This article examines the main provisions of the 1833 Abolition Act and the British Guiana Ordinances stemming from this Act and argues that the rules of the apprenticeship experiment and the record keeping and legality strategies contained therein were hinged on physical coercion, punishment and social and economic control to ultimately ensure the survival of the plantation economy and its attendant society in the post slavery period.
The Abolition of Slavery Act was passed in 1833. Despite the enactment of the Act, ex-slaves after 1st August 1834 were nonetheless for all intents and purposes, still bound since the Act instituted a four-to-six year apprenticeship period during which time the “apprentices” were forced to continue working for their former masters. The foremost intention underlying the apprenticeship system was to extract forced labour for the plantations in order to maintain or increase productivity within the context of an inequitable and exploitative social structure that was facing strong challenges. The apprenticeship system made provision for labour control by way of physical coercion as against the economic coercion of the market. Totally lacking was a regime of incentives that sought to convince the apprentices that working on the plantations would produce greater prospects for them than subsisting as peasant farmers. Rather, it was the slaveholders who were the beneficiaries of incentives as the Abolition Act established a 20 million fund distributable to former slaveholders once a colony’s legislature passed ordinances specifying work rules and punishment schemes by August 1, 1834 when the Abolition Act would take effect.
It was believed that the planters were the disadvantaged ones who were being forced to give up their property rights, even though the apprentices were required to live on plantation lands and perform the same tasks they had done as slaves. Planters and local legislatures in the Caribbean had been bitterly opposed to the abolition of slavery, but once slavery ended, their objectives by and large coincided with those of the British government – that is, to sustain plantation economies by maintaining an industrious and stable work force.
Planters, colonial legislators, and British Parliamentary leaders all believed that only compulsion would get Africans to work for their former masters. Consequently, rather than providing economic incentives (namely, reasonable wages or land ownership), the Abolition Act and subsequent local ordinances contained a complicated mixture of paternalism, categorization, fines, punishments, and social controls, that were underlain by record keeping to ensure obedience and submission from apprentices. Clearly, the main motivation for the introduction of the apprenticeship scheme was economic – in the short term to continue production through the use of force and keeping labour costs at a minimum, and in the long term to establish a class of amenable waged labourers through education and indoctrination.
The Abolition Act of 1833 contained detailed measures in addition to guiding principles. However, most of the details regarding work behaviour, task-rate levels, and punishment schemes, among a number of other issues, were to be determined by the colonial legislatures. It was calculated that slaves worked just about 54 hours per week before abolition. The Abolition Act restricted to 45 the number of unpaid hours apprentices should work for the plantation owners, but each colony was empowered to decide how these hours would be allocated on a daily/weekly basis. The apprentices were entitled to one day of rest and it was enforced by some planters “as a day of uninterrupted rest” from any work, such as tending provision grounds, to make sure that apprentices were totally rested by Monday morning when of course they worked for the plantation owners rather than for themselves.
A committee of “seven or eight of the most respected planters” was appointed to determine how labour could be controlled in British Guiana and it devised what it determined to be a “reasonable tariff of the amount of work each Negro ought to perform”. The committee, which was chaired by Charles Bean, established scales of taskwork for cane, coffee, cotton and plantain cultivation, as well as wood cutting, They recommended that once an apprentice failed to fully complete his/her assigned tasks, he/she could be required to work additional hours or face punishment. The committee however noted that apprentices should feel that the scales were reasonable to prevent civil disorder. While the Act did not specify whether an apprentice’s free time was subject to performance or meeting scale targets, the planters’ through Bean’s committee linked them as noted in a dispatch from Governor Smyth to E.G. Stanley, Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1834:
The committee recommend that this apportionment shall be by giving five days’ labour or 45 hours to the master, and one day, which they recommend to be Saturday, to the apprenticed labourer; provided that in all cases the consolidation of the daily time of one hour and a half of the labourer into the Saturday of each week shall only take place on the due and proper performance of the daily task, and be consequent upon the good, orderly and industrious conduct of the labourer, and not otherwise.
It was widely believed that if the daily possibility of flogging and other forms of physical punishment was removed, apprentices would only work on the plantations under a comprehensive arrangement of rules, regulations, adjudication procedures, paternalistic persuasion, education, policing, prison, and punishment schemes. Consequently, the Abolition Act contained a multifaceted array of legal and social controls to regulate the conduct of apprentices.
The Act required that apprentices live and work on the plantation; they were restricted from occupying vacant lands or surviving solely on proceeds of the provision-ground. They were punished, either through incarceration, additional work hours, or physical beating if they did not adhere to strict attendance rules, if they were deemed insubordinate, if they refused to work, if they were found in excess of five miles away from their plantation without a written pass, or if they did not satisfy the standard of “assiduous and steady industry”. Apprentices were also prohibited from buying land, obtaining other forms of employment, or relocating to another colony without a passport (which needed the written consent of the plantation owner). These rules were enforced by an extensive system of fines, additional work-hours, and floggings.
The creation of Special Magistrates was instrumental in the implementation of the Abolition Act and they combined “the roles of judge, teacher, and taskmaster”. They had vast responsibilities – they heard complaints, adjudicated cases, identified punishments, took part in appraisals, levied fines, submitted regular reports, and administered floggings for breaches of the Abolition Act and their local ordinances. In summary, they were responsible for ensuring that the apprentices fulfilled the mandatory number of labour hours, while shielding them from overwork, exploitation, or mistreatment.
However, the British Guiana judiciary, in particular the local appointees failed to act impartially as most members were linked to the local plantocracy. Out of 67 local magistrates who had functioned as special justices in British Guiana onto March 1835, only four were recorded as “Unconnected with Colonial Property.” It was therefore not surprising that the adjudications of local justices greatly favoured the interests of the planters. Although an attempt was made to address this bias by restricting locally appointed justices from trying apprentices or planters for breaches of the Abolition Act, cases were nonetheless rarely brought by apprentices against planters, and when they did, it was still largely the views of the planters that were endorsed. Moreover, it was clear that planters were incensed if d
ecisions were rendered against them, believing that this served to further diminish their authority over workers.
One of the main strategies used to bolster the apprenticeship system was keeping records. Record keeping served a dual role, to maintain control over labour and to assess the economic performance of the labourers. Work attendance, sub-standard work performance, acts of insubordination, and medical reports all had to be recorded in an approved format in specific journals so that when the special magistrates or justices visited or held special hearings, planters would have documentation to support their complaints. In other words, although the apprenticeship scheme was dependant on the force of law, it was reinforced and maintained by recorded or accounting evidence.
Plantations recorded their productivity for the various work gangs daily. Special magistrates determined whether the performance of the apprentices on the basis of this record keeping was satisfactory and as noted earlier, the impartiality of the special magistrates and justices was in great doubt considering their close links to planter interests. A system was also created to provide regular medical examinations to ensure apprentices didn’t avoid work by pretending to be ill. If an apprentice was determined to be genuinely ill or injured by the medical examiner, the main issue was to determine how soon he/she could resume work activities. These examinations were similarly meticulously recorded for possible judicial action.
As befitting their free status, responsibility for punishments was removed from the hands of the plantation owners and given to the special magistrates or justices as the Act sought to regulate the severity of penalties that could be imposed. The Abolition Act prohibited plantation owners from administering corporal punishment on the apprentice workers. However, corporal punishment from plantation owners and overseers did not cease, as unofficially there were numerous instances of illegal floggings on plantations, even of women although this practice was prohibited.
Africans in British Guiana clearly expected far more liberties than they were given by the Abolition Act and its local ordinances and this led to disturbances in early August 1834 as the apprentices were unwilling to abide by the legislation. Their continued resistance to this alternative form of forced labour, along with the gross violations of the terms of the Act by planters and appointed officials alike meant that the apprenticeship scheme’s long term objective of sustaining plantation economies by transforming ex-slaves in willing wage employees was not achieved and the apprenticeship experiment was deemed a failure and was discarded early. Moreover, events in the post apprenticeship period reinforced the failure of the scheme to achieve its objective as many former slaves in British Guiana exited the plantations for villages to become peasant farmers, using plantation work on a sporadic and supplementary basis and forcing planters to replace them with indentured workers.
