“Education for Freedom”?Footnote ³ — British Colonial Influences in the School System in the Danish West Indies

When the Moravian mission opened its first day schools in the Danish West Indies in 1841, its counterparts in the British Caribbean had already run their schools for some years. The missionary societies, which had started providing religious and moral education in Sunday schools when slavery was still legal, recognised slave emancipation as an opportunity to extend their religious influence among the population and thus intensified their efforts with the financial help of the Negro Education Grant. The British Parliament supported general school construction and the founding of normal schools under this grant between 1835 and 1845.Footnote ⁴ In the British West Indies, missionary influence on the enslaved population was limited before the spread of missionary churches in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵ As part of the ameliorative reforms of the slave system, more and more slaves could gain access to missionary teaching. When the issue of slave emancipation and its political and economic consequences were discussed in the British Parliament in 1833, education was regarded as a vital means of securing a smooth transition from slavery to freedom. Planters, colonial officials, and missionaries looked upon the schools that spread in the various British colonies after 1834 as places of social control.Footnote ⁶ While missionaries were keen on instilling European family values in their pupils, planters were of the opinion that they should be prepared for their work in the sugar industry.Footnote ⁷ As in Britain, education for the working class was intended to keep people in their place and stabilize society.Footnote ⁸

After 1834, the Danish West Indies were one of the few remaining slave colonies in the Caribbean and more or less surrounded by British post-emancipation societies. In the immediate vicinity of the Danish island of St. John, the British island of Tortola not only made freedom visible but also put it within reach. In particular, once the transition period from slavery to “freedom” ended in 1838, slaves from St. John tried to escape to Tortola.Footnote ⁹ The members of the colonial government in the Danish West Indies were extremely fearful that the enfranchisement of slaves in the British colonies would destabilize colonial society. Therefore, the Danish colonial government, under Acting Governor Peter von Scholten, in concert with the Danish colonial administration in Copenhagen, issued reforms that were intended to ameliorate the conditions of slavery in the colony.Footnote ¹⁰ The Danish hoped that they could discourage the slaves from striving for freedom, and that they would be able to postpone emancipation. So as to estimate the effects of emancipation on the Danish colony, von Scholten addressed himself to the outcome of abolition in the British colonies. He took trips to the Leeward Islands, Antigua, and St. Kitts, and he instructed his adjutant Louis Rothe to report on the social and economic development of these colonies.Footnote ¹¹ Of particular interest was Antigua, as this was one of the few colonies where full freedom came without a transition period, and because of its socio-economic similarities to St. Croix. It was also one British colony where missionary influence by Moravians and Methodists had reached large parts of the slave population by the nineteenth century. The influence of these missionary societies and their religious education of the enslaved were used by the colonial legislature of Antigua as grounds for not enacting apprenticeships in the colony.Footnote ¹² Consequently, von Scholten was especially interested in the education of former slaves in the British colonies, who under the terms of the British Negro Education Grant were to receive “religious and moral” instruction.Footnote ¹³ The governor was convinced that education for slaves would be an important means of preparing them for freedom.

There had been only a few attempts to establish educational facilities for slaves in the Danish Caribbean in the eighteenth century, but these were mostly unsuccessful and did not lead to general changes in the planters’ and colonial authorities’ rejection of slave education. Some schools existed in the towns on the Danish islands of St. Croix and St. Thomas, but they were inaccessible to slaves on the plantations.Footnote ¹⁴ Only if planters allowed missionaries to teach on their plantations were slaves able to receive any instruction at all. In these cases, tuition was mostly limited to religious education, and it was intended to serve the planters’ interests. This meant that missionary teaching was intended to remind the slaves to be obedient to their masters. The Moravians, who preached a doctrine of submission to the enslaved, were able to accommodate themselves within colonial society,Footnote ¹⁵ and those who initially regarded the mission as a threat later came to see the missionaries as the guardians of their safety. This enabled the missionaries to gain access to large numbers of the slaves in the Danish West Indies.Footnote ¹⁶

Danish colonial society wanted to make sure that slaves would continue to serve as a cheap and obedient labour force on the plantations, in order to prevent a mass exodus of the plantation society. Von Scholten presented his first plans for schools for slave children on a visit to Copenhagen in 1834. A commission inquired into the situation in the Danish West Indies and recommended that a local committee work out the details. This committee did not take up its duties until 1838. It took some time to enlist the planters’ support for the project, but they became more and more convinced of its necessity when the apprenticeship system ended in the British colonies. Regulations governing the establishment of country schools were issued in 1839 and covered the building of schoolhouses, the funding of the school system, and its curriculum. To appease planter opposition, children above nine years of age would only receive instruction on Saturdays, whereas children below that age would be instructed for three hours on weekdays. The language of instruction was English, which was the most common language of the population by the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷ A non-denominational Catechism of Scriptural Truths was prepared by the Danish Lutheran pastor of St. Croix in order to placate opposition by the various other denominations in the colony against the leading role of the Moravian Church. This catechism was intended to impart the “system of moral truth” to pupils by utilizing a question-and-answer system.Footnote ¹⁸ The teaching method was based on David Stow’s Training System, also known as the Glasgow System. Influenced by the monitorial system of Joseph Lancaster, it was developed for the “moral and intellectual elevation of youth especially of large towns and manufacturing villages.”Footnote ¹⁹ Although Stow originally conceived it for the education of children of the labouring classes in industrial Britain, his system soon spread throughout the British Empire. The option of training large numbers of pupils simultaneously, with the focus particularly on oral instruction, was regarded as beneficial to slave education. The latter was probably favoured because planters and colonial authorities still opposed any attempts to teach literacy to the slaves. The teaching emphasized obedience to worldly authorities and was intended to prepare children for work on the plantations. When the Danish governor visited the Elders Conference, the central governing body of the Moravian Church, in 1839, he pointed out that the education provided should be limited to “reading in the English language and the singing of Psalms … as anything else was not necessary for the Unfree.”Footnote ²⁰ Missionaries in the Danish West Indies complained that the colonial government “demands a facility they can label as a school, however, it isn’t relevant if the children learn something or not.”Footnote ²¹ Publicly, however, they still sided with the colonial authorities’ interests.

The schoolhouses were erected on St. Croix by a Danish architect who followed Stow’s recommendations on their interior design and incorporated galleries within classrooms that could accommodate up to 160 pupils. The money for their construction and the teachers’ salaries came from a new head tax on slaves in the Danish West Indies. Administration of the school system was entrusted to the Moravian Brethren. The Moravian Church was especially interested in the possibility of thereby extending its missionary influence among the slaves.Footnote ²² The work of the mission was controlled by a school commission that was composed of members of the plantocracy, the superintendents of the Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Moravian Churches and representatives of the colonial government.Footnote ²³ The first schools opened on St. Croix in 1841, on St. Thomas in 1846, and on St. John in 1844.Footnote ²⁴ The Moravians remained responsible for administration of the school system until 1873, when responsibility was transferred to the government.

Recruitment and training of Afro-Caribbean teachers in the British and Danish West Indies

The transfer of knowledge between the British and Danish Caribbean was not limited to the exchange of ideas. It had always been characterized by the migration of peoples between the colonies. The Afro-Caribbean teachers formed a new group within these inter-island migration processes.

A central problem with the plans to educate former slaves in the British colonies had been the lack of teachers. The missionary societies were unable to recruit sufficient personnel among their European members to staff the day schools. Thus the parliamentary grant that supported the erection of school buildings also supported the establishment of normal schools “for providing them [the apprentices] with competent teachers.”Footnote ²⁵ As teacher training institutes were only founded in Antigua, Trinidad, and Jamaica, the migration of its graduates into the various colonies was only a matter of time. The mission schools were already dependent on indigenous assistants who led working groups or disseminated textbook material to those working on the plantations in a monitoring capacity. Both played a crucial role as mediators between missionaries and pupils, however they did not receive a formal training for their position.Footnote ²⁶ In a letter printed in the Periodical Accounts, a periodical issued by the Moravian mission to inform the public about the progress and the work in the mission field, the missionary Wilhelm Häuser from St. Croix pointed out the importance of indigenous teachers as mediators in the mission congregation. He reports how the church was filled with people who wanted to see how the Afro-Caribbean teacher McIntosh led the service.Footnote ²⁷ Public preaching by an indigenous church member illustrated for the congregation the social mobility that was offered within the missionary society in contrast with their lives on the plantation.Footnote ²⁸ The profile gained by employing indigenous assistants thus contributed enormously to the attractiveness of church membership.

These teaching assistants were often recruited from amongst members of the mission churches and might have regarded their promotion as a means to achieve a higher status. The concept of the missionary society has been analysed by Helge Wendt, who describes the “social community within a colonial context” that developed under the influence of the missionary. It was a missionary’s goal to create a sense of belonging to the missionary society amongst its members. This society was hierarchical and violations of church rules could lead to sanctions or the downgrading of a member’s status.Footnote ²⁹ These general remarks also apply to the order of the Moravians in the mission field. Its members had to negotiate several hurdles before being accepted by the church and had to face the loss of their status in the event of “misbehaviour.” Indigenous assistants recruited from amongst church members and scholars from the teacher training institutes who worked for the Moravian mission in the Danish West Indies also had to bear this in mind. In most cases, free coloured assistants who had already worked under the supervision of missionaries were promoted from their congregations to receive a formal education at the Mico Charity Normal School in Antigua. A letter by Peter Ricksecker, a Moravian missionary from St. Kitts, illustrates this process.

The source highlights the close connection between the mission and its indigenous assistants who were promoted to teachers. Besides this, it points out that the students remained under close supervision by the Moravian mission while they were in Antigua. The Mico Charity school mentioned in Ricksecker’s letter was founded in Antigua in 1837 as an institution for teacher training. Its establishment was made possible with the help of money from the Lady Mico Trust. This society had resulted from a bequest by Lady Mico in 1670 that was intended to redeem Christian slaves from “Barbary States.” However, the funds were not used until the 1830s, and the statutes of the trust were changed so that its money could be used for the education of former slaves. Its graduates could take up teaching posts in any religious denomination, as the Mico Charity itself was a non-denominational institution.Footnote ³¹ In Antigua, the Moravian missionary John Morrish applied to the trustees of the Mico Charity for the founding of a teacher-training institute in that colony.Footnote ³² By 1837, the first scholars from Antigua and neighbouring colonies were being sent to the normal school. Ricksecker’s letter also illustrates the hierarchy among the teaching staff. Although Dennis Daly had received instruction in the Mico Charity School, his rank still remained inferior to that of the ordained missionaries. In one case, even a former slave owned by the Moravian mission was employed as a teaching assistant after emancipation.Footnote ³³ The Moravians employed male and female teachers, the latter being lower in the hierarchy than their colleagues and often being limited to training girls. Typically, they ran sewing classes or taught girls housekeeping.

In contrast to the schools in the British colonies, slave education in the Danish West Indies was a mandatory system administered solely by the Moravian Brethren. The Moravian missionary who acted as the school’s superintendent was in charge of the teaching staff and was accountable only to the school commission. The problem of providing suitable teachers proved to be a central concern when Peter von Scholten negotiated with the Elders Conference. The salary offered by the Danish colonial government for teaching positions was so low that the Elders Conference regarded it as sufficient only for single missionaries. Furthermore, the mission was concerned about the idea that missionaries were supposed to reside alone on plantations near the schools. This would leave the Moravians, who would assume a teaching position, without any social control that otherwise would have been provided by the mission community at the mission station. Like the indigenous members of the mission congregation, the missionaries themselves were closely supervised by their colleagues.

An additional problem was finding enough people who were fluent in English to instruct the enslaved. For the most part, the missionaries in the Danish West Indies came from Germany and were not fluent in English, as they communicated in Creole with their congregation. The Elders Conference soon rejected the idea of recruiting teachers among the English Moravians because of their sympathy for slave emancipation.Footnote ³⁴ The Danish governor tried to suppress any abolitionist influence in the colony and had already banished two missionaries from the islands in the 1820s for that reason.Footnote ³⁵ In order to avert the possible failure of the project, it was decided to recruit teachers among the free blacks in St. Croix and from the British colony of Antigua. Danish West Indian society contained a large number of free blacks; there were nearly 5,000 on St. Croix in 1835.Footnote ³⁶ Some of them became teachers in the slave schools on St. Croix. The first Afro-Caribbean teachers were employed in 1840. The government recommended William McFarlane, who was born on St. Croix and was a member of the Anglican Church. He had been trained at the Mico Charity Normal School in Antigua and was favoured because of his teaching experience and his knowledge of Stow’s Training System. The second was James McIntosh, who was born on Antigua and was a member of the Moravian Church. He received his education from the Moravians themselves at their school in Newfield and was promoted for service on St. Croix by the Moravian missionaries on Antigua.Footnote ³⁷ These two formed the first teaching unit, together with the Moravian missionaries William H. Warner from Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, and Kleiner from Germany. As this was insufficient to staff the eight schools on St. Croix, it was decided to employ additional teachers from Antigua by the end of 1841. Moreover, the missionaries in the Danish West Indies recommended church members for training at the Mico Charity Normal School.Footnote ³⁸ While the Moravian missionaries who worked in the schools lived on the mission stations, the Afro-Caribbean teachers were accommodated near the schoolhouses on the plantations.

Although there was considerable turnover of teaching staff, a list from 1847 facilitates reconstruction of the names and church affiliations of the Afro-Caribbean teachers at that time.

Table 1 demonstrates that, in contrast to the teaching staff in British West Indies schools run by the Moravian mission, the teachers in the Danish West Indies belonged to various denominations. Although the Moravians tried to recruit teachers from amongst their own church members so as to extend their religious influence in the slave schools, they were not able to achieve this goal. Of special interest is the teacher named George Stephens from Antigua. He came to St. Croix in 1841 after he had been educated at the Mico Charity Normal School. The missionaries were concerned about employing him because he was a Methodist. Missionary activities by Methodists were forbidden in the colony, and the Moravian missionaries told Stephens that he should pretend to belong to their church. The mission, which had refused to recruit English Moravians for its slave schools in the Danish West Indies for fear they might be sympathetic to the cause of slave emancipation, was aware that it was acting against Peter von Scholten’s veto. The lack of suitable teachers in the colony, however, made it necessary to make some concessions regarding their selection. Some time later, Stephens was received into the Moravian Church at his own request.Footnote ⁴⁰ The same happened a couple of years later with another graduate of the Mico Charity Normal School. Martin Abraham, a Methodist and teacher in the schools on St. Thomas, was received into the Moravian Church a few months before emancipation.Footnote ⁴¹

Table 1 Afro-Caribbean teachers on St. Croix, 1844Footnote ³⁹

Conflicts surrounding Afro-Caribbean teachers in the Danish West Indies

The Moravian Church presented the slave schools in St. Croix as a great success to the public. Regarding the employment of Afro-Caribbean teachers, the missionary in charge of the Danish West Indian mission, Wilhelm Häuser, wrote in the Periodical Accounts, “we feel it a peculiar happiness and privilege, to number among our fellow-servants in this blessed work, individuals nearly allied by descent to the nation whom we are called to serve in the Gospel.”Footnote ⁴² The work of indigenous teachers was presented as a first step towards the greater goal, the “training of assistants from the natives themselves.”Footnote ⁴³ However, from the beginning, there were several conflicts surrounding the employment of Afro-Caribbean teachers in the Danish West Indies. First and foremost between the Moravian missionaries and the teaching staff, but also between the teachers and the colonial government over the issue of salary,Footnote ⁴⁴ as well as between the Moravian mission and the Danish Lutheran and Anglican Church regarding religious influence in the schools.Footnote ⁴⁵

Afro-Caribbean teachers who took up a post at one of the slave schools on St. Croix were in a delicate position. They had to accommodate themselves to the Moravian missionary society. The mission congregation was hierarchically structured. Its rules, regulations, and the different statuses of its members applied not only to the indigenous members of the mission congregation but to the missionaries themselves. The superintendent was in charge of the mission field. He was the central decision maker regarding spiritual, financial, and political issues. He was supported by several missionary couples who were responsible for the congregation at the different mission stations. Married missionary women played a central role in the pastoral care of female congregants and were in some respects superior to single male missionaries, who held the lowest rank within this system.

The Afro-Caribbean teachers were a new group within the Moravian missionary society. They were directly answerable to the school inspector, the Moravian missionary Traugott Gardin. As the mission was interested in extending its religious influence through the school system, it endeavoured to place religious instruction in the hands of the missionaries themselves.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, as no missionary was experienced with Stow’s Training System and most of them needed further training in English, they had to be made fit for their job.Footnote ⁴⁷ The members of the school conference, who took the final decisions before the start of the school system in 1841, were concerned about whether missionaries would be willing to begin as assistants to an Afro-Caribbean teacher.Footnote ⁴⁸ The conference does not further comment on the issue, but the mission records detailing the relationship between Afro-Caribbean teachers and missionaries reveal several disputes between them.

When the Helper conference, the central decision committee in the mission field, discussed the building of schoolhouses on the neighbouring island of St. John in 1843, there was a preference for employing “white and single missionaries” as teachers, because they could also assist with the missionary service. The missionaries explained their decision by stating that “coloured Moravians are not so easy to employ and to accommodate.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, it seems as if the attitude of the Moravian mission towards its indigenous teachers was not free of prejudices. That the propagated equality between black and white members of the mission was limited in certain respects becomes even more evident in another context. The teacher Huyghue wanted to take a seat in the first row in church at the Sunday service. This Arbeiterbank, or “workman’s pew,” was reserved exclusively for missionaries and their families. As Huyghue tried to sit down there, he was sent away in front of the mission congregation. His public downgrading undermined his status and made the conflicts between European missionaries and their indigenous teachers visible. The missionary who had denied him the access to the Arbeiterbank wrote to his colleagues that “Huyghue had not been as humble as the Moravians had expected him to be.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This indicates that the missionaries regarded Huyghue as inferior to themselves and that they expected him to show this through his behaviour. The teacher was withdrawn from his post and employed at another mission station.

This incident led to discussions amongst the missionaries themselves, as to how far the Afro-Caribbean teachers should be integrated into the missionary society. The Moravians preferred their own members as teachers, as they were afraid of the religious influence that might be exerted on slave children by competing churches. Especially McFarlane, who alongside his job as teacher, also worked as a clerk for the Anglican Church, was regarded as a possible conduit for Anglican influence. The missionaries were suspicious because the Anglican priest had visited McFarlane several times at his school.Footnote ⁵¹ It is not clear whether McFarlane really promoted Anglicanism in the mission schools. He explained to the missionaries that he was simply dependent on his income as an Anglican clerk, as the salary he received as a teacher was insufficient to provide a livelihood for him and his family.Footnote ⁵² A similar conflict arose because of the worldly behaviour of the teacher Seckass, who belonged to the Danish Lutheran Church. He was seen several times gambling and drinking in town. That was absolutely incompatible with the behaviour the mission expected from its teachers. However, the Moravians were concerned that any the Danish Lutheran priest would regard any measures taken against Seckass as an attack on church as a whole.Footnote ⁵³

The conflict deepened when a student at the Mico Charity Normal School in Antigua, who belonged to the Danish Lutheran Church in St. Croix, asked to be received into the Moravian Church. This led to an intense discussion amongst the missionaries in the Danish West Indies as to whether the students from St. Croix should be allowed to apply for membership in the Moravian mission in Antigua. The superintendent of the mission, Gottfried Wilhelm Häuser, rejected this request. He regarded it as interference in the internal matters of the mission congregation on St. Croix. The missionary Traugott Gardin argued that, quite to the contrary, admitting Afro-Caribbean teachers to the Moravian Church would serve to extend the mission’s influence in the schools. It would be easier to control and discipline them if they were members of the Moravian mission. Gardin, who had himself worked in the Moravian schools in Antigua for several years, feared that open rejection of possible candidates would undermine their position as teacher and diminish the appeal of working in the schools.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, Gardin was outvoted in the Helper conference, which decided not to receive students into the Moravian Church.

In a letter to the Elders Conference, Gardin criticized that it was, in particular, prejudice against indigenous teachers that had led to this decision. “I readily admit that a European, particularly a German Brother, probably often has difficulties combating that type of prejudice. It depends on the degree to which somebody has the ability to disregard externals and … less essential matters. We will not succeed by making room for prejudices!“Footnote ⁵⁵ Gardin was not able to change the minds of his colleagues at this juncture. The Moravian mission in the Danish West Indies was not yet ready to integrate Afro-Caribbean teachers into its mission congregation. The dispute likewise highlights differences within the group of missionaries. Gardin, who had worked in the Moravian schools in the British Caribbean for several years, was much more open towards the integration of Afro-Caribbeans into the mission service than his colleagues on St. Croix.