Document-based question

Slavery Abolition Act, passed by the British Parliament, London, 1833.

WHEREAS divers Persons are holden in Slavery within divers of His Majesty's Colonies, and it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free, and that a reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves for the Loss which they will incur by being deprived of their Right to such Services: And whereas it is also expedient that Provision should be made for promoting the Industry and securing the good Conduct of the Persons so to be manumitted, for a limited Period after such their Manumission . . . . That from and after the first Day of August One thousand eight hundred and thirty-four all Persons who . . . shall . . . have been duly registered as Slaves . . . shall . . . become and be apprenticed Labourers . . . . . . . no such praedial [agricultural] apprenticed Labourer . . . shall be bound or liable, by virtue of such Apprenticeship, to perform any Labour in the Service of his or her Employer or Employers for more than forty-five Hours in the whole in any One Week.

James Williams, formerly enslaved teenage apprentice laborer from Jamaica, narrative dictated in Britain and published by opponents of the apprenticeship system, London, 1837.

I am about eighteen years old. I was a slave belonging to Mr. Senior and his sister . . . in Saint Ann's parish, in Jamaica. I have been very ill treated by Mr. Senior and the magistrates since the new law come in. Apprentices get a great deal more punishment now than they did when they was slaves; the master take spite, and do all he can to hurt them before the free come;—I have heard my master say, "Those English devils say we to be free, but if we is to free, he will pretty well weaken we, before the six and the four years done; we shall be no use to ourselves afterwards." Apprentices a great deal worse off for provision than beforetime; magistrate take away their day, and give to the property . . . . When I was a slave I never flogged,—I sometimes was switched, but not badly; but since the new law begin, I have been flogged seven times, and put in the house of correction four times.

Anthony Trollope, British novelist and post office official, account of a visit to British Guiana, a sugar colony in South America, from his book The West Indies and the Spanish Main, 1859.

The Anti-Slavery Society tells us that we ought to have no such hope [of importing laborers]—that it is simply hoping for a return of slavery . . . . But in the usually accepted sense of the word freedom, the [Indian or Chinese laborer] immigrating to the West Indies is free. . . . Though the contract is for five years, they can leave the estate at the end of the first three, transferring their services to any other master, and at the end of the five years they are entitled to a free passage home. . . . As it at present is, . . . these happy [Black] gentlemen will not work on an average more than three days a week, nor for above six hours a day. I saw a gang of ten or twelve [Black] girls in a cane-piece, lying idle on the ground . . . . The planter was with me, and they instantly attacked him [with demands for higher pay]. . . . It is hardly necessary to say that the gentleman refused to bargain with them. . . . Poor young ladies! It will certainly be cruel to subject them to the evil of competition in their labour.

Carl Schurz, Union army general sent by President Andrew Johnson to tour the former Confederate states, report to the president, published by the United States Senate, 1865.

In at least nineteen cases of twenty the reply I received to my inquiry about their views on the new system was uniformly this: "You cannot make the [Black man] work, without physical compulsion." I heard this hundreds of times, heard it wherever I went . . . . . . . there appears to be another popular notion prevalent in the south . . . . It is that the [Black man] exists for the special object of raising cotton, rice and sugar for the whites, and that it is illegitimate for him to indulge, like other people, in the pursuit of his own happiness in his own way. Although it is admitted that he has ceased to be the property of a master, it is not admitted that he has a right to become his own master. . . . In the reports of officers of the Freedmen's Bureau . . . you will find frequent repetitions of the statement that the [Black man] generally works well where he is decently treated and well compensated.

Census population of Mauritius, a British sugar colony in the Indian Ocean, where enslaved people were freed between 1834 and 1839. Figures from the colony's censuses as reported in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911; the 1846 figure for all other inhabitants is derived by subtracting the Indian population from the total.

Census year | Population of Indian origin | All other inhabitants | Total population
1846 | 56,245 | 102,217 | 158,462
1851 | 77,996 | 102,827 | 180,823
1861 | 192,634 | 117,416 | 310,050
1881 | 248,993 | 110,881 | 359,874
1891 | 255,920 | 114,668 | 370,588
1901 | 259,086 | 111,937 | 371,023

Donald Mackenzie Wallace, British journalist who lived in Russia from 1870 to 1875, on the peasants freed from serfdom in 1861, from his book Russia, 1877.

The present money-dues and taxes are often more burdensome than the labour-dues in the time of serfage. If the serfs had a great many ill-defined obligations to fulfil—such as the carting of the master's grain to market, the preparing of his firewood, the supplying him with eggs, chickens, home-made linen, and the like—they had, on the other hand, a good many ill-defined privileges. . . . Their burdens and their privileges have been swept away together, and been replaced by clearly-defined, unbending, unelastic legal relations. They have now to pay the market-price for every stick of firewood which they burn . . . . Nothing is now to be had gratis. . . . Thinking of all this and of the other advantages and disadvantages of his new position, he [the peasant] has naturally much difficulty in coming to a general conclusion, and is perhaps quite sincere when, on being asked whether his new position is better than the old, he scratches the back of his head and replies, in a mystified, doubtful tone, "How shall I say to you? It is both better and worse!"

George Washington Williams, African American historian and Union army veteran, open letter to King Leopold II of Belgium, ruler of the Congo Free State, written after traveling up the Congo River, 1890.

The labour system is radically unpractical; the soldiers and labourers of your Majesty's Government are very largely imported from Zanzibar at a cost of £10 per capita, and from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Accra and Lagos at from £1 to £1/10 per capita. . . . Upon the arrival of the survivors in the Congo they are set to work as labourers at one shilling a day; as soldiers they are promised sixteen shillings per month, in English money, but are usually paid off in cheap handkerchiefs and poisonous gin. . . . Your Majesty's Government is engaged in the slave-trade, wholesale and retail. It buys and sells and steals slaves. . . . The labour force at the stations of your Majesty's Government in the Upper River is composed of slaves of all ages and both sexes.