“Being careful” is especially significant in the context of this promise of a future opportunity to purchase his freedom, for it emphasizes that attribute of moral personhood considered a distinguishing feature of the free laboring subject: foresight. Even as the slave is enjoined to accept his present bondage, he is “encouraged” to practice his industry and the self-discipline of being careful with his money—to behave like a “sensible” free laborer—with a view toward a possible future, the end of his enslavement “in some time.”69Countering the proslavery view of black slaves as living solely in and for the present, Equiano depicts the master’s recognition of his slave as a moral person with the foresight necessary to comprehend the significance of the master’s promise.
Assimilation and Universal Emancipation
Equiano’s representation of the master’s promise of manumission as a reward for the slave’s fidelity draws directly from the proposals for practicable emancipation made by fellow abolitionists such as Anthony Benezet, Granville Sharp, Benjamin Rush, and Ottobah Cugoano. In his influential Historical Account of Guinea (1771), Benezet discussed the “expediency of a general freedom being granted to the Negroes” through the gradualist model of assimilation.70Benezet opposed sending to Africa those slaves already imported to the colonies, or those “born in our families,” on the grounds that such a deportation “would be to expose them, in a strange land, to greater difficulties than many of them labour under at present.”71He acknowledged, however, the possible difficulties attending immediate emancipation, due to what was described as the degraded moral characters of these slaves, which Benezet argued were the artificial “effects,” the social product, of an unnatural enslavement: “To let them suddenly free here, would perhaps be attended with no less difficulty; for, undisciplined as they are in religion and virtue, they might give a loose to their evil habits, which the fear of a master would have restrained. These are objections, which weigh with many well disposed people, and it must be granted, there are difficulties in the way.”72 Speaking directly to the economic concerns of the political elite, Benezet “offered for consideration” this proposal:
That all further importation of slaves be absolutely prohibited; and as those born among us, after serving so long as may appear to be equitable, let them by law be declared free. Let every one, thus set free, be enrolled in the county courts, and be obliged to be a resident, during a certain number of years, within the said county, under the care of the overseers of the poor. Thus being, in some sort, still under the direction of governors, and the notice of those who were formerly acquainted with them, they would be obliged to act the more circumspectly, and make proper use of their liberty, and their children would have an opportunity of obtaining such instructions, as are necessary to the common occasions of life; and thus both parents and children might gradually become useful members of the community. And further, where the nature of the country would permit…suppose a small tract of land were assigned to every Negroe family, and they obliged to live upon and improve it, (when not hired out to work for the white people) this would encourage them to exert their abilities, and become industrious subjects.73
Benezet’s proposal both assumes and projects a narrative of moral cultivation, and its concomitant “inculcation” of “economic virtues.”74The transformation from slave subject to free (because voluntary) laborer is imagined through the reciprocal inducements of “obligation” and “encouragement.” Even when formally free, the formerly enslaved would be “under the direction of governors,” and thus continue to feel “obliged to act the more circumspectly, and make proper use of their liberty.” The discipline of the lash—the “restraint” provided by “the fear of a master”—would be replaced by the slave’s moral self-discipline, marked here by that recurring term, “obliged.”
The result of such an assimilation of slave subjects into the world of “free” labor, Benezet concludes, is that “both planters and tradesman would be plentifully supplied with cheerful and willing-minded labourers, much vacant land would be cultivated, the produce of the country be justly increased, the taxes for the support of government lessened to the individuals, by the increase of taxables, and the Negroes, instead of being an object of terror, as they certainly must be where their numbers are great, would become interested in their safety and welfare.”75 I should emphasize as well that in order to imagine this transition to formal freedom, Benezet draws from the extant models of labor discipline applied to the British and colonial American “white” working class, as indicated here by his references to the “the overseers of the poor” and “the direction of governors” as the disciplinary mode through which the formerly enslaved would “become industrious subjects.”
Ottobah Cugoano concludes his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787) with proposals for the abolition of slavery that follow the same gradualist model of apprenticeship and assimilation invoked by Benezet:
I would propose that a total abolition of slavery should be…proclaimed; and that a universal emancipation of slaves should begin from the date thereof, and be carried out in the following manner:…[T]hat it should require all slaveholders to mitigate the labor of their slaves to that of lawful servitude.…And that it should be made known to the slaves that those who had been above seven years in the islands or elsewhere, if they had obtained any competent degree of knowledge of the Christian religion, and the laws of civilization, and had behaved themselves honestly and decently, that they should immediately become free; and that their owners should give them reasonable wages and maintenance for their labor.76
While Cugoano appealed to religious feeling and moral sentiment throughout the preceding pages, his positive proposals for the practical implementation of “universal emancipation” transposes the religious assimilation of conversion onto the economic assimilation of the “lawful servitude” of apprenticeship and indenture. The time period of seven years proposed by Cugoano may have come from the Bible—the jubilee, when bond servants were set free, arrived every seven years—yet more likely came from the standard term limits of the contracts for apprentices and indentured servants: as early as 1562, the Statute of Artificers imposed a minimum of seven years of service for all persons entering an industrial calling and specified that the apprenticeship was not to expire before the worker reached the age of twenty-four.77
Cugoano’s transposition of conversion onto servitude underscores the double nature of the structure of assimilation, as, on the one side, an “incorporation” of the individual subject by the community, which enjoins, on the other side, a transformation of the individual subject, such that this subject would be deemed worthy of such incorporation. The seven years thus figure as a period of apprenticeship, in the sense of what Cugoano pointedly calls a “lawful servitude” governed by training and instruction: “For in the course of that time, they would have sufficiently paid their owners by their labor, both for their first purpose, and for the expenses attending their education. By being thus instructed in the course of seven years, they would become tractable and obedient, useful laborers, dutiful servants and good subjects.”78Thus, while the proposed “universal emancipation of slaves” would be immediate, their labor subjection would continue as a “lawful servitude” until they paid their former masters “for their first purpose and for the expenses attending their education,” just as apprentices paid theirs; and until the formerly enslaved were themselves transformed into “good subjects,” and acquired the moral “character” of free laborers: “tractable and obedient, useful and dutiful.”
In addition to the extant models of labor discipline for “free” laborers, abolitionists looked to the slavery laws of other colonial states to describe the practical transition from slavery to freedom. To argue the practicability of gradual emancipation in the British West Indies, for example, Granville Sharp invoked the Spanish colonial system of slave self-purchase, coartación, as a model “worthy our imitation, in case we should not be so happy as to obtain an entire abolition of slavery”:
As soon as a slave is landed, his name, price, &c., are register’d in a public office, and