Watering the Tree of Liberty- Abraham Lincoln and the Caribbean

H’s majestic work resides in his abolition of slavery and the defeat of the Confederacy which sought to spread the reach of that abominable system to the other parts of the United States and even into the Caribbean.

It was at the age of ten, at the home of Dominica’s Director of the Police Special Branch, Oliver N. Phillip that I first read of Lincoln in the fascinating work Twenty Days by Dorothy and Phillip Kunhardt.

That work detailed the assassination and the twenty days it took for the martyred President Lincoln’s funeral procession to reach its final destination in Springfield, Illinois. In a greater sense however, Lincoln and his legacy had always been with us on Dominica, and in the wider Caribbean. How so?

In 1834 the British had abolished slavery in the British West Indies. The French colonies did not free their slaves until 1844. In Cuba slavery was only abolished in 1886. Haiti, the first country in the world to defeat slavery by slave rebellion abolished slavery upon its independence in 1804. However, at the time President Lincoln took office, the former enslaved Africans in the British West Indies still endured lives of much hardship as they were without the land, education and other means to rise up from the parlous condition that slavery had imposed on them. While the British West Indian planters had been compensated upon the passage of the abolition of slavery in 1834, the enslaved Africans had been given no such compensation.

When Lincoln came to office on an anti slavery platform the majority of the population of the Caribbean islands pinned their hopes on his victory. In anger at Lincoln’s victory and his opposition to slavery, the southern slave states seceded from the United States and formed the Confederacy.

The British West Indian planter class was still resentful of their lost possessions in the formerly enslaved Africans who had been freed and so they openly sympathized with the Confederacy. In Britain, the major banks and cotton mills which had grown wealthy on US cotton grown by slave labor, favored the Confederacy.

And for a time, it was feared that Britain would back the southern states then in rebellion against the United States led by President Lincoln. In his groundbreaking work An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean, historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy notes:

Prior to the American Revolution, the Lower South and the British West Indies had more in common with each other than either had with New England. South Carolina was founded in 1670 by settlers from Barbados who had spread their culture through the Leeward Islands and Jamaica before arriving on the mainland… Compared to the Southern colonies, the British West Indies were blacker, wealthier, more enslaved, more racialist, more conservative, more authoritarian, more aristocratic, and more loyalist – in almost every way, they represented a more extreme example of what we would recognize as Southern culture .

In the 1800s that planter class had the vote and the overwhelming majority of British West Indians did not. Universal adult suffrage only came to the British West Indies, first with Jamaica in 1944, and Dominica in 1951.

Other British West Islands gave the vote to their populations at or about that time. Indeed the harsh conditions imposed on ordinary West Indians by the little changed socio-economic conditions, post emancipation of 1834, was to lead to open rebellion when Jamaica’s Paul Bogle led the October 11, 1865 Morant Bay uprising against racial oppression and hunger.

When President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration in 1863, West Indians were ecstatic and saw his actions as favoring their kith and kin. The January 31, 1865 passage of the 13^th amendment to the US constitution engraved the abolition of slavery in the supreme law of the land.

Within months Lincoln was slain for his act. Lincoln’s murder stunned the world, in particular among formerly enslaved people. Many West Indians named their children after him, or named streets and ships in his honor. As a cub scout in the 1960s, our favorite marching song was:

John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave,

John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave

But his soul keeps marching on .

Glory! Glory! Alleluia!

His soul keeps marching on!

However, while we sang of old John Brown with gusto, I did not know who he was.

Later, I discovered that John Brown was a white abolitionist who was executed in 1859 for leading an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia to free slaves. In that cause he had the support of abolitionists such as the African American Frederick Douglas, though he may have opposed his methods.

Brown’s death was widely mourned in the northern United States and precipitated the US Civil War of 1861-1865. The song in his honor became the US Battle Hymn of the Republic, and was adopted in the English speaking Caribbean as a rallying cry at marches and rallies which sought freedom for our people.

The life of Abraham Lincoln therefore watered the tree of liberty, not only in the United States, but in the Caribbean. Arguably, Lincoln’s sacrifice sped the cause of democracy in the United States and elsewhere when his work dealt a death blow to southern slavery.

His life rendered a freedom loving gloss on US society, indeed the world. But for Abraham Lincoln, the freedom loving Caribbean people and others from around the world would not have found the US a welcoming place.

Be it in the West Indies or elsewhere, we still cherish the hope so resonant in Lincoln’s profound words in his Gettysburg Address of 1863:

That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.