Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
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on preparing children for freedom. Enslaved mothers were to have only a limited role in preparing their children to become free people.
Ramsay believed that moral institutions like the church best secured the social conditioning of young people. In his 1784 essay that the Abolition Society reprinted and distributed widely, he argued, “Religion brings conscience in to the aid of social regulations, and fits the man for acting his part in his proper station.” Ramsay believed that soon after weaning, enslaved children should learn Christian teachings that emphasized humility and long suffering. “Begin by drawing their attention particularly to the sufferings and crucifixion of our savior,” he wrote. “When this is found to have an impression on their minds, and filled their hearts of grateful sentiments, make them connect with repentance and a good life, submission to their masters and full obedience to their commands, even to working on the plantations when so ordered.” They should learn these lessons when “their minds are tender” before the “impositions of slavery corrupted them.”32
Ramsay’s writings reflected the principle of the “conditioned child,” which stressed creating desirable habits in young people for them to become “natural in them” in their adult life. A child was like a “blank slate” upon which adults could write the social actor they desired.33 With the new generation of enslaved people, Ramsay proposed abandoning the system of punishment upon which slavery had been built, and replacing it with Christianity. Christian-based obedience, gratitude, and morality would prove more “powerful incentives to the mind [that would] incline them to the right.”34 Successful emancipation depended on indoctrinating enslaved children from their infancy in the “knowledge of their duty” as obedient, moral subjects.35
Because of the centrality of retaining the purity of enslaved children’s minds, Ramsay did not expect enslaved mothers to socialize their children. British missionaries would have such responsibilities.36 Recalling the challenges one minister faced in proselytizing grown-ups, Ramsay doubted whether enslaved adults could be rescripted sufficiently into new ways of thinking and being in order to train children properly. Imported adults, he insisted, generally resisted change and sulked when persuaded to abandon their old prejudices. Enslaved parents could not be trusted to discard fully their old habits. Ramsay firmly believed that adults were products of their childhood, and as such, enslaved mothers who had converted in their adult years were constantly at risk for relapsing into the habits of their youth. It is for this reason he advocated that enslaved mothers play limited roles in caring for and socializing young people. Early weaning reflected such limitations. As Ramsay promoted lead roles for missionaries in raising enslaved children, parents stood to lose what little rights and liberties they fought to preserve in socializing their sons and daughters before the 1780s era of pronatalist abolitionism.37 For the few children born during slavery, mothers competed with masters for influence and control over them. Ramsay’s proposal magnified the already fraught relationships between enslaver and enslaved over the control and raising of enslaved children.
Amelioration and the Future of Slavery
Despite the contrasting views Ramsay and Wilberforce held on the roles enslaved mothers should play in raising their children, they agreed that successful emancipation was contingent upon women’s ability to reproduce and the acculturation of enslaved children to British values. Ramsay and Wilberforce were not the first to appropriate women’s reproductive ability in the service of abolition and reform, however. They echoed the writings of other imperial policymakers, especially those of Maurice Morgan, a colonial bureaucrat who, in 1772, had anticipated the end of the slave trade and designed a plan for how the British government could safely liberate the enslaved. Promoting biological reproduction and the resocialization of enslaved children and establishing a date for an embargo on slave trading were the hallmarks of Morgan’s plan. It would be impracticable to “liberate the present race of slaves,” Morgan argued, not because they were “incapable of receiving freedom [but because] their ignorance and their habits effectually forbids it.” He therefore proposed that the British government allow the slave trade to continue for fifteen years (he offered no precise date) during which time plantation owners would buy “a certain number of male and female children annually.” These new young recruits, he explained, would be sent to Britain, where they would attend English “Charity schools” until they turned age fourteen. At the end of their formal education (Morgan was never clear on what the curriculum should include) trainees would receive further practical instruction in the areas of gardening, agriculture, and manufacture.38
Having received the requisite schooling, colonial protégés should be married at the age of sixteen and then sent to an experimental settlement, which Morgan proposed would be a “district near Pensacola,” a new British settlement in west Florida. Early marriage, he asserted, was important in order to capitalize on black female fecundity. “The black women are mothers at fourteen, and often sooner,” Morgan wrote, and “they continue to breed till six and twenty.” By this calculation, he estimated that these specially trained youths would increase the number of settlers, quickly peopling the “deserts of Florida with freemen.” The British government should grant them land and the same support as had been given to migrants in the seventeenth-century founding of the North American and West Indian colonies. Morgan intended his scheme for the new west Florida settlement, but he urged, “this plan will admit of being greatly varied.” Pensacola could serve as a positive example that people of African descent were capable of improvement and could successfully plant the colonies as free workers.39
Morgan proposed a slight alternative to his Pensacola plan for the West Indies. He suggested a period of ten years instead of fifteen for the importation of children, who should be no older than six years old. Like the children for Pensacola, those purchased for the West Indies would attend school in England. When they returned to the colonies, as married and civilized men and women, they would work in lower government positions—“a magistracy of blacks” as Morgan called it, where they would be under “the controul of a Governor.” Most importantly, they would serve as an example to which the enslaved masses could aspire, and would offer a ready confirmation to the planter class that blacks could be trained to become industrious free laborers, and people who could be trusted with political responsibility.40
What distinguishes Maurice Morgan from abolitionists like James Ramsay and William Wilberforce was that he served the imperial government, and that his writings were never widely circulated among the British public. His work was not part of abolitionist propaganda, and it predated the national campaigns to ban the slave trade. It emerged out of a privately distributed imperial policy memorandum, in which Morgan laid out plans on how Britain could fortify control over its North American territories, beginning with west Florida. Morgan had served the British government in various capacities. In 1763 he was secretary-adviser to William Fitzmaurice Petty, president of the Board of Trade and responsible for administering territories gained in North America at the 1763 Peace of Paris. In 1767, Morgan served as emissary to Quebec and executive secretary to Sir Guy Carleton, commander at the British army headquarters in New York. Despite his various posts, he remained consistently responsible for devising measures to strengthen Britain’s control over its territories. One historian has concluded that Morgan “embraced empire” and spent much of his career trying to “make the empire work.”41 The Pensacola proposal for promoting biological reproduction and freeing carefully tutored black children was an important part of such a mission.
Morgan’s Plan for abolition was one of several proposed policies aimed at stabilizing Britain’s colonies. Significantly, it also revealed that alternatives to slavery were necessary for the British government to consider abolition. Parliament was concerned about financial losses the slavery interests would incur as well as the political repercussions of a disgruntled merchant and planter class. The publication of Morgan’s plan in 1772 marked a shift in antislavery thought. Breaking with the antislavery writings of the 1760s that had failed to attract support, Morgan’s work extended beyond the condemnation of slavery, and offered alternatives. Envisioning “an empire without slaves,” Morgan proposed that free back men and women, invested with “with certain limited rights and liberties traditionally enjoyed by British subjects” would supply the labor needs of the colonies.42
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