Reviews of Books

Apprenticing to Freedom in the West Indies

A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams. Edited by Diana Paton. (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. x, 141 . $ 16.95. )

Reviewed by Olwyn M. Blouet, Virginia State University

Imagine being "between slavery and freedom." When the British Parliament abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1833, more than 600,000 people in the British Caribbean were placed in limbo. They were neither slave nor free. Ex-slaves knew what it meant to be a slave. They had dreamed what it was like to be free. But the Abolition Act that went into effect on August 1, 1834, instituted a period of Apprenticeship before "full freedom." Only children under age six were immediately "free." All other ex-slaves were bound to their former owners for a fixed period: six years for plantation laborers (known as "praedials," that is, agricultural workers) and four years for domestics and non-field workers (non-praedials). Apprentices were expected not only to labor but also to be in training for "full freedom." As British authorities envisaged it, Apprenticeship was also a course in socialization for life; ex-slaves were supposed to learn and to accept the controls of freedom. Apprentices resisted that interpretation.	1
The Abolition Act provided compensation (£20 million sterling) to West Indian planters for their loss of "property." At the same time, in the fear that ex-slaves might withdraw their labor from the market, pursue only a bare subsistence, and thereby revert to "barbarism," the law restricted the economic benefits of emancipation. Apprentices were required to labor for forty-five hours per week for their former owners, in exchange for the customary indulgences (food, clothing, housing, medical treatment) allowed during slavery. Special officials, "stipendiary magistrates," were recruited in Britain to oversee and adjudicate the system. With their salaries paid by the mother country, it was thought that these magistrates, more than one hundred in all, would be relatively free from local planter influence and thereby impartial.	2
Not so, if the experience of special magistrate John Anderson is any guide. Assigned to the Windward island of St. Vincent, which came under British control in 1783, the Scottish-born Anderson (1798–1839) had trained as a lawyer in Edinburgh but pursued the life of a gentleman-scholar, with several books to his name. Evidently, necessity drove him to seek a magistrate's post in the West Indies from colonial secretary Lord Glenelg. Anderson needed the stipend, and he may have also harbored thoughts of writing a book for the antislavery audience interested in West Indian experience after emancipation.1 Perhaps for that reason, Anderson kept a detailed journal of his experiences in St. Vincent between 1836 and 1838. Now housed in the Aberdeen University Historic Collections, that cluttered record has been carefully edited and thoroughly annotated by Roderick A. McDonald, professor of history at Rider University.	. . .