Limited Fortunes, Unpaid Debt: The Untold Cost of Freedom on St Helena
If you come on one of my walks, I will tell you about that time the British government compensated Caribbean plantation owners for the loss of the slave labour they owned after abolition in 1833. Also, how the government paid that compensation from a loan taken at the time, which tax-payers - and I count myself among them - finally paid back in 2015.
Every time I tell this story, those who don’t know it are open-mouthed. There’s sometimes a gasp. Always a shaking of the head.
But this history made me wonder what had happened on St Helena - the British island in the South Atlantic which the East India Company (EIC) had governed for almost 200 years and the island where I was Governor between 2016 and 2019. I knew the Company used the enslaved to work the island. Indeed they had turned it into a huge farm to supply passing East India Company ships. But what was the story of abolition there; it would have been at the time the Company was in charge?
Turns out the Company went further than their government counterparts. Yes, the Company also compensated slave-owners directly, but it wasn’t the tax-payer who paid the Company back. It was the enslaved themselves. And because the requirement for individuals to repay largely came in 1834 ie. at the same time as the island was handed back to the Crown, many couldn’t subsequently afford to repay. When the Crown regained St Helena, cost-cutting became the order of the day. Wages plummeted. Food prices rose and employment was scarce. Poverty ensued. Nevertheless - and I think this is remarkable - almost two thirds of the formerly enslaved paid something. Not only this, the way the Company’s financial model worked meant that the tax revenue it raised from the people it governed in India was used to fund St Helena’s operations - as well as its other global operations. The implication being that it’s likely the compensation for slave-owners on St Helena was funded by the poor in India. And there’s more. It seems the Company was itself paid compensation by the British government when they were ordered to hand the island back to the Crown in 1834 - to the tune of £100,000 (or £11.2 million today).
But I’m getting ahead of myself! Let’s first fill in the gaps in this bit of history on a remote British island in the middle of the South Atlantic. One of the final remnants of the British Empire. What happened? And what sparked my interest in this in particular? To understand, we have to start at the end.
Imagine….you’re scrolling through Twitter. It’s 2018. And under its ‘FridayFact’ series, the U.K. Treasury has put out a tweet. It read…
“Millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes. Did you know? In 1833, Britain used £20 million, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.”
What the tweet neglected to mention was that the money borrowed ‘bought freedom’ by compensating owners of Caribbean plantations for the loss of their enslaved workforce. So the beneficiaries were slave owners, not the enslaved. In reality enslaved people were forced to return to plantations to carry on working there under the pretence of being ‘trained for freedom’. This ensuing apprenticeship scheme is now considered by some to be a continuation of the slavery model.
Almost certainly the Treasury Press Officer would have worked late that night, don’t you think? Social media exploded. Rather than the tweet being a snippet of what the Treasury thought would be interesting information intended to engender feelings of pride in Britain’s role in abolition : overwhelmingly the reaction was one of outrage. No mention of the enslaved themselves. Rather a self-congratulatory message about how current tax payers had somehow had a hand in abolishing slavery.
It has to be said, when the compensation scheme was established in 1833, it was hardly a secret. It was there in plain sight in the title. The full name of the act was ‘An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the industry of the manumitted slaves; and for compensating the persons hitherto entitled to the services of such slaves’’. In addition, UCL’s groundbreaking ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership’ database had also, a few years earlier, already made public the list of beneficiaries - their claims, names etc. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ The history just wasn’t widely known.
Plantation House with Jonathan
But knowing this made me curious about what had happened on St Helena at abolition. I had known that since the first two East India Company ships arrived on the island in 1659, enslaved people were brought with them. At the outset, St Helena’s enslaved mainly came from Cape Verde, Madagascar, and Mozambique. The need for the island to be turned into a huge farm is why the house I lived in - built for EIC Governors in 1792 - was called Plantation House. That and the fact that the East India Company was obsessed with plantations! Nothing would have made them happier than to replicate Barbados in the South Atlantic. They tried hard to do that and, according to Michael Bennett’s research, even brought seeds, and people who had experience of Barbadian plantations, to try. As someone who lived on St Helena for three years, it seems ridiculous that the Company Directors could believe the climate was similar. But I suppose they were a long way from both places. Nevertheless what they did cultivate well was fields of fruit and vegetables. Fresh water was nearby. Sheep and goats offered meat. All used to supply passing ships.
Indeed, I remember reading a book in the library at Plantation House called ‘Plantation Notes’. It has handwritten entries by various Governors over about 200 years. (I chose for my entry Jonathan the tortoise - still going strong and in the Guiness Book of Records as the world’s oldest land animal.) But I recalled other Governors in the well-thumbed manuscript referring to enslaved people. I definitely remember previous Governors describing ‘Company blacks’ as superior workers to other enslaved on the island. I also remember the authors said the Company’s enslaved had a particular propensity to quickly learn trades. And there was a note from another Governor about how the EIC encouraged Company servants to treat their enslaved well as they were a ‘Company investment’.
More recently I'd seen in the archives recently digitised by the St Helena National Trust fro the British Library as well as Colin Fox’s brilliant book about the abolition of slavery on St Helena that, as far back as 1825, slave owners on the island had started agitating for the emancipation of their enslaved and whether and how they would be compensated. Had they perhaps got wind of the move towards abolition in the UK? It is after all, eight years prior to the British Parliament's legislation abolishing slavery across its colonies.
Hudson Lowe anniversary stamp
Before that, several of St Helena’s Governors had already put in place measures towards emancipation. I talk about these on my East India Company tour. In 1792 one Governor issued a Proclamation declaring no more enslaved people were allowed to be brought to the island. This was apparently in an effort to encourage better treatment. Then in 1818, Governor Hudson Lowe (the much maligned Governor who was there during Napoleon’s time) had decreed that any baby born of a slave mother after Christmas Day should be considered to have been born free. The sting in the tail of that was that if the mother was sold to another owner, only those of her children under the age of 4 were allowed to go with her. The others were left behind with the previous owner, causing heartache and separation.
A few years later - in 1821, the year Napoleon died on the island - a census was taken and this gives us useful information about the proportion of ‘white inhabitants’ to ‘others’. Of a total of 3,587 people, there were 1,200 slaves; 420 ‘free blacks’; and 93 Company slaves. The ‘white inhabitants’ were 44% of the population, accounting for 694 people and Company troops of 891.
But it was in 1825 that abolition started to appear more frequently in the records. I could see St Helena’s slave owners (or ‘proprietors’ as they were termed) were growing increasingly anxious about their own financial futures. They worried that freed slaves would have no incentive to work unless they were somehow bound to a debt. They also worried that the price of labour would rise. More specifically they were keen to know if the East India Company Court of Directors in London were going to pay up and compensate them for losing their labour when abolition happened.
To get clarification the slave-owners wrote to the Directors of the East India Company in October 1825 suggesting that they would willingly offer a ‘greater noble sacrifice at the shrine of humanity’ and free their enslaved people. But ‘justice’ to themselves and their ‘limited fortunes forbade them to give full latitude to their generosity.’ They had a proposal however. They suggested the East India Company should advance the enslaved the price of their freedom. And that over the following 10-12 years, the enslaved would pay back the Company for that honour. The Governor on the other hand, had his own plan. In a covering letter, he suggested that emancipation should be phased over five years so the economy could ‘adjust’.
The first slave-owner to test the system was Captain Joseph Cole. At this time the way emancipation would work hadn’t even been agreed. But getting wind of the ‘grant to aid the emancipation of slaves’ Joseph Cole wrote to the St Helena Secretary in April 1827 suggesting that, because he was about to leave the island, his five slaves (Molly, Sally, Mary, Francis and William Sim) be freed. The reply, from the Governor and Council, was that, yes, he as their proprietor would be paid, but there was first the question of a valuation of each of them by the newly formed Emancipation Committee. Duly appearing before the Committee the five were valued at a total of £157 and, apart from £20 which Molly could pay for her emancipation, the money was to be ‘advanced’ to the slaves. Except it wasn’t. Captain Cole declared himself as in ‘need of ready money’ before he left the island. It was Captain Cole who expected to receive his compensation before he left. In his hand and direct.
I found the correspondence though - not just in this case but across alot of the minutes and letters - confusing. Sometimes the narrative appeared to suggest the money would go to the enslaved people and they would pay their owner. In other correspondence, it was clear the slave owners would receive the money direct and the debt would be levied on the enslaved to repay. To me, it didn’t really make sense for St Helena’s governing Council to hand over the money to the enslaved in order for them to pay their owners. But perhaps because, in the UK, there had been somewhat of a backlash about the £20million compensation fund set up by the government, the records on St Helena were purposely ambiguous?. In the UK there was criticism that the enslaved got nothing. Also that the government was using tax payers money to pay off those who were rich. Was this the backdrop?
Certainly the records were clear that all five of Captain Cole’s enslaved would be expected to pay the money back to the Company. And the Governor even put in place ways in which that could happen. Molly, a washerwoman and needlewoman, could, it was deemed, easily earn, and repay her loan; William Sim was to take the place of a Chinese servant who was with Reverend Boys, staying there until he paid off his debt to the Company and receiving the ‘pay and rations of a Chinese.’ Francis would be assigned to a trade and work for the EIC; Sally would be able to repay from her future earnings; and 14-year old Mary Jones would work at Plantation House until she had paid off her debt at aged 21. A portion of their salary was to be paid weekly into the Savings Bank and the Reporter of Emancipation, Lieutenant Den Taafe, would make sure it was, as he had the unfortunate job of keeping the repayments coming in.
This was 1827, and over the following nine years, the enslaved on St Helena were gradually granted their freedom. Specifically, between 1827 and 1836, 771 enslaved were freed through loans totalling £33,751 (about £3.8 million).
Even before 1827, some had been freed, perhaps by a benevolent owner, or because they agreed to convert to Christianity. Indeed, remember Molly, Captain Cole’s enslaved washerwoman? She had 12 children (or ‘encumbrances’ as they are referred to in the records). Two were born free under the law passed in 1818 which Governor Hudson Lowe introduced. But Molly had also already managed to buy the freedom of two of her other children. It was possible to earn a little extra by hiring yourself out to others, as long as your owner agreed of course. This is perhaps how she bought her children’s freedom.
It’s strange to read the list of names in these records. A common practice among freed people in a number of post-emancipation societies was to adopt the Christian names of their former owners as their surnames. Many of the names were familiar to me from my time on St Helena as Governor. I could picture them. There were surnames that were previously christian names, such as : Anthony, Benjamin, George, John, and Francis. And then some surnames, again, still common on the island today such as : Ellick; Bagley; Bowers; Mercury; Corker, and Knipe.
Each loan was based on how much the person was assessed to be worth. Two valuations took place, undertaken by a Committee comprising Lieutenant Den Taafe, some Council members and some slave owners. The first valuation was in 1827. The 869 enslaved individuals on the island were valued at a total of £37,639 (or about £3.5 million today). But because things happened so slowly - ironically Saints would often say to me this is a common feature of decision-making on their island - another valuation was taken in 1832 when 645 remaining enslaved people were assessed at a total value of £28,062 (or £2.7 million today).
The significance of 1832 was that this was when the numbers freed seemed to rise quickly, perhaps because the Abolition Act was nearing approval in the UK. Before that freedom had been granted in double figures and never over 50. But in 1832 144 enslaved were freed. They were all 45 years old or over. And importantly, the records state that owners were requested to present themselves at the Castle (where the Governor worked) in Jamestown to receive their money. This was 19 July 1832. There was no ambiguity here. A sure indication that the compensation went straight into the pockets of the slave owners themselves.
After 1832, the plan was to grant freedom over the following years. A lottery system was introduced to decide who should receive their freedom. Lots were drawn with some coupons being blank meaning the person had to wait another year The intention of the lottery was the idea to minimise disruption to the economy. But this was fraught with problems. Finally by 1836, a total of 771 people had been freed from slavery. They were indebted to the Company for their value.
However the transfer of the island to the Crown in 1834 - and with it the debt - brought about significant economic repercussions for the island. Many employees of the EIC lost their positions, leading to a sharp economic downturn and a considerable increase in the price of food. An often told story is one of former soldiers working in the fields alongside their former enslaved in order to earn a living. Unsurprisingly this economic hardship disproportionately affected the newly freed population, who were already in a precarious financial situation because they were burdened with outstanding emancipation loans.
Eventually in December 1839, the British Treasury decided to write-off the remaining unpaid emancipation loans. At this point, 91% of the loans were still outstanding. But despite the economic hardship, of the 82 loans outstanding, 51 people had paid something. I find this remarkable. How do we know? Well Lieutenant Den Taafe had to do yet another survey. This one was to collect the reasons why people hadn’t paid. It is a litany of sad stories and poverty. The most common phrase is ‘earns barely enough to feed and clothe him/herself.’
So yes, there is a story behind abolition on this small British island in the middle of the South Atlantic. It’s different to the one now known in respect to the Caribbean. Perhaps it’s different because the island was run by a Company - obsessed with profit? Whichever, it’s part of British history, a British history that should be more widely told and known.
The people on St Helena are the descendants of the people I've written about here. Today, due to its relative poverty and economic vulnerability, this British island receives aid. Every year a level of ‘reasonable assistance needs’ - a term undefined - is hard won from the British Government by the St Helena Government. When I was part of these annual negotiations a few years ago, the message to the St Helenians was often very similar to one that echoes down the years. That the British Government's ‘limited fortunes forbade them to give full latitude to their generosity.’ I imagine not much has changed.