Eamonn Bellin

The abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 transformed colonial slavery into a burning issue in British politics. If the slave trade was unjust, how could slavery be sustained? Some thought the enslaved should be emancipated and resettled throughout the Caribbean. However, most leaders of the anti-slave trade campaign balked at immediate emancipation. “It would be…the grossest violation and the merest mockery of justice and humanity,” William Wilberforce declared, “to emancipate [slaves] at once in their unhappy condition.” Nor did the abolition of the slave trade presage emancipation for Thomas Clarkson. It was a force by which enslavers “would be compelled, by a sort of inevitable necessity…to take better care of those whom they might then have in their possession.” Ever-adept at sloganeering, Foreign Secretary George Canning named “gradual measures producing gradual improvement” as the government’s ideal solution to the problem of slavery.

This drive to “ameliorate” slavery – by reforming the laws, labor practices, standards of welfare, and religious ministration attached to slavery – shaped the era between the suppression of the slave trade and slavery’s abolition in 1833. At the center of the ameliorative project stood John Gladstone: merchant prince, philanthropist, father of a famous prime minister, and one of Britain’s wealthiest slave owners. Gladstone never visited the West Indies. Yet by dint of ameliorative legislation and personal initiative, he sought to make slavery ethically and economically defensible. In slowly recasting the enslaved as upright Christians worthy of freedom, Gladstone even deemed amelioration reconcilable with abolition. Gladstone’s position appealed to his friends in government like Canning and Colonial Secretary Lord Bathurst. His failures, above all the enslaved uprising on his Demerara plantations in 1823, exposed amelioration’s tensions and limitations. Exploring Gladstone’s career as an “improving” enslaver clarifies the influence amelioration had on slavery’s final decades.  

To abolitionists like James Ramsay, Christianizing the enslaved in preparation for freedom was pointless unless preceded by legal changes in the colonies. As his friend Hannah More observed, “to attempt to reform the poor while the opulent are corrupt…was to throw odors into the stream while the springs are poisoned.” Provision of civil rights and legal protections–overseen by state authority and independent of planter influence–would have to underpin Christianization of the enslaved. For opponents of slavery, amelioration meant reducing planter power. Some reforms, like instituting a slave “protector” in colonies like Trinidad and Demerara and registering the enslaved in crown colonies, accorded with this logic. While modest, these efforts suggested that amelioration could dilute enslavers’ power, paving the way for abolition.  

But amelioration was an amorphous concept, and readily embraced by enslavers. Jamaican planter Charles Rose Ellis deplored the “corrupt Deism or Mahometanism” of Africans, and commended fellow planters who promoted Christianity to the enslaved. His fellow Jamaican enslaver Edward Long endorsed better nutrition and healthcare for enslaved women to increase the birthrate. Enslavers recognized that Westminster’s ameliorative measures depended on colonial cooperation. This meant that legislation unpopular with colonists often went unimplemented. Despite apparently sharing abolitionist anxiety over enslaved religious instruction and physical welfare, enslavers supported amelioration to preempt initiatives that would diminish their power and thus encourage emancipation.

This difference went unrecognized by government ministers. Deeming Christianization as a middle ground between abolitionists and enslavers, Canning asserted “It is not true that there is that in the Christian religion which makes it impossible that it should co-exist with slavery in the world.” The government used amelioration to curb abolitionist demands. Abolitionist MP Thomas Fowell Buxton’s 1823 Commons motion declared slavery to be “repugnant to the principles of the British constitution and of the Christian religion,” and advocated for gradual abolition in the British colonies. In response, Canning professed to “abjure the principle of perpetual slavery,” but demurred from supporting Buxton’s resolutions. At Canning’s instigation, Parliament adopted legislation forbidding the flogging of enslaved women, restricting use of the whip, legitimizing court testimony by the enslaved, and encouraging private manumission. Canning’s bills matched many antislavery aspirations but failed to weaken the legal power of enslavers or indicate a path to emancipation. They languished in abeyance in Demerara, the colony where most of John Gladstone’s properties were located. 

John Gladstone advised the government on commercial and colonial questions throughout the 1820s. As an absentee slave owner and an Evangelical, he approached amelioration differently from local planters. Having acquired his properties by foreclosing on insolvent estates, Gladstone appreciated the headwinds facing British plantations from foreign competition and chronic inefficiencies. He converted from coffee production to the more lucrative sugarcane and experimented in new agricultural and transportation technologies. A patron of church construction in England, Gladstone emphasized Christianization in Demerara. In a May 1823 letter to his agent Frederick Cort, Gladstone ordered the attorney to construct churches, promote Bible instruction, and encourage baptisms and marriage. He instructed his next agent, John Maclean, to have enslaved children taught to read “so as to understand their Bible.” 

Gladstone imagined the enslaved as grateful and prosperous under his protection. Armed with effusive reports from his agents, he touted his successes in the press and in his private correspondence. “Connection by marriage is encouraged,” he wrote in the Liverpool Mercury, “and its lawful fruits of increase rewarded.” Likewise, “night labor of the Slaves is now unknown…even on Sugar Estates, the grinding [of the canes] ceases at sunset.” More than generous, Gladstone presented himself as just. “Families cannot be separated…but, when disposed of, must be sold together.” He asserted that legal equality prevailed on his estates: “the slave, when guilty of crime, is tried in the same manner as his master.” Writing to his son Robertson, Gladstone recognized that his embrace of reformism diminished his popularity with planters without quieting  abolitionist criticism, but concluded “this must not prevent us from endeavoring to do justice to our people.” Neither a wedge to dismantle slavery nor wholly a ploy to blunt anti-slavery policies, amelioration for Gladstone promised to revive slavery’s profitability and legitimacy. 

Developments on Gladstone’s Demerara properties, however, belied his confidence in amelioration and accelerated Westminster’s move towards emancipation. In his correspondence with Gladstone, Cort presented Demerara as just short of paradise for the enslaved. They were seldom punished, treated generously, and eager to learn the Christian faith. Enslaved men proudly wore “nankeen trousers, white jackets and long coats and shoes.” Cort praised the two enslaved deacons on the Success plantation, Quamina and his son Jack Gladstone (named after his enslaver) for leading the enslaved in scriptural readings.  

The diary of John Smith, a missionary who ministered to Success’ enslaved, exposes Cort’s deceits. Smith deplored the “most immoderate quantity of work” demanded of the enslaved, including pregnant women. Instead of enjoying solicitude “when sick,” the enslaved were “neglected, ill-treated, or half-starved.” They were not spared flogging. Rather, “their punishments have been frequent and severe.” Far from trusting Gladstone’s justice, “redress they have so seldom been able to obtain, that many of them have long discontinued to seek it.” The enslaved were also aware that the Demerara government was blocking Canning’s ameliorative laws, but mistakenly believed these ordinances abolished slavery. In one of his last diary entries, Smith observed “the increase of knowledge among the slaves required that an alteration should be made in the mode of treating them.” Events soon vindicated his judgment.

On the night of August 18, 1823, the enslaved inhabitants of Gladstone’s Success plantation seized the estate house, confiscated arms, and imprisoned white residents. Over the next week, some thirteen thousand men and women, about a sixth of the enslaved population in Demerara, joined the revolt. Leading the revolt were Quamina and Jack Gladstone. They intended their rising to be a show of force, compelling Demerara’s government to implement Canning’s ameliorative laws which they believed would free them. Colonial officials crushed the revolt in six days. Over 250 enslaved men were killed in the fighting and reprisals to follow, including Quamina. Jack’s death sentence was commuted to deportation on John Gladstone’s intercession. John Smith, scapegoated for instigating the revolt, perished in prison before his royal pardon arrived. 

Gladstone reacted to the uprising with alarmed self-justification, if little self-examination. He wrote “I am not sorry to hear of Smith’s death, as his release [from prison] would have been followed by much cavil and discussion here.” Cort, his dishonest agent, was not terminated until Robertson Gladstone observed his maladroit administration firsthand years later. Yet Demerara’s repercussions in Britain were severe. The revolt and its repression emboldened antislavery activists to reject amelioration as ineffectual at best or a cynical slave owner ploy at worst. James Cropper, a prominent merchant friend of Gladstone, condemned him in the Liverpool press. Enslavers like Gladstone, Cropper charged, exposed the enslaved to “unrestrained licentiousness” and “inhumanely drove them like cattle.” After another severe uprising in Jamaica, parliament enacted the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.Abolition overtook amelioration, but did not escape its influence. Gladstone helped negotiate the Slavery Abolition Act, ensuring codicils like the 15 million pound compensation fund for enslavers, and the “apprenticeship” status which kept former enslaved persons in bondage until 1838. The underlying logic of amelioration–that “gradual measures” would produce “gradual improvement”–informed the British debate on slavery after emancipation. In 1850, a rising politician named William Gladstone denounced slavery as “by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind.” Yet, emulating his father’s friend Canning, he advised the House of Commons against action to interdict the resilient Atlantic slave trade. “Peaceful influences such as religion, education, and legitimate commerce,” would bring about slavery’s end. Amelioration’s legacy is visible in traditional remembrance of abolition: a steady march led by heroes like Wilberforce and Clarkson, rather than a contested and inconsistent process often favoring enslavers. The appeal of amelioration highlights the debate over slavery’s complexity, as well as the complicity of many of its key participants.

Image: “Retreat of Lt. Brady,” painted by Joshua Bryant (1824), John Carter Brown Library:

https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/YJC0013708/Retreat-of-Lieutenant-Brady

Eamonn Bellin is a second year M.A. student in history at Georgetown University, where he studies the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. He graduated with a B.A. from George Washington University and formerly worked for the Alexander Hamilton Society, a foreign policy nonprofit in Washington D.C.