Amelioration

While the slave trade was effectively abolished on January 1, 1808, British slavery in the West Indies was not. So, the abolitionists, bearing in mind that slavery should be gradually abolished, did not sit on their laurels. They were now campaigning for amelioration, the improvement of the well-being of the enslaved, to be enforced by law.

In 1823, the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery was established, attracting people, such as Fowell Buxton, James Stephens, George Canning, William Huskisson and Zachary Macauly, civil servants and politicians. It was their belief that without further importation from West Africa the planters would improve or ameliorate the conditions of their enslaved so that they could live longer.

The Society’s parliamentary leader, Thomas F. Buxton, decided to move resolutions in the House of Commons in May 1823 calling for immediate amelioration of the lots of the enslaved, and eventual emancipation. George Canning, the Tory leader in the House of Commons, countered with resolutions of his own, reflecting a previously agreed-upon compromise between the antislavery lobby and the West India Interest. This time around they formed a committee and drafted proposals which were considered and then forwarded to British colonies.

The 1823 Amelioration Proposal were: the flogging of women should be abolished; there should be a delay of at least one day before a male enslaved person was flogged; a record of all punishment of more than three lashes should be kept, and it should be presented to the magistrates at the next quarterly sessions, and the whip was no longer to be carried and used by gang foremen as an instrument to coerce labour in the field; enslaved people should not be sold as payment for debts, and their families were not to be broken up by sale.

Also, enslaved people should be allowed to give evidence in courts, if a religious instructor would sanction this. Slave evidence, under certain conditions, was to be admitted in the courts; enslaved people were to be given Christian instruction, and Sunday markets were to be abolished to encourage religious worship on Sundays; marriages were to be encouraged; enslaved people were to be allowed to purchase their freedom, even against their holders’ wishes; the informally recognised right of the enslaved to own property was to be backed by the law.

To the antislavery lobby, they were designed to prepare the enslaved for freedom; to the Government, their aim was to remove the most objectionable features of slavery and thus stave off Emancipation for the foreseeable future. The proposals were to be enforced in the Crown colonies by Orders in Council. So, the Amelioration reforms would be imposed by direct legislation only on the Crown Colonies, which had no elected Assemblies; the other colonies were told to enact laws to make the proposals legal.

The abolition of the Atlantic Trade in Africans was the beginning of the end of British slavery in the West Indies, and now the Amelioration Proposals were threatening to undermine the modus operandi of the plantations. They were met with much opposition and resentment from the Legislative Assemblies in the colonies. They would undermine owners’ control over their property, compromise plantation discipline, and incite slave rebellions, they argued.

Some planters adapted a few of the proposals, or parts thereof, while others rejected them wholesale. The colonies with their own Assemblies were able to resist the proposals even more successfully, while the Colonial Office in London worked hard to get them to comply. By 1830 it dawned on all the parties that the Amelioration system was a massive failure. So many things were wrong. And while the antislavery campaigners and pro-slavery agitators were locking jaws, despite a lull in their earnestness, the Christmas Rebellion exploded on December 27 in St James, Jamaica.

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