The Beacon’s editorial of July 28 contained a popular but inaccurate statement: “On Aug. 1, 1834, the Emancipation Proclamation, which abolished slavery across the British Empire, was read at the Sunday Morning Well and other locations around the territory.”
There is no document called an “Emancipation Proclamation” for this territory, and no evidence of any proclamation read at the site of the Sunday Morning Well (the well itself was dug in the early 1900s). The Abolition of Slavery Act 1833, passed in the United Kingdom on Aug. 28, 1833, was long before the date “proclaimed” to come into effect on Friday, Aug. 1, 1834.
Here is one related excerpt from my 2004 Frederick Pickering Memorial Foundation lecture on “The BVI Nation — Rhetoric or Reality,” referring to a 1983 book by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger.
“The thesis of the second cited work, The Invention of Tradition, is that many of the things that we think of as an ancient in their origins were not, in fact, so, but were invented comparatively recently. The book explored examples of this process of invention: the creation of Welsh and Scottish ‘national culture;’ the elaboration of British royal rituals in the 19th and 20th centuries; the origins of imperial rituals in British India and Africa (borrowed by Europeans); and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own. (A good local example of this process of invention may be the annual reading of the ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ at the Sunday Morning Well as a supposed re-enactment of what took place in 1834. The actual well dates back just over 100 years. Further, as the late McWelling Todman QC never tired of pointing out, if such a “proclamation” had indeed been read publicly by an official at all it would most likely have been at the president’s house and office in Road Town. I have never actually seen a copy of an Emancipation Proclamation per se. What is in existence is the proclamation of a holiday on Aug. 1, 1834, which was most likely read out in churches. The reading at the well, then, bears all the marks of an invented tradition which its inventors project back in time to have first taken place in 1834, and is now being hallowed and embedded in our consciousness by repetition.) Observing this phenomenon is not to condemn it. What the book moves us to do, in fact, is to reflect in general on the human need for tangible links to the past and for ways of differentiating ‘us’ from ‘them,’ ‘our nation’ from the many others — in a word, for markers of identity.”
Recent research
Dr. Angel Smith, our foremost researcher on this period, has been busy pointing out that historical evidence establishes that due to diligent preparatory work by Methodist missionaries over the preceding months, most slaves, Christian and non-Christian, thronged the churches from about 11 p.m. on Thursday, July 31, 1834 for great “Watch-night” worship services, many not leaving until around 4 a.m. to join others on the hills to watch for the dawn. Armed militia and warships were on standby. And don’t forget that the slaves had by law to report for work on the plantations by 6:30 on Monday morning, Aug. 4, 1834, the first “August Monday” — an appointment many of them kept through the influence of the missionaries.
{fcomment}