White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution by Christer Petley

Author:Christer Petley [Petley, Christer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198791638
Google: i1RuDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-11-15T00:28:53.646551+00:00

III Impasse

In the spring of 1789, Wilberforce rose for the first time in the House of Commons to propose an immediate abolition of the slave trade. He reflected on ‘the magnitude of the subject . . . in which the interests, not of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole world, and of posterity, are involved’. Taylor, along with the other members of the Jamaican assembly, soon produced a dissonant reaction from across the Atlantic. In November, they met to decide how to produce a coherent and united response from the white colonists of the island to ‘the magnitude of a question which involves in it our property, our characters, and every interest that is dear and valuable to ourselves and our posterity’.35

The assembly agreed to a series of resolutions, initially drafted by Bryan Edwards, one of its most outspoken and prominent members. These resolutions were subsequently published for circulation in Britain and expressed concern that Wilberforce had received encouragement from ‘persons in high trust and authority under the crown’, while maintaining that a unilateral British abolition would not serve British interests. They claimed that it would instead weaken the country, damage its economy, and throw the slave trade into the hands of other European powers. They attempted to rebut Wilberforce’s argument that the trade could be abolished without threatening the investments of Caribbean planters or their British creditors, denied claims about the mistreatment of enslaved workers on the estates, and argued that abolition unaccompanied by substantial compensation to colonial slaveholders would be unlawful.36

Along with their resolutions the men of the Jamaican legislature sent a remonstration to the House of Commons, stating that they had learned about the parliamentary proceedings on the question of the slave trade with ‘surprise, equalled only by our affliction’. ‘An abolition of the slave-trade of Great-Britain cannot but prove fatal to her colonial interests’, they argued, and noted that ‘this blow is meditated when, after having struggled for several successive years with most calamitous visitations of Providence, a dawn of hope just opens upon us’. They had been savouring the long-anticipated prospect of a period free from war, drought, or storms, when they as Jamaican planters could go about ‘gathering the fruits of our toil’. They concluded that the ‘rights of the British colonists are as inviolable as those of their fellow-citizens within any part of the British dominions’, protected by an imperial constitution that did ‘not give omnipotence to a British parliament’. The violation of colonial property by the ending of the slave trade ‘without our consent, or without full compensation’, would, the assembly proclaimed, ‘be an unconstitutional assumption of power, subversive of all public faith and confidence, as applied to the colonists; and must ultimately tend to alienate their affections from the parent state’.37

This bold assertion of colonial rights was a formal manifestation of a deep-seated disaffection that had been festering in Jamaica for nearly a decade—the consequence, as Taylor put it, of tensions between metropole and colony that had started as a mere ‘pimple’ before being aggravated into an ‘uncurable ulcer’.

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