Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

Rumours of emancipation are in the air, but the island’s Assembly has been resisting British governmental pressure even to ameliorate the conditions enslaved people endure there. Only three Assembly members voted in support of a recent proposal to end flogging of enslaved women – a trio led by Uncle Sam, who’s been back at Cinnamon Hill since 1827. The years he served as MP for Richmond, Yorkshire empowered Sam to write in 1831 to his Whig colleague Lord Howick, Under Secretary for War and the Colonies and the prime minister’s son, about the island’s brutal conditions. But nothing changed. Less than three months after he’d sent the letter, a general strike held by ‘slaves’ on Christmas Day erupted into riots involving up to a fifth of the island’s enslaved population, which at the time totalled around 300,000. The so-called Baptist War lasted just eleven days and was brutally suppressed: around five hundred enslaved people were killed, more than half of them by quasi-judicial execution including for trivial offences. The Assembly estimated – arguably, overestimated – the damage to (largely, its members’ own) property at £1,154,589: the rioters had mostly lacked weapons, but many plantation trash houses, where the trash leaves and stems of the sugar cane are stored and dried to serve as fuel for the sugar refineries, had been set alight.

That Cinnamon Hill was one of the few estates to escape damage is no coincidence. Since arriving on the island, Uncle Sam and his wife Mary Clementina have been recognised as more moderate than their crueller neighbours. When Mary Clementina died in June 1831 she was apparently much mourned, not only back in England, but ‘by all her negroes’. The couple had brought with them the Barrett family interest in Nonconformism; from England, Elizabeth’s father decreed that the Baptist William Knibb should be allowed to minister to the people enslaved on his own Oxford and Cambridge estates. In 1830, when their lives had proved so chaotic that Knibb stopped the work, Papa intervened once more to enable him to continue.

Such plantocracy support is key to any amelioration of the conditions it has itself created. In the 1830s, Baptist, Methodist, Moravian and Wesleyan ministers are Jamaica’s chief advocates of enslaved people’s rights. If not quite preaching liberation theology, they are ministering to enslaved, free black, and mixed-heritage congregants. Enslaved people can and do become elders in these churches, to the horror of many planters. Indeed the Baptist War got its name from the leadership of Samuel Sharpe, an enslaved Baptist deacon, as well as from the spiritual and practical support that the uprising received from Nonconformist ministers. During the eighteen months between the insurrection and Sharpe’s execution by hanging in May 1832, Nonconformist ministers were repeatedly accused by the Assembly and at the Courts Martial (in which landowners dispensed often summary justice for their losses) of inciting rebellion, and spreading false rumours that slavery had been abolished.

Around this very time Uncle Sam started to give the people enslaved on the Cinnamon Hill and Cornwall estates every Saturday off. Unsurprisingly, he was soon being fingered by the colonial establishment. His rescue of a minister whose chapel had been burnt down by planters prompted the custos, or warden, of Trelawny to complain, ‘I highly disapprove of the conduct of Mr Moulton-Barrett; it has been stated to me, that he was seen riding out of town with a Mr. Box, who I had ordered to be taken into custody as one of the incendiary preachers.’ Nevertheless Uncle Sam persisted and when, in early 1832, Knibb was arrested and his chapel razed, joined two ministers in writing an open letter of support care of the local custos – who was his own first cousin, Richard Barrett. More: after Sam himself had been appointed custos of St Ann in June 1832 by a new-broom governor, he supported an application by a Wesleyan, John Greenwood, for licence to preach, citing the Toleration Act. The courtroom in which he was hearing the application descended into mob violence; the governor sent in troops to support Sam and to maintain order.

So when Bro lands in Jamaica in December 1833 the island is, though no longer formally under martial law, in a restless state; and the Barrett name is deeply implicated in these upheavals. The following September, Elizabeth writes that her brother is still:

an exile in Jamaica […] there is no use in dreaming it—he cannot be happy there—among the white savages. I would rather see him in England, employed in the very humblest of honest employments.

That telling phrase, ‘white savages’, represents a step in her slow coming to terms with the realities of slavery. Her conscience won’t reach its public high point until 1848, when she’s married to an abolitionist and living a new life at a distance from her family and its shibboleths, amid the democratic revolutionaries of Risorgimento Italy. To get to that stage, this daughter and granddaughter of slave owners will have had to move a long way from the position she holds back in May 1833, when she writes of Parliament’s proposal to abolish slavery:

The West Indians are irreparably ruined if the bill passes. Papa says that in the case of its passing, nobody in his senses would think of even attempting the culture of sugar […] I am almost more sorry for poor Lord Grey who is going to ruin us, than for our poor selves who are going to be ruined.

On 28 August 1833, however, the Slavery Abolition Act does become law, its progress hastened by public disgust at revelations about the Baptist War.

Slavery won’t be abolished in America until the 1860s, but in Britain popular opinion has been mobilising for a while. The Anti-Slavery Society was founded by William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and others in 1823, when Elizabeth was seventeen. 1831, the Barretts’ last full year at Hope End, saw the publication of the first British slave narrative. Mary Prince,