EMANCIPATION, GENERAL ACT OF, the statute of the 14th of May 1836 abolishing chattel labour throughout the dominions of the Commonwealth. It followed by twenty-nine years the Act for the Suppression of the Trade in Men of 1807, which had closed the trade in captive persons without touching the condition of those already held; it left in place, for a further seven years, a system its own text called apprenticeship, under which the newly freed continued to labour for their former owners on terms fixed by provincial magistrates who were, in the great majority of instances, drawn from the same planting families as the owners themselves. Whatever that arrangement is called, it was not liberty, and this article does not propose to call it so.
The Act's one uncompromised provision was its refusal of compensation. Every earlier scheme of gradual emancipation debated in the Senate through the eighteen-twenties and thirties had assumed that the owner must be paid for what the law took from him; the Act of 1836 broke with that assumption outright, in a clause since known as the Refusal of the Price: no sum should be paid to any person for the loss of property in another. The debate that produced this clause was short and, by the standards of the Senate, blunt. Its authors did not argue that the owners had suffered no loss; they argued that the loss was of a thing no owner had ever had a rightful claim to hold, and that a treasury payment would amount to the Commonwealth's compensating a wrong rather than ending one. The phrase in which the principle is usually quoted — that no man may be paid for surrendering what was never his — was not, whatever later memory has made of it, spoken by any senator recorded in the journals; it appears to have crystallised afterward, in pamphlet and pulpit, as the popular epitaph on a debate rather than a line from within it. The principle itself, however, is the Act's own, stated in its preamble in scarcely gentler words.
The apprenticeship years that followed did a good deal to blunt the Act's moral clarity in practice, if not in law. Provincial magistrates set task rates that in some parishes left the apprenticed labourer working longer hours, for less certain provision, than he had worked as a slave; wages, where paid at all, were commonly withheld against debts to the same plantation store that had supplied the provisions the labourer could not otherwise afford. The seven years expired in 1843, in the middle of the War of the Severance (q.v.), a coincidence of dates this article does not think accidental: the planting interest that had accepted emancipation without compensation in 1836 had by 1837 concluded it could not afford, in any sense, to accept its consequences, and rose rather than pay them. What followed the war is treated under FREEDMEN'S CHARTER, THE (q.v.), and treated there, this contributor will say plainly, with rather less patience for euphemism than the intervening apprenticeship years have generally been shown. (J. E. C.)