Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous readers at CSSH, as well as Jens Hanssen, Velma Newton, Sue Peabody, Ronald Hughes, Woodville Marshall, Diana Paton, Barbara Todd, and Jerome Handler for their thorough reading, excellent criticisms, and insightful suggestions. I am also grateful to my former student and volunteer research assistant, Vanessa Tauro.

Introduction

In December 1832, less than a year before the British Parliament passed the first imperial slave emancipation bill, an all-white jury in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados convicted a black, enslaved man named Robert James of having robbed and sexually violated Margaret Higginbotham, an impoverished white widow and mother. Since Robert James was a black man accused of raping a white woman the jury's decision could hardly have surprised anyone and his rapid dispatch by a hangman must have been universally expected.¹

However, events conspired to make the case of The King v. Robert James one of the most controversial legal cases in the island's history. At the time of the trial, Barbados was temporarily without a governor, since the previous governor had been recalled in July 1832 and a replacement did not arrive until March 1833. The acting governor was the president of the Legislative Council, the appointed upper house of the island's bicameral legislature. As the acting governor and therefore chief magistrate, President John Brathwaite Skeete had sole dispensation to stay executions or even to overturn convictions. No one expected Skeete, a prominent planter and slaveowner, to defy white public opinion and intervene on behalf of a slave, especially one convicted of a capital offense against a white person.²

Skeete's ruling provoked outrage among the white population because slaves condemned to death and then pardoned could not legally be held in slavery. The rumor circulated that the president's decision would “most certainly ensure for the guilty monster a final reprieve at the hands of the King, by which instead of punishment, the criminal, as a slave obtains the reward of FREEDOM for his crime.”⁴

This extraordinary legal case has been almost entirely overlooked in studies of emancipation in Barbados.⁸

This study is an attempt to rethink the relationship between processes of legal reform and social change in the era of British slave emancipation. It aims to understand the wider implications of the amelioration process through a multi-layered analysis of its effects on this case. Amelioration's legal reforms were shaped by everyday struggles over the interpretation of the law between elites and social subordinates. The story of The King v. Robert James reflects the reality that tensions between the imperial and colonial arms of government, abolitionists, planters, and the plebian majority in colonial societies had fundamental consequences for amelioration, which neither the Colonial Office nor planter-legislators could completely control or foresee. Intermediate and subaltern groups within Caribbean society—particularly free people of color and slaves—took advantage of the interstices created within the state and judicial systems during the debate over the amelioration and abolition of slavery in ways which shaped the implementation of reform.¹¹

At the same time, this case serves as a focal point for understanding the insular dynamics of slavery and slave emancipation. This article foregrounds the specificities of the development of slave society and the slaveholding state in Barbados itself. The analysis concentrates on the amelioration period between 1823 and 1833, but draws heavily on the two hundred-year history of the island's colonization preceding the abolition of slavery. The pauper widow Margaret Higginbotham was the product of a long history of class differentiation and economic crisis among Barbadian whites, brought about by the consolidation of slavery. The outcome of this particular case was rooted in the disruptions which amelioration created within the social relations and state and judicial structures of the island. The case reflected a wider instability of white supremacist ideology and an institutional crisis in the planter-state, which was faltering in its efforts to preserve white racial purity, patriarchy, and supremacy.

The King v. Robert James also provides a unique window into the gendered and racialized dynamics of colonial inequality because the alleged crime in this case was arguably the most emotive and symbolically charged offense in the slave societies of the Americas—the rape of a white woman by a black man. It was unusual for a British Caribbean legal case to generate such extensive official correspondence, including detailed accounts of the trial itself. Such rare case documents provide rich material for examining the interactions between the judicial and legislative arms of the planter-state and the race, class, gender, and legal status hierarchies of slave society.¹²

The first section of this paper recounts the legal process and public reactions to the case. The second examines the judicial, social, and political tensions that complicated the amelioration process, affecting British Caribbean slave societies and the colony-metropole relationship. The final section returns to public reactions to the case in light of the preceding discussion of race, class, and gender in the development of Barbadian slave society and the amelioration process. The case gave different socio-legal and class groups a chance to forge alliances across the Atlantic and to contest the limits of nationhood in the context of empire.

The Unfolding of a Controversy, October 1832 to January 1834

On 11 October 1832, Robert James, an enslaved man around twenty-one years of age who belonged to one Mary Marshall of the southeastern parish of St. Philip, was committed to prison to await trial for sexually assaulting a white woman named Margaret Higginbotham, also of St. Philip and a neighbor of the Marshall household.¹³

In his notes Acting Protector of Slaves John Mayers recorded Higginbotham's testimony during cross-examination by Solicitor-General Robert Bowcher-Clarke:

Under cross-examination by defense lawyer William Griffith, Higginbotham told the court that Robert James was one of the local “Negroes” from whom she sometimes took in sewing, and at the time of the alleged attack she had a pair of his trousers at her house. She swore that, since her husband's death earlier in 1832, she was in the habit of retiring to bed around sunset. Furthermore, she claimed that Robert James “[had] never brought me any work at night before—he [had] never been in my House at night before. . . .” She asserted that Robert James had “never previously attempted any freedom with her” nor had she ever “allowed him any freedom.” According to Higginbotham she fled her home after the attack and had not returned since.¹⁵

The notes left behind by those present indicate that the trial was biased against Robert James, and that the Acting Protector of Slaves and Robert James' attorney failed to exert themselves in his defense. Defense attorney Griffith did not bother to call Higginbotham's neighbors, the Lords, to the witness stand, even though they were present in the courtroom. In one particularly telling incident, Solicitor-General Clarke turned to Griffith, informing him that the Lords were in the courtroom and “[Griffith] might call them . . . to impeach the testimony and character of Prosecutrix if he could—whereupon one of the Jury observed that she [Higginbotham] was known to many of them—that he had known her from the time she was a Child and that she had always conducted herself prudently.”¹⁶

After the lawyers' summations the jury retired briefly, returning with a guilty verdict, and Robert James was sentenced to death. His value, and therefore the amount of compensation to be paid to his owner, was assessed as £70, and it was determined that the island's Treasury should compensate Mary Marshall for her loss.¹⁷

On 4 January 1833, Skeete forwarded all of the case documents to the colonial secretary in London, Viscount Goderich, and informed Goderich of his doubts regarding the fairness of the trial. Skeete was troubled that the verdict rested so heavily on Higginbotham's testimony. The president expressed regret “that evidence had not been produced in favor of the general character of the Prosecutrix,” suggesting that Higginbotham might have known Robert James prior to the alleged attack more intimately than she claimed. He apparently did not consider her claim to be Robert James' seamstress as sufficient explanation for the fact that she and her eldest child seemed “familiar” with him. Furthermore, Skeete insinuated that she had encouraged sexual advances from the prisoner or that she had not at the time been an unwilling participant in the act of sexual intercourse.¹⁹

Skeete was also not convinced that she had actually called for help while her alleged attacker was present. Skeete argued that: “[I]t may be supposed that in the stillness of the night, when her door was open (as appears from her account) and when all these three persons [the Mr. Lords] lived near her, some of them might have heard her at that time, and have immediately come to her assistance . . . .” Skeete was also surprised that, having responded to what Higginbotham said was her second call for help, none of the neighbors pursued the accused, who was known to them and who could not have got far. Finally, Skeete thought that the prosecution's failure to call other witnesses to the stand to corroborate Higginbotham's account left “a very material chasm in the evidence against the prisoner, and might . . . have even entitled him to an acquittal; for if the woman was not, at any time, heard to call out, she has sworn falsely—and if she was heard, that corroborating evidence, which I apprehend the law requires, and which might have been produced, was not produced . . . .”²⁰

Based on these doubts, Skeete suspended Robert James' death sentence pending a decision by the Privy Council in England. Although it was within Skeete's power to overturn the conviction he did not do so, because he knew that a pardon would lead to Robert James' manumission. The reason for this legal mechanism was not explained in the documents concerning The King v. Robert James, but it was clearly outlined in an 1828 letter from Governor John Keane of Jamaica to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, advising him against recommending that the Privy Council pardon a Jamaican slave recently sentenced to death. Keane observed that, because the Jamaican treasury had already compensated the slave's owner, pardoning the convict now would place him in a “peculiar circumstance” with regard to the law: “He can not be restored to his former Proprietor as by his conviction, and the Jury who tried him having awarded to the Master a compensation for the Loss of his Slave's Services, the former has been divested of all claim thereto.—He can not be the property of the Public because the Public have no property in Slaves—He would therefore become to all intents and purposes Free, though the Law would not recognise him as such but no person could claim any servitude from him, and he would of course be placed in a more advantageous condition than those who have committed no crime.”²¹

In a letter to Goderich dated 20 January 1833, Skeete was at pains to explain that he did not intend his ruling to lead to Robert James' pardon, an outcome that would be detrimental to “the interests of society,” since it would encourage “the committal of similar offences hereafter.” It is not difficult to understand why he felt compelled to clarify his position. On 18 January Skeete had informed the members of his council—one of whom was Chief Justice Joseph W. Jordan, who had presided over Robert James' trial—of his decision. The council's angry but measured response was nothing compared to what awaited Skeete when the House of Assembly and the public learned the news. According to Skeete, his decision to suspend Robert James' sentence had “produced a general excitement in the community, which is, in a great measure, to be ascribed to an idea, which has been assumed, that this suspension, will be followed up on the part of His Majesty's government, by a pardon and the freedom of the Criminal.” Months later the new governor of the island, Sir Lionel Smith, wrote that: “The Council and Assembly and the whole white Population were almost excited to Insurrection against [Skeete's] Government for referring the case of this Criminal [Robert James] home.”²²

Led by the members of the House of Assembly, the lower chamber of the legislature, whites convened public meetings around the island demanding Skeete's resignation, lamenting the effect of his decision “on our mixed population,” and calling for Robert James' execution.²³

A letter in The Globe, a white-owned newspaper, from “A Widow Woman,” addressed to the members of the legislative council, who also comprised the magistracy, summed up the feeling of whites: “. . . [A]s fathers, as sons, as husbands, as brothers, as men [you have a duty to] defend the wrong done weak, helpless womam [sic], as well as to stand forth in the sacred cause of your country . . . .” The fact that a Barbadian newspaper published a letter purportedly written by a woman is an indication of the perceived scale of the crisis. Even voices professing to be those of women—who were typically excluded from public debate in the patriarchal world of Barbadian politics—were mobilized to express how much the president's decision had upset the order of things.²⁵

In the end, the Privy Council, on the Colonial Office's recommendation, upheld Skeete's decision but did not pardon Robert James, instead commuting his sentence to transportation for life. Governor Smith officially announced the reprieve in November. In a letter to Sir Edward Stanley, Goderich's successor as colonial secretary, Smith alleged that, since the trial, events had transpired which led him “to beleive [sic] the Woman was an agreeable Party to the fact [of sexual intercourse with Robert James].” However, he provided no details as to what gave him this impression. Skeete, who remained president of the Legislative Council despite his unpopularity, did not live to see Robert James transported. In the same letter, Governor Smith informed Stanley that Skeete had died.²⁶

With the exceptions of his owner Mary Marshall and the “Master” to whom Higginbotham referred in her testimony, none of the members of Robert James' household is mentioned in the case documents. It is therefore impossible to know how they responded to his arrest, conviction, and eventual transportation. The Barbadian slave registries, updated every three years between 1817 and 1832, indicate a high level of continuity among Marshall's slaves, who seem to have lived with her. Between 1817, when Robert James was six-years old, and the last registry in 1832, the household experienced only one recorded death and one sale. In 1817, Robert James was one of six slaves, the oldest of whom was Kitty, aged thirty-five. The registries do not show family relationships among slaves but the remaining four slaves in Marshall's possession were children like Robert James, ranging in age from eight-months to seventeen-years old, and it is possible that some or all of them, including Robert James, were Kitty's children. Even if Robert James and his close relations were relieved that he survived, the transportation order must have been a heavy personal blow. In December 1833, Robert James tried to escape from prison but was quickly recaptured. If the other slaves in Mary Marshall's possession were indeed Robert James' blood or fictive kin, his escape may have be an attempt to reunite with them, however briefly. In January 1834, Robert James was transported to Bermuda, and his fate thereafter is unknown.²⁷

Thus, on the surface, the status quo was temporarily preserved, despite the controversy. However, a closer examination of the legal background against which the case took place reveals a far more complicated story. The process of slave amelioration in Barbados had a significant impact on the interpretation of the law in all manner of cases involving slaves, including capital cases such as this one. Robert James' trial reflected the tensions between the reform of the slave code during amelioration and the socio-political realities of the British Atlantic world. Furthermore, the legal categories of free person and slave on which slavery was based were becoming less and less clear. We now turn our attention to the evolution of debates over manumission and how the law should deal with people of uncertain legal status, and the implications of ensuring due legal process for the enslaved during the 1820s and 1830s.

Interpreting the Policy of “Gradual Extinction”: Manumission, Due Process, and Capital Trials of Slaves, 1823–1833

Beginning in the 1780s, in an attempt to head off the growing threat from the anti-slave trade lobby, British Caribbean planters very publicly adopted what they termed “amelioration” policies. These reforms largely consisted of changes to estate management practices, and the degree to which they were actually implemented is dubious at best. The 1807 abolition of the slave trade marked a new phase in the history of amelioration, with the British Parliament now exerting greater pressure on self-governing Caribbean colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados to carry out further amelioration reforms. These reforms—a reluctant attempt by British authorities to “modernize,” improve, and thereby preserve slavery—were supposed to extend greater common law protection to slaves and free Afro-West Indians and provide state support for missionary activity to counter the abolitionist argument that slavery and Christianity were incompatible. In May 1823, the imperial government, under abolitionist pressure, adopted a policy of using amelioration to effect slavery's “gradual extinction.” The Tory government was determined to pursue reform only with the cooperation of planters, and the powerful West India interest in Britain, which defended planters' political interests, had a strong hand in designing the reforms. Nevertheless, the 1823 shift in policy was a serious blow to the pro-slavery lobby.²⁸

The issue of manumission was central to the debate over the reform of the slave codes. During the Napoleonic Wars and after the abolition of the British slave trade, imperial and West Indian colonial governments found themselves facing the problem of what to do with categories of people of African descent who occupied a liminal legal position, being neither slaves nor fully free people. What should be the fate, for example, of captives liberated from slave ships after 1807? The state could not be a slaveowner and assume ownership of such people, but neither did the imperial government wish to allow so many Africans to settle wherever they pleased.²⁹

In the 1820s, many influential people in imperial political and legal circles came to agree with the abolitionist argument that individual manumission might be the simplest way to resolve the problem of what to do with individuals of uncertain legal status, and slowly eliminate slavery in the West Indies. An 1823 imperial commission of inquiry, sent out to the West Indies to investigate the state of the territories' legal codes, took a positive view of manumission. One of the commissioners noted, in terms which planters must have found ominous, that: “It is very desirable that the utmost encouragement should be afforded to manumissions. They present the best, or certainly the least objectionable mode, of getting rid of slavery, safely and by imperceptible degrees.”³⁰

The issue of compulsory manumission struck at the core of the planter-state and British Caribbean legislatures vociferously and almost universally resisted measures that would have amounted to compulsory manumission. Only the legislature of the Bahamas—an impoverished non-plantation colony—adopted the Colonial Office's full range of recommendations on the subject. ³³

The consolidated slave acts of self-legislating islands such as Barbados and Jamaica also did not rectify the fact, roundly condemned by the legal commission of 1823, that slave law in the West Indies effectively superceded English common law. Legislators and judicial officials in the British Caribbean were adamant that, “The common law of England [was] not applicable to the slavery of the West Indies.”³⁵

The legislature did reluctantly establish an office called the Protector of Slaves, one of the cornerstones of the imperial government's amelioration policy after 1823. The Protector was supposed to defend slaves' interests in cases of abuse, gather information on the treatment of slaves, and arbitrate in legal proceedings involving slaves or free people of color whose legal status was in question. Protectors of Slaves could be relatively easily appointed in the Crown Colonies however, as was exemplified by the case of Jamaica, which flatly refused to establish the office—the colonial assemblies fought them tooth and nail.³⁸

Mayers was called upon to intervene in important cases involving slaves seeking manumission and free people of color whose legal freedom was in doubt, and his interventions were crucial to the petitioners' ability to present their case convincingly to imperial authorities. Between the mid-1820s and the early 1830s, the Colonial Office and the imperial Board of Treasury became increasingly likely to respond favorably to manumission petitions simply on the principle of the right to individual freedom, without considering other mitigating factors such as the economic circumstances of those involved.⁴¹

Several Barbadian cases that illustrate this shift reached the imperial government in the final decade of slavery.⁴³

By contrast, in the 1829–1830 case of the Denny family of slaves, which was supported with documentation from John Mayers' inquiries, including testimony which he gathered from the slaves themselves, the Board of Treasury did not inquire into the issue of how the Denny family had been treated as slaves, and it ignored claims made by the people of color who sought ownership of the Dennys that the slaves were required to settle debts. The Board decided that the Denny family should all be freed immediately. In another, 1831 case, a free woman of color named Susanna Prescod claimed ownership of the slaves of her deceased sister, who had been killed in a hurricane. Since her sister had died intestate, all her property was escheated to the Crown. The Board of Treasury ordered that the slaves be manumitted immediately. They also ordered that Prescod be compensated for them should her claim turn out to be valid, prioritizing the manumission of the slaves over Prescod's legal claim.⁴⁵

Prior to 1829, judicial and legislative officials in Barbados do not seem to have considered how the issue of manumission might impact upon questions of due process in criminal cases involving slaves. The Barbadian authorities were apparently entirely unaware of the concerns expressed in Governor Keane's 1828 letter regarding the pardon of slaves condemned to death in Jamaica. However, officials in Barbados were forced to face these matters in 1829, when a capital case against three slave men brought together the issues of manumission, legal reform, and the role of the Acting Protector of Slaves to subvert the desires of the Barbadian colonial state. This was possibly the only capital trial of slaves to result in the pardon and manumission of the defendants in the British Caribbean.

The case concerned three slaves named George Smith, Italy, and Will Thomas who were condemned to death for engaging a white man named John Hurley, said to be “intimate” with the three, to kill their owner. The King v. John Hurley et al. aroused public interest because it concerned white and black men who had plotted to kill a white man and it rested on evidence from another slave.⁴⁶

At this point officials realized that the three men were effectively free as a result of their pardon. It is likely that the fact came to light as the authorities tried to determine what to do with the men after they were released from jail. According to the governor, his Privy Council, and the Acting Protector of Slaves, they were free men; according to the legislature, they were not. While the matter was being debated the men were released from jail but a magistrate immediately incarcerated them again on new charges. The Acting Protector of Slaves bailed them out, and a prominent free man of color, who served as the men's catechist while they were imprisoned and agreed to act as surety once they were freed, said he came forward “under the belief of their being free,” an impression which he said Mayers had given him. The legislature petitioned the governor for permission to arrest the men on the rather dubious legal grounds that their freedom set a bad example to slaves. Legislators begged the imperial government to have the men transported but the governor's ruling was eventually upheld on the recommendation of the Colonial Office and the three remained in the island as free subjects.⁴⁸

After The King v. John Hurley et al., Barbadian officials made it clear that no enslaved person should expect either a fair trial or clemency as a matter of course. Almost a decade of Colonial Office and abolitionist monitoring of amelioration had produced damning evidence that the British Caribbean's planter-controlled judiciaries were beyond reform.⁴⁹

All of these cases helped to shape The King v. Robert James. The outcome of The King v. John Hurley et al. strengthened the reactionary tendency to deny Robert James the full benefit of due process, which could have led to his pardon. Because of the 1829 attempted murder trial, Barbadian state officials were now aware of the legal consequences of pardoning slaves condemned to death. By contrast, in the aftermath of Edward's 1830 execution and the 1832 acquittal of George's murderer, two appalling miscarriages of justice, fear of incurring the wrath of the Colonial Office helped motivate Skeete to suspend Robert James' execution.⁵²

The legal entanglements that saved Robert James from the gallows but prevented his pardon were therefore the result of a disorderly process of legislative amelioration conducted through a lengthy struggle between the Barbados legislature and the imperial government and among Barbadian officials themselves. The struggles that produced an uneven and contradictory reform process involved interventions from Afro-Barbadian petitioners and an attempted murder conspiracy that subverted all boundaries of class, color, and legal status. The reforms of the 1820s laid the groundwork for both The King v. John Hurley et al. and The King v. Robert James through changes to the letter and interpretation of the law regarding slave testimony and manumission, the creation of the Protector of Slaves office, as well as the wider atmosphere of debate about establishing impartial legal challenges in cases involving slaves. Interventions from slaves like the Denny family, slaveowners, and civil servants like the Acting Protector of Slaves also influenced the development of amelioration policy. In Barbados, these interventions reflected deep and longstanding social tensions that had shaped the development of slave society.

The Politics of Slavery, Sexuality, and Class in Barbadian Society

In the eyes of many slaves, free people of color and whites Robert James and Margaret Higginbotham represented the frontier of the struggle over the race, class, gender, and legal hierarchy of Barbadian society. Robert James—a young, black man—evoked fear, resentment and hostility in many whites while Margaret Higginbotham—a poor, white, widowed mother—was a symbol of endangered white supremacy, white womanhood, and, implicitly, the failure of white patriarchy. The possibility of sexual union between them evoked fears that dependence on slavery had provoked an endemic crisis of white class and gender relations.

Such fears were intrinsic to the dynamics of racially based slavery throughout the Americas, but were also rooted in the specificities of the island's colonial history. Barbados was the first Caribbean island to undergo the “Sugar Revolution” at the end of the 1640s and a powerful and overwhelmingly male plantocracy quickly emerged in the island. By the mid-eighteenth century, the men of the plantocracy, who accounted for around 4 percent of the island's approximately 7,850 white men, exercised total control over most of the island's landed wealth and political institutions. Their power accelerated the marginalization of lower class whites, who were mostly small farmers and indentured laborers. White indentured and free white laborers were displaced as the labor of slaves and free people of color permeated almost every area of skilled, domestic, and agricultural employment.⁵³

Planters considered white poverty an unsettling spectacle in a system that depended on inequality between blacks and whites. The legislature passed several measures restricting certain occupations to white men in order to preserve the economic viability of the white patriarchal family. Very rarely did this legislation preserve areas of work for white women.⁵⁵

Plantation slavery gradually made white female poverty an endemic feature of the Barbadian social landscape. Few areas of economic activity were open to white Caribbean women. Trevor Burnard's recent findings on marriage in early colonial Jamaica could plausibly be applied to Barbados and suggest that the consolidation of plantation-based slavery accelerated patterns of marital instability among white colonists. The poor prospects for white colonial marriages were compounded by the fact that white women in the British Caribbean tended to outlive white men. These factors would explain why white women, especially widows and wives deserted by their husbands, apparently constituted a disproportionate percentage of impoverished whites in Barbados.⁵⁷

Destitute white women were the ultimate symbol of what Cecily Forde-Jones terms the breakdown of white patriarchal family structures that were “critical to the formation and maintenance of a newly emerging white identity.” The planter-state did not go out of its way to help poor white women but a disproportionate number of white women received poor relief from the parish vestries, as the state stepped in to fill the role of the frequently absent white husband and father. Planters used the state's meager supplies of state charity to “prevent . . . the social status of poor whites from slipping below that of black people, and to keep the boundaries of whiteness from becoming blurred through white women forming sexual relationships with blacks.”⁵⁸

At first glance, Margaret Higginbotham appears, as a widowed woman with two infant sons, to fall into the category of women upon whom the state might bestow largesse. At the same time, as a white woman with few financial resources who had derived little real economic benefit from white privilege, she occupied a marginal space of whiteness. In the view of elite whites, white paupers and single women were already morally suspect and it did not require much for them to fall from grace entirely. White women's interactions with people of color were always potentially dangerous. In his study of slave society in Savannah, Georgia, Timothy Lockley argues that white women who “violated the sexual color line” and engaged in relationships that could not produce white children “found themselves punished rather than defended by the southern legal system.”⁵⁹

Maintaining the boundaries between whites and non-whites in slave societies required a racialized and state-sanctioned double standard regarding sexual violence against women. Courts in slave societies were unlikely to side with a woman of color who alleged that she had been raped, whether the man was white or non-white.⁶¹

The rape of white women by black men had long been a delegitimizing metaphor for slave resistance. Especially after the Haitian Revolution, whites in the Caribbean lived in terror that the emancipation debate would provoke slave rebellions. The political symbolism of black men raping white women was heightened in Barbados during the scandal surrounding The King v. Robert James by memories of the island's only large-scale slave rebellion that took place in 1816. At the time of the insurrection, according to colonial authorities, captured male rebels revealed a plan “to put to death all the white men who came into their possession; but they were not to kill the white women, who were to be reserved for their own purposes.” Whites were also terrified and enraged by a flag that rebel slaves allegedly carried into battle depicting “a rude drawing [which] served to inflame the Passions, representing the Union of a Black Man with a White Female.”⁶³

James and Higginbotham were embodiments of the tensions of class, gender, race, and legal status that characterized Barbadian slave society by the early nineteenth century. For Skeete, both were dangerous characters who could easily be imagined to have transgressed the boundaries of race, desire, and legal status. For many other whites Higginbotham's rape was a crime against the entire white creole community and Robert James was a symbol of black violence and servile rebellion. It was precisely because whites were so deeply divided that Higginbotham was such an effective and politically convenient symbol of white unity. The tension between the unifying thrust of white supremacy and the disharmonious tendencies of colonial society helped to determine the outcome of, and public reactions to, The King v. Robert James.

Inequality, the Planter-State, and the Crisis of Creole Identity

A fundamental commitment to slavery and white supremacy came to be vital to proletarian whites' collective identity, even if relations between lower-order whites and blacks in the slaveholding societies of the Atlantic world often subverted racial hierarchies. Nevertheless, West Indian whites were not a monolithic group—for many white Barbadians, poverty translated into exclusion from formal politics, limited access to judicial institutions, and susceptibility to legal victimization.⁶⁵

The political dominance of the old planter families was deeply resented by smaller planters, yeoman farmers, and the poor. In the second decade of the nineteenth century a group of planters of more recent and generally less prodigious wealth than the old landed families organized the island's first political party, claiming to oppose the oppression which lower class whites suffered at the hands of the planter elite. The “Salmagundis,” the party of the so-called “ten-acre men,” swept most of the big planters from the House of Assembly in bitterly fought elections in 1819, and gained control over the House of Assembly in the 1820s. This election set the stage for several years of tension between two opposing political camps among white landowners. On one side were the governor, who was invariably a person of aristocratic sympathies if not birth, and the Legislative Council, composed of the patriarchs of old planter families like President John Brathwaite Skeete. On the other side were the ten-acre men who formed the majority in the lower house.⁶⁶

Thus, at the height of the anti-slavery struggle, the House of Assembly and the Council wrestled to present themselves as the true defenders of the island's white “free-born Englishmen.” Reform of the slave laws was one battleground on which white patriarchal factions competed for control of the colonial state. Legislative debates, the courts, and official statements on courtroom procedures and judicial rulings in cases involving enslaved people were major theatres for this tug-of-war. A pattern was established whereby the Legislative Council—following the lead set by the West India interest in London—sought to accommodate the reform demands of the Colonial Office, while the Assembly resisted reform every step of the way. In the legislative debates of 1824 and 1825 on the content of the proposed Consolidated Slave Act, the Council presented itself to the Colonial Office as a voice of reason trying to restrain the violent bigots of the lower house. Political representatives and supporters of the old plantocracy mobilized a class-based discourse against lower class whites in an attempt to influence the direction of amelioration.⁶⁷

Disagreements between the lower and upper houses served to delay reform, and the imperial government ultimately settled for a more planter-friendly Consolidated Slave Act than the model which had been implemented in the Crown Colonies.⁶⁸

Skeete's dismissal of Higginbotham's accusations was quite consistent with elite attitudes toward poor white women. The possibility existed that she had voluntarily ‘contaminated’ whiteness and her claim to patriarchal protection from the state was therefore in doubt. However, Skeete's decision flew in the face of efforts to promote white unity at a moment when white creoles were expected to stand together against the threat of slave emancipation. Ironically, mass hatred of Skeete and Robert James temporarily produced the white solidarity which plantation-based slavery made elusive. The Council and the legislature were united in their opposition to his decision, as were the island's newspapers, all of which were white-owned but which represented different socioeconomic groups and political factions. Even the editor of The Barbadian newspaper, usually known for his anti-populist stances, accused the president of being“insensible and indifferent to the popular voice.”⁷⁰

The president's decision and the response to the case in Britain were bitter pills for many white Barbadians to swallow in the political context of the debate over the act of emancipation. Even though the 1833 Imperial Slave Emancipation Act incorporated many of the demands of West Indian slaveowners, emancipation was a political defeat for planters. During and after the French and Haitian revolutions, British Caribbean planters were increasingly marginalized in imperial political culture. The first elections after the 1832 reform of the British Parliament, in which most West Indian-interest members lost their seats, gave concrete political expression to the view that white West Indians did not fully ‘belong’ in Britain. As David Lambert has noted, the British abolitionist movement represented a redefinition of “Englishness” which reduced white West Indians to an “off white imitation” which was at odds with their sense of themselves as an integral part of the English ‘nation.’⁷¹

For many white Barbadians, the outcome of The King v. Robert Jameswas yet another step on the road to the impending catastrophe of emancipation, and a sign of their declining significance in imperial politics and culture. Petitioners from St. George parish proposed to send a deputation to England to help convince the Crown to order Robert James' execution. Otherwise, they feared, the case would be misrepresented and important details withheld from the British public, as they claimed had occurred in the dispatches from the governor after the 1816 rebellion. The petitioners spoke disconsolately of “the lack of local knowledge of West Indian affairs by those connected with them in England . . . .” The Mercuryand Barbadian newspapers were almost as dismayed by the fact that the London papers had not considered the scandal in Barbados “important” enough to merit press coverage as they were by Skeete's ruling.⁷²

Many British politicians certainly did view white West Indians as, at best, a parody of ‘real’ Englishness. Governor Lionel Smith, the zealous authoritarian who arrived in Barbados in 1833 and oversaw the transition from slavery to apprenticeship, held West Indian whites in extremely low regard. Smith described Skeete as an “unpopular, weak and vacillating” individual who had taken an uncharacteristically resolute stand in the Robert James case. Smith commended Skeete's behavior as “unlike a West Indian, and most honorable to his Character.”⁷³

At stake in the contest over the ‘Englishness’ of white West Indians was also the future of their particular conception of Englishness in the future of a multiracial and post-slavery British empire. White identity in the old self-governing territories of the Caribbean was forged around a strong identification with a sense of ‘English localism’ in which “priority [was] given to the apparent needs of a community smaller and more intimate than the state or nation.”⁷⁴

Still, in 1833, on the eve of abolition, these developments lay in the future, and the boundaries of Britishness seemed much more flexible and potentially open to Afro-Caribbean people than they would little more than a decade later. The most committed abolitionists and missionaries in the British Caribbean envisioned that, after emancipation, Christian Afro-West Indians “could think of themselves and be thought of as black Britons, a term which has come in and out of the language of nation and empire.”⁷⁶

White Barbadians violently rejected claims that free people of color were entitled to any ‘rights’ not gifted to them by local authorities. Members of the legislature used the case to imply that free Afro-Barbadians were neither truly ‘free’ nor necessarily deserving of liberty, having obtained their freedom through illegitimate means. The House of Assembly passed a resolution that complained that, due to the outcome of The King v. John Hurley et al.and The King v. Robert James, slaves could now expect “pardon and reward as the price of the most atrocious crime.” They also claimed that there were several enslaved “felons” who, “after having been convicted of capital offences have obtained their pardon on the basis of technicalities, and are now at large living in this island as free subjects.” These were direct references to John Hurley's co-defendants, George Smith, Italy, and Will Thomas, as well as the 1796 case of Joe Denny, a free man of color whose sentence was commuted to transportation after he was condemned to death for having accidentally murdered his white neighbor.⁷⁸

Free people of color in Barbados, as elsewhere, had always been in a politically ambivalent position with regard to slavery. While free Afro-Barbadians launched increasingly strident critiques of the planter-state's white supremacist policies, during the 1820s they stopped short of openly condemning slavery—not only was it dangerous to do so but some free blacks and coloreds were themselves slaveowners. However, the racist climate generated by Robert James' reprieve provided both the opportunity and the necessity for them to appeal to the symbols and institutions of British imperialism—the Crown, Parliament, and the common law—that seemed most likely to protect their interests. Free Afro-Barbadians presented themselves as the defenders of British reformism and liberal imperialism in the colonies against the perceived parochialism of whites. Members of the island's free black and colored population defied white popular anger by speaking up publicly in defense of Skeete's appeal to the Privy Council, condemning the legislature's disregard for the president's authority, supporting Robert James' right to a fair trial, and accusing whites of racist hypocrisy. Thus, the President was pitted against other whites and his only defenders were free people of color, a group whom planters had traditionally persecuted and probably not a sector of society whose support improved other whites' low opinion of Skeete.⁷⁹

In a petition sent to the legislature in March 1833, a delegation of free Afro-Barbadians observed that, while they detested “as much as any other portion of this community, the crime with which the said felon stands charged . . . white criminals, of every denomination, are let loose upon the community without producing any feeling of resentment.” Under those circumstances, the petitioners stated, “we must necessarily attribute the present ferment, in the particular case, to but one cause,” namely the color of Robert James' and Higginbotham's skin. They ended by affirming their support, in veiled terms, for slave emancipation as the only means of eliminating racism from the island's public institutions.⁸⁰

Conclusion

There is simply not enough evidence of what actually occurred between Robert James and Margaret Higginbotham for this article to reach a fair conclusion as to whether or not Robert James was guilty of rape. Nevertheless, The King v. Robert James provides a window into the multifaceted political, cultural, and ideological conflicts and negotiations that determined the dynamics of amelioration. Examining the amelioration process through the lens of this legal case allows us to see the changing relationship between institutions of imperial power, the development of colonial social and economic structures, and discourses of colonial identity.

The case also reminds us that patriarchal privilege in colonial slave societies was not racially neutral—white male power was secured, at least in part, by the suppression of competing claims by black men, and white masculine authority rested on preventing the kind of ‘illegitimate’ intercourse between white women and black men which The King v. Robert James represented. Margaret Higginbotham was a prime candidate for elite sympathy, as long as she behaved as was befitting of a poor, white, widowed mother. In the eyes of whites, Robert James was a black man who did not know his place—whether or not his sexual encounter with Higginbotham had been consensual or even whether it occurred at all was irrelevant. The possibility that he might have engaged in intercourse with her constituted an attack on the social order.

I have sought not to downplay the oppressive and inherently violent hegemonic power of imperial, racist, and slaveowning interests in the British Atlantic world. The authority to pass laws was undeniably immense power in a society where the majority of people were defined as property and most members of the free minority had no formal political voice. Still, this article has tried to offer an analysis of this case that highlights the agency of people of color, enslaved and free, in shaping the process of legal reform. Amelioration played out on a terrain of political struggles between Barbados and Britain and within Barbadian society, as well as class and gender tensions among Barbadians themselves. The reforms created opportunities for slaves, free people of color, and non-elite whites to challenge planters via the apparatus of the colonial and imperial states.

Slavery bound colony and metropole together even as it divided them, and the antislavery debate entailed a significant re-ordering of relationships between state and society within and between metropolitan and colonial polities. The hierarchies, conflicts of interest, and fragmentation which defined Britain's interactions with its slaveholding colonies never fully undermined the fact that the societies of the British Atlantic empire shared a public sphere based on a common transatlantic economic, judicial, and political system. The Haitian Revolution and abolitionism deepened old fissures and created new tensions in the British-Caribbean Atlantic. As many white West Indians clung tenaciously to an investment in slavery's survival, some free black and colored colonial subjects seized opportunities created by the antislavery struggle to present themselves as the standard-bearers of a reinvigorated British liberalism in the colonies.

Finally, the story of The King v. Robert James illustrates that legal emancipation was one step in the multifaceted negotiation of the meaning of freedom and imperial citizenship that continued long after 1834. The abolition of slavery from above in 1833–1834 represented an imperial attempt to preempt the workings of other, less predictable, currents of intellectual, cultural, socioeconomic, and political change, such as those which shaped the fates of Robert James and Margaret Higginbotham. The case is remarkable for being exceptional yet oddly commonplace. It is one of the more sensational examples of how amelioration brought tensions, which were simultaneously on the margins and at the heart of slave society, into the center of state power, unsettling judicial and political institutions and calling the legitimacy of the social order into question.