By the mid-i84os a groundswell of opposition to the Christian-humanitarian model of colonization advocated by the Aborigines Committee missionaries had become evident. Colonial settlers found opinions quoted more often and their representations more willingly accepted ‘at home’. Even as the dispute over the Wairau ‘Affray’ continued in 1843, the Nelson Examiner noted that its humanitarian enemies were no longer so powerful in Britain. It complained only that, ‘having ceased or worn out at home’, humanitarianism ‘still has life and activity’ in the person of government officials ‘here’. ‘The waves continue to roll when the storm that raised them is laid.’ Christian-humanitarian discourse found its influence diminished during this period as the result of a variety of interconnected developments. Some of these developments, such as the loss of Buxton’s parliamentary seat in 1837, and of Glenelg at the Colonial Office in 1839, reflected shifts in metropolitan politics. The origins of others were dispersed across a number of imperial sites. Avery significant factor was widespread British disappointment at the results of emancipation in the West Indies. Abolitionists and their supporters had assumed that most freed labourers in the West Indies would progress towards ‘civilization' through continued work on the plantations. The ‘missionary dream’, as Hall describes it, pictured sober, docile, black Christians dedicating themselves productively to the free market, post-emancipation economy of the Caribbean—‘a dream which fragmented as the missionaries came to realize, to a greater or lesser extent, that they could not control the destinies of others’. Within a few years of emancipation the majority of planters in Jamaica were in debt and capital was scarce. Ignoring underlying economic factors, planters blamed their distress on the desertion of roughly half of their labour force as former slaves moved off the plantations to cultivate their own small plots of land in the hilly parts of the island. William Knibb admitted that ‘The new Black subjects he had envisaged were less industrious and domesticated than he would have liked.' More galling for abolitionist missionaries, freed black West Indians shunned their religious authority, appropriating Christianity instead to new and syncretic forms such as revivalism, obeahism, and myalism. (See pp. 34 and 219-26.) The ‘failure’ of freed slaves to perform Christianity ‘properly' smacked of ingratitude to their supposed benefactors. It seemed that, ‘the freed people had... reverted to African barbarism’.
Despite disappointments in the West Indies, Buxton persisted in attempts to combat slavery in Africa itself and to sustain a metropolitan sense of concern for indigenous peoples. When the Niger Expedition of 1841, intended ‘to attack slavery at its source’ by introducing Christianity and ‘legitimate commerce’ to the parts of Africa most blighted by slave-trading, met disaster, the Aborigines Protection Society reflected that it had ‘not attained to that magnitude and importance, or achieved those results, which doubtless [its] early friends... might reasonably anticipate’. (See p. 52.) Most other observers drew a starker conclusion: Europeans had no hope of bringing redemptive light to the denizens of a ‘dark continent’ which was more than capable of swallowing puny and naive humanitarian endeavours. Charles Dickens pronounced the expedition ‘the prime example of philanthropic folly’.
Influential commentators on colonial affairs such as Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold (who savaged Bishop Colenso of Natal for being seduced into heresy by his Zulu congregation) helped make humanitarians figures of ridicule in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. When an increasing proportion of the British population saw family and friends emigrate to the colonies, unrepentant humanitarians were confounded by a general swelling of sympathy for their settler foes in places where violent indigenous resistance was peaking, such as the eastern Cape in 1847-8 and 1850-2, New Zealand in 1845-6 and 1863-4, and India in 1857. During each of these episodes the metropolitan public imbibed media images of half-naked ‘savages’ raping, mutilating, and killing innocent Britons, as well as more intimate expressions of fear and loathing from the private correspondence of friends and relatives among the settlers overseas. The sympathy that was aroused between metropolitan and colonial Britons during such crises contributed greatly to the dissipation of humanitarian political influence after the 1840s.
The controversy over Governor Eyre’s suppression of the Morant Bay Revolt in Jamaica in 1865 ‘crystallized Victorian thinking’ about racial difference. Eyre, who had been a Protector of the Aborigines in South Australia in his early career, crushed the uprising of former slaves seeking more access to land and hanged 439 of its participants, including a ‘mixed-race’ member of the House of Assembly. Prominent liberals and radicals including John Stuart Mill, John Bright, and Charles Darwin sought to have Eyre prosecuted, but he was successfully defended both by the island’s planters and by such leading figures as Dickens, Carlyle, and Alfred Tennyson. The Times found Morant Bay even more disappointing than the Indian Mutiny because ‘its inhabitants are our spoilt children’. Though it had been claimed ‘in Jamaica that the negro could become fit for self-government... Jamaica herself gainsays the fact and belies herself’, the reason being that it is ‘impossible to eradicate the original savageness of the African blood’.
Although shifts in public opinion helped, perhaps the most direct way in which settlers won their argument with humanitarians was through being granted representative government and the right, albeit hedged by continuing but often ineffective metropolitan safeguards, to devise their own ‘native policies’. Lord Durham’s Report, which had first advocated the granting of self-government as a way of securing the continued loyalty of the Canadian colonies, was written only two years after the Aborigines Committee Report, in 1839. It countermanded the thrust of that prior report through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by placing the political fate of colonized peoples largely in the hands of locally elected settler legislatures. The effect was to make humanitarian opinion in Britain largely irrelevant to the activities of colonial governance.
Governor George Grey showed in both the Cape and New Zealand how settler legislatures could help overturn humanitarian precepts ‘on the ground’. During his first governorship of New Zealand (1845-53) Grey dismissed Clarke and closed down the Protectorate. In both his terms as governor (the second from 1861 to 1868) he concentrated on combating Maori sovereignty through military force. In between times he assisted in crushing Xhosa resistance on the eastern Cape frontier and entrenching British rule once more over the former Queen Adelaide Province, now known as British Kaffraria. Grey barely encountered any real opposition from the old stalwarts of the missionary-humanitarian network in either colony, while ensuring that the settlers’ version of ‘amalgamation’ became official policy.
In the Australian colonies, by the end of the 1840s, mission stations were collapsing, having lost access to government funds because of their failure to attract settled converts. Protectorates of Aborigines were either abolished or neutered. While South Australia gave the job of protection to the police, in Western Australia the office became briefly the ‘Guardian of Natives and Protector of Settlers’. The following year that office too was effectively abolished. As in the Cape and in the West Indies before it, the refusal of those ‘saved’ by Christian humanitarians to conform to apparently universal, but in fact deeply ethnocentric, notions of ‘civilized’ conduct was interpreted as betraying a lack of gratitude and their incapacity to ‘progress’. Even where large numbers of indigenous people were adopting Christianity, the way they adapted Christian practices and beliefs to their own needs alienated many of the original supporters of the missionary enterprise.
Humanitarian influence had by no means disappeared. Well into the twentieth century the Aborigines Protection Society and its allies continued to mobilize support in Britain and to act as guardians of the legitimacy of the Empire. Though they did little to prevent further colonial aggressions, fear of their criticism could have a restraining influence. When, for instance, during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, General Sir Garnet Wolseley confessed to his wish ‘to let loose the Swazies’ upon the northern Zulu, who had been insufficiently punished by the shooting of 10,000 men, he still felt obliged ‘to think of the howling Societies at home who have sympathy with all black men whilst they care nothing for the miseries & cruelties inflicted upon their own kith and kin who have the misfortune to be located near these interesting niggers’.64 In other places and at other times during the later nineteenth century, too, humanitarian mobilization could prove effective on specific issues, especially when associated with popular figures such as David Livingstone. But indignation was more often directed at African slavers or rival European colonialists like Leopold in the Congo than at fellow Britons in the colonies of settlement. Many missionaries in British colonies continued to rail against powerful local settler interests,65 but the undercutting of the early nineteenth-century ‘missionary dream’—founded on a very particular model of civilization and Christianity—and the empowerment of colonial legislatures—removed their access to the efficacious trans-imperial political network that flourished under Buxton. Though, as Andrew Porter observes in Chapter 3, ‘increasingly missionaries called the humanitarian tune, with humanitarians and bodies such as the Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigines Protection Society dependent on fluctuating missionary concern’, both humanitarians and missionaries had lost the ability to challenge settler colonialism on its home ground.