Revisiting the Slave Ship Enterprise in Post-Emancipation Bermuda

Abstract

ABSTRACT This is the first study of the full range of documentary evidence concerning the unintended arrival of the Enterprise in Bermuda in 1835, the earliest incident of an American slave ship entering a British colonial port after the Emancipation Act. The choice for freedom made by 72 enslaved people touched off a tense discussion in Bermuda about the legal status of its human cargo. This challenged the capacity of elite white Bermudians to reconcile their reluctance to accept them into Bermuda with the imagined benevolence they had conjured during Bermuda's own recent emancipation. Bermuda's officials negotiated the degree to which calculated inaction would balance imperial abolitionism with local racial anxieties and American entanglements. Scholars have noted the incident mainly for its geopolitical significance in the post-emancipation Atlantic, but Bermudian and Colonial Office sources emphasize the role of local Black Bermudian communication networks and their knowledge of the law. The archive also reveals that the Enterprise incident encompassed some of the most prominent slave traders and abolitionist families in the United States. Rather than an aberration, in characteristics such as the striking young age of its human cargo, the Enterprise was typical of this phase of the American internal slave trade.