James Anthony Froude, a disciple of Carlyle and friend of Kingsley’s, who had previously travelled to Australia and New Zealand, and to South Africa, visited the West Indies shortly after the celebration of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, in 1887; the event provides part of the framework of the book, as a meditation upon the future of the British Empire, and how that future should be secured. It is safe to say, however, that Froude arrived with his mind made up and returned to Britain with it unchanged.
Froude’s concern at bottom is, like his mentor Carlyle’s, for the long continuance of Britain’s empire, and he shares Carlyle’s aristocratic contempt for democracy, a contempt exhibited throughout the work. An empire, in Froude’s eyes, should be an empire and he applauds the example of imperial Rome where “the sovereign people lost their liberties, and the tongues of political orators were silenced for centuries.”
The nature of Froude’s prejudgment of the issue of race and rule in the West Indies becomes apparent in his description of his voyage out to Barbados:
There was a small black boy among us, evidently of pure blood, for his hair was wool and his colour black as ink. His parents must have been well-to-do, for the boy had been in Europe to be educated. The officers on board and some of the ladies played with him as they would play with a monkey. He had little more sense than a monkey, perhaps less, and the gestures of him grinning behind gratings and pushing out his long thin arms between the bars were curiously suggestive of the original from whom we are told now that all of us come. The worst of it was that, being lifted above his own people, he had been taught to despise them. He had been spoilt as a black and could not be made into a white, and this, I found afterwards was the invariable and dangerous consequence whenever a superior negro contrived to raise himself. He might do well enough himself, but his family feel their blood as a degradation. His children will not marry among their own people, and not only will no white girl marry a negro, but hardly any dowry can be large enough to tempt a West Indian white to make a wife of a black lady. This is one of the most sinister features of the present state of social life there.
While Froude has more to say on the matter of racial inequality and the black people of the West Indies, and I will be discussing it, this passage is noteworthy for three reasons. One is Froude’s use of Darwinian theory to present blacks are a more primitive form of human than whites, the image of a monkey behind bars as at the zoo suggests, however, that Froude wants us to see the boy as subhuman; the second is the way in which he suggests that self-improvement by blacks is futile because, inter alia, blacks have been taught self-hatred, the question of by whom being left as an exercise for the reader; the third is the manner in which he simultaneously makes racist assertions and simultaneously suggests his superiority to white racism, it is white West Indians whose behaviour is sinister not the high-minded author. We cannot be surprised then, when, in describing his voyage from Barbados to Trinidad he delivers himself of more obiter dicta about the black West Indian acquired from his smoking companions:
Evidently they belonged to a race far inferior to the Zulus and Caffres, whom I had known in South Africa. They were more coarsely formed in limb and feature. They would have been slaves in their own country if they had not been brought to ours, and at the worst had lost nothing by the change. They were good-natured, innocent, harmless, lazy perhaps but not more lazy than is perfectly natural when even Europeans must be roused to activity by cocktail…. The curse is taken off nature and like Adam again they are under the covenant of innocence. Morals in the technical sense they have none, but they cannot be said to sin because they have no knowledge of a law, and therefore they can commit no breach of the law. They are naked and not ashamed…. There is evil but there is not the demoralizing effect of evil. They sin, but they sin only as animals without shame, because there is no sense of doing wrong. They eat the forbidden fruit, but it brings with it no knowledge of the difference between good and evil… In fact these poor children of darkness have escaped the consequences of the Fall, and must come of another stock after all.
These uneducable, subhuman dwellers in Eden, furthermore, are incredibly happy under the protection of the British crown, having few needs, no aspirations, and little need for clothing or shelter in the benign tropical climate. A mere couple of centuries of slavery, lighter than what they would have experienced in Africa at the hands of “more warlike races,” had been followed by an era in which the free West Indian black had no more to do than “laugh and sing and enjoy existence.” The black, Froude notes, can be as loyal as a horse or dog and requires the same kind of treatment in order to avoid being made “indifferent or sullen”; under slavery this was the actual relation, but with the end of slavery the only relation between white and black is that of employer and employee, without the “personal communication” that characterized slavery.
The black peasants of Grenada, who had replaced the whites who had “melted away”, were “as litigious as the Irish.” In other respects they were “quite harmless fellows,” conscious of their own limitations, who would prefer “a wise English governor” to a constitution that permitted them to choose their rulers. They were, in fine, inferiors conscious of their inferiority and deferential to their true superiors. Without the rule of the English, Froude does not doubt that within a couple of generations they would fall into “a state like that of Hayti (sic), where they eat the babies, and no white man can own a yard of land.”
In Trinidad, Froude found agitation for an elective element to be added to the crown colony system, as had been done just a few years before in Jamaica. Froude contends that “the local popularities” wanted access to government silver, and this desire for lucre was “dressed up in the phrases borrowed” from English Liberal orators. Froude failed to see why they wanted change, but wanted them to realise that any changes would have to include “the blacks and coolies” who outnumbered the whites considerably. He takes note of a rally at the Savannah calling for the inclusion of elected members in the Legislative Council, but attributes part of the crowd that gathered there to the governor’s batting in a cricket match nearby. To the argument that Trinidad or Jamaica had as much right to self-government as Tasmania or New Zealand, Froude replies that since the majority of the electors in the West Indies would be black peasants, the islands would, once the elective principle had been conceded, not remain much longer in the British Empire. While it would be unwise to deny blacks ownership of land, he declares:
But the ownership of freeholds is one thing, and political power is another. The blacks depend for the progress which they may be capable of making on the presence of a white community among them; and although it is undesirable or impossible for the blacks to be ruled by the minority of the white residents, it is equally undeniable and equally impossible that the whites should be ruled by them. The relative numbers of the two races being what they are, responsible government in Trinidad means government by a black parliament and a black ministry. The negro voters might elect, to begin with, their half-caste attorneys or such whites (the most disreputable of their colour) as would court their suffrages. But the black does not love the mulatto, and despises the white man who consents to be his servant. He has no grievances. He is not naturally a politician, and if left alone with his own patch of land, will never trouble himself to look further. But he knows what happened in St. Domingo. He has heard that his race is already in full possession of the finest of all the islands. If he has any thought or any hopes about the matter, it is that it may be with the rest of them as it has been with St. Domingo, and if you force the power into his hands, you must expect him to use it. Under the constitution which you would set up, whites and blacks may be nominally equal; but from the enormous preponderance of numbers the equality would be only in name, and such English people, at least, as would be really of any value, would refuse to remain in a false and intolerable position.
Unless the British are willing to let the West Indies go, Froude declares, they must be governed in the same manner as India. The blacks must be protected from themselves if the West Indies are to thrive; but with a government based on that of India, “within a generation or two” the islands would be filled with loyal “dusky citizens”. Partially elective government, Froude believes, will only “foster discontent and encourage jobbery”. Self-government is a natural right for Australians and New Zealanders, “who are part of ourselves” but not for West Indian blacks or East Indians who have no ties of sentiment or blood to the English who are, after all, their superiors. Better administrators are needed, however, if the West Indies are to achieve their potential. The West Indies have, unfortunately for them, been used as a training ground for colonial governors rather than administered by men of experience and knowledge.
Dominion status, that is to say full self-government under the crown, for the West Indies, Froude declares, speaking of proposals to federate the colonies in order to create a larger white electorate, would be an absurdity:
A West Indian self-governed Dominion is possible only with a full negro vote. If the whites are to combine, so will the blacks. Let a generation or two pass by and carry away with them the old traditions, and an English governor-general will be found presiding over a black council, delivering the speeches made for him by a black prime minister; and how long could this endure? No English gentleman would consent to occupy so absurd a situation. The two races are not equal and will not blend. If the white people do not depart of themselves, black legislation will make it impossible for any of them to stay who would not be better out of the way.
Froude compares the situation of the West Indies to that of Ireland; just as the establishment of a Catholic parliament in Ireland would lead to the departure of the Anglo-Irish, so too would the establishment of a black parliament in the West Indies lead to the departure of the whites, and in both cases the link to the British Empire would end. In several places, he notes that the white West Indians with whom he spoke wished sovereignty of the colonies to be transferred from Britain to the United States. They were, nonetheless aware, that this would be stoutly resisted by black and brown West Indians who would not take the imposition of Jim Crow lying down.
While blacks and whites are not equal, Froude declares that “there is no original or congenital difference of capacity between them” and given the same opportunities should have the same success, as the example of chief justice Sir Conrad Reeves, whom he met in Barbados, would indicate. But self-government requires more than ability, it requires a long period or collective apprenticeship “under the sharp rule of the strong over the weak, of the wise over the unwise” before members of the latter categories are fit to govern themselves. While blacks “of exceptional qualities” like Reeves or Frederick Douglass can rise given the right opportunities, and should be encouraged, the mass of blacks can only use self-government to their own detriment and “slide back into their old condition” ending any chance of development:
He would not pretend that he could have made himself what he is in Hayti or in Dahomey. Let English authority die away, and the average black nature, such as it now is, be left free to assert itself and there will be no more negroes like him in Barbadoes (sic) or anywhere.
The matter that Froude discussed with Reeves, with which the latter was “naturally” concerned, was the recently-published account of former British consul in Port au Prince, Sir Spencer St. John, Hayti or the Black Republic, which proclaimed that “cannibalism could be practised with impunity” in that country with children being sacrificed “as in the old days of Moloch” and their bodies cooked, salted and eaten. Froude found it hard to disbelieve that “a man in the position of a British resident” could have concocted such a story out of whole cloth, but was, while in Reeves’s company, “prepared to find these stories of child murder in Hayti were bred… of anti-negro prejudice.” After a flying visit to Port au Prince, however, Froude would say that complaints about St. John’s sensational account of Haiti were made “with a degree of anger which is the surest evidence of its truth.” As Froude had promised Reeves that he would look into the matter with an open mind, and that he did not think he could acquire a thorough knowledge of the subject on the basis of a brief visit, we can draw the reasonable conclusion that the openness and honesty he brought to all his inquiries in the Caribbean existed only in his imagination.
In Jamaica he gives us a garbled account of the Morant Bay Rebellion, the execution of George William Gordon, the subsequent surrender of Jamaica’s original colonial charter in favour of crown colony rule, and the reintroduction of elected representation. The last, Froude inaccurately declares, guaranteed the vote to “practically every negro peasant who possessed a hut and a garden.” Froude decries the reform as unwanted, save by some “newspaper writers and mulattoes whom it would raise into consequence.” It is worth noting that Froude says that black peasant proprietors objected to taxes, which were required in order to vote.
Continued imperial rule of the West Indies, by direct means with no grant of political rights to the majority of inhabitants, is, Froude contends, necessary in order to demonstrate the value of the imperial attachment to the white dominions, to protect West Indian whites and blacks from each other, and to ensure the raising of the latter “above the condition of their ancestors” which is only possible under white racial dominance.
The alternatives are dire. Left to themselves the blacks of the West Indies will turn the colonies into new Haitis, “and the nature of things will hardly permit” that this be allowed to happen; that is to say, the Americans will take a hand if the British do not. This is a direct echo of Carlyle’s warning in 1849 that if the British did not flog West Indian blacks into submission, the Americans would do it for them. Unlike Carlyle, Froude casts the issue in terms of a racial noblesse oblige:
We cannot disown responsibility for these poor adopted brothers of ours. We send missionaries into Africa to convert them to a better form of religion; why should the attempt seem chimerical to convert them practically to a higher purpose in our own colonies?
However, he also believes that the inferiority of blacks is inherent. Some blacks may rise in the professions, but the mass of West Indian blacks show no improvement “either in intelligence or moral habits; all the evidence is the other way.” Were he a West Indian, he would feel that only under American rule would he have hope of continued prosperity; the liberal policies of Britain having allowed white West Indians “to sink”. British rule in the West Indies had, in the end, resulted in the creation of “fresh Irelands”, thorns in the imperial side rather than jewels in the imperial crown, and this was the result of politicians in Britain pandering to the crowd.
Froude, thus, far more than Trollope, is Carlyle in the West Indies. Eric Williams states, bluntly, that with the exception of Carlyle no British writer had denigrated West Indian blacks as much as did Froude. Like Carlyle, Froude both sees blacks as inherently inferior, yet disclaims any perniciously racist intent. Williams portrays him as seeing West Indian conditions as “absolute, not relative” and being “above time”; blacks are people without history who need the rule of those who have experienced history. Facts which intrude themselves on his prejudices are cast aside as irrelevant, and the West Indian black is simultaneously full of potential and incapable of development.
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