Slave empire by Padraic X. Scanlan

Author:Padraic X. Scanlan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

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When news of the rebellion first reached Britain, leaders of the antislavery movement were weary and defensive. In one letter to Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay complained that Canning wanted to blame the rebellion on ‘Wilberforce, Buxton, and Co.’ Macaulay was dismayed that the Orders-in-Council had gone out too quickly, and had imposed ‘direct interference between master and slave’ rather than a slow evolution of colonial policy.38

Wilberforce prepared to accuse Canning of causing the violence. News of Smith’s death, however, and the Demerara planters’ extravagant efforts to pin the blame on him, changed the equation. Smith’s papers, and an account of his trial, published by the Anti-Slavery Society, became fodder for a counter-narrative of an innocent priest murdered by heathen slaveholders.

Slaveholders in other colonies helped the antislavery cause by responding to the rebellion in Demerara with their own persecutions of suspected conspiracies. In 1823 and 1824, Jamaican authorities claimed to have foiled a serious plot to overthrow the white government. According to reports that made their way to the House of Commons, a young enslaved butcher’s assistant, named William, answered a rebuke from his master with ‘Ah! Massa, you will have bad Christmas.’ The butcher demanded to know whether William knew something that he did not, whether the enslaved planned to ‘kill all the buckras’, and whether they were meeting at night to plan their assault. The boy – a teenager – might have felt a thrill of transgression when he told his master to get on board a ship as soon as he could, ‘as the negroes were going to rise, and walk all about and murder everybody’. William was arrested. Under interrogation, he implicated his father and six other men.

Jamaican planters were ferocious in punishing the trumped-up ‘conspiracy’. All eight of the alleged conspirators were swiftly tried and executed. The only evidence was self-contradictory hearsay based on a teenager’s boasts. The executions disgusted abolitionists, and even absentee slaveholders understood that their colonial counterparts had bolstered the case for imperial regulation of the slave colonies. Thomas Denman, MP for Nottingham, demanded a review. Justice, he argued, was impossible for an enslaved defendant in a court composed entirely of slaveholders. He cited another conspiracy case, where the accused was known to be mentally ill, and was punished for raving about ‘King Wilberforce’. He moved for censure, and the House of Commons passed a slightly amended version of the motion.39 The planters’ paranoia was wearing thin in London, even among their supporters.

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