We should all welcome the formal co-operation and dialogue between the Virgin Islands and the United States VI at the recent meeting of the Inter VI Council, which was reported in the Sept. 8 edition of the Beacon. The council’s agenda included co-operation on tourism education concerning an industry vital to the well-being of both territories, yet much of the publicity directed at tourists tends to ignore our shared history and culture.
We read that Columbus named this territory after St. Ursula and her numerous maidens, with no suggestion that he was naming the whole archipelago.
Education on tourism and the development of our tourist industries should concern us all, on both sides of the Sir Francis Drake Channel — not just students of VI Studies. It should be included at all levels of formal education and in government departments, chambers of trade, the mass media, and so on.
I was taken aback to be told by a store assistant in St. Thomas that she would never go to Tortola because of its prejudice against Rastafarians. She was unmoved by my assurance that the “Rasta law” had been repealed years ago. I vividly recall the three days of celebratory drumming that echoed across Long Look at a meeting of Rastafarians from throughout the Caribbean. Give a dog a bad name…!
Two events
I shall take two events in our shared history to illustrate my theme: the 1853 Cattle Tax riots in the VI and the 1867 hurricane that severely hit both territories. I shall call them “bittersweet anniversaries,” as one began on Aug. 1, 1853, exactly 19 years after Emancipation Day in the VI, and the other will see its 150th anniversary next year. Both were catastrophic events from which we are today, strangely, still reaping the benefits.
I propose that we should be preparing to mark Aug. 1 and Oct. 29, 2017 as bittersweet anniversaries with the respect they deserve, while encouraging visitors from the USVI, the wider Caribbean, and further afield to join us. The effort should include commemorative postage stamps; identification and clearing of appropriate land sites; preparation of tours; proposals for excavations; preparation of publicity materials; highlights in VI Studies; targeted marketing to cruise lines and so on. We should in turn publicise and support events in the USVI.
Most slaves had high hopes of a much better life after their emancipation on Aug. 1, 1834, but many became severely disappointed. Masters often exploited their new apprentices worse than they had before. Their conditions should have generally improved after the abolition of apprenticeship in 1838, but a downturn in the economy followed years of drought. Many landowners were deeply indebted to the bank and laid off workers despite their low rates of pay.
Many peasants and their families increased their efforts to develop their own plots of land, becoming more self-sufficient for food and able to sell surplus crops, poultry and livestock in the market. Others became fishermen or acquired land at low prices to expand their smallholdings into sizeable farms, making cattle-rearing a profitable proposition. The cash-strapped government took the opportunity to impose a tax on cattle in 1840, but the need for funds for capital projects led it to impose a 50 percent increase on that tax in 1853. This imposed a severe burden on the cattle-owners in the countryside, who viewed it as both crippling financially and an attempt to re-impose tighter controls over their lives.
A protest march down Main Street was calmed by a respected Methodist missionary who suggested the marchers go to the Treasury and offer to pay the old tax. However, the treasurer refused to accept it. During an ensuing scuffle, one of their leaders was thrown into prison. When their calls to release him were refused, they marched back up Main Street, threatening to bring many more back from the countryside the next day. When they did so, it turned into a full-scale riot until the missionaries persuaded them to go home. They were about to do so when they heard that one protester had been shot and killed.
Frightened
The shopkeepers, merchants and other whites became frightened at the sight of thousands of protesters the next day and sought to escape to St. Thomas, leaving President John Chads alone. The crowds torched most of the buildings in Road Town and many houses throughout the colony. Several invoked the Haitian rebellion as their inspiration, and Dr. Angel Smith (in his magisterial thesis, An Anatomy of a Slave Society in Transition: the Virgin Islands, 1807-1864) remarked on the high number of women actively involved in riot activities such as torching buildings. Women led by “Queen Mary” in the “Fireburn” on St. Croix some years later are much better known.
It took a detachment of 30 Danish soldiers from St. Thomas to restore order on Tortola until a Royal Naval warship brought two detachments of British soldiers two weeks later. Gradually, many, but not all, of the refugees returned from St. Thomas.
Afterwards, President Chads (a former British colonel) opined to the United Kingdom government and the governor in Antigua that the only way the labourers would be governed was if troops were stationed in the colony with warships visiting regularly, but new government policy was to remove all its troops from the smaller islands, leaving their inhabitants to defend themselves.
However, the government accepted his recommendation on parliamentary reform: that the House of Assembly should be replaced by a Legislative Council reduced to only nine members, as he believed many white refugees would never return permanently. Indeed, they made it a condition of financial assistance in helping the colony recover from the riot.
The reform was implemented on Aug. 26, 1854 and thereafter the legislature did its best not to tax residents beyond their means. Some protesters had invoked the spirit of the Haitian Revolution as a model for their actions, so Aug. 1, 1853 presented a warning of what might happen if the government neglected its people’s views.
Dr. Norwell Harrigan posited in a 1985 book, The Long March to Freedom: A Glimpse at the Virgin Islands, that the riot marked the foundation of a “truly indigenous Virgin Islands society” — a determined attempt by the people to break with the past and let their presence be felt. The brief, bitter conflict that began on Aug. 1, 1853 should be commemorated for its long-term beneficial outcome!
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