Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
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plan, a common theme that runs through the writings of 1780s abolitionists is the need to protect British economic interests by taking gradual steps toward freedom. Parliament’s hesitation to act and the conflicts that emerged between the slaving interests and abolitionists hinged on concerns for profit loss. The previously discussed Thomas Cooper, for example, who projected Africa’s population loss due to the slave trade at 180 million, strongly believed it was wrong for “Negroes to be deprived of their liberty, and of everything which belongs to them as human beings and British subjects.” He also thought that due consideration had to be given to the financial interests of investors, because it was equally “wrong” for them to “lose their money.”43
James Ramsay shared these concerns, and despite viewing slavery “as a vile institution” that sank “human nature to the lowest depth of wretchedness,” he hesitated to advocate immediately freeing those held in bondage.44 In his 1784 text Ramsay avoided the question of emancipation. Four years later, however, he offered a more concrete, though long-term, timetable for freedom. He disclaimed that his plan aimed “only at the abolition of the African slave trade.”45 Emancipation, he declared, “is not even suggested till their improvement shall have made it the master’s interest freely to bestow.”46 Concerns that liberty would financially ruin proprietors, investors, and the colonies stopped Ramsay short of fully advocating a plan for immediately freeing those enslaved.47 Although he was an ardent supporter of free trade and wage labor economies, and he agreed that prohibiting the slave trade would lead to new trade patterns and new markets, he strongly believed in a gradualist approach that included reforming the laboring populations of the colonies to advance progressively toward a free labor system.48 The economic and political disputes that demanded a gradual approach to freedom made framing abolition through women’s reproductive ability an effective strategy. Time was needed to conceive, birth, and socialize children fit for freedom.
Ramsay therefore emphasized that he did not envision “full emancipation” until some distant point in the future, after a number of conditions were satisfied.49 Primary among such conditions for “improvement” was having a reliable and sustainable population that would not only provide plantations with a stable and abundant supply of laborers but would also contribute to the socioeconomic and cultural advancement of the colonies. In addition to demonstrating that they were “capable of “procur[ing] the conveniences and comforts of life, in the same manner as other civilised people,” enslaved people had to exhibit a willingness to yield to the “government of the law.”50 A demonstrated disposition to submit to governmental authority was also a requisite for freedom in Wilberforce’s plans for emancipation. “Our poor degraded Negro Slaves,” he wrote, “are as yet incapable of enjoying freedom,” and to grant them immediate liberty “would be the grossest violation and the merest mockery of justice and humanity, [that] would insure not only their masters’ ruin, but their own.” A training and transitional period was therefore necessary to prepare Africans and their children for the enjoyment of true liberty, which, as Wilberforce underscored, included acceptance of “reason and law,” religious instruction, and moral improvement.51
Although abolitionists used the word citizen loosely in their writings, none of them made a clear case for enslaved people to share equal political rights with whites after emancipation. Instead, they concentrated their arguments on the possibility of the enslaved becoming moral, industrious, and obedient to the rule of law—civilized. The different cultural habits and behaviors of the enslaved, which also justified the marginalization of the poor in other places, including Britain, marked blacks as unprepared for citizenship and justified their unequal status. Abolitionists framed the abolition of the slave trade as a litmus test for masters to wean their dependence on cruelty in their treatment of slaves, thereby giving them an opportunity to reproduce naturally and to adopt British cultural practices. Successful biological reproduction and a reform of slavery as well as the character of the enslaved brought the possibility of freedom, which further constituted the basis for evaluating their readiness to enjoy rights and liberties extended to British subjects.
Contingent upon biological reproduction and cultural improvement, subject citizenship remained unattainable for blacks in Britain’s colonies.52 When the 1807 ban on the slave trade failed to stimulate population growth and improve the moral and material conditions of the enslaved, abolitionists in the 1820s insisted on an imperial reform. The Crown’s 1820s amelioration program to create policies and laws for colonial adoption would not only miss the mark in reforming slavery. It would also plunge the colonies into chaos and crises that ignited rebellions among the enslaved across the British Caribbean.
By 1833, political instability made slavery untenable. The possibility of reform prevailed with Parliament’s passage of the Emancipation Act, which put forth a six-year apprenticeship system designed to train enslaved people to work like free people and masters to hire these newly freed workers. Parliament terminated the apprenticeship system two years ahead of schedule; and the labor conflicts, fears about population decline, rebellion, and brutal reprisals that marked the 1840s to 1860s period convinced the Crown that former slaves were not ready to become subject-citizens. The Jamaican legislature and the British government denounced the formerly enslaved as unfit for freedom and citizenship, and abolished the island’s already limited self-government in 1866. The imposition of Crown colony government (colonial rule from England) suspended the possibility of formerly enslaved people governing themselves until 1944, and the limited constitutional reforms of the 1880s that allowed propertied men the franchise ensured that only an elite minority participated in formal politics.53 Autonomy and citizenship, it seemed, was always beyond the grasp of Africans and their descendants living in the West Indies. This meant that Afro-Caribbean people’s access to power was often informal and ephemeral, and like the struggles over childbirth, infused the ongoing tensions that marked slavery and colonialism.
Abolitionist activists of the 1780s concentrated their campaigns on the ability of enslaved people to become moral and productive subject-citizens. As Maurice Morgan explained, for the enslaved to be able to “talk the same language, read the same books, profess the same religion, and be fashioned by the same laws” as Englishmen, abolitionists needed to persuade Parliament that slaves could be reformed.54 Unlike some proslavery advocates, including Edward Long, who asserted inherent African inferiority as a justification for their enslavement, activists and strategists like Morgan, Ramsay, and Wilberforce worked hard to convince the British public that Africans and their descendants were capable of improvement.55 The proposed plan to harness the reproductive potential of women as a pathway to freedom and citizenship could only make sense if abolitionists avoided arguments about the inherent inferiority of African-descended people. Activists had to make the case that mothers would not reproduce their vices in their children. Abolitionist campaigns, therefore, concentrated on amendable external and environmental factors. They decried the works of philosophers like David Hume who argued for the inherent inferiorities of Africans and their descendants and only opposed the system of slavery because he viewed it as inefficient and exemplary of the wastes of imperial expansion.56
Abolitionists countered arguments like Hume’s by arguing that environmental conditions dictated morals, values, and accomplishments, but inherited bodily differences, like skin color and hair texture, had no bearing on mental capacities or achievements. For example, Morgan argued that “even though our bodies may be varied by colour, or any other corporeal distinction” there is no inherent difference in capabilities.57 He declared that captive Africans and their descendants existed in a state of moral and intellectual void because plantation societies had not stimulated the development of such capacities. Morgan, and later Ramsay and Wilberforce, insisted that freed children sent from the colonies to England improved in intelligence and social aptitude. The difference, they explained, was that such youths had been conditioned and socialized from their infancy to a different way of life. Encouraging births and socializing enslaved children in a manner compatible with the abolitionist goal of creating moral and free colonies would allow planters to capitalize on youths’ capacity for reform.
Although abolitionist writers generally avoided the racial inferiority arguments because of their potential to undermine their moralizing project, age introduced an exception to this rule.