In the early nineteenth century, Belize was bound only tenuously to the British Empire.Footnote 1 The Parliamentary Act of 1817 defined it as “a settlement, for certain purposes, in the possession and under the protection of His Majesty, but not within the territory and dominion of His Majesty.”Footnote 2 The settlement comprised around 150 British settlers, 900 “free blacks,” and 3000 slaves.Footnote 3 One of the consequences of this ambiguous definition was the confusion over applicability of British laws in the settlement. This extended to laws relating to slavery and relations between masters and slaves.Footnote 4 Indeed, before the 1820s, the laws of the British West Indies regulating slavery had little impact on the processes followed in the settlement.Footnote 5 Belize's position as a contested borderland—an enclave within Spanish colonial territory—also meant that until the 1820s there was little British imperial intervention in the management of slavery in the settlement. Instead, the highly localized and informal legal regime of Belize allowed for the rise of the settlers’ authority and power. As a result, the settler elite who controlled much of the land, labor, and instruments of governance in the settlement exercised almost unbridled sovereignty over slavery.Footnote 6
The 1820s were in many ways a turning point in the relations between the British imperial government and Belize. The end of the wars of independence in Spanish America brought an end to Anglo-Spanish rivalry over Belize, and by the 1820s Belize appeared poised to become economically lucrative as a British colonial possession, boasting “by far the highest merchandise exports per head of all Caribbean countries.”Footnote 7 Crucially, the efforts of the metropolitan government to bring within its own purview and control the practice of slavery in its colonial possessions in the Caribbean, as part of a broader effort to ameliorate the condition of slaves in the colonies, undermined the power of the settler elite.Footnote 8 The latter's main adversary in the first decades of the nineteenth century was the figure of the Superintendent, who was often the eyes and ears of the imperial government on the ground. Indeed, the struggle between Superintendent George Arthur (1814–22) and the settler elite in the 1820s is at the core of this essay, which explores how the amelioration phase of emancipation presented unprecedented challenges to settler sovereignty over slavery in the settlement.
The essay employs two inflection points, namely proceedings around the 1822 case of slaves from Mosquito Shore who claimed Indian descent and the subsequent desertion of African slaves from the settlement in 1825, as they sought freedom across contested borders. This conjunction of events exemplifies the opportunities presented by the amelioration period for imperial officials, enslaved people in the settlement, and neighboring Central American governments to challenge the sovereignty of the Belizean settler elite. Particularly, the concurrence of British amelioration and Central American emancipation militated against settler efforts to obtain restitution for runaway slaves. However, this essay is not about just the fracturing of settler sovereignty; rather, it also highlights how this elite attempted to recoup its losses and reassert its sovereignty through diplomatic efforts and by creating a narrative of Belizean slavery as ‘benign,’ a narrative that would persist for generations.
Belize became a British colony in 1862. Part of its transition from a settlement to a colony lay in the gradual displacement of power from the settler elite to the representatives of British imperial government. Indeed, as early as the 1830s the settler oligarchy had lost its control over executive authority in the settlement, leading to a concomitant rise in the power of the Superintendent. Since the struggle over sovereignty in the 1820s presaged and laid the groundwork for this later transformation, this article allows us to appreciate that in borderland regions such as Belize, which straddled the boundaries between Spanish America and the British Caribbean, emancipation and imperialism were inextricably linked. It also underlines how the overlapping contexts of British and Central American emancipations allowed for an unprecedented reversal of settler sovereignty over slavery in Belize.
Several historians of Belize have questioned the deeply held assumptions and myths surrounding early Belizean history. In his seminal works, Nigel Bolland (1977, 1988) demonstrated the fiction of benign slavery in Belize and showed how the lack of legal definitions contributed to the ill-treatment of slaves. Bolland highlighted the ways in which slaves resisted their masters, including revolts, marronage, and flight.Footnote 9 Building on Bolland's work on the agency of the enslaved, Anne Macpherson highlighted the gendered experience of slavery in Belize, showing how urban enslaved women experienced and resisted slavery in ways that were completely different from those of the majority of male slaves who labored in timber extraction.Footnote 10 In addition, scholars such as Victor and Barbara Bulmer-Thomas and Matthew Restall have shown that the origin myths we associate with early Belize were deliberately constructed by the settler elite in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to legitimize their position in society.Footnote 11 My work builds on these powerful insights and extends them through deep contextualization, by focusing on the critical amelioration phase of the 1820s, which witnessed unprecedented challenges to settler sovereignty over slavery and constituted a significant origin-point of mythmaking around ‘benign’ slavery in Belize.
The contest between the local interests of the slaveholders and the metropolitan stance over slavery expressed itself in an unprecedented manner during the amelioration period. Reforming or ameliorating the condition of slaves characterized metropolitan policy and informed colonial practice in the British Caribbean in the 1820s. However, amelioration had much deeper roots in the British abolitionist struggle. Describing the foundations of anti-slavery movements in Britain in the eighteenth century, Christopher Leslie Brown writes “that the first impulses toward reform were ameliorationist rather than abolitionist or emancipationist . . . activists often aimed to make slavery more humane or more Christian, not to liberate the enslaved.”Footnote 12 Leading abolitionists, including William Wilberforce, in the period between 1807, when the slave trade was abolished, and 1823 advocated a policy of gradual emancipation rather than outright freedom.Footnote 13
Christa Dierksheide and Caroline Spence have highlighted that both pro-slavery and anti-slavery supporters converged on amelioration, but with different objectives.Footnote 14 While pro-slavery advocates, mainly planters and their representatives, wanted to improve the condition of slaves as a way of responding to the critics of slavery and forestalling full emancipation, anti-slavery activists advocated for gradually emancipating slaves with ameliorative policies as a precursor to liberty. This article adds to this burgeoning literature by showing the ways in which the amelioration period influenced the struggle between metropolitan policies and colonial interests concerning mastery over slaves. Indeed, the case of Belize points to how amelioration allowed the British imperial government to bring frontier regions within its legal purview, in the process challenging the hegemony of the settler elite.
While amelioration characterized British emancipation in the Caribbean, the concurrence of Central American emancipation also impacted the struggle over sovereignty in Belize. Several scholars have separately examined British and Central American emancipation.Footnote 15 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara has employed the Atlantic dimension to look at the concurrence of various national/imperial projects of emancipation.Footnote 16 Scholars such as Alice Baumgartner have demonstrated the unevenness of emancipation in the Atlantic World.Footnote 17 Recent research on Spanish American abolition is actively reevaluating the relationship between British and Spanish American emancipation projects.Footnote 18 However, there has been little work on what the concurrence of these projects meant for slavery in frontier or borderland areas. Scholars have examined slave flight and desertion from British settlements to neighboring Spanish territories in Mexico and Central America, but their work has focused mainly on the eighteenth century.Footnote 19 Scholarly works in both Caribbean and Latin American Studies have in recent years moved away from traditional top-down narratives of histories of emancipation.Footnote 20 Examining the question of sovereignty in Belize through the vantage point of slave petitions and desertions in the context of concurrent projects of emancipation adds to this conversation.
Much can also be gained from recognizing the shared history of slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Scholars of US history, for instance, have engaged with the question of slavery in borderlands, a study that can be crucial to understanding the case of Belize.Footnote 21 An important thread running through this literature has been the role of the state in the relations between slaveholders and slaves. John Craig Hammond has shown continuities between dynamics of power in the colonial and post-independence United States, where state power remained a key determinant for planters to maintain sovereignty over slavery and the borderlands.Footnote 22 In many ways, laws regarding slaves and slavery became a crucial way in which state power was expressed. As Christopher Tomlins writes, “As a modality of rule, the expression of sovereignty, law was integral to the creation and implementation of governance.”Footnote 23 In this context, legal procedures such as public trials and petitions assumed a political aspect. Steven Lubert has shown how slave desertion was not seen as the simple act of running away, but rather as the fugitive slave trials of the 1850s United States exemplified, was regarded as a political act against the authority of the state.Footnote 24
It is important to put this literature in conversation with the broader borderlands scholarship that has also examined questions of sovereignty and empire. For Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, empire—especially inter-imperial contests—was crucial to what defined a borderland.Footnote 25 Lauren Benton, on the other hand, forwards the idea of corridors or enclaves to visualize the uneven imperial control and influence across colonial territories.Footnote 26 This unevenness was reflected in the variegated ways in which imperial legal administration operated at ground level, leaving a deep chasm between metropolitan intent and colonial reality. Taken together, these insights allow us to visualize borderlands as contested spaces where slaveholders vied to maintain their sovereignty over slavery even as the “state” occupied an ambiguous role—at times abetting the masters and at others undermining them—in the context of uneven imperial legal jurisdiction.
Moreover, this struggle over sovereignty must be seen in the context of the broader struggle between the metropole and the colony. Jack Greene has highlighted the broader contest between settlers and colonial government over the power of self-determination of colonies, from the seventeenth century forward.Footnote 27 Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford urge us to view local legal struggles in British settlements within the broader politics of legal pluralism in the British Empire. According to Benton and Ford, in the context of struggles over emancipation, magistracies became condensed sites of a power struggle between centers and peripheries of empire. Magistrates, who were often the only regulators of master-slave relationships, came under increasing scrutiny, both local and imperial.Footnote 28 This article adds to this literature by showing how magistrates responded to this scrutiny. Thus, in Belize, magistrates (who were also the principal slaveholders) created a narrative of a benign slavery to counter the policies of the imperial government, which increasingly challenged their mastery over slaves in the settlement.
Slavery, Settler Sovereignty, and the Superintendency of George Arthur
Belize featured as an important locus of Anglo-Spanish rivalry in the eighteenth century. By the Treaty of Paris of 1763, the British gained usufructory rights, but not title, to the settlement in the Bay of Honduras. In September 1779, the Spanish captured a critical British point on the bay, St. George's Caye. Subsequently, the Treaty of Versailles of 1783 and the Convention of London of 1786 extended the limits of British logwood and mahogany cutting but prohibited any fortifications or government or agricultural pursuits apart from timber extraction. In return for Spanish concessions in the Bay settlement, the British agreed to evacuate Mosquito Shore, another site of Anglo-Spanish rivalry in Central America.
The British metropolitan government was reluctant to establish any formal government in the settlement for fear of Spanish retaliation. Instead, the British settlers tried to set up their own rudimentary system of governance, using a set of laws and regulations known as Burnaby's Code. In 1798, after British settlers thwarted the Spanish in the Battle of St. George's Caye, the British assumed de facto control over the settlement. However, Belize as a contested borderland between Old World rivals Britain and Spain still remained tenuously connected to the British Empire. Instead, local authority was assumed by a minority of white settlers, or “Baymen,” who constituted an oligarchy that also controlled the executive and judicial power in the settlement.Footnote 29
By 1824, slaves constituted more than half of the 4700 inhabitants of Belize.Footnote 30 Three-fifths of the slaves were African-born and the rest were creoles, with a minority who were descendants of Indians from Mosquito Shore.Footnote 31 Figures from 1823 indicate that men comprised about 59 percent of the slave population, with women constituting 25 percent, and children around 16 percent.Footnote 32 Unlike slaves in the plantation economies elsewhere in the Caribbean, most Belizean slaves labored in the extraction of timber, first logwood and later mahogany.Footnote 33 This set up a unique master-slave dynamic in Belize that arguably provided slaves with a degree of leverage. First, the need for strong and healthy slaves to work in the arduous mahogany camps and the difficulty of importing new slaves into the settlement, especially after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, meant that masters were invested in the upkeep of slaves.Footnote 34 Second, mahogany extraction often required skilled laborers, so masters often tried to provide incentives to their skilled slaves, such as extra provisions or more leisure time.Footnote 35 The fact that it was relatively easy for slaves to desert to neighboring Hispanic territories and that white settlers were often outnumbered by slaves in the isolated mahogany camps may have restrained slaveholders from using excessively harsh punishments. This is not to say that Belizean slaves did not face violence: in fact, physical coercion and torture were sometimes used as tools to control slaves.Footnote 36 Rather, Belize's case suggests that the nature of the settlement may have afforded slaves some unique leveraging tools.Footnote 37
The evacuation of Mosquito Shore constituted an important episode in Belizean history. The great majority of the 2650 evacuees, including 1677 black and indigenous slaves, settled in Belize, altering the settlement's demography significantly.Footnote 38 There is evidence of widespread practice of slavery both among the native inhabitants of the Shore and by the British settlers in the area. Accounts of travelers to the Mosquito Shore from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries point to the existence of slavery in the region.Footnote 39 According to Helms, sambo Miskitos engaged in devastating raids into Spanish settlements to capture Africans and Central American natives.Footnote 40
By the early eighteenth century, Miskitos were the dominant power on the Mosquito Shore and regularly enslaved and sold indigenous captives from other native groups to Jamaican sugar planters, as well as to other Europeans.Footnote 41 According to Karl Offen, the incredible racial diversity of the Mosquito Shore resulted from the incorporation of Africans, indigenous people, and Europeans into Miskito society, often through the violent process of slave-raiding.Footnote 42 Scholars agree that prior to British evacuation in the late eighteenth century most of those captured in raids were indigenous.Footnote 43 According to Offen, the majority of slaves held at the British settlement in Black River were Afro-descendants, while those held on the Nicaraguan coast were Amerindian.Footnote 44 Given that the majority of the evacuees to Belize came from Black River, it is probable that most of the slaves who accompanied them were Afro-descendants and that many fewer Amerindian slaves evacuated to Belize.Footnote 45 Archaeological evidence suggests that the Mosquito Shore settlers who evacuated to Belize recreated a highly hierarchical social organization in Belize, which may have made lives of their slaves very rigid and controlled.Footnote 46
Despite the influx of evacuees from Mosquito Shore, the Baymen succeeded in monopolizing land ownership in the settlement by the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote 47 The Baymen constituted the public meeting that elected Magistrates who administered the settlement. The superintendency, a post introduced in 1784, represented the imperial government, and the early nineteenth century would witness a power struggle between the magistrates (and their public meeting) and the superintendent over the locus of executive authority in the settlement. The superintendent was responsible to the governor of Jamaica, the focal point of imperial authority in the region. However, the failure of the crown to adequately define the power of the superintendent, and the imperial government's vacillation over asserting its own sovereignty in Belize, contributed to the tenuous hold of the British imperial government over the settlement up to the 1820s.Footnote 48 The tenure of Superintendent George Arthur was a turning point that coincided with a greater metropolitan desire for establishing imperial control over the settlement, particularly in the matter of slaves.
On his arrival in Belize in 1814, Superintendent Arthur recognized that to assert the crown's sovereignty over the settlement it was necessary to break the settlers’ monopoly over land and labor. With the support of Henry Bathurst, the third Earl Bathurst, who was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Superintendent Arthur tried to curb the settlers’ powers by appropriating authority to dispose of unclaimed land to the office of the superintendent and requiring registration of existing claims.Footnote 49 Since the same settlers who monopolized land in the settlement were also the principal slaveholders—almost half of the slave population in 1816, for instance, was owned by only 11 families—Arthur's attempt to challenge the settlers’ mastery over slaves must be seen within the broader struggle between the imperial government and local settler interests over sovereignty in Belize.Footnote 50
The amelioration period provided British imperial officials a unique opportunity to challenge settlers’ sovereignty over slavery. Arthur's correspondence with the Earl Bathurst from 1816 to 1823 reveals a progressive disillusionment with the settlers’ treatment of slaves and a concurrent attempt to ameliorate the slaves’ condition. In 1816, at a time when Arthur appeared to hold a positive assessment of slavery in Belize, he wrote to the Earl Bathurst: “So great is the kindness, the liberality, the indulgent care of the Wood-cutters towards their Negroes that Slavery could scarcely be known to exist in this country.”Footnote 51 However, in the 1820s, a period coinciding with the rise of amelioration as the predominant position of the British government toward West Indies slavery, we can perceive a marked change in Arthur's views.
Beginning in 1820, Arthur questioned the legal system in Belize and attempted to bring the settlement within the legal regime of the British West Indies. Thus, in October 1820, following the acquittal of slaveholder Duncanette Campbell in a case involving her mistreatment of the slave Kitty, Arthur wrote to Bathurst that the result of the trial “absolutely excludes every hope under the present system of jurisprudence, of bringing offenders to punishment when guilty of the most flagrant acts of inhumanity and oppression.”Footnote 52 The following year, another case involving a female slave would bring Arthur to loggerheads with one of the principal magistrates and slaveholders in the settlement, a man named Bowen.
On September 25, 1821, Bowen was brought to trial on warrant for mistreating three of his slaves, including a black woman named Peggy. Arthur informed Bathurst that on the basis of a suspicion that the woman had stolen some handkerchiefs, she had been—by Bowen's orders— “severely flogged, and then handcuffed and shackled, placed in an old store, infested with vermin and the noisome flies of this country.” Five days later when she tried to complain about this treatment, “she was again seized on, tied down on her belly to the ground, her arms and legs being stretched out, and secured to four stakes with sharp cords . . . exposed before men in a perfect state of nature, she was again severely flogged.”Footnote 53 Reacting to the jury and magistrate's disinclination to punish Bowen, Arthur proclaimed the Consolidated Slave Law of Jamaica to be in force in the settlement.Footnote 54
The visibility of cases of maltreatment involving female slaves in these records may be due to what Anne Macpherson has described as a “volunteer” mode of resistance, in which female networks of relatives and friends would form a coalition that offered support to the victimized female slaves and brought complaints to the attention of the superintendent. Macpherson specifically makes the point that female slaves were able to maneuver to their benefit the conflict between the superintendent and the magistrates over the applicability of Jamaican slave laws in the settlement in the 1820s.Footnote 55
Cases such as those of Kitty and Peggy fed into Arthur's broader displeasure with the magistracy in the settlement. He observed to Bathurst the “total and absolute impossibility of protecting the slave population, under the present system of jurisprudence in the colony.”Footnote 56 Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford have highlighted how curtailment of magisterial authority emerged as an imperial strategy in the context of abolition. They write: “Attention to the magistrates’ actions reflected a widespread concern with the capacity of local legal institutions to define and limit the scope of masters’ authority to punish slaves.”Footnote 57 Benton and Ford argue that the presentations of these contests as individual cases— “a set of disjointed projects of legal reform”—obscure the larger politics of legal pluralism in the British Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Arthur's struggle with Bowen, and indeed his later championship of the Mosquito Shore slaves, must be seen within this broader struggle between the imperial government and the local legal bodies comprised of slaveholding settlers.
Benton and Ford's thesis helps us understand that while Arthur's view of the magistrates may have expressed his personal feelings, it was also fed by a broader imperial strategy to curb magisterial power in the colonies. The conformity between Arthur's views and the stance of the imperial government can be seen through the fact that Arthur's correspondence to the Earl Bathurst formed part of the appendix of the parliamentary report of 1823,Footnote 58 and very soon after Arthur's term as superintendent of Belize, the Earl Bathurst issued a circular that formed the basis of the British policy of amelioration.Footnote 59 Among the proposals in that circular was the prohibition of corporal punishment on female slaves.Footnote 60
Case of the ‘Indian’ slaves of Mosquito Shore (1822)
The proceedings of the Board of Commissioners (appointed by Superintendent Arthur to investigate the case of slaves held illegally in Belize) in 1822 in the case of the ‘Indian’ slaves can be regarded as the first crucial inflection point in the challenge to settler sovereignty in Belize in the 1820s. The death of a prominent settler from Mosquito Shore who had settled in Belize in 1821 following the evacuation opened the question of the disposal of the slaves in his possession.Footnote 61 Although the Laws, Regulations and Customs of Honduras of 1803 asserted that the Consolidated Slave Law of Jamaica could be adopted in the settlement to the extent possible, slave laws in Belize were frequently applied on an ad hoc basis before 1821. The cases dealt with by the slave court, established in 1787, were of a limited nature, and it was not until the establishment of the Supreme Court in 1819 that a variety of cases could be tried.Footnote 62 Slaves were not allowed to give evidence against white persons, although they could testify against other slaves. A slave was permitted to choose a person to assist him in his defense, although this role was usually assumed by the slave's owner.Footnote 63
Administration of justice was in the hands of seven annually elected magistrates who were often slaveholders themselves.Footnote 64 Immediately following Arthur's proclamation enforcing the Consolidated Slave Law in the settlement, slaves came forward in numbers that filled Arthur “with no less astonishment than the fraud and injustice which had so long been secretly practiced towards them.” Most of the petitioners claimed to be persons of Indian descent who had been brought from Mosquito Shore during the evacuation and subsequently held in illegal slavery.Footnote 65 This was not the first time these slaves had petitioned for freedom. Arthur's correspondence reveals that they had appeared before juries before, but their claims had been dismissed.
Under Arthur's direction, a “strict search” of Mosquito Shore records revealed two key pieces of information.Footnote 66 First, a proclamation in 1775 by the then governor of Jamaica, Basil Keith, strictly forbade enslavement of native Indians of the Mosquito Shore.Footnote 67 Second, on receiving Keith's proclamation, on October 29, 1776, the then acting superintendent of Mosquito Shore, James Laurie, prohibited any further enslavement of Mosquito Shore Indians but left untouched the question of the fate of Indians already enslaved before that date.Footnote 68 Firm in his conviction that these slaves had been retained unjustly by settlers in Belize, Arthur sought the legal opinion of the British government's attorney general in Jamaica, William Burge. The latter responded, making it clear that it was illegal to “hold in slavery the native Indians of the continent of America, or their descendants” and that Indians from Mosquito Shore were entitled to damages from their owners, who were also liable to criminal prosecution.Footnote 69
Forthwith, Arthur issued a proclamation asserting the “right of all such Indians or their descendants to their freedom.”Footnote 70 Convinced that the existing judicial system in Belize, in the hands of slaveholders, was incapable of providing justice, Arthur appointed an independent commission to investigate the case and propose reparations to those slaves held illegally in Belize.Footnote 71 The commission consisted of two military men, Major General A. H. Pye and Major John Coatquelvin, and James Hyde, a judge in the Supreme Court.Footnote 72
Beginning on January 9, 1822, this Board of Commissioners proceeded to collect evidence and testimonies regarding the alleged enslavement of Mosquito Shore Indians. The commissioners admitted the difficulty of their task, given the long time that had elapsed between the enslavement of the Indians in Mosquito Shore and the petition at hand. Thus, where possible, the evidence of witnesses was cross-checked against a “partial and imperfect” registry of the Indian slaves of Mosquito Shore, from 1777.Footnote 73 The Board met at 11:00 every morning to hear witnesses give their testimonies. A total of 91 slaves sought freedom on the grounds of being of Indian descent. The board resolved that if the owner of the slave opposed any evidence or claim presented, the burden of proof would fall on the owner.Footnote 74
The commissioners charged with investigating the claims of the Mosquito Shore slaves admitted the difficulty of distinguishing the petitioners from black slaves: “Many of the petitioners who have appeared before the Board, from their repeated admixtures with the African race, have so lost the appearance of their Indian origin as not to be distinguished from negro slaves.”Footnote 75 Before evidence for each petition was heard, the petition was read aloud.Footnote 76 But apart from their physical presence in front of the board, the petitioning slaves played little part in the proceedings. Instead, the board heard testimonies of witnesses who could speak to the descent of the slaves in question. Many of the witnesses attested to the descent of slaves from “real Indians” or “Indians without mixture.” Some even identified the specific indigenous groups to which the ancestors of the individual slaves had belonged, including the Buccatora, Woolwa, Cookrah, Sambola, and Valiente.Footnote 77 However, the physical appearance of only two of the petitioners “corroborated the evidence given” that they were of indigenous descent.Footnote 78
The proceedings reveal that 20 percent or less of the slaves were above the age of 40. Of these, only five were 50 years or above and only one above 60. Many of the petitioners were children or grandchildren of evacuees and claimed Indian descent from their mothers and grandmothers. From what we know of the demographics of Mosquito Shore slave evacuees, we know that most were of African descent and that very few ‘Indian’ slaves evacuated to Belize. Given the likelihood of miscegenation and the reality of racial diversity both in Mosquito Shore and later after their arrival in Belize, it is likely that most of the petitioners were in fact Afro-indigenous.
The proceedings of the commission were a clear blow to the sovereignty of the settler elite over slaves in the settlement. Superintendent Arthur had intentionally circumvented the authority of the magistrates by creating the Board of Commissioners to investigate the petitions, rather than bringing the case to the courts of the settlement. As the commissioners’ report made clear, the ‘Indian’ slaves were owned by the most prominent settlers, including judges and magistrates. By placing the burden of proof on the owners rather than the slaves, the commission further undermined settler authority. In addition, following the presentation of the petitions, many of the ‘Indian’ slaves resisted working for their owners, creating further resentment among the settlers. As the commission investigated the cases, the settler elite responded in two main ways: by questioning the legality of the proceedings and by taking punitive actions against the ‘Indian’ slaves.
During the proceedings, the owners of the petitioning slaves drew attention to an act of the Jamaican legislature that declared that all Indian slaves brought to Jamaica after December 28, 1741, and their descendants, were to be considered free. Using this act, the Belizean slaveholders argued that the petitioners should prove that they were not descended from Indians already in slavery before 1741, since the Jamaican law applied only to enslavement after that date.Footnote 79 Indeed, the slaveholders tried to reverse the commission's resolutions by arguing for the burden of proof to fall on the slaves themselves. Thus, one slaveholder, Thomas Paslow, expressed marked indignation at the Board of Commissioners’ processes: “It has been urged by one individual, that proof lay upon the possessor or proprietor, against which unconstitutional doctrine I solemnly protest [emphasis in original], as all claimants or plaintiffs, throughout the British dominions, are obliged to allege cause; and to the law of my country I implicitly bow.”Footnote 80
The proprietors also questioned the veracity of the slaves’ claims to Indian descent based on their physical appearance, which seemed indistinguishable from black slaves.Footnote 81 Thomas Paslow wrote that his slave Horatio claimed freedom “on the ground of being descended from an Indian, although apparently a real negro.”Footnote 82 Magistrate John Wright questioned the slaves’ motivation, suggesting they had been externally instigated to go against their owners: “The reason of which these persons now claim their freedom is obvious, from enquiries made amongst them; they were given to understand that the bare proof of Indian origin would at once liberate them, without the slightest knowledge that any Act was in existence to the contrary.”Footnote 83
The proceedings of the board heightened tensions between masters and slaves in the settlement. The board received complaints from proprietors that the slaves “refuse to do any duty whatever to them as servants and that some of them have even absented themselves entirely.”Footnote 84 More flagrantly, the slaveholders retaliated by punishing the ‘Indian’ slaves. Thus Bess Meighan, one of the petitioning slaves, was cruelly beaten and restrained by the influential magistrate Bowen (mentioned earlier) and his mulatto mistress Clarissa Paslow.Footnote 85 The Board of Commissioners reported that Bess had been “severely beat about the head and face, one of her eyes being completely closed, and also marks of whipping on the back and shoulders; her left foot was also swelled, as she stated from the effects of the chain with which she was fastened.”Footnote 86 As tensions mounted, the board expressed to Superintendent Arthur its inability to resolve the situation because of its limited powers, which were confined to the investigation of the case of the ‘Indian’ slaves.
Faced with the growing turmoil in the settlement, Arthur in an unprecedented move authorized the board to take the petitioning slaves under its protection. In this, Arthur presaged the practice, to be adopted in some British colonies soon after, of establishing protectors to oversee the interests of the enslaved.Footnote 87 The commissioners in turn removed the Indian petitioners from the owners and placed them under the protection of Provost Marshal Richard Davies Bull.Footnote 88 In placing the slaves under the protection of the Board of Commissioners, Arthur received backing from the imperial government, and he noted that his actions were “warmly supported by His Honor the Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica.”Footnote 89
By resolutely bypassing the judicial system of the settlement and instead devolving extraordinary powers on the Board of Commissioners, Arthur's actions presented an unprecedented challenge to the sovereignty of the settler elite. On January 28, 1822, he announced to the magistrates the consequences of the settlers’ continued resistance: “I have taken the fixed determination to allow no compromise or accommodation on behalf of those who shall excite further commotion; but placing the Indians under the protection of the Provost Marshal General, I shall, by the earliest opportunity, refer all such cases to His Majesty's government, praying that a mandamus from the Court of King's Bench may be issued to remove such parties to England for trial at the suit of the Indians.”Footnote 90 Indeed, in this and other pieces of correspondence, Arthur clearly expressed his desire to bring the case of the ‘Indian’ slaves within the purview of imperial law and justice.
On February 8, 1822, the Board of Commissioners submitted its report to the superintendent. The board's report made it clear that the ‘Indian’ slaves were owned not only by judges, magistrates, and other Belizean settlers, but also by officers of the crown on Mosquito Shore. Moreover, these slaves had been bought and sold publicly in all respects as African slaves in the settlement. However, the board also noted that since many of the slaves had passed through several hands, it was impracticable to try to recover damages from the owners. Finally, the board resolved that “their [the ‘Indian’ slaves’] freedom is an inherent or unalienable right, of which no consideration can deprive them.”Footnote 91 On February 11, Arthur laid the report of the commissioners before the magistrates of the settlement. At that meeting, the settlers opposed the recommendations of the commission using the provision of the Act of 1741 of Jamaica that allowed slaveholders to retain their slaves as long they were registered,Footnote 92 and Arthur noted: “The general determination is not to give up the Indians.”Footnote 93 Finally, submitting the case to the Earl Bathurst, for a final decision—and thereby, bringing it under the direct purview of the metropolitan government—Arthur asserted, “I have done nothing more than my duty.”Footnote 94
Following the Board of Commissioners’ report, the slaveholders sought to regain their mastery over slaves. They attempted to recover the Indians held by the Provost Marshal by making costly representations in Jamaica.Footnote 95 In March 1822, the Public Meeting—comprised of some of the principal slaveholders—approved a motion that all representations of the case would thenceforth be made through an agent in London and not through the superintendent.Footnote 96 One of the questions raised by Arthur's opponents was the applicability of Jamaican laws in Belize and, in fact, the superintendent himself was aware that he had extended his prerogatives in the Indian case. When ill health forced Arthur to return to England on leave, the settlers sent an agent to London to “orchestrate” legal measures and bar him from returning to Belize.Footnote 97 In 1823, Arthur left for Van Diemen's Land, where he took up the position of lieutenant governor.Footnote 98 Arthur's departure from the settlement was followed by the advent of Edward Codd, a superintendent much more sympathetic to settler interests.
Despite the efforts of the settler elite, however, the British imperial government would have the final say on the case of the ‘Indian’ slaves of Mosquito Shore. By February 1827, the Commission of Legal Inquiry on the Case of Indians at Honduras—which Bathurst had charged with investigating the matter after Arthur's departure—submitted its report. It recommended that all those enslaved before 1776 (that is, before Basil Keith's proclamation) be considered slaves and the masters compensated. However, all the Indian slaves were to be set free, since returning them to their masters might cause undue tensions and hostilities.Footnote 99 Commissions of Legal Inquiry began to operate in the 1820s when the British government sent London-trained barristers to its colonies to assess the legal system there. These became significant fact-finding missions, with the commissioners exercising unprecedented ability to comment on the legal systems they found and suggest ways of remedying what they perceived as limitations of these systems.Footnote 100 According to Benton and Ford, these commissions were “agents of a metropolitan drive to realign empire” and gave rise to “the ethos of extending metropolitan authority in the interests of the global, imperial order.”Footnote 101
In the case of Belize, the commission allowed the imperial government to extend its influence over an area that had hitherto been marginally connected to the British Caribbean legal system. The outcome of the commission's report was the liberation of all the petitioning slaves, regardless of ethnic origin. In that sense, it was a clear blow to the hegemonic power of the Belizean settler elite. While Benton and Ford have examined the commissions within the broader question of development of international law, the Belize case shows that the commissions are also critical to understanding how the amelioration period tied empire together—particularly in bringing frontier and marginal areas into the legal purview of the British empire—and challenged the settlers’ sovereignty over slavery.
In the aftermath of the report of the Commission of Legal Inquiry on the Case of Indians at Honduras, J. Stewart of the Treasury Chambers on April 16, 1829, informed Horace Twiss, Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, that none of the slaves under the protection of the Provost Marshal should be returned to their owners even if there was no evidence that they were descended from Indians. Rather, Stewart suggested, the settlers should nominate an agent in London.Footnote 102 That agent would negotiate with the British government for compensation to the slaveholders.Footnote 103 In March 1830, the agent successfully negotiated for almost £8000, and the following month Twiss wrote to Stewart that “the native Indians must now be considered as lawfully and conditionally free, and they will therefore be only answerable for misconduct to the laws of the settlement.”Footnote 104 After almost a decade of litigation and negotiation, and a few years shy of formal emancipation of slaves in the British Caribbean, the Mosquito Shore slaves had won their freedom.
The Case of Runaway Slaves (1825)
It was not just British imperial officials like Superintendent Arthur and the Earl Bathurst who challenged settler sovereignty in the amelioration period. Slaves themselves, emboldened by Central American emancipation, crossed over to safety and freedom. This section deals with the second inflection mentioned early in this article: the departure of African and Afro-descendant slaves in 1825, the challenge it constituted to settler sovereignty over slaves, and the diplomatic contest over the desertion.
The concurrence of this escape and British amelioration meant that restitution of runaway slaves was more difficult than ever. The diplomatic contest over desertion of slaves from the settlement in 1825 illuminates how the decade of the 1820s constituted a crucial challenge to settler sovereignty over slaves. From the very beginning of the litigation surrounding the ‘Indian’ slaves of Mosquito Shore, the settlers pointed to the harmful effects of the case on the black population of the settlement. Writing to the Earl Bathurst in March 1823, the then superintendent Edward Codd lamented that despite the good conditions of slaves in the settlement many were deserting because of the ‘Indian’ case:
Since Christmas, as it is ascertained (for I have called for their names and owners) 39, as they are represented, of the very best negroes, have absconded, without any apparent cause, no severity, no punishment, that I can learn, has been inflicted; but they have secretly left their homes; and it appears the general feeling [is] that it arises from the effects of so many persons standing up for their freedom, who have been for many years their fellow-slaves.Footnote 105
That highlighting the possible deleterious effects of the ‘Indian’ case on the black population was a strategy adopted by the settlers to counter efforts at emancipation of the Mosquito Shore slaves is apparent. It is true, however, that the records do show a preoccupation with slave desertion in the 1820s and an increase in the number who left. Contrary to the settlers’ claims, however, these likely resulted more from the fact of Central American emancipation than as a response to the Mosquito Shore case. Central American emancipation followed closely on the heels of the region's independence from Spain. Following the wars of independence, many Latin American states balked on the promise of immediate emancipation, even though Chile (1823), the Central American Federation (1824), and Mexico (1829) did carry out their projects of emancipation. As George Reid Andrews notes, “In each of these countries, however, the slave population numbered only a few thousand or less and was an insignificant part of the local labor market. In countries where slaves were more numerous, owners remained violently opposed to emancipation.”Footnote 106
Guatemala, which as part of the Central American Federation had ended slavery in 1824, became a prime receptacle for slaves deserting from Belize, the other major recipients being Omoa and Trujillo (in present day Honduras). However, as Catherine Komisaruk has shown, even before the formal end of slavery, Guatemala was an attractive destination for blacks from neighboring regions. She shows how through a combination of mechanisms including manumission, access to wages and credit, physical mobility and the use of law, a large percentage of black people had successfully moved out of slavery.Footnote 107 She convincingly argues that “the emancipation law of 1824 essentially ratified a long-term social transformation that was already almost complete.”Footnote 108
While the existence of free states no doubt provided an impetus to slave flight from Belize to places like Guatemala and Honduras, there was a much longer history of trans-imperial slave movement in the region.Footnote 109 From 1680 to 1790, the Spanish crown offered sanctuary and freedom to runaway slaves, especially those who converted to Catholicism. In 1750, the crown issued a royal decree that granted extensive and blanket emancipation to all slaves proceeding from English and Dutch colonies.Footnote 110 Even after the end of the sanctuary policy, enslaved people continued to cross over to Spanish territory. Slaves from Belize rebuilt their lives across the border, as in a case from 1795 when 32 Belizean slaves became freedmen. Some even intermarried with Maya women in Petén, much to the chagrin of local caciques.Footnote 111 Nor was Belize unique in this sort of movement. Rather we have evidence of slaves from other British colonies such as Essequibo and Grenada also fleeing into colonial Spanish America.Footnote 112 Matthew Restall, who has traced the phenomenon of slave flight from Belize back to the 1730s, notes that there was an increase in the incidence of slave flight in the 1820s in the context of Central American emancipation.Footnote 113 What differentiated the slave flights of the eighteenth century from those in the 1820s was the fact that the concurrence of Central American emancipation and British amelioration gave a de facto legality to this movement and made it increasingly difficult for the British government to press for restitution of slaves.
From the outset political leaders in Central America likened the period of colonialism under the Spanish as one of servitude. A proclamation addressed to the “citizens of the United Provinces of the Center of America” declared: “Hitherto ye had not been masters of your fate. . . . Your actions were tied by the sorrowful cord of slavery.”Footnote 114 Following on its independence, Central America promptly passed a decree abolishing slavery, in 1824. Article 4 of the decree related to fugitives from other nations: “All decrees and orders of the Spanish Government, that establish the freedom of slaves who come from foreign kingdoms to our states to regain their freedom, shall be ratified without prejudice to what is arranged on the matter, by treaties between nations.”Footnote 115 When 19 slaves fled to Petén and 13 to Omoa in 1825, Superintendent Codd wrote to the authorities in Guatemala seeking cooperation in apprehending the runaway slaves.Footnote 116 These slaves had been employed in the mahogany works on the Belize River and had used the recently constructed road connecting Petén and Belize to make their escape. The settlers feared that these desertions if left unchecked would spiral into insubordination and abscondence among the remaining slaves in the mahogany works, particularly since the runaway slaves appeared to be in communication with them.Footnote 117 By February 15, 1825, a total of 120 slaves had reportedly deserted.Footnote 118
Blaming Article 4 of the decree for the desertion of slaves, Codd wrote: “A decree thus openly promulgated of freedom and protection in your Provinces and speaking of orders and Laws of which we never had any knowledge, could not fail to produce on the slaves of this settlement the most dangerous influence.”Footnote 119 Prominent settlers argued that the Central American decree was a deliberate effort to weaken the British settlement: “It was now perfectly clear that the Law had evidently been made with a view to affecting this settlement, as it was now no secret in Petén that Guatemala had sent orders to declare free all English negroes that came there.”Footnote 120 Guatemala, it was felt, was enticing slaves since it lacked a large labor pool and could use the slaves to serve in its troops.Footnote 121 Pointing to “daring threats” circulated by slaves in the settlement, the magistrates argued for white soldiers to be deployed in Belize since black regiments could not be trusted to act against their “fellow countrymen.”Footnote 122
The settlers’ response to the threat of desertion of their slaves can be seen through diplomatic efforts on the part of Superintendent Codd, who presented himself as “the Protector of the interests and properties of his subjects.”Footnote 123 Correspondence between 1825 and 1829 shows Codd's attempts to arrive at a diplomatic solution to this problem with a two-pronged approach: negotiating with Guatemala and gaining support from the British government in London. In a letter to Wilmot Horton, undersecretary to the Earl Bathurst in March 1826, Codd expressed the difficulties of sending an envoy to Guatemala. In the same letter, he suggested that the Central American provinces were weak and might cooperate in the restitution of the runaway slaves if Britain threatened to withhold recognition of the nascent state.Footnote 124 However, Codd's efforts at a diplomatic solution failed. His envoy to Guatemala, Marshall Bennett, was treated as a “subaltern agent” and in July 1826 Codd informed Wilmot Horton of the failure of the mission.Footnote 125
Back in July 1823, almost a year before the decree of emancipation, the authorities of the United Provinces had expressed the desire to establish “liberal and good understanding” with Great Britain. Following Codd's efforts to gain restitution of the slaves, however, Guatemala proved to be inimical to the idea of negotiating with Belize. Instead, by the summer of 1826, Guatemala indicated that it would negotiate on the question of the runaway slaves only through its plenipotentiary to the British crown, and not through Codd.Footnote 126 The latter, on his part, urged the British Foreign Office to act on behalf of the settlement. The prevalent feeling among settlers around the question is evident from an article in the Honduras Gazette and Commercial Advertiser from July 15, 1826: “We know her [Guatemala's] imbecility, her want of everything essential to make a nation, and that her fall is certain—if Great Britain does not preserve her.”Footnote 127 For its part, the Foreign Office in London proceeded cautiously on the issue. As early as 1825, the king's advocate, Christopher Robinson, had urged on George Canning that Foreign Office intervention was needed to resolve the question of runaways to Central America.Footnote 128 By the spring of 1826, the Foreign Office was recommending a “friendly representation” to Guatemala, rejecting Codd's request for stronger measures.Footnote 129
While the issue of slaves presented a practical and immediate issue to resolve between Guatemala and Great Britain, a potentially farther-reaching concern was that of the boundary between Belize and Guatemala. According to the doctrine of uti possidetis, Guatemala sought to inherit the areas that had previously been under Spanish rule. However, despite a series of treaties between Spain and Great Britain, the territorial limits of the Honduras settlement had never been defined, and Spain had sought to maintain its title to the territory while permitting only usufruct rights to the British. Guatemala, by laying claim to the areas previously under Spanish control, presented a direct threat to British sovereignty in Belize. According to Narda Dobson, the persistence of Guatemalan claims against Britain over Belize may have resulted from Britain's reluctance to officially recognize the Central American Federation.Footnote 130 In 1823, a meeting of the national assembly in Guatemala brought to the fore the issue of British rights in the settlement of Honduras.
Throughout the late 1820s, there were intermittent negotiations between Britain and Guatemala over the twin issues of boundary and slaves.Footnote 131 There appears to have been some minor breakthrough: in June 1825 we have evidence that 11 runaway slaves did return to Belize from Petén.Footnote 132 In 1826, Consul O'Reilly attempted to negotiate with Guatemala to suspend the Federation's slave laws with respect to the runaways from Belize.Footnote 133 The settlers’ desperation to effect return of slaves can be seen in Codd's proclamation of January 1826, offering free pardon to all runaways who returned to their owners.Footnote 134 By the beginning of Francis Cockburn's term as superintendent of Belize in 1830, however, the possibility of restitution of runaway slaves looked increasingly remote.Footnote 135
Part of the difficulty in resolving the situation certainly was the commitment to emancipation or amelioration declared by governments of both Central America and Great Britain. The Guatemalan Senate was opposed to the idea of restitution, because it appeared to contravene the nation's constitutional guarantees of liberty, which extended to foreign slaves seeking asylum.Footnote 136 Moreover, following the Demerara Rebellion (1823) and the obstructionist attitude of West Indies assemblies toward amelioration from 1825 onward there was a greater impetus to abolitionist activity in Britain.Footnote 137 In this context, the Foreign Office did not want to appear to be taking the side of slaveholders, particularly since Britain subscribed to the same principles regarding slavery as Guatemala.Footnote 138 Writing to Canning about the Federation's position in February 1826, John O’ Reilly pointed out that “The violent Republican party will never retract the abolition Law of the Constitution, which they say would be degrading, and they rely that the British government will not enforce claims tending to perpetuate slavery.”Footnote 139 In fact, according to one interpretation, Britain's own policies may have contributed to abolition in Latin America. Thus, Schmidt-Nowara writes: “External forces also explain why abolition laws took hold [in Latin America]: the British government effectively enforced the suppression of the slave trade to the newly independent republics. In the 1820s, Britain made slave trade abolition a condition of recognizing independence. One of the questions that its envoys had to answer about new regimes was explicit: “Has it abjured and abolished the Slave Trade?””Footnote 140 Slave flight from Belize to neighboring regions was certainly not a new phenomenon. But the concurrence of the two projects of emancipation allowed for a novel situation in which slave flight was openly supported by the government of Central America and tolerated by Britain. This gave rise to a de facto legality for slave flight that blacks in Belize were able to use to their benefit.Footnote 141
Settler Response: The Narrative of ‘Benign’ Slavery in Belize
Throughout this period, the settlers were at pains to show that slavery in the settlement was benign and that slaves had deserted not due to ill treatment but because of the heightened expectations among slaves resulting from the ‘Indian’ case and from Central American efforts to lure them across the border. Thus, referring to the Central American decree of 1824, Codd wrote: “The treatment also of the negroes in the settlement has been of that excellent nature, that nothing but the visionary hopes, which such decrees are calculated to produce in the minds, could have influenced them to have deserted a home their families and friends where every comfort was afforded them and where slavery existed but by name.”Footnote 142 Indeed, perhaps the slaveholders’ most potent way of responding to the challenges presented by the amelioration period of the 1820s was in crafting a narrative of Belizean slavery as benign and wholesome—a story line that would persist for generations.
In 1824, the Anti-Slavery Society published materials showing abuses of slaves in the settlement, which Superintendent Arthur had collected, The settlers then published a response titled The Defence of the Settlers of Honduras against the Unjust and Unfounded Representations of Colonel George Arthur.Footnote 143 Accusing Arthur of using the issue of slavery to deflect attention from his poor reputation in the settlement and gain support from the British government, the settlers argued that the superintendent had misrepresented the condition of slaves in Belize. Arguing that Arthur's actions were motivated less by altruism than ambition, the report stated that “Colonel Arthur's proceedings throughout have not been actuated by good and worthy motives, but by the sure prospect of aggrandizing himself through the interest of a powerful party at home.”Footnote 144 Not only that, the settlers argued, but Arthur himself had been fomenting discontent among slaves in the settlement. Thus, commenting on the treatment of Bowen, the man accused of mistreating female slaves in 1821, the authors of The Defence claimed that Arthur's actions had been “actuated by feelings of revenge” and that he had interfered with the slaves, “inducing them to revolt” against the magistrate.Footnote 145
The settlers also portrayed Arthur as cruel and calculating toward the slave population, giving as evidence the case of Abraham Cooke, a black slave Arthur had punished with 500 lashes.Footnote 146 Moreover, the superintendent had humiliated and oppressed the settlers and their representatives. The report detailed the case of Archibald Colquhoun, a magistrate who was reduced to a common prisoner and subsequently died of depression.Footnote 147 Ultimately, suggested the authors of The Defence, Arthur had trampled on the freedom of ‘Britons’ and tried to tamper with the laws of the settlement—“all under the specious pretext of suppressing evils which never existed.”Footnote 148 By stressing the liberty of “freeborn Englishmen,” Lester and Dussart suggest, the settler community produced “a very different conception of freedom from that of both the antislavery movement and their humane, autocratic governor.”Footnote 149 The settlers’ characterization of Arthur as cruel and oppressive had far-reaching consequences. It was, as Lester and Dussart write, “the beginnings of a portrayal of Arthur as a touchy, tyrannical despot that historians have perpetuated and applied to his subsequent governorships in both Australia and Canada.”Footnote 150
In his popular 1811 account of the settlement, Captain George Henderson described slavery in Belize as benign compared to other plantation societies in the Caribbean and the United States. He described the “festivity and merriment” among African slaves as the season of felling wood ended, and suggested that their dwellings were comparable to those of their masters.Footnote 151 While the challenges of the 1820s, including the Mosquito Shore case and the ensuing slave flight, had undermined this image of Belizean slavery, the settler elite, in both The Defence and subsequent writings, attempted to recoup this image of the British settlement as a site of ‘benign’ slavery. From its first edition in 1826, the Honduras Gazette and Commercial Advertiser, a weekly newspaper, became the mouthpiece of the settler elite; it was edited in the first year by the magistrates and subsequently controlled by the legislative assembly.
The Honduras Gazette regularly featured news that portrayed settlers as just and merciful toward their black slaves. On June 27, 1826, for instance, it reported the case of King vs. Mary Tillet:
This was a case of a black woman, Margaret Cumming, for her freedom. . .. Her narrative of the circumstances whereby she had unjustly been brought into a state of slavery was clear, and appeared to be borne out by evidence. It caused our deepest commiseration. The trial occupied a considerable time, and after an able charge from the Court, the Jury found for the Prosecution, and thus at once emancipated the unfortunate woman. This trial reflects much credit on the authorities of this Settlement.Footnote 152
A Honduras Gazette editorial on July 22, 1826, asserted that contrary to the negative portrayal of the settlement on the question of slavery, steps toward amelioration of slaves had in fact already been taken by the settlers, even before any action of the metropolitan government. The editorial asserted that “offences committed by white and free people against slaves in the Colonies have been and are punished with tenfold greater severity than exactly similar offences committed in England by one free subject against another.”Footnote 153
The writers of the Honduras Gazette also compared slavery in Belize favorably against labor regimes in other parts of the world. Interestingly, one of the arguments made by the Honduras Gazette was that the slave in Belize was better off than a working-class person in Britain.Footnote 154 Of course in making this case, the settlers in Belize were feeding into a broader pro-slavery rhetoric that promoted the notion that West Indian slaves had better conditions than English laborers, artisans, beggars, and prisoners.Footnote 155 The Gazette also ran regular columns on slavery in other countries, again using them to exalt the slavery practiced in Belize as humane and progressive. On July 22, 1826, the Gazette ran a news piece titled “Horrors of the African Slave Trade, Practised by The French.” Describing Brazilian slaves as “miserable creatures,” the issue of August 12, 1826, deplored the practice in Brazil of importing more slaves from Africa to replenish the labor force, rather than ameliorating the condition of the slaves already there.Footnote 156 The writings in the Gazette reveal the zeal of the settlers in representing themselves as advocates of amelioration but also defenders of the institution of slavery.
Whether in the pages of their Defence or in the columns of the Honduras Gazette, the settlers produced a narrative of Belizean slavery as benign and wholesome. The power of this narrative can be seen from the way in which the narrative was appropriated by the later colonial government. In The Defence, citing the 1798 Battle of St. George's Caye as evidence of the “contentment and good conditions of the slaves in this country,” the settlers described how in the face of the Spanish challenge, slaves “cheerfully and manfully fought for and defended their Masters’ lives and their Masters’ property.”Footnote 157 In 1898 at a Public Meeting preceding the centenary celebrations of the Battle of St. George's Caye, colonial surgeon Charles Eyles used the same image and language of solidarity that the settlers had used in the Defence: “To them [slaves], death with fidelity was more honourable than life with falsity even though it was coupled with freedom. They demonstrated this by their act, for they stood SHOULDER TO SHOULDER with their masters to meet what seemed certain death.”Footnote 158 The Battle of St. George's Caye and the image of solidarity between masters and slaves would become one of the origin myths of Belize, giving rise to the image on the Belizean coat of arms that in some versions depicts a white man and a black man under the shade of a tree and colored popular views of slavery in the settlement. Indeed, the view of Belizean slavery as benign permeated historical works on Belize up to the 1960s and 1970s, and persists to some extent even today.Footnote 159
Conclusion
Up to the early nineteenth century, Belize was a frontier outpost of the British empire, connected only tenuously to the broader legal regimes of the West Indies and the metropolitan government. This lack of imperial legal purview and the ambivalent nature of the settlement allowed for a great degree of autonomy for the local settler elite, who monopolized the land, labor, and systems of law and justice in Belize. The 1820s, which saw the concurrence of British amelioration and Central American emancipation, provided a singular moment that saw a great reversal in the location of sovereignty in Belize. As imperial officials such as Superintendent George Arthur and metropolitan bodies such as Bathurst's Commission on Legal Enquiry contested with local legal bodies and attempted to bring the settlement within the imperial legal purview, the settlers experienced an unprecedented challenge to their autonomy and sovereignty over slavery. The challenge came not just from imperial officials, however; slaves themselves through their petitions and acts of desertion also undermined the settlers’ hold over them and the force of slavery as an institution. The settlers did not, however, go gently into the night. They responded with all means at their disposal, using force, diplomacy, and the print media. Ultimately, they crafted a narrative of Belizean slavery as benign to counter imperial criticisms, a narrative that proved to be surprisingly robust, coloring popular and official notions of Belizean slavery for generations.
