A Summer Back in Time
Student history project uncovers story of missionaries' efforts to end apprenticeship of slaves in Jamaica
Beginning in 1837, British missionaries and abolitionists distributed a pamphlet dictated by a former slave from Jamaica that "played a major role in the campaign to end the system known as apprenticeship that had replaced, but not fully abolished, slavery in Britain's colonies."
When Duke senior Christienna Fryar read that in a book for Professor Deborah Thomas' "Culture/Politics in Caribbean" course last year, she was following a thread that would lead her across the Atlantic in an effort to contribute to the history of 19th century British missionaries.
The pamphlet -- A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica -- contains James Williams' accounts of cruel and unfair treatment of former slaves, like himself, who were declared "apprentices" on Aug. 1, 1834, by British law. As apprentices, the newly "freed" slaves were bound to work without pay for their former masters for another four or six years.
Fryar, a history major, was particularly intrigued by the role that Baptist missionaries played in producing the pamphlet and otherwise supporting the movement to end the apprenticeship system in Jamaica. Fryar, who was raised as a Baptist by her Jamaican mother, decided to devote her senior honors thesis to the subject.
As Fryar read up on the topic last semester and discussed it with Duke history professors Jocelyn Olcott, Susan Thorne and Barry Gaspar, she formulated her research question: In what ways did missionaries in Jamaica influence the British Empire's apprenticeship laws?
She set off for England this past summer, on grants from Duke's Undergraduate Research Support Office, Center for International Studies and the Reginaldo Howard Memorial Scholarship Fund, to seek out primary sources -- letters, newspapers, reports and pamphlets from British missionaries from 1834-38. For five weeks, she pored over missionary documents in archives at six libraries in Oxford and London.
Her main surprise came from a newsletter of a Methodist missionary society, written in 1837. In it was a charge by a prominent abolitionist that the policies of many missionary societies "do not allow [their missionaries] to give a more open and public expression of their views relative to the civil condition of the Negro Population." The publisher of the newsletter responded that, in effect, politics are not the business of missionaries:
"The Society does require its Missionaries to confine themselves to their own proper work; neither allowing themselves to be diverted from it by the pursuit of any other object, nor impeding their useful labours by mixing them up with other engagements."
Fryar said, "Basically what I found was that really only one missionary society was active in the campaign [to end the apprenticeship system], and that was the Baptist Missionary Society. And they were very active.
"Pretty much everybody else ignored the problem...," she said. "Pretty much everybody else was building schools, working on literacy campaigns for the apprentices -- so schools for adults and children -- building chapels."
Fryar said she was able to refine her search for sources as she progressed.
"The first two places I went to in Oxford, I think I photocopied perhaps too much because I didn't know what I needed," she said. "But then when I got to London, I started having enough base of knowledge so that I didn't have to get every single letter about schools.
"That's when it got less about, 'I have to go to the library today,' and more about, 'I'm starting to see how this is mapping out.'"
Back at Duke, Fryar met with Olcott, her thesis adviser, to discuss how to proceed. Olcott suggested ways to analyze the 1,500-or-so photocopied documents Fryar had accumulated: by type of document, by social issue and/or by church denomination, always keeping an eye out for a good story.
Fryar said she now wants to understand why the Baptist missionaries in Jamaica were politically active and the other denominations apparently were not.
"It could be something in the way that the different denominations were structured," she said. "It could really just be the personalities of the people who were in charge of the missionary societies.
"And then for the Baptist missionaries on the flip side of that -- were they not building chapels, schools, literacy campaigns? And so then were their parishes getting ignored in terms of those other important things as well?"
Said Olcott, "Christienna has come across something that really changes the narrative" of this part of history.
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