A Scramble for Souls: The Impact of the Negro Education Grant on Evangelical Missionaries in the British West Indies

Abstract

THE UNITED STATES has produced a lively and impressive body of scholarship on the education of freedmen during Reconstruction (1) The story has a consistently melancholy tone-that of the hopes, aspirations and rhetoric which accompanied the perilous journey from unschooled bondsman to schooled freedman-a journey which culminated in broken promises and repressive realities. It is too frequently forgotten that such an experience had been shared some thirty years previously in the British West Indies after the 1833 Act of Emancipation. The story however is somewhat different in that formal schooling had been available to some of the black population during slavery. (2) When the dubious regulations of servitude were lifted while its real abuses remained, the British Govern ment's Negro Education Grant, which spanned a decade from 1835-45, expanded existing missionary facilities so that during the apprenticeship period, 1834-38, the ex-slaves could be satisfactorily prepared for free dom. This preparation intended that they comprehend the skills, qual ities, and virtues requisite for taking upon themselves the apparently on erous burden of their emancipation, thus becoming a "grateful peasantry." The apprenticeship period assured colonial legislatures a compensation in addition to the twenty million pounds granted by Parliament to be shared among the various West Indian planters. Therefore, a period of indentured labour was deemed a salutory means of compensating the con fiscation of what a plantation economy saw as real property. Thus the planters remained the employers of ex-slaves and their wide authority

Moravian Mission Education in the Nineteenth Century: Global Patterns and Local Manifestations at New Fairfield, Upper Canada

“…In the West Indies, the Moravians, along with many other religious groups, were given financial support by the British government to supply freed slaves with education. 64 Thus, Moravian missionaries worked closely with governments throughout the British colonial world to provide education to indigenous peoples.…”