EMANCIPATION DAY, AUGUST 1, 1834, marked the moment when chattel slavery throughout the British empire ceased to exist. Severe limitations were initially imposed on the ex-slaves' freedom--forty hours of unpaid labor a week were extracted from the Jamaican "apprentices" until 1838--but emancipation immediately established full religious freedom and transformed the missionaries' relation with their converts. It allowed them to develop full-fledged church organizations complete with Jamaican lay preachers, ministers, and even missionaries. Mission schools expanded with the help of an education grant from the British government, and the missionaries, freed from all political constraints, could openly engage themselves in all issues concerning their converts. They could, and did, intervene in wage disputes, attack the apprenticeship system, condemn racism, promote the development of an independent peasantry, and encourage the peasants to claim their share of political power by putting themselves on the electoral register.
The ex-slaves, to whom emancipation restored a measure of the hope and confidence generated by the rebellion, responded massively. They gave an "astonishing impulse" to the development of mission work; the destroyed chapels were replaced by larger buildings that were still too small to contain the congregations they attracted, and the number of mission churches and missionary societies represented in the island multiplied.1"It was all happiness--almost unmingled joy--wherever we went multitudes came flocking to hear the good men," wrote a Baptist missionary retrospectively. So great was the influence the missionaries enjoyed in the decade following abolition that their old ally at the Colonial Office, James Stephen, predicted that the government of the island would fall into their hands.2 The freedmen's enthusiasm for the missionaries was justified; by 1834 they had proved to be agents in the destruction of
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