Peter Espeut | Fashioning a free society

Every year on August 1 (like yesterday) we celebrate Emancipation Day (1834) and/or Full Freedom (1838), and then five days later we celebrate political Independence from the United Kingdom which took place in 1962. A lot of water flowed under the Jamaican bridge between 1834 and 1962, including the events of 1865 (the Morant Bay Riot), the 1938 Riots, and the first elections under universal adult suffrage in 1844. It’s a big jump from 1834 to 1962. Let’s see if we can connect the dots/dates.

When on August 1, 1834 the legal status of 309,331 Jamaicans changed from slave to apprentice, and then in 1838 to fully free person, there was no thought in the minds of the authorities that these former slaves would ever be equal to their former masters, that they would ever vote, or ever be elected to the Jamaica House of Assembly.

Sam Sharpe’s 1831/1832 Rebellion exposed the unsustainability of the system of slavery. The British Parliament reformed itself in 1832 to eliminate “Rotten Boroughs” and “Pocket Boroughs”, the bedrock of the power of the Planters’ Lobby. Just over a year later (on July 22, 1833) it was this reformed parliament that forced slave Emancipation on Jamaican slaveowners, but that did not imply that the former slaves became equal to their former masters. Whites still did not believe that people of African descent were equal to them – ontologically, morally, or legally.

Free people – even whites – did not automatically have the right to vote in Jamaica, nor to stand for public office (these were determined by the amount of taxes paid, which was related to land ownership); the planters were the legislators, the magistrates, the prosecutors and the juries, which led to persistent enduring injustice.

It should also be pointed out that, at the time, there was no equality in white society in the British Isles. The rigid British class system maintained real status differences between royalty, nobility, gentry, and commoner – all white Britons, but certainly not equal! It would be 1918 before all English males could vote regardless of how much property they owned; Englishwomen had to wait until 1928. It should be no surprise that Fully Free Jamaica in 1838 was still a grossly unequal society, which sowed the seeds which grew into the 1865 Morant Bay Riot.

CHILDREN EMPLOYED AS WORKERS

It must also be pointed out that in Britain, white children were employed as workers in the cotton, flax, silk, wool and worsted factories. In 1833 a petition circulated in the UK “to confine the hours of labour to 10 hours per day, etc., and that no children under nine years shall in future be employed” [ The Baptist Magazine (March 1833), page 131].

This inequality was exacerbated by the fact that after Full Freedom, the owners of slaves in Jamaica received $6,161,927.5.10 in compensation for the loss of their property (rather more than £19 per head), while the former slaves received no compensation for the loss of their freedom, their families, their homeland and their heritage.

To finance the payout, the British government took a loan from a financial syndicate led by Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777-1836) and his brother-in-law Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, 1st Bart. FRS (1784-1885); and only finally liquidated the debt in 2015! Some of the British taxpayers who paid off the loan were descendants of the enslaved, who helped to compensate the enslavers of their forebears.

While the former slaveowners were capitalised to make a life after slavery, the former slaves had to make their own world. It seems that the planters, attorneys, and overseers expected the ex-slaves to just continue working on the estates without any labour contract or agreement on wages. Baptist missionaries had to act as go-betweens, negotiating wages and working conditions for the now free labour force.

How did Jamaica morph from a society and economy of contiguous slave plantations to a peasant society and economy soon worth more than the formal sector? Baptist missionaries – and to a much lesser extent the Moravians, Methodists and Presbyterians – spawned the formation of Free Villages, where newly freed people owned enough land to live on, feed themselves, earn a decent living by selling their produce, and – most importantly – to vote!

FREE VILLAGES

By 1840 there were about 200 free villages across Jamaica, with about 8,000 peasant freeholders. By 1845 there were 19,000 peasant freeholders, almost all members of Non-Conformist churches. This data goes a far way toward explaining the subsequent distribution of Christian denominations across Jamaica.

“The free village was a holistic concept of sustainable Christian communities: freehold land ownership, church, Sunday worship, family based on marriage, home, small farm, and school. Land tenure, home ownership, Christian family values, economic viability, opportunity for education and worship were integrated. Each of these elements was designed to change an aspect of the slave society, including Saturday replacing Sunday as market day. Previously Jamaican society was organised by plantations, towns, settlements, and Maroon compounds. Village was a new form of community living and a new term in the Jamaican lexicon” [Miller, Errol. (2023). Elections and Governance: Jamaica on the Global Frontier: The Colonial Years 1663-1962. Kingston: Ian Randle. Page 289]

Soon brown and black Jamaicans were elected to the Vestries (local government) and to the House of Assembly (central government). Soon laws would be passed to favour the poor and the powerless instead of the big man.

The Hon William Hosack (1808-1883), custos of St George (1857-1866), MHA St George (1854-1866), wrote on November 29, 1865 after the Morant Bay riot:

“The elective franchise can no longer be safely entrusted to an ignorant, rebellious people, such as the mass of the people of Jamaica, after all that has happened. The present franchise would, if the Assembly be continued, very soon fill the Assembly with men without character, property, or education; so that the Home Government would very soon be compelled to interfere, to prevent anarchy and confusion, while such an interference might lead to the same fearful consequences which followed the intervention of the French National Assembly with the Constitution of Saint Domingo.”

And so to keep down black people, the House of Assembly abolished itself in 1866, and not even white people could vote.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and antiquarian. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com