Journal of British Studies 57 (January 2018): 29–52. doi:10.1017/jbr.2017.

179
© The North American Conference on British Studies, 2018

Perceptions of French and Spanish Slave Law in Late

Eighteenth-Century Britain

Matthew Wyman-McCarthy

Abstract This article examines British understandings of the laws and legal traditions
that regulated slavery in French and Spanish colonies in the late eighteenth century, par-
ticularly between the American and French Revolutions. Based on reports from those
with firsthand knowledge of different slave systems, many imperial commentators con-
tended that enslaved persons under French and Spanish rule were treated more
humanely—and consequently worked more efficiently—than those in British jurisdic-
tions. Advocates of slavery reform therefore looked to the slave management strategies
of competitors to help advance their cause. For some, appropriating foreign slave reg-
ulations became a central feature of programs designed to lessen the brutality of
slavery and eventually bring about emancipation. For others, highlighting the compar-
atively benign treatment of enslaved workers in French and Spanish islands served as a
way to pressure the British government to more proactively police slaveholding in its
own colonies. By exploring calls to emulate the slave regulations of rival empires, this
article provides a window onto shifting British attitudes toward both slavery and impe-
rial governance during a period of major political and economic change in the Atlantic
World.

I n winter 1792, at the height of public opposition to the transatlantic slave

trade, army physician and political reformer Robert Hamilton wrote a force-
ful tract adding his voice to the abolitionist cause. After condemning the
traffic on the grounds of justice and humanity, Hamilton sought to convince his
readers that abolition would be economically beneficial as well. Sugar exports
from the British West Indies could be maintained or even increased, he wrote, if
only those already enslaved were treated better. His logic was simple: improved
labor and living conditions would make enslaved persons more efficient workers,
lengthen their working lives, and reduce acts of resistance. In thinking about ways
to ameliorate slavery, Hamilton drew inspiration from foreign sources. Arguing
for the creation of an empire-wide slave code, he encouraged British lawmakers to
“imitate the French,” whose “code noir contains many admirable regulations respect-
ing the diet, cloathing [sic], treatment, government, discipline, morals, and religion
of the Negroes.” Citing customary practice on the Spanish island of Cuba, he

Matthew Wyman-McCarthy is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Hampshire. He is grateful

for feedback on earlier versions of this work from audiences at the Imperial Comparisons Conference at
Oxford, the 2016 meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Modern
British History seminar at Columbia University. He also thanks Holger Hoock, Peter Walker, and anon-
ymous reviewers for the Journal of British Studies for their helpful suggestions. Funding for this research
came from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the American Philosophical
Society.

29

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 30 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

recommended that British slaves be provided limited opportunities to earn wages,

which they could then use to gradually purchase their freedom. Like French laws,
these “Spanish regulations” were known to “have great and good effects” and to
“take away entirely the sting of slavery.” If such policies were implemented in
British islands, Hamilton believed, “the colonies would flourish; the Planters
become rich; morality and order would be practised … and perpetual harmony
prevail.”1
Hamilton’s call to emulate the slave management practices of rival empires rested
on his conviction that enslaved Africans in foreign islands were “far more humanely
treated than in the British.”2 He was not alone in this opinion. During the final third
of the eighteenth century, Britons who had spent time in the West Indies regularly
reported that enslaved persons in French and Spanish colonies were both more
content and better workers than those under British rule. According to the former
captive Olaudah Equiano, they “were better treated, had more holidays, and
looked better than those in English islands.” The Governor of Jamaica, John
Dalling, acknowledged that slaves “certainly are under much better regulations
among them than with us.”3 This information fed into growing anti-colonial preju-
dices in the imperial metropole, leading a number of analysts to conclude, as Josiah
Tucker did, that “English planters in general treat their slaves, or suffer them to be
treated, with a greater degree of inhumanity than the planters of any other European
nation.”4 Other observers wrote favorably of the systematic efforts by Catholic
powers to baptize and instruct the enslaved in the principles of religion, and of
laws placing limits on the authority of slave owners.
According to some British commentators, slavery reform was an economic neces-
sity: sugar exports from Saint-Domingue outpaced those from all British Caribbean
colonies combined during much of the latter eighteenth century, and the compara-
tively mild treatment of French slaves appeared to help explain the productivity
gap.5 Others emphasized the moral imperative not to be outdone in what the Earl
of Hopetown referred to as “the race of humanity.”6 They therefore urged their
government to set nationalistic pride aside and to borrow policies from imperial
rivals. “The Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, have set examples,” asserted
the pamphleteer Africanus, “which the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland
may be proud to follow.” As an anonymous contributor to the Templar counseled

1
Robert Hamilton, An Address Intended to Have Been Delivered at a Meeting of the Inhabitants of Ipswich,
on Friday, February 17th, for the Purpose of Considering the Propriety of Petitioning Parliament, for an Abolition
of the Slave Trade (Ipswich, 1792), 50–52.
2
Ibid., 22.
3
Oladuah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, rev. ed., ed. Vincent Carretta (New
York, 2003), 161; Colonel John Dalling, “Observations on the Present State of the Island of Jamaica,”
(unpublished manuscript), 1774, Osborne c524, unpaginated, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
4
Josiah Tucker, Reflections on the Present Matters in Dispute between Great Britain and Ireland; And on the
Means of Converting These Articles into Mutual Benefits to Both Kingdoms (London, 1785), 10.
5
Christa Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Char-
lottesville, 2014), 161–62; J. R. Ward, “The Profitability of Sugar Planting in the British West Indies,
1650–1834,” Economic History Review, n.s., 31, no. 2 (May 1978): 197–213.
6
Earl of Hopetown, 25 June 1788, in The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the
Year 1803, ed. T. C. Hansard, 36 vols. (London, 1806–20), 27:645.

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 31

his countrymen, “while we affect to despise the foibles of other nations, let us not
blush to emulate their virtues.”7
Contemporaries attributed the superior treatment and conditions of enslaved
persons in foreign colonies to a variety of factors. French and Spanish slave
owners were more likely than were their British counterparts to be resident on
their estates, for instance, or to own modest-sized plantations unencumbered by
debt. Cited more frequently than structural differences, however, were differences
in the legal regimes that regulated New World slavery. Whereas slave codes in the
British Caribbean were promulgated by colonial assemblies composed largely of
slaveholders, Britain’s rivals appeared to possess standardized rules that originated
in Europe and extended outward. In Spanish colonies, traditions derived from
Roman civil law delimited the authority of masters over slaves and yielded liberal
manumission policies that appeared to explain the comparatively high number of
free people of color in Spanish America. In French colonies, slaveholding was medi-
ated by the 1685 royal ordinance that came to be known colloquially as the code noir.
The statute protected slaves from arbitrary violence, guaranteed minimum amounts
of food, clothing, and rest from labor, and mandated that all slaves be baptized in the
Catholic faith. It charged a specific official in each colony with ensuring compliance,
and made manumitted slaves naturalized French citizens.8 In identifying the code noir
in particular as worth emulating, British advocates of slavery reform focused on these
clauses while almost entirely ignoring others, including those authorizing brutal
forms of slave punishment such as mutilation and death. They also overlooked
both the myriad ways in which colonists of all nationalities evaded regulations and
European governments’ limited capacity for enforcement in colonial settings. In
their selective and abstracted readings of foreign slave laws, though, reformers
detected both a spirit of compassion and models for how to make British slavery a
more humane institution.
While historians have long recognized that comparing British slavery unfavorably
to other slave systems was common among imperial analysts, the patterns, implica-
tions, and strategies behind these comparisons have gone curiously unexamined.
Most scholars who have studied slave regulations in multiple empires have sought
to assess the accuracy of contemporaneous assessments. Through comparing
metrics such as mortality and manumission rates in different colonies, they have
tried to determine the extent to which differences in the lived experience of slavery
can be traced to variations in legal systems.9 Summarizing the current consensus,

7
Africanus [William Leigh], Remarks on the Slave Trade, and the Slavery of the Negroes (London, 1788),
75; “Remarks on the Villenage of Our Ancestors, and the Slavery of the Negroes in the West-Indies, with a
Proposition for a Negro Code,” Templar, no. 1 (1789): 62.
8
For overviews of the code noir, see Leo Elizabeth, “The French Antilles,” in Neither Slave nor Free: The
Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, ed. David Cohen and Jack P. Greene (Bal-
timore, 1974): 134–71, at 141–44; Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in
New France (Williamsburg, 2014), 122–32. On Spanish slave law, see Alan Watson, Slave Law in the Amer-
icas (Athens, 1989), 40–62.
9
Debate over the comparative severity of New World legal regimes began in the 1940s when sociologist
Frank Tannenbaum asserted that slavery was milder in Spanish than in British colonies based on higher
manumission rates in the former. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas
(New York, 1947). Notable subsequent works to explore comparative slave law include David Brion
Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966), 262–88; Elsa V. Goveia, West Indian

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 32 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

James Epstein writes that “British laws were generally harsher than those of either
France or Spain.”10 Another body of literature has highlighted how foreign slave
practices served as templates for British policies from the 1800s to the 1820s,
when ameliorating slavery became a formal government objective. This research,
however, has largely overlooked how endorsements of French and Spanish legal tra-
ditions in the latter eighteenth century provided precedents for later government-
driven reforms.11 In short, while scholarship on both comparative slave law and ame-
lioration has done much to contextualize British slave management within a wider
Atlantic context, a focus on specific laws has deflected attention away from questions
about how and why eighteenth-century Britons compared slave regulations in the
first place.
This article, by contrast, examines comparisons themselves. What foreign customs
and policies did commentators identify as most suitable for British colonies? What do
they reveal about the priorities of those who made them? Can they tell us something
about the relationship between slavery and issues such as colonial governance and
imperial sovereignty? In exploring these questions, I focus primarily on commentary
about French and Spanish slave regulations from the end of the American War of
Independence to the beginning of the wars with revolutionary France. During this
decade, hitherto disparate misgivings about the Atlantic slave system coalesced
into an organized movement, as slavery came to be hotly debated in pamphlets,
newspapers, parliament, and throughout the public sphere.12 For a core group of
abolitionists whose writings drove debate in this period, the practices of Britain’s
chief imperial rivals provided models for their own programs of slavery reform,
proving both the feasibility and advantages of amelioration. Influenced by these pro-
posals, other British writers came to recommend emulating foreign laws, and like-
wise used the comparative deficiencies of British slave management as a way to
prod their government into more proactively policing slaveholding in its colonies.
Between 1783 and 1793, over thirty publications explicitly endorsed at least some
aspect of French or Spanish slave policy.
Beyond their varying impact on the slavery debate in Britain, these texts are signifi-
cant because they offer a window onto evolving attitudes toward empire more

Slave Laws of the 18th Century (Eagle Hall, 1970); Watson, Slave Law in the Americas; Sue Peabody and
Keila Greenberg, eds., Slavery, Freedom, and the Law in the Atlantic Word: A Brief History with Documents
(New York, 2007); Rebecca Scott, “Slavery and the Law in Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurispru-
dence, and Justice,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (November 2011): 915–24.
10
James Epstein, The Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age
of Revolutions (Cambridge, 2012).
11
For example, see J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration
(Oxford, 1988); Epstein, The Scandal of Colonial Rule; Robert Luster, The Amelioration of Slaves in the
British Empire, 1790–1833 (New York, 1995); Noel Titus, The Amelioration and Abolition of Slavery in Trin-
idad, 1812–1834: Experiments and Protest in a New Slave Colony (Bloomington, 2009); Kit Cadlin, The Last
Caribbean Frontier (Basingstoke, 2012). A recent exception is Caroline Spence, “Ameliorating Empire:
Slavery and Protection in the British Caribbean, 1783–1865” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014),
esp. 27–54.
12
Seymour Drescher, “The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism,” Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 4 (Fall
2012): 571–93; Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill,
2006), esp. chaps. 6 and 7; John Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of
Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester, 1995).

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 33

broadly in the final decades of the eighteenth century. As a spate of recent scholarship
has shown, defeat in America generated extensive discussion in the postwar years
about the morality, structure, management, and even goals of Britain’s increasingly
global and multiethnic empire.13 Within this ferment, many proposals for reform
combined humanitarian policies toward non-Europeans with efforts to centralize
imperial governance within metropolitan institutions.14 Emulating certain foreign
slave practices appealed to both these impulses, as it appeared to offer the imperial
state a way to morally rejuvenate its empire while simultaneously actuating its
claim to sovereignty over West Indian colonies. While comparisons with rival
empires did not necessarily lead analysts to uncover a connection between moral
rule and centralized governance, it did contribute to this general trend. Studying per-
ceptions of French and Spanish slave regulations, therefore, helps illustrate how
Britons sought to reorient their nation’s overseas agenda during a transformative
decade in Britain’s imperial history.

IMITATING THE FRENCH

Though slavery reform had been raised by a handful of writers from the Seven Years’
War onward, the topic only began garnering widespread attention with the publica-
tion of James Ramsay’s 1784 Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves
in the British Sugar Colonies.15 Based on his twenty years as an Anglican clergyman in
Saint Christopher, as well as his travels around the West Indies as a naval surgeon
prior to that, Ramsay concluded that slavery throughout the region was a brutal insti-
tution. His long residency in the Leeward Islands in particular, however, convinced
him that enslaved persons in French colonies were appreciably better off than those
under British rule. French planters on neighboring islands were more likely to be res-
ident on their estates, Ramsay wrote, and to “live more in a family way among their
slaves, than our planters.” Consequently, they “naturally contract a regard and affec-
tion for them.”16 Reinforcing this paternalistic relationship was the code noir, which

13
For example, see Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
(New York, 2011), 5–20; Peter Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the
British Empire after American Independence (Oxford, 2012); Jack P. Greene, Evaluating Empire and Con-
fronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 2013), esp. 296–340.
14
Abolitionism is identified as part of this wider project in a number of important works on late eigh-
teenth-century imperialism, including Greene, Evaluating Empire, 317–32; Eliga Gould, The Persistence of
Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the America Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2000), 128–29; Andrew
Jackson O’Shaugnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadel-
phia, 2000), 241–48; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), 350–60.
15
James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies
(London, 1784).
16
Ibid., 52–61, 92–95, 274–76, at 59–60. While French slaveowners in the Leeward Islands were in
fact more likely than were their British counterparts to reside on their plantations, this pattern did not
extend to Saint-Domingue, where larger estates and increased sugar production enabled higher rates of
absenteeism. See David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Dom-
ingue (Oxford, 1981), 7–12, 24–26; Malick Ghachem, “Prosecuting Torture: The Strategic Ethics of
Slavery in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (November 2011):
985–1029, at 996.

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 34 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

stood in stark contrast to the minimalist slave codes in British colonies. The latter,
Ramsay asserted, contained “not a single clause … to secure to them [slaves] the
least humane treatment or to save them from the capricious cruelty of an ignorant,
unprincipled master.” The code noir, on the other hand, restrained the power of
masters, and outlined the responsibilities of slave owners alongside their rights. To
Ramsay, it demonstrated an “attention and benevolence of the French Government,
that may well put British negligence to shame.”17
Ramsay’s commendation of French slave policy became one of the most seized
upon parts of his Essay. To be sure, previous writers had also lauded French legislation
and practices. In his 1776 Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith identified “the good man-
agement of their slaves” as the principal reason for “the prosperity of the sugar col-
onies of France … [and their] superiority over those of the English.” Nearly two
decades earlier, Edmund Burke and his cousin William had praised the code noir’s
“just and sensible mixture of humanity and steadiness,” describing the ordinance
in detail in hopes it would “excite an emulation in us [Britons].”18 Moreover, the
government’s decision to retain French civil law in Quebec in 1774 had demon-
strated that legal borrowing—even legal pluralism—could be an effective strategy
of imperial rule. Commentary supporting this decision occasionally raised the possi-
bility of applying the code noir to Britain’s Caribbean colonies.19 Prior to Ramsay,
though, no writer had made imitating French slave practices a central part of a com-
prehensive system for improving Britain’s sugar islands. Reviewers highlighted the
contrast between French and British slavery as one of the Essay’s principal themes,
and subsequent writers cited the tract when putting forth similar comparisons.
Predictably, Ramsay’s chapter on French slave management also attracted the ire of
British slave owners. In his initial response to the Essay, the absentee planter James
Tobin accused Ramsay of being eager “to embrace every opportunity” to extol the
virtues of “our inveterate and natural enemies.” Only a “rooted prejudice …
against his old friends and acquaintance[s] of the English islands,” Tobin wrote,
could lead Ramsay to claim that slaves were better off under French rule.20
Ramsay rebutted the charge by declaring Tobin “the first stranger, who, on going
from an English to a French Charib island … has not been insensibly struck with
the superior advantages to the French slaves.”21 The two men continued to exchange

17
Ramsay, Essay, 63, 54.
18
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London, 1776),
2:395–97; [Edmund and William Burke], An Account of the European Settlements in America, 2 vols.
(London, 1757), 2:44–49, at 47, 48.
19
For example, see Thoughts on the Act for Making More Effectual Provision for the Government of the Prov-
ince of Quebec (London, 1774), 17–19; William Knox, The Justice and Policy of the Late Act of Parliament, for
Making More Effectual Provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec, Asserted and Proved, and the
Conduct of the Administration Respecting That Province Stated and Vindicated (London, 1774), 56–57.
20
A Friend to the West India Colonies [James Tobin], Cursory Remarks upon the Reverend Mr. Ramsay’s
Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (Salisbury, 1785), 23, 46. In his
testimony before a House of Commons committee years later, Tobin claimed to have “had some personal
acquaintance” with slaves in French islands, and to have “taken some pains to inform myself of their sit-
uation.” James Tobin, 26 February 1790, House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century,
ed. Sheila Lambert, 147 vols. (Wilmington, 1975), 71:274.
21
James Ramsay, A Reply to the Personal Invectives and Objections Contained in Two Answers, Published by
Certain Anonymous Persons, to an Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves, in the British Col-
onies (London, 1785), 86.

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 35

intensely personal accusations and counter-accusations over the coming years, pub-
lishing a combined seven tracts between 1784 and 1788. Each one featured compar-
isons between the nature of slavery in French and British colonies, and writers who
joined the discussion often questioned either Ramsay’s or Tobin’s account of French
slaveholding in making their case for or against reform. According to Ottobah
Cugoano, for instance, the “crafty author” Tobin provided “sundry comparisons
and descriptions of the treatment of slaves in the French islands … contrary to
what is the true case.” Like Ramsay, Cugoano insisted that the treatment of the
slaves in French islands was considerably “milder” than in British ones.22
In his Essay, Ramsay identified two types of clauses in the code noir as particularly
estimable: those protecting the physical and material welfare of enslaved persons, and
those designed to foster Christianity among them. Included in the former category
were articles outlining the minimum amounts of food and clothing that masters
were required to provide, along with clauses specifying fixed periods of rest from
labor. Other aspects of the code’s protective mandate limited the types and extent
of punishment masters could legally inflict by assigning set penalties to common
transgressions. While the punishments outlined were harsh (including death for
recidivists), British analysts tended to focus on the fact they were codified, were in
theory known to all French slaves, and were administered by public officials. To abo-
litionists such as William Dickson, this standardization served to “abridge
the exorbitant powers of owners and managers, and … effectually secure the
COMFORT, protect the PERSONS and the LIVES” of the enslaved. Urging the
British government to adopt a similar pan-imperial slave code, he noted what “a glo-
rious emulation” it would be “for two great nations to rival one another in justice and
humanity.”23
The second aspect of the code noir endorsed by Ramsay concerned the promotion
of Christianity among the enslaved population. Issued the same year in which the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes formally proscribed Protestantism in France,
the code noir was part of a wider effort by Louis XIV to extend religious uniformity
throughout the nation and its empire. Taken together, its first five articles forbad the
public exercise of any religion but Catholicism and mandated that all slaves be bap-
tized into the faith. Though he vehemently opposed Catholic doctrine, Ramsay com-
mended the seriousness with which both France and Spain heeded the call to spread
the gospel. Like other writers who deemed it a “disgrace” that “religious instruction
has been more attended to in the Popish colonies than in the English,” Ramsay
denounced what he saw as “the listless indifference of Protestants.”24 To overcome
Britain’s hitherto negligence, the Essay recommended “imitation of the Roman Cath-
olics in bestowing baptism” on the enslaved and extending the sacrament of Christian
marriage to them.25 Ramsay also appealed to Britain’s political and ecclesiastical
leaders to follow France’s lead by sending more missionaries to the West Indies to
work specifically with Africans and their descendants.

22
Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (London, 1787), 18.
23
William Dickson, Letters on Slavery (London, 1789), 169–70, 100.
24
[Joseph Woods], Thoughts on the Slavery of the Negroes (London, 1784), 26; James Ramsay, An
Inquiry into the Effects of Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade, and of Granting Liberty to the Slaves in
the British Sugar Colonies (London, 1784), 38.
25
Ramsay, Essay, 261, 284.

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 36 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

In part, Ramsay’s call to more vigorously propagate the gospel abroad reflected a
long-standing fear that Catholic powers were winning the competition between
nations and denominations for non-European converts. Over the course of the eigh-
teenth century, a handful of British observers had taken note of successful Jesuit
efforts to spread the faith among indigenous peoples in the Americas. William
Wilberforce, for one, sought information on Jesuit strategies in the belief that they
would “prove a most useful subject of investigation for anyone who would form a
plan for the civilization of Africa.”26 In the West Indies in the 1780s and early
1790s, a number of Ramsay’s fellow clergy echoed his warning about Catholicism
outpacing Protestantism. In Grenada, home to both French and British-owned plan-
tations, Church of England ministers reported that “the Roman Catholic priests …
have laboured with much Assiduity,” and that “there is little or no Hope of our
making proselytes” at a similar rate without greater support from Britain. As Rever-
end William Gordon substantiated, “in places where Popery and Protestantism are
professed as in the island of Grenada, the Negroes are more inclined to Popery”
because of their greater exposure to it.27 Based on reports from clergy throughout
the West Indies, the Oxford divine William Agutter put the origins of this discrep-
ancy succinctly: “The Spaniards, the French, and the Portuguese, endeavour to
instruct, to improve, and to convert their slaves: but the Protestants the English
do not.”28
While foreign practices and regulations were of interest to a number of Britons
concerned with growing Protestantism abroad, the code noir held particular appeal
for those who believed that control over one’s body and labor were necessary precon-
ditions for understanding religion and—by extension—for moral personhood.
During the final decades of the eighteenth century, this position was most associated
with converts to evangelicalism. Both within and outside the Church of England,
evangelicals made the case that security in the necessities of life was a requisite for
freely choosing Christianity: only once one’s physical needs were met, they argued,
could a person devote sufficient time and energy to contemplating God. According
to this worldview, spiritual bondage was a by-product of the intensity of physical
bondage. Ending the former therefore required mitigating the latter.29 With its
dual emphasis on securing the physical and spiritual welfare of the enslaved, the
code noir offered a template for simultaneously ameliorating the hardships of
slavery and cultivating an understanding of Christianity.
In the years following the American War, no one made this argument more directly
than did Beilby Porteus, the evangelical bishop of Chester. Based largely on informa-
tion provided by Ramsay, who himself held evangelical leanings, Porteus in 1783
delivered a sermon before the annual meeting of the Society for the Propagation

26
William Wilberforce to William Robertson, cited in John Charles Pollock, Wilberforce (London,
1977), 76.
27
Clergy of Grenada to Beilby Porteus, St. George’s, Grenada, 30 September 1788, Fulham Papers, vol.
20, fols. 18–19, Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL); William Gordon to Beilby Porteus, Exuma,
Bahamas, 2 September 1792, Fulham Papers, vol. 15, fol. 90, LPL.
28
William Agutter, The Abolition of the Slave Trade Considered in a Religious Point of View; a Sermon
Preached before the Corporation of the City of Oxford, at St. Martin’s Church, on Sunday, February 3, 1788
(London, 1788), 24.
29
The most thoroughgoing examination of evangelical theology and antislavery remains Roger Anstey,
The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, 1975), esp. 157–99.

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 37

of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. In it, he urged trustees of the church-owned Codring-
ton plantation in Barbados to implement a series of reforms, many modelled directly
on the “admirable regulations” contained in the code noir.30 The following year,
Porteus presented the Society with a comprehensive plan for ameliorating slave life
on Codrington that further extolled French policy.31 Arguing that efforts to
educate slaves in Christianity could only succeed if accompanied by measures to
protect their physical wellbeing, he implored Codrington’s trustees to “compose a
Code Noir for their own estates,” consisting of “certain grants and privileges,
which they [slaves] should have a right to claim, and of which it should not be in
the power of a cruel and oppressive manager to deprive them.”32 Upon his transla-
tion from Chester to the bishopric of London in 1787, Porteus assumed ecclesiastical
authority over all British colonies. From this position of influence, he continued
advocating slavery reform along French lines, frequently asking clergy stationed in
the West Indies about the applicability of French laws to British islands.33

ALTRUISM AND AUTHORITY

For Beilby Porteus, a more humane and expansive slave code had the potential not
only to ameliorate slavery in the West Indies; it could also, he hoped, catalyze a
moral reformation in colonial societies more broadly. As the activist bishop recog-
nized, though, effectively enforcing legislation would be as central to realizing
these goals as passing new regulations in the first place. In thinking about the
issue of compliance, Porteus again drew inspiration from the French. If French
slaves “are not fed and cloathed [sic] as the laws prescribe, or if they are in any
respect cruelly treated,” he wrote, “they may apply to the Procureur, who is
obliged by his office to protect and redress them.”34 As Porteus correctly observed,
the procureur was a public official (often a colony’s attorney general) whose principal
responsibilities included hearing slaves’ complaints, interceding in disputes between
slaves and masters, and prosecuting masters in cases of abuse or neglect. The post can
be traced back to the Roman civil law position of defensor civitatis—an official
charged with representing disadvantaged social groups before the state. In the impe-
rial context, it had analogs in the Spanish offices of protector de esclavos (also known as
síndico procurador) and protector de indios. Along with highlighting the French procur-
eur, Porteus singled out the protector de indios as offering a model for a protector

30
Beilby Porteus, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts (London, 1783), 15. Porteus reports having “corresponded & conversed” with Ramsay
prior to writing his sermon in “Porteus Diary,” Porteus MS 2099, fols. 57–59, LPL. Reviews of Porteus’s
sermon tended to identify emulating the code noir as one of its principal aims. For example, see “Review of a
Sermon…,” Gentleman’s Magazine, no. 53 (October 1783): 859–60.
31
Beilbly Porteus, “An Essay towards the More Effectual Civilization and Conversion of the Negro
Slaves, on the Trust Estate in Barbados…,” in The Works of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, ed. Robert
Hodgson, 6 vols. (London, 1823), 6:165–217, esp. 176–200 and 206–7.
32
Ibid., 190.
33
Few copies of Porteus’s letters to the West Indies survive, but extant responses clearly indicate the
questions he asked. See assorted letters to Porteus from 1788 to 1791 in Fulham Papers, vols. 15–20, LPL.
34
Porteus, Sermon, 16.

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 38 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

figure for Britain’s sugar islands.35 In his view, protective offices in French and
Spanish colonies imbued efforts to regulate relations with non-Europeans with a
degree of efficacy and impartiality that was absent in the British West Indies.
Porteus was far from alone in arguing that the only way to realize slavery reform
was for the imperial state to take an active role in its enforcement. As commentators
pointed out, colonial judicial and police apparatuses were composed almost entirely
of colonists, who naturally regarded slaves—not masters or overseers—as most in
need of monitoring. This absence of a supervening authority effectively made slave
owners, as the former chief justice of Saint Vincent put it, “beyond the reach of
the law.”36 Though statutes in all colonies prohibited the wilful murder of enslaved
persons, Africanus noted that in the history of the British West Indies there had not
been “above three or four instances of Planters” having been charged for the crime;
“still fewer of them have been punished.”37 A culture of impunity also meant that
revised slave codes passed in the 1780s and 1790s—part of the plantocracy’s effort
to forestall abolition—were, as William Wilberforce told parliament, “a dead
letter.”38 The lawyer Arthur Browne applauded many articles in Jamaica’s Consoli-
dated Slave Act of 1792, for example, but noted that “to give energy and effect to
that act, some public officer is wanting, OBLIGED to defend the rights of the
negroes.” “In this respect,” he continued, “the French Colonies have the advantage
… their Code Noir is much more forcible … [since] a King’s Attorney was bound
to prosecute wherever he learned of abuses.”39 After remarking on how British
slaves “receive harsher treatment than those belonging to the French or Spaniards,”
a correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine made the same point with a rhetorical
question: “What are laws,” he asked, “in the hands of those whose interest is to
pervert them?”40
As the above comments indicate, most analysts who called for a protector figure
for British colonies identified safeguarding the physical welfare of enslaved persons
as the office’s primary responsibility. Among a smaller group of individuals who
developed more detailed programs for slavery reform, however, at least a handful
hoped to imbue the position with a much wider set of duties in order to help
advance their ambitious agendas. James Ramsay, for instance, called for a state-
appointed officer both to enforce statutes and to provide moral instruction to the
enslaved population. By “mixing the authority of the master … with the exhortations
of the teacher,” this individual would inspire in those under his care a “love for his
doctrine,” guiding them towards more Christian lives.41 Similarly, Beilby Porteus

35
Porteus, “An Essay,” 198–200. On Spanish protective offices, see Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and
the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4
(November 2007): 659–92, at 665 and 670–71; Spence, “Ameliorating Empire,” 47–52.
36
Drewry Ottley, in Lambert, ed., House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, 82:158.
The retired jurist went on to recommend that instead of an individual, “councils of protection or guardians
should be appointed … to inspect the treatment of Slaves, and to see that those provisions which may be
made for their benefit are put in force.” Ibid., 161.
37
Africanus, Remarks on the Slave Trade, 53.
38
William Wilberforce, 18 April 1791, Parliamentary History of England, 29:273.
39
Arthur Browne, A Compendious View of the Civil Law, Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures Read in
the University of Dublin, 2 vols. (London, 1798), 1:66–67.
40
“Letter to the Editor,” Gentleman’s Magazine, no. 58 (March 1788): 211–12.
41
Ramsay, Essay, 269–70.

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 39

envisioned a relatively expansive mandate for a position he referred to as “Guardian

of the Negroes.” Beyond acting as “a legal protector for the injured slaves” (like the
“pleasant and delightful institution” of the French procureur), the “Guardian”
would work alongside a catechist to advance slaves’ “moral and spiritual concerns.”42
Long an admirer of both French and Spanish slave management strategies, Edmund
Burke made a protective office central to his 1780 Negro Code—a seventy-four-
point plan for regulating slavery and the slave trade, and for gradually eliminating
both.43 As in the French system, in Burke’s scheme the attorney general of each
colony would assume the position of “Protector of Negroes,” responsible for secur-
ing slaves’ material welfare, interceding in disputes with masters, and investigating
breaches of the code. In parts of his plan, though, Burke went well beyond any
French or Spanish precedent. Among other things, his proposed “Protector” was
to keep a registry of slaves; inspect ships upon arrival in the West Indies to ensure
regulations during the Middle Passage were met; identify enslaved children of excep-
tional intelligence to be sent to London to be educated; and purchase the freedom of
“any Negro who shall appear to him to excel in any mechanical art.”44 While aspects
of his program were remarkably quixotic, Burke nonetheless believed wide-ranging
reforms could be attained if overseen by a public official charged primarily with
defending the welfare of slaves—not the interests of masters. That both he and
Porteus would have charged a protector figure with sending regular reports to offi-
cials in London underscores how they conceived the position as involving the super-
vision of masters and slaves alike.45
In terms of policy, calls to establish protective offices in British islands went
unheeded until the early nineteenth century. But in antislavery publications in the
1780s and beginning of the 1790s, advocates of reform used the fact that such an
institution existed in French islands in order to underscore a troubling contradiction
that lay at the heart of Britain’s Atlantic empire. Eighteenth-century Britons consid-
ered themselves the most politically free people in Europe, and colonists had long
argued it was the extension of English common law to the colonies that provided
them the right to legislate on internal matters. As appendages of an absolutist
state, French islands, by contrast, were more squarely under the authority of the
king and his administrators across the ocean. Yet as a number of British writers
pointed out, it was precisely this concentration of sovereignty that imbued royally
appointed officials with both the right and ability to monitor slavery in French col-
onies. That such an authoritarian system led to the comparatively benign treatment
of enslaved peoples presented what some described as a paradox. As the novelist
James White put it, “That arbitrary power should ever be a friend to liberty, or to
the alleviation of slavery, may appear a thing too opposite to its very nature to be
admitted. But so it is.” The cleric and political economist Josiah Tucker stated the
matter similarly: “[T]hough absolute governments are tyrannical themselves, they
are also a great check on the tyranny of their subjects.” Tucker proceeded, “The

42
Porteus, “An Essay,” 176, 198.
43
Edmund Burke, “Sketch of a Negro Code,” [1780], Windham Papers, Add. MS 37890, fols. 3–12,
British Library (hereafter BL). Subsequent references from Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Hon-
ourable Edmund Burke, 16 vols. (Boston, 1826), 5:188–212.
44
Ibid., 211.
45
Ibid., 197; Porteus, “An Essay,” 208.

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 40 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

English planters are more their own masters … than those of any other nation,” but
“the very form of the English constitution, originally calculated for the preservation
of liberty, in this instance tends to destroy it.”46 In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
identified the correlation between colonists’ lack of political liberty and the humane
treatment of slaves as not unique to the French empire. Casting his gaze as far back as
ancient Rome, he concluded that “the history of all ages and nations” proved that
“the condition of a slave is better under an arbitrary than under a free government.”47
The relationship that British writers detected between centralized government and
the welfare of enslaved persons did not mark a wholesale endorsement of the French
imperial system. As Linda Colley has shown, the association between French abso-
lutism and political oppression remained strong in the British psyche well into the
nineteenth century.48 Yet the notion that slaves under French rule were better off
than those under British authority did help throw light on tensions inherent in the
structure of sovereignty in the British Atlantic. For the author Henry Lemoine, it
underscored the hypocrisy of colonists who clamored for political liberty while mis-
treating their human chattel; as he noted in 1786, “[S]laves in French colonies are not
nearly so much oppressed as those who are under the descendants of Britons, who
boast so loudly of their birthright.”49 A decade earlier, Adam Smith had cited the
comparative defects of British slave regulations as proof of the danger of a system
in which “the authority of the assembly over-awes the executive.”50 Many who
read his writings agreed. These included Thomas Burgess, future bishop of St
David’s, who in 1789 cited “the gentle usage” of French slaves as an argument for
endowing colonial governors with greater power to enforce legislation. Burgess
acknowledged that emulating the “mild despotism of France” would represent “a
paradox,” but claimed it was the only way to prevent enslaved persons from contin-
uing to be “treated with greater cruelty in the British colonies, than in the French and
others.”51 Recommendations from advocates of slavery reform in the West Indies
often substantiated these opinions, such as one from the Barbadian estate manager
Samuel Estwick. While Estwick supported an empire-wide slave code modelled on
the code noir, he conceded that enforcing such a law would be difficult due to “the
limited power of our monarchy” compared to “the Crown of France.”52 Also
writing from Barbados, Reverend John Duke informed Granville Sharp that officials
on the island would require the same level of “legislative or gubernatorial Authority”

46
James White, Hints for a Specific Plan for an Abolition of the Slave Trade, and for the Relief of the Negroes
in the British West Indies (London, 1788), 18–19; Tucker, Reflections, 10.
47
Smith, An Inquiry, 2:395.
48
Colley, Britons.
49
Henry Lemoine, The Kentish Curate, 4 vols. (London, 1786), 4:138–39. A politically attuned read-
ership would have detected in Lemoine’s remarks echoes of Samuel Johnson’s famous 1775 questioning of
why the “loudest yelps of liberty” came from “the drivers of negroes.”
50
Smith, An Inquiry, 2:391.
51
Thomas Burgess, Considerations on the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade, upon the Grounds of
Natural, Religious, and Political Duty (Oxford, 1789), 89, 128, 95. Burgess quoted Smith at length
while making the case that variances in British and French slave management were due to “difference of
civil government in the two parent states.” Ibid., 83–95.
52
Samuel Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause Commonly So Called, Addressed to the Right Hon-
ourable Lord Mansfield, 2nd ed. (London, 1773), 26.

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 41

as existed in French colonies if ameliorative regulations had any hope of being

implemented.53
In the final decades of the eighteenth century, it was not only assumptions about
the superior treatment of French slaves that lead British commentators to encourage
their government to consolidate and enhance its control over empire. The loss of
America and waning authority in Ireland both demonstrated the consequences of
allowing colonial elites too much political autonomy. The displacement of indige-
nous peoples in mainland North America proved that, without proper oversight, col-
onists would disregard the welfare of non-Europeans in furthering their aims.
Perhaps most significantly, proliferating stories about rapacious East India
Company officials revealed the devastating effects of allowing private enterprise over-
seas to go unchecked. These and other examples of abuse all called into question the
natural right of Britain’s ruling class to manage the affairs of the empire, and in so
doing put pressure on politicians to reign in the autonomy of various imperial
actors.54 Within this wider political environment, it was becoming increasingly
clear to those with misgivings about West Indian slavery that ameliorating the insti-
tution could not be left to the initiative of colonists. Perceptions of foreign slave
policy in general, and of protective offices in particular, appeared to confirm this
link between centralized authority and moral imperium. Similar to the lessons fur-
nished by other spheres of empire, then, thinking about slavery in a pan-Atlantic
context led analysts to conclude that meaningful reform could only occur if slavehold-
ing were brought under the aegis of the imperial state.

FROM AMELIORATION TO EMANCIPATION

Not without reason, slave owners in the years following American independence
tended to view proposals for empire-wide slavery reform modelled on foreign regu-
lations as threats to colonial self-government. Yet looking at the theme of slavery
amelioration over a longer timeframe reveals that planters were not always wholly
averse to borrowing policies and strategies from their competitors. Concerned by
the meteoric rise in sugar exports from Saint-Domingue from the Seven Years’
War onward, a number of British slaveholders studied the agronomy, technologies,
business models, and slave management practices employed on French plantations
as part of their effort to make slaveholding more efficient and profitable.55 In his
three-volume History of Jamaica (1774), for instance, Edward Long highlighted
the merits of French slave regulations in a number of places. According to Long,
well cared-for slaves who were protected from abuse were strong, efficient
workers. Moreover, good treatment led to longer working lives and higher birthrates,

53
Duke to Sharp, St Thomas, Barbados, 27 March 1784, 13/1/D20, Gloucestershire Records Office
(hereafter GRO).
54
P. J. Marshall, “Empire and Authority in the Later Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Com-
monwealth History 15, no. 2 (January 1987): 105–22; Christopher A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British
Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (New York, 1989); Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonial-
ism, esp. 296–340.
55
On planter-led amelioration, see Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic,
1750–1807 (New York, 2013); Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in
Western Culture, 259–60.

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 42 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

thereby requiring French planters to purchase fewer Africans annually than British
planters in order to maintain their workforces. Because French laws made sound eco-
nomic sense, Long appended an annotated translation of the code noir to his History,
hoping it would be received “not merely as [a] matter of curiosity, but [as] an
example … worthy [of] our imitation.” Anticipating the language of metropolitan
reformers in the decades to come, he rhetorically asked his fellow slave owners,
“[W]hy should we not … interweave so much of their jurisprudence, a[s] may
serve to render our own more compleat [sic] and valuable?” “Let us not to be deaf
to instruction,” Long urged, “even though it comes from our rival.”56
In addition to curbing the physical and material hardships of slavery, elevating the
spiritual condition of the enslaved was also cited by reform-minded planters as poten-
tially both socially and economically advantageous. Their logic was simple: convert-
ing slaves to Christianity would make them more accepting of authority and less
prone to resistance. As “A Professional Planter” who claimed that French slaves
were “incomparably better disposed than our own” argued, “every endeavour …
should be used in imitation of the French, to create a due reverence” for religion,
as this would contribute “not only to the spiritual good of the slaves, but to the tem-
poral benefit of the master.”57 An “Inhabitant of Jamaica” noted that regular religious
instruction fostered the values of “Obedience, Honesty, and Faithful Servitude,” which
would lead to a reduction in slave executions for criminality and “a very large savings”
for slaveholders.58 These assessments paralleled those contained in letters from clergy
and officials in the West Indies to advocates of slavery reform in Britain. Based on
their experiences, a number of correspondents reported that internalizing Christian
teachings would make slaves more accepting of both their earthly fate and their
masters’ discipline. “If religious instructions and humane treatment were practiced
here as in the French colonies,” one clergyman in Jamaica informed Beilby
Porteus, “the internal peace of this island would be most effectively secured.”59
The acting Governor of the Virgin Islands likewise expressed to Porteus his certainty
“that instructing slaves in the Christian Religion will render them more tractable and
trusty, and Consequently more usefull & valuable to their Proprietors.”60
These reports helped reformers make the case to planters that dispatching mission-
aries to work with enslaved persons would in no way undermine existing labor rela-
tions in the West Indies. In fact, they claimed just the opposite would occur: that
regular religious instruction would enhance masters’ control over those in bondage
and, ultimately, the profitability of slavery itself. As Ramsay argued, once religion

56
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 2:440–41; 3:921–34, at 921.
However, though holding out the code noir as an exemplar for British colonies, Long also claimed that
the law was frequently evaded. Ibid., 2:140, 3:935–36. This became a common refrain among British
slave owners in the following decades. For example, see Bryan Edwards, An Historical Survey of the
French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo (London, 1797), 10.
57
A Professional Planter [Dr. Collins], Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of
Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (London, 1803), 226, 216, and 223.
58
An inhabitant of Jamaica [Reverend Doctor John Lindsay], “A Few Conjectural Considerations upon
the Creation of the Human Race Occasioned by the Present Quixottical Rage of Setting the Slaves from
Africa at Liberty” (unpublished manuscript), 1788, Add. MS 12439, fols. 173b and 183b, BL.
59
Stanford to Porteus, Westmoreland, Jamaica, 22 July 1788, Fulham Papers, vol. 18, fol. 68a, LPL.
60
William Twinbull in T. Lyttleton to Porteus, 25 October 1788, Fulham Papers, vol. 20, fols. 106–7,
LPL.

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 43

makes “an impression on their [slaves’] minds … submission to their masters and a
full obedience to their commands … are strongly inforced [sic].” Porteus made this
point even more laconically: “The best Christian[s],” he told one colonist, “make
the best servants.”61 Yet coming from individuals such as Ramsay and Porteus, this
argument would have struck slave owners as at least somewhat disingenuous.
Despite assuring planters that reforms would strengthen slavery, both men also
expressed a clear (though muted) desire to one day see the institution eradicated.
While on the one hand telling West Indians that reforms would make slaves more
“tractable,” Ramsay, for instance, also wrote of his hope that “regulations would
lay a foundation for that far distant time … when liberty shall claim every exiled
African for her own.” According to Porteus, it would be “wonderfully pleasing …
if the Negroes on any of our plantations were emancipated gradually.” Joseph
Woods, who enthusiastically endorsed the code noir, also expressed a dual desire.
Laws designed to lessen the plight of slaves were worthwhile in their own right,
he wrote, but the end goal of legislation pertaining to the sugar colonies should be
the “gradual … but total abolition of slavery.”62
For those who supported the eventual goal of emancipation, foreign laws and prac-
tices appeared to offer a number ways to further this objective. None was more sig-
nificant than the effect that slavery reform was expected to have on enslaved persons
themselves. With few exceptions, eighteenth-century emancipationists believed that
slaves ought to be educated in Christian family life and other prerequisites for citizen-
ship prior to being granted full freedom. Liberty, they contended, was a gift to be
bestowed only to those whose personal conduct demonstrated their commitment
to European values and norms. As Edmund Burke put it, slaves must be “fitted to
fill the office of freemen” before they attained the status.63 In this line of thinking,
slavery was cast as a period of apprenticeship during which enslaved persons could
become “civilized” through learning the importance of labor discipline, obedience
to authority, and moral probity. With its standardized rules and attention to religious
instruction, the code noir was seen by some activists as a proven template for inculcat-
ing these values. By endowing slaves with a basic set of rights, a comparable code in
British colonies would help raise the physical, intellectual, and moral conditions of
those in bondage, thus equipping them with the tools necessary to handle the
demands of future freedom. In this sense, legislation modelled on the code noir
could pave the way for British colonies to one day transition from a slave to a
wage labor system with minimum social disruption.
Another way to prepare enslaved men and women for freedom was to invest them
with greater responsibility for their personal, familial, and communal welfare than
was hitherto customary. According to a number of writers on the topic, providing
slaves with greater influence in shaping their lives and futures would help them
develop both the skills and outlook required for self-determination. They therefore
put forward proposals that sought to protect certain spheres of slave life from unwar-
ranted interference by masters. While some called for laws prohibiting the separation
of husbands and wives, similar to those in effect in French and Spanish colonies,

61
Ramsay, Essay, 163; Porteus to unknown, London, 22 May 1788, Fulham Papers, vol. 20, fols.
188–89, LPL.
62
Ramsay, Essay, 286; Porteus, Sermon, 23; [Woods], Thoughts on the Slavery of the Negroes, 31–32.
63
Burke, “Negro Code,” 211.

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 44 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

others applauded foreign legislation that prevented owners from selling slaves off of
their estates to pay debts. In order to instill a respect for the law, Ramsay and Gran-
ville Sharp each endorsed the idea of courts in which enslaved persons would judge
and penalize their own for misdemeanor violations against each other and the com-
munity.64 In what would have amounted to a more fundamental restructuring of
colonial slavery, some supporters of emancipation proposed paying slaves a modest
income for their labor. In the short run, it was hoped, the ability to acquire and accu-
mulate property in the form of wages would condition enslaved men and women to a
sense of ownership over their futures. In the longer term, it would prepare them for
the market economy in which, once emancipated, they would be expected to will-
ingly participate as agricultural workers.
Earning and accruing wages could also contribute to manumission in a more direct
way. As Christopher Brown has observed, a number of British proposals for eman-
cipation from the era of the American Revolution featured avenues through which
enslaved persons could use their earnings to buy their freedom. In most of these
schemes, liberty was to be worked out gradually and by degrees: only once an indi-
vidual could pay a predetermined sum and demonstrate compliance with other con-
ditions would he or she be granted full independence.65 In working through the
logistics of self-purchase, some proponents of the idea drew inspiration from the
Spanish practice of coartación. Having evolved customarily in Cuba from the six-
teenth century onward, coartación was based on slaves hiring out their labor to
their masters during days off in exchange for funds to be put towards manumission.
Cortado slaves (that is, slaves who had negotiated a payment schedule with their
masters, and had the agreement approved by a judge) generally began their period
of bondage with one day off per week.66 Once they saved the requisite income,
they could then purchase a second day per week, to be used for wage labor as
well. This process would continue until an individual earned enough money to
buy his or her freedom. Though coartación was not formally written into Spanish
colonial law until 1842, by the final decades of the eighteenth century its basic con-
tours were well established. Moreover, enslaved men and women by this decade had
succeeded in bringing the practice under the oversight of colonial officials. Not only
did judges record and enforce agreements between owners and cortado slaves, but
they also determined the price of full freedom, which could not be altered once set.67
Whereas French slave law was codified and widely accessible to British readers,
information about Spanish slave practices was difficult to come by. Though British
officials were struck by the good treatment of Cuban slaves when they toured
parts of the island during Britain’s brief occupation in 1762–63, no one at the
time formally recorded Spanish slave practices. Indeed, the first published

64
Ramsay, Essay, 193; Sharp, “Proposals for the Gradual Enfranchisement of the Slave in a West-India
Estate Sent to Mr. *** with Mr. Ramsay’s Book against Slavery,” box 3826, 13/3/55, fols. 1–3, GRO.
65
Brown, Moral Capital, 234–36.
66
The term cortado comes from the verb coartar, meaning to “limit” or “cut off ” (that is, to cut off the
period of enslavement). Herbert Aimes, “Coartación: A Spanish Institution for the Advancement of Slaves
into Freedmen,” Yale Review 18 (February 1909): 412–31, at 414.
67
The most thorough English-language study of coartación is de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of
Legal Rights.” See also Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum
Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 339–69; Watson, Slave Law, 51–56;
Peabody and Grinberg, Slavery, Freedom, and the Law, 16; and Aimes, “Coartación.”

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 45

description of coartación in Britain did not appear until 1776, coming in the form of
an appendix to an antislavery tract by Granville Sharp. Titled “The Regulations lately
adopted by the Spaniards, at the Havanna, and some other Places, for the gradual
enfranchisement of Slaves,” the appendix was based on information supplied by the
London merchant Brook Watson, who had spent part of his teenaged years in
Cuba aboard his uncle’s ship.68 Based on Watson’s recollections, Sharp reported
that Cuban slave owners were “obligated, by law” to provide slaves with one
working day to themselves, and to pay them “the wages of a freeman” if they
labored on that day. Once a slave had earned the equivalent of one-fifth the cost of
his initial purchase, he could then use those funds to redeem a second day per
week, “and so, likewise, the remaining four days, at the same rate … after which
he is absolutely free.” In addition to outlining the steps involved in the system of
self-purchase, Sharp advertised its advantages to slave owners. The prospect of
freedom would spur even the indolent to industry, he claimed, and the gradualness
of the process would ensure those who did obtain liberty were first “enured [sic]
to the labour of the country,” making them “the most useful subjects that a colony
can acquire.” Believing the price of full manumission to be roughly equivalent to
the enslaved persons’ original cost, Sharp also emphasized how coartación enabled
slave owners to recoup their initial investment, thereby rendering slaveholding “less
expensive to the planter.”69
Sharp’s appendix generated significant interest within emerging abolitionist circles
in the decade and a half following its publication. During this period, over a dozen
British writers included a description of what came to be known as “the Spanish Reg-
ulations” in their own antislavery tracts. In almost all of these pieces, the author also
called attention to the merits of aspects of French slave policy. The proliferating
awareness and endorsement of coartación in the Anglo-Atlantic world was largely
the result of Sharp’s own initiatives. As early as 1772, he had sent a sketch of the
practice to a Quaker correspondent in Pennsylvania, who in turn relayed it to the
physician and abolitionist Benjamin Rush. Rush proceeded to publish and distribute
the information throughout the mid-Atlantic colonies.70 Heartened by “the most
extraordinary manner” in which the idea was received, Sharp continued disseminat-
ing accounts of self-purchase in Cuba to correspondents ranging from planters to
estate managers to clergy.71 Accompanying each of these descriptions were suggested

68
Granville Sharp, The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God, Compared with the Unbound Claims of
Africa Traders and British American Slaveholders (London, 1776), 54–55. Sharp identifies Watson as his
“only authority,” in Sharp to David Barclay Esq., “Copy of a Letter to the late worthy Bishop of Peterbor-
ough (Dr. Hinchliffe) dated 12 March 1781, towards the close of the American War,” box D3549, 13/1/
P23, GRO. My thanks to Caroline Spence for sharing her notes on Watson with me. In a letter to an
unidentified correspondent, likely written in 1772, Sharp notes, “I have never seen an account of the
Spanish regulations in writing.” Sharp to unnamed, in A Pennsylvanian [Benjamin Rush], An Address
to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements, on the Slavery of the Negroes in America… (Philadelphia,
1773), 20.
69
Sharp, The Just Limitation of Slavery, 54–55.
70
[Rush], An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements, 20–21. A number of publications
simply copied verbatim from Sharp’s letter, as published by Rush. For example, see the anonymous anno-
tations in John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (Philadelphia, 1774), 43.
71
Sharp to Barclay, undated, box D3549, 13/1/P23, GRO; Sharp to Barclay, 23 May 1807, box D3549,
13/1/B6, GRO.

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 46 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

modifications, such as having cortados begin their enslavement with one and half days
to themselves instead of one, and defining a work day as no more than ten hours.
Despite such recommendations, Sharp assured his correspondents, “All these propos-
als concur for the most part in the same points, and contain nothing inconsistent in
each other.”72
Yet because coartación was an evolved rather than a codified practice, ambiguity
concerning its details remained even once its essential features were widely known.
In 1781, Sharp himself asked Brook Watson to confirm the veracity of his appendix,
confessing that it might reflect a “defective memory” of their conversation years
earlier.73 Charged with investigating slavery in foreign colonies, even government
officials complained in 1789 about their inability to procure reliable information con-
cerning the practice.74 As late as 1807, no less an authority on West Indian slavery
than Thomas Clarkson appealed to Sharp for “an accurate account of the Spanish
Regulations,” seeking clarity in particular about the rate at which slaves could pur-
chase days from their masters.75
Difficulty obtaining a definitive account of the particulars of coartación did not
prevent the idea of self-purchase from featuring prominently in British schemes for
emancipation. In his 1780 Negro Code, Edmund Burke stipulated that freedom
by degrees should be made available to every enslaved man over the age of thirty
with at least three children “born to him in lawful matrimony,” whose “good behav-
iour” and “regularity in the duties of religion” could be vouched for by a minister.76
James Ramsay proposed creating a table specifying fixed salaries for fixed periods of
labor. While he argued that slaves should be allowed to use their earnings to buy out
their liberty, he also believed that those thus emancipated should be required to work
on plantations for a set period after becoming free. “In this situation,” he wrote,
former masters would act as the “patrons and benefactors” of liberated slaves, and
“would still have the same people to do their work, [but] better than at
present.”77 Beilby Porteus agreed that enfranchised slaves “should be obliged to con-
tinue for a stated time, as day-labourers on the plantation, and at a certain price.” Like
Sharp and Ramsay, he too sought to convince planters of the merits of self-purchase,
claiming that former slaves who had earned their freedom—“a new race of free,

72
Sharp, “Proposals for Gradual Enfranchisement,” box 3826, 13/3/55, fols. 2–3, GRO; Sharp to
Archbishop of Canterbury, 9 October 1788, box 3811, 13/1/C3, GRO.
73
Sharp to Watson, 26 February 1781, box D3549, 13/1/W9, GRO.
74
Officials did report, though, that coartación was sufficiently widespread to help explain the “near
Twenty Thousand free People of Colour in the City of Havannah alone.” Proportionally, this made the
free black population of Cuba significantly larger than that of British colonies. Lambert, House of
Commons Sessional Papers, 70:377. Britain’s ambassador to Spain, William Eden, obtained a written
description of coartación in 1789 as part of a proposed slave code for Cuba, but few Britons appear to
have taken note of the document. “Real cedula … concediendo libertad para el comercio de negros con las
islas de Cuba,” Auckland Papers, Add. MS 34429, fol. 27, BL.
75
Clarkson to Sharp, London, 27 May 1807, D3549/13/C15, GRO.
76
Burke, “Negro Code,” 211. There is no mention of coartación in Edmund and William Burke’s sec-
tions on slave regulations in their 1757 An Account of the European Settlements in America. This absence
suggests that Burke only became aware of the practice at a later date, perhaps via Sharp’s appendix. The
Negro Code also contained a clause identical to the Spanish custom of pedir papel, whereby a magistrate
could order a master to sell a slave who had been abused to a new owner. Burke did not acknowledge
the Spanish influence on his proposals for either self-purchase or forced sale.
77
Ramsay, Essay, 130–31.

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 47

hardy labourers, who had been brought up in habits of industry, and accustomed to
the heat of the climate”—would do “more work in less time … than any equal
number of slaves.” Alongside the “humanity” of the practice, this anticipated produc-
tivity gain made it “greatly to be wished that some expedient of this kind might be
tried, at least as an experiment, in some of the English islands.”78
Though confident in the myriad benefits that self-purchase would bring masters
and slaves alike, Porteus did not believe all enslaved persons should be eligible for
it. Representing perhaps the most restrictive position among those Britons who
endorsed the Spanish custom, Porteus wrote that earning freedom by degrees
should be available to only the most deserving—“a reward of superior merit and
industry, and of an uncommon progress in the knowledge and the practice of Chris-
tianity.” By restricting eligibility “to a very few,” self-purchase “would operate as a
most powerful and irresistible instrument of conversion.”79 Other advocates of
emancipation called for a more expansive application of the practice. The theologian
Philip Howard, for example, encouraged the government to purchase one day of
freedom per week for every slave over the age of twenty-one, to begin them on
the path to manumission. Another writer suggested that former slaves be allowed
to buy the freedom of their kin by similar degrees, envisioning this process as
leading to the eventual eradication of slavery throughout Britain’s empire.80
Further proponents of coartación recommended that slaves begin their period of ser-
vitude with two working days to themselves, or be permitted to buy out their time in
installments of less than one-fifth their purchase price.81 However, while various
writers emphasized and modified different components of what they understood
to be “the Spanish Regulations,” almost all followed Granville Sharp’s lead in high-
lighting the economic benefits of such a system to slave owners.82 Most commonly,
they argued that the prospect of self-purchase would make slaves more dutiful
workers and condition them for wage labor post-emancipation, as well as stressed
that when their bondage was over, “the proprietor would be reimbursed the initial

78
Porteus, “An Essay,” 201; Porteus, A Sermon, 23. The Baptist minister Robert Robinson claimed
“some gentlemen have made trials similar to this in the main in the British plantations with great
success,” but provided no corroborating evidence. Robert Robinson, Slavery Inconsistent with the Spirit
of Christianity: A Sermon Preached at Cambridge, on Sunday, Feb. 10, 1788 (London, 1788), 37.
79
Porteus, A Sermon, 22; Porteus, “An Essay,” 201.
80
Philip Howard, The Scriptural History of the Earth and of Mankind, Compared with the Cosmogonies,
Chronologies, and Original Traditions of Ancient Nations (London, 1797), 85–87; Essays Commercial and
Political, on the Real and Relative Interests of Imperial and Dependent States, Particularly Those of Great
Britain and Her Dependencies (Newcastle, 1777), 135–40.
81
Stanford to Porteus, 22 July 1788, Fulham Papers, vol. 18, fol. 65a, LPL; Tucker, Reflections, 11;
Essays Commercial and Political, 138; William Roscoe, A General View of the African Slave-Trade, Demon-
strating Its Injustice and Impolicy: With Hints towards a Bill for Its Abolition (London, 1788), 36.
82
To my knowledge, no British slave owner in the eighteenth century publically endorsed coartación. In
an unpublished manuscript from 1788, however, Jamaican slaveholder John Lindsay discusses the poten-
tial social and economic benefits of select manumission. His ideas contain many similarities with the
Spanish model of self-purchase, though he does not acknowledge any foreign inspiration. Similar to met-
ropolitan abolitionists, Lindsay made the case that liberating those with over ten years of “good service”
and unblemished characters could have a “good effect” on the morals and productivity of the entire slave
population. He also promoted having “umpires” (“judges of freedom”) oversee the process. Lindsay, “A
Few Conjectural Considerations,” fols. 162–84.

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 48 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

cost of them.” In myriad ways, then, coartación was “so perfectly agreeable to the
principles of political economy.”83
Beyond coartación’s utility in plans to reform and end colonial slaveholding, the
practice also served a useful rhetorical function for abolitionists. Similar to lauding
the code noir, discussing coartación provided an opportunity to draw comparisons
with supposedly unenlightened foreign nations in ways that highlighted the inhu-
manity of British colonial laws. Since Spain, even more than France, had traditionally
been associated with violence and despotism in the New World, commentary about
the superior situation of Spanish slaves arguably called attention to British callous-
ness and the scandalous neglect of the metropolitan government even more emphat-
ically.84 Asked an anonymous essayist, “Shall the English, ever famed for courage and
humanity, be out done in the latter by a nation in many instances notorious for
cruelty? Let not they who boast of their own freedom … be greater tyrants and
oppressors of their fellow-creatures than the subjects of a despotic monarch are.”85
The celebrated organist James Nares wrote to Granville Sharp about the paradox
of the nation that pioneered the Catholic Inquisition managing its slaves with
“more good Policy and Humanity” than Protestant Britain. Sharp shared his
friend’s insight, claiming that self-purchase demonstrated that “even the cruel Span-
iards are more civilized and show more mercy to their slaves at present than the
English.”86 The political writer Thomas Cooper likewise criticized the hypocrisy
of his countrymen who “exclaim against Spanish cruelty” despite Spain’s compara-
tively liberal approach to manumission. “Englishmen ought deeply to blush,” he
wrote, that they had not “preceded the French and Spanish” in providing avenues
to freedom for enslaved people under their jurisdiction.87
Cooper’s inclusion of French manumission policies alongside coartación in the
above admonition is revealing. Though the code noir contained no mention of
wages, slave property, or self-purchase, its final four articles allowed masters to
free slaves without penalty, as well as guaranteed manumitted slaves the same
rights as freeborn persons. The code also placed those recently manumitted
under the tutelage of their former masters, in order to ease the transition from
slavery to freedom for both parties. Some British commentators erroneously
described these measures as akin to coartación. These included Joseph Priestley,
who claimed that the French placed freedom “within the reach of the more indus-
trious of the slaves, as it is with the Spanish.”88 A greater number, however, shared

83
White, Hints for a Specific Plan, 18; Joseph Townsend, A Journey Through Spain in the Years 1786 and
1787, 3 vols. (London, 1791), 2:381–82.
84
The Black Legend of Spanish rapacity in the Americas reached its peak in the seventeenth century,
though vestiges lingered for centuries thereafter. See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies
of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, 1998), 87; Maria DeGuzman,
Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minneapolis, 2005);
and William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–
1660 (Durham, 1971). For a different view, see Gabriel Paquette, “The Image of Imperial Spain in
British Political Thought, 1750–1800,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 2 (2004): 187–214.
85
Essays Commercial and Political, 136.
86
Nares to Sharp, London, [date illegible], box D3549/1/N3, GRO; Sharp, The Just Limitation, 54.
87
Thomas Cooper, Letters on the Slave Trade (Manchester, 1787), 24, 27.
88
Joseph Priestley, A Sermon on the subject of the Slave Trade; Delivered to a Society of Protestant Dissenters,
at the New Meeting, in Birmingham; and Published at Their Request (Birmingham, 1788), 8–9, 30.

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 49

Cooper’s view that the code noir’s concluding clauses reflected “the same spirit” as
the Spanish Regulations: namely, they suggested that slavery could be temporary
rather than permanent, and that Europeans could have a positive impact on Afri-
cans and their descendants by exposing them to “evolved society.”89 Moreover, as
in the case of self-purchase, French policy on manumission stood in stark contrast
to British colonial codes, many of which, in order to limit the size of the free black
population, levied heavy fines on slave owners for liberating their slaves.90 For
observers like Cooper, the details of foreign approaches to manumission were
often less significant than the basic fact that other governments appeared to
condone, facilitate, and even encourage the freeing of enslaved persons.
Of course, viewing foreign slave policies as engendering emancipation rested on
highly selective readings of them. Further, like reformers’ commendation of
French and Spanish slave policy more generally, this conclusion was rooted in
abstract interpretations of regulations themselves, not their application. As Ale-
jandro de la Fuente as shown, contextual factors such as the availability of labor
in a given region often determined whether or not an enslaved person had the
opportunity to negotiate cortado status. Evidence also suggests that only a fraction
of cortados ever achieved manumission, owing to the length of the process and
limited access to legal advocates such as síndico procuradors.91 Limited contact
with protector figures was also a reality for enslaved persons in French islands
where, even when procureurs were called in to enforce the code noir, it was
almost always to prosecute and punish slaves. In his study of Saint-Domingue
legal records, Malick Ghachem uncovered only one instance over the entire colo-
nial period of an enslaved person successfully using the justice system to press
charges against an owner. On only a handful of occasions were owners charged
by government officials with violating sections of the code proscribing the
murder, torture, brutalization, or improper maintenance of their human
chattel.92 Ironically, the French state’s lack of control over slaveholding was
most pronounced in the late 1780s, right when favorable descriptions of French
slave management were peaking in Britain.93 Further underscoring the discrep-
ancy between British perceptions and colonial realities is the fact that, in each
year from 1785 to 1790, French planters were the foremost purchasers of
African slaves in the New World.94 In Spanish America as well, slave-based mer-
chant capitalism had reached a “fever pitch” by 1790, thanks largely to an expand-
ing agricultural frontier and increased access to commercial credit.95 Most Britons
who lauded their rivals’ slave management policies as humane and tending

89
Cooper, Letters, 24.
90
For slave manumission as a public concern in British colonies, see Watson, Slave Law, 63–82.
91
De la Fuente, “Slaves and Legal Rights,” 662, 666–69.
92
Ghachem, “Prosecuting Torture,” 994–95, 1017.
93
Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York, 2012), 145–66; David
Patrick Geggus, “Saint-Domingue on the Eve of the Revolution,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution,
ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington, 2009): 3–20, esp. 12–14; Jeremy Popkin,
You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 2010), 28–33.
94
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/estimates/
BP4CEWLf, accessed 25 January 2017.
95
Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, 2006), 83.

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 50 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

towards freedom were either willfully ignorant of these realities or elected not to
grapple with them in the texts they produced.

CONCLUSION

By 1788, foreign slave regulations had attracted the attention of the British govern-
ment. In February of that year, in response to mounting public opposition to the
slave trade, the Privy Council launched a comprehensive inquiry into the Atlantic
slave system. One of its stated objectives was to collect information “relating to
the Advantage which the French West India Islands are supposed at present to
enjoy over the British Islands, and the Reasons and Circumstances on which these
superior Advantages appear to be founded.” To this end, heads of examination
were sent to colonial assemblies inquiring “whether many of the regulations in the
French Code Noir might not be adopted in our Colonies as well for the Benefit of
these people [enslaved Africans] as for the advantage of the Planters?” The assemblies
were also asked about the feasibility of implementing “the Spanish Regulations” in
British colonies.96 In the House of Commons investigation that same year, it too
approached its work from a comparative perspective, soliciting the merits and short-
comings of different slave systems from witnesses with firsthand knowledge of them.
The Commons committee also studied dozens of slave codes from British, French,
Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Danish colonies, publishing these ordinances as a
single volume as part of its findings.97
This interest in applying foreign slave regulations to British colonies, however,
would not survive the tumult of the 1790s. To both policy makers and advocates
of reform, the slave uprising in Saint-Domingue that began in August 1791 was a
stunning rebuke of ideas about the efficacy and wisdom of French slave management
practices.98 Since the insurrection was largely spearheaded by enslaved Africans who
had arrived in the colony over the previous decade (and who in 1791 constituted a
majority of the island’s population), it also helped solidify the shift in antislavery pri-
orities away from amelioration and towards the abolition of the slave trade.99Already
by the late 1780s, momentum was swinging in this direction: indeed, a majority of
authors who promoted reform along French lines between 1787 and 1791 also called
for a simultaneous abrogation of the “African commerce.” Once again, it is James
Ramsay who perhaps best exemplifies this evolution in antislavery thought. While
his 1784 Essay had stated “what a glory would it be to Britain … to enlarge the benev-
olent plan of France and Spain, for improving the condition of their slaves,” a tract
published only months prior to his death in 1789 made no positive mention of rivals’
practices. Instead, it outlined the positive results that would follow the abolition of

96
Lord Hawkesbury, “Heads of Examination,” 12 February 1788, National Archives at Kew, Board of
Trade Papers 3/2, fol. 15.
97
Lambert, House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 67. The Commons also
reprinted a full volume of slave codes compiled by the House of Lords investigation. Ibid., vol. 70.
98
David Geggus, “British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791–1805,” in Slavery and British
Society, 1776–1846, ed. James Walvin (Baton Rouge, 1982), 123–49.
99
John K. Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History 25, no.
1 (1993): 58–80, at 59. See also John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African
Political Ideology and the Haitain Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 181–214.

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 PERCEPTIONS OF FRENCH AND SPANISH SLAVE LAW ▪ 51

the slave trade, and asserted that France and Spain would “eagerly run to share with
us all these advantages” if Britain took the lead.100 Ramsay’s pivot towards abolition
reveals how the first great wave of public opposition to the Atlantic slave system had
fundamentally changed the terms of the discussion.
French slave policies, like French colonial management more broadly, remained dis-
credited well into the nineteenth century. As revolution raged in Saint-Domingue
from 1791 to 1804, antislavery campaigners struggled to keep slave trade abolition
on Britain’s political agenda. With this as their foremost priority, they almost entirely
abandoned earlier calls to police and amend slavery itself. Indeed, the most significant
initiative for slavery reform during these years came from two absentee planters, who
in 1797 asked parliament to support colonial legislatures in taking steps to morally
uplift enslaved persons and safeguard against their abuse. In this context, amelioration
was part of an attempt to divert interest away from the immediate termination of the
slave trade. It was therefore vehemently opposed by abolitionists in parliament.101
Even once abolition re-emerged as a feasible measure, and antislavery campaigners
again began entertaining ideas of slavery reform, they had little positive to say
about French regulations. Most now also conceded that the code noir was easily cir-
cumvented on the ground in the West Indies. In a lengthy tract published on the
eve of slave trade abolition in 1807, Wilberforce noted that despite “the more despotic
system of government which was established in the French islands before the revolu-
tion, the Code Noir … [had] fallen into practical disuse.” By the time of the revolu-
tion, he wrote, it had “become a mere dead letter.”102 Seven years later, the veteran
abolitionist William Dickson echoed this view. Though “applauded by the theorists
of Europe,” the code noir was “laughed at” by French colonists, and had “slept in
dust and cobwebs for above a century.” According to Dickson, “it made its exit in
the butcheries and burnings of St. Domingo; not a single article of it having ever
been put in force in that colony!”103
Spanish slave practices fared better in British eyes, and in the long run would exert
a greater influence in shaping British policy. In 1802, the Colonial Office decided to
retain Spanish regulations on the newly acquired island of Trinidad, believing them
to be both comparatively humane and economical. Over the following two decades,
Trinidad served as the staging ground for further laws designed to extend basic pro-
tections and a measure of “civilization” to those in bondage. Among other things,
ordinances restricted arbitrary punishments, strengthened the protective office on
the island, incentivized slave marriage, proscribed the separation of family
members, reduced barriers to manumission, and brought the process of self-purchase
under greater public oversight. Once ameliorating slavery became official govern-
ment policy in 1824, these and other directives were extended piecemeal to other
Crown Colonies in the West Indies. The government also applied “different kinds

100
Ramsay, Essay, 294; James Ramsay, An Address on the Proposed Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade
(London, 1789), 25–29, at 29.
101
“Debate on Mr. Ellis’s Motion for the Amelioration of the Condition of Negroes,” 6 April 1797,
Parliamentary History of England, 33:251–94. The slave owners were William Young and Charles Rose
Ellis.
102
William Wilberforce, A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Addressed to the Freeholders and Other
Inhabitants of Yorkshire (London, 1807), 232–33. See also note 38 above.
103
William Dickson, Mitigation of Slavery, in Two Parts (London, 1814), xii.

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 52 ▪ WYMAN-MCCARTHY

and degrees of interference … toward the Colonial Legislatures” of older self-govern-

ing colonies in order to coerce them into adopting similar measures.104 Though slave
owners sometimes implemented ameliorative policies of their own accord, believing
them to be conducive to a self-reproducing workforce, the initiative behind amelio-
ration from 1807 onward came primarily from the imperial state. During this period,
Spanish legislation continued to hold significant appeal for British legislators.105 For
no one was this more true than the antislavery movement’s sharpest legal mind and
government advisor James Stephen, who in his 1823 treatise on New World slavery
extensively lauded Spanish policies such as coartación.106 In private, however,
Stephen confessed his ignorance of the specifics of Spanish slave law.107
As this article has shown, Stephen was far from the first advocate of slavery reform
to be enticed by a vague understanding and selective reading of foreign slave regula-
tions. Particularly in the decade following American independence, metropolitan
imperial commentators devoted considerable attention to analyzing the laws and
practices of other slaving empires. Of course, that slave owners also sought to
learn from the legal customs of their competitors points to a truth often overlooked
by reformers with antislavery leanings: namely, foreign slave regulations were
intended primarily to strengthen and perpetuate slaveholding itself. Indeed, by mit-
igating the harshest features of chattel slavery, both slave legislation and evolved tra-
ditions made the institution easier to justify in an age where human bondage was
increasingly seen as morally dubious. To most individuals examined in this article,
though, slaveholding that was regulated and policed by the imperial state was signifi-
cantly preferable to the status quo. In their view, closer metropolitan oversight
offered protection to the most vulnerable of British subjects, while simultaneously
providing means through which to curb the excesses and autonomy of colonial
elites. Since what looked to be the comparative benignity of slavery in French and
Spanish colonies proved the value of this approach, advocates of reform in Britain
identified foreign policies as offering templates for how to ameliorate slavery in
their own nation’s overseas possessions. British efforts to regulate and reform colo-
nial slavery are therefore part of wider story about the circulation of ideas, laws,
and strategies of rule among rival empires in the Atlantic World.

104
George Canning, The Speech of the Rt. Hon. George Canning … on the 16th of March, 1824 (London,
1824), 14.
105
Claudius Fergus, Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies
(Baton Rouge, 2013), 123–60.
106
James Stephen, The Slavery of the British West India Colonies Delineated, as It Exists in Both Law and
Practice, and Compared with the Slavery of Other Colonies, Ancient and Modern, 2 vols. (London, 1824). For
example, see 1:60, 192–95, and 267–74.
107
Fergus, Revolutionary Emancipation, 131.

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