A New System of Restraint: Politics, Law, and Democracy in Postemancipation Jamaica

In the summer of 1833, British abolitionists finally achieved their goal of forcing the British government to decree an end to slavery over the virulent opposition of West Indian planters. When the Jubilee was proclaimed in Westminster, however, the regulations that would govern post-emancipation society had not yet been written. Influenced by their understanding of the Haitian Revolution as a chaotic and bloody catastrophe, abolitionists, British government officials, and free Jamaicans all agreed that abolition should be an orderly process and that afterward the freedpeople should continue growing crops for export. To achieve that goal, they agreed that “a new system of restraint” must be substituted for slavery, a system that coerced Black labor and locked the freedpeople out of the political system.

The British Abolition Act set up a framework for emancipation but left it to the local governments of the sugar colonies to implement it. To do so, the Jamaican government set about constructing a new legal architecture meant to cement the planter hold on political power and guarantee a continuity of Black labor. Planters took advantage of the fact that almost no freedpeople gained the franchise in the 1830s and used their largely unchecked dominance to pass dozens of new laws during the decade, aiming to create a highly regimented free labor economy and a dependent and politically powerless free Black population. Although the British government largely abandoned Caribbean freedpeople to their fate after 1839, the unanticipated growth of Black landholding provided a basis for black political power and led to widespread conflict with the planter elite over the terms of emancipation and democracy, culminating in the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865.