George Canning1,
Speech of the Rt. Hon. George Canning in the House of Commons, on the 16th day of
March 1824, on laying before the House the Papers in explanation of the measures adopted
by His Majesty’s Government, for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Slave
Population in His Majesty’s Dominions in the West Indies , London, 1824.
[…] I will now recapitulate the improvements which Government propose to effect in the
island of Trinidad: - First, abolition of the use of the whip with regard to females entirely; Discontinuance of the use of the whip as applied to males as a stimulus to labour; Restrictions on the infliction on males of punishment by the whip. Secondly, a religious
establishment and religious instruction; - and in order to give time for the acquirement of that
instruction, the abolition of the markets and of slave labour on the Sunday. Thirdly,
encouragement of marriage among the slaves; the keeping together of families of slaves, in
sales or transfers of estates; the securing to slaves the enjoyment of property, and the right to
distribute it at their death. Fourthly, the admissibility of the evidence of slaves under certain
regulations; and lastly, a power to the slave to purchase his known freedom and that of his
wife or children. These are the chief objects of the Order in Council. Such is the example
which the Government are disposed to set in the island of Trinidad; and it is hoped that other
colonies will follow an example so set, without the apprehension of danger2.
I am aware that whilst with respect to the last point alluded to in the Order in Council the power to be given to slaves to purchase their own freedom, or that of their wives or
children - Government has gone beyond the general assent of the West India Body3, they have
fallen very short of the desires of some excellent and honourable persons. I know very well
that the honourable gentleman opposite [Mr Buxton4], last year stated that he was disposed to
go a shorter way to work, and to enact the emancipation of a particular generation of slaves.
Sir, in the interval which has elapsed since the debate of last May, I have turned the matter in
my mind with the most painful anxiety; and I feel bound to declare, that with the most sincere
desire to come to the conclusion most favourable to the cause of humanity, I cannot concur in
the Honourable Member’s proposition. If it were carried into effect, it would in my opinion be
productive of the greatest injury, not only to the white population, but also to the blacks
themselves. – (Mr Buxton here observed across the table that he only proposed to emancipate’
the children of the existing slaves, not the slaves themselves.)
1
George Canning was then Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons.
This became known as the Trinidad Order in Council. Orders in council were edicted by the Privy Council, i.e.
the monarch’s council, i.e., the Britsh government. For the first time since the abolition of the slave trade
(1807), the British government was trying to improve the condition of slaves in the sugar islands. The slave trade
had been abolished but the slaves were still very badly treated. However, the Order in Council could only be
enforced in the colony of Trinidad, a Crown colony where the Government could impose legislation (but which
did not have many slaves), and not in the main sugar islands, Barbados and Jamaica, where it was ignored by
the local assemblies – entirely in the hands of the planters.
3
The West India Body or West India Interest refers to the West Indian planters -the owners of slaves in the
West Indian colonies.
4
Sir Thomas Fulwell Buxton had launched the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery in
London one year before, in 1823. Local branches existed in several towns.
2
1
The honourable gentleman is not prepared to grant emancipation to the existing
generation of slaves. Certainly not. To let in the full light of freedom on eyes scarcely
unsealed, eyes from which the scales of bondage have not yet been purged away, would
indeed be a perilous experiment. But would it not be scarcely less unwise to hold out the hope
of emancipation to the next generation of Negroes? The slave would view the freedom which
was thus placed in prospect before him, as an infant views any object of desire, without the
faculty of calculating the distance which separates him from it. To hold out the prospect, for a
future generation might create dissatisfaction in the present race of slaves, and render their
actual existence intolerable.
The course which the Government proposes to pursue, is to arrive at the liberation of
the child through the instrumentality of the parent. Enable the Negro to purchase his own
freedom, - enable him equally to purchase that of his offspring, - whenever he shall have
acquired the means of doing so; - and the option between himself and his child being left to
his own feelings, how probable is it that those feelings may lead him to prefer the liberation of
his child! - On the contrary, if we were to take the rising generation of slaves, or those
hereafter to be born, under the special protection of the legislature, as proposed by the
Honourable Member, parents might perhaps be tempted to look upon their offspring with
feelings, I will not say of envy, but with feelings far other than those of unmixed satisfaction,
with which a parent ought to contemplate the happiness and prosperity of his child.
Immediate emancipation to the Negro himself, I am most happy to hear the honourable
gentleman disclaim. It would indeed be a fatal gift. To be safely enjoyed it must gradually and
diligently earned […] This condition is the legitimate stimulant of laudable industry, and the
best corrective of ambitious desire. No effort of an individual, and no enactment of a
legislature can relieve human nature from the operation of this condition. To attempt to
shorten the road between desire and attainment is nine times out of ten to go astray, and to
miss the wished-for object altogether. I am fully persuaded that freedom, when acquired under
the regulations prescribed by the Government, will be a more delightful as well as a more safe
and more stable possession than if it were bestowed by a sudden acclamation.
In dealing with the Negro, Sir, we must remember that we are dealing with a being
possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose
in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity if his physical passions, but in the
infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid
fiction of a recent romance5; the hero of which constructs a human form, with all the
corporeal capabilities of man, and with the thews and sinews of a giant; but being unable to
impart to the work of his hands a perception of right and wrong, he finds too late that he has
only created a more than mortal power of doing mischief, and himself recoils from the
monster which he has made.
Such would be the effect of a sudden emancipation, before the Negro was prepared for
the enjoyment of well-regulated liberty. […]
5
An allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1818.
2
Elizabeth Heyrick, A Member of the Society of Friends,
Immediate, not Gradual Abolition, London, 18246.
The history of emancipation in St. Domingo, and of the conduct of the emancipated
slaves for thirty years subsequent to that event (as detailed in Clarkson’s admirable pamphlet,
on the necessity of improving the conditions of our West Indian slaves7) is a complete
refutation of all the elaborate arguments which have been artfully advanced to discredit the
design of immediate emancipation. No instance has been recorded in these important annals,
of the emancipated slaves (not the gradually but the immediately emancipated slaves) having
abused their freedom. On the contrary, it is frequently asserted in the course of the narrative,
that the negroes continued to work upon all the plantations as quietly as before emancipation.
Through the whole of Clarkson’s diligent and candid investigations of the conduct of
emancipated slaves, comprising a body of more than 500, 000 persons, under a great variety
of circumstances, a considerable proportion of whom had been suddenly emancipated- with
all the vicious habits of slavery upon them ; many of them accustomed to the use of arms; he
has not, throughout this mass of emancipated slaves, found a single instance of bad
behaviour, not even a refusal to work, or of disobedience to orders; much less, had he heard
of frightful massacres, or of revenge for past injuries, even when they had it amply in their
power. Well might this benevolent and indefatigable abolitionist arrive at the conclusion,
“that emancipation, (why did he not say immediate emancipation?) was not only practicable,
but practicable without danger” […]
In the face of such a body of evidence, the detaining our West Indian slaves in
bondage, is a continued acting of the same atrocious injustice which first kidnapped and tore
them from their kindred and native soil, and robbed them of that sacred unalienable right
which no considerations, how plausible [what]soever, can justify the withholding. We have no
right, on any pretext of expediency or pretended humanity, to say – “because you have been
made a slave, and thereby degraded or debased, - therefore, I will continue to hold you in
bondage until you have acquired a capacity to make a right use of your liberty.” As well
might you say to a poor wretch, gasping and languishing in a pest-house, “here will I keep
you, till I have given you a capacity for the enjoyment of pure air8.”
You admit that the vices of the slave, as well as his miseries – his intellectual and moral, as
well as corporeal degradation are consequent on9 his slavery; - remove the cause then, and the
effect will cease. Give the slave his liberty, - in the sacred name of justice, give it him at once.
6
Elizabeth Heyrick was among the first abolitionists to counter the argument in favour of « gradual »
emancipation, such as put forward by Canning in the preceding text.
7
Thomas Clarkson, a famous British abolitionist, was the author of Thoughts on the Necessity of
Improving The Condition of The Slaves in the British Colonies With a View to their Ultimate
Emancipation And on the Practicability… And the Advantages of the Latter Measure (1818). Clarkson
never went to Haiti but was well-informed because he corresponded with Henri Christophe, who
became the King of independent Haiti n 1811, and even became his advisor. Toussaint Louverture had
led the first successful slaves’riot which led to the independence of Haiti in 1804.
8
A pest-house was a building used to keep persons afflicted with communicable diseases in
quarantine.
9
the consequence of
3
Whilst you hold him in bondage, he will profit little from your plans of amelioration. He has
not, by all his complicated injuries and debasements, been disinherited of his sagacity, - this
will teach him to give no credit to your admonitory lessons – your Christian instructions will
be lost upon him, so long as he both knows and feels that his instructors are grossly violating
their own lessons.
The enemies of slavery have hitherto ruined their cause by the senseless cry of gradual
emancipation. It is marvellous that the wise and the good should have suffered themselves to
have been imposed upon by this wily artifice of the slaveholder10, for with him must the
project of gradual emancipation have first originated. The slaveholder knew very well that his
prey would be secure, so long as the abolitionists could be cajoled into a demand for gradual
instead of immediate emancipation. He knew very well that the contemplation of a gradual
emancipation, would beget a gradual indifference to emancipation itself. He knew very well,
that even the wise and good, may, by habit and familiarity, be brought to endure and tolerate
almost anything […] He knew very well, that the faithful delineation11 of the horrors of West
Indian slavery, would produce such a general insurrection of sympathetic and indignant
feeling, such abhorrence of the oppressor, such compassion for the oppressed, as must soon
have been fatal to the whole system. He knew very well that a strong moral fermentation had
begun, which, had it gone forward, would soon have purified the nation of the foulest of its
corruptions; that the cries of the people for emancipation would have been too unanimous,
and too importunate for the Government to resist, and that slavery would, long ago, have been
exterminated throughout the British dominions12.
10
Heyrick is referring to the planters, the owners of plantations in the British West Indies ; Barbados and
Jamaica were the main sugar islands with the greatest numbers of African slaves.
11
description
12
Heyrick’s arguments carried weight as in 1833 the British abolitionist society – until then called the Society
for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery replaced the word « gradual » by « immediate » and the Act
for the Abolition of slavery throughout the British empire was eventually passed in Parliament the same year.
4