Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (3 page)

Y
ET almost at once a seminal imperial event occurred: the final manumission of slaves throughout the British possessions. Slavery as such had been abolished in 1834, but for another four years slaves were bound by a system of apprenticeship to their masters, and it was not until August 1, 1838, that the last serfs of empire, nearly all black Africans, were officially emancipated. There were 768,000 of them, not counting those in the hands of native potentates whose bondage lingered longer. This was a fresh start indeed. The old British Empire had been inextricably linked with slavery. Colonies had been built upon the practice, industries depended upon it, and it was only thirty years since British military recruiters, when faced with a shortage of manpower, paid cash for their colonial volunteers. So organic did slavery seem to the shape of the old empire that the eighteenth-century cartographers divided West Africa quite naturally by commodities—the Gold Coast for minerals, the Ivory Coast for elephant tusks, the Slave Coast for human beings. Many British families had numbered their securities in human stock, for to perfectly decent Britons, only a generation before, slavery had seemed part of the divine order. ‘To abolish a
status
’‚ thought Boswell, ‘which in all ages GOD has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be
robbery
to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it … introduced into a much happier state of life.’ The end of slavery was thus doubly ritual: obsequies for the old empire, consecration for the new.

Let us visit, on that day, the little town of Falmouth in northern
Jamaica. It was a pleasant clapboard sort of place, wide straight streets and a lighthouse on the shore, set at the foot of the Cockpit Country on the Atlantic coast of the island. Several great sugar estates dominated the country round about, and Falmouth was the outlet for their merchandise, and the chief shopping and gathering place for their slaves. It was a lively town, made elegant by the colonial British, made exuberant by the expatriate blacks. Clouds softly drifted through the mountain-tops behind: in front the Atlantic breakers frothed and churned. It is true that Jamaica, severely hit by the prospect of emancipation, was in the economic doldrums, but still it was a lovely island, full of gay animation, and mellowed by two centuries of the colonial presence.

The aesthetics, though, were misleading. Jamaica was one of the most important slave colonies—there were 320,000 blacks to some 35,000 whites—and slavery there had been an institution of ruthless power. The shady plantation houses on their hillsides, the picturesque affection of the old retainers, the native merriment, the air of indolent ease, all gave a false impression of magnolia charm and paternalism. In reality the life of the island was based uncompromisingly upon the ownership and exploitation of human beings. Architecturally any of the Falmouth sugar estates graphically illustrated this truth. Take, for instance, Orange Valley, a well-known plantation a few miles north of town. It was built of solid limestone, and displayed an almost ecclesiastical air of conviction. On the hill above stood its Great House, balconied and wide-eaved, lapped by lawns and caressed by creepers. Nearby was the house of the overseer, an English yeoman house, pretty in an unassuming way, as though always conscious of its place at the mansion gates. And all around the central factory area, where the sugar was refined and packed, were the slave-installations—the slots or stables or repair bays in which those human mechanisms were installed, housed and serviced. The refinery had a churchy look, its limestone finely dressed and mortared; the slave hospital was an elegant little structure in the classical mode; the slave quarters were rows and rows of shanties, like rickety garden pavilions, with their vegetable plots behind (slaves were expected to grow their own nourishment) and their gaudy patched washing fluttering upon their clothes-lines. It
was a highly functional arrangement: like a ship disposed about its engine-room, the estate was assembled efficiently about its motive-power, the muscle of captive humans.
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Orange Valley was clearly built to last, and it looked on the face of it benevolent enough—that gracious house on the hill, that bowered cottage for the overseer, the hospital in whose wards, it seemed, crinolined ladies must surely be soothing with scented hands the brows of grateful fevered blacks. But slavery in the British West Indies was not always like that. A series of exposés had lately revealed that British slave-masters could be as cruel as any Arab traders or Bokhara khan. The English public had read with horrified fascination of ears cut off in punishment, eyes gouged, teeth drawn, hands amputated. Slaves were hung by their arms from trees, nailed by their ears to posts, clamped in steel collars or iron boots. Throughout the British possessions the slave had been utterly at the mercy of his employer—or worse still his employer’s wife, who was often more vicious in the refinement of her spite.

Of course there were good owners too, conditions greatly varied in the nineteen British slave colonies, and no doubt evangelical reporters sometimes exaggerated the horrors. But the consensus of evidence was appalling, and it was not surprising that when the final emancipation came at last, on that August day in 1838, the negroes of Falmouth celebrated it with almost hysterical fervour. The pastor of the Baptist Church, the Reverend William Knibb, summoned his congregation for a midnight service of thanksgiving, and the negroes assembled joyously. Mr Knibb was one of the most active non-conformist clergymen on the island, a native of Northamptonshire and a passionate abolitionist, and he carried his faith theatrically, as the blacks preferred. It was very hot that night. The wide lattice windows of the chapel were open, clumsy insects buzzed in the lamp-lights, the congregation was a blaze of primary colours and glistening black, and as the midnight deadline drew near Mr Knibb
ascended his pulpit with portentous step, ‘The hour approaches!’ he cried, pointing a quivering finger at the clock upon the wall. ‘The time is drawing near! The monster is dying!’—and as the minutes ticked by, and the pastor stood there tense and fiery, and the harmonium played, so the congregation worked itself into a frenzy of excitement and delight, until midnight struck, Knibb cried triumphantly, ‘The monster is dead!’ and all those negroes leapt to their feet and broke into cheers, songs, shouts, tears and embraces. The slaves were free! They took the symbols of their bondage, chain, whip and iron collar, and buried them for ever in the schoolroom yard, singing a dirge as they did so:

Though slavery had been so old an imperial practice, paradoxically its ending did not weaken the idea of empire, but rather gave it new life: for among those who argued that Britain had an imperial mission to fulfil were the prime agents of abolition, the English evangelicals. They were a power in the land. They had infiltrated the Established Church, they had representatives in the highest quarters of government, their most celebrated spokesman, William Wilberforce, was a saint among low churchmen, if a prig among high. The evangelical force—‘vital Christianity’—was concerned with every kind of cruelty and injustice. Prison reform, factory conditions, corporal and capital punishment, child labour, cruelty to animals, the treatment of lunatics—all these matters engaged the conscience
of the English reformers in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In the imperial context, though, they were concerned most with the welfare of the coloured peoples, and their several institutions became powerful forces of imperial commitment: the Clapham Sect, a humanitarian cult whose members had included a Governor-General of Bengal, a Governor of Sierra Leone, several members of Parliament and a permanent head of the Colonial Office; the African Association, which concerned itself with the exploration of Africa for humanitarian ends, and which was to develop into the Royal Geographical Society; the Aborigines Protection Society, founded in the year of Queen Victoria’s accession; or best-known of all, Exeter Hall, not really an institution at all, but a religious meeting hall in the Strand whose name had become synonymous with the entire humanitarian movement.

It was the pressure of this vague but potent guild that gave to the Victorian Empire, in its earliest years, functions of guardianship. Exeter Hall believed that the power of Great Britain should be used to guard the welfare of the backward peoples, to protect them from exploitation, and guide them into the Christian way. The Colonial Office became a stronghold of imperial trusteeship—James Stephen, ‘Mr Mother Country’, its permanent under-secretary in 1838, was a stalwart of Exeter Hall, while Lord Glenelg, the Colonial Secretary, was hardly less evangelical. Even Lord Melbourne, that worldly old Whig, could hardly disregard so strong a political current, for the evangelicals were skilled propagandists, masters of the pamphlet and the protest march, the petition and the fund-raising needle-party. The House of Commons itself reflected the trend in a motion which, while it did not actually advocate the extension of empire for pious purposes, did call upon all colonial governors and officers to promote the spread of civilization among the Natives everywhere, and ‘lead them to the peaceful and voluntary reception of the Christian religion’.

So for many Victorian Englishmen the instinct of empire was first to be rationalized as a call to Christian duty. Lord John Russell, a future Prime Minister, defined the imperial purpose towards the negro people as being ‘to encourage religious instruction, let them partake of the blessings of Christianity, preserve order and internal
peace, induce the African race to feel that wherever the British flag flies they have a friend and protector, check all oppression, and watch over the impartial administration of the law’. Even the directors of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a sufficiently materialist concern, laid it down in standing orders that divine service must be read each Sunday in its remotest Canadian fur posts, for the civilization and instruction of the Red Indians. The statesmen of England had behaved with exemplary modesty and restraint in settling the affairs of the world in 1815, but by 1838 one detects a certain smugness among the islanders, and this superior tone of voice came not, as it would later come, from an arrogant Right, but from a highly moralistic Left. The middle classes, newly enfranchised, were emerging into power: and it was the middle classes who would eventually prove, later in Victoria’s reign, the most passionate imperialists of all.

The greatest triumph of the evangelicals was the abolition of slavery. Economically its results had been devastating. Planters were ruined from Antigua to Mauritius.
1
Middlemen of Ashanti, slave captains of Merseyside, overseers of Nassau, found themselves without an occupation. Paupers proliferated in all the slave colonies, squatters defied the land laws, a Select Committee defined the condition of the average Jamaican freedman as
otium
cum
dignitate
—‘idle dignity’—which he fulfilled by working for a few hours two days a week, and going home with a bottle of Bass. Most of the sugar colonies never really recovered. Thousands of Indians had to be shipped to the West Indies to work the estates there, and in Jamaica the authorities were obliged to import German labourers too—dirty and drunk, thought the planters, who were hard to please.
2
In London the West India Association warned that there might be no other course for the Caribbean colonies but to ‘appeal to the Crown for a release from their unprofitable allegiance, in order that they may attach themselves to some other country willing to extend to them the protection of a parent State’. In all the British Government had
to pay out
£
20 million in compensation (
£
8,823 8s 9d of it to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, whose
ex
officio
members included the Archbishop of York, and whose properties included two plantations in Barbados).

But morally emancipation put the British on a special plane, and set an example for the world. It also gave a fresh impulse to the empire. If so much could be achieved by agitation at home, what might not be done if the moral authority of England were distributed across the earth—to tackle the evils of slavery, ignorance and paganism at source, to teach the simpler peoples the benefits of Steam, Free Trade and Revealed Religion, and to establish not a world empire in the bad Napoleonic sense, but a Moral Empire of loftier intent? So was evolved the chemistry of evangelical imperialism; and since hatred of slavery was its original ingredient, it became the first imperial purpose of Victoria’s reign to extend to all parts of the world the convictions of Exeter Hall and Mr Mother Country on what the Americans in their prevaricating bigotry preferred to call the Peculiar Institution.
1

The British could not enforce the abolition of slavery everywhere in the world, but their command of the sea did qualify them to interfere with the movement of slaves from source to customer. In the suppression of piracy the Empire had already assumed a police function. Now its power was harnessed to the evangelical purpose, and for the first thirty years of Victoria’s reign the Royal Navy’s chief task was the interception of slavers. Legally the anti-slave patrols were international, the American, French and Portuguese navies contributing squadrons: in practice they were almost entirely British, in execution as in concept.