Tag Archives: slavery in the British empire

Black soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars

Posted on by
40

Let’s start with numbers. We can get them out of the way so quickly that I can’t resist.

How many Black soldiers fought for Britain in the Napoleonic Wars? 

Dunno. Record keeping was– Should we be kind and call it inconsistent? 

More than I thought isn’t a number that’ll make a statistician happy, but if I’m a fair sample of the English-speaking population (I seldom am but I might be for this) it will tell us something about the history we’re taught. It never crossed my mind that any Black soldiers fought for Britain, for France, or for the Republic of Never Happened.

The history I was taught was (a) boring, (b) often inaccurate, and (3) except for a quick digression into the slave trade, white. And just when I think I’ve cleared its last sticky residue out of my head, I find a few more bits. So, Napoleonic Wars? Of course my mind showed me white soldiers. And my mind was wrong. Although we can’t have solid numbers, we’re talking about a significant block of people. In the British armed forces, they would’ve come from the West Indies, from Africa, from the US, from Canada, from the East Indies, from Britain itself, and from Ireland. 

I don’t suppose I need to remind you that Britain was an imperial power by then.

Irrelevant photo: November sunset

 

Historian Carole Divall says, “It’s often forgotten how many black soldiers were employed by both the British Army and Navy during the period. There were many in the Northamptonshire Regiment, a fair number in the 73rd and probably also the 69th regiments who had both been in the West Indies. No doubt some of the other regiments of the British Army also had black drummers, as did the 1/30th India.”

You can find a website about Black soldiers who served in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire regiments. I’m sure you can find others, but I stopped there.

 

The West India Regiments

The majority of Britain’s Black soldiers seem to have been in the West India Regiments, so let’s focus on them. 

The regiments were formed in the 1790s to fight the French in the Caribbean. The British started out thinking British recruits could handle the fighting, but enough of them died of tropical diseases that the government was left with a problem, which it decided to solve by recruiting Black soldiers, who it was sure were better suited to the climate. 

When I say “recruit,” though, what I really mean is buy. The Caribbean islands were slave economies. And what would seem more natural to a slave-owning power than to buy itself some slaves, both off the plantations and from newly arrived slave ships, and turn them into soldiers? In 12 years, they bought some 13,400 men to serve as soldiers.

The soldiers’ legal status wasn’t clear–were they slaves? weren’t they slaves?–but once they were discharged they became free and some were awarded pensions. Which implies that some weren’t awarded pensions. That, unfortunately, is all I know about that.

The regiments might’ve been formed to fight in the Caribbean, but they ended up fighting wherever they were needed, which included the Battle of Waterloo. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

In 1807, Britain did two things that matter to the story: it abolished the slave trade, although not yet slavery, and it passed the Mutiny Act, which made it clear that the soldiers of the West India Regiments were free and should be treated like any other soldiers. Military discipline wasn’t anything you’d think of as fun, but it wasn’t slavery.

After 1807, the regiments incorporated men the navy had liberated from slave ships (the trade was now illegal, remember) as well as Black soldiers captured from French and Dutch colonies.

Unlike colonial subjects from India and from other parts of the empire, soldiers in the West India Regiments were recognised as part of the British Army. Increasingly, formerly enslaved soldiers got the same enlistment bounty, pay, and allowances as white soldiers, and soldiers of equal rank were equal, which seems, at the same time, stupidly obvious and also amazing.

Compared to the other choices on offer for Black men (working as servants; cobbling together whatever casual work they could) the army would have been an improvement. The work and the pay were steady, and it was a place where Black men in an overwhelmingly white society could find a small community, although that business of people shooting at you and being expected to shoot at them might’ve been off-putting. 

Black soldiers had a high re-enlistment rate.

 

Consider one soldier, Private Thomas James

Thomas James, from the West India Regiments, has been in the news recently because the National Army Museum identified him as–very probably, although not 600% certainly–the subject of an 1821 portrait by a painter whose more usual subjects were, say, the Duke of Wellington or Lord Byron, not lowly privates. The way painters made their money wasn’t by looking around for interesting faces but by charging their subjects. If you wanted to see yourself looking handsome in oils, you paid for the privilege, which is why we find the ordinary riffraff underrepresented and the aristocratic riffraff overrepresented.

In spite of which history has handed us the handsome portrait of a Black private in a bandsman’s white uniform, and it’s said, “You figure it out.” 

The National Army Museum speculates that James’s officers would’ve commissioned the portrait to honor his courage. That’s not impossible and I don’t have a better story to offer, but before we give it our tentative acceptance let’s sprinkle a little salt on top.

Not much is known about James’s background, but that’s typical of enlisted men of the era. He may well have been enslaved. He was illiterate. He breaks into history as one of 9 Black soldiers who received the Waterloo Medal–the first British medal awarded regardless of rank; 38,500 were issued. 

James was wounded by Prussian deserters who were trying to loot the belongings of British officers during the battle of Waterloo. (That’s 1815; you’re welcome. I won’t remember it ten minutes from now either.) It’s an odd little sidelight to the battle: we–or I, at least–imagine everyone out there on the battlefield hacking the hell out of each other after their flintlocks misfired (health and sanity warning: military history isn’t one of my strengths), but here were 20 soldiers assigned to guard the officers’ money, jewelry, silver dishes, and whatever else they considered necessary to the rough and tumble of a military life. And clearly it did need guarding. This wasn’t a safe neighborhood.

We–or at least I–don’t know what happened to the other 19 defenders, but James was seriously wounded. And got a medal. And a portrait, for whatever either of those might’ve meant to him. The portrait shows him holding a cymbal, and along with his white uniform it indicates that he was part of the regimental band.

 

Music and warfare

Musicians were an essential part of warfare. They kept morale up; they communicated with–

C’mon, people. Use your own imaginations here. Whoever. Their own guys on the other side of the battlefield, or hidden in the trees. The system wasn’t good enough to carry letters home but it worked.

But bands weren’t only about the music. Band members flipped their cymbals into the air, swung them under their legs. Military music was full of athletics and show-offery. And Black soldiers were–

Okay, the story goes kind of queasy here. European armies had adopted the idea of military music from the Ottomans, and for a while it was the thing to have Turkish musicians in their bands. Gradually, they replaced them with men of African backgrounds. They weren’t Turkish but they were, you know, exotic. They brought a prestige addition to any military band. And I have no doubt some officer was sitting in a tent somewhere telling another officer, “They have natural rhythm, don’t they?”

I know. You get a little progress on one side of the equation and on the other you lay the foundation for a racist stereotype the next generations will build on. If you’re serious about your history, don’t expect purity. The water’s so murky it’s hard to tell it from the land.

 

So is this a feel-good story?

Depends what you’re wired to feel good about. Historians–or some of them, anyway–argue that the Napoleonic Wars opened up ways for marginalized groups to move half a rung up the social ladder. 

No, I know that’s not physically possible. My best guess is it would’ve been precarious, so half a rung? Yeah, I’ll stand by that, in all its absurdity.

What marginalized groups are we talking about? Jews from Central Europe, who fought in the Austrian and Prussian armies. Catholics from Ireland who fought in the British army. And the people we’ve been talking about: enslaved men of African heritage. 

How far up the ladder did they get? Far enough that a lot of Black soldiers re-enlisted. It doesn’t sound like a great deal from where I sit, but that’s not where they were sitting. It was worth it to them. 

If you want your history smoothly stitched out of feel-good stories, stick to kids’ books. 

What happened after Britain abolished slavery?

Posted on by
21

We’re living through a time when one part of Britain is talking about slavery’s role in making the country a world power and another part is accusing the first part of rewriting history and also of being politically correct and no fun at all. But we’re going to skip over the argument and look at the history itself. 

Britain abolished slavery before its former thirteen colonies and takes some official pride in that, and in the role of its abolitionists, but history’s always being rewritten, otherwise we could have one book on every topic and call it enough. So let’s look at one of the less acknowledged things the British Empire did after it abolished slavery. (That was in 1834, since you asked). Because the story of slavery doesn’t end with abolition. 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: Thrift. I have no idea why it’s called that.

 

The apprenticeship system

When slavery ended, Britain’s Caribbean colonies shifted to an apprenticeship system, which basically said to the slaves, Look, you’re now free, but you’re also so ignorant you need years-long apprenticeships to teach you the ways of freedom. During that time, of course, you’ll work for your former masters and get paid nothing. You don’t know how to handle money anyway. And your former masters will still be your masters, but this is different from slavery because–

Oh, let’s not worry about the details. You wouldn’t understand the subtleties.

Most of the sources I’ve read repeat the system’s rhetoric about getting the slaves used to freedom. It’s the justification was used at the time. One source, though–an academic paper–talks about it as a way for the slaves to buy their freedom from their masters by working forty-five unpaid hours a week for their former masters. That was the behind-the-scenes rhetoric. 

That would’ve been in addition to the money Britain paid slave owners as compensation for having let their property walk free. 

After their forty-five hour weeks, the former slaves could work for themselves or for someone who’d pay them. 

Field slaves would be apprenticed for six years and house slaves for four. 

Why the difference? Not because one group needed more training than the other but because the work of the field slave was more important to the economy. Sugar plantations were central both to the economies of both the colonies and Britain itself. Many a respectable British fortune came from the sugar plantations run by slave labor.

Former slave children under six were freed immediately. 

That’s good, right? 

Well, no, because if you give children under six enough time they become children over six, and as soon as that happened the kids entered into apprenticeships that would last not four years and not six years but until they were twenty-one. 

Many former slaves refused to work as apprentices, at which point the justice system, in the form of local magistrates, stepped in. And who were the local magistrates? People of stature in the community, of course, which is to say planters. Which is to say former slave owners–the people who’d lose money if the former slaves refused to shift quietly into the new system and work for free as apprentices. 

Magistrates could and did impose flogging–a punishment widely used under slavery–or a new punishment, the treadmill, which involved strapping a person to a bar so that their feet had to keep a drum rotating. If they didn’t keep it rolling, it would hit them, hard. A governmental commission sent from Britain to investigate conditions called it an instrument of torture.

Antigua and Bermuda skipped over the apprenticeship system–not for noble motives but because slave owners realized they could make more money by freeing their slaves immediately, paying them a very small daily wage, and leaving them to  feed and house themselves as best they could on the inadequate amount they were paid. Since sugar plantations dominated the economy, other jobs were somewhere between hard and impossible to come by and people were trapped. So slavery ended and–

Have you ever read about wage slavery and rolled your eyes at the overblown rhetoric? Antigua and Bermuda could make a person regret that eye roll. 

 

The end of the apprenticeship system

The apprenticeship system was abandoned early, in 1838, and the former slaves were granted their full freedom. That was due in part to the resistance that former slaves put up, which ranged from “disquiet” and “unrest” to full-scale rioting. Not a lot is written about that–at least not that I found–but at one point St. Kitts declared martial law. Much more is written about abolitionists who shifted over to campaign against the apprenticeship system, and they tend to get the credit for the system’s early end. To historians in Britain, they were more visible than the rebels, and more familiar, and they left a kind of documentation that the rebels couldn’t. 

In Jamaica, where land was going uncultivated, many freed slaves abandoned the plantations and took over what was considered waste land. In other parts of the Caribbean, though, there was no waste land to be had and no alternative to working on the plantations at whatever wage was offered. 

Yes, I do regret that eye roll.