware that the spectacular sales and reviews of his book magnified the risk of his being recaptured as a fugitive slave. Massachusetts provided very limited protections, and Douglass’s owners, Hugh and Thomas Auld, furious over the way Douglass had portrayed them, reportedly vowed to reenslave him. Britain not only provided a safe haven, but British abolitionists finally succeeded in raising funds and negotiating with Hugh Auld for Douglass’s legal manumission.1
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 37
