page_title: Danish West Indies
section_title: Emancipation
hierarchical_section_title: Danish West Indies / Slavery / Emancipation
caption_attribution_description: English: Governor-General Peter von Scholten had this bilingual poster printed immediately on the night of July 3-4, 1848, publicizing his decision to abolish slavery effective immediately. The poster was put up everywhere in the Danish West Indies in the days to come. (The Danish National Archives).
context_page_description: The Danish West Indies or Danish Antilles or Danish Virgin Islands was a Danish colony in the Caribbean, consisting of the islands of Saint Thomas with 32 square miles; Saint John with 19 square miles; Saint Croix with 84 square miles, and Water Island with 491.5 acres. The islands have belonged to the United States since they were purchased in 1917.
  The Danish West India Guinea Company annexed the uninhabited island of Saint Thomas
  in 1672 and St. John in 1718. In 1733, Saint Croix was purchased from the French West India Company. When the Danish company went bankrupt in 1754, the King of Denmark–Norway assumed direct control of the three islands. Britain occupied the Danish West Indies in 1801–02 and 1807–15, during the Napoleonic Wars.
  Danish colonizers in the West Indies aimed to exploit the profitable triangular trade, involving the export of firearms and other manufactured goods to Africa in exchange for slaves, who were then transported to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations.
  Caribbean colonies, in turn, exported sugar, rum, and molasses to Denmark. The economy of the Danish West Indies depended on slavery.
context_section_description: By the 1830s and 1840s, the sugar beet industry had reduced the profitability of sugarcane. The British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 emancipated slaves in the neighboring British West Indies, fully effective as of 1840. Abolition in the Danish West Indies was discussed, with Governor von Scholten, who had been seeking reforms since 1830, in favor of emancipation. Scholarly consensus suggests von Scholten's views were influenced by his free-coloured mistress Anna Heegaard.
  King Christian VIII supported the gradual abolition of slavery and ruled in 1847 that every child born of an unfree woman should be free from birth, and that slavery would end entirely after 12 years. That ruling satisfied neither the slaves, nor the plantation owners.
  Meanwhile on April 27, 1848, France signed a law to abolish slavery in their colonies within two months, but a slave insurrection on Martinique led to immediate abolition on Martinique on May 22 and Guadeloupe on May 27.
  The slaves in the Danish West Indies did not want to wait for their freedom either. On July 2, 1848 freedman John Gottlieb (also known as "Moses Gottlieb" or "General Buddhoe") and Admiral Martin King (among others) led a slave rebellion, taking over Frederiksted, Saint Croix. That evening hundreds of slaves gathered peaceably outside Fort Frederik refusing to work the next day and demanding freedom. By 10 AM the following morning about 8000 slaves had joined.
  On the afternoon of July 3, 1848 (now known as Emancipation Day), Peter von Scholten, in order to end the rebellion and prevent bloodshed and damages, went to Frederiksted and announced an immediate and total emancipation of all slaves. He then went to Christiansted where a second rebellion had formed and some fires had been set, and had notices disseminated to the other islands. General Buddhoe worked with the governor and other officials to end the riots and violence that had broken out on a few estates.
  In the aftermath, Buddhoe is said to have been jailed and exiled to Trinidad. Governor von Scholten also fared poorly. As governor, he did not actually have the authority to end slavery, but had found himself in a situation where he needed to take immediate action that could not wait for communicating with Denmark. For his actions, he was called back to Denmark to face a trial for treason. He was first denied his pension, but later cleared of the charges.
  When Denmark abolished slavery in 1848, many plantation owners wanted full reimbursement on the grounds that their assets were damaged by the loss of the slaves, and by the fact that they would have to pay for labor in the future. The Danish government paid fifty dollars for every slave the plantation owners had owned and recognized that the slaves' release had caused a financial loss for the owners.
caption: Emancipation proclamation, 1848
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