This rare, and seemingly unrecorded broadside, was issued during the grey-years between the 1807 Abolition Act and the 1833 Emancipation Act. During this time, the focus of many abolitionists and evidently government officials highlighted the appalling treatment of those still enslaved. In 1823, the matter was debated in parliament which eventually passed the “Canning Resolutions”, which among other things outlawed the flogging of women, recognised marriage between enslaved men and women, and allowed for the testimony of enslaved labourers to be used in court.
A salvo in the debate between abolitionists and those representing plantation owners, the broadside reprints extracts from an 1820 correspondence between Sir George Arthur (1784-1854), then Lieutenant Governor of British Honduras, and Henry, third Earl Bathurst (1762-1834), then Colonial Secretary, regarding the iniquity of “the result of a trial … against an inhabitant for excessive cruelty towards a poor slave.” In some horrific detail the Colonial Governor notes the facts of the case, brought against “a free-woman of colour, named Duncannette Campbell … for punishing her Slave called Kitty, in an illegal, cruel, and severe manner, by chaining her, and repeatedly whipping her, and for confining her, a considerable time in the said chains, in the loft of the house!”
Lord Bathurst was known for his paternalistic administration as Colonial Secretary, and despite not supporting the abolition of the practice of slave-owning, was a gradual reformist, a friend of William Wilberforce and critical of mistreatment of the enslaved. Arthur, who had served in the British Army in various theatres during the Napoleonic Wars and was in command in both military and civil roles in British Honduras, was - as demonstrated - here critical of the exercise of justice by the elected magistrates of the Honduran landowning class, and considered amongst the earliest of humanitarian colonial governors. He notes that the prevailing laws allowed for “punishing to the extent of thirty-nine lashes; and therefore the only point for the consideration of the jury, was, whether a greater number of lashes had been inflicted in the present case.” As interpreted by the self-interested Honduran magistrates, who directed the jury as such and ignored other more stark allegations of criminality, this led to acquittal without “five minutes hesitation.”
When this correspondence was cited in the Parliamentary debates, opponents of reform were quick to cite contradictory opinions on the condition of enslaved persons from amongst Arthur’s own reports. However their cause - reliant upon generalities rather than specific examples such as the plight of Kitty - rightly lost out, with the Canning Resolutions being passed unanimously.
Not in OCLC, not in Libraryhub.
Baxter, T.R., “Caribbean Bishops: The Establishment of the Bishoprics of Jamaica and of Barbados and the Leeward Islands, 1824-1843” in Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Vol. 32, No. 3, (September, 1963) p.191.
