Reparative histories: tracing narratives of black resistance and white entitlement

Memorial battles for the racialised past

Writing recently about the statue wars in the United States, Jonathan Beecher Field argued that the Confederate effigies that have become a rallying point for the far Right in the US offer an opportunity to ‘reflect on how seemingly race-neutral public monuments often in fact stake territory in debates over racial identity and whiteness’. Moreover, he urged, we should ‘treat each statue as an invitation to think critically about the story it tells about a past, the work it does in the present, and the impact it has on the future’. ¹ Beecher Field has no problem with the statues being removed. He is more interested in reflecting critically on the ways in which America’s racialised legacies are woven into myriad forms of memorialisation that reach beyond the brittle stares of Confederate generals. Indeed, the removal of Confederacy statues provides exhaustive space for thinking about the occlusions of racialised pasts in the service of contemporary race politics. At the same time, the mobilisation of race conscious resistance is redolent of the rich history of black opposition to the whitening of European and American history. The stark symbolism of the empty plinths where looming Confederate ‘heroes’ have been taken down has often been eclipsed by the spectacle of the actual processes of the physical removal of the statues.

In Baltimore, August 2017, Stonewall Jackson and Robert Lee were driven through the city streets at night with ‘Black Lives Matter’ scrawled on the prone generals. In the city, which saw mass protest over the police killing of Freddie Gray in 2015, the Mayor and city council ordered the removal of the statues ‘following the acts of domestic terrorism carried out by white supremacist terrorist groups in Charlottesville Virginia’. ² In Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of Heather Heyer’s killing, anti-racist protesters themselves pulled down the quickly crumpling Confederate Soldier monument outside the court house. The image of General Lee hoisted and swinging on a crane against a clouded blue sky in New Orleans, in May 2017, provides a wealth of symbolic readings about industrialisation, plantation slavery and racial terror in the US. As has been widely noted, these statues, which were mostly erected in the early twentieth century to justify Jim Crowism, were cheaply mass produced in order to consolidate the mythologisation of the Civil War and also to police African American life. ³ In effect, they inserted a disciplining memory into the lexicon of America’s race history, in the service of a narrative of white martyrdom. Their removal, and the resistances to their removal, are also about memory, martyrdom and discipline. The emergence of ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013 instantiated a form of black radical protest, which has maintained an unwavering focus on the ‘disciplining’ of black bodies by the homicidal policing of African American communities.

The simultaneous emergence of a narrative of ‘white’ dispossession and alienation, where white America has been abandoned by a mythical multiracial elite, played a considerable part in the election of Donald Trump. In this context, the statue wars are indeed a fitting place from which to extend the ‘cultural reach’ of their local meanings. Taken within the wider context of the dominant disavowal of Europe and America’s imperial and racialising origins, the controversy over what gets remembered by whom, and the form that memorialisation takes, are urgent questions for a reparative history. We are, at this moment, witnessing an eruption of active memory. Here anti-racist resistance is directly targeting a dominant memory that has obliterated traumatic black pasts in the name of a beleaguered white identity. But there is more at stake than competing concepts of historical authority centring on traumatic legacies of racialised terror. The resistances mobilised around Confederacy statues are not about memory alone – but about the now. The expunging of racialised violence and racialised labour practices in a shiny iteration of whitewashed history in the service of negating contemporary racism is taking place in the context of the most significant anti-racist movement in the US since the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s. ⁴ Moreover, the campaigns that have focused on statues from South Africa to Oxford to North Carolina have brought the past and present into a productively fractious relationship for thinking about reparative history.

On this side of the Atlantic, the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign in Oxford University has been greeted in the Tory press by the familiar faux horror at the spectacle of ‘snowflake’ students who are demanding a history which meets the exacting standards of their safe-space universe. ⁵ The campaign has been read through the paradigms of free speech, but at the centre of the critique is a complaint that criticism of Empire has become too un-nuanced and that colonial crimes must be seen in context of the ‘standards of the time’. ⁶ In this context, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘then’ and ‘now’, are assumed to be of quite different orders. Moreover, underlining these divisions is a demand that the colonial past remains firmly in the past, not least in terms of refusing to bring that past into any kind of dialogue with contemporary racialisations. In this rubric, the temporal and spatial interconnections of Empire and contemporary globalisation are riven asunder in a ‘common sense’ discourse, in which the colonial past is frozen as a moment that should not be asked to bear the weight of contemporary sensitivities about race. Moreover, this is a demand underpinned by the idea that the ‘now’ is a moment untroubled by racism, save for the hyper-sensitivity of a generation of mollycoddled students.

In Bristol, the controversial statue of the slaver Edward Colston has been at the centre of a long and charged debate about Bristol’s slaving past. The blindingly polarised narrative of white philanthropy underpinned by black death could hardly be starker. In the campaign to trouble Colston’s representation as a beneficent donor and, according to the statue’s plaque, as ‘one of the most virtuous and wise sons’ of the city, his role as a slaver and the 85,000 Africans who were kidnapped and enslaved while he was running the Royal Africa Company have been highlighted. ⁷ In November 2016, the plinth of Colston’s statue was daubed with ‘kidnapper’, ‘murderer’, ‘slave trader’ and ‘human trafficker’. The latter indicated a set of connections that were being made to present circumstances – however complicated that connection might be – as the scale of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean was emerging in the British press. ⁸ For a reparative history that seeks to revisit the past in relation to contemporary resistances, the statue wars that have sought to destabilise the literal monumentalising of racialised histories, are indicative of the ways in which silencing narratives of ‘closure’ on violent pasts are being contested.

This article builds upon Catherine Hall’s call to open up the ‘entangled histories’ of racialised capitalism and to trouble the ‘binary between black and white’ which we can see at work in the reactions to the statue wars. ⁹ It does so via the investigation of a quite different historical moment, and one to which no memorial exists. It is a moment, however, that reaches out from the history of the enslaved to illuminate what Colin Prescod has termed the ‘radical histories of resistance to White supremacy, locally and globally’. ¹⁰ It is a moment opened up by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project.

Reparative history and Legacies of British Slave-ownership

The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (LBS) has examined the records of the Commission set up to administer the £20 million paid by the state to British slave-holders as part of the Emancipation Act. Its findings have further solidified Eric Williams’s argument about the significance of British colonial slavery for the take-off of Britain’s industrialisation. An extraordinary, and hitherto hidden, picture has emerged, not only of a set of corporate foundations in slavery but also of the subsequent trajectories of those funds which were acquired as compensation for slavery’s ending, and which were funneled – post-emancipation – into key financial, industrial and political institutions. The members of the research team are not only tracing the evolution of particular financial and commercial businesses that received slave compensation, and the redeployment of those monies into other investments, but have also identified, and are tracing further, concrete legacies that extend from the economic after-life of slavery, and which are intimately bound into it. This includes the ways in which those monies circulated through the wider contours of the British Empire as ex-slave owners moved on to become investors, administrators and settlers in colonial spaces within and beyond the slave colonies, as well as their impact on the political, cultural, historical, physical and built landscapes of the imperial nation itself. ¹¹

The project has provided an extraordinary resource for tracing the global reach of transatlantic slavery down the streets and into the houses and drawing rooms of Britain. As the researchers readily acknowledge, however, following these monies tells us much about those diverse beneficiaries and the ways in which slavery sutured the Empire, structured modern Britain and moulded British identities, but little about the enslaved who were registered in ledger books and assigned generic monetary value in scribbled ink. Indeed, C. L. R. James was critical of Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery – upon which the legacies project directly builds – precisely because, while he focused sharply on the role of slavery in the emergence of capitalism, his argument that abolition was the outcome of the triumph of bourgeois economic interests over bankrupt protectionism meant that he left out the ‘liberating activity of the slaves themselves’. ¹² As James’s critique shows, the challenge of connecting histories from above with those from below in this context is not new. It has long been a productive problematic within histories of the black radical tradition.

The current reparative challenge, then, is to develop narratives that widen the analytical frame in order to build on the radical black tradition. Tracing the dialectic between past and present, and the local and the global in order to identify the erosion or domestication of black rage is an urgent task for anti-racist praxis. It helps to redress the effective erasure of the connections between metropolitan accumulation and the everyday resistances practised in the Caribbean. This was an erasure or a forgetting inaugurated by the compensation scheme itself, as it effectively laundered property in human beings – and the memory of holding property in human beings – into abstract cash, thereby setting in motion a powerful process of metropolitan divestment and disavowal. ¹³ Moreover, as Christer Petley notes, in discussing the further political potential of the legacies research, despite the considerable methodological challenges that it poses, ‘Britain’s true relationship with (and debt to) slavery will perhaps be clearer when lived realities in colonial towns, smallholdings, and plantations can be shown in the same analytic frame as British country estates, town houses, and parliamentary debates.’ ¹⁴ Bringing the lived realities of those on the plantation estates into the same analytical frame as Britain’s local geographies offers further possibilities. It would also help to counter, as Manisha Sinha has recently done in her extraordinary study, The Slave’s Cause, ¹⁵ the conventional, and usually racialised, divisions between slave resistance and anti-slavery activism.

As she has recently argued:

only by writing people of African descent out of the history of abolition can we view it as a white, bourgeois movement designed to justify capitalism and, later, imperialism. Only by writing the non-white world out of the history of democracy and human rights can we develop narrow and ahistorical genealogies of their emergence and progress in the modern Western World, which since its inception has been interracial. ¹⁶

Sinha’s intervention is a vigorous riposte to a current upsurge in academic debates about whether the status of the term ‘resistance’ is thoroughly compromised by its relation to bourgeois liberalism. ¹⁷ The term certainly deserves scrutiny, especially for its particularly masculinist history, but given the current political cataclysm – and the ways in which individualising ‘trauma’ so often neutralises collective rage or conceptions of economic justice – to dismiss resistance as somehow passé is either peculiarly out of joint with the times or simply indulgent.

Tracing racialised pasts in a British coastal city

In the Autumn of 2017, a three-week gallery installation opened in the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton. The project presented a blank map of the town in order to create a ‘moment of collision between local lives and global market forces, in Brighton’ to collaboratively create a ‘collective streetscape’. ¹⁸ Its aim was to reclaim Brighton from the property-developing vision of a gentrified ossified space, so as to make visible the memories of political activism, the hidden histories and the lived experience of the town. Gallery visitors and community groups were invited to ‘fill’ the map with objects, photographs and stories which would reimagine their city in a variety of ways that challenged its asinine contemporary corporatisation and subverted traditional exhibitionary practices. Over the three weeks, the classic landmarks that condense Brighton’s identity as a place of tourist consumption, such as the Royal Pavilion, the pleasure pier and the beach, were largely ignored by participants who instead marked out their allotments, their local parks, their own neighbourhood streets and crossroads and their everyday meeting and marching points. ¹⁹

Brighton and Hove Black History Group inserted its extraordinary research into Brighton’s historic Black presence across the exhibition space, with notably, their recent discovery of the grave of a young African boy named Tom Highflyer, who had been rescued from a slave Dhow in 1866 and brought to Brighton by Captain Thomas Malcolm Sabine Pasley of the Royal Navy’s East African Anti-Slave Trade Squadron. ²⁰ Britain had abolished its part in the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1838. The marking of Highflyer’s grave acted as a reminder of the continuation of human trafficking.

The Brighton seafront was also mapped in order to illuminate its slave-owning past. Raiding the rich archive created by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, we told the stories of some of the compensated slave owners who resided in the Regency splendour of these heritage dwellings. Perhaps it is unsurprising that a significant number of awardees of slave compensation lived in, or owned properties in, Brighton. It had become the stylish English resort town by the early nineteenth century, attracting aristocrats and the nouveau riche, many of whom invested in the new luxury housing developments springing up along the seafront to the east and west of the Prince Regent’s ‘stately pleasure dome’, the Royal Pavilion. The Pavilion’s myriad Orientalist minarets and extravagant lattice-work – referenced in many other contemporary buildings throughout the town – symbolise the significance of British imperial conquests in ‘the East’ in shaping the tastes and fantasies of the new fashionable elite of the time. This colonially derived exoticism remains central to the city’s dominant heritage narrative today, but it also helps to obscure the significance of the colonial wealth extracted from the other side of the Atlantic, which also congealed in the city’s brick and flint. This history of colonial connection and entanglement is far less visible, but in the short half mile along the sea-front, running east towards the grandeur of Thomas Kemp’s Sussex Square, records show eight properties occupied by recipients of very substantial slave compensation monies.

If part of the wider project of the ‘Maps and Lives’ participatory exhibition was to re-inscribe the topography of the town with its hidden and occluded histories, this moment of talking about ‘here’ also became a moment of talking about ‘there’. In telling the story of white settlement (in both the financial and geographical senses of the word), it opened a space for tracing black resistance in the tiny island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. Caroline Ellen Anderson was a co-claimant with her sister of £2,222.5s. 9d. in compensation ²¹ whose last known address was 9, Bedford Street, Marine Parade, Brighton. ²² These monies came from the family plantation in Brewers Bay, Tortola; a plantation on which a planned rebellion – one that has been hitherto overlooked in the archive – has much to tell us about black agency on a tiny Caribbean island and about the extent and reach of anti-slavery resistance. ²³

Tracing anti-slavery resistance on a Caribbean plantation

As the sun went down on Sunday, 4 September 1831, a conch shell sounded on the Anderson plantation in Brewers Bay, Tortola, signalling that there was urgent news. In response, enslaved men from the neighbouring Martin estate hurried to find out what was going on. When they arrived at the home of an elderly enslaved woman, Tanty Sophy, she told them that ‘Anderson’s People’ had gone to Road Town to ‘look for their freedom’. She passed on details of the agreed meeting place just outside the town at Frances Head under the plum tree. That night, some sixty-five enslaved men from all parts of the island gathered in the darkness and waited for others who had given their word that they would join them. For months, if not years (as one of them noted), talk had seeped across plantation lines, as elsewhere across the Caribbean that ‘Freedom was come in the Packet for the Slaves’ but that local Whites were refusing to implement the King of England’s decree. As elsewhere across the Caribbean too, the enslaved were not prepared to wait any longer. Tortola’s labourers had begun to organise their rising six months earlier. They knew the ‘Blacks were more than the Whites – and they could take the Island from them’. ²⁴ They appointed ‘Captains’, and made a deal with a black mariner from the nearby Danish island of St Thomas called Romney. One enslaved man, Sam Fahie, had tried to get to Haiti before and so he already knew what course would need to be set. He also knew ‘what sort of colours’ stood for ‘St Domingo’ and he wanted the rebels to wear them, marked with the letters, ‘L’ and ‘K’ for ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’. Thus arrayed, they planned to arm themselves and march into town en masse to demand their freedom. If they were denied, they would take it collectively and by force. They were to kill the Whites, torch the town, take money and food, and sail with Romney to ‘St Domingo’ and freedom. ²⁵

That the rebels planned to leave the island for ‘St Domingo’ demonstrates the power and reach of the Haitian Revolution (1791‒1804) – the only successful slave rebellion in history – to inspire the enslaved across the Americas during the early nineteenth century. It is also evidence of the rebels’ geopolitical literacy and the importance of maritime networks – and of Black Atlantic involvement in those sea-borne activities – for reporting news and transmitting political currents. Tortola was only a stone’s throw from the Danish island of St Thomas and the enslaved would have known that the thriving free port and cosmopolitan entrepôt of Charlotte Amelie provided a ‘porthole of opportunity to a wider world’. The heavy commercial traffic between St Thomas and St Domingue/Haiti caused considerable paranoia amongst local colonial authorities, given the multiple possibilities of revolutionary contamination, and especially as many ship captains were free peoples of colour, as Romney most probably was. In such a vessel, as Neville Hall notes, ‘a slave could find the maritime equivalent of a house of safety in a Free Gut’. ²⁶

The fact that the plan to sail for Haiti was dropped until September registers the complexity of Tortola’s island life and culture for the enslaved, as well as the extreme difficulty of cohering collective forms of resistance. A set of Methodist Revival meetings were called across that summer and, as many of the rebels were also members of the church, they put their plans on hold in order to worship. The day before the secret meeting under the plum tree, however, another packet had arrived in port bearing large sacks of mail that were carted – covertly, the enslaved thought – into the Court House. ²⁷ Moreover, Woodcock, the Deputy Provost Marshal, had beaten a drum in town that afternoon to announce that the British Government had extended civil rights to all ‘Free Coloured and Free Black Subjects’. They were now able to sit on local juries. The rebel leader, Sam Fahie did not trust the official enfranchisement of free peoples because it breached racialised boundaries. As far as he was concerned, the Whites would never ‘let them pass an opinion on the Blacks’. Given his suspicions, Fahie had a different interpretation of the drumming, thinking that it meant that the ‘Whites must have smelt a rat that the Slaves were going to rise’. ²⁸ His concern that the plot was about to be uncovered set off twenty-four hours of intense efforts to disseminate the message that it needed to be activated immediately. The enslaved’s long established provisioning grounds, their well-mapped ‘rival geography’, carefully honed communication networks and the strong sense of moral economy that had facilitated their ability to countenance a rising now enabled them to spread word of it, undetected, across the entire island. ²⁹

Twelve miles long and just over three miles wide, Tortola was in steep economic decline as British mercantile interest waned in the Caribbean sugar islands in the early nineteenth century. In 1819, a devastating hurricane caused widespread structural damage as well as impacting social relations on the island in the context of weakening white authority. Despite the fact that the enslaved at Brewer’s Bay in Tortola were still known as ‘Anderson’s People’ in 1831, Andrew Anderson, the long-time resident owner of the sugar plantation, had been dead for over a decade, leaving his declining estate, like so many others, heavily mortgaged. He had nominated his brother, James Anderson, a lawyer in London, to act as executor, leaving his children to inherit their father’s land, his debts, and ninety-six enslaved women and seventy-eight enslaved men from afar. Their uncle put the estate in the hands of powerful local attorneys, William Rogers Isaacs and William George Crabb, whom the enslaved loathed. In 1831, Isaacs and Crabb were still in legal possession of Anderson’s plantation, managing it for the Anderson children. Indeed, Isaacs and Crabb are perfect examples of how new money was made and new powers were generated out of the financial ruin of the planter class.

Prior to emancipation, these two men had held nearly every position of colonial officialdom on the island, and sometimes many at the same time. They were merchants, planters, dispensers of criminal justice and also attorneys by mortgage tenure for the London-based financial trading firm, Reid Irving and Company, whose off-shore global financial interests reached from the majority of encumbered estates in Tortola all the way to Mauritius. ³⁰ To all intents and purposes, as a recent Tortolan memoirist has written, by the early decades of the nineteenth century, Isaacs more or less owned the island. ³¹ From this position, Isaacs and his business partner Crabb ‘managed’ emancipation when it finally came in 1833, and also the ensuing period known as ‘apprenticeship’. This was a period, as set out in the Emancipation Act of 1833, that stipulated that the enslaved were legally freed but obliged to work for their former masters for up to forty-five hours a week without pay. ‘Apprenticeship’ (as well as the £20 million in compensation) was meant to lessen the burden of emancipation for planters, whilst easing the ex-slaves into ‘citizenship’.

Joseph Gurney, visiting Tortola in 1838 on behalf of the Society of Friends to report on the apprenticeship system, met with the ‘most respectable old gentleman’ Isaacs who had, by then, 1,500 ex-slaves ‘under him’. Gurney was interested to know his views, given that his ‘habits had long been associated with the old system’. Isaacs tersely replied, ‘I have … no complaint to make’. Gurney later visited one of Isaacs’ estates to find the apprentices labouring at cane-holing. His comment that ‘the fact that so large a proportion of the island has passed out of the hands of proprietors, into those of the merchant and the money lender, was a conclusive evidence against slavery’ betrays his unwillingness to register the continuities of labouring conditions pre- and post-emancipation, and the ways in which they were overseen by ‘old system’ figures such as Isaacs. ³² Seven years earlier, Sam Fahie and his co-conspirators were determined that they, rather than ‘the merchant and the money lender’ would determine their route out of slavery, offering, in doing so, a vision of black liberation outside the imaginary of capital investment.

It is impossible to know whether Caroline Ellen Anderson knew about the rage that fomented into a long-planned conspiracy to rebel on ‘her’ estate in 1831. More generally, it is impossible to know whether she knew anything at all about the material realities, and source of, her wealth. Prior to the compensation monies paid to her by the British state for her (inherited) ‘property’, and precisely because of her gender, whiteness and social status as an upper middle-class unmarried British woman, she lived on income violently generated thousands of miles from Brighton that was extracted and abstracted by the corrupt local attorneys and her uncle. One of the most revealing aspects of the research undertaken by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership team concerns the fact that 21 per cent of the absentees who received compensation awards were women. Only a few of them owned large numbers of enslaved people like Caroline Anderson. While we can know little about Anderson, her brief place in the archive illustrates the familial intimacy of the relationship between slavery-derived colonial wealth and white patriarchal domination. As Catherine Hall powerfully argues, ‘Capital was not anonymous – it had “blood” coursing through its veins and this had implications for how it functioned on both sides of the Atlantic.’ ³³ Indeed, she quotes Marx’s famous lines, ‘Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’, and notes that ‘the blood we could associate with the blood lines of familial capitalism and with women’s bodies – as objects of desire, as workers in the cane fields, as bearers of children, as transmitters of capital – whether the capital of the heiress or the capital of labour reproduced.’ ³⁴

Caroline Anderson’s capital was certainly not anonymous and not simply property. Colonial law designated enslaved peoples as persons and property. It was the consistent and rebellious agency of enslaved peoples that ensured that human life, as well as commodity status, was recognised. That recognition, as Hartman notes in her discussion of the relation of the law to plantation slavery, was inescapably bound to violence. As she argues, it ‘set minimal standards on existence for it depended upon the calculation of interest and injury’. ³⁵ However, the enslaved never settled for these minimal standards of existence and they rejected their translation into something fungible, something for which monetary compensation could be found.

Under the plum tree that night in 1831, as they bolstered their resolve to rise up and claim their freedom, Anderson’s enslaved men, along with those from other estates, talked about their local and immediate grievances as well as about what they had read in the newspapers and heard in the port, about the British anti-slavery reforms. They focused their ire on the reviled attorneys, Isaacs and Crabb. They knew how powerful the two colonials were. One of the rebels Jacob Long thought that, should they be refused their freedom, they only needed to kill Crabb and Isaacs and they would ‘get the country’. ³⁶ Long wanted Isaacs’ white horse to ‘lead the troops’. Isaacs’ humiliating treatment of the black workers, his withdrawal of their customary rights and cutting off of food allowances, made him a particular object of their fury. Valentine, who worked in the distillery of one of the plantations newly managed by Isaacs, reported that Isaacs had said that he would ‘rather have his head cut off’ than ‘give the negroes free’. Since the planter-owner Kelly had ‘gone away’, Valentine, as a ‘Stiller Man’, said he was ‘not the same man’. He complained bitterly that he had been obliged, ‘every night to go home with an empty pan not as much as hot or cold liquor in it and as much as Mr. Isaacs had in the World, he would shortly lose it’. Valentine was determined to burn Isaacs’ house first. The house was so grand that it did not have a thatched roof, leading the men to debate how best to burn it. Peter believed that Isaacs was, in fact, an ‘Obea Man’ who had ‘worked Obea and driven his Master off the Island’ and now barely fed the workers. He said that he was prepared to ‘fight on his knees in blood for his freedom’. ³⁷

Despite the fact that some were committed to act, the assault on the town was called off for that night. It was felt that not enough men had assembled for the plan to succeed. In the early hours, however, messengers were again dispatched around the island, this time to tell people to strike work the next day. The precise extent of the work stoppage is not clear, but ‘Anderson’s People’ refused to go out to work the next morning and the altercation led to exposure of the wider plot. Three of the Andersons were arrested and taken to Road Town, followed by the rest of the gang who behaved in what was considered a disorderly manner. While this was being investigated, the conspiracy was uncovered. Forty-seven enslaved men were arrested and tried for ‘Mutiny and Rebellion’, of whom thirty-eight were later discharged. The judge stressed the ‘appalling’ nature of the case to the jury in relation to the numbers of accused and the ‘enormity of the crime’, and he blamed the British press for having fired up the men. ³⁸ The nine who were convicted were sentenced to death. A legal debate ensued about whether these men – as slaves – were entitled to ‘benefit of Clergy’. This dispensation was an ancient English common law clause that enabled a sentence of death to be transmuted. The debate turned on whether the enslaved should be treated as men or as property. ³⁹ Despite the fact that Isaacs argued strongly that the crime had taken place in a ‘Slave Colony’, which ‘must make it a Capital Felony’, the Governor was inclined to clemency on the grounds that the plot had not been activated. ⁴⁰ He denied the enslaved their part in the plot, however. He argued that they had been ‘led astray’ under a ‘mistaken notion that their freedom had been withheld from them’. ⁴¹ The nine were transported from the island.

Interconnected histories and black resistance

The Tortola conspiracy is a little acknowledged contribution to the great Atlantic-wide wave of militant Black anti-slavery rebellion and resistance, with the success of the Haitian Revolution as its motor, that reached yet another crescendo in 1831. Only a month before the Tortola conspiracy was hatched, Nat Turner led a revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, the bloodiest of all slave rebellions prior to the Civil War. Just weeks after the Tortola rebels had been tried and convicted, Sam Sharpe’s Jamaican ‘Baptist War’ mobilised tens of thousands of the enslaved, thus dealing a final blow to slavery. ⁴² One week after Sam Sharpe’s execution in 1832, Parliament appointed a select committee to debate ‘Effecting the Extinction of Slavery throughout the British Dominions’. In the House of Lords, English Baptist missionary Henry Knibb was pressed about the causes of the Jamaica rebellion. In reply, he assured the Lords that of course the enslaved read the ‘English newspapers’, noting specifically the edition of the Falmouth Packet which ‘had an Account of the Rebellion in Tortola, and he stated that it had been read and circulated’. Significantly, Knibb recalled that the newspaper had also carried a headline, ‘British Colonial Slavery’, an itinerary of anti-slavery lectures and ‘something about the brutish Custom of flogging’. ⁴³ This was an article, read by the enslaved in Jamaica, that was not about the practice of flogging in the West Indies but in Britain.

Unlike Nat Turner’s and Sam Sharpe’s uprisings, the Tortola conspiracy involved relatively few individuals and never exploded. It was an unprecedented moment in the colony’s history, however. Earlier incidences of unrest had occurred on single plantations but this was the first plot that was island-wide, demonstrating the mobility of the enslaved and their readiness to act in solidarity. A record of the conspiracy can be found in the colonial archive in the form of a set of forced confessions, panicked letters and excessive indictments, but they do not yield the full picture. The place of the plot within the wider Atlantic revolutionary vortex, however, is registered in scraps of connecting evidence that testify to the circulation of radical struggle, the wider currents of political action, and the power of fugitive connections that, together, defined the collective nature of the revolutionary Atlantic. It also speaks to the multiple ways in which Black Atlantic solidarity and struggle from below helped to shape, and radicalise, anti-slavery activism from above.

As William Knibb confirmed in the House of Lords, the Tortola conspiracy was covered in the press. News of the rebels’ plan was conveyed throughout the Caribbean and reported in American and British newspapers. The salacious and exaggerated narration of the rebels’ designs, together with the publication of letters stressing the terror evoked among the colonists on the island, signalled the deep alarm of the planter class about the fate of their property, their patriarchal and sexual security and, more generally, the threat posed to their hegemony – not only in the Caribbean but also in the metropole. ⁴⁴ Reports about the ‘diabolical plot’ on Tortola sat side by side with those documenting the urban and rural unrest sweeping the Mother Country in the context of Reform in 1831, most immediately with those reporting the radical protest and riots that had broken out in Bristol in response to the rejection of the Reform Bill by the House of Lords. ⁴⁵ James MacQueen – an extremely vocal and prolific supporter of slavery – directly linked the Tortola conspiracy to the ‘sacking’ of Bristol, in the context of a blistering critique of the Reform movement in his ultra-Tory and protectionist newspaper, The Glasgow Courier, and which was also reprinted in the Morning Post. His article is a stark reminder that anti-slavery activism was at the heart of the radical protests for domestic political reform. Reversing conventional understandings of the direction in which radical protest travelled, MacQueen suggested that Bristol’s destruction was a warning that the reformers’ ‘pernicious principles of robbery, insurrection and rebellion’, which had already destabilised the colonies, were, in fact, coming home. The Morning Post published an alarmist note below his article called ‘Political Parallels’ in which 1831 was likened to the revolutionary period of 1641. ⁴⁶

MacQueen, who was a particularly virulent example of the pro-slavery interest, was fighting against, and losing to, the combined forces of slave resistance and anti-slavery activism on all fronts in 1831. Earlier in the year, the first female slave narrative, The History of Mary Prince had been published in London. ⁴⁷ MacQueen infamously published a scurrilous attack on the moral character and veracity of Mary Prince in Blackwood’s Magazine, helping to provoke two widely publicised libel cases at which Prince testified. The testimony that she offered about her abuse at the hands of several sadistic owners contributed to the abolitionist writings of English women who were radicalising the anti-slavery movement by boycotting West Indian sugar and demanding immediate emancipation. Indeed, Elizabeth Heyrick’s incendiary pamphlet, ‘Immediate, not Gradual Emancipation’, first published in 1824, had already had a decisive impact on the direction and tactics of the Anti-Slavery Society. ⁴⁸ Heyrick defended the Haitian Revolution. She argued not for sympathy for the plight of the enslaved but for their rights, and she had called for the boycott of West Indian sugar to be stepped up. As Manisha Sinha notes, with reference to the impact of Prince’s narrative, abolitionism was an interracial movement shaped by black protest. This article has, perhaps, travelled a long way from the Tortolan heiress Caroline Anderson’s Brighton address, but Heyrick allows us another shard of connection by which to find a way back to the south coast. Heyrick’s incendiary pamphlet, written in the wake of the Demerara slave rebellion of 1823, was prefaced with an advertisement informing readers that Brighton’s grocers were already refusing to sell West Indian sugar.

A year before the Tortolan rebels were tried and convicted for ‘Mutiny and Rebellion’, a packed public meeting had been held in Brighton to debate the subject of colonial slavery. Passionate speeches were given referencing the upsurge of resistance in the Caribbean. Locals demanded the government move on the issue or else it might be ‘enforced in a way dreadful to contemplate’. Others spoke of the ‘mighty power’ of the diffusion of knowledge and information that ‘would break down every barrier opposed to the destruction of tyranny and oppression’. There was a unanimous vote for ‘the early and entire Emancipation of slaves in our Colonies’. ⁴⁹ The public gathering agreed to petition the House of Commons and to found immediately an Anti-Slavery Society and a Ladies Anti-Slavery Association. ⁵⁰ Leading merchant and Brighton grocer, Isaac Bass, who attended the Brighton meeting, was subsequently appointed the town’s delegate to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention held at Exeter Hall in 1840.

Conclusion

In a special issue of Race & Class on Reparative Histories in January 2016, we argued that ‘the politics of the present moment demand a rigorous investigation of how certain stories of the past are mobilised, and how certain histories are shaped in the light of contemporary concerns’. ⁵¹ The story of Sam Fahie and his co-conspirators in Tortola is oblique in the annals of anti-slavery rebellion, but it provides a way for thinking about the intertwined history of black resistance and abolitionism in light of current debates about black agency and the mobilisation of forms of humanism against racialised exclusionary practices. The idea of the ‘reparative’ sets up a certain temporality – one marked by the interval between what Avery Gordon has recently called the ‘no-longer’ and the ‘not yet’. The Tortola rebels moved into that interval in their preparedness to act. Their actions – in the interval – changed the nature of that in-between time. As she notes, it is what that ‘mobility or movement inaugurates in its refusal to tolerate any longer the conditions of life as given that matters, that changes things’. ⁵² The black radical tradition has always insisted that liberal universalism is forced to face the oppressions that have contradicted its vaulting and seductive claims. In relation to the contemporary moment, frantic claims of ‘heritage’ and ‘legacy’ are rallying forms of white supremacy and colonial apologetics that precisely seek to deny the interval, and deny contemporary institutionalised racism as much as violent racialised pasts. Tired clichés about ‘memory wars’ are wholly inadequate to the heightened stakes unfolding in the context of a newly emboldened toxic far Right which, as Robin Kelley reminds us, is ‘not seeking normalization’ but rather thrives on ‘the chaotic, on the symbolic’. ⁵³ The symbolism of the removal of confederacy statues is thus more than an occasion for wry observations about the inverted spectacle of disembodied whiteness being carted off in the middle of the night. Rather, it points to a politics of active and potent resistance to the project of disavowing black life and black labour in race-making capitalism. In this context, the commitment to excavating interconnected histories which can be identified in the very architecture and streets of the towns in which we live is an insistence on the multi-racial inherited past which we inhabit and the multi-racial traditions of resistance upon which we must build.