1865 and the Incomplete Caribbean Emancipation Project: Class Migration in Barbados in the Long Nineteenth century

Abstract

The year 1865 has served a temporal marker of freedom in both the USA and the Caribbean. For African Americans who sought various means to escape the travails of an American slave society, 1865 symbolized the possibilities for a future secured by legislation. By contrast, instead of optimism, 1865 in the British Caribbean signaled demise, failure, and gloomy prospects for the future of an already 30-year-old emancipation legislation passed by parliament. It thereby came to mark a point of renewed resistance. While the Morant Bay Rebellion played a prominent role in symbolizing the failures of the 1833 Emancipation Act in Jamaica, everyday Barbadians had maintained the quest for liberty in the years leading up to 1865 and after. Indeed, as a point of legislative, economic and political collapse, the 1865 upheaval, by serving as a highpoint, reveals the connections between everyday resistance that flanked both sides. Viewing the failures of the emancipation legislation through the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, a temporally specific and spatially bounded phenomenon, would be to dismiss the quotidian efforts of the different social groups as they pushed against the boundaries erected around freedom. By exploring the different motivations and calculations by which different groups of Barbadians came to view migration as desirable after both 1834 and 1865, this essay shows how 1865 instead served as a point of continuity for different social classes in Barbados who had long used mobility to vigorously reimagine and transgress the boundaries around freedom throughout the long nineteenth century.