IN FEBRUARY 1832, while abolitionists rallied their troops for a final attack on the institution of slavery, Archibald Alison, a 40-year-old Scot, issued a dire warning to the nation on the appalling consequences that would follow emancipation. Reeling from the ‘destruction of the constitution’ as a consequence of the Reform Bill, he argued that Britain was now facing ‘the dismemberment and dissolution of the empire’. ‘The vast and splendid colonial possessions of Great Britain, encircling the globe with their stations, and nourishing its commerce by their productions’, were, he warned, ‘menaced with destruction’. ‘The rash innovations of the mother country’ were enraging the West Indian colonists and driving them into the arms of the Americans. If slavery was abolished, he was convinced, the white colonists would abandon Great Britain. But sugar islands were not separate colonies of settlement, they should be thought of as a part of the mother country. The majority of West India proprietors lived in Britain and brought their riches home. A separation between the sugar islands and the mother country would be a disaster, not just for them, but also for Britain. In a flourish of his rhetorical imagination, Alison declared that the old country would be mortally wounded if the islands were lost.

His dramatic rendition of the dangers facing Britain in the event of emancipation was only part of the nightmare scenario that Alison evoked. The idea of abolition, he reported, was breeding terror among the West Indians. It came from ‘the same spirit of rash, ignorant, and impetuous innovation’ that had inspired the madness of parliamentary reform. Such a spirit was particularly dangerous in the Caribbean, ‘as the passions are more violent, and reason less powerful, under a tropical sun and among an enslaved population, than under the cloudy atmosphere and among the free inhabitants of northern regions’. ‘We’ have the interests of the negroes at heart, he insisted, and do not love slavery. But slavery was ‘a necessary step in the progress of improvement in the early ages of mankind.’ This was a truth demonstrated by history; slavery was coexistent with the human race.