It was not easy – in Brazil and Europe, his cruelty and promiscuity were notorious. He compromised, choosing Princess Amélie, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Josephine’s son Prince Eugène. So his first wife was Habsburg, his second Bonapartist. He became a loyal husband. Meanwhile, he struggled to establish Brazil. First he defeated the northern Confederation of the Equator before leading a war in the south: in 1825, the remote Brazilian province of Banda Oriental (East Bank) rebelled, encouraged by the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. Pedro fought the Argentines on land and sea in small skirmishes (both the Argentine and Brazilian fleets on the River Plate were commanded by British mercenaries). At the same time, his father João of Portugal died, making him king there too. But he abdicated that throne in favour of his little daughter Maria II, who, with the negligence of dynasties, was dispatched to Portugal. But the Liberator’s war failed; he lost part of the province, which became Uruguay.
Hated for his marital cruelty, challenged by the liberal Assembly, facing rebellion from
His five-year-old son, now Emperor Pedro II, was raised in the seclusion of a country estate while Brazil was ruled by regents. Although the first constitution had promised a ‘gradual emancipation of African slaves’, the next one in 1824 ignored slavery, which was booming: 40,000 African slaves arrived annually in the first half of the 1820s, and 60,000 a year after 1826. British abolition of slave trading and its West Africa Squadron had reduced the Atlantic trade. Yet between 1807 and 1865, 3.5 million enslaved Africans were bought and transported across the ocean.
THE GLADSTONES – QUAMINA AND SIR JOHN: SLAVE REBELS AND SLAVE MASTERS
As Britain fought Napoleon and debated political reform, even Wilberforce said little about slavery, though 700,000 people remained enslaved on British plantations. Jamaican slavery was consolidated by the acquisition of Dutch Guiana on the mainland, where plantations in Demerara used slaves to make the world’s best brown sugar. Sir John Gladstone, devout Presbyterian son of a Scottish trader, who had moved to Liverpool and made a fortune in commodities, corn, sugar and cotton, trading with India, US and Brazil, already owned plantations in Jamaica but had bought a new one in Demerara that helped make him the biggest British slave owner and chairman of the West India Association, the Interest. Yet it was just at this moment that the slaves themselves placed their suffering back at the centre of politics.
In August 1823, Quamina and Jack Gladstone, an enslaved father and son, led a revolt starting on the Success plantation, owned by Gladstone. They were not, however, related to the nabob of Liverpool, whose three sons, including William, the future prime minister, were already at Eton. Quamina, in his late forties, who had been trafficked from the Gold Coast, was Gladstone’s head carpenter; his son Jack, a cooper, was handsome, ‘well-made’ and six foot two. Forced to work thirteen-hour shifts, Quamina had been prevented from nursing his dying wife Peggy, and returned to find her dead. Encouraged by an English pastor, John Smith, whose church Quamina attended, Jack organized a revolt which was joined by 13,000 slaves. They almost seized the colony.
The British rushed their West India Regiment, made up of freed Caribbean slaves, to crush the rebels. Hundreds were killed; nineteen were sentenced to death, their heads displayed on spikes, a warning to the African-born slaves who believed only complete bodies would return to their homes after death. Quamina was cornered, shot and strung up on a gibbet, where a ‘colony of wasps built a nest in the cavity of the stomach and were flying in and out of the jaws that hung frightfully open’. After a letter from Gladstone in England requesting mercy, Jack was exiled to St Lucia, but the death in prison of the Reverend John Smith ignited the abolitionist cause as much as killing the enslaved. As abolition gathered momentum, so did the resistance of the Interest.
The duke of Wellington, now prime minister,* was determined to resist abolition, parliamentary reform and the lifting of restrictions on Catholics and Jews. Yet his lieutenant Robert Peel, the textiles heir, persuaded him to end Catholic restrictions.* The duke claimed Parliament had no right to free slaves. ‘We must not plunder the proprietors in the West Indies,’ he said, ‘to acquire popularity in England,’ while the removing of Jewish restrictions was out of the question.
