Prof Emerita Bridget Brereton
AS we approach Emancipation Day, it might be interesting to consider how Trinidadians celebrated – or did not celebrate – August 1 back in the 1800s, much closer to the time of enslavement.
August 1 wasn’t made a public or official holiday until 1985, but that didn’t mean it went unmarked in earlier times. This piece will look at how the day was observed in the first 50 years after full Emancipation in 1838.
In the years immediately after 1838, annual August 1 dinners, or meetings of the Trinidad Auxiliary Anti-Slavery Society, founded in that year, were organised by a group of politically minded and race-conscious men. Most were of mixed race and came from the group of “free coloureds,” people who had been free long before 1838 – many had been born to free parents – and were fairly well educated.
These men had white allies, especially Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist ministers who shared their anti-slavery sentiments and often attended and spoke at the August 1 events.
But their leaders appreciated that it was expedient to stress their identity with the former enslaved rather than with the whites – they began to describe themselves as “people of African descent” in their petitions. The celebration of Emancipation was a useful symbol of this new-found identity, as well as a good opportunity for airing their grievances and political demands.
At these meetings or dinners, held nearly every year between 1839 and 1851, and reported in the Trinidad press, speeches were made denouncing slavery (which still existed in many parts of the Americas) and stressing its horrors.
In 1849 Michael Maxwell Philip, a young mixed-race man who would later become a famous lawyer and serve as solicitor-general, stated unequivocally that African enslavement in the New World was worse than any other form of bondage in human history. He said that the enslavers were “bloodstained and insolent usurpers” – strong stuff only 11 years after Emancipation, when many of them were very much around, and still very powerful.
At the August 1, 1850 dinner in San Fernando, one speaker hit at whites “who at this present moment denounce slavery as a crime, who, before the emancipation, held meetings to prevent the abolition of slavery.” Using slavery as a political metaphor, he condemned the policy of the colonial government since 1838 and declared, “We are still slaves.”
These educated mixed-race men, mostly lawyers, civil servants and teachers, were self-consciously constructing an ideology of racial identity, as well as participating in the political movements of the day for constitutional change and social and economic reforms.
It’s difficult to find evidence of how the formerly enslaved themselves marked the anniversary of Emancipation. It seems likely that many estate workers took the day off – a newspaper editor commented in 1851 that the day was a “popular holiday” on which labourers stayed at home commemorating “by repose or pleasure, a day so holy to the people.” There’s scattered evidence th
