Elections in the Mid-Nineteenth Century British Empire

Naomi Gabrielle Parkinson

November 2017

Hughes Hall

This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Elections in the Mid-Nineteenth Century British Empire

Naomi Gabrielle Parkinson

Abstract

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of the operation and significance of elections in the British colonies of Jamaica, New South Wales and the Cape, from 1849- 1860, with a particular focus on the creation and reconstruction of ideas of politically- entitled British subjecthood over this period. Beginning with the first elections under a system of representative government in New South Wales and the Cape, and the early elections of the post-emancipation period in Jamaica, it questions how residents within these sites engaged with elections via the cultures of the canvass, public meetings, open nominations and viva voce polling. Through this study, I show how mid-century elections became critical sites for the articulation of social tensions and long-standing rivalries between competing settler groups within each of these colonies. I argue that the franchise, although highly demonstrative of the Colonial Office and settlers’ attempts to reconcile the respective competing histories of and justifications for colonisation, was often frustrated in practice. Cultures of violence, the manipulation of land-values, double-voting and bribery provided avenues through which laws governing the right to vote were transcended during elections. Through this thesis, I show how both residents and officials used such mechanisms to reshape the function and meaning of the franchise. I also show the lasting implications of such changes, particularly for their impact on nascent attitudes to race.

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increasingly centred on an individual, defined by his race and gender, as well as his class. Although affirming the importance of the period, it shows the complexities and inconsistencies of attempts to define the boundaries of enfranchisement over this period, and the impact of struggles to achieve it via changes to electoral law and practice. The comparison between New South Wales, the Cape and Jamaica illuminates the manner through which global discourses of reform, including those relating to bribery, privacy and order, would come to be repurposed within each site. It also serves to reinforce the striking role that attitudes to race would come to play in the formation and regulation of electoral practice across the British Empire. In this manner, this thesis aims to advance imperial historiography by highlighting the role of electoral culture as a reflection of and instigating factor in wider reconceptions of political rights across the British colonial world.

Declaration

This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text.

It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text.

It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee.

Acknowledgements

This work is indebted to the assistance and dedication of archivists in libraries and repositories across Britain, Jamaica, Australia and South Africa, who offered me much guidance during long research trips. Particular thanks must go to staff at the Western Cape Archives, the National Library of South Africa, and at the State Records Office of New South Wales and the National Archives and National Library of Jamaica, who not only offered detailed advice with their collections, but continued to offer follow up assistance after my departure.

Equal thanks to those who offered much needed company at the archives and during these trips. To Lindsey and Yann, my housemates in Cape Town, and Raphael and Leontine in the archives. Also to the members of the Atlantic Athletic Club generally and Tim, in particular, who accompanied me on tours around Cape Town and much of the Western Cape, including helping me visit many of the sites covered in this thesis. Nigel Worden set me up at the University of Cape Town and made me feel very welcome while I was there, as did members of the History Department Seminar and reading group. With thanks also to the Empires reading group at the University of Sydney, and to Kirsten McKenzie for her advice during my stay in Australia. Chris Holdridge, particularly, has offered lively discussion from the first days of this thesis. In Cambridge, I would like to thank the World History community, particularly my fellow graduate students and the members of the World History Workshop. With special thanks to Emma Hunter for her early supervision and continued support of this project, and the MPhil that preceded it.

Utmost thanks must go to my supervisor, Alison Bashford, who has offered constant support and critical guidance throughout this project. Finally, to my family, Ben, Judith, Michael and Miriam, who have been by my side throughout.

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Funding for this PhD and its research was generously provided by the Cambridge Trusts, the SMUTS Memorial Fund, the Holland Rose Fund and the Cambridge University History Faculty, for which I am very grateful.

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Contents

ABSTRACT ...... III

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... VII

CONTENTS ...... IX

FIGURES AND MAPS ...... XI FIGURES ...... XI MAPS ...... XI

TABLES AND GRAPHS ...... XII TABLES ...... XII GRAPHS ...... XII

ABBREVIATIONS ...... XIII

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 MID-CENTURY COLONIAL ELECTIONS ...... 4 ELECTIONS IN BRITISH AND IMPERIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY ...... 8 SOURCES AND METHODS: ...... 18 CHAPTER OUTLINE: ...... 21

CHAPTER ONE: ESTABLISHING A COLONIAL FRANCHISE ...... 25 DEBATING THE FRANCHISE IN POST-EMANCIPATION JAMAICA ...... 33 THE CAPE CONSTITUTION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE CAPE QUALIFIED FRANCHISE, 1830-1853 ...... 43 THE CAPE’S ‘NON-RACIAL’ FRANCHISE IN IDEOLOGY AND OPERATION ...... 46 NEW SOUTH WALES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE ‘UNIVERSAL’ FRANCHISE ...... 53 ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS AND THE ISSUES OF POLITICAL SUBJECTHOOD ...... 59 CONCLUSION ...... 63

CHAPTER TWO: IMPERSONATING A VOTER ...... 66 THE POLITICS OF REGISTRATION ...... 68 CHRISTIAN RESPECTABILITY AND THE MISSION STATIONS OF THE CAPE ...... 71 GENADENDAL AND THE 1859 ELECTION FOR CALEDON ...... 79 GENADENDAL’S VOTERS AND THE MEANING OF THE CAPE QUALIFIED FRANCHISE ...... 84

IMPERSONATING A VOTER ...... 88 CLASS AND RACE IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF NEW SOUTH WALES’ FRANCHISE ...... 97 CONCLUSION ...... 102

CHAPTER THREE: COLONIAL ELECTIONEERING ...... 106 THE CANVASS ...... 108 THE NOMINATION ...... 128 THE POLL ...... 135 CONCLUSION ...... 144

CHAPTER FOUR: DISORDER AND DISSENT ...... 147 ORGANISED VIOLENCE AT JAMAICAN ELECTIONS, 1849-1860 ...... 151 CONTESTING ‘RESPECTABLE’ INTERACTION ...... 163 VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC OPINION IN COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES ...... 167 CONTROLLING CONTENTION ...... 178 VIOLENCE AND APATHY WITHIN THE CAPE ...... 180 CONCLUSION ...... 184

CHAPTER FIVE: INFLUENCE, INDEPENDENCE AND REFORM ...... 187 BRIBERY, TREATING AND COERCION IN THE MID-CENTURY COLONIES ...... 190 ELIMINATING BRIBERY IN POST-EMANCIPATION JAMAICA ...... 192 BRIBERY AND TREATING IN THE CAPE COLONY ...... 205 UNDUE INFLUENCE AND THE SECRET BALLOT IN COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES ...... 211 THE IMPACTS AND LIMITS OF REFORM ...... 218 CONCLUSION ...... 226

CONCLUSION ...... 228

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 238

Figures and Maps

FIGURES

FIGURE 1: WALTER MASON, 'SYDNEY ELECTION - THE HUSTINGS. MACQUARIE PLACE.' ...... 1 FIGURE 2: THE CENTRAL GROUNDS OF GENADENDAL...... 66 FIGURE 3: CAPE COLONY, NOTICE OF REGISTRATION ...... 71 FIGURE 4: ADOLPHE DUPERLY, THE KINGSTON ELECTION, JAMAICA 1854 ...... 106 FIGURE 5: VOTE FOR SOLOMON ...... 115 FIGURE 6: AN UNCUT ROLL OF CANDIDATES' POSTERS ...... 122 FIGURE 7: THE HUSTINGS, HYDE PARK, NEW SOUTH WALES ...... 128 FIGURE 8: MONTEGO BAY COURTHOUSE, C. 1905 ...... 167 FIGURE 9: PARRAMATTA COURT HOUSE ...... 173 FIGURE 10: PARRAMATTA COURTHOUSE, 1837 ...... 174 FIGURE 11: CROWD AT THE DUBBO HUSTINGS, NEW SOUTH WALES, C.1880 ...... 237

MAPS

MAP 1: PAROCHIAL AND PARLIAMENTARY ELECTORATES, JAMAICA, 1816-1867 ...... XV MAP 2: ELECTORAL DISTRICTS OF NEW SOUTH WALES, 1851-1858 ...... XVII MAP 3: ELECTORAL DISTRICTS OF THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE ...... XIX

Tables and Graphs

TABLES

TABLE 1: VOTING IN THE CAPE'S MISSION STATIONS ...... 78

GRAPHS

GRAPH 1: QUALIFICATION OF VOTERS, JAMAICA 1854-1865 ...... 38 GRAPH 2: CAPE VOTERS’ RESIDENCES BY LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL DISTRICT, WESTERN PROVINCE, 1859 ...... 52 GRAPH 3: COMPOSITION OF THE ELECTORAL ROLL, WESTERN PROVINCE 1858-9...... 53

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Abbreviations

APS: Aborigines Protection Society

LMS: London Missionary Society

CCP: Cape Colonial Papers

NLJ: National Library of Jamaica

CO: Colonial Office

CWM: Christian World Mission

SLNSW: State Library of New South Wales

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Parochial and Parliamentary Electorates, Jamaica , Falmouth 1816-1867

HANOVER ST. JAMES Port Maria TRELAWNY ST. ANN ST. MARY

WESTMORELAND

ST. THOM. IN THE VALE ST. GEORGE

ST. ELIZABETH CLARENDON ST. JOHN ST. PORTLAND ANDREW

MANCHESTER KINGSTON PORT ST. ST. Kingston ROYAL DOROTHY CATHERINE ST. THOM. ST. DAVID IN THE EAST Port Royal VERE

Easington

20 km

Source: Boundaries drawn from B. W Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation maps and plans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Map 1: Parochial and Parliamentary Electorates, Jamaica, 1816-1867 (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica Publications, 1988), p. 3.

Electoral Districts of New South Wales, 1851-1858

Legend Electorates Not Shown:

1 1. Moreton, Wide Bay and Maranoa Boroughs: 3 3 2. Clarence and Darling Downs 2 § Southern Boroughs 3. Stanley County 3 4 Braidwood, Goulburn, 4. Moreton (part of district 1) 3 Queanbeyan, Yass. 5. Liverpool Plains and Gwydir § North Eastern Boroughs 6. New England and McLeay Newcastle, Raymond Terrace 7. Lachlan and Lower Darling § 5 8. Wellington and Bligh Western Boroughs 6 3 9. Phillip, Brisbane and Bligh Bathurst, Carcoar, Kelso 1 Armidale 10. Durham § Stanely Boroughs 11. Gloucester and Macquarie Brisbane, Ipswich 8 12. Wellington County § Northumberland Boroughs 7 3 11 13. Roxburgh East Maitland, West Maitland, 9 10 14. Northumberland and Hunter 12 3 Morpeth 13 14 15. Bathurst County Bathurst 16. Cook and Westmoreland 15 16 17 17. Cumberland North Riding

18 Sydney 18. Cumberland South Riding 19 21 Sydney Districts: 19. King and Georgiana 20 22 § 20. Argyle Parramatta § Sydney City 23 24 25 21. West Camden § 22. East Camden Sydney Hamlets

23. Murrumbidgee

26 24. Murray 25. Saint Vincent 26. Maneroo

Sources and notes: In addition to the twenty-five country districts (1-26) and the three city seats in Sydney, New South Wales had five ‘boroughs’ seats, elected from residents in Map 2: Electoral Districts of New South Wales, 1851-1858 the regional towns. Boundaries drawn from Eamonn Clifford, Antony Green, David Clune (eds.), Electoral Atlas of New South Wales (Bathurst: New South Wales Department 200 km of Lands, 2006). See, also, New South Wales Electoral Act 1851, which xvii provides detailed descriptions of the boundary points enacted with the 1851 Electoral Act.

Electoral Districts of the Cape of Good Hope, 1853-1868

WESTERN PROVINCE EASTERN PROVINCE

COLESBERG ALBERT

CLANWILLIAM CRADOCK

BEAUFORT GRAAFF- REINET

WORCESTER SOMERSET FORT BEAUFORT MALMESBURY GRAHAM’S VICTORIA TOWN & ALBANY Graham’s Town PAARL UITENHAGE GEORGE SWELLENDAM Cape Town STELLENBOSCH Genadendal PORT ELIZABETH

CAPE CALEDON DISTRICT & CAPE TOWN Sources and notes: Map 3: Electoral Districts of the Cape of Good Hope Many of these boundaries changed shortly after the institution of representative 100 km government due to the amalgamation of annexed territory into the colony in the east, in addition to the division of districts into smaller divisions. Boundaries drawn from Sir Harry Smith, The Autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Smith, Baronet of Aliwal on the Sutlej, G.C.B. (London: J. Murray, 1903), p. 594; ‘The Colony of the Cape of Good Hope and Neighbouring Territories 1879,’ University of Cape Town Digital Collections, http://www.digitalcollections.lib.uct.ac.za/islandora/object/islandora%3A19782/da tastream/OBJ/view, accessed 20 October 2017; Stanley Trapido, ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation in the Politics of the Cape of Good Hope 1853-1910,’ (University of London: PhD Thesis, 1970), p. 493. xix

Introduction

Elections and the British Empire: A comparative history

Figure 1: Walter Mason, 'Sydney Election - The Hustings. Macquarie Place.' Source: Illustrated Sydney News, 6 May 1854, p.3.1

As prescribed disruptions to the operation of government, elections hold the potential to act as moments of marked social and political transition, if not radical

1 Later published as: Walter Mason, Australian Picture Pleasure Book (Sydney: J. R. Clarke, 1857).

upheaval. They represent rare meetings of high and low political forces; lead to the disruption of any clear division between public and private; and, in the issues and contention they draw, elections serve to reveal deep fissures and prejudices within a society. Today, ‘free’ and ‘fair’ elections tend to be associated with both safety and scrutiny. Yet, historically, elections have served as divisive trigger points for social unrest, organised intimidation, fraud and manipulation. Even when peaceful, there remains something highly symbolic and richly revealing in the periodic suspension of parliament, as leaders take to the ‘hustings’ to test themselves and their policies. Unpopularity is countered with attempts to garner support from the public, in many cases leading to fleeting, unexpected and unlikely alliances or policies. While the focus of elections is often upon candidate, platform or party, moreover, through the debates and contention they raise, these events provide moments for a community to reflect on its history and to make a claim for contesting views of its core identity and its future.

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of the operation and significance of elections in the British colonies of Jamaica, New South Wales and the Cape, c.1849-1860. It does so in order to show their role in the creation and reconstruction of ideas of politically-entitled subjecthood, as the boundaries and entitlements of this category became matters of critical attention across the Empire. Beginning with the first elections under a system of representative government in New South Wales and the Cape, and the early elections of the post-emancipation period in Jamaica, it questions how residents within these sites engaged with elections via the cultures of the canvass, public meetings, open nominations and viva voce polling. It particularly considers how these cultures, working in conjunction with practices of bribery, violence and intimidation, were used to reshape the franchise, and how they would come to shape broader understandings of the right to vote. Within this history I am concerned with changes in enfranchisement, appeals for reform and the social and political impact that limited franchises were to have across the British colonial world. Ultimately, I am concerned with the wider process by which elections would increasingly be seen to be the prerogative of the settler colonies, as increasing legislative freedom was given to New South Wales and the Cape, while Jamaica came under further imperial control.

1849-1860 was a period marked by major shifts in British imperial policy, a period that saw the Colonial Office attempt to reconcile settlers’ appeals for greater political independence against a wider desire to maintain the integrity of the Empire. Within Jamaica, New South Wales and the Cape, elections and enfranchisement came under focus as the Colonial Office pursued a new agenda of constitutional reform. In 1850 and 1853 respectively, new constitutions were introduced in New South Wales and the Cape, drastically lowering the franchise established in 1842 in the former and introducing a low, colour-blind franchise and a locally-elected parliament in the latter. Against the prohibitive restrictions of Jamaica’s franchise and the continued attempts of European settlers to reintroduce racial restrictions removed in the 1830s, the Colonial Office also continued to monitor any attempted changes to the island’s election law, expressing a desire (never fulfilled) that the franchise be made more inclusive. Yet, in all three colonies, longstanding tensions and contesting perceptions of the identity and boundaries of political subjecthood left policies regarding the right to vote wholly unsettled and often politically explosive. Within a context of widespread disagreement over the franchise, elections were taken up as opportunities to contest its limits.

This thesis shows how mid-century elections became critical sites for the articulation of social tensions and long-standing rivalries between competing settler groups within each of these colonies. I argue that the franchise, although highly demonstrative of the Colonial Office and settlers’ attempts to reconcile the respective competing histories of and justifications for colonisation, was often frustrated in practice. Cultures of violence, the manipulation of land-values, double-voting and bribery provided avenues through which laws governing the right to vote were transcended during elections. Political influence, exclusion and inclusion were not limited to statutes: this thesis argues that the whole process of elections, including registration, the nomination and polling must be analysed in order to understand the realities of participation within this period. I take up five key components: enfranchisement, registration, vote collection (including nomination and the poll), violence and bribery, in order to show the continued lines of influence that were created and shut down throughout the election. Through this thesis, I examine both residents’ and officials’ use of these mechanisms to reshape the function and meaning of

the franchise, and the lasting implications this would have on understandings of the right to vote.

Via a close examination of case studies across the three sites, this history broadens understandings of the mid-century as a period in which locally-elected legislatures increasingly became the prerogative of white ‘settler’ colonies and political rights increasingly centred on an individual, defined by his race and gender, as well as his class. Although affirming the importance of the decade, it shows the complexities and inconsistencies of attempts to define the boundaries of enfranchisement over this period, and the impact of struggles to achieve it via changes to electoral law and practice. The comparison between New South Wales, the Cape and Jamaica illuminates the manner through which global discourses of reform, including those relating to bribery, privacy and order, would come to be repurposed within each site. It also serves to reinforce the striking role that attitudes to race would come to play in the formation and regulation of electoral practice across the British Empire. In this manner, this thesis aims to advance imperial historiography by highlighting the role of electoral culture as a reflection of and instigating factor in wider reconceptions of political rights across the British colonial world.

Mid-Century Colonial Elections, 1849-1860

This thesis examines elections occurring within the Cape, New South Wales and Jamaica in the mid-nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the elections that occurred from 1849-1860. The narrative traces the earliest elections of New South Wales and the Cape, and the earliest elections of the post-emancipation period in Jamaica, as many British, Dutch and other European settlers, as well as indigenous, emancipated and non-European residents across the colonies came to participate in elections for the first time. This was a period in which attendance at, celebration of and the potential violence associated with elections was increasing, even against wider campaigns for greater order and privacy at the poll. For Mimi Sheller and Gad Heuman, this period saw an increase in the ‘Jacksonian’ character of electoral politics, as candidates attempted to increase

participation amongst poorer and unenfranchised Jamaicans through the provision of food, drink and hospitality.2

The mid-nineteenth century saw significant and rapid constitutional and franchise reform across Britain and its colonies, influenced by changing perceptions of class, race and gender. For Keith McClelland, Catherine Hall and Jane Rendall, the 1850s and 1860s were marked by the reshaping of the United Kingdom around these social categories, with debates over the Second Reform Act highlighting those now deemed to fall ‘within’ the nation.3 Angela Woollacott’s work has revealed similar debates over the gendering of political rights within the Australian colonies, where appeals for ‘universal’ suffrage from 1857-8 were taken up as an opportunity for women to assert their inclusion as political subjects.4 The reforms that were eventually passed within these sites were certainly not even, and nor did they represent a gradual widening of political inclusion, but across the three colonies considerable changes were made. Between 1849-60, New South Wales saw an unprecedented rise in male enfranchisement, with the twenty-pound franchise halved to ten pounds in 1850, before universal male suffrage was introduced in 1858. The 1853 Constitution Ordinance of the Cape instituted a franchise Robert Ross has described as the most democratic of its time.5 Within Jamaica, the 1850s opened with the pursuit of further franchise reform but was followed, in quick succession, by increasing efforts to prevent the registration of poorer ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ residents. From a point of peak enfranchisement in 1849, electoral reforms in Jamaica passed in 1852 and 1859 served to limit both enrolment and informal participation – itself an instrumental factor in the island’s rising tensions. While changes in the Cape’s franchise would not be achieved until

2 Gad Heuman, Between Black and White : Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792-1865 (Oxford: Clio Press, 1981); Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery : Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 176. 3 Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation : Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4 Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies : Self-government and imperial culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) pp. 123-151. 5 Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870: A tragedy of manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 173.

the 1880s, already by 1859, laws were being considered to make the enfranchisement of Xhosa and other African immigrants in the Cape more difficult.6

Changes in enfranchisement and increasing contests over political subjecthood came against, and through, wider shifts in British imperial policy. The mid-nineteenth century was a period that saw critical changes in ideologies and policies of colonial governance, a period often analysed as seeing increased concessions for the demands of settlers emerging alongside a fading belief in the potential of evangelical humanitarianism.7 While, for decades, the Colonial Office had stated its opposition to introducing local colonial assemblies within the ‘settler colonies’ of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa, by the 1850s new constitutions were being drafted for those colonies deemed sufficiently stable to support local legislatures. Miles Taylor’s recent work has done much to show the critical place of 1840s upheavals in accelerating these changes, with colonial self-government one of many economic and political reforms made to appease discontent in Britain and its colonies.8 Yet, as control over land and legislation was increasingly handed over to settler-controlled parliaments, this change in policy also highlighted the shifting priorities being placed on the position and protection of indigenous and emancipated populations by the Colonial Office. From a high point of liberal humanitarianism in 1830, by the close of the 1850s the Colonial Office was showing an increasing reluctance to interfere in matters of colonial legislation. In 1859 the Colonial Office infamously upheld a new electoral law passed by the Jamaican Assembly deliberately designed to disenfranchise poorer non-European voters. Its passage marked a reversal to longstanding commitments to non-racial legislation, argued by David Killingray to be

6 These first shifts came via European-language clauses in naturalisation policies, explored in Chapter One. 7 See, for example: Paul McHugh and Lisa Ford, 'Settler Sovereignty and the Shapeshifting Crown,' in in Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (eds.), Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835-36 Select Committee on Aborigines and debates over virtue and conquest in the early nineteenth-century British white settler colonies,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (2003), n.p.; Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2015); Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,’ History Workshop Journal 54, no. 1 (January 2002), pp. 24-48. 8 Miles Taylor, ‘1848 Revolutions and the British Empire,’ Past and Present, 166, no. 1 (February 2000), pp. 146-180.

emblematic of the increasingly ‘colour-conscious’ Empire.9 At the close of the 1850s, further independence had been achieved in New South Wales and was being sought in the Cape, while Jamaica’s representative government – although long-subject to controversy – was deemed to be increasingly untenable.10

Finally, 1849-1860 saw the culmination of longstanding debates over the practice of elections themselves, as policies and regulations surrounding open voting, the permissibility of bribery and allowances for violence and contention came under review. In keeping with Victorian appeals for order and a belief in regulation and accountability, the acceptability of open voting was called into question, as different sites variously pursued individualised voting via the secret ballot, bans placed on bribery and treating, and the expansion of the franchise itself. Such debates were not limited to the colonies, but the colonies were also well aware of their place within this period of global change, drawing on and inspiring legislative and practical reform across Britain and other parts of the Empire.

To examine elections occurring within these colonies from 1849-60 is to engage with a rich, and much studied period, but it is also to partially unsettle a traditional periodisation of mid-century imperial and colonial histories. Given the subject matter in question, it may well be asked why this thesis begins in the 1840s and ends in 1860, long after the highpoint of liberal humanitarianism in the 1830s, but prior to the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865. Yet, it is precisely this sense of flux, uncertainty and the playing out of these competing concerns that makes the late 1840s through the 1850s an ideal point within which to situate a spatial comparison. This uncertainty and contradiction was apparent in imperial policy as well as domestic shifts; in widespread campaigns for the right to vote as well growing agitations against the entitlements of indigenous and emancipated

9 David Killingray, ‘“A Good West Indian, a Good African, and, in Short, a Good Britisher”: Black and British in a Colour-Conscious Empire, 1760-1950,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 3 (2008), pp. 363-381. 10 See: Jack P. Greene, ‘Liberty and Slavery: The transfer of British liberty to the West Indies, 1627-1865,’ in in Jack P. Greene (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 50-76, for a comprehensive examination of the controversies of the Assembly from its inception to its close.

populations. Within sites subject to rapid and uneven changes in enfranchisement, 1849- 60 represented a moment of crossover: when elections were being held in all three sites. While Jamaica, the Cape and New South Wales were subject to radically different policies and concerns by the close of the decade, and have come to occupy very different places within historical scholarship, at the opening of the 1850s there remained the hope that their continuation on a plane to greater independence might be possible. Taking three sites at a point of debate and change allows for a level of deep spatial analysis not possible within a history that attempts to chart change over time.

Elections in British and Imperial Historiography

This history draws broadly on British cultural and social histories of electoral practice, bringing these approaches together with recent and emerging histories of the British Empire. It does so in order to offer a new perspective on longstanding questions of mid-century political participation, extending examinations of colonial political rights beyond the franchise through a comparative cultural history of elections and electoral practice. I draw particular influence from a rich British historiography of ‘new’ political history, where scholarship of the ‘hustings’ and ‘pre-modern’ electoral practice has developed considerably since the 1990s. Influenced by the cultural and linguistic turn as well as contemporary politics, these histories argued against characterisations of pre- Reform Act politics as ‘farcical’ – outlining the social role and political importance of the rich cultures that surrounded it.11 Against an increasing emphasis placed upon political language, these histories stressed the role of images, dress, mannerisms and performance within constituencies where enfranchisement was limited and illiteracy remained

11 Frank O’Gorman, ‘Campaign rituals and ceremonies: The social meaning of elections in England 1780-1860,’ Past & Present 135 (1992), p. 79. Major works include: Jon Lawrence, ‘The transformation of British public politics after the First World War,’ Past & present 190, no. 1 (2006), pp. 185-216; James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, 1815- 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); James Epstein, ‘Understanding the cap of liberty: symbolic practice and social conflict in early nineteenth-century England,’ Past & Present 122 (1989), pp, 75-118; James Epistein, Radical Expression: Political language, ritual, and symbol in England, 1790-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

widespread.12 They also expanded the Habermasian vision of a rational public sphere, highlighting the centrality of ‘street politics’ – exemplified by raucous out-of-door meetings, torchlight processions and violent interference – to the formation of public opinion amongst the working classes.13 Of particular concern to these histories was the wider making of the nation, of languages of constitutionalism and the formalisation of elections and political parties.

Most influential in this respect, and most influential to my own work, was James Vernon’s 1993 Politics and the People, which drew upon these new approaches to politics and culture to argue against the democratic credentials of the two reform acts (1832 and 1867).14 Moving away from an emphasis upon franchise reform, Vernon offered an analysis that brought together considerations of electoral practice alongside changes in the franchise. Applying a Foucauldian interpretation to the changes of the mid-century, Vernon affirmed that the Second Reform Act widened the franchise, but argued that its coupling with practical reforms that aimed to limit opportunities for influence eroded much of its inclusionary value. As Vernon put this: ‘In short, many of the electoral events which had previously afforded the disenfranchised their most powerful role were eroded or abolished.’15 For Vernon, changes such as the removal of the hustings and the introduction of the secret ballot were highly detrimental to political participation, and many of those who lost lines of influence through such reforms would not be formally included until the 1910s.

Scholarship on the hustings and the Second Reform Act has since expanded considerably. Earlier contentions, including those of Vernon, have been criticised and revised for their approach and their periodization.16 Other scholars, including Australian

12 Particularly via Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English working class history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and the further work this inspired. 13 See, particularly: James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the language and culture of popular politics in modern Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 59-125. 14 Vernon, Politics and the People. 15 Vernon, Politics and the People, p. 158. 16 Jon Lawrence, particularly, has argued against the Second Reform Act as a switching point. See: Jon Lawrence, ‘The transformation of British public politics after the First World War,’ Past

historian Marian Sawer, have offered precedent to the current study, by complicating the arguments of Vernon and others through an analysis of electoral reform within nineteenth century Australia.17 This scholarship has also been valuably broadened through the work of ‘new’ imperial historians, interested in the role of Empire in shaping the democratic movements of the mid-century. Most influentially, Keith McClelland, Catherine Hall and Jane Rendall have provided a persuasive revision of the Second Reform Act that resituates this legislation against contemporaneous women’s rights movements and imperial crises, including the Indian ‘Mutiny’ and the Morant Bay Rebellion.18 For Hall, developments in India and Jamaica were critical not merely in shaping this reform, but also in creating new definitions of British ‘citizenship’ bounded by race and gender.19

For scholars of settler colonialism and historians of the ‘British World’, the history of settler self-government, the political entitlements it entailed, and the impact this transition had on indigenous/settler relations has remained similarly central.20 The most common approach to the impact of settler governance within the former body of scholars still remains those works that trace changing franchise restrictions for the insight they give into the principal and changing concerns of the Colonial Office and settlers. Such histories include Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips and Shurlee Swain’s comprehensive analysis of changing enfranchisement from the 1830s until the early twentieth century –

& present 190, no. 1 (2006), pp. 185-216; and Lawrence, Electing Our Masters. On approach, see: Keith Jenkins (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader (London: Routledge, 1997). 17 Marian Sawer disagrees with Vernon’s assessment, and argues that the secret ballot allowed for the expansion of the franchise to women: Marian Sawer, ‘Pacemakers for the World?’ in Marian Sawer (ed.), Elections: Full, free and fair (Annandale: Federation Press, 2001) pp. 1-27. 18 Keith McClelland, Catherine Hall, Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, race, gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 19 Catherine Hall, ‘The Nation Within and Without,’ in Keith McClelland, Catherine Hall and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, race, gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 179-233. Antoinette Burton has offered a similar analysis of women’s rights and India. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of history: British feminists, Indian women, and imperial culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 20 On British World and self-government, see: Jack P. Greene (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English liberty overseas, 1600–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (eds.), The British World : Diaspora, Culture, and Identity (London: F. Cass, 2003); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

the length and breadth of which allows these historians to highlight the deeply inconsistent attention given to the status of indigenous populations within British colonial franchises, in addition to showing the lasting impact restrictive franchises would have.21 Alan Lester’s work on enfranchisement in the Victorian world follows a similar trajectory, highlighting the changing relationship between ideas of race and ‘citizenship’. Like that of Evans et al, his work commences at the height of liberal humanitarianism in the 1830s until 1901, a period over which, Lester argues, ‘citizenship’ was being discussed in more openly racial terms.22

The comparative perspective of these studies remains particularly valuable – providing a reminder of the extent to which highly different levels of oversight were already being given to sites such as the Cape and New Zealand, while questions of indigenous subjecthood within New South Wales and the Australian colonies generally were often left to the discretion of local administrators. For Evans et al, who draw on theories of settler colonialism, this is critical to the argument. Examining the colonies comparatively, Evans et al show that the Colonial Office’s varying concern for indigenous populations was not shaped by liberal humanitarian ideologies, but was rather a direct reflection of the threat they were deemed to pose to settler sovereignty.23 Evans et al’s work also captures much of the consequential uncertainty that surrounded enfranchisement within both the Canadian colonies and those of Australia, where many were left wholly unsure of who did and did not qualify as a subject with political rights.

This thesis builds on these comparative histories, but it extends them to include other parts of the electoral process, including registration, the ‘ceremony’ of the nomination and critical modes of informal influence and resistance. I also draw upon a well-developed scholarship on the development of women’s suffrage across the Empire, further questioning the role of electoral practice in serving to reinforce the masculinity of

21 Julie Evans, Equal Subjects, Unequal Right : Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830-1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) 22 Alan Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship,’ in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 381-397. 23 Evans, Equal Subjects, p. 6

political rights.24 Drawing inspiration from the findings and approach of these multi-sited histories, I do this via a study that covers three colonial sites, each of which offer a different perspective to questions of political participation which have also tended to occupy different places within imperial scholarship.

Considerable variation exists in the extent to which elections have been subject to study across New South Wales, Jamaica and the Cape Colony. Australian historians have long shown interest in the developments leading to responsible government, universal male suffrage and the institution of the secret ballot, all of which remain part of foundational narratives. Paul Pickering, Sean Scalmer, Terry Irving and Mark McKenna are amongst those who have since offered detailed histories of protest movements in the mid-century, in addition to providing considerations of the impact and origins of the secret ballot, although perhaps paying insufficient attention to questions of race within this.25 In the Cape, pre-Responsible Government elections remain less studied beyond Stanley Trapido’s DPhil of 1970, although historians including Saul Dubow, Kirsten McKenzie and Chris Holdridge have examined popular movements such as the ‘Anti-Convict’ crisis of 1849, considering its role in the shaping of ideas of colonial maturity, respectability and contributing to the formation of the 1853 constitution. Robert Ross, by contrast, has influentially furthered histories of the constitution and arguments over the formation of its liberal franchise in his work on the Kat River Rebellion by showing the influence of tensions between settlers, Khoisan and the colonial government on the Eastern Frontier

24 These histories tend to be transnational rather than comparative. See: Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, Philippa Levine (eds.), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, nation and race (London: Routledge, 2000); Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, Marilyn Lake (eds.), Women's Rights and Human Rights: International historical perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), for recent perspectives. Patricia Grimshaw has provided a particularly rich comparative analysis of the role of race and colonialism in shaping women’s campaigns for the vote across the colonies of New Zealand, Australia and Hawai’i: Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women’s Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Hawai’I, 1888 to 1902,’ Pacific Historical Review vol. 69, no. 4 (November 2000), pp. 553-572. 25 Paul Pickering, ‘“The oak of English liberty”: popular constitutionalism in New South Wales, 1848-1856,’ Journal of Australian Colonial History 3, no. 1 (2001), pp. 1-27 ; Mark McKenna, ‘Building “a closet of prayer” in the New World: the story of the Australian Ballot,’ in Marian Sawer (ed.), Elections: Full, free and fair (Annandale: Federation Press, 2001) pp. 45-62; Sean Scalmer, ‘Containing Contention: A Reinterpretation of Democratic Change and Electoral Reform in the Australian Colonies’, Australian Historical Studies, 42, no. 3 (2011), pp. 337–356.

to the shaping of the Cape Colony’s low franchise.26 In Jamaica, works including Swithin Wilmot’s extensive analyses of vestry politics, in addition to rich histories of violent protest have demonstrated the continued interaction and influence of freed men and women in spite of prohibitive restrictions on formal enfranchisement.27 Here, however, I agree with Diana Paton that a focus on riots and rebellions has occasionally come at the cost of a wider understanding of the everyday life of the island’s emancipated population, and risks presenting violence as the key form of interaction for freed men and women with colonial authorities.28

The historiographies of all three sites have also generated important work on gender and race, much of which has affirmed the importance of the period, and has shown the impact changing policies of enfranchisement had on the formation of these categories. Both Pamela Scully and Mimi Sheller are amongst those historians who have studied the post-emancipation period for its impact on reshaping social relations between men and

26 Robert Ross, Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River settlement, 1829-1856 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa 1820-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Stanley Trapido, ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation in the Politics of the Cape of Good Hope, 1853-1910, (University of London: PhD Thesis, 1970). Aspects of this scholarship, particularly between Sydney and Cape Town in the Anti-Convict crisis, have been explored via transnational as well as comparative history. See: Chris Holdridge, ‘The Pageantry of the Anti-Convict Cause: Colonial Loyalism and Settler Celebrations in Van Diemen’s Land and the Cape Colony,’ History Australia 12, no. 1 (2015), pp. 141-164; Kirsten McKenzie, ‘Discourses of Scandal: Bourgeois Respectability and the End of Slavery and Transportation at the Cape and New South Wales,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (2003), n.p. 27 See, for example: Swithin Wilmot, ‘The politics of Samuel Clarke: Black creole politician in free Jamaica, 1851–1865,’ Caribbean quarterly 44, no. 1-2 (1998), pp. 129-144; Swithin Wilmot, ‘Black Voters and Jewish Politicians: Electoral Poltics in Three Jamaican Parishes, Kingston, Portland and St Mary, in the post-slavery period,’ Journal of Caribbean History vol. 49, no. 1 (2015), pp. 30- 53. Works on riots and rebellions are numerous, but key accounts include the statistical work of Lorna Simmonds, ‘Civil Disturbances in Western Jamaica, 1838–1865,’ Jamaican Historical Review XIV (1984), pp. 1–16; Gad Heuman, The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London: Macmillian, 1994). Heuman has also written on the changing membership of the Assembly over 1840-1860 which I draw upon in greater detail in my first chapter, see: Gad Heuman, Between Black and White (Oxford: Clio Press, 1981). 28 Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, race, and gender in Jamaican state formation, 1780-1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 159.

women.29 Equally important work has been done on those women who resisted any restriction to a private sphere and continued to place a role in public life in spite often increasing pressure to limit themselves to the home.30 Similar transitions whereby formal political inclusion served to reinforce a gender-bound respectability were also occurring amongst settlers. Kirsten McKenzie, for example, has shown the formative role of the Anti-Convict crisis of 1849 on middle class male respectability in Cape Town.31 Recently, Angela Woollacott and Catherine Bishop have also demonstrated evidence of feminist movements in 1850, long prior to the 1880s and 1890s where studies of Australian feminism tend to situate their histories.32 Woollacott’s work on frontier violence and political manhood has further nuanced accounts of responsible government through an analysis that considers the formation of political masculinity through contact with Aboriginal Australians.33 The most recent scholarship on settler self-government within the Australian context has aimed to show the mutually constitutive processes by which

29 Pamela Scully, ‘Masculinity, Citizenship, and the Production of Knowledge in the Postemancipation Cape Colony, 1834-1844,’ in Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (eds.), Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 37-55; Mimi Sheller, ‘Acting as Free Men: Subaltern Masculinties and Citizenship in Postslavery Jamaica,’ in Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (eds.), Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 79-98. See, also: Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British slave emancipation in the rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853 (Oxford: James Currey, 1997); Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic agency and caribbean freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 30 Swithin Wilmot, ‘“Females of Abandoned Character”? Women and Protest in Jamaica, 1838- 1865,’ in Verene Shepherd, Barbara Bailey and Bridget Brereton (eds.), Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995), pp. 279-295; Sheller, Citizenship from Below; Mimi Sheller, ‘Quasheba, mother, queen: Black women's public leadership and political protest in post-emancipation Jamaica, 1834–65,’ Slavery and Abolition 19, no. 3 (1998), pp. 90-117. 31 Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town 1820–1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004); Kirsten McKenzie, ‘Gender and Honour in the Making of Middle-Class Cape Town: The making of colonial identities, 1828-1850 (University of Oxford: PhD Thesis, 1997). 32 Catherine Bishop and Angela Woollacott, ‘Business and Politics as Women’s Work: The Australian Colonies and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Women’s Movement’, Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 1 (2016), pp. 84-106. 33 Angela Woollacott, Settler society in the Australian colonies: Self-government and imperial culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 67-97; 152-178.

settlers obtained their right to self-governance as Aboriginal Australians were dispossessed.34

This thesis further extends much of this work, considering not merely how social relationships were reformed at the point of emancipation or in the construction of colonial constitutions, but rather through the practices and processes of elections. Here, institutions such as the ‘hustings’ doubled as a platform through which settlers could celebrate the achievement of representative government, and functioned as a site in which the masculinity of leadership and voting was reinforced. Equally, it was often within the space of elections that the fragility of settlers’ presumed exclusive right to enfranchisement became apparent, as settlers within colonial New South Wales struggled to define themselves as different to Aboriginal Australians according to the requirements of the constitution. In the Cape, again, European residents discovered they could not control the voting patterns or enfranchisement of ‘coloured’ voters. In Jamaica, over the 1850s, the position of many Europeans within the Assembly was being challenged both via the formal enfranchisement of free ‘black’ and ‘coloured’, as well as emancipated voters, while the masculinity of political inclusion was also being challenged through the place of women in riots and unrest at elections. Bringing these three sites together at a moment in which all three were subject to considerable change in the formal boundaries of the right to vote reinforces the role of colonial ‘others’ in the formation of these categories. It also shows the highly uneven processes via which political subjecthood was coming to be formed within these sites and across this period.

The three case studies of Jamaica, New South Wales and the Cape have been chosen for the contrasting perspectives they bring to changing conceptions of and opportunities for political participation at this time. Considerable precedent exists in

34 See, particularly: Ann Curthoys, ‘Indigenous People and Settler Self Government: Introduction’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2012); Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, ‘The Advent of Self-Government, 1840s-90’, in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (eds.), The Cambridge History of Australia: Volume 1 Indigenous and Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 149-169; Jessie Mitchell, ‘“Are we in Danger of a Hostile Visit from the Aborigines?” Dispossession and the Rise of Self-Government in New South Wales’, Australian Historical Studies 40, no. 3 (2009), pp. 294-307.

histories that cover the Cape and New South Wales, which have been analysed collectively and comparatively through the lenses of convictism and slavery, frontier violence, ideas of honour, settler identity and governance by historians such as Nigel Worden, Kirsten McKenzie, Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw, amongst many others.35 These sites have also been brought together in studies of sovereignty and law.36 Yet, Jamaica might be viewed as sitting awkwardly alongside two sites where settlement was increasing, and land acquisition remained a key priority for local British settlers. Instead, Jamaica more commonly functions as a valuable site of comparison and analysis within histories of Britain, or histories that extend across empires in the Caribbean, the Americas and the Atlantic, although Jamaica and the Cape have been brought together via global histories of the slave trade as well as histories of ‘imperial lives’.37 This ‘break[ing] out’ of a mould of sharp dichotomies between colonies of settlement and ‘colonies of exploitation’ has, however, recently been attempted by Jack P. Greene, whose edited collection on British liberty brings together Ireland, India and the Caribbean colonies with histories of colonial parliaments in Canada, New Zealand, southern Africa and Australia.38 In doing so, Greene’s stated intention is to ‘blur the sharp distinctions drawn by many scholars between colonies of settlement and colonies of exploitation and to suggest that settler and nonsettler colonies might profitably be studied together as mutually enlightening.’39

Although not without precedent, this history usually cuts across traditional separations between the settler colonies of the periphery and the older colonies of America

35 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating identities in nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820- 1850 (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2004); Penny Russell and Nigel Worden, Honourable Intentions? Violence and virtue in Australian and Cape Colonies, c. 1750 to 1850 (London: Routledge, 2016); Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815-45: Patronage, the information revolution and colonial government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 36 Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 37 See, for example David Lambert and Alan Lester’s work on ‘lives across the British Empire,’ as well as Lambert’s work on Atlantic slavery: David Lambert and Alan Lester, Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial careering in the long nineteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 38 Greene, Exclusionary Empire. 39 Greene, Exclusionary Empire, p. xii.

and the Caribbean. Yet, I bring these sites together in order to highlight the simultaneous engagement of these three sites in debates over both the practice of elections and the boundaries of political rights; in order to show differences in the technicalities of registration, the allowances of bribery, or the impact of violence on shaping the gendering of political participation. Each of these colonies brings different and valuable perspectives: differences that can be delineated in terms of attitudes to gender and race; differences in the struggle over land and labour; and differences in imperial oversight. Elections within New South Wales in this period were particularly marked by the strength of working-class movements, juxtaposed against the near-total silence surrounding Aboriginal Australians’ status as political subjects. The Cape represented a site with a high level of participation from emancipated and Khoisan residents, but there remained considerable controversy over the franchise and considerable effort was made to limit it in practice. Finally, Jamaica was characterised by a franchise that was so prohibitively restrictive that elections became critical sites through which the boundaries of these laws could be contested.

A comparative analysis of these three sites brings together three colonies simultaneously under the eye of the Colonial Office, and simultaneously engaging in questions of both who should participate in elections and how these events should be conducted. In spite of differences in ideology and policy, and the increasingly different place they were beginning to hold in the eyes of the Colonial Office, a history situated within the late 1840s and early 1850s serves as a reminder that there did remain a hope that all three sites might continue to function as partially autonomous entities. Finally, and most critically, a comparative focus that combines both electoral process and formal enfranchisement serves as a further reminder of the extent to which the democratic movements of the nineteenth century were neither even, nor linear.

Imperial scholarship of the franchise and of constitutional development remains critical to histories of settler/indigenous relations within this period. Yet, an approach based on enfranchisement alone leaves the engagement and influence of those settler, indigenous and emancipated populations who were either formally included, or who sought out their inclusion by other means, inadvertently overlooked. Critically, the emphasis on the franchise within this history sits imperfectly within a period in which

influence at elections was multiple and the lines between ‘voters’ and ‘non-voters’ were often highly unclear. Extending recent developments in the democratic history of the British Empire through a history of elections offers a valuable opportunity to widen British histories of elections as well as imperial histories of enfranchisement and political participation. It further enriches understandings of ‘hustings’ electoral culture by examining how it developed within the colonies, and broadens understandings of settler self-government through an examination that extends to the whole electoral process.

Sources and Methods:

In spite of the proliferation of multi-sited colonial histories, comparative approaches remain a controversial and often criticised mode of analysis. Frederick Cooper’s warning against the production of artificial comparisons remains oft-cited, and provides a valuable reminder of the critical importance of caution when choosing sites, periods and sources in any multi-sited history.40 Yet, there remains something particularly valuable in a single scholar examining the same themes across different places. In keeping with histories such as Evans et al and Lester, the purpose of this comparison is not merely to highlight similar processes occurring in different sites within a single period, but rather the manner through which the comparative serves to revise existing understandings of both sites and imperial history as a whole.41 The style of comparative history presented within this thesis draws particular inspiration from historians such as Philippa Levine, as well as other comparative-connected histories such as that of Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds in Drawing the Global Colour Line.42 Levine’s work on policing prostitution and her emphasis on spatial comparison has done much to demonstrate the striking insights gained when one examines the uneven development of regulatory practices across the British

40 Frederick Cooper, ‘Race, Ideology, and the Perils of Comparative History,’ American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996), pp. 1122-1138. 41 Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship’; Evans, Equal Subjects. 42 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing venereal disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Empire. The work of Lake and Reynolds has been similarly critical in showing the strategic use of legislation – from immigration acts to literary tests – as a means of building race- based demarcations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.43 Drawing on the approaches of these historians, this thesis stresses the unevenness of electoral reform across the three colonies, and the radically different expectations being placed on the achievement of order across the three sites by the end of the decade. I analyse the use of other regulations, including both the closing down of public voting, as well as strategies such as English-language tests, as a means of enacting race-based restrictions to electoral participation at a time when colonial franchise legislation was still subject to imperial scrutiny.

Considerable care has been taken in the ordering of the chapters and the choices of source material, in order to avoid any erasure of critical difference. The source material itself is drawn from over two years of research in Britain, South Africa, Australia and Jamaica, comprising material from national, state, local and university archives. Here, I draw together the vast ephemera, newspaper reports and correspondence elections generated, in order to reconstruct both individual campaigns and the wider cultural processes these events entailed. My principal source base remains the internal correspondence between administrators and respective colonial secretaries, witness reports from parliamentary inquiries, as well as court reports following cases of fraud or outbreaks of violence. Whenever possible, I draw on the private papers and campaign notes of candidates, although, unfortunately, much of this has been lost. Newspapers remain key for much of the history here, not only as the only surviving copies of court correspondence and parliamentary debates, but also as the principal form of communication regarding the events of an election beyond the statistical data of poll books or those elections where results were appealed. Reports have, however, been treated with suitable caution, and awareness of the political bias of authors – itself an aspect of the analysis conducted here.

43 See also: Marilyn Lake, ‘From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal: The invention of the literacy test as a technology of racial exclusion,’ in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds.), Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2005), pp. 209-232.

Even when contained to a shorter time-span, however, the breadth of this study is not without pitfalls. Amongst the challenges provoked by the research for this thesis was the difficulty of attempting to balance source material across the three sites: drawing together thousands of ephemeral pieces and simultaneously facing substantial gaps. Considerable differences exist in the form and quantity of this material between Australia, South Africa and Jamaica, and in the challenges researchers face in attempting to retrieve it. Where, in both Australia and South Africa, much material has been preserved in rich archives, in Jamaica, by contrast, none of the internal colonial correspondence between administrators has survived, and the Colonial Secretary’s indexes are not available prior to the late 1860s. Even parliamentary debates only began to be recorded in 1856. Over the past two decades, these records have diminished further as unmicrofilmed newspapers have been withdrawn from use, while other pieces have been lost.

Structuring this thesis around case studies has remained essential to providing similar depth into themes across the three sites, balancing the breadth of material involved and allowing for close analysis of the particular. Yet, I remain cognisant of the manner through which surviving sources have been shaped by the archive. Within Jamaica, particularly, it is often only via episodes of violence that poorer Jamaicans come into the permanent record, serving only to extend the contemporary perception that this remained their core mode of engagement in public cultures.44 Similarly, very little is known about the engagement of Malay or ‘coloured’ voters in the Cape outside those recorded within mission stations, the records of which must themselves be treated with care. In New South Wales, close to no record of Aboriginal Australian participation at elections has survived, and the highly imperfect, where surviving, electoral rolls make any estimation of formal involvement impossible. Yet, even where the instances recorded prove exceptional, such cases often provide critical revisions, giving insight into personal and local, as well as imperial perceptions of enfranchisement and electoral practice. These cases, therefore, remain wholly worthy of study.

44 Diana Paton has stressed the dominance of riots and rebellions in Jamaican historiography, partially to the detriment to wider understandings of everyday life. Paton, No Bond But the Law, p. 159.

This thesis does not attempt to give a complete history of constitutional developments, nor is it a history of ‘Responsible Government’ – both topics that have their own well-developed historiographies.45 Beyond the consideration of parliamentary debates in histories of the franchise (Chapter One), and considerations over bribery (Chapter Five), neither the Colonial Office nor colonial parliaments receive immediate focus. Similarly, although I am concerned with the processes by which many would come to view Jamaica as an unsuitable colony within which to hold elections, I am also wary of attempting to ‘link up’ the history presented here to the outbreak of violence in Morant Bay. While Morant Bay was unquestionably influential in reshaping Empire-wide attitudes to liberalism and served to reinforce changing ideas of race across the colonies, it tends to loom large within Jamaican histories and imperial histories generally. In the former case, its presence risks the presentation of this event as a unified response of non-elite Jamaicans and, occasionally, an inevitability.46 More critical to this study is the manner through which longstanding prejudices would serve to shape attitudes to non-elite Jamaican’s enfranchisement prior to Morant Bay. Across the colonies, my concern remains the everyday experiences of elections – the strange connections they draw, the corruption they encompass, the violence they entailed – as candidates tested themselves and their policies, and sought to secure their place in government.

Chapter Outline:

The chapters of this thesis are structured around core components of the election as experienced within Jamaica, New South Wales and the Cape from 1849-1850, with additional discussion of debates that preceded and influenced these elections in Chapter One. The Chapters move in focus and subject matter from policies and complexities of enfranchisement, the technicalities of registration, to elections and the forms of influence

45 John M. Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience, 1759-1856 (London: Macmillan, 1976), remains particularly critical as a comparative history that covers all three sites. 46 Jonathan Dalby has recently raised a similar claim. Jonathan Dalby, ‘Precursors to Morant Bay: The pattern of popular protest in post-emancipation Jamaica (1834-1865),’ Journal of Caribbean History 50, no. 2 (2016), p. 118.

they encompassed. Within these chapters, I have aimed to capture a sense of the ritual and performance, as well as the multiple forms of activity and lines of influence elections generated. There is no single chapter to examine matters of gender, race or class, but such questions are linked throughout the thesis, as the identity and behaviour of voters and representatives became topics of debate.

Chapter One, begins with familiar debates over colonial franchises as they came under the critical attention of settlers and the Colonial Office in the mid-nineteenth century. Here I chart the construction of the first constitutions of New South Wales and the Cape, and the rewriting of Jamaica’s franchise during the early post-emancipation period, examining the rapid and influential changes that were made to the right to vote at this time. Where existing histories have principally looked to franchise statutes, here I emphasise the critical importance of policies of implementation in highlighting the principal concerns of the colonies in question. Through a comparative examination, I highlight the vast differences in the ostensibly global category of ‘subjecthood’ as it developed across the British colonial world.

Chapter Two examines the technicalities of registration. Building on the policies of enfranchisement outlined in the first chapter, Chapter Two examines processes and practices for the registration of voters within a context in which enfranchisement rested upon an individual’s adherence to a raced as well as classed and gendered order. The focus of this chapter is on those non-European subjects who ascribed to the conditions of colonial franchises, but who, via accident or design, were nonetheless dropped from colonial electoral rolls. It examines instances in which the personal views of such individuals can be analysed, alongside the wider public’s views of their entitlements. This chapter takes up two richly revealing case studies, the first of mission residents in the Cape, the second an Aboriginal Australian ‘half-caste’ in order to engage with a growing historiography of indigenous agency and colonial citizenship. Thus, the focus moves away from London, Cape Town, Sydney and Spanish Town, to the experiences of voters at the colonies’ edges.

Chapter Three examines cultures of electioneering and the manner through which candidates’ campaigns were structured around the official practices of the election and the expectations of voters. This chapter considers the rich ritual culture surrounding the canvass and the hustings, and the relationship between candidates and voters from the dissolution of colonial assemblies and councils to the closing of the poll. I examine the print advertising and public meetings used by candidates to publicise their policies, as well as techniques including food, music and physical conveyancing used to bring local residents to the poll. Engaging with British scholarship of elections, this chapter highlights how the individual social structures and official electoral practice would serve to shape candidates’ campaigns and thus the extent to which both electors and non-electors were brought into the official elements of the election.

In Chapter Four, the first of two chapters directly addressing ‘informal’ influence, or the illegal influencing of voters, I consider resistance to the franchise in the form most concerning to administrators: that of electoral violence. This chapter questions the causes of growing violence within Jamaica and the fear that came to surround elections, as the level of agitation associated with elections in the colony increased. Here, I highlight considerable levels of violence in New South Wales and Jamaica, but contrast both sites to the Cape, where violence remained rare, if ever, present. I argue that violence was not limited to the unenfranchised alone, but was rather a mechanism taken to by electors, non- electors and candidates, and highlights the considerable levels of concern that contests within this period often attracted.

Finally, in Chapter Five I turn to the growing concerns with bribery, corruption and other forms of ‘illegitimate’ influence, as perceptions of the appropriate freedom and independence of the voter became subject of global reconsideration. While 1849-1860 was a period associated with the growing interest and excitement of elections within the colonies, it was also one in which the whole practice of open elections was scrutinised against new imperatives for order. The legitimacy of the hustings and viva voce voting, alongside longstanding practices of providing food, drink and public entertainment were questioned, and new laws were brought in that took aim at bribery, but simultaneously also served to ensure the independence of voters themselves. Within this final chapter, the lens

turns back to the high political debates of the Chapter One, as I compare the different emphases that were placed on reform in each site.

The five cultural elements and practices explored within each of these chapters were critical parts of the history of elections across the colonies, and central to residents’ experiences with elections at this time. By bringing these threads together a more richly textured and inclusive history of electoral rights and political participation is revealed.

24 Chapter One

Establishing a Colonial Franchise

When John Dick went to compile the electoral list for the New South Wales regional district of Port Macquarie, he encountered a problem. Dick was new to the job, and although he had received instructions from the Governor, neither the circular nor the colony’s new electoral law in any way indicated what should be done. Not wishing to make any mistakes, he wrote a quick note to the colonial secretary for advice. ‘Sir… a question has arisen as to the eligibility of a man of color being enroled [sic] upon the List of Electors of this District.’ Dick continued, ‘The person alluded to is a native of the West Indies.’1 When the colonial secretary’s office in Sydney received the note a week later, they were equally mystified. Universal suffrage for male British subjects had recently been passed through the colony’s Parliament, but while the constitution and franchise of New South Wales offered the right to vote to any male British subject or naturalised resident over twenty-one, the law was silent on the question of race. Few within the colony’s Assembly had considered the possibility that a universal franchise based on sex, age and subjecthood alone might entitle the colony’s indigenous inhabitants to register. The Legislative Assembly had also been assured that naturalised Chinese immigrants would have additional blocks placed on their ability to vote or run as members of the Parliament. Already, political entitlements within colonial New South Wales were being articulated as the privilege of white settlers. Yet, as early as the first electoral registration under the new law, Port Macquarie’s collector was confronted with an individual wholly qualified by the letter of the law, but who was assumed to be disqualified by virtue of its local meaning. As

1 J Dick to the Colonial Secretary, 31 December 1858, State Records NSW, Box 4/3396 Item 59/47.

an individual moving across the British colonial world, the Port Macquarie resident challenged local interpretations of the meaning of ‘subject’ and highlighted the strikingly different interpretations existing across New South Wales, Jamaica and the Cape at this time.

In taking up the history of enfranchisement, this chapter builds on recent and emerging histories of political entitlements and British subjecthood as a rights-based category in the nineteenth century.2 It examines the unevenness with which humanitarian commitments to the protection of non-European populations were applied in the 1830s and 1840s, and how such understandings would come to shape enfranchisement. Placed within an imperial perspective, the changes made to the franchise across these sites strikingly highlight the impact on political rights in the Victorian period, of sharpening attitudes to race and the shifting ideologies of the Colonial Office.3 Where such histories have focused on the origins and impacts of increasing exclusions, this chapter also examines the peculiarities of franchise implementation. The franchises that were enacted across the British colonies in the nineteenth century reflected a complex and often

2 Here I include debates in politics as well as in law. For the imperial context of colonial franchises, see: Alan Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship: Colonial Inclusions and Exclusions,’ in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 381-397; Evans [et al.], Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous peoples in British settler colonies, 1830-1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); John Manning Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British experience (London: Macmillan, 1976). For the Australian colonies in particular, questions of entitlements have provoked much recent scholarship: Ann Curthoys, ‘Indigenous People and Settler Self Government: Introduction,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2012); Jessie Mitchell, ‘“Are we in Danger of a Hostile Visit from the Aborigines?” Dispossession and the Rise of Self-Government in New South Wales,’ Australian Historical Studies 40, no. 3 (2009), pp. 294-307; Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, ‘The Advent of Self-Government, 1840s-90,’ in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (eds.), The Cambridge History of Australia: Volume 1 Indigenous and Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 149-169. For discussion in law, see: Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and indigenous people in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Damen Ward, ‘Constructing British Authority in Australasia: Charles Cooper and the Legal Status of Aborigines in the South Australian Supreme Court, c. 1840-60, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 34, no, 4 (2006), pp. 483-504 and others. 3 As demonstrated in: Catherine Hall, ‘The Nation Within and Without,’ in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (eds.), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 381-397; Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship’; Evans, Equal Subjects.

controversial interplay of imperial interests balanced against local concerns. The documents produced, the debates that preceded them, and the ideologies that underwrote them provide an opportunity to reconstruct the dominant understanding of political rights entitlements in this period – a crucial starting point for this thesis. Yet, as the case of John Dick highlights, the meanings of these documents were never stable, but rather subject to interpretation and challenge. It is this tension between law, interpretation and implementation, and between global meanings and local practice that will form the analytical framework around which the comparative history of the franchise of Jamaica, the Cape and New South Wales is explored in this chapter.

Over the 1840s and 1850s, the parliaments, press and settlers in the respective British colonies of Jamaica, the Cape Colony and New South Wales fiercely debated the appropriate conditions of local franchise laws. Within these discussions, individuals drew on reforms occurring across Europe and the United States as well as the British colonies, and articulated their understandings of their society’s identity, its issues and its future. Continued proclamations of the universal and natural rights of parliamentary representation, sounded across the British and French empires and in the United States, provided powerful rhetoric for liberal reformers at local public meetings and in editorial discussions, regardless of any inherent contradictions this sentiment entailed. Others dismissed the existence of any universal ‘rights of man’ as ‘un-English’ or a ‘nonsense’ and instead held fast to a limited vision of rights guaranteed to British born subjects by the Glorious Revolution.4 As a number of historians have demonstrated, the language of ‘subjecthood’ proved to be particularly powerful in agitations for self-government and was used in early petitions and discussions with the Colonial Office.5 In the seventeenth century, for example, Jamaican settlers successfully argued that their separation from England did not diminish their rights to the freedoms of the unwritten constitution and

4 See, for example, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 June 1856, p. 4. 5 Jack P. Greene (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English liberty overseas, 1600-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), offers a particularly comprehensive account across the sites.

were granted a local House of Assembly.6 Similarly, during the 1840s and 1850s, as Robert Ross has shown, claims to rights on the basis of British subjecthood were made simultaneously by Khoisan, British and Dutch settlers in the Cape Colony, often in opposition to each other.7 Settlers in New South Wales looked on at the granting of representative institutions to the Cape colony and Canada, and petitioned the metropolitan government for representative institutions, claiming it to be a right of ‘birth.’8

As the department responsible for considering settlers’ claims, the Colonial Office in London sat at the centre of these debates, and its changing ideologies had significant consequences for the formation of the franchise. Early nineteenth-century humanitarian movements, including the abolition of the slave trade, the promotion of indigenous rights through the Aborigines Protection Society (APS) and the Select Committee on Aborigines, influenced understandings of the appropriateness of entrenching distinctions based on race or passing too much authority over indigenous affairs to self-interested settlers. The Colonial Office was also concerned that an extension of government might create divisions in colonial societies between British and Dutch or French settlers, or between free settlers and freed convicts or slaves. In 1830s Jamaica, as historians have widely noted, this position saw the Colonial Office directly intervene in the attempt made by the local Assembly to prohibit emancipated slaves from qualifying as electors, while, in the Cape, it was stated that representative government would not be introduced so long as slavery was still in operation. Nonetheless, by the 1850s, the Colonial Offices’ position seemed to be increasingly in favour of extending representative government wherever possible.

6 See, particularly: Jack P. Greene, ‘Liberty and Slavery: The transfer of British Liberty to the West Indies, 1627-1865,’ in Jack P. Greene (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 50-76. 7 Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870: A tragedy of manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), particularly pp. 160-172. 8 See, particularly, Peter Cochrane, ‘Like Canada,’ in Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006), pp. 283-291; See also, McKenna, ‘Transplanted to Savage Shores: Indigenous Australians and British birthright in the mid nineteenth-century Australian Colonies,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 13 no. 1 (2012) and Richard Waterhouse, ‘“…a bastard offspring of tyranny under the guise of liberty” liberty and representative government in Australia, 1788-1901,’ in Jack P. Greene (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English liberty overseas, 1600-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 240- 247 for the place of Aboriginal Australians within this.

In spite of earlier concerns, in the mid-nineteenth century there was a marked shift in the attitudes of the Colonial Office towards colonial administration.9 The rebellions in Canada over 1837 and 1838 had served as a reminder that the further dissolution of colonies was possible if reform was not introduced, while agitations in New South Wales and the Cape over the 1840s suggested similar discontent in the southern colonies. The shift towards local institutions can also be read against the Colonial Office’s waning humanitarian commitments to protection of indigenous and non-European populations, as Alan Lester and others have noted.10 Beginning with the tabling of the ‘Durham Report’ on the North American colonies and the re-election of a financially conservative Whig administration, in 1839 and 1846, plans were made with representatives from each of the colonies to draft local constitutions. Over a period of fifteen years, new constitutions were extended to the colonies of Canada, the Australian colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and later Queensland, the neighbouring colony of New Zealand, as well as the southern African colonies of the Cape and Natal. Across the British colonial world, the model of local representative institutions increasingly became the norm.

When it came to drafting and redrafting local constitutions, the broader imperial context of representative government influenced the very language and terms of franchise law, shaping the statutes and conditions surrounding who would be entitled to vote for colonial governments. The structure of franchise legislation was often borrowed from British electoral law and adapted to fit local needs. Figures such as William Porter, the member of the Cape Legislative Council responsible for drafting the colony’s constitution in committee, looked to British legal precedent when considering local franchise laws. Amongst the collection on Porter’s bookshelf were Francis Newman Rogers’ and John Clerks’ respective Law and Practice of Elections and he openly consulted these texts when later

9 For an extended history of the imperial context, see: John M. Ward, Colonial Self-Government: The British Experience, 1759-1856 (London: Macmillan, 1976). 10 Alan Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship: Colonial Inclusions and Exclusions,’ in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World, (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 381-397; Evans, Equal Subjects.

deciding the legality of election proceedings.11 Certain passages of franchise law in Jamaica, New South Wales and the Cape drew on the British model without alteration, while other clauses were changed to match the peculiarities of the context. Thus, while in all three colonies political subjects were defined as male, over twenty-one, residents and not subject to legal incapacity, in the Cape additional provisions were made to enfranchise those Dutch residents whose arrival in the colony predated British settlement. In New South Wales, laws excluding criminals were amended to ensure the inclusion of emancipated convicts.

There were, however, important and often striking differences in the application of these laws, which necessitate a close examination over the following three sections. Transplanted to a new colonial setting, the adoption of British precedents could have unexpected and unintended consequences. A striking contrast between the three sites explored below remains the impact systems of land ownership had in shaping the meaning of a property-based franchise that was, in many senses, outwardly uniform. While the availability of land in Jamaica fostered the conditions for many emancipated residents’ enfranchisement over the 1840s and 1850s, in the Cape many freed slaves and Khoisan residents took shelter in mission stations rather than continuing to live with former masters.12 In New South Wales, infamously, large tracts of land declared to belong to the Crown were taken up by influential squatters, and violence as well as disease and dispossession caused significant damage to the Aboriginal Australian population. Of similar interest is the manner in which regulations preventing individuals in receipt of state aid from qualifying as electors were removed within the Cape, but retained in New South Wales, Jamaica, Victoria and many of the Canadian colonies.13 Within the Cape, these

11 CCP 1859 [A68], ‘Papers Relative to the Election of Members for the Legislative Council of Port Elizabeth,’ Annexures to the Votes and Proceedings of the House of Assembly (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1859), p. 5; CCP 1859 [A3], ‘Committee on Colesberg Election Petition,’ pp. 4-5. Porter used these books when deciding on a disputed case in the electorate of Port Elizabeth and Colesberg. 12 See Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, missions, and the contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family: Gender and slave emancipation in the rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997) for more on this. 13 John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 14; Evans, Equal Subjects, p. 84.

restrictions were removed to ensure the participation of emancipated residents and Khoisan who sought refuge in mission stations over the 1830s and 1840s. Within New South Wales, by contrast, all indigenous inhabitants who lived on mission stations or reserves were excluded from political rights by virtue of this clause.14

Even the very category of ‘subject’ drew questions and highlighted contradictions when applied in a colonial context. I began this chapter with reference to the case of a Caribbean immigrant in New South Wales in part to highlight the complexities of British subjecthood in nineteenth-century British colonies. In contrast to the French Empire, where the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’ worked (often imperfectly) to delineate between those empowered with political rights and those whose race, gender or context rendered them ineligible, in Jamaica, the Cape and New South Wales the singular category of ‘subject’ was used.15 Legally, British subjecthood was considered to encompass any individual born in any territory of the British Empire, but across the colonies over the first half of the nineteenth century such understandings were unevenly applied. Scholars of British law and sovereignty in New Zealand, Canada and Australia have shown the extent to which jurists and administrators were often unsure whether and under what conditions indigenous populations counted as 'subjects' under British law and within British courts. In lieu of clear or consistent directives, jurists and administrators often exercised discretion when deciding whether indigenous men and women were to be tried under British law, or

14 This remained an inadvertent application of the clause. For the clause under discussion during franchise debates see: Legislative Council, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 1858, p. 7. 15 Recent historical work in the French imperial context is increasingly illuminating similar difficulties and imperfections with the ‘citizen’ / ‘subject’ divide throughout the French empire. See, for example, Natasha Pairaudeau, Mobile Citizens: French Indians in Indochina 1858-1954 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016).

if they could legally be sworn as witnesses.16 While the 1828 passage of Ordinance 50 was viewed to affirm the equal rights of Khoisan in the Cape and, in 1830, a Colonial Office directive had affirmed the civil liberties of free non-European residents in Jamaica, in New South Wales the status of Aboriginal Australians as subjects with political rights remained unclear. Settlers at different points voiced concern, confusion or contempt at the prospect of Aboriginal Australians being considered as politically enfranchised subjects, with earlier uncertainties regarding the position of indigenous residents under British law replicated in later debates of the franchise.17

Scholars of enfranchisement often use the term ‘citizenship’ when discussing questions of both belonging and political inclusion across the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Hall, McClelland and Rendall, for example, have extended the argument that it was the right to vote that distinguished the active political subject or ‘citizen’ from the protected subject, choosing to use the latter to distinguish those with political rights in their discussion of the Second Reform Act.18 While ‘citizenship’ has been retrospectively applied by historians in discussions of political rights, throughout the nineteenth century the term retained associations with republicanism. Here, and

16 James Belich, ‘Riders of the Whirlwind: Tribal peoples and European settlement Booms, 1790s-1900s,’ in Richard Boast and Richard S. Hill (eds.), Raupatu: The confiscation of Maori land (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009), p. 39 in particular has made this argument with regards to 1840s and 1850s New Zealand. For jurisdictional disputes, see: Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal regimes in world history, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Damen Ward, ‘Constructing British Authority in Australasia: Charles Cooper and the Legal Status of Aborigines in the South Australian Supreme Court,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 34, no. 4 (2006), pp. 483-504; Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and indigenous people in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge: Hardvard University Press, 2010); Smandyth, Russell, ‘The Exclusionary Effect of Colonial Law: Indigenous peoples and English law in Western Canada, 1670-1870’ in Louis A Knafla and Jonathan Swainger (eds.), Law and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West 1670-1940 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), pp. 127-149; Sampson, Jane, ‘British Voices and Indigenous Rights: Debating Aboriginal legal status in nineteenth-century Australia and Canada’, Cultures of the Commonwealth 2, (Winter, 1996-1997), pp. 5-16, and others. 17 See, Damen Ward, ‘Constructing British Authority in Australasia: Charles Cooper and the Legal Status of Aborigines in the South Australian Supreme Court, c. 1840-60, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 34, no. 4 (2006), pp. 483-504. 18 Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, race, gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 180.

throughout this thesis, I will continue to use the legal category of ‘subject’, exploring the many inconsistencies and difficulties of application that could arise from this category.

Turning to the discrete histories of the franchise in each of these settings, the following three sections take up the history and structure of the franchise law respectively in Jamaica, New South Wales and the Cape, highlighting the inconsistencies captured in John Dick’s query and the colonial secretary’s silence. I will trace through the local and global debates and concerns that underwrote the forming of the franchise in these locations as well as the operation and controversies of the franchise in practice. For Jamaica, this includes examining the changes to the franchise in the decades after slavery, the continued tension between reform and further restriction into the 1850s, and the increasingly successful attempts of the local Assembly to shape the local electorate by manipulating the franchise’s provisions. In the Cape, I will examine the tensions between Dutch, British and non-European settlers in the decades after slavery and the formation of the Cape’s ‘non-racial’ franchise of 1853. In New South Wales, I will turn to the debates and reforms of the 1840s and 1850s, which led to one of the earliest introductions of universal male suffrage, contrasting this against the silence and inconsistencies of the franchise with regard to race.

Debating the Franchise in Post-Emancipation Jamaica

The first elective Assembly of Jamaica was established in 1662, over a century and a half prior to the extension of responsible government to the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and southern Africa. In the mid-seventeenth century, following the defeat of the Spanish and the colonisation of the island by the English, settlers in Jamaica had successfully argued for their rights as subjects to a locally elected system of government. Although attempts were made throughout the century to curtail the island government’s power, English settlers retained authority over local laws and institutions. As Jack P. Greene has shown, discourses of ‘British liberty’ continued to provide powerful rhetoric within seventeenth and eighteenth-century oppositions to metropolitan

interference, as settlers pronounced the entitlements due to them by virtue of their freedom against a wider context of slavery.19 Under the Assembly’s early electoral law until 1830, the right to vote was based on sex, subjecthood, landownership and freedom. It also excluded any non-white residents, whether enslaved or free.

With the turn of the nineteenth century and the growing strength of humanitarian and anti-slavery movements both within and outside the colony, the Assembly’s attempts to reinforce and maintain racial divisions faced an increasingly critical reception. The revolution in Saint-Domingue reverberated across the Caribbean, not least because of the immigration of Haitian residents into Jamaica, and inspired local campaigns for political rights as well as a wider fear of domestic agitation.20 Following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, but prior to the abolition of slavery in Jamaica, the self-described ‘free coloured’ community petitioned the House of Assembly for civil rights and the protection of British law as equal British subjects. Initially, residents’ requests for equal civil liberties and political rights were directed to the local legislature, but, when reform was slow to come, local agitations bonded with anti-slavery and humanitarian movements in Britain. After several decades of agitation, a bill to include non-European subjects under the franchise was passed in 1830.

Over the 1830s and 1840s, the Colonial Office adhered to the principle of equality and showed a reticence to approve any changes in the franchise law aimed at restricting the power of non-white residents. In 1830, the Colonial Secretary, James Stephen, attacked an attempt made by incumbent ministers to sustain planter power in the Assembly through franchise and membership restrictions, stating that the Act was ‘at variance with those

19 Jack P. Greene, ‘Liberty and Slavery: The transfer of British liberty to the West Indies, 1627- 1865,’ in Jack P. Greene (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English liberty overseas, 1600-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 50-76; Jack P. Greene, ‘The Jamaica Privilege Controversy, 1764-66: An episode in the process of constitutional definition in the early modern British empire,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22, no. 1 (January 1994), pp. 16-53. 20 Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black publics and peasant radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 2000) for a wider discussion of the interaction between Haitian and Jamaican civil and political rights movements. See also, Gad Heuman, Between Black and White (Oxford: Clio Press, 1981) Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) for detailed history of electoral politics over this period.

principles respecting the equal rights of His Majesty’s free Subjects of all classes’.21 When the proposed introduction of responsible government was discussed in 1832, Stephen reiterated his earlier commitment to the equality of subjects, claiming that ‘the single motive for withholding that system… is the division of people into castes as slaves and free men or as convicts and free settlers.’22 In 1833, and again in 1838, election laws with racially divisive qualifications were overturned, and new requirements for Crown approval on any changes to the franchise were brought into place.23 In 1841, with the passage of a new electoral law to qualify procedure at elections, Governor Metcalfe assured Lord John Russell that no further restrictions were contained within the new law and ‘of course no distinction with respect to Race or Color, [sic] that being entirely abolished in all the Legislative Institutions of this Island.’24 While no substantial reductions were made to the qualification, it was also not further restricted. From 1830 until the introduction of new restrictions in 1859, the freehold qualification remained at six pounds.

While the freehold franchise remained unaltered, the growing prosperity of small landholders over this period produced a more radical transformation in the electoral roll and the Assembly’s membership. Following slavery’s abolition, a number of men and women took up small lots on existing estates, or moved into new towns. Others moved into the ‘free villages’ established by Baptist ministers with the intention of providing protection to freed slaves. A number of these small lots cultivated by emancipated men and women had, by the 1840s, reached the value of six pounds required by the colony’s franchise. Tracing through land records and claims to vote books, in addition to surviving poll books, historians including Gad Heuman and Swithin Wilmot have linked these small freeholders on lots under twenty-five acres to the growing ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ politically

21 J Stephen to Goderich, 6 June 1831, quoted in Heuman, Between Black and White, p. 49. 22 Paul Knaplund, James Stephen and the British Colonial System (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953), p. 256. 23 Philip Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The role of ideas in a tropical colony (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 179. 24 Metcalfe to Russell, 4 January 1841, British National Archives, CO 137/254.

enfranchised class, emphasising their increasing influence in electoral politics.25 This link was also drawn in Parliament and by local residents, who often placed the blame for any bribery or disturbances at elections on the small freeholders.26 Responding to a request from Russell to ascertain the acquisition of freehold property and, through it, electoral rights by emancipated residents, Metcalfe confirmed that there had been an increase in freeholders since the end of apprenticeship. In 1841, he informed Russell that while there was ‘no record that shows these acquisitions by negroes alone’, ‘the additional number of freeholds with electoral rights’ was ‘934’ – a potentially substantial increase on the 2,199 qualified to vote at the previous election.27

Scholars of Jamaican history have fluctuated in their treatment of representative government prior to the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. Traditional narratives of formal politics tended to dismiss the first Jamaican House of Assembly as entirely unrepresentative, and highlighted the highly restrictive franchise as a key factor in the colony’s heightening tensions over the 1860s. Gad Heuman’s analyses of polling data and land statistics, as well as the work of Swithin Wilmot on black candidates and their agents have helped to destabilise this narrative, and have emphasised the influence that was wielded by emancipated and free small landholders at elections.28 More recently, Mimi Sheller’s work has turned away from electoral politics, building a ‘citizenship from below’ based on everyday forms of resistance exercised by men and women in Jamaica.29 Without

25 Heuman, Between Black and White, pp. 117-135; Swithin Wilmot, ‘The Politics of Samuel Clarke: Black Creole Politician in Free Jamaica, 1851-1865 Caribbean Quarterly 44 (March-June 1998), pp. 129-144; Swithin Wilmot, ‘From Bondage to Political Office: Blacks and Vestry Politics in Two Jamaican Parishes, Kingston and St David, 1831-1865, in Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards (eds.) Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), p. 307-323. 26 See, for example, discussions during changes to the electoral law in 1859: Abraham Judah and A. C. Sinclair, Debates of the Colonial Parliament of Jamaica: Volume 3 (Kingston, 1858), pp. 93-106. 27 Metcalfe to Russell, 9 June 1840, British National Archives, CO 137/25 25. 28 Gad Heuman, Between Black and White; Swithin Wilmot, ‘The Politics of Samuel Clarke: Black Creole Politician in Free Jamaica, 1851-1865 Caribbean Quarterly 44, no. ½ (March-June 1998), pp. 129-144; Swithin Wilmot, ‘From Bondage to Political Office: Blacks and Vestry Politics in Two Jamaican Parishes, Kingston and St David, 1831-1865, in Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards (eds.) Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), p. 307-323. 29 Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom; Sheller, Democracy After Slavery.

discounting the myriad forms of influence that could be exercised outside of elections, here I am principally concerned with the formal definitions of political subjects in law and in practice, with a particular focus on the small freeholders identified by Heuman and Wilmot.

As will become apparent in Chapter Three, campaigns for seats in the Assembly particularly targeted Jamaica’s newly enfranchised small freeholders. Candidates often paid the taxes due on voters’ lands, and encouraged them to the poll through other forms of legal and illegal incentivising. Crucially in a site such as Jamaica where the franchise was so restrictive, these small freeholders also provided a link to hundreds of others who were not entitled to register to vote, but nonetheless remained highly active at elections. The elections of 1849 were widely targeted as indicative of the dangers of lowering the franchise within greater reach of the small freeholders, with bribery and corruption seen to be endemic. Anticipating the contests to come, in January the Falmouth Post warned respectable voters and candidates to be on guard for the ‘negro voters’ who would be ‘coaxed, cajoled, and infamously tampered with’, arguing that not ‘one third’ of ‘respectable freeholders’ were ‘legally qualified’.30 For these commentators, changes to the Assembly’s membership were a particular point of concern. Despite the highly restrictive membership qualifications, by the end of the 1840s seventeen ‘coloured’ and three ‘black’ residents together held twenty of the Assembly’s forty-five seats.

In addition to the small freeholders, the franchise included large-scale landowners, taxpayers, renters or tenants and rectors. Husbands were entitled to vote based on land held by their wives, and trustees were also entitled to vote if they were in possession of freeholds valued over six pounds. Though the franchise was restrictive as a proportion of the population, voters were certainly not limited to wealthy plantation owners. Enfranchised electors included employees at the British naval dockyard in Port Royal, such as Nathaniel Allen, who voted on freehold held by his wife.31 They included artisans and

30 ‘The Elective Franchise in Jamaica,’ Falmouth Post, 19 January 1849, pp. 1-4. 31 For reference to Nathaniel Allen’s background see: ‘Port Royal Election,’ Falmouth Post, 28 August 1849, pp. 1-4. For his vote in the election, House of Assembly Poll Books, 1B/11/23/19, p. 70.

skilled labourers, including the mason John Elliot a voter in the Metcalf district, or businessmen such as John Nunes who ran a stable in Kingston, as well as storekeepers and their employees.32 ‘Marks’ in place of signatures in Claims to Vote books also indicate that a substantial number of voters were illiterate.33 Finally, from 1859, new laws introduced a fifty pound salary provisions into the franchise, extending the right to vote to clerks, bookkeepers and others holding professional employment. Nonetheless, for vocal commentators and conservative politicians, the small-scale freeholders remained the primary point of concern.

Total Number of Voters in Jamaica, Organised by Qualification: 1854- 1865

3000 Rector 2500 Money 2000 Salary 1500 Tenant

1000 Rent

500 Taxpayer

0 Freehold 1854 1858 1859 1860 1863 1864 1865

Graph 1: Qualification of Voters, Jamaica 1854-1865. Source: Henry Barkly to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 March 1854, British National Archives, CO 137/322; Votes and Proceedings of the Jamaican Assembly, 1859, p. 225; Votes and Proceedings of the Jamaican Assembly, 1865, p. 236.

32 Daily Advertiser, 5 October 1854, p. 2. 33 See, for example, Port Royal Claims to Vote, National Archives of Jamaica, 2/19/17.

The controversy of the freehold vote partially derived from its vulnerability to manipulation. To register as a freeholder, voters had to declare the location and worth of their land to any Justice of the Peace or parochial official, and their names would subsequently be entered into the parish rolls. These estimates would be open to the objection of neighbouring residents at circuit courts and at the point of polling, but parish officials did not initially verify the value of the land. Writing of the 1849 election for Port Royal, the Falmouth Post claimed that four electors in Port Royal were voting on a trust that was ‘a ruinate and worth nothing’, and at least four electors voted on freehold that was being leased out. These eight voters represented eleven percent of the total number who attended the poll.34 In 1851, the Colonial Standard bemoaned the events of the Kingston election where every ‘Merchant assessed to public and parochial rates to the extent of hundreds of pounds annually’ was overrun by ‘half-a-dozen draymen’ qualified on ‘hovels in the suburbs… who have been wholly relleved [sic] of their taxes’.35 Members of the Assembly were equally guilty of using this highly fallible system to their advantage. In 1858, Robert Russell, member for the parish of Westmoreland, moved that the qualification for members of the Assembly be reduced, putting ‘to an end [the] doubtful returns of incomes’ by the House’s membership. At present, another member confirmed, they were ‘bringing men to swear that they had incomes, which everybody knew they had not.’36 The attempted reform to secure members’ entitlements were not passed, however, with small freeholders alone targeted in the electoral law’s revision.

Over the 1850s, two crucial alterations were made to the franchise law that together worked to limit the changing demographic of the Assembly and the electorate. In 1852, a new Electoral Act was passed, requiring taxes to be paid well in advance of an election and disenfranchising any individual whose payments fell into arrears. Though a meeting of

34 House of Assembly Poll Books, National Archives of Jamaica, 1B/11/23/19. See also: Port Royal Claims to Vote, National Archives of Jamaica, 2/19/17. 35 Colonial Standard, 21 November 1851, pp. 2-3. The Morning Journal also critiqued the use of bribery at the Kingston election: Morning Journal, 20 November 1851, pp. 2-3. 36 During the discussion of the qualification of members of the House of Assembly it was proposed that the property requirements be lowered, since it was notorious that so many elected lied about the worth of their land. Judah and Sinclair, Debates of the Colonial Parliament of Jamaica: Volume 3, p. 89-91.

small freeholders objected that the change was an attempt to ‘crush’ their interests, Charles Edward Grey defended the measure to the Colonial Office, arguing that it in no way limited the qualification and that it would stop the ‘notorious prevalence’ of ‘corrupt practices’ performed by ‘poor’ freeholders.37 This group, Grey and the Assembly argued, were overvaluing their land in order to obtain electoral rights, and then convincing candidates or their agents to pay the taxes attached to the overvaluation. The alteration seemingly had its desired result, with the registration of voters falling to 2 235 in 1854 – close to the level reported by Russell in 1841.38

The second alteration, passed in 1859, was more sinister in its application and less circumspect in its intentions. In the late 1850s, the Assembly faced the challenge of an imminently expiring election law that, if allowed to pass, would disenfranchise all electors across the colony. In addition to this, until 1858, the six pound freeholders had been required to pay a ‘hereditament’ tax (a tax on inheritable property) of twelve shillings on their land that, like all taxes, needed to be paid prior to an election. While the tax was removed to alleviate the burden of poorer freeholders, however, the election law still required all voters to pay tax in some form. The 1859 law was intended to redress this inconsistency and, on its passage was defended as also offering the controlled reduction in the franchise mandated by the Colonial Office in 1854. The act retained the six-pound freehold, reduced the rental qualification from thirty pounds to twenty pounds, cut the tax threshold from three pounds to one pound, and introduced a new qualification enfranchising individuals on a salary of fifty pounds or more. The only additional burden was the introduction of a flat tax of ten shillings on every voter to be paid at the point of registration. In practice, the ten-shilling tax was almost a direct replacement of the twelve- shilling hereditament tax freeholders were already known to not be able to pay. While the law was attacked by liberal Assemblymen as ‘class’ legislation, it is likely that it passed with a thin majority out of expediency.39 By the election of 1860, the new professional salary

37 C Grey to Pakington, 28 April 1852, British National Archives, CO 137/313 39. 38 H Barkly to Newcastle, 22 March 1854, British National Archives, CO 137/322 37. 39 Words of W. T. March, Votes and Proceedings of the Jamaican Assembly: 1858, p. 99.

qualifications had added an additional four hundred electors to the rolls, while the proportion of freeholders had dropped considerably.

Although bribery at elections continued, the returns of the electoral rolls in 1860 and 1864 suggest that the laws had the predicted impact on the size and composition of the electorate. Overall, there was an increase in the number of registered voters.40 But there was also a significant change in their qualification. While over the 1830s and 1840s the percentage of voters qualifying under small freeholds had been growing steadily, peaking at over sixty percent in St. John and St. Thomas in the Vale in 1849, as Heuman has shown, there was a rapid decline in their registration with the passage of the new law.41 Cross- checking polling and claims to vote books against the 1860s registration lists, shows a similar impact in the district of Port Royal.42 Of seventy individuals who voted in the 1849 Port Royal election, only thirty-four of these individuals were still registered as electors anywhere in the island by 1860. Increasingly, it was taxpayers and salary earners that were acting at elections, rather than the freeholders.

It is difficult to definitively reconcile the response of the Colonial Office against its previously stated position. The law received the assent of the crown in spite of the Governor making it quite clear that it had been introduced ‘for no other reason’ than its operation ‘as a great discouragement of the exercise of the Franchise, by the more numerous and humbler Class of Freeholders’.43 In the Jamaican Assembly, ministers had done little to hide the intention of the law and spoke quite freely of preventing ‘ignorant, half-civilized, and easily duped peasants’ from approaching the polls on a freehold qualification.44 Public meetings and petitions from residents, in addition to the denouncement of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society also did not prevent its

40 Votes and Proceedings of the Jamaican Assembly: 1859-1860, p. 225. 41 See Heuman’s analysis of polling data: Between Black and White, p. 125-128. 42 National Archives of Jamaica, IB/11/23/19, p. 70-71; Voters’ List for Port Royal, Jamaica Almanac 1860. 43 Darling, quoted in Holt, The Problem of Freedom, p. 257. 44 John Castello, Votes and Proceedings of the Jamaican Assembly 1858, p. 95.

ascent.45 For many historians, its passage reflected the metropolitan government’s weakening commitment to humanitarian causes. In the final chapter of this thesis, I will return to the 1852 and 1859 changes in the franchise law, investigating the elections that immediately preceded its passage.

In overlooking the intentional exclusion of one class of voters, however, the metropolitan government played into local characterisations of the freehold vote and helped to affirm perceptions that non-European voters had no serious interest in electoral politics.46 For residents already struggling against the burdens of taxation, the decision not to pay the ten-shilling stamp was perhaps not surprising. Yet conservative commentators took up the passage of the law in Westminster as tacit approval of a measure designed to ensure that ‘ignorant and easily duped’ owners of freeholds could not ‘control elections as they had done for nearly a quarter of a century’.47 Introducing an optional tax on land, only payable as a prerequisite to registration helped to legitimise the exclusion of poorer freehold voters, and its passage in Westminster helped to confirm this view. According to the Falmouth Post’s commentators, the metropolitan parliament – well known for its reticence to uphold racially restrictive laws – was equally convinced of the new franchise’s ‘liberal’ provisions, which extended ‘the franchise to all persons by whom it is valued as it should be’.48 Rather than merely overseeing a restriction in the franchise, the shifting policies of the Colonial Office over the 1830s to 1850s helped to underwrite and reinforce the exclusion of Jamaica’s non-white residents from the political sphere.

45 Falmouth Post, 16 September 1859, p. 2 discusses the petition sent to the House of Assembly. Falmouth Post, 8 July 1859, p. 2 and 19 July 1859, p. 2 complains about the denouncement of the law by the Anti-Slavery Reporter and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. 46 Falmouth Post, 8 July 1859, p. 2. 47 Falmouth Post, 16 September 1859, p. 2. 48 Falmouth Post, 16 September 1859, p. 2.

The Cape Constitution and the Construction of the Cape Qualified Franchise, 1830-

1853

By contrast to Jamaica, where representative government was introduced for the new settlers shortly after British occupation, in the Cape Colony a constitution for a locally elected government was passed after several decades of lobbying, agitation and, eventually, widespread demonstrations that coincided with a frontier war. The development of self- government at the Cape followed a similar trajectory to other British settler colonies including Canadian provinces, New Zealand, New South Wales and Victoria, where local representative institutions were initially withheld out of fear that they might create disruptive divisions in the local society, but then later granted arguably out of expediency. The statement made by Stephen in 1832, that ‘the division of the people into castes as slaves and free men or as convicts and free settlers’ was ‘the single motive’ for denying representative government, was also applied by the Colonial Office to the Cape Colony.49 Here their concern was the potential exclusion of slaves and other members of the Cape’s ‘coloured’ population, the strong social divisions between Dutch and British settlers and the fear of which group might ultimately hold the balance of power in the new assembly.

When the Cape’s inhabitants initially lobbied the Colonial Office for a locally- elected government, strong divisions existed in settler society. Systems of slavery were still in place, and the colony’s freed population consisted of locally born and immigrant Dutch, English, German and French settlers in addition to Khoisan and Xhosa inhabitants. Also resident within the colony were the children of European settlers and Khoisan who, along with Khoisan and other free and enslaved non-European subjects were often collectively termed the ‘coloured’ population. Strong animosity existed between the Dutch and British, while humanitarians and liberal reformers voiced particular concern that economic disparity would leave few non-European residents eligible to vote for an assembly with a high franchise. While an early petition drawn up by a meeting of Cape Town settlers in 1832 attempted to quell the Colonial Office’s unease by offering a ‘gradual’ emancipation

49 Knaplund, James Stephen and the British Colonial System, p. 256.

of slaves in exchange for a legislative assembly, the conservative offer was refused. Instead, in 1834, a legislative council composed of colonial officials and nominated local residents was established and remained in place until 1853.

Agitations to disband the nominated council and introduce a representative system came to a climax in 1849, when a mass protest movement known as the ‘convict crisis’ overturned an imperial order to despatch British prisoners to the Cape.50 By the late 1840s, the newly elected Whig government was also reconsidering its position on self-rule in the settler colonies. Constitutions were being drafted for New South Wales and New Zealand, while in Canada the first elections under ‘responsible government’ were underway by the end of the decade. Colonial agitations for reform in the Cape were pushed further in 1847, when the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Earl Grey, attempted to resume convict transportation to New South Wales and introduce it to the Cape. In both sites the decision sparked mass meetings of several thousands, and renewed calls for greater control over local affairs. Unofficial elections for members to assist with the formation of a new constitution were held, but ‘out-of-doors’ protests continued. With the outbreak of the Kat River rebellion, and a war on the Eastern Frontier, the external pressures on the Council to finalise legislation further intensified. In 1852, as tensions mounted, the Council passed a proposed constitution that was adopted with slight revisions by the Imperial Government in 1853. As Robert Ross has recently emphasised, this wider context of agitation, and the twin themes of loyalty and rebellion would prove crucial in securing the Cape’s low and liberal franchise.51

Of key consideration to the Council in forming the Cape’s constitution throughout this period was the value of land to be fixed upon as a qualification for voters. A low franchise of twenty-five pounds was initially suggested, but was repealed and replaced with

50 Chris Holdridge, ‘Liberty Unchained: Anti-Convict Lobbying, Popular Politics and Settler- Government in the Australian Colonies and Cape of Good Hope, 1846-1856,’ (Sydney University: PhD Thesis, 2015), for more on the connection between protests in Sydney and Cape Town. 51 Robert Ross, Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River settlement, 1829-1856 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also, Edna Bradlow, ‘The “Great Fear” at the Cape of Good Hope, 1851-2,’ International Journal of African Historical Studies 22, no. 3 (January 1989), pp. 401-421.

a fifty-pound franchise by a majority of members when the draft constitution was passed through the Council. The fifty-pound franchise was expressly intended, in the words of Governor Montagu, to prevent a ‘body of ignorant coloured persons’ from controlling electoral politics.52 Petitions were sent to the imperial government advocating the fifty- pound franchise on the grounds that it would be ‘dangerous’ to enfranchise such a large portion of the ‘coloured’ community.53 Yet, petitions were also received in opposition to the fifty-pound franchise, including strongly-worded appeals from inhabitants of the Kat River settlement and other mission stations.54 Khoisan inhabitants and emancipated slaves living in the Moravian mission of Genadendal, in the district of Caledon, reminded the metropolitan government of their participation as soldiers in the frontier war and their loyalty when Kat River inhabitants rose up against the British government.55 The liberal Cape Town press together with poorer Dutch residents also advocated the lower franchise, while wealthy English and Dutch residents in Cape Town opposed it, as Trapido has emphasised.56 Finally, against this sustained petitioning, rumours circulated that the exclusion of the Cape’s non-European population would lead to further agitation against the British government from amongst the Cape’s ‘coloured’ inhabitants.57 Responding to residents’ petitions, the concern on the Eastern Frontier and holding firm to the principle that ‘coloured’ residents should not be excluded, the Cape Legislative Council’s proposed constitution was passed with an amended twenty-five pound franchise. In amending the constitution, the Duke of Newcastle made his rationale clear: it was ‘exceedingly undesirable that the franchise should be so restricted as to leave those of the coloured

52 British Parliamentary Papers (1852), p. 159, quoted in Evans, Equal Subjects, p. 93; Stanley Trapido, ‘Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853,’ Journal of African History 5, no.1 (March 1964) p. 50. 53 Ross, Borders of Race, p. 192. 54 See, Ross, Borders of Race, pp. 191-192. See also, for example, petition from Zuurbraak, BPP 1852-53 (1581 1636), Papers Relative to the Establishment of a Representative Assembly at the Cape of Good Hope, pp. 306-307. 55 BPP 1852-53 (1581 1636), Papers Relative to the Establishment of a Representative Assembly at the Cape of Good Hope, pp. 274-275. 56 Trapido, ‘Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853.’ 57 See, BPP 1852-53 (1581 1636), Papers Relative to the Establishment of a Representative Assembly at the Cape of Good Hope, pp. 47; 66-67; 92. See also, Bradlow, ‘The “Great Fear” at the Cape of Good Hope,’ and Robert Ross, Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River settlement, 1829-1856 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

classes who in point of intelligence are qualified for the exercise of political power, practically unrepresented’.58 Though spoken to the Colonial Office, Newcastle’s words were read and digested by settlers in New South Wales.59

The Cape’s ‘Non-Racial’ Franchise in Ideology and Operation

The twenty-five pound franchise was estimated by the South African Commercial Advertiser to entitle ten percent of the colony’s total population to register.60 It extended these provisions to male British subjects and naturalised residents, but provisions were also made to allow male Dutch immigrants who had settled in the Cape prior to British occupation to qualify as voters. The value of the franchise was low enough to ensure that merchants, professionals and others in ‘respectable’ employment across the Colony would be qualified to participate at elections either through their accommodation or their salary. The requirement of fifty pounds per annum in wages was below the average income of clerks, constables, surgeons and most tradesmen, as well as higher level farmhands, but above that which labourers or domestic servants received.61 Many farmers qualified through the value of their lands. Substantially, labourers resident on mission stations whose wages fell below the fifty-pound threshold could be enfranchised through the erven, or small plots of land, granted to them by the missionary institutions.

Revisionist scholarship of Cape liberalism has rightly voiced cynicism towards the liberal or humanitarian intentions of the 1853 franchise, and the subject of its origins and implications have provoked much valuable discussion.62 While no direct exclusions were made on the basis of race, and the low qualification of twenty-five pounds per annum

58 Newcastle to Cathcart, 14 March 1853. British National Archives, CO 48/337. Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 1853, p. 3; The Courier, 19 July 1853, p. 2. 59 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 August 1853, p. 3; The Courier, 19 July 1853, p. 2. 60 South African Commercial Advertiser, 18 May 1854, p. 2. 61 See: The Cape of Good Hope, Blue Books of Statistical Returns (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, & Co, 1856), pp. 187-382; 535-537, for annual wage and board returns. 62 Trapido, ‘Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853’; Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (London: Leicester University Press, 1996); Evans, Equal Subjects; Ross, Borders of Race.

ensured that some non-European residents would be in a position to vote, historians have argued that its provisions offered no threat to Europeans at the poll.63 The valuation of land at twenty-five pounds favoured ‘respectable’ forms of living based on European standards, with brick houses and adjacent gardens often required to meet the twenty-five pounds franchise within mission stations.64 Finally, as in Jamaica and New South Wales, the franchise was premised on ‘subjecthood’, and while this protected the political rights of Khoekhoe and freed slaves, within the Cape it was not considered to apply to Xhosa or other African residents born outside the colony’s territory. As the Attorney General, William Porter, explained in 1853, the ‘Fingoes who came into this colony from beyond the boundary’, as well as ‘all Liberated Africans’ were not ‘natural-born’ subjects and could not register as voters.65

There is also evidence that already by the 1850s politicians and commentators in the Cape were drawing distinctions between the enfranchisement of Khoisan and emancipated subjects and immigrant African populations, and taking steps to prevent the latter’s enfranchisement. In 1859, when naturalization laws were drafted within the Cape to allow German, Dutch and other European immigrants to serve as voters for and members of the Assembly, a European language and partial literacy requirement was introduced expressly to ensure that ‘numerous native emigrants and the lowest class of other emigrants’ would not be able to ‘share a privilege’ preserved for ‘foreigners who are likely to prove a really valuable addition to our population.’66 The law required that any prospective immigrant be able to speak a European language and write their name, and was passed in 1861.

Discussing differences between the Cape’s ‘coloured’ residents and non-subject African populations the previous year, the Argus expressed a limited celebration of the twenty-five pound franchise that allowed ‘the class called Hottentots’ to ‘enjoy equal

63 Trapido, ‘Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualification of 1853,’ has particularly emphasised this. 64 As occurred in Genadendal in the early 1860s, taken up in Chapter Two. 65 William Porter, The Elective Franchise: Illustrated and Explained (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1853), p. 8. 66 ‘House of Assembly,’ Zuid Afrikaan, 28 March 1859, p. 3.

electoral rights along with their fellow subjects’, claiming it to be ‘partly as a measure of justice and partly as a feeble attempt at compensation to the descendants of our aborigines’.67 The Argus’s writer nonetheless affirmed that immigrant African populations did not hold the same position. For the Argus, ‘a little application of common sense will soon lead us to decide that they have no manner of right, as a body, to privileges which we are willing to concede to them as individuals’, recommending naturalisation policies akin to those of any European resident.68 Where a ‘white foreigner requires nothing towards his naturalization but a declaratory act, - the black foreigner must go through a long moral and social acclimation, before he can rid himself of the exceptional liabilities under which he labours’.69 Similar literacy restrictions were also considered to prevent the registration of Chinese immigrants in New South Wales, explored below, and would be recommended, although not introduced in Jamaica in the same period.

The continuing controversy surrounding the franchise’s operation over the 1850s also suggests grounds for scepticism, and reveals fractures in the Cape’s popular political sphere recurrently brought to the fore in the events explored throughout this thesis. In 1858, the member for Clanwilliam proclaimed ‘I shall regret to the day of my death the active part I took in the £25 franchise’, asserting that if a new figure of seventy-five pounds could not be reached, then perhaps they could settle on fifty pounds.70 In 1854, the Graaff Reinet Herald stated that colonists should ‘dread’ the ‘baneful influence’ thrown into the hands of missionaries by the low franchise.71 Similarly, the strength of inhabitants resident at the mission stations of Elim and Genadendal, who together controlled the electorate, infuriated residents in the Caledon constituency. During the October 1858 election for Caledon, D. R. Roux, a farmer resident in the district accused the member, Johan Conrad Silberbauer, of running in Caledon rather than Cape Town (where he lived) because he was assured of the support of Genadendal voters. Roux stated that the missionaries were,

67 Cape Argus, 25 November 1858, p. 2. 68 Cape Argus, 25 November 1858, p. 2. 69 Cape Argus, 25 November 1858, p. 2. 70 Augustus Tancred, The Necessity and Advantage of Reflection: A lecture delivered at the Town Hall, on Friday evening, October 15 (Cape Town, A. S. Roberston, 1858), with thanks to Christopher Holdridge for alerting me to this source. 71 25 January 1854, Graaff-Reinet Herald, pp. 1-4.

in turn, putting forward candidates in opposition to the white population of the district, and that this was only going to exacerbate the resentment of resident farmers who had been left unrepresented.72 Also of considerable concern to many Dutch residents, and fuelling further animosity with the Constitution, was the advantage deemed to be given to English residents by virtue of English-language requirements in Parliament.73

Despite the apparent lack of consensus, however, many of the attacks made against missionaries and mission inhabitants stemmed from the reality that in its application the Cape’s constitution was enfranchising a number – if not a proportionate one – of the colony’s non-European residents. Graph Two provides a breakdown of the percentage of voters registered in mission stations in 1859, showing the sizable influence of residents in Genadendal and Elim in the district of Caledon, the source of the above correspondent’s concern, and taken up in further detail in Chapter Two. No official statistics were compiled at this time, and few voters’ rolls have survived, but the table, in addition to that which separates voters as ‘English’, ‘Dutch’, ‘Coloured’ and ‘Other’ (Graph Three) is derived from returns presented unprompted by one of the Cape’s polling officers, the Assembly’s first speaker and owner of the Zuid Afrikaan, Christoffel Brand.74 In 1853, during the first period of registration, all such registration officers had been reminded via a circular that the franchise was intended to ‘benefit and embrace’ the ‘poorer class of voters.’ Officers were instructed to afford mission residents ‘every facility for registering their names.’75 In spite of considerable agitation, it is clear that within the 1850s, a considerable attempt was made by members of government to ensure the participation of the Cape’s non-European population.

Missionaries themselves encouraged the registration of their members, using the promise of political rights as an incentive to maintain the upkeep of homes that would

72 Letter of D. T. Roux, in Het Volksblad, 7 October 1858. 73 See, ‘Een Winterveldsche Boer,’ Het Volksblad, 4 December 1856, p. 3, for one resident’s complaint. Issues of Dutch versus English language were also articulated at the 1854 elections, following the nomination for Worcester where it was taken up by candidates, see: South African Commercial Advertiser, 25 May 1854, pp. 2-3. 74 C Brand to the Colonial Secretary, 18 April 1859, Western Cape Archives, CO 4107 B47. 75 Circular to Civil Commissioners, 30 May 1853, a copy of which is contained in Western Cape Archives, CO 4075 M83.

form the basis of their entitlements, as Robert Ross has also noted.76 Within some of these separated stations, a second tier of enfranchisement developed. In Zuurbraak, a London Missionary Society mission in Swellendam, residents’ formal participation in the mission’s meetings was founded upon the same structure as the Parliamentary franchise, but set at a lower level.77 Any male resident in possession of five pounds of land – so valued by the Cape government’s official registering officers – was entitled to cast a vote in elections for the mission board. The five-pound mission-station franchise of Zuurbraak was intended to provide extra incentive for residents to keep their houses in good condition and was withdrawn where houses fell into disarray. Similar incentivising was also instituted in Genadendal, where money was given to residents who built stone houses.78 Zuurbraak residents accounted for just on twenty percent of Swellendam’s one thousand registered voters and, as with other missions throughout the Cape, polling was held at open meetings of residents within the station.

Though only one electorate, that of Caledon, contained a sufficient number of qualified mission inhabitants for European voters to feel threatened by their collective participation, other mission stations were home to a number of voters who were active during elections. This included the 117 electors resident at Zoar in Riversdale, a constituency of 779, and the cumulative 273 voters resident across Clanwilliam’s four missions who together constituted thirty percent of the district’s voters.79 This is not to suggest that the franchise provided a fair representation of non-Europeans, or that mission residents were united in their political views, but rather to show that significant numbers of non-Europeans living in missions were active in their registration and participation at elections. Moreover, as returning officers were instructed by the colonial secretary to appoint mission stations as separate polling places, residents in mission stations were not required to journey into the main towns to cast their votes.

76 Robert Ross, ‘Missions, Respectability and Civil Rights: The Cape Colony, 1828-1854,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 25, no. 3 (1999), pp. 333-345. 77 J Marquad to the Colonial Secretary, May 1858, Western Cape Archives, CO 4104 M46. 78 CCP 1854 [SC10], Report from the Select Committee on Granting Land in Freehold to Hottentots, p. 9. 79 C. Brand to the Colonial Secretary, 18 April 1859, Western Cape Archives, CO 4107 B47.

There was no single response to the introduction of representative government in the Cape, nor to the franchise that was enacted within the 1853 Constitution Ordinance. While many celebrated the ‘boon’ conferred by a constitution and representative government, others continued to express their apprehension. Writing to London Missionary Society (LMS) overseers from the Paarl, the minister George Barker stated that news of the Constitution’s passage had provoked apprehension and alarm amongst his congregants. Barker reported that a series of lectures he prepared on the practices of elections and government were stormed by ‘a number of bad characters among the coloured people headed by an Englishman’, with residents fearing that the introduction of representative government signified an end to the ‘Queen’s authority.’80 Unexpectedly, the tying together of mission residence and enfranchisement also created a layer of legal pluralism not intended by the Colonial Office or the Constitution’s drafters. Across Moravian stations including Genadendal and Elim, and LMS stations such as Zuurbraak, residents were only permitted to remain in the homes upon which their enfranchisement rested for as long as they subscribed to mission regulations. These regulations placed behavioural conditions – including temperance, curfews and sexual morality – on enfranchisement. Over the 1850s and 1860s, these codes in addition to the land and political privileges they facilitated continued as a subject of controversy as efforts were made from within and without to disband mission stations across the Cape.81

Throughout the 1850s, the protracted disagreements that had culminated in the passage of the Cape’s 1853 constitution continued to mark its operation. Yet, the successful introduction of a low, twenty-five pound franchise via this legislation proved significant for many of the colony’s poorer voters. In spite of the continued controversies of the Cape’s franchise, and recurrent appeals for its restriction, throughout the 1850s and 1860s the franchise continued to ensure the eligibility of large numbers of residents

80 G Barker to the LMS Directors, 29 October 1853, CWM Archives, SOAS CWM/LMS/05/02/02/Box 28, Folder 4. 81 J Marquad to the Colonial Secretary, May 1858, Western Cape Archives, CO 4104 M46, contains a copy of Zuurbraak’s mission regulations. Bernard Kruger, Pear Tree Blossoms: A history of the Moravian mission stations in South Africa, 1737-1869 (Genadendal: Genadendal Printing Press, 1966), pp. 303-306, has a copy of Genadendal’s regulations.

stationed on the Cape’s mission stations in addition to residents in towns and on farms whose property fell below a fifty-pound threshold. It was only in the closing decades of the nineteenth century when, faced with the likely enrolment of large numbers of Xhosa and other African populations, reforms were introduced to re-restrict the franchise via the 1887 Registration Act and 1892 Franchise and Ballot Act.

Cape Voters' Residence by Legislative Council District (Western Province), 1859

6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0

All Other Electors Electors Residing on Mission Stations

Graph 2: Cape Voters’ Residences by Legislative Council District, Western Province, 1859. This and the below table is derived from statistics gathered by Christoffel Brand, first speaker of the Legislative Assembly, who was acting as a scrutineer for the Western Province. His stated reason for gathering the data was ‘that some light may thereby be shown upon the present system’ and he particularly wanted to know the distribution of votes across mission stations. He stated his authority in differentiating between the identity of ‘Dutch’, ‘coloured’, ‘other’ and English (as shown in Graph Three) as having rested upon his ‘long professional intercourse with the public at large’. Brand’s data must be treated with care, particularly in his categorisation of voters, but the data from mission stations is particularly insightful and less subject to personal interpretation. Source: C Brand to the Colonial Secretary, 18 April 1859. Western Cape Archives, CO 4107 B47.

Composition of Electoral Roll, Western Province 1858-9

6000

5000

4000

3000

2000

1000

English Dutch Coloured Other

Graph 3: Composition of the Electoral Roll, Western Province 1858-9. Source: C. Brand to the Colonial Secretary, 18 April, Western Cape Archives, CO 4107 B47.

New South Wales and the Construction of the ‘Universal’ Franchise

Locally-elected government in New South Wales was introduced in stages over the 1840s and 1850s.82 Initially established as a convict colony, from 1788 New South Wales was administered by a Crown-appointed governor, with a small, nominated advisory committee offering the only form of representation to settlers agitating for political reform. Of particular concern within New South Wales throughout this period was the perception that its history as a penal colony was continuing to shape the imperial government’s reticence to introduce local institutions. As the colony’s population was transformed by

82 See: Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006); M. M. H. Thompson, The Seeds of Democracy: Early Elections in Colonial New South Wales (Sydney: Federation Press, 2006) for extended histories of representative government in New South Wales. Angela Woollacott has recently emphasised the imperial context of many shifts towards self-government. See, Angela Woollacott, Settler society in the Australian colonies: Self-government and imperial culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

free migration and the ending of convict transportation, demands for greater transparency and control were amplified. In 1842, the advisory committee was replaced with a partially elected Legislative Council, with electors’ enfranchisement based upon a strict property qualification of twenty pounds in rent per annum or two hundred pounds in land per annum. Debate intensified over the 1840s and, as settlers in Cape Town took to the streets to oppose Earl Grey’s decisions to resume convict transportation, similar protests were held in Sydney. In 1850, the colony of Victoria was separated from New South Wales via the Australian Colonies Government Act, which also halved the colony’s franchise to ten pounds. Finally, in 1855 ‘responsible government’ was introduced, providing settlers with a bicameral parliament and the power to amend their own franchise, laws and constitution, subject to imperial veto.

When elective government was first instituted within New South Wales, considerable agitation surrounded the question of whether or not freed convicts should be entitled to the right to vote. The franchise of twenty pounds initially set in 1842 controversially conceded the right to vote to freed convicts as well as other settlers, but remained out of reach of the vast majority of the colony’s inhabitants. By the 1850s, such tensions had faded, but the restrictive nature of the franchise remained controversial. In 1845, the Morning Chronicle argued that despite the colony’s growing population, the falling value of land left fewer individuals able to vote in the Council’s elections than had been eligible in 1843.83 Liberal reformers continued to demand universal male suffrage, while others suggested a more modest decrease to ten pounds to correspond with the falling prices of land and rent per annum. In addition to this, those in possession of leases to cultivate lands outside the colony’s borders, known colloquially as ‘squatters’, also argued for their rights to representation on the basis of the taxes they contributed to the colony’s revenue.84

83 Morning Chronicle, 9 August 1845, p. 2. This is confirmed by returns presented to the Colonial Office, which show a decrease in the number of electors in the majority of the colony’s districts from 1843 to 1846, with 9 315 registered voters falling to 8 232. BPP 1850 (1160) Copies or Extracts of Correspondence on the Subject of the Australian Colonies Government Bill, p. 95-96. 84 Considerable animosity existed between ‘squatters’ and liberal reformers, for more on this see: Cochrane, Colonial Ambition.

In a pattern already apparent in the Cape and Jamaica, the shape of New South Wales’ franchise remained a point of protracted contention amongst local settlers and between residents and the Colonial Office. Between 1842 and 1858, tensions between emancipated convicts and free settlers, squatters and liberal reformers were expressed within debates over the franchise, as both groups appealed to the Colonial Office to secure their interests via new legislation. Yet, by contrast to the Cape and Jamaica, agitation for franchise reform within the colony was shaped by the assumption that British liberties remained the prerogative of white male inhabitants. Here, residents sought out a highly inclusive franchise (in terms of property qualification) and eventually universal male suffrage, in this instance unaware of its potential to enfranchise Aboriginal Australians as well as settlers.

Nor were debates over enfranchisement within this period limited to men appealing for their rights to inclusion. Outside of the discussions at election meetings and in Parliament, women in colonial New South Wales were simultaneously campaigning for formal inclusion under the franchise. In their recent work both Angela Woollacott and Catherine Bishop have noted how discussions and appeals for the further extension of the franchise led to debates over whether ‘universal’ rights applied to women as well as men.85 In the United States, women’s rights movements were intensifying and news of these campaigns were supplementing and inspiring agitations in New South Wales. The scope of these discussions extended to the introduction of a six-part column within the Empire entitled ‘A Woman’s Ideas on Politics’, in addition to anonymised correspondence, presumably from women.86 Via the press, women and men spoke out for the rights of women to the vote. For the Empire’s correspondent, there should at least be a gallery in

85 Catherine Bishop and Angela Woollacott, ‘Business and Politics as Women’s Work: The Australian Colonies and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Women’s Movement,’ Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 84-106. See also, Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-government and imperial culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 123-151. 86 ‘Woman’s Ideas on Politics,’ Empire, 1 July 1858, p. 5; Empire, 7 July 1858, p. 4; Empire, 15 July 1858, p. 5; Empire, 27 July 1858, p. 4; Empire, 28 July 1858, p. 4; Empire, 25 August 1858, p. 5. See, also: ‘H.,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 2 July 1858, p. 5; 6 August 1858, p. 8, as an example of anonymised correspondence for this period.

Parliament in order to watch the speeches of members.87 For ‘H.’, who wrote two letters to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1858, the colony should enfranchise ‘those women holding property, who, were they men, would thereby be entitled to the privilege.’88 When a residence-based franchise was extended to men in New South Wales, another male correspondent expressed his disappointment that women had been overlooked, describing it as a ‘great mistake’ that did ‘little credit to [the Parliament’s] gallantry or knowledge of human nature’.89 The discussions that occurred over this period were considerable enough to have been described by one correspondent as having ‘of late occupied much of the attention of the public.’90 These debates would continue into the 1860s, when they would also couple with concurrent discussions over women’s enfranchisement in Britain and other parts of the Empire.91 Similar debates seem not to have occurred in either the Cape Colony or Jamaica at this time.

Within the masculine rhetoric of election meetings and press editorials, however, the enfranchisement of female residents was more regularly introduced as a subject of parody or warning against the slippery-slope of universal suffrage than a subject of serious consideration. Women were identified alongside children, non-European and Chinese immigrants, itinerant workers and others whose ‘legal incapacities’ rendered them ineligible to participate formally. For conservative commentators opposed to universal franchise reform, this inherent contradiction in the ‘natural rights’ argument of liberal reformers helped to reinforce opposition to the widening of the franchise. As the Sydney Morning Herald claimed in defence of conservative candidates in 1856, the ‘natural right to vote for the laws they must obey is sheer non-sense’, since ‘Women obey them’, as well as children.92

87 Empire, 1 July 1858, p. 5. 88 Sydney Morning Herald, 6 August 1858 ,p. 8. 89 Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 1859, p. 8. 90 Bathurst Free Press, 13 October 1858, p. 3. 91 For example, see: Armidale Express, 24 November 1866, p. 2; Armidale Express, 8 December 1866, p. 3; Empire, 9 July 1867, p. 8, for discussions of women’s entitlements within municipal politics. This is taken up in greater detail in the final chapter. 92 See, for example: ‘Legislative Assembly,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1858, p. 5.

As authority to amend the colony’s franchise was extended to settlers in 1855, local concerns with the boundaries of enfranchisement were increasingly shown via the legislation’s additional clauses rather than merely value of the franchise. While significant opposition towards universal suffrage existed amongst members of the Assembly up to the franchise’s reduction, from 1856 its introduction was increasingly considered inevitable. With the tabling of universal suffrage legislation within Parliament in 1857 and 1858, members of the Assembly looked to the clauses that framed residence and education, as well as occupation, criminality and insanity to shape who would be entitled to vote at future elections. Conditions stipulating education and morality, residence and occupation were all considered and dismissed as measures to prevent ‘idlers’, ‘drunkards’, and ‘vagabonds’, from improperly influencing elections.93 Also targeted were recently arrived immigrants from Britain, deemed ‘strangers’, who, it was argued, should not be immediately granted the same privileges as established settlers. Reformers particularly wished to ensure that labourers who moved for work or had only informal employment would continue to hold their rights as electors. They also wished to enfranchise adult men who lived on the colony’s goldfields.

Within these debates, the careful articulation of such clauses under a ‘universal’ suffrage for men became particularly pertinent as discussions of the potential entitlement of naturalised Chinese residents came to the fore. As petitions from public meetings were presented to Parliament affirming or opposing the necessities of universal suffrage and vote via ballot, others including residents in Orange, the Western Boroughs and Richmond insisted that ‘the Chinese and other Asiatic races ought not, though naturalized, to be admitted to the franchise.’94 Although naturalisation remained a requirement of enfranchisement, existing laws were deemed insufficient to prevent large numbers of Chinese residents from seeking the formalisation of their status. Candidates, including the prominent liberal reformer, Henry Parkes, promised that only ‘naturalised foreigners’ were to be entitled, and such a ‘privilege he would extend to Chinamen.’95 In the Legislative

93 See, for example: ‘Legislative Assembly,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1858, p. 5. 94 See, for example, Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 1021. 95 Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 1858, p. 5.

Council, a member moved that reports of the level of migration and the extent of naturalisation be tabled, in order to know with certainty how many Chinese immigrants were likely to qualify as electors with the passage of the new law.96 Within the Electoral Law, clauses were moved to defend against Chinese immigrants’ entitlements as members of government.97 Rather than include explicit restrictions based upon race or nationality within the colony’s Electoral Act, however, members of the Council looked to the recently tabled Chinese Immigration Bill as the measure through which these reforms could be ensured and their ‘impartiality’ shown.98 As had occurred within the Cape, naturalisation law became an initial means of enacting race based restrictions without requiring the introduction of clauses within franchise law.

When universal suffrage legislation was eventually framed and passed with amendments in late 1858, the technicalities of its restrictions helped to ensure that appropriate residents would be in a position to register and vote formally at elections. Following strong appeals from resident labourers, a distinction was drawn between ‘district’ and ‘colonial’ residence, to ensure that while no new immigrants of under three years’ residence would be entitled to vote, any male British subject could register provided that he had lived within a district for six months regardless of the stability of his accommodation. Miners’ rights were also taken up as qualifications, and enfranchised individuals working in goldfields for a minimum of six months. Following a protracted negotiation, the rights of freed criminals to vote were upheld, with members of the Legislative Council recalling old rivalries between free settlers and emancipists to justify the clause.99 Finally, unlike the neighbouring colony of Victoria, the drafters of the New South Wales electoral act also refrained from stipulating any requirements on the basis of literacy, and measures were taken to ensure that illiterate residents would still be able to participate under a secret ballot. The care with which this legislation was composed was reflected in the intricacies of its provisions, and the protracted examinations each of them had received over its six-month passage through Parliament. Nonetheless, though

96 ‘Legislative Council,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 22 September 1858, p. 4. 97 ‘Legislative Council,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 8 October 1858, p. 4. 98 ‘Legislative Council,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 1858, p. 5. 99 ‘Legislative Council,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 1858., p. 7

intricately constructed and carefully applied, many of these additional clauses had unforeseen consequences when settlers attempted to draw a line between themselves as politically entitled subjects and Aboriginal Australian residents as outside this category.

Aboriginal Australians and the Issues of Political Subjecthood

By contrast to Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica or the Cape, the position of Aboriginal Australians as politically entitled British subjects figured very little in the mid- nineteenth century franchise debates of any Australian colonies. In her detailed study of responsible government and dispossession, Jessie Mitchell has found challenging silences surrounding Aboriginal Australians in New South Wales political debates, concurring with Evans et al, that Indigenous peoples were treated with ‘theoretical indifference’ by settlers seeking representation.100 Few colonists considered that Aboriginal Australians could legally claim political rights based on their position as subjects. In the early 1860s, the Empire fiercely rebuked the judge Roger Therry when he postulated that a ‘member of the pure aboriginal race’ might ‘enter the House of Assembly and rise to be a minister of state.’101 ‘The aboriginals are, no doubt, subject to the authority of her Majesty’, the Empire countered, ‘but no one, except Mr. THERRY, ever contended that the aboriginals were possessed of the same constitutional privileges as British-born subjects.’102 A similar uncertainty was voiced in government, when ministers were confronted with Indigenous Australians’ participation in elections. In 1859, the member for Balranald, Augustus Morris moved for clarification on the application of franchise law to Aboriginal Australians. Though sent to the law officers, the motion was never responded to and the question

100 Jessie Mitchell, ‘“Are we in Danger of a Hostile Visit from the Aborigines?” Dispossession and the Rise of Self-Government in New South wales,’ Australian Historical Studies 40, no. 3 (2009), p. 297. Curthoys, ‘Indigenous People and Settler Self Government: Introduction.’ 101 Empire, 23 April 1863, p. 4. 102 Empire, 23 April 1863, p. 4. ‘It would be strange indeed were we to confer constitutional privileges upon men whom we will not listen to as witnesses in a court of justice. Mr. Therry’s argument amounts to this, that because the Electoral Act has not expressly excluded aboriginals from the franchise, it must be construed as having expressly conferred the franchise on them. It would be as just to argue that the Chinese possess the right to vote because they are not expressly excluded.’

never officially answered.103 Here, the shifting imperial context also left its mark. As Evans et al have found, while the Aborigines Protection Society requested the explicit inclusion in New South Wales franchise law the Colonial Office chose not to intervene in the formation of the law, stating instead that as ‘British subjects’ Aboriginal Australians ‘could qualify … equally with others’.104

During debates over the composition of New South Wales’ franchise, rare cries of alarm at the potential entitlements of the colony’s indigenous inhabitants were largely greeted with silence. Agitating for a reform to the franchise on the basis of ‘manhood’ alone, one candidate argued that the only individuals who should be excluded from participation at elections were ‘blackfellows, Chinamen, and foreigners’ – later amending his statement to ‘blackfellows’ and ‘Chinamen’, for fear of offence amongst the colony’s German population.105 An anonymous contributor to the Empire as the legislation passed the House of Assembly insisted upon the inclusion of a literacy qualification as the only means by which ‘any dishonest minded man’ could be prevented from ‘getting a lot of aborigines in the wilds of the interior to register their names and record their votes at elections’, although the letter was not responded to.106 Within government, one member did note his curiosity at the position of Aboriginal Australians within the new laws, and asked ‘whether it was intended to exclude the aborigines.’ A second member followed, observing the consequences this might have for the distribution of members in regional seats, adding that ‘if they were not to be excluded, he should move that the Bogan have an additional member on their account.’107 The comment came amidst concerns being raised that the wide residency qualification was likely to introduce an element of ‘idle, drunken, dissipated, vagabond characters’, but debate quickly moved away without a response.108

103 State Records NSW, Legislative Assembly, Box: 4/3315 Item: 59/59. 104 Colonial Intelligencer, April 1850, pp. 403-8, quoted in Evans, Equal Subjects, p. 68. 105 Empire, 23 October 1857, p. 3; Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October 1857, p. 8. 106 Empire, 2 June 1858, p. 5. 107 Sydney Morning Herald, 31 July 1858, p. 7. This source itself highlights something about the composition of Parliamentary debates by the press at this time, as it was contained in the debates of the Sydney Moring Herald, but not those of the Empire. The question does not seem to have been responded to. 108 Sydney Morning Herald, 31 July 1858, p. 7.

Despite the concern with building restrictions around universal male suffrage laws expressed in above debates, the prerogative to resolve the inconsistencies and ambiguities that a ‘universal’ franchise based on subjecthood evoked was often left the responsibility of individual returning officers and local authorities. In 1859, faced with the silences of the colonial secretary’s office in Sydney, the collector for Port Macquarie, John Dick, may have applied to local magistrates or just as easily made the decision himself. The latter course of action was taken by the police magistrate of New England in 1865, when one landowner attempted to place the name of Jonathan Combo, ‘a native over twenty-one years of age’ on the electoral roll for the district. ‘Mr. Thomas,’ a local J.P., questioned the authority of the bench to disenfranchise Aboriginal Australians, particularly those who were ‘well educated’ or ‘Christian’, but the police magistrate stood his ground, citing ‘the words in the Act, “who shall appear to be disqualified, to the satisfaction of the court”’ as being ‘sufficient’. He continued, ‘Aboriginals were called British subjects, but they had not the privileges of such, being subject to legal disabilities.’109 Just to ensure that no other similar mistakes had been made in the list, he asked ‘if any other names of aboriginals had been sent in? The collectors replied in the negative.’ In 1859, by contrast, the young labourer of Armidale, ‘Yellow Jimmy’, was included under the collection for New England, and his status as a politically enfranchised subject was affirmed by a court.110

Though the police magistrate of New England felt no qualms in dismissing the claim of Jonathan Combo to political subjecthood, others struggled to satisfactorily situate the position of Aboriginal Australians under the law. The difficulty posed by offering de facto exclusions on the basis of literacy, or legal ability to take an oath when Indigenous residents were clearly ‘educated’ or ‘Christian’, as identified by Thomas above, was only exacerbated by the failings of settlers’ own behaviour. When the Legislative Assembly debated the motion passed by Morris in 1859, various possible exclusions were posed, including their lack of a ‘fixed abode’, but the member voiced concern at the blanket application of residence requirements. If collectors were allowed to exercise discretion in

109 Empire, 11 April 1865, p. 6; Armidale Express, 1 April 1865, p. 2. 110 This is taken up in further detail in Chapter Two. See, also: Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, pp. 989-1044.

this regard, settlers could be equally excluded. As Morris put this: ‘the squatters, who wandered about [in as] much as the aborigines, might be omitted… in fact nearly all the electors in the pastoral districts[moved] about within their districts at least once a year.’111 Morris was the member for Balranald, a district which, according to the Wagga Wagga Express, had just experienced an uptake in the enrolment of both ‘Chinamen and Aborigines.’112 He expressed concern that Aboriginal Australians formed a ‘numerous proportion of the inhabitants’ in many districts and that, at present, there were no satisfactory legal disabilities to prevent their enfranchisement. He suggested that a new supplementary Act be passed to conclusively disqualify them from political privileges. Yet, no conclusive answer was ever submitted by the colonial secretary or law officers on the position of Aboriginal Australians. Officials in Sydney seemed unwilling or unable to conclusively include, or conclusively exclude Aboriginal Australians from the franchise.

While historians, including John Chesterman and Brian Galligan and Marilyn Lake have identified respective clauses of the franchise law as offering tacit exclusions of Aboriginal Australians, in practice these conditions and definitions were only awkwardly applied.113 Despite the care taken in the construction of franchise law in New South Wales, figures such as Morris, the member for Balranald, or Thomas, a justice of the peace in New England, were trapped by a broader desire to ensure the continued participation of British settlers and the inherent contradictions of any ‘civilising’ intentions within the law. If used universally, restrictive requirements of residence, Christianity or literacy would exclude large numbers of settlers without necessarily ensuring the exclusion of all Aboriginal Australians themselves. Morris’ suggestion of explicitly excluding Aboriginal Australians from the franchise law seemed to offer the only conclusive means of preventing their participation. Nonetheless, at least during the mid-nineteenth century, this measure seemed to be considered undesirable or unnecessary.

111 Sydney Morning Herald, 15 October 1859, p. 4. 112 Wagga Wagga Express, 29 January 1859, p. 2. 113 Marilyn Lake, ‘The Gendered and Racialised Self who Claimed the Right to Self-Government,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, no. 1 (2012) n.p.; Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens Without Rights, p. 14.

Conclusion

Over the course of the 1830-1850s, residents in Jamaica, the Cape and New South Wales drew on global debates and responded to imperial interventions in order to consider and contest the boundaries of their popular political spheres. In Jamaica, as the strength of humanitarian movements and imperial intervention waned over the mid-nineteenth century, the initial promise of progressive representative government seemed increasingly unlikely. While the franchise of Jamaica never reached a point of inclusivity equal or approaching that of the Cape or New South Wales, with the passage of the 1859 Electoral Act the strength of European settlers within the Assembly was entrenched until its dissolution in 1866. In the Cape, the push for low and inclusive franchise legislation over the 1840s and early 1850s was more successful, and the unlikely fusing of interests between Dutch farmers, mission residents and liberal reformers in the early 1850s resulted in a low, colour-blind franchise that remained in place well into the late nineteenth century. Finally, in contrast to both Jamaica and the Cape, in the Australian colony of New South Wales a radical agenda of franchise reform was successfully pursued by settlers and, in late 1858, universal male suffrage and secret ballot legislation was passed through government. Increasingly, over the course of the nineteenth century, New South Wales came to join Victoria, South Australia, Canada and Britain as sites where wide franchises were deemed preferable and appropriate.

Presented comparatively, the significant and increasing differences that existed between the franchises of Jamaica, the Cape and New South Wales become strikingly apparent, as does the lasting implications of the Colonial Office’s decisions for and against intervention. Within this analysis, the purportedly ‘universal’ male franchise of New South Wales with which this chapter closes sits in stark contrast to the conditions of Jamaica where, at its peak, an estimated one percent of the population was entitled to vote. Here, the powerful role that changing attitudes to race could play in shaping the boundaries of enfranchisement is demonstrated, with residents in Jamaica as well as the Colonial Office expressing some concern at the weakening influence of white planters at elections and within the Assembly, particularly in the late 1850s. In the Cape, similarly, the franchise

remained restricted to ‘respectable’ residents and increasingly over the nineteenth century, attempts were made to ensure that Xhosa inhabitants would not be eligible to enrol as electors. It is significant that of the three colonies, it was New South Wales alone in which a universal franchise based on age, sex, subjecthood and residence was pursued. By the 1850s, the Colonial Office expressed little concern at the potential divisions of New South Wales’ settler society and handed over great autonomy to local reformers to shape the provisions of its own electoral law. In 1850, the decision of the Colonial Secretary not to formally proclaim the entitlements of indigenous inhabitants subsequently introduced a lasting division between settlers and Aboriginal Australians as politically enfranchised and politically unenfranchised subjects, later formalised in the Australian federal franchise of 1902.

Also of significance is the contrasting and certainly non-uniform understandings of subjecthood across the three sites. The key position of subjecthood within colonial franchises reflected a common history of British colonisation. Yet, local understandings of its provisions often rested on discrete debates, unique to their context. While within Jamaica and the Cape, the position of non-European British subjects was formalised via law and directive in 1828 and 1830 respectively, similar positive confirmation of Aboriginal Australians’ rights as subjects were not provided, either under law or the franchise. Within New South Wales the disputed position of Aboriginal Australians as subjects saw magistrates, jurists and administrators often express differences of opinion as to the rights of indigenous men. Later, the prevailing assumption that indigenous men were not entitled as subjects led to individuals including Jonathan Combo being struck out under revision. Nonetheless, ambiguities abounded and individuals, including the anonymous resident in Port Macquarie, continued to challenge settlers’ understandings of the meanings and boundaries of subjecthood as a rights-bearing category within the elections of this period.

In spite of shifting forms of political exclusions exhibited across colonial franchises in the nineteenth century, the attempts made towards inclusivity of political rights emphasised throughout this chapter should be stressed. This remained most obvious within colonial New South Wales, where a radical agenda of franchise reform in addition to high levels of immigration saw the electorate climb from five to roughly twenty-one

percent of the colony’s total population over the 1850s.114 Although modest by comparison to New South Wales, the 1853 estimate that ten percent of the Cape’s total population were qualified to register as voters left the colony’s franchise highly liberal by contrast to the contemporary franchise in Britain. Crucially, flexible approaches taken to the ownership of land and state aid within the colony helped to ensure the inclusion of poorer non-European residents. Even within Jamaica, 1849-1859 represented a peak period of interest in elections from amongst the colony’s poorer voters. Across these three sites, moreover, wider agitations saw elections taken up as opportunities to further contest the boundaries of enfranchisement. In Jamaica and New South Wales particularly, vast cultures of informality surrounded the workings of the franchise, serving to further augment its operation in practice.

114 Maitland Mercury, 14 August 1850, p. 2; Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1859- 1860, p. 1143; Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Historical Population Studies, catalogue no. 3105.0.65.001, Population by Sex, State and Territories, 31 December 1788 onwards. The population of New South Wales in 1850 was 266 900, and in 1859 it was 327 459.

65 Chapter Two

Impersonating a Voter: Race, Registration and Respectability

Figure 2: The central grounds of Genadendal. Source: Christian Ignatius Latrobe, Journal of a Visit to South Africa, 1815 and 1816 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1818), p. 271.

While the boundaries of formal enfranchisement within the colonies were set in the extensively debated franchise acts, participation at an election, and thus practical subjecthood, required successful registration. Such processes were always performative, obliging men to position themselves before colonial courts as living according to the racialised and gendered as well as classed conditions of colonial constitutions. But where many histories have covered the often-exclusionary inconsistencies of franchise acts, this

chapter focusses on the cases of individuals who challenged their exclusion from the electoral rolls. The two key cases explored in this chapter involved men who conformed to the requirements of colonial constitutions, but via grossly inaccurate and corruptible systems of registration were otherwise overlooked during registration. Within both instances, the negotiation over formal enfranchisement also became debates over the boundaries of inclusion within respectable colonial society.

Each of the two cases explored in this chapter involved a different form of electoral irregularity: the first a fraudulent deregistration, the second a case of impersonation. In 1859, following the second election for the Legislative Assembly in the Cape, a partial Field Cornet chose to deliberately disenfranchise three hundred registered voters within the mission station of Genadendal, close to a third of the district’s registered electors. The Field Cornet believed that Genadendal’s voters had acted against his interests and, after having threatened them with their enfranchisement, used his power over the rolls to strike off their names. Within New South Wales in the same year, a young ‘half- caste’ man named James Johnson, but known almost universally as ‘Yellow Jimmy’ was accused of impersonating a voter and claiming a vote he was not entitled to. In each instance, the cases raised questions of the meaning and boundaries of enfranchisement. In the Cape, the case involved a debate over the legitimacy and valuation of mission residences. In New South Wales, the case provoked wider debate over the legal position and entitlements of a ‘half-caste’ as a British subject.

This chapter uses these cases to explore the susceptibility of registration procedures to wilful or unknowing error or manipulation, both by those responsible for enacting them and others subsequently disenfranchised. My focus is on the role of non- European subjects in this process, and the manner via which such individuals contributed to lasting understandings of enfranchisement. Both of the cases studied within this chapter were at once exemplary and extraordinary, bringing into focus the all too common phenomenon of irregularity and manipulation in practices of registration, but showing the critical manner through which colonised populations could resist their exclusion. Cases of electoral irregularity within the colonies highlighted the continued mistakes made by registering officers and others when applying the technicalities of enfranchisement. They

showed disagreement over the boundaries and rights associated with ‘subjecthood’. Crucially, these cases highlighted changing and competing notions of what it meant to ‘impersonate’ a voter.

The Politics of Registration

The majority of non-European men living within colonial societies in the mid- century did not qualify as voters. Raced and classed social orders meant that few indigenous or free men met the required economic thresholds. The closest exception to this was the case of Jamaica, where although under two-percent of the colony’s total population were registered, a proportionately larger number of those men who did were ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ subjects. But for those who did qualify and did wish to be enrolled, the performative aspects of enfranchisement and wider belonging were often crucial. Non- white men who qualified as residents often remained subject to suspicion, and were not always readily accepted as fellow subjects within the political process. Even where genuine, ‘The generation and performance of new, Christian, agricultural identities by Indigenous peoples… never guaranteed integration on equal terms’ as Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester have recently asserted.1 Within the spaces of elections, a lack of acceptance as equals had a number of consequences. In the Cape, appeals to ‘coloured’ voters by candidates were rarely considered to be genuine by other European voters and commentators. In Jamaica, men and women who sought out new alternatives to both middle-class and elite ‘coloured’ or white leaders could be accused of being swayed by ‘demagogues’. In New South Wales, an underlying and almost wholly unspoken assumption that political subjecthood was a category preserved for white settlers alone meant that even where indigenous men lived and worked alongside white labourers, they were rarely included on the lists of names forwarded to collectors.

1 Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester, ‘Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected struggles in the long nineteenth century’, in Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester (eds.), Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Landholding, loss and survival in an interconnected world (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 4.

Registration was one of many barriers to enfranchisement beyond the franchise, and both the processes by which it was conducted and the individuals tasked with its inaction could reveal unintended biases on the part of colonial parliaments.2 In addition to clauses deliberately intended to encourage both European and non-European populations to seek out a particular way of life, ostensibly benign requirements such as active registration or the writing-out of claims could also knowingly or unknowingly impact the production of rolls. Nineteenth-century electoral registration, unlike census enumeration, was not about information collection but rather the creation of a vigorous and upstanding body of citizens defined according to local standards of respectability. Many believed that only those who sufficiently cared for their enrolment should be entitled, and active processes that involved men travelling into a central courthouse or sending in a claim via post, signed by a Justice of the Peace – as required in Jamaica – was one way of doing this. Current debates over the production of voter identification, similarly, have shown the raced and classed impacts requirements of officially proving one’s identity can have.3 It was equally apparent to commentators in mid-century Cape Town that the returning officer’s unofficial requirement that Malay voters alone bring identity cards to poll in 1859 would cause a lower turnout.4

The biases of registration procedures could also reveal a desire to facilitate the registration of other facets of the settler, indigenous or freed populations. Mission stations within the Cape were appointed as areas of registration to render it easier for mission inhabitants to lay claim to votes, although those non-Europeans living on farms were not similarly accounted for. The individual responsible for this was William Porter, who

2 Similar arguments are well known to scholars of colonial censuses: Alan Atkinson, ‘Conquest,’ in Dereck Schreuder and Stuart Ward (eds.), Australia’s Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 46; Janet McCalman and Rebecca Kippen, ‘Population and Health,’ in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, Cambridge History of Australia: Volume 1 Indigenous and Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 294-314. 3 Matt A. Barreto, Stephen A. Nuno and Gabriel R. Sanchez, ‘The Disproportionate Impact of Voter-ID Requirements on the Electorate: New evidence from Indiana,’ Political Science and Politics 42, no. 1 (January 2009), pp. 111-116; Stephen Ansolabehere, ‘Effects of Identification Requirements on Voting: Evidence from the experience of voters on election day,’ Political Science and Politics 42, no. 1 (January 2009), pp. 127-130. 4 Cape Argus, 8 January 1859, p. 2.

insisted that field cornets make their way to missions to register anyone qualified, and to ensure that lists were displayed on site.5 Within colonial New South Wales, a passive system of registration was chosen in the knowledge that an active system would create a barrier to registration in regional areas. It reflected a desire to ensure that working-class white settlers would be entitled as voters, in spite of wider fears that ‘vagabonds’ and others outside settler society might be inadvertently registered. In practice, this system passed over responsibility for registration into the hands of employers across the colony’s frontier, who themselves negotiated the claims to entitlement of their employees.

Yet, both with and against barriers and allowances, claims to inclusion were made. Registration was a powerful tool, and one used deliberately in some cases while passively acquired in others. It is tempting to view claims to entitlement as wholly mediated by the instructions of colonists, including missionaries, or to consider appeals to enfranchisement as strategic. In his influential thesis Stanley Trapido argued that the registration of African voters in the Cape was largely the product of white conflict, and therefore that: ‘the registration of African or Coloured voters became a major political contest.’6 It is true that the politics of registration could be fraught, and it certainly was in the late-nineteenth century Cape – the area in which Trapido’s work is principally focused. Yet, recent works on identity, land and law within colonies including those of Tony Ballantyne, Lauren Benton or Tim Rowse, have in different ways stressed a deeper understanding of indigenous subjecthood, citizenship and daily relations.7 Historians of colonial jurisdictional and land disputes, similarly, are increasingly sensitive to a balance between understanding identity claims as genuine as well as strategic, and emphasise different forms of relationships between settler, indigenous, free and immigrant populations even if those entanglements were not on equal terms. Here, I wish to add to that scholarship by considering how such relationships shaped political entitlements, and how non-European

5 Circular to Civil Commissioners, 30 May 1853, Western Cape Archives, CO 4075 M83. 6 Stanley Trapido, ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation in the Politics of the Cape of Good Hope, 1853-1910,’ (University of London: PhD Thesis, 1970) p. 207. 7 Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the question of the body (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015); Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (eds.), Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).

subjects sought out, exercised or defended their own positions as political subjects immediately following the passage of colonial constitutions.

Figure 3: Cape Colony, Notice of Registration. These were circulated in English and Dutch, with outlines of forms also provided in the Cape Gazette, which could be cut out and sent in. Where individuals wished to object, they sent in similar forms, listing the individual they objected to and the reason for their objection. Source: Western Cape Archives, 1/GEO 14/33, 1865.

Christian Respectability and the Mission Stations of the Cape

Before turning to the particular circumstances of the deregistration of Genadendal residents, the first of two key case studies in this chapter, it is worth briefly outlining the workings of elections from within mission stations. While the many imperfections of the ‘colour-blind’ franchise have been outlined by historians of the Cape, very little work has yet been completed on the impact of elections within these sites. Yet, within the Cape, both the entanglements and controversies of colonial enfranchisement were often focused

on mission stations: not because of their exclusion, but rather from a perception that they wielded illiberal advantages in questions of political privileges. It was a unique feature of the elections of the Cape that mission stations formed their own polling places, and residents could qualify on the basis of land held in trust. This interpretation of the ownership of land and the organisation of elections differed considerably from the circumstances in other British colonies, where residing upon a mission station would later be taken as a form of ‘state aid’ that barred the elector in question from registration.8 This difference in interpretations of ‘state aid’ and notions of independence within the Cape spoke to the strength of continued concerns with the protection of the colony’s Khoisan and emancipated population, even as the Colonial Office simultaneously instituted a system of representative government in which settlers would remain dominant. This model of enfranchisement did not negate the tie between respectability and enfranchisement, but it did institute new conditions upon which that enfranchisement would be judged. It also fostered the conditions for relationships between candidates and mission residents to emerge.

While many missionaries and mission inhabitants had petitioned against the institution of settler government in the 1850s, others responded with positivity to the extension of a low franchise that entitled a number of their congregants and residents to register. For some missionaries, the institution of a qualified franchise provided an added incentive for residents to attain the outward markers of respectability provided by permanent and European-style homes. Such buildings were significant, not merely for their projection of the respectability of the station as a whole, but also as a signifier of the progress and conversion of the mission inhabitants themselves. The residences that would come to entitle mission inhabitants to register as voters sat at the centre of missionaries’ philosophies of civilisation and conversion. Within the Moravian stations of Genadendal, Groenekloof and Elim, the construction of a home was viewed as forming the first stage on a journey towards spiritual enlightenment. ‘When a Hottentot candidate is admitted to

8 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens Without Rights, p. 14; Evans, Equal Subjects, p. 85; and 84; Lake, ‘The Gendered and Racialised Self,’ paragraph 24. For more on the Canadian context, see: John Garner, The Franchise and Politics in British North America, 1755-1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).

the settlement he is first employed in building his rude hut, and is also immediately placed under elementary religious instruction’ one London correspondent explained in the Coleraine Chronicle.9 ‘His cottage, as the months roll on, assumes a more perfect and comfortable appearance, his mind is furnished with ideas, his moral training progresses.’10 Residents of stations including Zuurbraak, Genadendal and Elim were provided with grants of land and materials in addition to financial incentives to build homes, and the extension of voting rights for both mission boards and for Parliament were an added benefit.11

The institution of a qualified franchise provided a further marker of respectability to be judged or projected. When set at twenty-five pounds, with the express intention of ensuring that members of the ‘coloured classes’ who were ‘in point of intelligence… qualified for the exercise of political power’, the Colonial Office had provided an economic threshold to that respectability.12 The LMS missionary of Pacaltsdorp, Theophilus Atkinson, for one, used the election and the participation of voters as an opportunity to emphasise the progress and unity of the congregation as a whole.13 He noted that Howson Edward Rutherford received 275 of 360 available votes, and, remarkably, a hundred percent of the station’s registered voters turned out to the poll.14

The power of mission inhabitants’ votes was often limited, but when placed collectively could influence a contest. The closest insight into mission voting patterns within this period is provided by polling statistics gathered by Christoffel Brand, who acted as scrutineer in 1858.15 Brand only provided statistics for the Legislative Council elections,

9 Coleraine Chronicle, 24 December 1853, p. 2. 10 Coleraine Chronicle, 24 December 1853, p. 2. 11 See: J Marquad to the Colonial Secretary, May 1858, Western Cape Archives, CO 4104 M46; and CCP 1856 [SC13] Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Granting Lands in Freehold to Hottentots for more on incentivising within missions. 12 Duke of Newcastle, on the passage and reason for the franchise, published in The Courier, 19 July 1853, p. 2. 13 T Atkinson to LMS Superintendent, 16 January 1854, SOAS CWM Archive, CWM/LMS/05/02/02; T. Atkinson, South African Commercial Advertiser, 24 January 1854, p. 2. 14 T. Atkinson, South African Commercial Advertiser, 24 January 1854, p. 2. 15 C Brand to the Colonial Secretary, 18 April 1859, Western Cape Archives, CO 4107 B47. Vigne was elected to the Western Province Legislative Council in 1854, largely due to the plumpers received from Genadendal voters. He pulled out of the contest in 1858.

but focused his analysis on mission stations in addition to the distribution of ‘English’, ‘Dutch’, ‘coloured’, and ‘other’ registered voters within various districts. His data confirms that mission residents often ‘plumped’ their votes, and it was not uncommon for a single candidate to be given the support of a strong majority of inhabitants. Rarely was this sufficient to decide a contest, and the choice of a single candidate could also reflect the limited number of candidates who vied for mission inhabitants’ votes. On at least one occasion, however, the decision of mission inhabitants was instrumental, and saw the election of Henry Vigne, an English immigrant who was otherwise quite unpopular across the colony. In 1854 and 1858 (as Brand’s statistics show), Vigne appealed to the residents of Genadendal and Elim in the district of Caledon where he employed many as labourers, and was elected on the previous occasion on this basis alone.

In spite of the eagerness of individuals such as Atkinson to stress high levels of participation amongst inhabitants, polling data also suggest that many mission inhabitants did not vote, or chose to vote in other areas. In 1858, half to two-thirds of registered voters participated in the mission stations of Amandelboom, Ebenezer, Elim, Genadendal and Mamre (Table One). Pacaltsdorp had slipped from a turnout of a hundred percent in the Council elections of 1854 to fifty-six percent in 1858.16 The lowest turnout of any mission station in the Province in 1858 was that of Kamaggas in Clanwilliam, where only seventeen percent logged their votes. It is not possible to state with certainty the causes for low turnouts in any districts. But mission residents, particularly men, were subject to the same seasonal fluctuations in work as others across the colony, and were as likely as many European farmers to be unable to attend an election held during a harvest period. At other points, labourers were accused of ‘abandoning’ their posts in order to participate – a measure that from the passage of new Masters and Servants ordinances in 1856 was likely to carry heavy penalties.17

As independent polling places and partially independent communities, mission stations could also hold their own political cultures and modes of engagement, including

16 C Brand to the Colonial Secretary, 18 April 1859, Western Cape Archives, CO 4107 B47. 17 CCP 1864 [A9], Report of the Select Committee on Standing Rules and Orders on the Subject of Clanwilliam and Caledon Elections, p. 5.

forms of coercion. Tensions between residents, disagreements over land or competing visions for the mission’s future led, at times, to disagreement and pressure placed on voters. In his reading of the Moravian missionaries’ diaries, Bernhard Kruger has noted that individuals in Caledon were evicted from land they rented from a Twistwyk resident after voting for a candidate who was disliked.18 Candidates were also partially bound to obey the codes of the station in their canvass, although many chose to disregard it. In 1854, the constable of the Genadendal mission was called in to evict individuals who distributed fireworks and alcohol amongst residents during the poll in Genadendal.19 By the late 1850s, the Genadendal station was viewed to have its own candidate in Parliament, the banker Johan Conrad Silberbauer. In September 1861 the Moravian Brother, F. W. Kuhn noted with delight that Silberbauer’s visit to the Genadendal station had been greeted with a ‘triumphal arch of branches and flowers’ across the entrance to the lodging house where he was to stay, all done ‘without either advice or aid’ from the missionaries themselves.20 The timing of Silberbauer’s visit suggests that this was a response to his assistance in helping to preserve their position on the rolls.

Remarkably, there is also evidence that at least some residents were aware that they might become candidates for the Assembly. Drafters of the Cape constitution decided upon having no differentiation between franchise requirements for voters and members, leaving any voter technically able to become a candidate.21 Candidates still had to obtain sufficient votes to secure a majority, and were required to fund themselves for the duration of their period in office – both of which were prohibitive. Nonetheless, in 1859, a Khoisan resident of the Cape was presented with a requisition to stand for the House of Assembly, although his campaign did not last until the nomination. At the second House of Assembly election in 1859, the Cape Argus expressed its pleasure when the residents of the Kat River settlement in the colony’s Eastern Province district of Fort Beaufort ‘turned against’ the

18 According to the Genadendal diaries, Jackobus Linde ‘expelled eight families from Twistwyk, who had given their support to Vigne.’ Kruger, The Pear Tree Blossoms, p. 257. 19 Silberbauer to the Colonial Secretary, 31 December 1858, Western Cape Archives CO 4105, S153. 20 United Brethren, Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren: Volume 24 (London: Walter McDowall, 1861), pp. 279-280. 21 Constitution Ordinance 1853.

local Khoisan man Hendrick Heyn as a candidate.22 Heyn was a leading figure within the Kat River settlement.23 By the time of the nomination, however, the Kat River voters were viewed to have turned in favour of W. Stanton, an office-bearer in the Dutch Reformed Church. It is unclear how Heyn came to lose support, although short reports of Heyn’s candidacy do suggest that it provoked controversy across the district. In early January, the Zuid Afrikaan reported that the candidate Richard Painter had stated he would resign if Heyn was successful at the nomination and the poll.24 Although Heyn appeared at the nomination, however, the Argus’s correspondent reported that his supporters had not, and he was not proposed as a candidate.25

There were certainly limitations to the electoral influence of mission inhabitants, not least of which was the anger their enfranchisement continued to provoke from others. It was not merely that the level of the franchise was deemed too low, but also that the conditions outlined in its implementation were seen to give advantage to mission inhabitants and disfavour settlers. By the 1850s, appeals were being made against mission stations as a whole and allowances made to mission communities during elections played into this. By the 1850s, and in spite of the extension of provisions to mission communities, laissez faire liberal policies saw widespread disagreement with the protection of land and labour. Some of the first pieces of legislation pursued by the newly instituted Parliament in 1854 were harsher Masters and Servants’ Acts designed to limit the movement of labourers and tie them into work in Cape farming areas.

Other factors contributed to the shifting positions of missions and mission land within the Cape, not least of which was the changing dynamics of missionary societies themselves. By the 1850s, the LMS overseers were pushing for the institution of independent and self-sufficient churches, with overseas funds to be directed elsewhere.26

22 Cape Argus, 8 January 1859, p. 2. Heyn’s receipt of a requisition signed by 26 voters of the settlement was reported in the Australian papers. The Courier, 5 February 1859, p. 2. 23 For more on Hendrick Heyn, see: Robert Ross, Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat Rivert settlement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 127; 280-281. 24 Zuid Afrikaan, 3 January 1859, p. 3. 25 Cape Argus, 8 January 1859, p. 2. 26 For more on this see: Elbourne, Blood Ground, pp. 311-344

The station of Genadendal in the district of Caledon was at the heart of the debates over freehold, with a petition signed by residents within the station requesting greater freedom from missionary influence. Immediately upon the assembling of Parliament in 1854, the English-born representative for Caledon, Henry Bryan Darnell, presented a motion for mission land to be passed over in freehold to mission inhabitants. In Pacaltsdorp, similarly, residents wished for greater control over land, and a candidate for the House of Assembly made a direct appeal to mission residents on these grounds.27 The scheme of formally transferring land in trust to residents of missions was also favoured by those within the Assembly who viewed missions as causing a block to freely accessible labour.

The level of influence mission inhabitants were able to exert at elections could differ considerably from station to station. One of the wider inconsistencies that applied both to mission residents and to the Cape’s ‘coloured’ population, moreover, were the complaints of settlers who viewed appeals made by candidates as neither authentic nor legitimate. Nonetheless, it is clear residents in some districts were both aware of and took up the influence they had at elections. Others, similarly, defended their rights to participate as electors. In 1859, this became particularly clear when an attempt was made to deregister several hundred voters in Caledon. Against a colony-wide push against mission stations, residents within the station of Genadendal came out in defence of their position and rights as voters.

27 CCP 1856 [SC13] Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Granting Lands in Freehold to Hottentots, p. 44.

Voting in the Cape’s Mission Stations, Legislative Council Elections 1858.

Total Total Percentage Percentage

Mission Station Registered Participating Participating Plumpers

Amandelboom 80 54 67.5 85.2

Tyzelskraal 23 9 39.1 0.0

Ebenezer 38 23 60.5 100.0

Elim 185 119 64.3 65.5

Genadendal 486 273 56.2 91.6

Hermon 9 4 44.4 100.0

Kamaggas 62 11 17.7 18.2

Kamiesberg 110 37 33.6 100.0

Mamre 105 63 60.0 23.8

Pacaltsdorp 61 33 54.1 18.2

Pniel 59 29 49.2 17.2

Saaron 94 33 35.1 72.7

Steinthal 76 39 51.3 48.7

Wupperthal 63 34 54.0 0.0

Zoar 117 71 60.7 59.2

Zuurbraak 211 94 44.5 38.3

Table 1: This table shows the registration, participation and percentage of ‘plumpers’ cast within mission stations in the Western Cape over the course of the 1858 Legislative Council election, held in September 1858. Source: Derived from data collected by Christoffel Brand: C Brand to the Colonial Secretary, 18 April 1859, Western Cape Archives, CO 4107 B47.

Genadendal and the 1859 Election for Caledon

Conflict over missions and enfranchisement came substantially to the fore in 1859, when – for the first time – the votes of mission inhabitants were viewed to overturn the interests of settlers. The station in question was that of Genadendal, the Cape’s oldest mission, established by Moravians in the eighteenth century. Genadendal together with the neighbouring station of Elim held 759 registered voters in a constituency of 1291.28 The strength of the station’s voters when participating as a group was known, but until 1859 the choices made by inhabitants of Genadendal and Elim were not deemed to have worked against the wishes of those in a position of authority over the roll. At the first elections held in 1854, a number of Genadendal’s voters had joined British settlers in the district of Caledon in supporting Henry Vigne for the Legislative Council, casting ‘plumpers’ in support. As a conservative 1820 settler from Britain, and partially opposed to the commercial issues of the Western Province, Vigne was unpopular in the Province, but popular amongst Genadendal’s residents, many of whom he employed as labourers.29 Were it not for the support of Genadendal’s voters, Vigne would not have been elected. The same was true of Henry Bryan Darnell, who ran for the Legislative Assembly in the elections immediately following Vigne’s success. The English-born Henry Bryan Darnell had led residents of Genadendal as a captain during the third frontier war against the Xhosa and was successfully returned along with Charles Fairbridge.

The unity of Caledon and Genadendal’s polling at the 1854 election belied deep- set animosity and tension between some residents of Genadendal and the wider district. These tensions only became more marked over the 1850s as efforts were made to alter the system of landholding across the colony’s mission stations. In 1856, Genadendal’s residents appealed against the election of a new Civil Commissioner for Caledon, stating that they had ‘no confidence’ in the man elected – Theodor Osterloh – and that they ‘cannot consider him as representing us’.30 They also opposed the institution of a local

28 C Brand to the Colonial Secretary, 18 April 1859, Western Cape Archives, CO 4107 B47. 29 Morning Chronicle (London), 25 April 1854, p. 6. 30 Petition of the Inhabitants of Genadendal to Governor G Grey, 22 March 1856, Western Cape Archives, CO 4087 18.

policeman, viewed as only damaging the station’s reputation.31 In another request, sent within the same period, petitioners described the animosity they felt towards the wider district and prayed for the maintenance of the missionaries’ position as overseers of the land: ‘it being well known to us who are Inhabitants of Genadendal that since the time this institution was Established all the white people (Except the English) with discontentment and contempt raised their eyes over us’.32 It was clear that many within Genadendal considered themselves to be victims of prejudice and wished to maintain the boundaries of their community.

It remains difficult to determine the extent to which the claims of Genadendal’s petitioners stood for the wishes of the majority of inhabitants. By the 1850s, the station of five thousand residents was subject to considerable tension, including rivalries between older and newer members of the mission, as well as tensions between those who wished to be granted their land as freehold and those content with the land in trust. As campaigns to change the status of missions rose over this period, many within the settlement appealed against the Regulations of the station and requested full ownership of their land.33 Individuals such as the hotel-owner Christian Reitz, whose family had prospered through the scheme of mission land, wished to sell their property on the open market in order to invest elsewhere.34 Hendrick Lott similarly argued that while England had made them ‘free’, and that the franchise had made them ‘men’, the scheme of land held inhabitants

31 J Silberbauer to the Colonial Secretary, 31 December 1858, Western Cape Archives, CO 4105 S153 32 Petition of the Inhabitants of Genadendal, [20] April 1855, Western Cape Archives, CO 4080 G10. 33 In 1858-9 missionaries were involved in a legal dispute with one resident, Gustava Wildschut, who they were attempting to evict for breaking the regulations. See: ‘Records of Proceedings of Illiquid Case. Gustava Wildschut Versus CR Kolbing,’ Western Cape Archives, 2/1/1/92 20, 1859. 34 Petition of Christian Reitz to Governor G. Grey, 4 March 1859, Western Cape Archives CO 4111 R18. See also: Western Cape Archives CO 4125 G38. During discussions on land in freehold, Christian Reitz was the one individual every witness in support of the scheme drew on as evidence that some of the inhabitants wished to own their land. See: CCP 1854 [SC10], Report from the Select Committee on Granting Land in Freehold to Hottentots; CCP 1856 [SC13] Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Granting Lands in Freehold to Hottentots.

back as ‘children’.35 Genadendal was overseen by a board known as the ‘opzieners’ composed of native ministers, deacons and others holding positions within the church, and signatures suggest that it was these individuals who were largely responsible for the representations made to Parliament on behalf of the inhabitants. During the investigations in 1856, Caledon’s Civil Commissioner, Theodor Osterloh, stated the ‘improper’ manner via which petitions were gathered on behalf of congregations: ‘a meeting of the opzieners is first held by the missionaries, and the object of the petition is explained to them… then they go amongst the people and get them to put their crosses on the petition’.36 But while the station was facing challenge from within, the majority of voters seemed to have been in favour of the maintenance of the mission’s scheme of land. To a significant extent, the provision of land within missions was still deemed to offer a means through which Khoisan and emancipated slaves could control their position within the labour market – particularly as laws against vagrancy became more pronounced.

The perceived insufficiency of Vigne, Darnell and Fairbridge as representatives of Genadendal in Parliament was shown over the course of the Cape Parliament’s first session, when two of the three members spoke in favour of breaking up the mission lands. While Vigne initially opposed the scheme, by 1856 he had changed his mind and spoke to the ‘very bad’ character of the station’s inhabitants: ‘I think they are generally very immoral, great drunkards, very much given over to petty thefts; the most of them are of idle habits, and have a very loose idea of the obligations of a contract.’37 Immediately upon the assembly of Parliament in 1854, Fairbridge had moved for the transfer of freehold. Both Darnell and Fairbridge sat on the committee, and questioning was led by Darnell and the member for the neighbouring electorate of Swellendam, John Fairbairn. Residents of Caledon, in addition to missionaries from other parts of the colony were questioned on the extent to which mission stations were serving to reinforce divisions between European

35 H Lott to the Colonial Secretary, 25 January 1858, CO 4103 L5, 1858. 36 CCP 1856 [SC13] Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Granting Lands in Freehold to Hottentots, p. 10. 37 CCP 1856 [SC13] Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Granting Lands in Freehold to Hottentots, p. 16.

and non-European residents in the Cape: pitching ‘class against class’.38 Elections were viewed to reinforce this. When questioned on the impact mission stations had on relations between European and non-European populations within the Cape, the Justice of the Peace for Caledon, T. B. Bayley, asserted that ‘they are likely to be arrayed class against class. I know that this feeling exists in the district generally, and was materially increased during the last elections.’39 Witnesses claimed that figures within Genadendal boasted of their control over the station’s voters, and had promised to return any candidate pledged to prevent the transfer of land.40 At its heart, the committee was one focused on labour and land, and the evidence provided by Caledon’s residents reflected the desire of many to gain better access to secure labour, deemed to be prevented by the protections offered by mission stations.

Provoked by the emergence of a new candidate viewed as defending the station’s interest, neither member Vigne nor Darnell were re-elected. While Henry Vigne was still successful in receiving the vast majority of Genadendal’s votes during the second elections of 1858, he was defeated for the Council.41 The failure of Vigne as a candidate was as much an issue of disagreements between European inhabitants across the Western Province and the district, and statistics suggest that Vigne was no more popular in Caledon than he was across the Western Province.42 Following his failure, Vigne ran for a seat in the lower house, expecting an easy election alongside Darnell on the basis of Genadendal’s votes. But both men were rejected in favour of Johan Conrad Silberbauer, a Cape-born German banker who was viewed as protecting the interests of the station. At the elections of 1859,

38 CCP 1856 [SC13] Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Granting Lands in Freehold to Hottentots, p. 3. 39 CCP 1856 [SC13] Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Granting Lands in Freehold to Hottentots, p. 3. 40 CCP 1856 [SC13] Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on Granting Lands in Freehold to Hottentots, p. 14. 41 Polling statistics broken down by Field Cornetcy are available: Het Volksblad, 14 September 1858, p. 4; C Brand to the Colonial Secretary, 18 April 1859, Western Cape Archives, CO 4107 B47. 42 Het Volksblad, 14 September 1858, p. 4.

he was easily elected, securing the majority of the votes of the district alongside Johannes van der Byl.

The strength demonstrated by Genadendal’s voters and the controversies of Vigne’s defeat provoked wider reconsiderations of the place of missions within the franchise. Vigne was strongly supported by conservative English residents, and some Dutch farmers, but was opposed by the large proportion of locals. In light of the strength of Genadendal’s voters, however, these tensions were focused on the mission station by the faction of Caledon disappointed with Vigne’s defeat, and the group gained the support of the English and Dutch-language public press. It was noted that while Silberbauer was campaigning within Genadendal, he had made no effort to address the residents of Caledon as a whole. He was a ‘stranger’ whose success would only serve to strengthen animosity with mission stations.43 Silberbauer was positioned as a candidate coming out ‘in direct opposition to the white population of the district’.44 The events of the election were publicised in the Zuid Afrikaan, Het Volksblad and the Cape Argus. References were also made to the nomination of Hendrik Heyn in Fort Beaufort, and the increasing attempts of the Cape’s ‘coloured’ voters to return ‘one of their own race’.45

While the voters of Genadendal provoked contention within the Cape press, others took direct measures to disenfranchise the station’s inhabitants. In direct response to the defeat of Vigne, the Field Cornet of Caledon ignored the claims for new Genadendal voters to be registered and struck several hundred others from the electoral roll. 310 of 550, or more than two thirds of Genadendal’s registered electors were judged to have property under the twenty-five pound threshold by ‘Mr. Peters’ – Field Cornet for Caledon and the brother in law of the defeated candidate Henry Vigne. In reporting the deregistration of voters, Peters did not publicise the new roll at the mission station as required by the law, but rather posted it at his own farm. A group of Genadendal’s voters

43 Letter of D. T. Roux, Het Volksblad, 7 October 1858, pp. 1-4. 44 ‘in direkte oppositie tegen de geheele blanke bevolking van dit district’. D. T. Roux, Het Volksblad, 7 October 1858, 1-4. 45 ‘en hy drong by hen aan om be de toekomende elective een van hun eigen geslacht te kiezen.’ Het Volksblad, D. T. Roux, 7 October 1858, 1-4.

working at the farm of the Field Cornet noticed that their names had been removed from the roll, and petitioned the Civil Commissioner to have them included. Suspecting interference, Silberbauer had appealed to the Civil Commission of Caledon and then to the Governor to discover what had happened to the lists. ‘No one was aware that the lists had been posted up’, Silberbauer explained, ‘and those who were struck out of the old list, many of whom were qualified electors, were thus deprived of their opportunity which the law gives them of renewing their applications to be registered’.46 Silberbauer went on to explain that the deregistration of Genadendal’s voters had been used as a threat against them in attempts to sway their votes, and that the Field Cornet had subsequently followed through. A special court was appointed to be conducted at Caledon, at which representatives from Cape Town, Caledon and Genadendal debated the meaning of the Cape’s franchise, and the conformity of Genadendal’s residents to its provisions.

Genadendal’s Voters and the Meaning of the Cape Qualified Franchise

Thus, in 1861, the meaning of the Cape’s franchise was brought under question for the first time via a registration court held in Caledon. Until this point the only explanation of its value was that provided by Porter to Field Cornets in 1853. Within a decade of the Constitution’s passage, however, the colony’s commitment to a non-racial franchise that allowed ‘respectable’ mission inhabitants to register votes was tested, and the meanings of that respectability refined. The significance of the court was demonstrated by the attendees, who included residents from the Genadendal mission, the Attorney General William Porter, the Civil Commissioner for Caledon, the defeated candidate Henry Vigne in addition to George Gain and Silberbauer – the latter two men both being members of the Cape’s Parliament. Over a period of days, the group debated the manner via which mission inhabitants’ homes should be valued and whether or not Genadendal’s

46 J Silberbauer to the Colonial Secretary, 15 February 1859, Western Cape Archives, CO 4111 S25.

residents could be viewed to conform to it. They discussed the place of commonages, in addition to gardens and the value of brick multi-room houses.

Within the courts, residents of Genadendal spoke out in defence of their entitlements. Six witnesses – labourers, an opziener and the field-captain – were brought in to testify to the entitlements of the first claimant, and described the quality of his home and grounds.47 The questioning of each witness lasted over three hours. The Civil Commissioner for Caledon was sent to the mission to value each of the homes, in addition to being asked to judge how the commonage should be subdivided. The value of the commonage as contributing to enfranchisement was upheld to the value of ten pounds, requiring only fifteen pounds in land for each resident. Convicted criminals and individuals who were deceased were removed from the roll, with 470 of the original 530 voters upheld. It was in keeping with the requirements of elections and the emphasis placed on local officials that it was Caledon’s Civil Commissioner who eventually judged the eligibility of Genadendal’s residents, but the proceedings of the court were viewed to hold true for mission stations across the colony.48

The deregistration of Genadendal’s voters by an elected and partial Field Cornet highlighted the susceptibility of land values to manipulation, but it also revealed genuine ambiguity in the meaning of the 1853 Constitution. When Genadendal’s voters were first registered, their homes had been valued alongside a commonage. Within the Field Cornet’s revised interpretation, by contrast, the materiality of the home and its conformity to European standards alone stood for the political entitlement of each of the mission’s adult male residents. Its dimensions, build and upkeep were provided as a reflection of his capacity to rationally contribute to the colony’s government; a sign of his stability and the manner in which his spare time was spent. Ultimately, the quality and upkeep of male mission residents’ homes were to be taken as demonstration of their capacity to contribute as an independent voter.

47 South African Commercial Advertiser, 20 April 1861, pp. 2-3. 48 Cape Argus, 23 April 1864, p. 3.

Because registration as a voter rested on ownership of property that also doubled as a demonstration of respectability and inclusion, the Field Cornet’s claim that the residents did not meet the threshold for enfranchisement was also taken as an assault (with potentially damaging consequences) on the purpose and respectability of the mission as a whole. Supporters of the mission took to the press to affirm the respectability of mission inhabitants and their homes. They were not ‘wretched pondocks’ but rather ‘nice clean workmen’s cottages.’49 The ferocity with which Genadendal was defended reflected the perceived vulnerability of the station, and the extent to which its future was deemed to rest upon its external reputation: judged by contemporary standards of respectability, from housing to the dress and behaviour of inhabitants.

The deregistration of Genadendal’s voters embodied the tensions identified by Trapido, and the extent to which ‘non-white’ registration could be bound up in European political differences. The European population of Caledon was far from united, with many of its farmers annoyed at Vigne’s performance in the local council. Vigne was part of the high political networks running across the Eastern Province, supporting the English settlers on the colony’s frontier. Until the late 1850s, those with the authority over the rolls and who supported Vigne had either genuinely or for reasons of self interest viewed the registration of mission inhabitants as to their favour. Vigne himself had come out and informed residents in the mission that the quality of their homes did not count toward their enfranchisement, provided they had access to land. Following Vigne’s defeat in 1859, this shifted and Genadendal’s residents were deregistered. The member of Parliament, Silberbauer noted the contradiction of these claims: ‘Mr. Vigne told the people that “if any Hottentot had only three bundles of thatching straw to cover himself against a wall, with a right of lands, it was sufficient for the franchise...” Now Mr. Vigne objects to houses “built of brick under beams, and stone, 9 feet long, 15 feet wide, and having three rooms!.”’50 It is clear that Silberbauer was concerned with the future of Genadendal, and positioned himself as their firm defender.

49 South African Commercial Advertiser, 20 April 1861, pp. 2-3. 50 South African Advertiser and Mail, 20 April 1861, pp. 2-3.

Yet, residents in Genadendal were not passive within this process, but rather spoke out to defend the quality of their homes and their entitlements as voters. The twenty-five pound franchise was limited in the power it granted to the Cape’s non-European population, but it also created a body of residents who were aware of their status as political subjects. Within Genadendal, residents were conscious of the power they held to elect a representative sensitive to their interests, and showed this throughout the elections of the 1850s and 1860s. They took advantage of the processes of voting, using plumpers to return individuals who supported them and to unseat others when candidates failed to follow through on promises. Over the course of the 1859 deregistration, electors within Genadendal continued to protect their entitlements. It was local residents who discovered that their names had been removed from the roll, and they sent in appeals to prevent it. During the land courts, Genadendal’s residents similarly took to the stand to express their entitlements as voters. In the end, the claims were successful, and Genadendal’s voters were reinstated. The adherence of their homes to the value of the franchise was confirmed, as was the allowance of lands collectively cultivated.

The responses to the strength of Genadendal’s voters were bound up in tensions of race and class, as local European settlers claimed their own political power was being eroded. Individuals such as the anonymous ‘elector’ recalled the fear that had surrounded missions following the rebellion at the Kat River settlement in 1851 and the concurrent fear that had surrounded mission inhabitants in the Western Cape over the same period.51 Those raising objections drew on this history and insinuated that the behaviour of voters was reflective of a wider conspiracy. The controversies provoked by Silberbauer’s election continued into the 1860s and 1870s, as the enfranchisement of Genadendal’s voters continued to stand in for wider discontentment with mission stations. In 1864, the re- election of Silberbauer and defeat of Vigne was taken as the basis of a second appeal, as residents within Caledon urged voters across the Cape’s Western Province to unite and return Vigne for the Council in response. But the impact of the Genadendal residents’ appeal to enfranchisement was long-lasting. Years later, established voters continued to

51 Edna Bradlow, ‘The “Great Fear” at the Cape of Good Hope, 1851-52,’ The International Journal of African Historical Studies 22, no. 3 (1989), pp. 401-421.

complain of the ‘illiberal’ provisions of the franchise, which allowed common lands to be held as contributing to the valuation of the franchise. When, in 1872, plans were made to transfer land over in freehold across the Cape’s LMS stations, these changes were not made in Genadendal where local residents continued to argue for their desire to retain lands in trust.

Impersonating a Voter

In the colony of New South Wales in precisely the same period as the voters of Genadendal were defending their entitlements, shifting understandings of land and residence as measures of respectability provoked unexpected consideration of the position of indigenous residents as political subjects. As in the Cape, it was a case of electoral irregularity that brought the question of an indigenous man’s entitlements to the fore. Unlike the Cape, however, the prominent issue presented by the case was not accounting for non-Europeans on the electoral roll, but rather accounting for the entitlements of working-class white men. In 1859, immediately following the first elections under universal male suffrage, a young resident named James Johnson but better known as ‘Yellow Jimmy’ was one of four men arrested for fraudulent conduct.52 The crime he stood accused of was that of impersonating an Irishman, James Johnson, and casting a vote he knew himself not to be entitled to. On the afternoon of the election, Yellow Jimmy had entered Armidale’s courthouse and cast a vote under the name of ‘James Johnson’ of ‘Terrible Vale’. He was ‘not naked’, a policeman explained, but rather ‘had on a green coat, and either trowsers [sic] or breeches’.53 Along with three others, all white settlers who worked as casual labourers in New England, Yellow Jimmy was pulled into a legal dispute precipitated by the attempt of a defeated candidate to overturn an election result. Though the case had initially seemed easy to prove, however, it very quickly turned against the Crown Prosecutor as local residents came out in Yellow Jimmy and the four men’s defence.

52 For details, see: Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1859-60, pp. 989-1044. 53 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4.

Issues of impersonation were not limited to New South Wales within this period. Across the three sites, polling clerks remained on the lookout for ‘dead men’ coming to vote. Even within Jamaica, where fourteen of twenty-two constituencies held fewer than a hundred registered voters according to 1854 returns,54 impersonations occurred.55 Issues of impersonation remained particularly pronounced in the Cape Colony. In 1868, when interviewed on the elections of the 1850s, the returning officer for Cape Town relayed the ‘system’ that had developed: ‘Suppose one of the agents employed, either by looking over the shoulder of the polling officer, or in any other way, sees that there are a dozen Caroluses open on the list, you will find in half an hour that a dozen Caroluses are brought in to vote’.56 He noted that a scrutineer had confirmed that ‘dead men only vote the first day’ at the Cape’s drawn out poll.57 For Cape Town’s returning officer the commonality of Malay names remained a key point of concern. Hoping to reduce impersonation, and stating his personal inability to identify true voters from impersonators,58 in 1859 he requested that all Malay voters bring certificates of identity signed by a field cornet to prove their identity at the poll.59 Officials appointed as scrutineers similarly stated their concern with attempting to decide which individuals were entitled to vote under a given registered name.60 They explained that often three or more individuals might vote under a single name that only appeared once or twice on the roll. Unable to determine the true voter and the impersonators, they decided that all of the votes should be struck out. In total, scrutineers for the 1858 Legislative Council elections reported 3,709 votes had been

54 H Barkly to Newcastle, 22 March 1854, British National Archives, CO 137/322 37. 55 In 1849, one of 69 voters attending the poll in Port Royal was reported to be an impersonation, an accusation affirmed by the poll books but not followed up. ‘Port Royal Election,’ Falmouth Post, 28 August 1849, pp. 1-4; Poll Books, Jamaica Archives, IB/11/23/19, pp. 70-71. For more on this, see Chapter Four. 56 CPP 1868 [SC9], Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Consider and report on the Registration of Voters, p. 16. 57 CPP 1868 [SC9], Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Consider and report on the Registration of Voters, p. 14. 58 CPP 1868 [SC9], Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Consider and report on the Registration of Voters, p. 13. 59 Cape Argus, 8 January 1859, p. 2. 60 CPP 1863 [A1], Report of the Select Committee On Scrutiny of Votes for Candidates for the Legislative Council, pp. 3-12.

rejected, including one hundred and eighty votes from ‘Malays and other persons of colour, two or three voting when only one duly registered, without means of identification’.61

Where a mission was the site that prompted debate over franchise in the Cape from 1859-61, it was the squatting stations and frontier regions of areas such as New England that became a cause for concern within contemporary New South Wales. Impersonation had long posed a challenge to returning officers in New South Wales, but had remained remarkably untouched by the extension of the franchise and the introduction of new technologies such as the ballot. In 1858, the passage of the new Electoral Law saw hundreds of workers stationed on vast runs of land becoming entitled to vote. These men were shearers, drivers, fencers and horse-breakers. They were casual as well as contracted labourers, and many of them were illiterate. On some stations, these workers included Aboriginal Australians or the children of Aboriginal Australians and white settlers, deemed ‘half-castes’ by contemporaries. But while any man who had lived anywhere in the district for six months or more was technically entitled as a voter, collectors experienced considerable difficulty in attempting to account for hundreds of new electors. Few of these men had documentation to prove their identity, or even stable names with which they were identified. Until 1858, many of them were deemed to fall far below the level of respectability required for enfranchisement, but the strength of working-class movements within the colony saw them entitled under the new franchise.

When the franchise was debated in 1858, the risks posed by universal suffrage had not gone without comment. Fearing the mass registration of ‘vagabonds’, drunkards and others (a source of greater fear than the potential registration of Aboriginal Australians within this period) residents within New South Wales had contemplated the ‘checks’ that might be placed on enfranchisement. Individuals such as Henry Parkes argued that registration should be an active process and men who wished to be enfranchised should have to perform their registration to the courts. ‘[I]t was necessary that every person who wished his name placed on the electoral list should have to go to some public place to

61 CPP 1863 [A1], Report of the Select Committee On Scrutiny of Votes for Candidates for the Legislative Council, p. 13.

register his name on the electoral roll. He thought that the mere fact of his having gone to such a public place, showed that the person had sufficient interest in the welfare and good government of the country to entitle him to vote.’62 Others suggested the provision of identity certificates or polling cards for each voter as a means of preventing impersonation.63 In the end, however, none of these measures were taken. Registration remained a passive process, conducted by collectors and assisted by employers, and the only identification required was a number. As expected under a universal male franchise, the absence of documentation and the instability of residence facilitated the conditions for irregularity and impersonation.

One of the principal difficulties with impersonation was that it was highly difficult to detect. It was in the nature of cases of impersonation that they tended to be committed by residents who lived and worked beyond the respectable society of their accusers. Individuals who were unemployed, had unstable residence or were left off the rolls by mistake adopted the names of others in order to cast a vote they were seemingly not entitled to. Cases of impersonation rarely made it to court, owing to the expense and the knowledge that successful prosecution was unlikely. Where cases were pursued the eligibility and identity of defendants often remained under question. Unable to establish even defendants’ names, bodily identifications were resorted to in order to place the defendant within the courthouse on the day of polling. Facial features, complexion and dress stood in as means of identifying both the victim and perpetrator of the fraud.

These difficulties characterised the prosecution of Yellow Jimmy alongside the three other men. Little is known about Yellow Jimmy, although records of the trial do give some insight into his upbringing. As a child, Yellow Jimmy had arrived alone into Armidale on a mail cart, and had been placed into employment with a local landholder.64 Like many, he was under contract and bound to remain at work on a station for a set number of years.

62 Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 1858, p. 4; Empire, 26 January 1858, p. 4. 63 Sydney Morning Herald, 21 October 1858, p. 2; Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October 1858, p. 6; Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October 1858, p. 3; Freeman’s Journal, 27 October 1858, p. 2. 64 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4.; Sessional Papers 1859- 60, pp. 1013-1014; 1024

He later came to work under Armidale’s pound keeper, before going into contract under Edward Allingham Junior, who managed the property of his father, Edward Allingham, at a station called Gara. As the work of a number of colonial historians has shown, it was not unusual for both Aboriginal Australians and those deemed ‘half-castes’ to be kidnapped and put into contracted labour.65 Angela Woollacott has also recently shown that other indigenous workers and settlers were ‘mutually dependent’.66 As one brought into Armidale as a child it is difficult to view Yellow Jimmy’s employment as an autonomous decision, but records give little detail into how or why this arose.

The circumstances via which the young resident came to be arrested followed the election for New England, held in July 1859, when Daniel Hart contested the seat against Thomas George Rusden. The election was closely fought, and it was suspected that landholders across the district had encouraged their workers to go and vote for their favoured candidate. Polling took place in the central room of Armidale’s courthouse, requiring many of these men to travel ten or more miles into town. Within the central courthouse of Armidale, the candidate Rusden was flanked by scrutineers and police, as well as the Returning Office. Voters gave their number to a clerk, and checked their name with the scrutineers before disappearing behind a calico curtain to cast their vote, placing the ballot paper into the box and leaving through the back doors.

At some point during the day, Yellow Jimmy had travelled into Armidale from the Gara station in order to attend the election. His employer, Edward Allingham, had informed him that his name had been given to the Returning Officer – that ‘he had a vote’ and ‘he should exercise it’.67 It is likely that Yellow Jimmy stopped prior to entering the courthouse in order to collect his voting number from an agent of Hart, stationed outside, who was there to provide these details to voters in order that they might deliver them to the polling clerk in exchange for a ballot paper. As an illiterate voter, Yellow Jimmy was

65 See: Shirleene Robinson, Something Like Slavery? Queensland’s Aboriginal Child Workers, 1842-1945 (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008); Shirleene Robinson, ‘Regulating the race: Aboriginal children in private European homes in colonial Australia,’ Journal of Australian Studies 37, no. 3 (2013), pp. 302-315 66 Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies, pp. 76-77. 67 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4.

not directed behind the calico curtain, but was rather instructed to provide his vote to the Returning Officer. Rusden knew of Yellow Jimmy and suspected that he was ineligible, and instructed the Returning Officer to caution him.68 He was asked to read the oath testifying to his entitlement as stated on the roll, but confirming his name and his qualification, the returning officer had little choice but to accept Yellow Jimmy’s vote and deposit it along with the others.

Suspicion had similarly surrounded the votes of the other three men. The bullock driver Samuel Buck entered the courthouse drunk and attempted two different names before successfully voting as ‘Stephen Burke.’ The fencer, John Stevenson had recently been involved in a civil matter, and the candidate Rusden had seen him testify to the name of ‘John Stevenson’ and not ‘William Martin Stephenson’ as he claimed.69 It was only the horse-breaker Yellow Jimmy who seemed to vote under an entirely different name, stating he was ‘James Johnson’ of ‘Terrible Vale.’ Marks were made next to the name of each man by the scrutineers to allow them to contest the entries under scrutiny. ‘Drunk’ was written next to the name of Stephen Burke and ‘half-caste’ was written next to the name of Yellow Jimmy.70 Angry at his defeat, Thomas George Rusden visited the police immediately following the election and Yellow Jimmy and the three others were immediately arrested.71

The trial of each impersonator was divided into two parts: a committal hearing called before one of Armidale’s magistrates, followed by a trial before a jury of local residents. Charges of personation required a prosecutor to prove that each of the men had ‘knowingly’ taken on the identity and entitlements of another – effectively that each impersonator had deliberately misled the returning officer. Invariably, the first stage pursued was proving the true identity of the witness in the dock. Next it would be shown that the defendant was not on the electoral roll. Then, the true elector would have his identity proved and he would testify to having voted. Finally, it would have to be shown

68 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1859-1860, p. 1031; ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4. 69 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4. 70 Armidale Express, 16 July 1859, pp. 2-3; ‘Armidale Police Court,’ Armidale Express, 23 July 1859, p. 3. 71 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional papers, 1859-1860, p. 1031.

that the defendant knew himself not to be the individual on the roll, and knew himself not to be entitled to vote. Given that any male resident of six months was entitled to be included on the roll and most of those who committed cases of impersonation had inadvertently been left off the rolls for their district, this was difficult to prove.

In keeping with the difficulties presented by cases of impersonation, the identity of the offenders and the components of the crime were not firmly established. Countless witnesses were brought in to testify to the ‘true’ identity of each man, but in each instance a contrary name was given. For ‘John Stephenson’, who voted as ‘William Martin Stephenson’, witnesses gave the names of ‘John’, ‘Jack’, ‘Snuffling Stephenson’ and ‘Snuffling Jack’, in addition to ‘Bill’’, and ‘William.’72 The local cabinet maker, James Eames, who had himself run for the seat of New England in a previous contest, testified to being known variously as ‘James’, ‘John’, and ‘Johnny’, and claimed to know Stephenson as ‘Bill.’73 Similar issues arose in the cases of Samuel Buck and John Connall, with countless names given by employers for each individual.74 Another witness was happy to state that he had seen Buck passed out at an inn throughout the election, nowhere near the polling place.75 The Crown Prosecutor had initially assumed that the identity of Yellow Jimmy would be easier to prove, but here too Foster struggled. While policemen, past employers and the candidate all confirmed they had only ever known him as ‘Yellow Jimmy’, a past employer testified to Yellow Jimmy’s claims to hold the name of ‘James Johnson’, having seen a contract for his release under that name.76

Establishing the identity and entitlements of ‘true’ electors was no easier. From the stand, the Irish James Johnson was required to corroborate his registration and participation at the election. But while he happily recalled casting his vote, confirming that like Yellow Jimmy his illiteracy required him to give his choice ‘viva voce’ to the returning

72 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4; Armidale Express, 23 July 1859, p. 3. 73 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4. 74 ‘Armidale Police Court,’ Armidale Express 23 July 1859, p. 3. 75 ‘Court of Quarter Sessions,’ Armidale Express, 7 January 1860, p. 2. 76 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4.

officer, he was not able to confirm his place on the roll.77 When asked if he had taken steps or ‘efforts’ to ensure his enfranchisement, Johnson’s response was ‘Not a bit, sir!’ – relaying that he ‘expected’ that he was an elector: ‘bin long enough in the district to be one.’78 A clerk was brought in to confirm that he had taken the vote of the Irish James Johnson:

He would not swear he [the witness James Johnson] was the James Johnson he knew… witness would not swear that the person now before the Court was the man for whom he recorded the vote’ there might be some likeness… the Johnson whom witness knew was an Irishman, not at all of the complexion of the person now before him; the nose and eyes were something like, but he could not be positive to identity.79

Under Parliamentary scrutiny, members of the Assembly had questioned witnesses as to whether or not Yellow Jimmy could have been mistaken for an Irishman. They similarly questioned whether the Irish James Johnson could have been mistaken for Yellow Jimmy – if his complexion was ‘ruddy’ or at all alike that of Yellow Jimmy’s, to which witnesses replied definitively in the negative: ‘There is a deal of difference; one is a white man, the other is a half-caste.’80 Yet, when presented with an ‘authentic’ elector, the identity and qualifications of this individual remained equally elusive. Officials and Johnson himself were no better able to state with confidence that he was qualified to vote and was the individual described on the roll than they could prove that Yellow Jimmy was not.

In the narratives adopted by their prosecutors, cases of personation reflected an expectation that political entitlements would be preserved and treated with reverence by those who were granted them – that individuals such as James Johnson, the Irishman, could concretely establish that he knew himself to be an elector and cared that someone had attempted to take that from him. The inability of those who had been impersonated to conform to the standards of respectability expected of electors prevented prosecutors from making such a case. Individuals who were impersonated were as likely to be known

77 Armidale Express, 16 July 1859, pp. 2-3; Sessional Papers 1859-60, p. 1022. 78 Armidale Express, 16 July 1859, pp. 2-3 79 Armidale Express, 16 July 1859, pp. 2-3. 80 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1859-60, p. 1022.

by three or more names; to have no formal documentation; or to have as little interest in their registration as the ‘vagabonds’ who impersonated them. It was difficult to argue that an impersonator left off the roll should have checked to make sure he was entitled before attempting to vote, when the individuals they impersonated had not checked their registration. Having taken no efforts to ensure his registration, the Irish James Johnson could easily have accidentally committed impersonation under Yellow Jimmy’s entry on the roll.

Members of the community came out in defence of the four men on these grounds. Three of the four men, including Yellow Jimmy, were acquitted by the jury, with the results of the case reported to have been met with cries of approbation from individuals who filled the gallery.81 In the case of the fourth, John Stevenson, a petition was composed overnight and signed by over a hundred local men, ‘praying for merciful consideration of the case.’82 A second petition, addressed to the Governor recalled the still-recent change in the electoral law. ‘[Y]our petitioners beg to draw your Excellency’s attention and the attention of your honourable Council to the fact that, under the new Electoral Act now in force in the colony, this is the first conviction for an offence in connection therewith that has taken place’.83 Stevenson, they explained, was as guilty as any of the other men, and should be forgiven for his illiteracy. Funds for a testimonial to the lawyer who volunteered his time to defend Stevenson, Yellow Jimmy, Buck and O’Connell were raised. Forster declined the honour, but confirmed his belief that the men were the unwitting victims of the new act: ‘I… believed that every one of these men was by law entitled to have a vote, and that if their names were omitted from the Electoral Roll… they ought not therefore to be punished’.84 In spite of the energy and concern that had gone into the composition of the electoral act, for many within Armidale this was a crime that should be treated with consideration and forgiveness.

81 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4; Armidale Express, 21 January 1860, p. 4. 82 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4. 83 Armidale Express, 21 January 1860, p. 4. 84 Armidale Express, 17 March 1860, p. 4.

Class and Race in the Construction of New South Wales’ Franchise

The case of Yellow Jimmy had consequences beyond standard instances of impersonation, however, also serving to expose the continued difficulties returning officers, collectors and others faced in attempting to account for the place of Indigenous Australians on the roll. Yellow Jimmy’s status as a ‘half-caste’ and a resident who had grown up with European labourers perhaps compounded this issue, as judges and politicians still grappled to place the children of white settlers and Indigenous Australians within settler society. In the mid-nineteenth century, those termed ‘half-castes’ often occupied a highly unstable position under law, in the courts and in settler society. Within this period, inclusion on juries and in court rested on a notion that only Christians could be held to an oath, and this belief underwrote the exclusion of many Indigenous Australians as well as ‘half-castes’ from the electoral roll. Yet, such a requirement seems to have sat imperfectly in the case of Yellow Jimmy – the son of a white settler who had been raised in the company of white workers.

There is surprisingly little evidence that Yellow Jimmy received different treatment to the other four men on the basis of his race, and available sources are ambiguous at best. The individual who indicated the most surprise at Yellow Jimmy’s attempt to participate in the election was a scrutineer for Hart, Robert Forster, who had been heard to exclaim ‘why, that is a half-caste’ when Yellow Jimmy entered the polling room.85 Yet, differences based on race and class were playing a role in other ways, and underwrote the suspicion of the scrutineers. It was on account of Yellow Jimmy’s race that no one within the polling room could believe that he might be entitled to the name of ‘James Johnson’, with Rusden later stating to a Parliamentary select committee that he did ‘not think he has a surname’ upon which to register as a voter.86 It was similarly a product of Yellow Jimmy’s upbringing that no-one knew whether or not he was old enough to qualify. This treatment continued

85 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4. 86 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1859-60, p. 1013.

into court, where the prosecution built a case assuming that Yellow Jimmy had no entitlements to another name.

On its surface, Yellow Jimmy’s impersonation of the Irish man, James Johnson, had seemed to present an easy case to prosecute. In the defence mounted, the Crown Prosecutor showed an assumption that there was little chance Yellow Jimmy might qualify as an elector or have any authentic interest in participating. In court, Yellow Jimmy’s employer was asked whether or not he was aware that Yellow Jimmy was not a ‘white man’ when he chose to include his name on the roll, and why Allingham had chosen to include him and not ‘all the blackfellows on the station.’87 When the case was referred to the ‘Committee of Elections and Qualifications’ much speculation was made as to who had put him ‘up’ to the personation. Policemen were asked if they had had any success in discovering who was to blame for Yellow Jimmy’s personation – to which they replied that they had attempted to ascertain who might be responsible with little success.88 In the trial of one of the four men, Allingham’s father was accused of riding out with Yellow Jimmy to the polling place, and walking him to the door to cast the vote.89 Where individuals were simultaneously expressing their discontentment with the enfranchisement of the Cape’s ‘coloured’ population, the treatment of Yellow Jimmy by Parliament revealed much about contemporary attitudes to the potential enfranchisement of Indigenous Australians. The notion that Yellow Jimmy, a ‘half-caste’ and a ‘native’, should participate as an elector was received with sceptical indifference from members of Parliament who were more concerned with discovering who had paid or convinced him to vote.

Yet, this surprise seems to not have been shared amongst members of Armidale’s community, where Yellow Jimmy’s vote was treated equally with the other men. In giving Armidale’s collector the name of ‘James Johnson’ along with others at Gara, Edward Allingham Junior showed every confidence that Yellow Jimmy was no less legally entitled than others who lived and worked on his station. In court, the officials pursuing the case were also confronted with the falsity of the assumption they had made as to Yellow

87 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4. 88 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1859-60, p. 1026. 89 ‘Armidale Police Court,’ Armidale Express, 23 July 1859, p. 3.

Jimmy’s ‘legal incapacities’ as the son of an Indigenous Australian and his position as a subject was definitively affirmed by the judge. When the Crown Prosecutor insinuated that Yellow Jimmy’s enrolment was not authentic he was quickly put down by the judge, Robert Owen. The claim that Allingham had acted deceptively in including Yellow Jimmy was responded to with ‘a sharp reproof’ in which Owen stated that he ‘considered defendant as good an Englishman in constitutional rights as any man in court’.90 For Owen, there was no question that Yellow Jimmy was inherently entitled. Yellow Jimmy also seemed to have the support of many within Armidale, who came out to watch the proceedings of the trial. The verdict of ‘not-guilty’ was reported to have evoked ‘an expression of satisfaction’ from local residents who ‘filled the court’.91

It is unclear why Yellow Jimmy’s name was not included upon the roll by the collector after Edward Allingham had provided his details. It is also difficult to discover what happened to his vote in subsequent elections. While, technically, collectors were required to personally add names, on squatting stations it was the practice that employers such as Allingham provided lists of names and details of their employees, passing them on to the collector for a final decision. In 1859 Allingham rode out to his brother’s farm to meet the collector and provide the list that, he asserted, had included Yellow Jimmy’s name as ‘James Johnson.’92 Yellow Jimmy was far from the only individual whose name had slipped off the list after being provided to the collector, and a similar situation seems to have occurred in the case of John Connell. It is possible that it was the collector, George Mitchell, who decided not to include Yellow Jimmy’s name. It is similarly not clear whether Yellow Jimmy was included on later rolls. Unfortunately, electoral rolls were not systematically recorded until the 1880s, and there are no available rolls from New England or Armidale to check for Yellow Jimmy’s entitlements.

In some respects, Yellow Jimmy’s treatment by the courts preceded changes that would be made in the late nineteenth century, when lines of differentiation between Aboriginal Australians and those deemed ‘half-castes’ were given legislative backing and

90 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4. 91 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4. 92 ‘The Impersonating Indictments,’ Armidale Express, 14 January 1860, p. 4.

defined by statutes. Within this earlier period, however, significant uncertainty seems to have continued to surround the entitlements and subjecthood of ‘half-caste’ residents just as it surrounded Aboriginal Australians as a whole. The position of Indigenous Australians as subjects was more unclear in New South Wales than it was in Victoria, where witness acts were passed to define the interaction of Indigenous Australians within the courts.93 Given this, it is significant that Yellow Jimmy was requested to state an oath by the returning officer and this was accepted, while the necessities of being put to an oath was elsewhere used to justify Indigenous Australians’ exclusion from the roll.

It was unsurprising that Yellow Jimmy’s status as a subject under the constitution became the subject of disagreement between a Crown Prosecutor and one of the colony’s justices. As debates raised in Chapter One of this thesis demonstrated, great uncertainty surrounded the eligibility and rights of indigenous residents as subjects both in law and in politics. The publicity that surrounded Yellow Jimmy’s trial for impersonation came at a point at which the boundaries of enfranchisement in colonial New South Wales and the place of indigenous residents within this were under scrutiny, and the disagreement between the Crown Prosecutor and Justice Owen represented yet another moment in which the entitlements of an indigenous resident under the franchise was raised for debate. What was more striking in this case is that Yellow Jimmy’s treatment by the public, the press and Parliament suggested that his race was not outwardly deemed a barrier to enfranchisement for many in this context, even amongst those who wished to see the election of Daniel Hart overturned. Where the inclusion of other Aboriginal Australians was simultaneously being considered as a mistake in the constitution’s drafting, individuals in Parliament – although well aware that Yellow Jimmy was a ‘half-caste’ – seemed unconcerned that he had been registered as a voter. This apparent lack of concern was preceded by Yellow Jimmy’s treatment within the polling room, where although seemingly a novel occurrence, little surprise was voiced at the young worker’s entitlement. Within the press, similarly, correspondents noted the pursuit of charges against a ‘half-caste’ named

93 See: Russell Smandych, ‘Contemplating the Testimony of “Others”: James Stephen, the Colonial Office, and the fate of Australian Aboriginal Evidence Acts, circa 1839-1849,’ Australian Journal of Legal History 8, no. 2 (2004), pp. 237-283.

100

Yellow Jimmy by the defeated candidate, without further concern for his background or how he had come to be on the roll in the first place. In court, this differentiation was repeated and when Yellow Jimmy’s status as a subject in constitutional rights became the focus of questioning, it was quickly and definitively asserted that he was included.

Through the case of Yellow Jimmy and the three other impersonators we also see how registration processes were shaping the inclusion and exclusion of different individuals and groups from the electoral roll. In the reports of Edward Allingham as well as those of the collector, the influence of employers’ personal perceptions in compiling lists of workers they deemed to be eligible is clear. Based on such understandings, Yellow Jimmy was subsequently included as a voter, told that he ‘had a vote and to exercise it’, while Allingham personally chose not to include the groups of Aboriginal Australians who lived on his land.

Through the close questioning of polling scrutineers and district collectors, newly elected politicians were informed of the difficulties collectors faced in accounting for names and length of residence in a community in which it was ‘the practice… for persons to change their names… Going at one time by the name of Jack, and at another by the name of Will’, as well as frequently changing their place of residence. Of issue in this case was accounting for individuals such as ‘John Stevenson’, better known as ‘Snuffling Stevenson’ or ‘Snuffling Jack’, who voted under the name of William Martin Stephenson, and who had lived in New England long enough to qualify as a voter but was left off the roll. ‘Samuel Buck’, who voted as ‘Stephen Burke’, and ‘John Connol’ who voted as ‘John Connal’ were also arrested for impersonation, in spite of having lived in New England for many years. Where the twenty-five pound franchise of the Cape defined the respectability required to register as a voter in terms of land, within New South Wales the single test of enfranchisement had become the possession of full, Christian name. Such requirements of respectability operated imperfectly within colonial New South Wale’s working-class communities. As late as 1865, collectors would still be complaining of the vast inaccuracies of New England’s electoral lists, due to the inability of obtain the full Christian names necessary to register an individual as a voter, with the bench objection to those cases where Christian names could not be provided. The ‘system’ employed within this case was far

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from the regulation proposed by Henry Parkes in 1858 as an appropriate check to the universal male franchise.

Unfortunately, it is only possible to speculate as to Yellow Jimmy’s own considerations of his position as a politically entitled subject. As with other defendants within this period, Yellow Jimmy’s voice is silent within the courts and within the records, leaving only the claims of his lawyer and the responses of crowds. Yet, this case is also notable as one of very few early examples of the participation of non-Europeans in the colonial elections of New South Wales, and reaffirms the unlikely ironies and consequences of universal male suffrage based on residence and subjecthood alone. The case of Yellow Jimmy, and the surprising support he received from some highlights the extent to which many settlers experienced difficulties in attempting to navigate the boundaries of political subjecthood within this period. It also points to the likelihood that Yellow Jimmy was not alone as an Indigenous Australian or ‘half-caste’ in being included upon the rolls within colonial New South Wales and participating in an election.

Conclusion

Histories of colonial enfranchisement and constructions of subjecthood often focus on the limitations of colonial franchises, and the many mechanisms via which the liberal promises of colonial constitutions were limited in practice. This history is certainly essential to any account of the shifting power of settlers and the Colonial Office, and both the demise and contradictions of humanitarian commitments to the protection of indigenous and other non-European populations within the mid-century. Yet, unlike histories of landholding and law, where the work of Lauren Benton, Lisa Ford, Tim Rowse and others has emphasised mutual themes of resistance, collaboration and entanglement, histories of colonial political rights within the nineteenth century British Empire still tend towards emphasis on the exclusionary conditions of colonial constitutions, often told from the perspective of colonial parliaments or the Colonial Office itself. In moving away from Parliament to the edges of colonial settlements, this chapter has demonstrated the place of

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non-European populations within the continued negotiations and disputes over the boundaries of enfranchisement and the meanings of subjecthood. It has highlighted the susceptibility of the franchise to manipulation, and has emphasised the extent to which wholly enfranchised non-European men were still defending their own entitlements, even where they fulfilled the racialised and classed requirements of colonial constitutions.

Across the colonies, it is clear that many were preoccupied with electoral irregularity, and the burdens of proving entitlement often fell most strongly upon non- European populations. Considerable suspicion surrounded the registration of Malay, or ‘coloured’ voters in the Cape, with mission inhabitants particularly deemed to be under the control of missionaries. Yet, when examined closely, it is not only apparent that franchise manipulation was endemic across settler populations, but that non-Europeans were also playing a role in protecting their own status as politically entitled subjects often according to the very provisions that colonial franchises required. This is perhaps most pronounced in the Cape, where the case of the Genadendal voters disenfranchised in 1859-61 highlighted the extent to which residents on missions were willing to defend their positions as both respectable and politically entitled subjects. Not merely were the residents of Genadendal defending their entitlements under the franchise, they were also doing so within the language of respectability this was seen to represent. Here, the level of the franchise not only ‘put a figure on respectability’, as Robert Ross has noted, but it also created a new markers against which respectability could be projected and judged.94 The ferocity with which voters in Genadendal were defending their entitlements reflected not merely a desire to ensure that eligible residents would remain upon the roll, but also a fear that accusations of their failure to meet the property qualifications might have wider repercussions for the mission’s future.

The case of Yellow Jimmy similarly served to expose misunderstandings and reinterpretations of the meanings of subjecthood, and the consequences this reinterpretation could have. Here, a ‘half-caste’ Indigenous Australian was assumed to be entitled by those he lived and worked with, but assumed not to be entitled by others who

94 Ross, Status and Respectability, p. 173.

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were required to take his vote. In this case, a misinterpretation over his status upon the electoral roll led to his arrest, and potential imprisonment for up to two months. This case also highlighted the many ways race-based prejudice could operate in shaping registration, with a belief that ‘Yellow Jimmy’ had no claims to a Christian name remaining the most pertinent factor in the suspicion that surrounded his vote. There is little question that the conditions of dispossession and his own status as an ‘illegitimate’ son of a white settler an Indigenous Australian mother, but for those who lived and worked with him, there was little issue with his registration as a voter.

Each of the case studies explored within this chapter remained exceptional, but the prejudice the cases exposed and the forms of manipulation used were quite common. Within the Cape, the manipulation of electoral rolls – including the exclusion of otherwise entitled voters and inclusion of others who were not entitled – remained a common form of irregularity used to alter the outcomes of elections within this period. Civil Commissioners, Field Cornets and others with authority over the roll and interests in the outcomes of elections demonstrated discretion in evaluating those considered to be entitled. The exceptional aspect of this case was the degree to which this manipulation had been attempted and the impact it would have on interpretations of the franchise moving forward. Here, an appointed officer had reinterpreted the meaning of the Cape’s franchise in order to deliberately disenfranchise voters known to oppose his interest, striking several hundred names from the roll. Rather than accepting or overlooking the enfranchisement, however, voters within Genadendal pursued this case to the courts. By doing so, and speaking out for the worth of their lands and commonages, Genadendal’s voters helped to clarify the meaning of the Cape’s franchise, and ensured that mission voters across the colony could register on the basis of lands held in trust and collectively cultivated.

The impact of Yellow Jimmy’s trial for impersonation in 1858 is harder to determine. In common with Genadendal, this remained a striking case of an otherwise common form of irregularity – that of impersonation. The 1858 trial of Yellow Jimmy and the other impersonators highlighted how rarely cases of impersonation were pursued to the courts and how difficult they were to prosecute. It also highlighted the extent to which public sympathy often fell upon those deemed to have been improperly excluded from the

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roll, regardless of their social position. What remained exceptional in this case was that it was an Indigenous Australian that came under trial – the only such instance within this period. In spite of the seeming rarity of indigenous Australians’ participation within these early elections and the publicity that this case received, however, it seems not to have generated any change in wider assumptions as to Aboriginal Australians’ eligibility as voters. Well into the 1860s and beyond, residents would continue to debate whether and under what conditions Aboriginal Australians might qualify as voters.

It is clear that rather than being fixed via colonial constitutions, understandings of political subjecthood continued to be shaped long after the extension of colonial franchises, not merely by parliaments but also in the interactions of communities of settlers, indigenous and emancipated populations. Such negotiations involved more than a mere consideration of who should be legally entitled to vote, raising questions of the position of non-European populations within settler society. Land and registration courts, in addition to prosecutions for electoral fraud, challenged understandings of political subjecthood and voter identity, revealing significant uncertainty in the manner through which colonial franchises should be applied. In one sense, these contests demonstrated the susceptibility of constitutional statutes to wilful or mistaken manipulation by local ‘respectable’ figures charged with their implementation. But their examination also reveals the position of non-European populations within this, not merely as victims or perpetrators of electoral fraud, but also as defenders of the boundaries of respectable enfranchisement.

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Colonial Electioneering: The official structure of campaigns

Figure 4: Adolphe Duperly, The Kingston Election, Jamaica 1854. Source: Adolphe Duperly, Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica (Kingston: A. Duperly, 1884).

For those living in the colonies in the mid-nineteenth century, elections represented far more than the act of casting or receiving a vote. These were drawn out, often highly ritualised periods of engagement between candidates and colonial residents, not wholly captured in any history that focuses on the outcomes of contests alone. Elections were processes in which key issues of policy were to be discussed via public meetings, press editorials and private dinners. While the reach of campaigns could be limited, for those included within them elections were opportunities to contribute to the

formation of policy, or to challenge decisions made in parliament. The widespread social and political engagement engendered by elections within this period was vividly captured in artistic depictions such as that of French photographer and lithographer, Adolphe Duperly (Figure Four), whose famous lithograph of the 1854 election for Kingston presented a romanticised depiction of elections within a period in which contests were increasingly attended by large crowds of interested local residents.1 Even within constituencies in which enfranchisement was limited, it was not uncommon for candidates to draw upon non-electors as well as electors to ensure their success, and many candidates were expected to answer to whole communities, and not merely those enfranchised, during their campaign.

The previous chapter of this thesis examined how practices of registration shaped the operation of the franchise. This chapter shifts the discussion to the election itself and the dominant modes of engagement at elections, examining the processes by which candidates appealed to voters. Here I investigate the crafting of candidates’ campaigns around the official practices of elections and the expectations of voters, in order to show their impact in shaping growing and emerging political communities within the colonies during the mid-century. Such practices could be formative to the operation of the franchise and the wider meaning of elections, shaping the extent to which different indigenous, emancipated or settler groups were engaged by candidates. This includes electoral cultures in New South Wales, which facilitated high levels of engagement between candidates and male settlers, but which remained exclusive to settler populations alone and largely excluded women in spite of their continued expressions of interest and often noted presence at the election itself. This chapter is structured around the official practices of the election: the canvass, the nomination and the poll. Here, I consider the impact of lively cultures of electioneering within colonial New South Wales. I examine the manner through which cultures of canvassing were transformed within Jamaica through the increasing influence of small freeholders. Finally, I show the complex interchange between Dutch, British and ‘coloured’ voters at elections in the Cape, as candidates attempted to secure

1 Adolphe Duperly, Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica (Kingston: A. Duperly, 1884).

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their return against the Cape Colony’s imperfect mail services, roads and the scattered population, as well as the lack of interest expressed by many voters themselves.

The purpose of the chapter is two-fold: both capturing a sense of the structure of campaigns within a period in which voting occurred in public via open assemblies, as well as highlighting the opportunities for engagement at elections for those included within them. This chapter emphasises the extent to which participation at elections was being shaped by the official and accepted cultures of electioneering, which regularly blurred the lines between ‘electors’ and ‘non-electors’, but could also limit influences by cutting off the involvement of particular groups from the campaign. In subsequent chapters I will turn more explicitly to the modes through which the limitations of the franchise or the official practices of elections were resisted through violence and bribery. Yet, within this period it was as much the widely accepted processes of campaigning as the fraudulent reinterpretation of franchise qualifications that was shaping the significance of elections and the operation of the franchise.

The Canvass

As in Britain, elections within the colonies were often lively and engrossing affairs that captured widespread interest, regularly dominated the press and provided fuel for slander, gossip and the airing of local tensions. Evidence of the levels of interaction between candidates and communities generated by elections was apparent from the opening of the canvass, when incumbent and new candidates opened their campaigns. Here, via public meetings and press advertisements, candidates put forward key issues of policy and courted voters. The key purpose of the canvass was to ensure that as many votes as possible were secure long before the official contest, and canvassing could begin several months prior to the poll’s opening. In colonial New South Wales, particularly, high levels of competition over seats, as well as often vast constituencies, led to an extensive canvass composed of mass meetings and considerable press correspondence. Within Jamaica, the canvass took on the added importance of being the period in which the

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registration of voters took place. It was in the Cape Colony alone that canvassing was minimal over this period, as low interest in elections often saw candidates struggle to ensure that they would receive support at the poll.

New South Wales

The tendency for colonial electoral campaigns to extend beyond the barriers of enfranchisement and offer significant opportunities for input and critique was exemplified in the case of colonial New South Wales. Here, over a period of several months, candidates for seats in the settler parliament advertised their policies via press advertisements and printed pamphlets circulated by hand at frequent public meetings or handed out at candidates’ committee rooms. The surviving personal papers of candidates from this period reinforce both the effort and expense often incumbent upon candidates in organising these campaigns, even for the wealthy and well-connected. In contests from 1843 to 1858, the influential James Macarthur relied almost wholly upon his agent, J. M. Antill, who worked behind the scenes to ensure a strong return, including circulating Macathur’s ‘requisition’, or his letter of invitation, in order to secure the pledges of supporters.2 The considerable burdens placed on those candidates who wished to ensure support at elections within the colony were noted in 1850 by the influential conservative William Wentworth, who remarked that it was ‘impossible’ to run for a seat in New South Wales’ country districts without being ‘nearly ruined’ by the cost, with his own bills including cab fare, the hiring of committee rooms, scrutineers’ and agents’ bills alongside considerable printing and advertising.3 Such burdens only increased over the 1850s, as higher levels of enfranchisement saw candidates taking greater measures to ensure their success at the poll.

2 H Badgery to Oxley, 25 November 1855, SLNSW James Macarthur Papers, Volume 27, A2923, p. 406; James Macarthur Papers, Volumes 24 to 41, SLNSW A2920-A2937. 3 Sydney Morning Herald, 7 March 1850, p. 2; A copy of the expenses of Wentworth’s own campaign in 1851 is available: W. C. Wentworth, ‘Papers Concerning Election Committee Kept by Treasurer of the Committee, Joseph Yeomans, 7 July-25 September 1851,’ SLNSW MLMSS 3008. Also, Wentworth Papers, SLNSW A758, pp. 200-206. That of James Macarthur in 1843 is available: Macarthur Papers, Volume 26, SLNSW A2922, pp. 234-235.

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Campaigning within New South Wales was split between public meetings and the press. Yet, the distinguishing feature of the colony’s elections remained the considerable emphasis placed upon personal interaction between candidates and voters, principally via lively public meetings. This was in spite of the vast size of many of the colony’s constituencies, many of which were several times the total area of Jamaica. The emphasis on public engagement was in keeping with changes occurring in Britain where, as Jon Lawrence has emphasised, the rise of the platform saw fewer and fewer candidates remaining detached from the campaign.4 Yet, it was also a product of key changes within colonial New South Wales over the 1850s, including both the expansion of the franchise and the removal of economic barriers to seats in Parliament in 1856. Following changes to the colony’s constitution in 1856, any registered elector was qualified to run for a position in Parliament, and competition over seats in the newly established Assembly grew. Voters were actively encouraged not to trust politicians who failed to present their policies for scrutiny, and few candidates could get away without taking considerable efforts to personally address electors’ concerns.5 Even within regional districts such as Cumberland, where voters were spread across several towns, candidates expressed concern that failure to travel and meet electors prior to the contest might result in failure at the poll.6

The impact of this culture was strongly demonstrated in seats such as Sydney, where it was not uncommon for candidates to make themselves available nightly in the weeks prior to an election. Thus, between the proroguing of the colony’s Assembly in December 1857 and the close of the polls for Sydney in January 1858, the incumbent liberal Premier Charles Cowper appeared before the city’s residents almost nightly. Cowper was popular amongst voters, but the perceived failures of his cabinet to secure electoral and land reform over 1857 led to widespread anger at his performance, particularly shown at the 1858 meetings. On January 8, the Sydney Morning Herald estimated that four to five

4 Jon Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The hustings in British politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 14-41. 5 Henry Parkes, The Electoral Act and How to Work It: A series of letters on the subject of the approaching elections (Sydney: G. T. Thornton by W. C. Belbridge, 1859), p. 16. 6 W M Manning to J Macarthur, 3 April 1856, James Macarthur Papers, SLNSW, A2923, pp. 480- 486. Manning, who was running for the seat of South Cumberland, travelled to Liverpool, Campbeltown and Narellan over a day, in addition to travelling to Appin shortly afterwards.

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thousand residents came out to chastise Cowper, with the size of the crowds forcing the meeting outside and requiring Cowper to address attendees from a balcony.7 Cowper’s rivals for the seat were equally lively over this period, and six to seven hundred electors met to hear the policies of another candidate for Sydney City elsewhere on the same night.8 George Thornton, a third candidate for Sydney, organised another two meetings of local residents that evening.

It was clear that for participants, the public meetings of the canvass were as much about critiquing as praising potential representatives, and the task of facing uproarious gatherings remained one of the more unpleasant parts of running for a seat at this time. At the January 8 meeting, the press complained that it remained impossible to hear Cowper’s claims amidst ‘cheering, counter-cheering, hooting, and howling’, from locals angry within his performance, and was described as ‘one of the most boisterous [meetings] ever held’ and ‘one continued scene of uproar and confusion’.9 The previous evening, another three to four thousand had treated Cowper similarly in a neighbouring ward, and it speaks to the level of interest being taken in elections at this time that such large crowds were summoned with considerable regularity, and the size of the crowds was roughly equivalent to a third of the city’s registered voters.10 The impact of both the size and the frequency of these meetings was the partial transformation of the city and central towns, as sites such as Wynyard Square and Macquarie Place were taken over by nightly, out-of-doors public meetings.

Along with the nomination, public meetings such as those of Cowper were also part of a culture in which the masculinity of political life was being reinforced, even against concurrent appeals for formal enfranchisement from women. Candidates were themselves contributing to perceptions that political rights and the public platforms of election meetings were a masculine domain. This came not only through many candidates’ personal

7 Sydney Morning Herald, 9 January 1858, p. 6 8 Sydney Morning Herald, 9 January 1858, p. 4. 9 Sydney Morning Herald, 9 January 1858, p. 6. 10 Sydney Morning Herald, 8 January 1858, p. 4. Electoral roll returns: Sydney Morning Herald, 27 March 1858, p. 5.

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objections to the formal enfranchisement of women, but also through the marginalisation of women in the public events of their canvasses. There were occasions within this period when women played a role in candidates’ campaigns and their appearance at the nomination was not uncommon.11 But while some women sought out active involvement, the most common response to their active participation remained the light chastisement of crowds as well as candidates themselves. In 1856, opponents of the candidate Ralph Mayer Robey laughed that they would have a ‘petticoat government’ if he got in, given the support he had been receiving from the ‘ladies’.12 His supporters confirmed that women had indeed been active on his campaign, and therefore Robey was bound to be successful: ‘they all knew that the ladies were invincible, and consequently Mr. Robey’s party would conquer – (laughter) – with the ladies’ assistance.’13 The capacity of women to turn contests was shown on other occasions, including in 1858, when the returning officer for Northumberland and Hunter explained how a candidate had almost suffered the defeat through the influence of a local resident: ‘It was a black-eyed Scotch woman who took the matter up (laughter).’14 Seeking revenge for an injustice done to her husband, the woman in question had gone door to door and successfully ensured no voter in her neighbourhood polled for one of the candidates.

It is likely that the very character of open meetings contributed to an opinion that they were unsuitable for respectable women. Meetings such as that of Charles Cowper in 1858 drew heavily on the tradition of ‘stump oratory’, or open political gatherings in which attendance was not to be limited by tickets or to the supporters of a candidate. As Joy Damousi has noted in her study of cultures of public speaking, these meetings at once stressed inclusivity, but through the very ‘indelicate male talk’ and ‘hurraring’ they celebrated they could also serve to reinforce the inappropriateness of this space for women.15 Historians have nonetheless debated the extent to which women were included

11 The examples of this were numerous: Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September 1851, p. 2; Sydney Morning Herald, 28 March 1856, p. 5, Goulburn Herald, 5 April 1856, p. 3 and others. 12 Sydney Morning Herald, 8 April 1856, pp. 5-6. 13 Sydney Morning Herald, 8 April 1856, pp. 5-6. 14 Northern Times, 6 February 1858, p. 2. 15 See: Joy Damousi, Colonial Voices: A cultural history of English in Australia, 1840-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) p. 51.

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within campaigns in colonial New South Wales as elsewhere. Frank Bongiorno, for example, has noted the participation of women at the closing of the poll in New England in 1859 as ‘complicating’ Marian Sawer’s analysis of the masculinity of pre-ballot electoral cultures.16 For James Vernon, whose work focuses on English constituencies from 1830- 1860, historians should not ‘underestimate the scale and style of women’s involvement, not only at the nomination, but throughout the entire electoral ritual process’.17 Certainly, within Britain at this time, women remained prominent at nomination meetings, with separate hustings built in Ipswich, although Catherine Hall, by contrast to Vernon, has shown the critical place of the 1840s through to 1860s in solidifying middle-class women’s position on the margins of public culture, including elections.18

That some women were participating in campaigns within this period is unsurprising given both the wide reach of many of these events and the formal appeals for inclusion from women, and the wider participation of women in New England identified by Bongiorno was certainly not an uncommon feature of elections within this period. Yet, what was remarkable within colonial New South Wales was the level to which women’s active participation was criticised, even by contrast to Britain at this time. In my examination of public meetings throughout this period, I have found only one instance in which a candidate responded positively to a woman, with William Bede Dalley in 1858 telling a ‘female in the crowd’ who raised a question about the ‘tax on tea’ that he expected to obtain the vote of her husband ‘through her influence’.19 It is likely that many candidates were supportive of women’s participation, and this would certainly become evident over the 1860s. More usually, as the nomination of Robey in 1858 suggested, however, women’s

16 Frank Bongiorno, ‘Electioneering in New England 1856-1889,’ Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 93, no. 2 (November 2007), p. 134; Marian Sawer, ‘Pacemakers for the World?’ in Marian Sawer (ed.), Elections, Full, Free and Fair (Annandale: Federation Press, 2001), p. 12. 17 James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, 1815-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 92. 18 Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 142-143. On hustings built for women in Ipswich, see: Vernon, Politics and the People, p. 92. 19 Empire, 11 January 1858, p. 2.

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participation was a source of amusement and, across nominations held within this period, the active participation of women was regularly met with laughter from the crowd.

Alongside the placarding of the streets with notices and pamphlets, widespread public meetings were part of a culture that made elections difficult to ignore, regardless of formal enfranchisement. In 1856, the public meeting of George Oakes was called together by a local bellman, who walked through the central streets of Parramatta announcing the meeting’s commencement as the town was placarded with notices of the emergency meeting.20 Figures such as Oakes rarely relied upon public meetings alone, moreover, and over the course of his 1856 campaign for Parramatta agents for both candidates had gone door to door through the town canvassing for votes.21 Two years later, in 1858, the canvassing of the district extended to Oakes wandering through Parramatta’s prison with his brother and agent, Francis Oakes, who similarly attempted to gain the ‘pledges’ of voters.22

The impact of the cultures of electioneering within colonial New South Wales was high levels of input in the formation of candidates’ policies throughout a long canvass, and an expectation that candidates would be held to account for failures to deliver on their promises. It was not uncommon for candidates to refine their policies over the course of a campaign, which could itself last eight weeks or more. The public meetings of the canvass served to extend growing forms of popular political engagement, not merely within the city, but also in towns across the colony’s interior, only further amplified through official electoral practice including both the nomination and the poll, to be examined in detail in the second section of this chapter.

20 Empire, 10 January 1856, p. 4. 21 Witnesses in a case of impersonation following this election noted going door to door through Parramatta, with James Galloway, an agent for Oakes’ opponents Henry Watson Parker and Andrew Murray noting that he had ‘canvassed every house’ in the street: Sydney Morning Herald, 18 November 1856, p. 5. 22 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 852.

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Figure 5: Vote for Solomon. Painted gold leaf, c. 1854. The exact campaign this was derived from is not known. One of few surviving pieces of ephemera for this period. Source: National Library of South Africa, Special Collections, AZP.1983-12, Cape Town, c. 1854.

The Cape

Aspects of the culture of New South Wales’ campaigns, including publication of lengthy requisitions as a means of signalling entry into the contest were also apparent within canvasses of the Cape Colony. Here, however, elections were complicated and elongated through both the existence of two elected houses of parliament and a smaller, scatted population. Of the three colonies, the Cape was also alone in having the added complexity of a pre-existing European population coexisting with a newer British population, with many socially separated by barriers of language. Since the second British occupation in 1806, considerable efforts had been made by governors to Anglicise middle- and working-class institutions, language and culture within the Cape, especially via systems of schooling, literary and scientific institutions and popular culture, as scholars have shown.23 Electoral practices were themselves part of the continued Anglicisation of the

23 Saul Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, sensibility, and white South Africa, 1820-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Vivian Bickford-Smith, ‘Leisure and Social Identity in Cape Town, British Cape Colony, 1838-1910,’ Kronos, no. (1998-1999), pp. 103-128; Vivian Bickford-Smith, ‘Revisiting Anglicisation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 2 (2003), pp. 82-95; Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 17 50-1870: A tragedy of manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); James Sturgis, ‘Anglicisation at the Cape of Good Hope in the Early Nineteenth Century,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 11, no. 1 (1982), pp. 5-32.

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public cultures of this period: with the ‘hustings’ nomination introduced as a compulsory first step for any candidate who wished to run for a seat in the House of Assembly.

The emphasis upon electors’ and non-electors’ regular engagement with candidates over a lengthy canvass was less common within the Cape Colony’s mid-century elections, however. In the Cape, by contrast to New South Wales, candidates often went to a poll having only ever advertised their policies via the press, and interaction between candidates and voters could be minimal. Perhaps one of the most striking features of early elections in the Cape was the inconsistent interest taken from election to election, and from district to district throughout the 1850s and 1860s, in spite of the widespread agitations that had led to the formation of the 1853 Constitution and the level of anxiety that characterised the contests analysed in the previous chapter. Here, as in New South Wales, the acquisition of representative government was spurred by widespread unrest, via both the Anti-Convict crisis and the Kat River rebellion, both of which had been formative in the eventual introduction of a Constitution and the franchise it contained (Chapter One). But while the former, particularly, was read by many as an indication of political maturity, this level of interest was not sustained into elections themselves. In 1858, there were only nine candidates for eight seats in the Legislative Council in the Western Province, and seven candidates for seven seats in the Eastern Province.24 Seats in the Legislative Assembly regularly went uncontested, while candidates who were running for seats often struggled to encourage voters to come to the poll.

South African scholars have noted high levels of apathy in the early elections of the Cape Colony, and have offered reasons to explain it. For Hermann Giliomee, writing on the formation of Afrikaner ‘ethnic consciousness’ from the 1870s-1910s, low level engagement remained the product of the weak power of the Cape Parliament itself: ‘the colony’s parliament hardly touched their daily lives. It had a limited ability to tax, and its

24 Cape Gazette, 30 November 1858, p. 1, has final results of the poll for the Legislative Council in 1858.

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greatest topic of discussion was the budget deficit and the need for retrenchment.’25 Similarly, Stanley Trapido has pointed to the limited efforts made by candidates, particularly in the Legislative Council elections.26 The controversies of the Constitution and its implementation, including the institution of English as the language of Parliament and the decision to hold sessions in Cape Town, also contributed to the comparatively low levels of interest in the elections of this period. Writing in 1856, a resident in the Eastern Cape district of Colesberg appealed for a Dutch translator in Parliament, and noted the impossibility of finding suitable candidates to represent them so long as proceedings occurred in English, with many voters choosing to ‘stay home’ during elections.27 Even where candidates were available, many were unable or unwilling to travel the several hundred miles to Cape Town in order to attend the sitting of Parliament.

Even where interest was shown in an election, and even for those who were anxious to ensure suitable representatives might be found to represent their district, securing a seat could be difficult. Throughout the elections of this period, the Cape Colony was formally divided into the Western and Eastern Provinces, with the latter holding the greater portion of English settlers, while the former was principally Dutch-speaking – with the exception of Cape Town itself. For the purposes of Legislative Council elections, these Provinces represented divisions, with eight members chosen for the Western Province and seven for the Eastern. Map Three captures a sense of the task faced by candidates for the Council, who were required to secure votes from across their provinces. In the case of elections for the Council, this task was made slightly easier by regulations that gave voters multiple votes and allowed them to split them between candidates or give all eight votes (in the case of the Western Province) or all seven votes (in the case of the Eastern Province) to a single candidate. Assembly elections were held immediately following the close of those for the Council, and candidates were selected from twenty-two districts

25 Hermann Giliomee, ‘The Beginnings of Afrikaner Ethnic Consciousness, 1850-1915,’ in Leroy Vall (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 26. 26 Stanley Trapido, ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation,’ (University of London: PhD Dissertation, 1970), p. 61. 27 Het Volksblad, 4 December 1856, p. 3.

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closer in size to those of colonial New South Wales, but still far larger than those of Jamaica. Outside of major towns including Port Elizabeth and Graham’s Town, in the colony’s east, or Cape Town, in the colony’s west, support needed to be collected from voters located on farms across the colony’s interior.

Within the Legislative Council, particularly, it remained difficult for those without existing influence or vast networks to gather support, and many of the men who were first elected to seats in the Council in 1854 had longstanding commercial and social prestige. The ability of voters to ‘plump’ their votes for a single candidate, and the density of voters within sites such as Cape Town and Graham’s Town gave candidates whose support bases lay in such areas a considerable advantage and amplified tensions between major towns such as Graham’s Town and Port Elizabeth, or between residents in Cape Town and those in the regional areas of the Western Province.28 Even where candidates held prestige, however, many went to considerable lengths behind-the-scenes to ensure their support, and it was often difficult to establish whether or not voters would appear at the poll. In 1864, an agent for the leading Eastern Cape conservative Robert Godlonton noted the manner through which he had attempted to court voters for the previous election, but the men who had promised support had ‘forgotten’ to turn up at the polls – explaining that he would take careful measures to ensure that this did not happen in future.29 Godlonton himself relied upon a vast network of contacts, and correspondence from the 1864 election (a contest that drew particular interest due to the decision to hold the next session in the Eastern Province) highlights the level of behind the scenes activity occurring across parts of the Eastern Province, with paid agents and voluntary supporters traveling to farms and visiting voters in Bathurst, Peddie, Cradock, Colesberg and Graaff-Reinet, amongst

28 Much has been written on the political tensions of period, both within and between provinces, see: Basil A. Le Cordeur, ‘Eastern Cape Political Alignments and Re-Alignments, 1854-1858,’ Historia 35, no. 2 (November 1990), pp. 39-63, for an overview. Stanley Trapido has also outlined the contribution of plumpers to the strength of Graham’s Town at early elections, see: Trapido, ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation’, pp. 60-61, as well as pp. 41-94 for an overview of political tensions over the nineteenth century. 29 W Young to Godlonton, 22 January 1864, University of Witswatersrand, Historical Papers, Godlonton Papers, A43 767.

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others.30 Godlonton’s success in 1854 contrasted to a fellow candidate for the Council, William Cock, who attempted to counter his relative lack of support in the elections for the Council by personally riding from district to district during the lengthy period of polling, but was nonetheless ultimately unsuccessful.31

Seats in the Legislative Assembly were often easier to obtain, with many constituencies going wholly uncontested, and the house itself was often viewed as offering a second chance to failed candidates for the upper house. Thus, after failing to obtain a seat in the Legislative Council in 1854, William Cock immediately ran unopposed for the district of Albany and secured a seat in the House of Assembly.32 The same path was taken by the former colonial secretary, John Molteno, who ran for his district of Beaufort when he failed to gain a seat in the Legislative Council for the Western Province. Where Cock ran unopposed, Molteno remained less certain of his success, and expressed concern to the Governor that country voters might not appear at the poll.33 Elsewhere, other candidates misread their support, leading to defeat. In 1854, Benjamin Norden, who also supported the ‘frontier’ interests of Godlonton and Cock, but was highly unpopular amongst Cape Town voters, informed the former gentleman that his return was ‘certain’ since he had ‘all the Dutch and Malay interests as well as a large portion of the English Inhabitants’ of Cape Town in his favour.34 Norden was, however, second to last on the poll.35

The difficulties of adequately structuring any election within the Cape were noted and formed a topic of discussion as the Constitution was debated – even suggested as a

30 For the collection of papers, see: University of Witswatersrand, Historical Papers, Godlonton Papers, A43 1864. Unfortunately, little correspondence from the 1854 and 1858 elections has survived. 31 See: South African Commercial Advertiser, 16 February 1854, p. 3, as well as South African Commercial Advertiser, 22 February 1854, p. 3, for a reply from William Cock. 32 William Cock made plans to do so even prior to the close of the poll: South African Commercial Advertiser, 24 January 1854, p. 3. 33 J Molteno to the Colonial Secretary, 28 April 1854, Western Cape Archives, CO 4075 M83. 34 B Norden to Godlonton, 26 February 1854, University of Witswatersrand, Historical Papers, Godlonton Papers, A43 139. 35 B Norden to Godlonton, 26 February 1854, University of Witswatersrand, Historical Papers, Godlonton Papers, A43 139. Cape Gazette, 29 June 1854, pp. 1-2.

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further reason against settler government. In response to petitions from settlers in the 1840s, the Colonial Office had requested clarification on how an election might be conducted, particularly given the ‘scattered’ state of the population and the difficulties of determining upon a franchise suitable for a colony composed of both Dutch and British, as well as indigenous and emancipated residents. Responding to a petition in 1842, the Colonial Office asked for clarification on the processes of voting. ‘Where are the votes of the electors to be taken? If there be only one polling place in the district, is it expected that voters will be found disposed to travel what must frequently be very inconvenient distances… and will not the representation become in many places merely nominal from the non-attendance of voters?’36 Indeed, during the 1850s even printed communication could be limited, with farming areas relying upon networks of Field Cornets to convey information about contests.

The level of organisation of candidates’ campaigns from the first elections in 1854 was nonetheless remarkable, and included not only countering poor mail services, but also canvassing in multiple languages. While English was established as the official language of government, a substantial portion of voters remained Dutch-speaking. Particularly within the Western Province, where districts were principally populated by Dutch voters, many of whom did not speak English, candidates and their agents were well aware of the necessities of canvassing in both languages. In 1854, a supporter of John Fairbairn, candidate for the Western Cape district of Swellendam, noted that one of Fairbairn’s promised supporters was doing him a disservice by turning voters against him, and recommended the publication of a letter in the South African Commercial Advertiser as a counter-attack. ‘[H]is agents and his committee here have left no stone unturned to keep you out… I again beg of you, should you publish my letter to keep my name and address secret’, he explained, adding that his letter would ‘fail to hit the mark’ unless ‘published in Dutch’.37 The use of the two languages certainly added an additional layer of fun for those tasked with composing squibs and other scandalous handbills, with the two languages used

36 John Centlivres Chase, The Cape of Good Hope and the Eastern Province of Algoa Bay, &.c (London: J. Haynes, 1843), p. 110. 37 J Hudson to Fairbairn, 11 May 1854, University of Witswatersrand Historical Papers, Fairbairn Papers, A 230 F.

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strategically to cause a stir. In 1859 a squib was composed and circulated in Dutch, but suspected to have been written by an English speaker, in the hope its declarations that ‘Afrikaners’ should unite against the English would stir animosity at the poll.38

Despite many candidates’ efforts, it is likely that the overall paucity of communication only amplified the sense of apathy that marked contests in this period, and electioneering was still limited by comparison to New South Wales and Jamaica. The difficulties of ensuring support at the poll could amplify the desire of many candidates to draw upon the support of mission voters, or amplify animosity against candidates who relied upon their support. Part of the reason Vigne sought out the support of voters within Genadendal and Elim from 1854 to 1864 was to counter his unpopularity amongst settlers within Cape Town, where he remained second to bottom of the poll at contests throughout this period.39 Much of this muted atmosphere continued onto the nomination and the poll, where attendances were often limited outside of Cape Town and Graham’s Town and, in some cases, Port Elizabeth. In certain years, few seats were contested in either house, and contests remained subject to considerable fluctuation.

Jamaica

In spite of a much longer history of elections, canvassing also came to play a significant role in the expansion of political communities within the Jamaican colony in the mid-century, as small freeholders emerged as a decisive force in electoral politics, and new candidates sought out and were elected through their influence. The changes of the 1840s and 1850s were apparent both within the Assembly and throughout the campaign, leading initially to increased attendances at the poll and, by the late 1840s, considerable changes in the composition of Parliament. In Chapter One I outlined the extent to which the Assembly was subject to change over the 1840s to the highest composition of ‘black’

38 Het Volksblad, 20 January 1859, p. 4. 39 See returns of polling and discussions of this over 1858: Het Volksblad, 9 September 1858, p. 4; Cape Argus, 9 September 1858, p. 3; Cape Argus, 14 September 1858, pp. 2-3. CPP 1863 [A1], Report of the Scrutineers Appointed to Examine Votes for Members of the Legislative Council (Western Province), p. 15 has a breakdown of the poll by district.

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and ‘coloured’ members by the opening of the 1850s. Considerable changes also occurred in the composition of the electorate, partially encouraged through new candidates. By the mid-1850s, elections within Jamaica were attracting considerable crowds, with canvasses seeing newly entitled men courted by new and established candidates.

Figure 6: An Uncut Roll of Candidates' Posters, Cape Colony 1854. Each poster is around 5.8 inches by 8.3 inches. Source: National Library of South Africa, Grey Collection, G.39.d.26.

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Politics within Jamaica was structured around deep networks that cut across social, religious and public spheres. The two major parties were known as the 'planter’ or country party and the ‘town’ party, and the two unstable factions were loosely divided by race as well as political affiliation. Longstanding European men tended to be conservative and vote in the ‘planter’ interest, and included individuals such as Samuel Magnus and James Dunstone, who respectively owned vast estates in Trelawny and Saint James, and easily held positions in the Assembly for the former over this period with minimal competition. The ‘town’ party were liberal in politics, and had their major base amongst newer ‘coloured’ and ‘black’ politicians who took up seats in the 1840s. Liberal European settlers elected over this period, including men such as William Smith, also voted with the town party and campaigned amongst small freeholders. Locally born, these men were often deeply concerned with the state of poorer and emancipated Jamaicans, and anxious to assist the development of the emancipated population through local systems of education and other infrastructure.

Changes to Jamaica’s Assembly were initially slow, principally due to prohibitive restrictions placed on candidacy for the House. As Thomas Holt has put this, ‘the black and brown electoral majority had to choose its representatives largely from among the white elite minority’.40 Yet, changes did occur, beginning in 1835 with the election of Robert Osborne and Edward Jordon, the influential proprietors of the liberal Jamaica Watchman, both of whom had led movements appealing for the removal of race-based restrictions in the colony’s franchise. Jordon and Osborne destabilised the position of longstanding members of the island’s Assembly, yet their status and prestige saw the two men widely respected, drawing support from both European and non-European residents by the 1850s. Jordon’s campaigning also followed respectable methods, with Jordon particularly advocating the use of a ‘requisition’ or invitation to stand. Jordon also canvassed for votes through small public meetings, held in courthouses as well as private residences. As Mavis Campbell has noted, many of these initial changes were strongly supported by the Colonial Office, who viewed the liberal policies of men such as Jordon

40 Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, labor and politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 217.

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and Osborne as a check to the longstanding conservatism of the ‘planter’ or ‘country’ party.41

Other wealthy men who took up seats following the removal of race-based restrictions to membership of the Assembly included the conservative solicitor Wellesley Bourke and the proprietor of the conservative Falmouth Post, John Castello, both of whom voted in the ‘planter’ interest. Perhaps the most considerable shift of this period, however, was the emergence of popular merchants and middle-class professionals who tended to almost exclusively focus their campaigns amongst small freeholders. This included men such as George William Gordon, John Nunes and James Taylor, as well as Edward Vickers and Foster Henry March, all of whom strongly supported policies of education and advocated reforms to taxation and franchise restrictions. These campaigns were supported by grass-roots societies, as well as influential local men. Candidates also drew upon religious networks, including the Baptist ministers who led congregations amongst the colony’s Free Villages – settlements established by Baptists in the years following emancipation, which could also hold substantial numbers of voters.

Even against the considerable restrictions of Jamaica’s franchise, campaigning became more extensive over the 1840s and 1850s. By the mid-century, voters were registered in locations across plantations, in villages established following emancipation as well as in the colony’s towns. The comparatively small geographic area of the colony’s electorates rendered canvassing easier (Map One), but districts of fewer than a hundred registered voters made ensuring the support of every available voter more of an imperative.42 Candidates were assisted by local agents, who worked on the ground in villages and on plantations, and this was not limited to newer popular candidates. Agents within this period included men such as Samuel Clarke, Daniel Hart and Foster Henry March, many of whom later became candidates themselves. Foster Henry March, for example, as Swithin Wilmot has shown, worked as a lawyer on the campaign of the first

41 Mavis Campbell, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society: A socio-political history of the free coloureds of Jamaica, 1800-1865 (London: Associated University Presses, 1976), p. 198. 42 H Barkly to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 March 1854, British National Archives, CO 137/322 37.

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black Assemblyman Edward Vickers in 1844, guaranteeing the qualifications of his voters, and in 1851 ran for a seat himself.43 Others, such as Samuel Clarke, held insufficient property to run in the Assembly, but identified constituencies in which seats were winnable and worked to encourage small freeholders to claim their property as voters. Within tiny districts, in which one or two voters could decide a contest, the level of interaction within these campaigns was often considerable. In Saint David in 1851, for example, an election in which Clarke worked on the canvass of the stable owner John Nunes, one voter Joseph Brown claimed to have been canvassed three times before eventually hiding on the day of the election.44 Having refused offers from Nunes’ rival and Nunes himself, Brown conveyed that ‘Samuel Clarke, one of the leading agents of Mr. Nunes, met me at the Baptist Chapel yard’, offering him a vestry position for his vote, with Brown replying that he ‘wanted no Commission’, before hiding on the day of the election.45

It is likely that many of these agents were well-known locally, akin to the ‘organic intellectuals’ or self-trained lawyers who defended non-elite Jamaicans in the courts, identified in the respective works of Mimi Sheller and Diana Paton.46 Men such as Clarke were popular local leaders, but held insufficient property to run for seats in the Assembly.47 For Sheller, these men were an ‘educated group who mediated between peasants and the

43 For more on Edward Vickers, see: Swithin Wilmot, ‘Black Politics in Free Jamaica, 1838-1865,’ in Ulrike Schmieder, Katja Füllberg-Stolberg, Michael Zeuske (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa and the Americas: A comparative approach (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011), pp. 103-106; Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, IB/11/23/19, pp. 105-106. 44 Letter of Joseph Brown, Colonial Standard, 3 February 1851, p. 2. Swithin Wilmot has looked more extensively into this campaign, see: Swithin Wilmot, ‘The Politics of Samuel Clarke: Black Creole Politician in Free Jamaica, 1851-1865’, Caribbean Quarterly, 44 (March-June 1998), pp. 129- 144. 45 Letter of Joseph Brown, Colonial Standard, 3 February 1851, p. 2. 46 Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 221; Diana Paton, No Bond But the Law: Punishment, race, and gender in Jamaican state formation, 1780-1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 174. 47 See: Swithin Wilmot, ‘From Bondage to Political Office: Blacks and Vestry Politics in Two Jamaican Parishes, Kingston and St David, 1831-1865’, in Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards (eds.) Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), p. 307-323; Swithin Wilmot, ‘Race, Electoral Violence and Constitutional Reform in Jamaica, 1830-54,’ Journal of Caribbean History 17, (November 1982), pp. 1-13, for more on vestry politics.

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state’.48 Paton has extended this analysis further to consider not merely the role of these men in mediating (in this case between candidates and small freeholders) but also in structuring hierarchies within free communities. This was not merely in terms of education, but also gender: ‘while the politics of the street and even the courthouse were easily accessible to women, the public meetings organized by men such as March and Grant were entirely dominated by men.’49 Paton’s analysis draws upon records of public meetings, where the names of attendees are known. Unfortunately, similar records are not available for most election meetings, although there is similar evidence that women were often marginal within candidates’ campaigns, even as they remained prominent at the point of the poll.

Within this period, candidates also drew upon the social influence of ministers, and it was not unusual for canvassing to spill into churches and chapels. In 1849, the longstanding position of the former slave owners James Dunstone and Samuel Magnus was threatened for the first time, with the two candidates George Lyons and William Smith stepping forward, partially through the assistance of the Baptist minister John Henderson, who acted as their agent.50 In 1849, a local to Trelawny, where Henderson as well as Lyons and Smith were based, complained that the minister had ‘thrown open his chapel, as a political booth, and outraged every Christian feeling by converting the Communion table into a rostrum, on which Mr. George Lyons mounted’.51 The influence of Baptist ministers remained as controversial as the courting of mission votes in the Cape, but it also reflected differences in the ideologies of Baptist missionaries as well as being a reflection of the core place of religious networks to daily life within Jamaica.52 In later years, men such as Henderson would show their influence not only in encouraging opposition to conservative planters such as Dunstone and Magnus, but also in choosing between popular candidates, and in 1850, Henderson told a public meeting of William Smith’s supporters that he had

48 Paton, No Bond But the Law, p. 174. 49 Paton, No Bond But the Law, p. 175. 50 Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, 1B/11/23/19, p. 99. 51 Letter of ‘Senex,’ Falmouth Post, 2 October 1849, pp. 1-4. 52 See: Catherine Hall, ‘White Visions, Black Lives: The Free Villages of Jamaica,’ History Workshop, no. 93 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 100-132, for more on Free Villages.

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actively encouraged voters to choose Smith ahead of George Lyons at a by-election contested between the two men.53

The form of canvassing within Jamaica was significant not only in shaping engagement at elections, but also in shaping wider animosity towards newer candidates within the Assembly. Candidates’ and agents’ recruitment of support amongst small freeholders and free communities went against longstanding modes of canvassing, and commonly provoked rebuke. By the late 1850s, there was increasing scorn towards new candidates, with accusations of bribery particularly widespread. By 1860, it was widely believed that these agents could decide contests across the colony. Thus, in 1860, the Daily Advertiser noted that a candidate for the seat of Saint Ann had withdrawn, because ‘Mr. Naar De Graaf, who was to support him with his Macedonian phalanx of voters’ had decided to support someone else.54 It is telling that it was not merely new, but also established candidates who increasingly relied upon the support of agents or newly enfranchised voters within this period, and spoke to the partial transformation of Jamaican politics as competition over the Assembly increased.

53 Morning Journal, 15 July 1850, p. 2. See, Morning Journal, 24 June 1850, p. 3, for Henderson’s support of William Smith. 54 Daily Advertiser, 13 July 1860, p. 2.

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Figure 7: The Hustings, Hyde Park, New South Wales. Source: Illustrated Sydney News, 23 December 1869.

The Nomination

Electioneering within the colonies usually began immediately following the dissolution of parliament, and it was often not until months later that the actual election was called. The degree to which this period was filled with activity, meetings and pamphleteering varied considerably, often closely tied into the competition over seats. Yet, expectations of exchange between candidates was also built into the official practice of elections. Across all three colonies, candidates for the Assembly had to be proposed and seconded via public gatherings, giving rise to public meetings even in sites where such gatherings remained rare.

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In both New South Wales and the Cape, elections for the lower house were preceded by a public nomination, at which candidates were to be proposed and seconded by local electors. The practice was based directly on the British ‘hustings’ nomination: an event that had developed over the eighteenth century when the franchise almost wholly excluded working-class voters. The open hustings nomination was an event that provided formal recognition of the limited franchise, and partially exemplifies the difficulty of drawing firm lines between voters and non-voters during colonial elections or basing a history upon enfranchisement alone. By law, voting at these events was to be taken via a show of hands from an open crowd, and the result of the show of hands was binding unless a formal poll was demanded. Thus ahead of the elections in 1854, William Porter instructed returning officers in the Cape that no attempt should be made ‘to separate electors from non-electors in the mixed assembly’.55 In New South Wales, similarly, it was argued that the hustings nomination embodied the ‘principle’ of ‘universal attendance,’ by allowing communities to provide a collective expression of their intended candidate.56 It was also intended to ensure that candidates would be forced to present their policies – not merely to their supporters, but also to whole communities, including the unenfranchised men and women in attendance.

The wider significance of hustings nominations to settlers within colonial New South Wales was shown from the first nominations in 1843 and strongly captured in images such as that of Walter Mason in 1869 (Figure Seven) and that of Mason in 1854 (Figure One). At the first elections in Sydney in 1843, a crowd estimated to be five thousand (roughly the size of the electorate) gathered to listen to candidates’ speeches.57 The candidates had themselves been forced to push through the crowds that ‘thickly lined’ the entirety of the space, as they processed from their committee headquarters to the hustings immediately prior to the meetings’ opening.58 The most unruly of these were gathered immediately below the platform, where, in the words of the Australian’s

55 Zuid Afrikaan (Supplement), 13 April 1854, p. 1. 56 Empire, 4 September 1857, p. 5. 57 The Australian, 14 June 1843. Audit Office to the Colonial Secretary, 20 July 1843, State Records NSW, Bundle: 4/2607.1 Item: 43/4799. 58 The Australian, 14 June 1843, p. 2.

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correspondent, ‘A vociferous knot of about one hundred of the lowest order of the mob, banded themselves around the foot… and kept up such incessant yelling and hooting, that it was not possible, except at occasional intervals, to hear what fell from the various speakers.’59 Attendances at the hustings nomination regularly exceeded those of public meetings during the canvass, bringing together rival candidates and rival factions of the local community. These meetings only grew over the 1850s, where the institution formed one of two key mandatory public gatherings at which candidates would be expected to present their policies. Perhaps the only exception to the widespread interest drawn in nomination meetings over this period remained the pastoral seats on the colony’s edges – districts including Moreton, Wide Bay and Maranoa, or Lachlan and Lower Darling, where voters were principally located on farms considerable distances from the main town, and did not bother to come in to attend a nomination. Many of these seats regularly went uncontested, ending with the presentation of the candidate during the nomination.60

In New South Wales’s regional areas, including districts such as Bathurst, Northumberland or Camden, the construction of the hustings outside reinforced an expectation that candidates were performing to whole communities and not merely enfranchised electors. These meetings also remained key to the construction of difference between male and female non-electors, creating expectations of the forms of engagement that respectable women would partake in. It was not uncommon for women to watch on from the side lines, where their presence on the margins was often taken as a sign of the respectability of the gathering. In Bathurst in 1856, the nomination for the Western Boroughs took place at a hustings constructed within the town’s main square, which was surrounded by an estimated seven hundred to a thousand participants, with women reported to skirt the boundaries of the assembly.61 Elite women were also not uncommonly included amongst candidates’ cavalcades or ‘grand processions’ into the hustings, as a means of reinforcing candidates’ social prestige. At elections over the 1850s James

59 The Australian, 14 June 1843. 60 See, for example, Murrumbidgee, which was only contested once from 1856-1860: Sydney Morning Herald, 9 April 1856, p. 2; Sydney Morning Herald, 22 October 1856, p. 4; Sydney Morning Herald, 5 February 1858, p. 2; Sydney Morning Herald, 11 June 1859, p. 6. 61 Bathurst Free Press, 29 March 1856.

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Macarthur, for instance, was accompanied to the poll by his wife and daughter, and in 1856 they were stationed beside the hustings throughout the meeting, cheered by the crowd.62 Such practices were part of the gendered construction of these cultures, and the community-wide engagement they were deemed to foster.

Within the Cape, where elections were held for both the Legislative Council and the Assembly, the practice of ‘nomination via requisition’ was used for candidates for the Council, meaning that men such as Godlonton did not have to present themselves publicly to electors. From the first elections in 1854, however, candidates for the lower house were required to receive a public nomination at an event located at the central polling place of each constituency – in towns such as Cape Town, Paarl, Stellenbosch, Graham’s Town and Port Elizabeth – before they could stand. Unlike New South Wales, smaller crowds and a desire to reduce the costs of elections saw these events take place in local courthouses, rather than at purpose-built hustings. Additional emphasis was given to the event’s significance via the law, which required candidates to pay a security of fifty pounds each if they wished to contest the result of the show of hands and seek out a formal poll. Due to the low level of competition over seats in the Legislative Assembly in the 1850s and 1860s, it was not uncommon for the election to terminate with the nomination itself, and at elections in Albany, Cradock, Graaff-Reinet, Graham’s Town, Malmesbury, Somerset, Stellenbosch and Victoria in 1854 candidates were elected without contest following the nomination.63

Given the rarity of public interaction during the canvass, and the rarity of public meetings within some of the Cape’s country districts, the institution of open nominations held the potential to further expand the Cape’s public sphere by putting in place a mandatory, scheduled public meeting. Yet, open nominations were one of many practices that worked imperfectly within the Cape, and both candidates and settlers continued to show reluctance to use these forums in the 1850s. It was only in Cape Town that attendances were constant over the 1850s and 1860s, and the several hundred who

62 Sydney Morning Herald, 28 March 1856, p. 5. 63 Cape Gazette, 29 June 1854, pp. 1-2, has results of the first elections for the House of Assembly, including a breakdown of the poll.

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crowded out the Supreme Court on Adderley Street in 1854, for example, contrasted starkly to the attendance at the Cape Division nomination a week earlier, when only a handful had been in attendance and the meeting itself had lasted ten minutes.64 William Porter himself had noted with delight a crowd ‘equalling, if not surpassing that of electors in the great city of London’,65 but severely rebuked crowds on the former occasion who he deemed had wasted a valuable opportunity to test representatives.66 In Graaff-Reinet in 1859, the local candidate Jacobus Meintjes chose not to attend the January nomination held at the town’s courthouse, for fear his presence might ‘influence’ the electors in attendance.67

Small attendances and the tendency for candidates not to attend nominations reflected another way in which often very little was expected of candidates during the Cape’s early elections. When questioned on low attendances, it was commonly remarked that voters expected elections to proceed to a poll, and there seemed little reason for voters to make the journey. At the nomination in Beaufort in 1854, John Molteno received rough treatment from a crowd chiefly composed of his opponents’ supporters, and later explained to the Colonial Secretary that the nomination was thinly attended ‘chiefly on account of the difficulty of making long journeys’ but also because it was presumed the nomination would go onto a poll.68 Again, the minimal attendance at the Cape Division nomination in 1854 was explained by the South African Commercial Advertiser as resulting from both the distance of the nomination from the residences of electors and an expectation ‘that the nomination would be little more than a preparatory form for the contest at the chief polling places’, themselves more easily accessible.69

64 Various reports confirmed attendances, see: South African Commercial Advertiser, 20 April 1854, p. 2; South African Commercial Advertiser, 22 April 1854, p. 2; Zuid Afrikaan, 24 April 1854, p. 2; Zuid Afrikaan, 27 April 1854, p. 3, for Cape Division including editorials on low attendance. See: South African Commercial Advertiser, 2 May 1854, p. 2; Zuid Afrikaan, 8 May 1854, p. 3, for the nomination for Cape Town. 65 Zuid Afrikaan, 8 May 1854, p. 3. 66 South African Commercial Advertiser, 22 April 1854, p. 2. 67 Cape Argus, 6 January 1859, p. 2. 68 J Molteno to the Colonial Secretary, 28 April 1854, Western Cape Archives CO 4075 M83. 69 South African Commercial Advertiser, 2 May 1854, p. 2.

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Where public nominations were well attended, it was clear that they could play a role in shaping the outcome of contests, and the meetings remained sites in which key issues of a district’s future could be debated. Voters were encouraged to ride out to attend public nominations and ensure that the contest went onto a poll, leading in 1854, for example, to one man riding the eighty miles from Prince Albert to Beaufort (later Beaufort West) in order to support a candidate who was himself not present.70 It was not unusual for these forums to be used principally by voters and local men to discuss the various merits of candidates and the best qualities of representatives for their districts, leading to situations such as that in the Paarl in 1859, for example, when a resident interjected immediately prior to the show of hands in order to ‘urg[e] upon those present’ the necessity of supporting the only ‘two candidates really worthy of being the representatives of the Paarl division’, with both candidates subsequently unanimously supported by the two hundred in attendance, and rival candidates withdrawing in response.71 At a nomination held in Stellenbosch in 1859, crowds were encouraged to hold more frequent public meetings, rather than continuing to rely upon practices of circulating public requisitions for signature.72 Similar comments were made at the nomination in Swellendam, held the same day.73

The hustings nominations of the Cape also captured an element of the wider complexity of British electoral culture within the colony, where its institution at once served to further Anglicise public cultures, but also created a forum in which Dutch- speaking communities were debating the future of the colony, including the very place of English in public life. As late as 1869, English attendees at the nomination in the Eastern Province seat of Cradock were partially excluded from the speeches conducted entirely in Dutch, before lightly ‘roasting’ the candidate and asking him to repeat his comments in English for those not acquainted with ‘high Dutch’.74 In Worcester in 1854, the principal of topic of the nomination became the suitability of English as the central language of

70 Zuid Afrikaan, 8 May 1854, p. 3. 71 Cape Argus, 1 January 1859, p. 3. 72 Zuid Afrikaan, 10 January 1859, p. 4. 73 Cape Argus, 4 January 1859, p. 2. 74 Cradock News, 14 May 1869.

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government and the suitability of candidates based on their competency in English. Two speakers rose at the nomination in order to oppose the candidacy of their opponent on the grounds that, in the words of one letter-writer, he knew ‘as much about the English language as a “donkey” about Algebra’.75 The speakers mocked their own incompetency in English, and then noted that voters ‘might as well send a cat to England to represent you there’.76 The derision of their opponent from the platform was unsuccessful in securing the show of hands for their candidate, but it did see their Dutch-speaking opponent retire from the contest, refusing to pay the security, in spite of the nomination being contested to a poll.77

While the meeting did not hold the same local meaning and was not always widely used, it is clear that Dutch and English settlers, as well as indigenous and emancipated populations were participating in the Cape’s nomination, in spite of the tensions it could raise. There is every chance that the positioning of these meetings in central towns partially limited the attendance of mission inhabitants, but in those sites where missions were in close proximity to the central polling place and location of the meeting, it is clear that mission inhabitants were travelling into town in order to attend. As stated in Chapter Two, this included attendances of Kat River settlers in 1859, and may well have included supporters of Silberbauer from Genadendal from 1859 into the 1860s.78 Unfortunately it remains highly difficult to locate Aboriginal Australians within the culture of hustings nominations within colonial New South Wales, with no record made of their attendance. Images, such as that of Walter Mason, with which this thesis began, were perhaps the best suggestion of the assumed racial exclusivity of electoral culture within colonial New South Wales – an assumption that seems to have extended across the entirety of candidates’ canvasses.79

75 Description in a follow-up letter, South African Commercial Advertiser, 25 May 1854, pp. 2-3. 76 Zuid Afrikaan, 1 May 1854, p. 2. 77 See: Zuid Afrikaan, 1 May 1854, p. 2, for a report. The event caused a wider discussion: South African Commercial Advertiser, 25 May 1854, pp. 2-3. 78 Cape Argus, 8 January 1859, p. 2. 79 Illustrated Sydney News, 6 May 1854, p.3.

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The practice of the open ‘hustings’ nomination, although of considerable importance within colonial New South Wales, was never introduced within colonial Jamaica. Here, rather than holding a separate event at which candidates were to be nominated, candidates stepped forward and received the support of local electors immediately upon the poll’s opening, meaning that it was usually impossible to tell whether or not a seat was contested prior to the day of the election. The absence of public nominations reflected the longer history of elections within the colony, but it also took out a key potential point at which non-electors could conclusively influence the process. Instead, the poll itself became the centrepiece of campaigns within Jamaica, with small freeholders, as well as labourers and plantation owners often travelling into town in order to attend the event.

The Poll

The canvassing of voters culminated in the poll itself, an event that remained the centrepiece of candidates’ campaigns, often coming months after the first men had stepped forward. Here, too, there were significant differences across the colonies in the form of voting, the distribution of polling places, and the length of contests, all of which would shape the forms of engagement used by candidates, and the levels of interaction between candidates and their electorates. Three different methods of voting were used, while polling itself lasted from a single day in Jamaica and New South Wales, to five days in the case of the Cape. Such differences remained key to the structure of candidates’ campaigns as carts were hired to bring voters across distances to the poll in the Cape, or inns were held open for candidates’ supporters near central polling places in New South Wales. In Jamaica, the single day of polling in a central site facilitated large numbers of spectators within even small constituencies.

Across the colonies, a central point of difference in the canvassing of voters and the atmosphere of polling remained the allocation of polling places, with the Cape Colony’s twenty or more polling places per district contrasting markedly to the single polling place

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per parish used in Jamaica, where elections often closed within hours of their opening. Until 1832 in Britain, the practice had been for the hustings itself to be a polling place, with voters declaring their choice in a similar manner to the declarations of candidates at the nomination. But a desire to reduce excessive crowds at the point of polling led to an increasing reliance upon multiple booths, as Jon Lawrence, James Vernon and Frank O’Gorman have shown, and from the Reform Act of 1832 the hustings was used at the nomination and close of the election alone.80 Jamaica had never had out-of-doors hustings, and the open nomination was not a feature of elections, but it was in keeping with the much longer history of elections that the central courthouse of the vestry remained the single polling place for each district, and voters would be required to travel in for the event. Voters could also vote in as many constituencies as they were eligible, amplifying the influence of those who held the requisite six pounds of property in multiple districts.

Within Jamaica, elections had long formed moments of social exchange between candidates, voters and members of the vestry, but this culture had been closed to enslaved men and women. The status of the poll as the only official event associated with elections in Jamaica, in addition to provisions that allowed those few registered voters to participate in as many constituencies as they were qualified, amplified the wider interaction it generated. Electoral law facilitated the engagement between voters and candidates at these events, vestries required to provide ‘proper refreshments for the voters, at the expense of the city or parish’.81 At contests including that of Saint Mary in 1835, for example, candidates saved their speeches for the ‘grand lunch’ within the Ball Room of the Port Maria courthouse at the close.82 This activity usually began the day prior to a contest, when voters based outside the town came in for the purposes of participating, and were provided with overnight accommodation. Men who travelled within this period included H. Kingston, who travelled over the water to Port Royal in order to attend elections in the

80 Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1732-1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 132; Lawrence, Electing Our Masters, p. 18; James Vernon, Politics and the People: A study in English political culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 101. 81 Laws of Jamaica, 1840, p. 166. 82 Kingston Chronicle, 19 October 1835, p. 4. See, also, Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, IB/11/23/19.

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early 1860s.83 The culture of free lunches being provided to select groups was to continue in some seats, with elections in Manchester, for instance, closing in 1849 with a lunch within the courthouse amongst the two candidates and the Returning Officer as chair.84

The location of these events, in the central courthouses of parochial vestries may well have amplified the perceived respectability of participation, as well as the challenge new electors posed to established voters and candidates, suddenly subject to mixed crowds within settings that had only twenty years previously been populated by European candidates and voters alone. Within Jamaica, courthouses had long sat at the centre of respectable political engagement, often set against marketplaces that remained key sites of commerce and social life for non-elite Jamaicans.85 Buildings such as the courthouse of Falmouth held the offices of the magistrates, the members of the vestry, court and jury rooms and were the location into which taxes had to be paid. They were also a key site of public meetings, as well as social gatherings. When petitions were to be composed to the Assembly or the Colonial Office, locals would request use of the courthouse for a public meeting, from which a petition would be drawn. A week prior to the election of Trelawny in 1849, for example, the courthouse of Falmouth was used for a dinner to commemorate the abolition of slavery, a ticketed event attended by the parish’s respectable middle classes, with middle-class women also requesting to be in attendance.86

The changes of Jamaica’s electorate were nonetheless particularly acute at the poll, where courthouses were increasingly crowded with small freeholders. One of the consequences of new practices of canvassing among small freeholders living in free communities and on plantations was increased attendance, not merely of electors, but also non-electors who travelled into town in order to attend the event. It is likely that voters were encouraged to the poll through refreshments, as Gad Heuman has also noted, and receipts for George William Gordon’s campaign for Saint Thomas in the East in 1865

83 H. Kingston, 12 October 1861, Jamaican National Library, Richard Hill Correspondence, MS 756. 84 ‘Manchester Election,’ Falmouth Post, 21 August 1849, pp. 1-4. 85 See: Mimi Sheller, Citizenship From Below, pp. 48-87. 86 Morning Journal, 30 July 1849, p. 2.

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show ‘music’, ‘bread’, ‘cheese’ and ‘ale’ amongst the expenses incurred, although the small costs involved suggest that provisions were not extensive.87 Supporters of Jordon in Kingston were also advised where they could find ‘refreshments’ during the election, with headquarters established in an inn adjacent to the polling place.88 In the 1854 election captured in Duperly’s picture, correspondents relayed that a ‘drum and fife’ band was organised to draw interest in the uncontested election. The candidates were Jordon, Foster Henry March, as well as the large landholder, Peter Alexander Espeut, all of whom were elected unopposed with sixty-five votes each, and the former two men addressed crowds outside when the contest closed at midday.89

While many feared violence and disorder at elections within this period, (taken up in greater detail in the following chapter), such scenes still occurred at a minority of contests. Residents more commonly attended the poll in order to celebrate candidates or to take part in the wider social engagement the event offered. At the Trelawny election of 1850, contested between the popular candidates George Lyons and William Smith, voters flocked into the central town of Falmouth the previous day, and Smith was accompanied to the poll by the minister John Henderson who had also thrown his support behind him.90 Here, as in many other contests, constituencies of under a hundred registered voters drew crowds of several hundred who filled into squares in order to follow the proceedings of polls. In Montego Bay in 1854, the celebrations that had accompanied the closing of the poll for Saint James included not merely a dinner amongst the supporters of the conservative new member Wellesley Bourke, but also a dance in town.91 Such shifts can certainly be exaggerated, and it is clear that only a small portion of Jamaica’s population was attending elections, and a still-smaller group was qualified to formally participate. Yet,

87 The cost was one pound and sixteen shillings, and in total it was only ten bottles of ale. See: BPP 1866 (3683-I), Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission 1866, Part 2: Minutes of Evidence, p. 1035, also quoted in Gad Heuman, The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 66. 88 Morning Journal, 27 August 1849, p. 2. 89 Daily Advertiser, 19 September 1854, p. 3. 90 Morning Journal, 15 July 1850, p. 2. See, Morning Journal, 24 June 1850, p. 3, for Henderson’s support of William Smith. 91 W Dendy to Underhill, 24 March 1852, National Library of Jamaica, Baptist Missionary Society 1844-1854, MS 378. The minister, Thomas Hands, was reprimanded for his attendance.

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it is also clear that elections within this period were drawing crowds and support far beyond the boundaries of formal enfranchisement, and were serving a purpose beyond the immediate outcome of choosing a new representative in Parliament.

Equal levels of excitement were evident on polling day within New South Wales, and the event itself usually terminated with a mass meeting, similar in size to the nomination, when candidates returned to the hustings platform in order to deliver a final address. As in Jamaica, crowds in New South Wales were amplified by the allocation of polling places in major towns, although in New South Wales these were usually supplemented by multiple polling places across vast districts. Complaints were frequently made that the flooding of rivers, poor roads or considerable distances made it impossible to attend – but the situation of Yellow Jimmy in New England, where he and other electors travelled ten miles in order to poll their votes in Armidale, was quite common.92 Others requested that polling places be allocated to avoid ‘doing an injustice to [their] families by the loss of a days [sic] work’ – with polling across these vast areas was taken over a single day.93 In order to process votes, multiple polling places were also allocated in Sydney, with the city’s ten to thirteen thousand voters attending polling places in fourteen sites across the city.94 Here, it was principally only at the close of the poll that electors congregated as a whole. Thus, in September 1856, the closing of the poll coincided with streams of voters making their way into the city centre. Again, in 1858, correspondents noted the doubling and tripling of crowds at the hustings in Hyde Park, until an estimated eight thousand, according to the Sydney Morning Herald’s correspondent, and twelve thousand, according to the Empire had gathered for the speeches of the successful and unsuccessful candidates.95

92 Such complaints were numerous. See, for example: Returning Office of Liverpool Plains and Gwydir to the Colonial Secretary, August 1857, State Records Office NSW, Box 4/3375 Item 56/2998, put by with 58/380. Others had their nearest polling place ninety miles away. See: H. H Brown to the Colonial Secretary, January 1858, State Records Office NSW, Box 4/3375 Item 58/399. 93 W Knox Child to the Colonial Secretary, 20 January 1858, State Records Office NSW, Box 4/3375 Item: 58/303. 94 Details of polling places can be found: Empire, 5 September 1856, p. 4. 95 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 January 1858, p. 4; Empire, 16 January 1858, p. 4.

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The considerable interest accorded to elections in colonial New South Wales meant that candidates often had to do little to bring voters to the poll by the time of the election, although many still held inns open or placed touters at the doors of courthouses to further incentivise attendances. In Parramatta in 1858, the courthouse was surrounded by voting tables, and agents picked out the men who they had canvassed and called them over to fill out papers.96 Similar scenes characterised the poll in Darlinghurst, where one correspondent – self-described as a ‘novice in electioneering matters’ – noted that as voters approached the courthouse they were approached and walked over to the candidates’ tables.97 The pressure put on voters was likely quite considerable, and witnesses to the Parramatta election in 1858 relayed the manner through which touters had called out to voters who looked like they were heading towards the wrong table.98 Polling rooms were equally lively, with elections from 1843 to 1858 characterised by densely packed courthouses and inns where electors and non-electors could cry out their support or opposition to an elector’s decision. The voting used in colonial New South Wales, that of an open ballot, was intended to provide partial protection to the voter, but the culture of open voting was sufficiently pronounced that an alternate tradition of voters declaring their choice ‘viva voce’ as they handed over the ballot developed.

Polling day was subject to the same dynamics of gender as the nomination and much of the canvass, where women as well as children were often present, but rarely considered to be included in shaping candidates’ campaigns. Historians have associated the ‘family festivals’ of elections with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, following the introduction of bans on using inns or hotels as polling places in addition to the ballot.99 There is, however, considerable evidence to suggest that even the earliest elections of colonial New South Wales were viewed to be moments of interaction between candidates and the whole community, in spite of the potential for drunken disturbances they entailed. In the Northumberland Boroughs in 1856, the engagement of women at the

96 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 860. 97 Empire, 22 August 1858, p. 5. 98 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 860. 99 Marian Sawer, ‘Pacemakers for the World?’ in Marian Sawer (ed.), Elections, Full, Free and Fair (Annandale: Federation Press, 2001), pp. 11-14.

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poll included both partisan displays from those local to the town who dressed in candidates’ colours, as well as the events of the close of the poll, when crowds began to gather outside the courthouse at the central hustings in Maitland. Here, one correspondent relayed, ‘the ladies of the town shared in the universal excitement, and crowded the windows and doors of houses, showing by the colours they wore the encouragement they gave to different candidates’.100 Correspondents noted that stores had been closed, with many taking the event as a holiday.101

The excitement of the poll within both Jamaica and New South Wales continued to contrast with the Cape Colony for much of the 1850s and 1860s, where the concern of candidates remained ensuring that voters would attend polls in spite of known difficulties in travel and suspected lack of interest. Considerable efforts were made by officials to attempt to render voting easier, and one of the most pronounced contrasts between the colony and voting elsewhere was the number of polling places allocated and the period allowed for polling. In the Cape, the residence of every Field Cornet was allocated as a polling place, alongside mission stations and public offices in towns, meaning that large numbers of votes were collected at private residences on farms.102 In the Western Cape district of Swellendam twenty-five polling places were allocated, including the mission station of Zuurbraak. Similarly, in the Eastern Province district of Uitenhage, candidates for the Assembly needed to send scrutineers to twenty-four polling places, and in many cases it was the returning officer alone who was present. Cape Town, Graham’s Town and Port Elizabeth remained the only constituencies in which the traditional model of a single polling place was used, and here polls remained open for several days.103

The difficulties of polling within the Cape were regularly noted by candidates, and efforts were often made to ensure that there would be sufficient support at the poll. In 1865, a candidate for Port Elizabeth claimed that voters ‘would rather stay away altogether than walk one or two miles for any Candidate’ and requested two further polling places

100 Sydney Morning Herald, 31 March 1856, p. 4. 101 Sydney Morning Herald, 31 March 1856, p. 4. 102 For a full breakdown of polling places, see: Cape Gazette, 5 January 1854, pp. 3-5. 103 Cape Gazette, 5 January 1854, pp. 3-5.

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within the town.104 Similarly, following a low attendance of voters at the Beaufort nomination, and following his failed bid for the Legislative Council, John Molteno personally paid for notices to be sent through the Field Cornets, for fear that there would be ‘scarcely any attendance of voters’ at the ‘Country polling-places’.105 Across the districts, carts hired by candidates remained a staple component of campaigns well into the 1860s. This included individuals such as J Collett, who in 1869 informed Robert Godlonton that he would visit neighbouring farms and take ‘as many… as [his] cart will hold and possibly hire another cart or two’ to assist voters in getting to the local poll.106

The efforts of candidates were particularly pronounced within major towns where single polling places and larger numbers of voters made these efforts worthwhile, but even then, it was principally only in Cape Town that anything like the atmosphere of elections common to Jamaica and New South Wales was consistently apparent. In spite of having thousands of registered voters, a desire to prevent double voting or personation meant that all five thousand votes for Cape Town were to be processed in a single polling place, with three thousand votes, for instance, being taken over five days in Cape Town’s Supreme Court in 1858.107 While participation remained muted elsewhere, records suggest that even the earliest elections within Cape Town were akin to small festivals, with entertainment funded at the expense of candidates. In 1854, it was noted that the regimental band had been set up in the Botanic Gardens, a popular site of leisure for Cape Town’s middle classes.108 Women may well have been present, although no mention is made within electoral correspondence for this period. The engagement of both middle- class and working voters in these forms of entertainment was, however, regularly emphasised by correspondents. For the South African Commercial Advertiser’s writer, the entertainment funded by candidates for the election ‘show how much music is relished by

104 P Caro to the Colonial Secretary, 30 December 1865, Western Cape Archives CO 4138 47. 105 J Molteno to the Civil Commissioner of Beaufort, 1 May 1854, Western Cape Archives CO 4075 M83; J Molteno to R Southey, 28 April 1854, Western Cape Archives CO 4075 M83. Molteno paid £152’ 6’ 8 in order that notice be sent through the Field Cornets. 106 J Collett to Robert Godlonton, 5 February 1869, University of Witswatersrand Historical Papers, Godlonton Papers, A43 1151. In keeping with the irregularities of polling at this time, Collett found that none of the men on neighbouring farms had been registered to vote. 107 Cape Argus, 14 September 1858, p. 3. 108 South African Commercial Advertiser, 16 May 1854, p. 2; Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, p. 53.

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all classes’, with ‘Candidates… not grudg[ing] the expense, for the purpose of bringing out their supporters and keeping them in hand’, expressing hope that it would become a more regular occurrence.109

The structure of the franchise in the Cape Colony was such that candidates courted the votes of ex-slave, Khoisan and Malay voters, all of whom were often prominent at the poll, albeit not always in the canvass. In Cape Town, carts were sent into the ‘Malay Quarter’ of the city to collect voters and bring them either to the hustings in the Parade or to the Supreme Court– a practice that would continue into the 1860s and 1870s.110 There is some chance that, here too, religious networks formed a means through which voters were canvassed. In 1854 there was a small scandal when members of the Cape Town municipality (a regular source of controversy in elections of Cape Town) had circulated ‘how to vote’ cards amongst the Malay priests, with the intention that they not merely instruct, but also suggest for whom individuals should vote.111 The scandal, never proved, was nonetheless in keeping with a period in which considerable suspicion surrounded the canvassing of non-European voters, who remained largely excluded from the public meetings of candidates at which much of the policy of campaigns was discussed and formed.

It is clear that contests could still be quite marked within this period, even if inconsistent interest was taken by voters themselves. The energy exhibited by candidates was often in spite of the relative lack of interest from voters. At a by-election in Worcester, the methods adopted by candidates to ensure support at the poll were widely discussed by correspondents via the Zuid Afrikaan, with writers reviewing the extent to which candidates were relying on carts to bring voters to the poll. In keeping with continued prejudices against many non-European voters amongst many sections of the Cape’s European population, one correspondent went so far as to identify exactly how many ‘white’ and ‘colored’ men had voted for each candidate, while another noted the methods through

109 South African Commercial Advertiser, 16 May 1854, p. 2. 110 Zuid Afrikaan (Supplement), 12 January 1854, p. 1. 111 Oloof Marthinus Bergh, ‘More Disreputable Dodging at the Hotel de Ville [The Town House],’ 1854, National Library of South Africa, Grey Collection, G.16.c.92.

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which both groups had been solicited: ‘Carts with placards – “vote for Mr. Denyssen,” &c., on both sides, were in commotion from eight in the morning… Had this not been the case, at least nine-tenths of the number… would have been kept away from the polling place’.112 The report noted that the ‘coloured’ voter, Joseph Jassan, was stated to have been visited at home by agents on behalf of the candidate, who intended to see him brought in to poll at the closest polling place on the Hex River. Another seven voters were brought to the poll on a ‘mule wagon’ from Tulbagh.113

The level of interest exhibited in Cape Town’s elections was far from consistent across the Western and Eastern Provinces and, as correspondence well into the 1860s would emphasise, candidates would continue to struggle to ensure support at the poll. In spite of the considerable controversies of the franchise and the energy with which the constitution was debated, the level of interest was not sustained into the early years of elections. Difficulties in canvassing were amplified through the poor state of the roads, and scattered state of the population, yet, as Giliomee has noted, it also came from the minimal interest taken in the proceedings of Parliament in its early years.114 There is every chance that the perceived apathy that surrounded elections in the Cape Colony only amplified growing cultures of bribery, taken up in greater detail in Chapter Five, or the intimidation apparent in Chapter Two. The case of the Cape Colony certainly contrasted to concurrent elections occurring in Jamaica and New South Wales, where election day was more routinely taken as a public holiday, attended by women and children as well as male electors and non-electors.

Conclusion

Cultures of electioneering remained part of the operation of elections within this period, often strongly shaping the wider meaning and social significance of these events to growing colonial communities, if not also shaping lines of inclusion and exclusion

112 ‘F. L. Lindenberg (allias),’ Zuid Afrikaan, 20 March 1856, p. 7. 113 Zuid Afrikaan, 13 March 1856, p. 7. 114 Giliomee, ‘The Beginnings of Afrikaner Ethnic Consciousness,’ p. 26.

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throughout the many meetings and events they involved. Candidates were well aware of the necessity of ensuring their success through an expansive canvass, particularly within a period prior to the emergence of political parties, when the burdens of canvassing fell upon the individual candidate in question. In colonial New South Wales, particularly, both the strength of a working-class public sphere and competition over seats saw considerable expectations placed on candidates, and it was perhaps here more than any other colony at this time that elections remained expansive, drawing in thousands of electors and non- electors. In Jamaica within the same period, the increasing influence of small freeholders in line with tensions within the Assembly led to much higher levels of canvassing, as men moved out into free communities to court votes. It was principally in the Cape Colony where inconsistent interest in elections saw often low turnouts at the poll, and candidates often relied upon vast networks of agents to ensure their success at the poll.

Many of the practices explored within this chapter held significance beyond the immediate outcomes of elections, often contributing to the formation and expansion of political communities within the colonies. Practices including mass public meetings, extensive press correspondences as well as door to door canvassing or the use of entertainment to bring voters to the poll were part of processes by which the issues and concerns of elections were broadcast across colonial constituencies. Even within the Cape, the act of candidates’ agents going from farm to farm served to link up still-disconnected parts of the colony. Detailed examinations of candidates’ campaigns, and the manner through which they were shaped around the official practices of the election including the nomination and the open poll also highlights the considerable work electioneering could involve, with candidates relying upon extensive networks of hired and voluntary agents. It is likely that these cultures were shaping the very accessibility of seats in Parliament, with candidates in the Cape Colony, for example, often struggling to obtain sufficient support without relying on an extensive canvass.

Tracing the candidate through the many stages of the election, this chapter has aimed to emphasise the expansive cultures through which these men attempted to ensure their success, highlighting how much more there was to an election for those included than merely the act of casting a vote. Turning away from these official practices, to the cultures

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of violence and bribery, the next two chapters examine how both electors and non-electors resisted the formal processes of electioneering and vote collection, and the mechanisms via which the franchise could be reshaped from below throughout the election.

146 Chapter Four

Disorder and Dissent: Cultures of Violence in Colonial Elections

‘Whatever your notion of the propriety of electing Mr. Simon, instead of Mr. Clemetson as coroner, might have been, you had no right to attempt to carry that out by force and violence… and you, women, were just as bad as the men in mixing yourselves in things which you had nothing to do’1

Assizes Court, Saint Marys, Jamaica, 1849.

In July 1849, registered voters travelling to a courthouse election within Jamaica were greeted with what would come to be a defining feature of contests within the mid- century colony. A crowd of local men and women had been organised to surround the parochial building and, based on their knowledge of local voters, were deciding who should be admitted to the central hall within.2 The cause of the crowd was Robert Clemetson, a freed slave and ex-slave owner who was attempting to obtain the lucrative position of the parish’s coroner. Unable to prevent his election by legal means, the crowd had ‘taken possession of the poll’, filling around the space of the courthouse and threatening any of Clemetson’s supporters as they approached. The crowd of men and women were one of many, almost identical, displays of interference to occur within elections that year – taking place at both parochial and parliamentary contests across the colony. Their appearance

1 ‘Middlesex Assizes,’ Morning Journal, 28 June 1849, p. 1. 2 Morning Journal, 16 April 1849, p. 3; ‘Middlesex Assizes,’ Morning Journal, 28 June 1849, p. 1; Middlesex Indictment Register 1847-1850, Jamaican Archives, 1A/7/2/6.

was emblematic of the heightened tensions surrounding politics within the island, and the measures taken by candidates and supporters (both electors and non-electors) to shape a contest’s outcomes.

One of the difficulties with any history of political rights that rests upon definitions of enfranchisement alone is that participation at an election was never solely shaped by voting, nor was it limited to those formally enfranchised. The preceding chapters of this thesis have explored this with reference to registration and hustings culture and the following chapter will explore this in relation to bribery and changing perceptions of voter ‘freedom.’ Yet, perhaps the most critical feature in this respect, and the feature perhaps most expected of this period, was organised intimidation and violence. Violence was a much debated and widely expected element of elections within Jamaica and New South Wales, one often considered as an inevitable outcome of open polls. It was one defended by some in New South Wales as part of the ‘manly integrity’ of voting; and viewed by others within Jamaica as symptomatic of issues within colonial society. It also remained a feature that was, perhaps unexpectedly, absent within the Cape, where violence remained rare at early elections. Reading violence across these three sites reveals much about changing attitudes to order, and wider associations between ‘safety’ and the legitimacy of an election. It shows shifting attitudes to appropriate levels of unrest at an election, as officials across the three sites struggled to determine the best means of conducting an election.

In taking up an analysis of violence and its relationship to enfranchisement, this chapter engages with a rich scholarly field. Popular protest, of which electoral violence is often contained within, has long occupied the attention of both imperial, colonial and national historians, particularly those interested in its impact on changing policies regarding formal enfranchisement. For imperial historians, the mid-century was marked by violent and influential crises, not limited to the Indian Mutiny and the Morant Bay Rebellion.3 This

3 See, for example: Miles Taylor, ‘The 1848 revolutions and the British empire,’ Past & Present 166 (2000), pp. 146-180; Catherine Hall, ‘The nation within and without,’ in Catherine Hall, Keith McClellan, and Jane Rendall (eds.), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 179-233.

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sense of rising tension against widespread concern with order is also present within Jamaican histories of this period, where Morant Bay remains similarly, and understandably dominant. Aiming to explain the outbreak of violence in 1865, scholars including Swithin Wilmot, Jonathan Dalby and Mimi Sheller have noted episodes of electoral violence during the 1840s and 1850s as one part of a wider analysis of increasing riot and public protest over the middle decades of the nineteenth century.4 From these studies, it has been suggested that in the decades prior to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, organised protest, petitioning and other forms of public outcry increased, and episodes of violence at elections between 1849 and 1860 can be seen as part of this rising tension. Similar discussions of electoral violence as a form of collective action have also been broached within Australian colonial historiography, where both Sean Scalmer and Terry Irving have drawn on the theories of sociologist Charles Tilly. These scholars, in common with Tilly, aim to rescue violence from critique and show its role as one form of ‘contentious’ interference or interaction used by those excluded from political processes to carve out space for themselves.5

Existing approaches to violence, particularly those of imperial scholars, have been influential in highlighting the lasting, and wide-ranging impact of imperial crises, and the manner in which moments such as Morant Bay served to galvanize opinion across the Empire. So, too, have those of Jamaican historians in contextualising the atmosphere of the colony prior to its occurrence. Yet, an analysis focused on moments of crisis alone also

4 Jonathan Dalby, ‘Precursors to Morant Bay: The Pattern of Popular Protest in Post- Emancipation Jamaica (1834-1865), Journal of Caribbean History 50, no. 2 (2016), pp. 99-129; Swithin Wilmot, ‘“Females of Abandoned Character”? Women and Protest in Jamaica, 1838- 1865,’ in Verene Shepherd, Barbara Bailey and Bridget Brereton (eds.), Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995), pp. 279-295; Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black publics and peasant radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 2000). See, also: Lorna Simmonds, ‘Civil Disturbances in Western Jamaica, 1838- 1865,’ Jamaica Historical Review XIV (1984), pp. 1-16; which offers another excellent survey of violence across the island. 5 Terry Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty: The democratic movement in New South Wales before 1856 (Annandale: Federation Press, 2006); Sean Scalmer, ‘Containing Contention: A reinterpretation of democratic change and electoral reform in the Australian colonies,’ Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 3 (2011), pp. 337-356; Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Charles Tilly, Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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risks flattening out politics, or painting violence as solely associated with anti-colonial concerns. It stresses the worst instances, overlooking the extent to which reports of violence not only represented efforts to resist exclusion, but could also represent reactions to social change. Diana Paton, for instance, has argued that ‘the focus on post- emancipation riots and rebellions has been at the expense of a broader understanding of the dynamics of daily life’, and risks a historiography that portrays ‘a heroic but uncomplicated people who “endure[d] what they had to” and “resist[ed] however and whenever they could.”’6 While the focus on violence remains critical to histories of elections within this period, here I wish to qualify existing histories of violence to show the level of variation in episodes of violence, and the multiple motivations of those engaging in them.

Qualifying these approaches offers an opportunity to further nuance histories of violence and popular protest within this period, and raises questions of how we can, given widespread calls for order, account for the radically different priorities placed on the eradication of electoral violence across the British colonial world. It also serves to reinforce the multiple motivations of those involved, and the multiple consequences of attempts to prevent it. Where violence at elections is often considered as an expression of resistance from those not formally enfranchised, here I emphasise that violence was never limited to the non-enfranchised alone and nor was it necessarily done for political purposes. Taken comparatively, the considerable variety of forms of violence, perceptions of its legitimacy, motivations for participation, and the impacts of attempts to prevent it become apparent. So, too, do the broader, enduring impacts of perceptions of the boundaries of political inclusion.

Bringing these three sites together also highlights one of the greater ironies and inconsistencies that surrounded attempts to outlaw violence, relating to its surprising implications for the participation of women across the colonial world. Historians have widely noted the connection between attempts to make elections safer and wider

6 Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, race, and gender in Jamaican state formation, 1780-1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 159.

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perceptions of the suitability of women’s participation at elections, with reforms such as the secret ballot often taken as necessary precursors to women’s formal enfranchisement.7 While violence was often used as a justification for decisions to withhold formal political enfranchisement, this did not mean that women were not using violence to reshape their participation – and this too, was deeply rooted in differences of context. The manner in which the pursuit of greater safety at elections was simultaneously pursued as leading to the wider inclusion of women in some sites, while reinforcing their exclusion in others serves as a reminder of the complex history of democratic change over the nineteenth century.

Organised Violence at Jamaican Elections, 1849-1860

The events at the Saint Mary election in 1849 were initially described by the Morning Journal as ‘one of the most serious rows that ever occurred in the island’, but it was by no means the most severe episode of electoral violence within the post-emancipation period.8 By the late 1840s, violence was becoming an increasingly influential and increasingly feared part of elections across the colony. Aspects of this fear were bound up in the wider prejudices of Jamaican society, with many residents quick to take to the colonial press to express their contempt for the growing interaction of lower class Jamaican residents at the polls. While the use of violence remained limited to a minority of contests, the comments nonetheless reflected a growing reality in which forms of organised intimidation were increasingly being used to turn an election’s result, with crowds prearranged by many candidates or their agents to attempt to turn the results of a contest.

Although there are no full records of disturbances at Jamaica’s elections, and records of violence must be treated with considerable care, crosschecking electoral

7 Marian Sawer, ‘Pacemakers for the World?’ in Marian Sawer (ed.), Elections, Full, Free and Fair (Annandale: Federation Press, 2001), p. 12; Sophia A. Van Wingerden, The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866-1928 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Patricia Grimshaw, Women's Suffrage in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1987), p. 15. 8 Morning Journal, 30 and 31 March 1849, p. 2.

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correspondence, judicial records and poll books provides a sense of the emergence and prevalence of reported agitation and intimidation at mid-century elections within the colony.9 One of the first incidents was noted in Saint Catherine in 1835, five years after the removal of race-based distinctions in Jamaica’s franchise, when a small group was reported to have made a ‘ludicrous’ attempt to ‘prevent voters coming up to the poll’, which was quickly prevented by the voters present.10 Again, in 1845, a crowd of labourers armed with matching sticks were reported to have arrived at the poll of Clarendon to support the election of Charles Hamilton Jackson.11 The disturbance of 1845 was significant, not merely as one of the earlier organised uses of intimidation by a candidate, but also as one of the first instances that police were called in to a Jamaican election. Poll books reveal that between 1849 and 1860, protests of disturbances were made on fifteen separate occasions out of over sixty-five contests, leading to the suspension of voting on four occasions.12

The scale of disorder at elections ranged vastly in severity: with scuffles or large- scale crowds receiving censure alongside riots that ended in multiple arrests and long-term prison sentences. Amongst the worst, and certainly the most widely studied, was that of Saint David in 1851, which ended in the death of a parochial official as well as three policemen called in to protect candidates and officials, with more than fifty indicted for riot and five for murder.13 Witnesses relayed that on the morning of the election, three to four hundred had arrived to take part in a contest at which fewer than thirty cast their votes, and were suspected of having been organised to storm the courthouse and the streets if their favoured candidate was unsuccessful. On other occasions, candidates were

9 Here I am using records of disturbances preserved in poll books, in addition to reports captured in election correspondence, and some judicial and parochial records. See, particularly: Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, IB/11/23/19. 10 Kingston Chronicle, 30 October 1835, p. 2. 11 For details on this riot, see: Swithin Wilmot, ‘Race, Electoral Violence and Constitutional Reform in Jamaica, 1830-54,’ Journal of Caribbean History 17, (November 1982), pp. 1-13. 12 Unfortunately, it is not wholly possible to state how many contests occurred at this time. Poll Books within the Jamaican archives are remarkably complete, but are missing entries. See: Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, IB/11/23/19. 13 ‘Surry Assizes,’ Colonial Standard, 31 July 1851, p. 2; 1 August 1851, p. 1; 7 August 1851, pp. 1- 3; Morning Journal, 4 August 1851, pp. 2-3; 7 August 1851, pp. 2-3.

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stoned leaving the courthouse at a poll’s close, or celebratory dinners were stormed.14 Crowds tended to be principally composed of poorer residents, although they were often led by well-known locals, themselves voters, who rallied and organised the disturbance.15

Within a colony in which elections had largely been the prerogative of elite and middle-class Europeans for over a century, it is clear that both crowds and violent intimidation were challenging acceptable forms of participation. Both the novelty and the fear of this shift was captured in public correspondence, where commentators spoke with distress at the levels of disorder that had come to mark Jamaica’s elections. It was ‘A Parishioner’, rather than the Morning Journal’s correspondent who informed the public of the riot at the Saint Mary’s election of 1849: ‘A very serious disturbance did take place, after the ex-Coroner left the hustings, occasioned by a prepared mob, whose declared object was [to] commit insolence on all who supported Mr. Clemetson.’16 He added, ‘You will, perhaps, not be surprised when I say that the principal actors in the riot were common females, who reside on and about the Bay’.17 Reporters in Manchester in 1849 spoke of candidates’ post-election lunches being interrupted when ‘idlers’ burst into the courthouse and ‘seized on everything on the table’.18

Fear of disorder within many of these reports was bound up in the wider tensions of Jamaican society, and reflected a prejudiced concern with the numbers of poorer ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ Jamaicans who were registering their claims to vote or taking part in elections as non-electors. Mimi Sheller’s claim that ‘official reports of “riots” … are not a reliable source for gauging popular grievances’ is particularly true of electoral correspondence, which was written for a literate public that excluded most of the individuals who participated as non-electors.19 Such depictions are, however, illustrative for the light they shed on how the violent interaction of non-electors was challenging accepted forms of

14 For example, Morning Journal, 15 July 1850, p. 2. 15 Court records cross-checked with voters’ lists confirm some attendees of riots to have been registered voters. See, for example: Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, IB/11/23/19, pp. 105-106; ‘Surry Assizes,’ Colonial Standard, 31 July 1851, p. 2; Colonial Standard, 1 August 1851, p. 1. 16 Morning Journal, 16 April 1849, p. 3. 17 Morning Journal, 16 April 1849, p. 3. 18 ‘Manchester Election,’ Falmouth Post, 21 August 1849, pp. 1-4. 19 Sheller, Democracy After Slavery, p. 182.

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engagement at elections from groups who otherwise leave little trace in the archive. Objections, such as those quoted above, were infused with perceptions of respectable forms of contention and political interaction, seen to be parodied by the attempts of lower class non-electors to engage in courtroom polls.

For writers in the Morning Journal and the Colonial Standard, even non-violent crowds were an issue, with the presence of ‘idlers’ deemed to be a symptom of a lack of industry amongst working Jamaicans, rather than evidence of an engaged community. ‘The practice of large numbers of persons attending elections, and frequently creating disturbances at them, has become common in the island’, one writer in the Morning Journal expressed in 1851.20 Similarly, for the Falmouth Post, it was ‘but recently that this state of things has commenced, and there is not the least difficulty in tracing its cause [to the low state of the franchise]’.21 Such complaints were remarkably similar to the courthouse audiences identified in Diana Paton’s work on justice in the pre- and post-emancipation period. As Paton has noted, ‘These people’s presence was offensive not only because of its disruptive potential, but also because the individuals were not at work’. Idleness was commonly identified as a major source of crime within post-emancipation Jamaica, and thus, Paton notes, the presence of men and women within the courthouse implied that a space ‘that was intended to maintain order was becoming instead a source of crime’.22 Evidently, ‘idlers’ at elections were equally objectionable, given that the franchise rested upon low levels of property ownership and the payment of taxes. Attendees were asserting their rights to inclusion while simultaneously neglecting the duties by which they might be legally enfranchised – ‘taking possession’ of political rights to which they were not entitled. For such correspondents, it was apparent attendees should pursue their formal rights and not interrupt the rights of those legally enfranchised.

Women were often singled out within these crowds, both by witnesses and the justices trying cases of assault. This gendering could amplify perceptions of the severity of unrest, or the level to which it was endemic, with judges referring to women in riots as ‘of

20 Morning Journal, 8 and 9 August 1851, p. 2. 21 Falmouth Post, quoted in Colonial Standard, 14 August 1851, p. 2. 22 Paton, No Bond But the Law, p. 169.

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the worst character.’23 Yet, the presence of women within crowds was also highly reflective of wider differences in the history and social structure of Jamaican society, particularly the impacts of the island’s recent history of slavery, which had until the 1830s dictated both labour and familial relations amongst the enslaved. Mimi Sheller, for example, has speculated that women’s roles as fieldworkers contributed to their participation in labour riots both prior to and following emancipation.24 By the 1850s, both family and public life within Jamaica were being transformed, with enlightenment principles of sexual divisions between public and private increasingly associated with respectability. In this respect, the accepted position of women on the streets was particularly significant within the electoral culture of the 1850s, as political rights were extended to free men. As emphasised in Chapter Three, the expanding public sphere of candidates’ meetings and commerce, as well as the very concept of political rights were viewed to be masculine domains, and here women’s involvement remained a challenge to respectable political interaction. Such divisions seem not to have applied within many of Jamaica’s poorer communities, however, where women continued to play a role in public politics. Single women journeyed to the poll of Saint David from Poor Man’s Corner, and socialised with male electors and non-electors throughout the day, long prior to the riot.25 Women were also present within the square of Morant Bay in 1849, within the courthouse of Saint James and were noted within the riot of Saint Marys.26 Even as campaign meetings were increasingly viewed as sites through which men argued for their entitlements, women continued to shape campaigns on the street.

23 Daily Advertiser, 12 August 1853, quoted in Dalby, ‘Precursors to Morant Bay,’ p. 104. 24 Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic agency and caribbean freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); Mimi Sheller, ‘Quasheba, Mother, Queen: Black women's public leadership and political protest in post-emancipation Jamaica, 1834–65,’ Slavery and Abolition 19, no. 3 (1998), pp. 90-117. Wilmot has given an overview of women’s participation in riot and public protest: Wilmot, ‘Females of Abandoned Character’. 25 See witness statements: ‘Surry Assizes,’ Colonial Standard, 31 July 1851, p. 2; Colonial Standard, 1 August 1851, p. 1; Colonial Standard, 7 August 1851, pp. 1-3; Morning Journal, 6 August 1851; Morning Journal, 7 August 1851. 26 For Saint Mary, see: Morning Journal, 16 April 1849, p. 3; ‘Middlesex Assizes,’ Morning Journal, 28 June 1849, p. 1; Middlesex Indictment Register 1847-1850, Jamaican Archives, 1A/7/2/6. For Kingston, see: Morning Journal, 28 to 30 August 1849, p. 1.

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By the late 1840s, organised intimidation within the polling room was sufficiently widespread that it was better known by the name ‘taking possession’ of the poll. Men and women surrounded or filled into parochial courthouses and used their bodies to challenge access to the public building. Such crowds appeared within the campaigns of conservative as well as liberal; pro-planter as well as popular candidates, and there is every chance that some men and women were paid for their support. Even where relatively passive, such crowds could be effective and, remarkably, the sentiments of those blocked off from the courthouse are captured in the archive. During polling for Saint Thomas in the East and Saint Thomas in the Vale in 1849, for example, blocked electors sent an appeal to the returning officer located inside. ‘Sir, We the undersigned voters of the above Parish inform you that the Poll being blocked up by the supporters not voters of Mr. Barrow’, one note reads, ‘we are prevented by forciable [sic] means from recording our votes.’27 The voters Thomas Howell, Andrew Gabay, William Labam and others requested that the Sheriff should ‘use [his] influence in affording us free access to the Hustings as its present appearance precludes a great number of voters from recording their votes’.28 In Saint Thomas in the East that year, papers later relayed that the candidates whose voters were blocked withdrew, causing the de facto election of the member supported by the crowd.29

But while disturbances at elections were invariably associated with poorer non- electors, it was clear that these crowds were composed of electors as well as non-electors and, more significantly, they were sufficiently common to occur across political divides. One of the difficulties with creating a heroic narrative of non-electors’ turn to violence as a means of undoing their formal exclusion from politics is that it risks reading political motivation into crowds, or viewing subaltern political cultures as simple if not uniform. While there is little question that small groups were using violence as a means of expressing frustration at their exclusion from the political process, such crowds also appeared in the

27 Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, IB/11/23/19, p. 74 28 Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, IB/11/23/19, p. 74 29 As the Falmouth Post relayed: ‘Immediately after the opening of proceedings, the polling-place was taken possession of… Under these circumstances, and seeing the impossibility of polling Mr. Davidson’s votes, Mr. Leaycraft (after polling about 25 votes), withdrew Mr. Davidson under protest.’ ‘The Elections. St. Thomas in the East and Vere,’ Falmouth Post, 31 July 1849, pp. 1-4.

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campaigns of individuals who had widespread support from both wealthy and influential voters, many of whom remained opposed to the wider interests of poorer Jamaicans. Elsewhere, as in the case of Saint Mary, the purpose of the crowd was to prevent an individual’s election; while there is every chance that others were paid or otherwise incentivised into supporting candidates.

Port Royal, 1849

While it is often difficult to obtain information about the identity of those who participated in crowds, it is possible to reconstruct a sense of their organisation within candidates’ campaigns. The campaign of Port Royal provides a perfect case study, partially because in this instance it was the conservative white solicitor, James Porteous, who recruited a band to ensure his return. Disturbances at elections tended to be blamed on poorer non-electors, while the ‘political agitators’ who organised them were associated with ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ candidates and blamed with the increasingly fractured nature of the Jamaican Assembly itself. Yet, crowds appeared across campaigns of both pro-planter and popular candidates, making it apparent that the emergence of crowds also reflected the determination of candidates to be elected. In 1849, the same year in which rioters interrupted the coronial election of Saint Mary, a ‘band’ was organised to interrupt the supporters of James Taylor by an agent on behalf of the white conservative solicitor, James Porteous, after Porteous had failed to secure the election by other means.

Port Royal, the district in question, exemplified the highly unrepresentative nature of Jamaica’s constituencies at this time. In its geography, it covered a thin piece of land that stretched from the Blue Mountains regions out into the harbour, via a thin strip of sand known as the ‘Palisadoes’ (Map One). Only accessible via water from Kingston, the majority of its registered voters lived in the city or on the mainland, and only came to the peninsular in order to vote at elections. At 6,856 residents, it had under a third of the population of Saint Mary in 1844 and, in total, only thirty-one residents were qualified to

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vote in 1854.30 Yet, the historical status of the district as the old capital meant that it returned three seats to the Assembly: or one representative for every ten electors in 1854, and one for every twenty voters who participated in 1849.31 Few of the men who lived locally were entitled to vote. Like other sites across Jamaica, however, the constituency was partially transformed over the 1840s, as poorer residents and labourers on small plots under ten acres gained sufficient wealth to register as electors. One of the first signs that Porteous and Taylor desired a seat in the constituency was their registration of these poorer small freeholders over 1849.32

Porteous and Taylor were both part of a new class of candidate within Jamaica, who stood in contrast to those men who had once dominated within the Assembly. Both men were professionals and aspiring middle-class politicians who hoped to take the third seat behind two established candidates guaranteed support from wealthy landholders. In doing so, these men relied upon recruiting newly qualified freeholders from the district, and much of their campaign was spent registering across the constituency. Although he was still treated with scorn by the conservative Colonial Standard, Taylor had the support of men such as Edward Vickers Junior – the son of Jamaica’s first black Assemblyman – and the backing of Jordon’s Morning Journal.33 Surviving ‘Claims to Vote’ books show that, over 1849, Taylor or committee men on his behalf registered the residents who lived and worked across the district, committing himself to lowering taxation in order to gain their support.34 Individuals who were registered by Taylor in this period included the illiterate Charles Davis, a self-described ‘poor man’ and father of ‘six’ who owed his entitlement to property owned by his wife.35 Taylor’s signature also appears as a witness to the registration of William Butler, John Ennis, John Davidson, Jacob Reese and William Dick, all labourers

30 In 1844 the population of Saint Mary was 22,000 and that of Port Royal was 6,856. See: Jonathan Dalby, Crime and Punishment in Jamaica: A qualitative analysis of the assize court records, 1756- 1856 (Kingston: University of the West Indies, 2000), p. 64. H Barkly to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 March 1854, British National Archives, CO 137/322 37. 31 Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, 1B/11/23/19, pp. 70-71. 32 Claims to Vote Books, Port Royal, Jamaican Archives, 2/19/17. 33 Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, 1B/11/23/19, p. 70. Taylor, along with Porteous and S. J. Dallas received the votes of the district’s minister, C. F. Hall. 34 Claims to Vote Books, Port Royal, Jamaican Archives, 2/19/17. 35 Poll Books, IB/11/23/19, pp. 70-71.

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and small freeholders, whose claims were signed with an ‘x’. Others, although ‘gentlemen’ transferred property for the purposes of registering and, fraudulently, claimed their right to vote. In total, twelve of twenty-nine new registrations for 1849 were completed by Taylor.36 It is unclear how many claims were sought out, but at least one was completed by Porteous.37

The two contests between Porteous and Taylor in August and December that year were both marked by high levels of informality, with the latter by-election called when Taylor’s initial success was overturned. When a scrutiny was called for by Porteous, four of Taylor’s deciding votes were shown to have been false.38 The ‘gentlemen’ Peter Constantine, Edward Vickers Junior, George Naar and Alexander Naar DeGraff, were shown to have all made claims to vote upon a single piece of land that did not legally convey any entitlement.39 Other rumours of impropriety made against Taylor’s successful election included his having bribed a ‘bluefield porter’ to dress as a recently deceased elector and lodge a vote for Taylor under the false name – a claim that is supported by the records of the island’s poll books.40 The imperially-employed commodore of Britain’s Royal Navy station, John Bennet, was also accused of pressuring his eligible workers into voting for Taylor and threatening others (including a woman who lived and worked on the peninsular) with a loss of their employment or livelihood should Porteous be elected.41 Taylor, it was claimed, had bribed and threatened his way into the House of Assembly, using his available connections within the parish and with British imperial employees to secure his election.

Although Porteous had also been accused of bribery and intimidation during the August 1849 election, his efforts had proved insufficient to overcome the popularity of

36 Claims to Vote, Port Royal, Jamaican Archives, 2/19/17. 37 Claims to Vote, Port Royal, Jamaican Archives, 2/19/17. 38 For report of the scrutiny committee, see: ‘Port Royal Scrutiny Committee,’ Falmouth Post, 16 October 1849, pp. 1-4. See also: ‘Port Royal Election,’ Falmouth Post, 28 August 1849, pp. 1-4. 39 For report of the scrutiny committee, see: ‘Port Royal Scrutiny Committee,’ Falmouth Post, 16 October 1849, pp. 1-4. 40 ‘Port Royal Election,’ Falmouth Post, 28 August 1849, pp. 1-4. The Poll Books show that the vote was indeed received under a false name: Poll Books, IB/11/23/19, p. 70-71. 41 ‘Port Royal Election,’ Falmouth Post, 28 August 1849, pp. 1-4.

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Taylor.42 When Taylor’s election was overturned and a second election called, a blockade was organised by Daniel Hart to surround Port Royal’s polling place and prevent Taylor’s election. On the morning of the December by-election, a ‘band’ described by the Morning Journal as being composed of ‘upwards of two hundred vagabonds, all armed’ met in the streets of the Port Royal peninsular, surrounding the house of one of the district’s registered voters, Charles Powell.43 Eight voters who had travelled to the peninsular were left inside, unable to leave in order to attend the poll. One gentleman who attempted to get past the band, the Morning Journal claimed, was ‘immediately rescued, and, after being detained for three or four hours, was brought to the poll under duress, and made to vote for Porteous.’44 Finally, after numerous attempts were made on the part of police, boats were sent in from the British naval yard to carry the eight trapped voters over water to the courthouse to participate in the poll.

The election of Port Royal was exemplary, rather than extraordinary, capturing the place of violence within Jamaica’s mid-century elections. Here, as in many other incidents, newly enfranchised small freeholders were amongst those who were caught up at the poll, or suffered injuries as a result. Bands were widespread, used even by those who objected to their own defeat due to violence.45 It is unclear how Porteous’ support was organised. There is every chance that the individuals who came armed to the election 1849 were incentivised to do so. At a later election involving yet another band of supporters for Porteous, the crowd was reported to have been recruited from labourers on an estate where Porteous worked as a solicitor.46 According to two witnesses, an otherwise unidentified ‘Mr. George’ ‘employed those parties to come there with sticks which he had employed one of them to cut.’47 But while sources do not provide insight into the motivations of participants, episodes such as the crowd who intimidated voters at the Port

42 Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, 1B/11/23/19, p. 71. 43 Morning Journal, 31 December 1849, p. 2. 44 Morning Journal, 31 December 1849, p. 2. 45 John Nunes objected to a band in 1849, and then had committee men use one in 1851; James Porteous was here accused of using a band, and then complained of its use in 1851. Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, 1B/11/23/19, pp. 68-69. 46 Surry Assizes, Morning Journal, 7 August 1851, pp. 2-3. 47 Surry Assizes, Morning Journal, 7 August 1851, pp. 2-3.

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Royal election of 1849 or the ‘band’ who stormed the courthouse of Saint Mary in the same year also highlighted the adaptability of crowds, and the often limited resources parishes had to prevent them.

Episodes such as the Port Royal and the Saint Mary elections of 1849 capture the fraught nature of politics in the mid-century, and the levels that candidates were prepared to go to in order to secure their return. Importantly, they also highlight the range of motives and intentions of those organising and participating in the crowds. It is telling that of at least fifteen episodes of organised intimidation reported between 1849 and 1860, five occurred within the single year of 1849 – a point of peak enfranchisement within the post- emancipation era. Organised intimidation also occurred at contests for parochial positions, increasingly looked to as a channel via which emerging leaders could gain influence over the day to day affairs of parochial communities.48 That violence only became prominent in the late-1840s in spite of centuries-long restrictions to the franchise suggests something about the nature of its organisation – the turn to violence was not merely a response to exclusion, but also the emergence of candidates viewed as alternatives worthy of support. Candidates or agents with access to large bodies of non-electors prepared to come to the poll increasingly used intimidation alongside bribery and the registration of new small freeholders as a mechanism via which their success could be secured.

Few Jamaican residents were participating in either violent or non-violent interaction at the poll, certainly fewer than reactions suggested, and the largest of these groups involved only a slim minority of a district’s total population. The riot of Saint Mary, in 1849, for example, involved fewer than two hundred in a district of 22,000.49 Yet, such crowds were one of few ways non-elite Jamaicans were shaping the political process with and against the tight restrictions of the franchise, and they also represented a radical

48 Swithin Wilmot has written a great deal on vestry politics, see: Swithin Wilmot, ‘From Bondage to Political Office: Blacks and Vestry Politics in Two Jamaican Parishes, Kingston and St David, 1831–1865,’ in Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards (eds.) Jamaica in Slavery & Freedom: History, heritage & culture (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2002), pp. 307–323; Swithin Wilmot, ‘The Politics of Samuel Clarke: Black Creole Politician in Free Jamaica, 1851- 1865, Caribbean Quarterly 44, no. 1/2 (1998), pp. 129-44. 49 Jonathan Dalby, Crime and Punishment in Jamaica: A quantitative analysis of the Assize Court records, 1756-1856 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), p. 64.

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departure from contests that until the 1830s had been wholly attended by middle-class and elite free-‘black’ and ‘coloured’ or European electors. Caribbean historians have shown the long-term interest working-class Jamaicans had taken in political matters. Even prior to the ending of apprenticeship, enslaved men and women were known to come into market to buy and sell excess produce, and exchange information.50 Over the course of the 1840s, however, these men and women from both town and country areas were also being directly appealed to by candidates, and being encouraged to come to the poll. It is clear, for instance, that the men and women who came armed to the Saint Mary election of 1849 had a strong conviction of the impact their presence could have, particularly in the absence of police. On this occasion, the intention of the crowd was not to ensure the election of a candidate, but rather prevent Clemetson from being re-elected as coroner.

Critically, during a period when political rights were largely considered to be the prerogative of men alone, and would not be held out to women within the island for another nine decades, cultures of intimidation allowed Jamaican women to shape the outcomes of elections. Court records of the Saint Mary riot in 1849 confirm that many of those who participated were women, representing a double challenge to respectable political inclusion to those middle-class and elite Jamaicans who were increasingly concerned with the restriction of women to a private sphere. In passing sentences against the rioters in Saint Mary in 1849, the judge identified three women as amongst the worst offenders, showing little surprise at their participation.51 ‘Whatever your notion of the propriety of electing Mr. Simon, instead of Mr. Clemetson as coroner, might have been’, the judge relayed in closing, ‘you had no right to attempt to carry that out by force and violence… and you, women, were just as bad as the men in mixing yourself in things with which you had nothing to do, but only to create a disturbance.’52 ‘Caroline, Johanna, and Kelly Carty’ were each given three months’ imprisonment with hard labour, distinguished from the one month sentences of the other rioters. Given growing divisions between the sexes, it is similarly significant that four women at the riot of Saint David in 1851 held

50 See: Sidney Mintz and Douglass Hall, The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System (New Haven: Human relations Area Files Press, 1970). 51 ‘Middlesex Assizes,’ Morning Journal, 28 June 1849, p. 1. 52 ‘Middlesex Assizes,’ Morning Journal, 28 June 1849, p. 1.

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sticks especially prepared for the supporters of John Nunes.53 These women were not merely actors in the crowd, they were specifically recruited for their support.

Contesting ‘Respectable’ Interaction

Responses to the perceived threats of violence within Jamaica varied considerably, with some commentators expressing their sympathy, while others called for widespread and severe restrictions to elections, if not their total eradication. Such reactions spoke to wider differences in the manner in which violence was being read and responded to within Jamaica at this time, and help to explain why a further widening of the franchise was not commonly considered a suitable solution. Amongst the more influential responses were those of the two governors, Charles Grey and Henry Barkley, both of whom were anxious to prevent further unrest. For Grey, the outbreak of violence in 1851 reinforced perceptions that elections might serve as flashpoints within an already strained colony, and he expressed his concern with holding any further elections in the immediate future (although by-elections continued).54 Indeed, throughout his period as governor, Grey expressed considerable concern with the operation of the Assembly, and viewed the events of Saint David as ‘a remarkable indication of the growing desire and determination of the coloured and negro classes to rise into consequence’ although the Colonial Office continued to deny his calls for the reform or eradication of the Assembly.55 Two years later, in 1853, Grey remained reluctant to hold elections, noting that dissolving the Assembly and holding fresh elections held the potential to lead to ‘riot and disorder’ and was not advisable.56 Sir Henry Barkly noted the severe restrictions of Jamaica’s franchise

53 ‘Middlesex Assizes,’ Morning Journal, 28 June 1849, p. 1. 54 C Grey to Earl Grey, 11 June 1851, quoted in: BPP 1852-53 [67] Despatches on Conditions of Sugar-Growing Colonies: Part II Jamaica, p. 67. 55 C Grey to Earl Grey, 11 June 1851, quoted in: BPP 1852-53 [67] Despatches on Conditions of Sugar-Growing Colonies: Part II Jamaica, p. 49. See, also, Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, labor and politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 232 for more on this. 56 C Grey to the Duke of Newcastle, 26 May 1853, quoted in: BPP 1852-53 [1655] Papers Relative to Legislative Proceedings in Jamaica, p. 26.

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upon his appointment in 1854, but expressed the care with which any extension must be conducted. For Barkly, disturbances at elections reinforced the fraught nature of politics within the island, and partially confirmed the ‘universal’ opinion that ‘the power of selecting representatives’ rested with ‘the least competent part of the community’.57 For Barkly, widening the franchise risked, rather than prevented, further unrest.

Colonial responses similarly differed. For those already convinced of a lack of industry amongst Jamaica’s poorer residents, the increased disorder associated with elections such as the Saint David riot of 1851 were powerful as a switching point that allowed prejudices against Jamaica’s poorer residents to be aired. For the Colonial Standard, there was ‘no amendment of the franchise’ that would ‘remedy the evil so long as a savage non-electorate body can be collected to deter, by means of brickbats, bludgeons, and murder, the honest voter from exercising his privilege’.58 Indicating the manner through which some within Jamaica were looking across the Empire for their cues, the Standard’s writer added that ‘Either elections, therefore, must be carried on in the presence of a force capable of supressing instantly any attempted outrage, or Jamaica must come down to the category of New Zealand, and be told that representative institutions are not adapted to savages.’ Still, such attitudes were certainly not universal. Although equally condemning of violence, writers in the Morning Journal continued to advocate further franchise reform as a means of preventing unrest.

It is likely that the fears expressed by many, including governors Grey and Barkly, were shaped by the very effectiveness of efforts to ‘take possession’, exposing the limitations of the police force over this period. Jamaican historians have highlighted the many accusations of incompetency and insufficiency made against the police at this time, and it was not uncommon for the British military to be called in to put down widespread disorder.59 It was part of the electoral law that a ‘sufficiency’ of police needed to be made

57 H Barkly to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 March 1854, British National Archives, CO 137/322 37. 58 Colonial Standard, 4 February 1851, p. 3. 59 Paton, No Bond but the Law, pp. 59-61.

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available for the duration of any election, but this was rarely possible.60 Knowing that the contest was close, for example, in 1851, parochial officials in Saint David brought in men from the neighbouring districts of Port Royal, Kingston and Morant Bay to assist local reinforcements. Fifty in total stayed in the home of a local man for the duration of the poll. In spite of their presence, rioting broke out, and they were requested to remain in the district in order to ‘restore and preserve order’, while the British military was also called in to keep the peace.61 In 1860, following riots at the election in Saint David in 1851, the parish went still further, preparing arms and ammunition for the police force, but a small scandal nonetheless erupted when it became known that they were planning to come armed to an election.62

Increasing police presence was coupled with changes to the accessibility of polling rooms, as efforts were made to render these only available to enfranchised voters during an election. This, too, could be highly controversial. Immediately following the violence at Port Maria in Saint Mary, for example, rumours of similar unrest at the Montego Bay courthouse of Saint James led parochial officials to close off access to the courthouse for the duration of the contest, with forty to fifty policemen called in to lend assistance. An emergency meeting of the vestry was held to discuss arrangements, and additional policemen were called in to stand on guard throughout the day.63 A polling room with dimensions of ‘70 by 35 behind the polling table, and a space of 15 feet by 15 feet in front of it’ was to be built by boarding off the lower portion of the stairs leading up to the elevated courthouse.64 Sufficient space was provided for the candidates, scrutineers and others, while resident electors and non-electors wishing to follow the contest throughout the day were to remain outside in the market square. Here, too, forty to fifty policemen were called in to ensure protection of people and property, but the courthouse was nonetheless stormed by individuals who demanded access to the public building.65 Similar

60 Laws of Jamaica, 1852. 61 Petition of Henry G. Nord, 13 January 1852, Saint Davids Vestry Minutes, National Archives of Jamaica, 1B/11/9/8. 62 Falmouth Post, 31 July 1860, p. 1. 63 Details of the repair can be found: Morning Journal, 15 January 1849, p. 3. 64 Public letter of inspector I. L. Lewin, Morning Journal, 24 September 1849, p. 3. 65 ‘The St. James Election,’ Falmouth Post, 14 August 1849.

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arrangements were made in Kingston and Saint Catherine, while, in Saint David in 1851 voters were taken up by candidates’ committee members as small groups or one at a time, with the remainder of those in attendance waiting outside.66

It is evident that against the strict regulations of Jamaica’s franchise, and considerable delineations of Jamaican society, both the organisation and frequency of agitation at elections posed a significant challenge to contemporary understandings of public order. Emerging cultures of ‘taking possession’ represented one of few ways through which non-elite men and women were able to shape elections against the prohibitive restrictions of the franchise. This was particularly true of women who were increasingly excluded from ‘respectable’ political interaction, including public meetings and petitioning as well as the right to vote. Yet, responses to such crowds were also bound up in the wider tensions of Jamaican society, including increased concern with the control of public space in addition to anxiety over eroding political authority within Jamaica’s Assembly. While even the largest crowds of non-electors were small by contrast to the tens of thousands congregating at elections in Britain, or five to seven thousand who might appear in elections in contemporary New South Wales, many responded quickly to what they perceived as a new threat of disorder.

66 ‘Assizes,’ Colonial Standard, 31 July 1851, p. 2; ‘Assizes,’ Colonial Standard, 1 August 1851, p. 1; ‘Assizes,’ Morning Journal, 7 August 1851, pp. 1-3.

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Figure 8: Montego Bay Courthouse, c. 1905. This picture shows Charles Square and the courthouse to the right. The hustings was built into the lower portion of the building in an open- air, basement lobby area that led into the courthouse. Source: ‘Charles Square, Montego Bay, 1924,’ National Library of Jamaica Digital Collection, http://nljdigital.nlj.gov.jm/items/show /780, accessed September 2017.

Violence and Public Opinion in Colonial New South Wales

Concerns with violence were not limited to Jamaica within this period, however. Across Britain and the colonies, considerations were being made as to how, and if, greater order and safety could be secured at elections. The mid-nineteenth century was a period marked by a wider reconsideration of the tie between violence, contention and voting. As numerous scholars have shown, the question of the legitimacy of violence at elections was under consideration in Britain.67 There is little question that significant levels of violence continued to mark elections, even as ‘safety’ was increasingly associated with the freedom

67 Jon Lawrence, ‘The transformation of British public politics after the First World War,’ Past & present 190, no. 1 (2006), pp. 185-216; James Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion,’ 1867-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 117-119.

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of voters.68 Indeed, looking across Britain and its colonies within this period, the Cape Colony formed one of few sites in which violence did not occur, in spite of open polling. Here, it was principally not until the 1870s that the first incidents occurred.69 This was not a function of an inclusive franchise, but rather represented limitations in the interests of many voters with the proceedings of Parliament. Indeed, writing in 1869 one correspondent relayed that ‘a little violence’ of the form seen in Britain might be better than the seeming indifference that was being paid to elections within the colony.70 It served as a marked contrast to both New South Wales and Jamaica, as well as Britain itself.

The use of violence at elections within colonial New South Wales extended back to the first contests in 1843, and continued (at a lower level) in spite of changes to the franchise over the 1850s. The worst years of violence at New South Wales’ elections occurred in 1843, when episodes of unrest across the colonies led to two deaths and several instances of serious injury. Within this year, polling in the regional district of Patterson ended in the death of an elector when he was struck in the back of the head with a block of wood following a fight between two rival groups. Many attempted to defend the violence as the result of drunkenness, but elsewhere, the partisan, if not premeditated, impulses of the violence were difficult to deny.71 In Windsor in the same year a candidate was pelted with sticks and stones, and had his colours torn down from the hustings, with one correspondent relaying the ‘riot and confusion’ across the town to be ‘indescribable’.72

There was likely some level of horror for officials who looked on at these contests. The outbreak of violence came at the first contests within the colony, after several decades of agitation in which settlers had attempted to show they were sufficiently ‘mature’ for representative government. Efforts were made to prevent further unrest. In 1846, the first

68 See: K. Theodore Hoppen, ‘Grammars of electoral violence in nineteenth-century England and Ireland,’ The English Historical Review 109, no. 432 (1994), pp. 597-620; Justin Wasserman and Edwin Jaggard, ‘Electoral violence in mid nineteenth-century England and Wales,’ Historical research 80, no. 207 (2007), pp. 124-155. 69 CCP 1874 [A2], Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Consider and Report on the Petition of L. Weiner, formed one of the first cases in which violence was noted within the polling room. 70 ‘Coming Elections,’ Queenstown Free Press, 12 January 1869, p. 2. 71 Colonial Observer, 12 July 1843. 72 Sydney Morning Herald, 22 June 1843, p. 2; Australasian Chronicle, 27 June 1843, p. 2.

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laws against ‘Party Processions’ were introduced, making it more difficult for groups to assemble.73 The laws placed a ban on the gathering of individuals for political or religious purposes, but they also provided important concessions for elections, allowing candidates and supporters to march with banners during an election. In the early 1850s, the reduction in the franchise provided further reform and by 1858, it was suspected that around ninety percent of adult men living in Sydney were entitled to vote on the basis of the value of their land. In spite of this, however, violence continued into the late 1840s and early 1850s. Yet, it was not always greeted with the same level of concern as the riots of the 1840s, and significant concessions were made to allow for the safety of voters in spite of it. For some, low level violence was in keeping with the perceptions of elections as periodic and scheduled points of ideological disagreement, in which neighbours could show their local affiliations. Even as the secret ballot was being debated, many continued to profess a ‘right’ to contention, and returning officers often took considerable measures to allow it.

While violence was also present at elections in colonial New South Wales, however, and efforts were being made to prevent it, responses to it were complicated through the wider perceptions of the acceptability of contention, and the difficulties many faced in attempting to find measures to put it down. Here, it is worth partially qualifying some Australian historians’ characterisation of the 1850s as a period in which authorities became preoccupied with putting an end to the violence of elections.74 Although partially true, it overlooks the extent to which many middle-class reformers, including men such as the leading liberal Henry Parkes, still viewed forms of contention as necessary to the political process. In 1858, Parkes spoke out in defence of such contention, training newly qualified electors in the place of uproarious political meetings to an election, viewing it as helping to guarantee the integrity of leaders. For Parkes, who strongly advocated the continuation of the hustings alongside the ballot, ‘political fermentation’ via lively and noisy public meetings remained key to the formation of public opinion.75 Rather than being a period in which violence was put down, records suggest that the 1850s was a period in which

73 See Irving for more on this. Irving, Southern Tree of Liberty, pp. 168-170. 74 Principally, Scalmer, 'Containing Contention,' pp. 337-356; Irving, Southern Tree of Liberty. 75 Henry Parkes, The Electoral Act and How to Work It: A series of letters on the subject of the approaching elections (Sydney: G. T. Thornton, 1859), pp. 16-17.

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Returning Officers attempted to carefully maintain the boundary between acceptable disorder and outright unrest, with some viewing the secret ballot as providing safety to voters, without compromising the contentious politics of elections.

Negotiating Violence: The elections of 1858

In 1858, the year of the secret ballot’s introduction, two cases came before Parliament after disturbances had led to the injury of attendees, both of which speak to understandings of legitimate violence at New South Wales’ elections. The first, that of the Western Boroughs, highlights the difficulty that returning officers often faced in attempting to balance protection of voters against allowances for intervention, while the second reinforces the often-limited consequence that participation within a riot could have. The two cases were additionally significant given that this was an election fought over the secret ballot itself, and both candidates formally advocated the reform.

The worst case of individual violence within the two elections came at the contest for the Western Boroughs, which saw an elderly store-owner of Bathurst, Charles Sutherland, brought by the throat to cast his vote.76 The election in question was fought between Henry Rotton and Arthur Todd Holroyd, the former a local pastoralist and cattle- breeder, while the latter was a lawyer and Crown Prosecutor within the colony. In spite of Holroyd’s status, and his position as one whose role was to prosecute crime, his supporters were anxious to ensure his return, and steps had been taken to fill the courthouse in order to put pressure on those voters who came forward. In this instance, unrest was also expected by the Returning Officer, Richard Machattie, who had sworn in additional constables to be on standby. Machattie had also rearranged the polling place itself, asking for separations between the supporters of the two candidates within the hall.

On the morning of the election, witnesses relayed, Sutherland approached the courthouse to give his ballot for the pastoralist Henry Rotton, to whom he had ‘pledged’ support. But as he turned onto the main street he was ‘seized upon’ and ‘dragged with

76 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, pp. 1123-1132.

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great force’ into the courthouse polling room by a group of assailants.77 Sutherland was dragged through the side of the hall filled with supporters of Holroyd. ‘I was almost strangled by the parties who dragged me into the said Court House – their hands having been placed on my throat’, Sutherland explained, ‘I believe that had the struggle lasted two minutes longer I would have been killed.’ Sutherland continued: ‘A voting paper in favor [sic] of the said Arthur Todd Holroyd was placed in my hands by one of his supporters’, noting that he had ‘voted for the said Arthur Todd Holroyd to save my life.’ Police arrived at the scene too late to intervene, and the men involved were caught and placed in the nearby lockup. Although the men were arrested, it was the Returning Officer who was accused of improperly influencing the election’s outcome.

Within districts such as the Western Boroughs, electors were likely aware of the chance for abuse upon entering the courthouse. But contests were also tightly fought, and going to the courthouse or not could decide an election. It was also equally clear that providing an opposition within the courthouse, either by formally objecting to the eligibility of voters at the poll or violently preventing them from voting, could be similarly influential. On this occasion, the voting was split 230 to 228 and, in spite of the efforts of Holroyd’s supporters, Rotton was elected.

Although telling, the events of the Western Boroughs were not wholly unique. A second case, that of a Parramatta election held two weeks earlier provides a further indication of some of the dimensions and consequences of this rowdy interaction. Parramatta was a constituency often referred to as being marked by ‘party spirit,’ and in this instance high levels of animosity existed between the supporters of the two candidates George Oakes and his rival James Pye. Aspects of this were demonstrated as early as the nomination, when a number of individuals had been subject to assault within the crowd at the hustings. 78 One participant had brought a ‘leaded whip’ to the nomination, which he wielded at a policeman who was struck down attempting to intervene in a fight.79 A fight also broke out immediately before the hustings and, when a local publican attempted to

77 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 1125. 78 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 January 1858, p. 5; Empire, 19 January 1858, p. 2. 79 Empire, 19 January 1858, p. 2.

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intervene, he was struck down and kicked, before being carried to safety to an inn adjacent to the hustings itself.

This level of uproar was maintained through to the following day, when the poll opened at the courthouse. While Returning Officers were often worried about the potential for injury from voters, on this instance it was amongst the agents that threats were made. Supporters of Pye were accused of attempting to get the known supporters of Oakes to renege on their promises at the point of polling. It spoke to the emphasis placed on these pledges, and the competition over the seat that such attempts provoked quick and considerable anger. Mid-way through the poll, when James Pye took a lead, a crowd of Oakes’ supporters stormed into the courthouse carrying cornstalks. The stalks were the symbol of Oakes, indicating his status as a ‘native born’ colonist, and they were ‘waved about’ the heads of the individuals who had voted for his rival.80 Beer was also brought into the courtroom, and shared about with Oakes’ supporters, while the agents of Pye fled, taking shelter in the watchtower behind the courthouse.

Unusually for New South Wales, the tumult of the polling room in Parramatta became the subject of inquiry, and its treatment by Parliament and the courts revealed much about contemporary attitudes to violence at colonial elections.81 The petition against the return of George Oakes was served by supporters of James Pye, who claimed that the threats made by the Oakes brothers prior to the poll combined with the scenes in the polling room saw many ‘withheld from so voting.’82 The committee heard of ale and sandwiches being brought into the courtroom and shared around amongst the supporters of Oakes, as others – deemed non-electors – ran through the hall with cornstalks. Over

80 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 272. 81 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, 849-884; Sydney Morning Herald, 11 February 1858, p. 4; Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February 1858, p. 5. 82 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 845.

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Figure 9: Parramatta Courthouse. Source: Walter Mason, ‘View of the Court House and Scotch Church, at Parramatta, N.S.W.,’ The Australian Picture Pleasure Book: Illustrating the scenery, architecture, historical events, natural history, public characters &c., of Australia (Sydney: J. R. Clarke, 1857).

the course of the inquiries, the tumult of the polling room remained secondary to investigations into potential bribery and threats, but the case itself was ultimately dismissed as unproven. In court, Henry Tunks was prosecuted for his assault on William Fullagar, and the jury were told in extensive detail of Fullagar being accidentally struck down and then kicked by Tunks, who had perhaps intended the blows for another party.83 Because the assault had occurred within the dense crowd of the hustings, however, it was found impossible to ascertain that Tunks had been particularly responsible for the worst of Fullagar’s injuries. Tunks was found guilty, but ‘recommended to mercy by the jury, and the prosecutor’ – in the end being sentenced to a fine of ten pounds with no jail time.84

83 See: Sydney Morning Herald, 11 February 1858, p. 4 for abridged transcripts. 84 ‘Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February 1858, p. 5.

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Figure 10: Parramatta Court House, 1837. Plans of the courthouse built in 1843, the hustings was built into the porch, while voting occurred within the main hall. Police were stationed on the doors. Source: ‘Parramatta Court House, 1837,’ State Archives NSW, Designs of Public Buildings, Series: 4334 Item: X694, available on Reel: 2660.

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The Western Boroughs election was also brought before a Parliamentary committee, but not because of the abuse encountered by Sutherland, but rather for the efforts made by the returning officer to prevent it.85 When Henry Rotton lost the election to Holroyd, his supporters had petitioned for scrutiny, accusing Richard Machattie of ‘undue influence.’ On forwarding the papers to the Colonial Secretary, Machattie submitted the witness statement from Sutherland, and explained the efforts he had taken to attempt to keep crowds down in the courthouse:

I regret I have to observe that a great deal of misconduct was evinced on the part of several of the electors… for the purposes of accommodating both parties, I allotted one side of the Court House to the supporters of each candidate, and I allowed them to vote in tallies of five alternately… when Mr. Rotton obtained a lead in the poll; a scene of intimidation then took place towards Mr. Chs. Sutherland… I may state that the Poll Clerk took down the words of the said Mr. Sutherland at the moment he used them, on his voting paper, - to wit, that he “voted for Mr. Holroyd to save his life.”86

Defending his decision to remove the ‘more violent of the parties’ Machattie explained that he had done so only because Holroyd’s supporters had become ‘so violent that the proceedings of the Election were for some time interrupted’.87 Bathurst’s police magistrate amongst many others confirmed the disturbances, noting that he had ‘considered it necessary to swear in a number of special constables’ on the basis of information given to him a week prior to the election.88 Yet, the Governor was concerned at the petition served against Machattie, signed as it was by some of the most ‘respectable’ men of the district. An official inquiry was set up into Machattie’s conduct, in order to ensure that he had not improperly intervened.

The case of Parramatta and the Western Boroughs both illustrated the difficulties Returning Officers experienced in attempting to manage crowds, and the consequences for failing to take adequate measures both to protect voters, and to provide a sufficiency of freedom. By contrast to Jamaica, this was not principally because of widespread

85 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, pp. 1123-1132. 86 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 1125. 87 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 1125. 88 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, p. 1131.

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violence, but rather because of perceptions that voters should remain free to question, critique and interject at the point of polling. The violence of elections within New South Wales reflected more than the efforts of non-electors to seek formal inclusion: this was an expression of resolve to turn a contest, from individuals who felt that they had a right to intervene. Indeed, on other occasions, the sentiments of such crowds were captured within electoral correspondence, where crowds were noted to have declared that ‘they were privileged to make as much noise as they pleased… Unrestrained freedom at popular elections, so long as it does not denigrate into riot or personal violence, is a privilege of Britains handed down from very remote times’.89 Similar sentiments were expressed by a group of men working on the railroad in 1858, who again petitioned against the returning officer for his ‘undue influence’ in treatment of crowds.90 These men were ‘non-electors’ from the district, but registered in a neighbouring county, and had been given the day off by their employer for the express purpose of crowding out an opponent at the nomination.91 The returning officer complained in defence that they were ‘far from sober’ and that ‘the meeting was a very violent one, occasioned by the attendance of about one hundred Navvies’.92

In turn, as cases such as Parramatta show, a desire on the part of returning officers to err on the side of voter freedom and avoid reprimand often resulted in high levels of intimidation and unruliness within the courthouse. At the hustings of Parramatta, and within the courthouse, public space was thus partially given over as a container for accepted public disorder – with violence a known outcome of entering into a courthouse poll or participating in the crowd before the hustings. In 1858, the polarised contrast between the polling room and the street was emphasised by an electoral correspondent, who noted that ‘While, within the Court-house… the grossest irregularity prevailed all day,

89 Sydney Morning Herald, 18 August 1854, p. 8. 90 William Knox Child to the Colonial Secretary, 5 February 1858, State Records NSW, Box: 4/3376 Item: 58/471. See also: Northern Times, 23 January 1858. 91 William Knox Child to the Colonial Secretary, 5 February 1858, State Records NSW, Box: 4/3376 Item: 58/471. See also: Northern Times, 23 January 1858. 92 William Knox Child to the Colonial Secretary, 5 February 1858, State Records NSW, Box: 4/3376 Item: 58/471. See also: Northern Times, 23 January 1858.

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outside the people were quiet and the streets of Parramatta were peaceable and decorous.’93 In this instance, the fence that served to separate the courthouse square from Parramatta’s streets also demarcated the out-of-doors agitation of touters and agents collecting voters, filling out voting papers, or holding electors to account for their pledges from the street where the business of the town was viewed to continue, uninterrupted by the election.

Considerable differences existed in the violence of elections in New South Wales to those of Jamaica. This went beyond understandings of its acceptability, and the fear that surrounded crowds (although both represented striking differences) to the manner through which it was serving to reinforce perceptions of the masculinity of political rights. Where violence was a form of influence used by both men and women within colonial Jamaica, within colonial New South Wales it was taken to by men alone, often used as a justification for the exclusion of women. Where premeditated, the groups of men who came to the poll were often sourced from networks of male labourers stationed on farms or, in the case of the Northumberland and Hunter election, on the railroad.94

Individuals also defended their right to violence at elections as part of their position as political subjects, and defended open voting as well as the hustings for the guarantee it would give to the ‘manly’ integrity of voters and candidates themselves. Such comments came against appeals for women’s formal inclusion, noted in Chapter One, and the apparent influence of women shown in Chapter Three. It is significant that in 1858, women were among those who advocated the ballot, for the allowances it would make for the future enfranchisement of women.95 For historians of this period, it is likely that the gendering of violence within Jamaica remains more surprising. But the contrast serves to highlight the extent to which political violence had been and was being constructed as masculine within New South Wales. Given that women were often prominent advocates

93 Sydney Morning Herald, 20 January 1858, p. 4. 94 William Knox Child to the Colonial Secretary, 5 February 1858, State Records NSW, Box: 4/3376 Item: 58/471. See also: Northern Times, 23 January 1858. 95 Empire, 25 August 1858, p. 5.

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for the reduction of violence at elections, it also highlights the highly uneven impacts of many global movements for reform.

Controlling Contention

The limited acceptability of violence did not negate efforts to ensure the safety of participants at the hustings or in courthouse polls, and the 1850s was certainly marked by attempts to minimise harm at elections. This included the measures taken by the returning officer for the Western Boroughs in 1858, who organised additional police to be on standby throughout the day. It is also apparent in the arrangement Machattie made within the courthouse. Men such as Machattie held a legal responsibility for ensuring widespread unrest did not occur, but they were often under pains to prevent this against accusations of misconduct from voters who objected to their ‘liberties’ at the poll being interrupted. Letters sent between returning officers and the colonial secretary, outlining efforts to ensure regularity, often speak powerfully to the precarious position men such as Machattie could occupy as returning officers in attempting to navigate this line.96 The most common forms of intervention prior to the ballot’s introduction in 1858 were increases of police protection at the entry to and within the courthouse. On several occasions, men were sworn in as special constables to assist the permanent police, giving up their own vote for ten pounds and the duty to keep order.97

These efforts were also taken in Sydney, where more than ten times as many voters participated in 1858 to those who had placed a ballot for the Western Boroughs in 1858.98

96 Complaints that Returning Officers had overstepped their influence were common. In 1858, for example, William Knox Child explained the steps he had taken for safety, while residents from his constituency of Northumberland and Hunter requested that he be taken down. W Knox Child to the Colonial Secretary, 5 February 1858, State Records NSW, Box: 4/3376 Item: 58/471. 97 In 1856, for example, the Returning Officer for the North Eastern Boroughs hired 23 special constables: Returning Officer of the North Eastern Boroughs to the Colonial Secretary, 5 April 1856, State Records Office NSW, Box: 4/3320, Item: 56/3312. 98 5,303 individuals voted in the elections of Sydney City in 1858: Sydney Morning Herald, 19 January 1858, p. 3. Sydney Morning Herald, 27 March 1858, p. 5 gives a slightly higher figure of 5,393.

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Here, measures taken in the 1850s suggest officials remained worried that the disturbances of the city elections in the 1840s might be repeated. Customs House was to be closed for the duration of any city election, ‘as in the event of a disturbance, an attack might be made… and possibly they would be set on fire.’99 The returning officer and Sheriff of Sydney, John O’Neill Brenan, also took considerable care in organising the arrangement of the city’s polling places, meeting with the Inspector General of the police ahead of the first elections under responsible government in 1856.100 For Brennan it was crucial that booths in each ward be chosen with care to the safety of electors, and he toured the city with the inspector before appealing to the Governor for the most suitable spaces, chosen with reference to crowd size and the capacity of the police. The use of multiple booths (not implemented in Jamaica) was itself a tactic to minimise crowds and allow greater ease of voting where voters were numerous.

Residents, similarly, wished for greater order at elections, and sent in appeals for hotels and inns appointed as polling places to be reconsidered. In 1856, three residents requested that the Governor intervene to prevent the appointment of an inn in Ulladulla as a polling place. George Underwood Alley explained that the site was likely to lead to ‘drunkenness and riots,’ which he knew ‘his Excellence the Governor General’ would wish to ‘take into consideration.’101 Another writer noted that its distance from the nearest police station would render it ‘hopeless in the event of any disturbance to look for aid from the Police’ adding that he had ‘with great difficulty… rescued some of the Electors at the said Public house from violence.’102 The Governor replied to state that it was beyond his power to intervene in the placement of a polling place and that any dispute must be settled with the returning officer, but against the limitations of appropriate locations for polls, inns

99 Collector of Customs to the Colonial Secretary, 6 March 1856, State Records NSW, Box 4/3316 Item: 56/2398. 100 Correspondence between J Brenan and the Colonial Secretary, State Records NSW, 1856, Box 4/3316 Item: 56/2283. See, also: J Brenan to the Colonial Secretary, 29 February 1856, Letters Received from the Sheriff, State Records Office NSW, Box: 5/2301-02, Item: 56/17. Also available ‘Letters Received from the Sheriff,’ State Records Office NSW, Reel 842, p. 294. 101 George Underwood Alley to the Colonial Secretary, 30 March 1856, enclosed in State Records NSW, Box: 4/3319 Item: 56/3159. 102 Rich and Sadlier to the Colonial Secretary, 2 April 1856, State Records NSW, Box: 4/3319 Item: 56/3159.

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continued to be used. Even as residents argued for their rights to contentious participation, voters were among those who expressed distress at the potential for unrest within the polling room, amplified through scarcity of police reinforcements and the continued provision of inns as polling places. Ultimately, many argued for the secret ballot as a means of protecting voters from the assaults of their peers as well as their employers.

The details of the secret ballot and its introduction will be taken up in the following chapter, where I will detail its relationship between bribery and intimidation and the increasing emphasis that was being placed on the individual conscience of voters. Nonetheless, at this point it is worth emphasising that the secret ballot’s introduction did not signal a radical switch in the safety of elections. The Electoral Reform Act retained the hustings, while some of the worst incidences of violence at elections occurred following the introduction of universal male suffrage and the secret ballot. This included the scenes of Armidale courthouse in 1859, when Yellow Jimmy had had to push through crowds to poll his vote.103 Such events affirm the manner in which organised intimidation reflected a culture that went beyond efforts made by non-electors to ensure their inclusion. Instead, it was a reflection of the risks deemed worthy of taking, or the efforts worth expending in order to turn the result of an election. In a wider sense, and within New South Wales particularly, there was an extent to which violence formed a performance of rights associated with their inclusion as subjects, rather than a reaction of the denial of political rights.

Violence and Apathy Within the Cape

Against the shifting prevalence of violence within New South Wales and Jamaica, the Cape emerges as a striking point of difference: one worthy of explanation. Here, as in New South Wales, representative government had been extended following a period of significant unrest, and violence continued to mark the frontier. The franchise was still

103 See: Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1859-60, pp. 993-1044 for details of the unrest of this election.

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limited, and entitled only ten percent of the colony’s total population to vote. Yet, by contrast to both Jamaica and New South Wales, where contests were regularly marked by episodes of violence within the polling room, in the Cape there was little reported violence prior to 1870. Rather than representing a difference in the level of violence within the colony or a lack of concern, it is likely that the apparent absence of any violence or even low-level contention at elections rested upon both procedural and cultural differences in the associations with elections within the colony, principally rooted in the still-limited interest taken by many in the proceedings of Parliament.

By contrast to other sites, it was rare for crowds to assemble at all at elections in the Cape within this period, let alone organised oppositions. The closest occurrence to violence prior to the 1870s occurred at a particularly heated election in 1858, when the level of attendance within the central polling place of Cape Town in 1858, led Het Volksblad and the Cape Argus to independently complain of highly improper conduct and arrangements within the courthouse. ‘The large hall of the Supreme Court, was closely packed throughout the whole day with touters and idlers,’ Het Volksblad explained, ‘The struggles of contending agents to capture unlucky voters were of the utmost violent description, and not infrequently led to open fighting within a yard of the Presiding Civil Commissioner himself.’104 The Cape Argus compared the scene to a ‘greengrocer’ and demanded that better arrangements be made in the following days and at future elections, both in the organisation of polling within the hall, and the police presence.105 Within the Cape, it was principally ‘touters’ who remained the sole object of concern: men who attempted to change the minds of voters as they came forward. Even against limited disorder at elections within this period, the commentary was indicative of a wider discomfort with any level of disturbance within the courthouse.

Outside of Cape Town and Graham’s Town, crowds remained rare, with the atmosphere of the poll at farms, towns or mission stations strongly shaped by differences in procedure as well as wider disinterest in the election itself. Here, polling statistics give a

104 Het Volksblad, 9 September 1858, p. 4. 105 Cape Argus, 9 September 1858, p. 3.

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practical indication of differences in the distribution of voters at the poll. Where an election of a regional district of New South Wales such as the Western Boroughs might attract five hundred voters to the central polling place in Bathurst, the six-hundred voters of Swellendam were dispersed amongst twenty-five different polling places, including the residences of field cornets, two mission stations, and the courtrooms within the two main towns. The most to appear within any one site were the two hundred who cast votes over two days in Swellendam’s courthouse, while at least three different sites polled fewer than ten total votes.106 Similar divisions existed for the five hundred voters of Worcester, or the four hundred voters of George. Indeed, Cape Town and Graham’s Town were alone in having only one polling place, with the average closer to fifteen separate polling places.107 Limited numbers of crowds likely reduced the chance of impromptu violence. While, outside of Cape Town, Graham’s Town and Port Elizabeth, there was little way of knowing where, or if, the supporters of a candidate might poll their votes, rendering an organised opposition impractical.

Even as the organisation of polling shaped the wider atmosphere of elections, however, the absence of violence or even low-level contention beyond small incidences in Cape Town reflected a wider, cultural difference in the interest being taken in the outcomes of contests at this time. To a considerable extent, it is likely that few would have considered it worth organising an opposition, and even for those events such as the nomination that took place in a central site, attendance was often a fraction of the total enfranchised population for the district. For those who did wish to manipulate the outcome of elections, moreover, there were more efficient and less detectable ways of doing so, and organised intimidation often remained wholly unnecessary. As highlighted in Chapter Two, Civil Commissioners, Field Cornets and others had considerable say over the composition of the electoral roll, and high levels of informality existed in the registration and polling of

106 ‘Elections,’ South African Commercial Advertiser, 9 May 1854, p. 2; ‘Result of the Poll,’ South African Commercial Advertiser, 16 May 1854, p. 2. 107 See Cape Gazette, 5 January 1854, pp. 3-5 for a full outline of the polling places at the first elections in 1854. CCP 1863 [A1], Report of the Scrutineers Appointed to Examine Votes for Members of the Legislative Council (Western Province), p. 15 has a breakdown of the votes cast across the districts at the elections of the Legislative Council in 1858.

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votes. Double voting, and impersonation remained high, proof of identity was not required, and individuals were often found to fill into available slots in the roll. Against low turnouts, moreover, candidates and agents used assistance as well as incentives to get potential supporters to the poll. As shown in Chapter Three, this was a period in which the greater concern of many candidates and their agents was getting voters to the poll, not preventing opponents from doing so.

Within a context in which the practice of elections was intended to promote debate, moreover, the absence of similar levels of competition to that of New South Wales were not without implications for elections’ outcomes. Nominations went wholly uncontested, or candidates were elected on the basis of a handful of hands when insufficient individuals could be found to offer an alternative. On one occasion, in Port Elizabeth in 1859, it was the candidates who argued over who should be required to take up the position in the Assembly, with two of them unwilling to do so.108 When three candidates were nominated for the two seats at the hustings, the two more popular men promptly resigned from the contest, leaving a seat vacant. The Attorney General quickly wrote to inform them that whether or not they had consented to the position, they were legally elected, and required to attend Parliament until its dissolution.109 Although unusual, the case was emblematic of wider reluctance from many candidates, who viewed the burdens of attending parliamentary sessions in Cape Town too great, and this culture would continue into the 1860s and 1870s.

108 CCP 1859 [A68], ‘Papers and Correspondence Relative to Election of Members of the Legislative Council for Eastern District, and Members of the House of Assembly for the Electoral Division of Port Elizabeth,’ in Annexures to the Votes and Proceedings of the House of Assembly (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1859), pp. 5-7; see also: ‘Port Elizabeth,’ Graaff-Reinet Herald, 15 January 1859, for correspondence on the candidates’ withdrawl. 109 CCP 1859 [A68], ‘Papers and Correspondence Relative to Election of Members of the Legislative Council for Eastern District, and Members of the House of Assembly for the Electoral Division of Port Elizabeth,’ in Annexures to the Votes and Proceedings of the House of Assembly (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1859), pp. 5-7

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Conclusion

Where present, violence at elections could serve to substantially reshape both the boundaries of participation, and the forms of participation that the election would turn upon. This chapter has focused on the forms of violent interaction that were apparent at elections across New South Wales, the Cape Colony and Jamaica in the mid-century, as well as the efforts that were made to ensure the safety of voters in spite of it. This includes the ‘everyday’ contention of crowds, as well as marked episodes of organised violence involving hundreds and leading to serious riot. In doing so, the aim of this chapter has been to contextualise these events against concurrent debates over the acceptability of violence at elections, in order to consider not merely how violence was reshaping the outcome of contests, but also the extent to which such violence was expected or considered acceptable. Here, I have qualified those analyses that view electoral violence as popular protest in order to highlight both the considerable variation in the forms of violence apparent at elections, as well as the multitude of motivations of those involved.

Violence was unquestionably playing a key role in shaping perceptions of political inclusion across the colonies, both in the immediate impact it had in partially determining the outcome of contests, as well as for its contribution to debates over whether or not elections were working or suitable in colonies. It is also clear that, for many, violent interference formed a powerful means through which their formal political exclusion could be rejected. In Jamaica in the mid-century, whole elections were being decided by the ability of voters to make their way through crowds of electors and non-electors, with participants ‘taking possession’ of the election’s outcomes. Here, crowds could number several times those formally enfranchised, although they still remained minimal as a proportion of the island’s total population. As in parts of New South Wales, the level of violence at elections highlighted the intensity with which competitions were fought, and the methods deemed worthwhile for the purposes of securing the outcome of a contest. Importantly, within a period in which elections were often turned by bribery, violence was also a mechanism of influence available to those without the economic or social capital to sway voters by other means.

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Violence remained less pronounced within New South Wales by the 1850s, with higher levels of enfranchisement rendering it far less of a necessity in turning contests. Yet, here, cultures of contentious interference, often bordering on if not becoming moments of interpersonal violence continued to mark contests in spite of earlier changes in the franchise. High levels of disorder within the polling places of colonial New South Wales were often facilitated by limited police reinforcements and a wider belief that voters should not be interrupted in their attempt to cast a vote. Measures taken within Jamaica – including the wholescale clearing of courthouses, would not have been considered legitimate to many settlers, even on the eve of the ballot’s introduction, and were again emblematic of the level of inclusion working-class groups had carved out for themselves, even as members of the colony’s middle classes or elite complained at the disorder of polling rooms. Within New South Wales, it was not merely violence but also its acceptability that was serving to shape wider perceptions of political inclusion, with contention often defended as part of the masculinity of political rights. Until the ballot’s introduction, voting continued to be deemed ‘unsafe’ for women, and cultures of violent interference would continue to mark polling and hustings nominations long after practices of voting were officially changed.

In addition to differences in the levels to which violence was being used across the colonies and the extent to which it was feared by voters, candidates and authorities, considerable differences also existed in its impact on the gendering of political participation. It was part of the wider complexity of reforms within this period, and the certainly far from linear history of political inclusion that at once global changes such as widespread appeals against violence could have such contrasting impacts in different sites. As women within colonial New South Wales appealed for changes such as the ballot, and political subjecthood was partially being reinforced as masculine through forms of accepted contention within the colony, violence remained one of few decisive means through which women in colonial Jamaica were altering the outcomes of elections.

While episodes of violence and riot at elections were not limited to Jamaica, it is likely that the high steaks of contests and the limited means most men and women within the island had to shape the outcome of contests did foster its emergence and prevalence

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at contests within the colony. Even as violence was taken to across political divides, however, its widespread use was contributing to perceptions that the island might not be sufficiently stable to support elections. While it was not until the outbreak of violence in Morant Bay in 1865 that the Colonial Office conceded to the appeals of many within the island to abolish the Assembly, such concerns were being raised as early as the 1850s. These concerns were likely only amplified by increased protest outside of elections and the difficulties of ensuring the safety of voters, as returning officers in Jamaica in common with those in Britain and colonial New South Wales struggled to find means through which the safety of voters might be ensured, and the potential for unrest averted.

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Influence, Independence and Reform

‘When… we arrive at such a state of demoralization and degradation that the franchise, which is the boast of the citizens of a free State, may be purchased from a sufficiently large number to carry an election… the institutions of the City cease to be what they ought to be – it becomes necessary to suspend, if not to abolish, those institutions, and to disfranchise such voters.’

Morning Journal (Jamaica), 26 July 1851

A common characteristic of elections conducted across Britain and its colonies in the mid-century remained a wider uncertainty as to how, and if, contests could be regulated; how much privacy should be given to voters; and whether or not a vote should reflect an expression of individual conscience on the part of electors. Equally unclear was the scope that should be given to candidates to incentivise attendances at the poll; or of how vote-buying could be detected and prevented. These debates preceded the introduction of elections to the settler colonies, but came to a head in the mid-century amidst wider appeals for greater order and regulation at elections. Successive laws were passed in Britain and the colonies that aimed to change the modes through which electors could be legally engaged by candidates. Acts were introduced that banned candidates’ or agents’ use of carts and carriages; neither music nor alcohol could be provided to procure votes; and the distribution of party colours was similarly prohibited. Laws were also passed that prevented the buying or selling of votes, and, as the Morning Journal’s comments in

1851 suggested, constituency-wide disenfranchisement was proposed for those electorates where bribery was considered to be endemic.

The previous four chapters of this thesis have focused on how high levels of informality and irregularity shaped both the operation of elections and their wider significance to colonial communities. This final chapter turns to early debates and reforms that were proposed to better regulate elections, with a particular focus on efforts to define and prevent the ‘undue’ influencing of voters. Within this chapter I examine campaigns against vote-buying, coercion and the use of alcohol by candidates, all of which were strongly associated with the potential irregularity of elections, if not the corruption and ‘venality’ of electorates. I also consider early debates over the secret ballot, including questions of whether or not it was suitable or desirable for voting to occur in private, and how this might serve to alter the masculinity of political rights and political leadership. In doing so, my aim is not to emphasise radical changes in how elections were to be conducted, often widely debated within British scholarship.1 Instead, I wish to show how appeals against undue influence were being interpreted within the colonies, in addition to the implications of their successes and failures in implementing change.

The appeals against ‘undue’ influence under focus within this chapter were in keeping with an increasing desire for order and regularity at elections, and were often coupled with increasing concern with violence at the poll. Although not always well defined, ‘undue’ influence covered all forms of inappropriate pressure placed on voters. It included vote-buying, treating and voter coercion, and was in keeping with the growth of liberal sentiment that saw any incentivising or pressure as inimical to the freedom of voters and the integrity of elected parliaments. Concerns with the improper influencing of voters became apparent across the three colonies in the role they played in shaping major changes

1 See debates between Jon Lawrence and James Vernon, as well as considerable scholarship on the effectiveness of campaigns against bribery and violence: Jon Lawrence, ‘The Transformation of British Public Politics After the First World War,’ Past and Present, no. 190 (February 2006), p. 187; James Vernon, Politics and the People: A study in English political culture, c. 1815-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). On bribery: Kathryn Rix, ‘The Elimination of Corrupt Practices in British Elections? Reassessing the impact of the 1883 corrupt practices act,’ English Historical Review CXXIII, no. 500 (February 2008), pp. 65-97.

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to electoral practice, including appeals for the secret ballot in New South Wales; the introduction of new laws that banned carts, alcohol and entertainment at elections in the Cape Colony; as well as the use of bribery as a continued justification for franchise restriction in Jamaica. In keeping with many of the tensions shown in Chapter Two, practical reforms were sought out to help ensure the independence of voters and create a more vigorous and engaged polity.

Reforms also held the potential to reshape forms of engagement at elections, and could hold unintended implications for the class, gender and racial dynamics of political participation. Many of the practices that came under question in the mid-century were part of the festivities that surrounded elections, including the entertainment around the polling place on election day, the use of carts by candidates to bring voters to the poll or the provision of dinners and lunches following contests. Reforms including the secret ballot privatised voting, ensuring that electors could not be influenced by their peers at the point of polling. Historians have debated the implications of such changes, with James Vernon particularly arguing that attempts to ‘sober’ the electorate over the mid-century could also serve to further alienate non-electors from the proceedings of elections: ‘No longer could the disenfranchised vote at the nomination or hold a vigil beside the hustings to intimidate voters’.2 Although reforms could certainly reshape both the forms and boundaries of participation, however, here I wish to emphasise the complexity of this process, with changes such as the introduction of the secret ballot in colonial New South Wales neither serving to cut off lines of influence to women, nor immediately leading to their enfranchisement. Although also supported by candidates and members of parliament, moreover, many of the changes passed during the 1850s were also as desired by voters who wished to avoid coercion as candidates annoyed at being forced to pay considerable sums to ensure their success, and in no site were changes immediately successful.

While reforms were sought out in all three sites, considerable differences nonetheless existed in the stress that was placed upon eradicating forms of coercion or

2 James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, 1815-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 230; 158.

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incentivising, and the allowances that were made for such practices to continue. Within the Cape Colony it was not until the 1870s that substantial changes would be made to the practice of elections in spite of the introduction of laws against bribery and coercion in the late 1850s. This certainly contrasted to colonial New South Wales, where appeals for the secret ballot were made throughout the 1850s, culminating in its introduction in 1858. Yet the debates and changes studied within this chapter remained particularly substantial in the case of Jamaica, where bribery began to be held up as a key justification for decisions to limit the colony’s franchise. Increasingly, political subjecthood implied not merely conformity to particular conditions of enfranchisement, but also the exercise of independence in political decisions – with voters expected to come to the polls motivated by political decisions alone, even where factors such as the payment of their taxes by candidates remained critical to their capacity to register and participate.

Bribery, Treating and Coercion in the Mid-Century Colonies

Systems of bribery and treating at elections formed one of many exchanges between electors and candidates, serving as a means of gaining materially from the right to vote. They were part of the colour and culture of elections, and were not always identified as improper. In Chapter Three I outlined many of the festivities that surrounded elections – with inns held open, and ribbons and cockades distributed amongst voters. Even against widespread criticism, treating at elections within the mid-nineteenth century was often dismissed as being part of the dirtier parts of electioneering. Frank O’Gorman has argued that for much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, bribery and treating were wholly accepted at elections, as measures ‘intended to compliment, reward, and flatter the faithful not to change opinions and disturb settled loyalties’.3 Similarly, for Graeme Orr, ‘the image of bribery as an ultimate corruption – the trading of an inalienable

3 Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The unreformed electoral system of Hanoverian England 1734-1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 142, also quoted in Graeme Orr, ‘Supressing Vote-Buying: the “war” on electoral bribery from 1868,’ Journal of Legal History 27, no. 3 (2006), p. 290.

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right – only came to the fore in the nineteenth century’ as the franchise was lowered and an increasing emphasis was placed on ‘the autonomous, independent voter’.4

It is clear that colonial elections were similarly being swayed by incentivising and coercion. From the Cape Colony’s first elections in 1854, men such as Robert Godlonton or John Ebden hired carts to encourage voters to come to the poll, and the technique seems to have attracted very little criticism. In parts of colonial New South Wales, voters were encouraged through the provision of food and alcohol. In both colonies, and in Jamaica, entertainment at the point of the poll was not uncommon, with bands hired with the intention that the election itself might be transformed into something akin to a festival, and placards and banners strung up around the point of polling. Bribery and coercion also took on more marked forms, and included the outright buying and selling of votes, or pressure put on men by their employers or landholders. Vote buying in Jamaica was particularly pronounced, with candidates paying taxes due on lands in order to ensure that their supporters would be able to participate at the polls, while others outright paid for votes. By the 1850s, bribery was deemed to be turning contests both for parochial councils and the Assembly. But against the continued struggles of many men and women against high taxation and poor wages, receiving money for votes – whether from a candidate who was supported anyway, or through someone supported on the basis of a bribe alone – formed an opportunity to obtain further income.

It is clear that many were happy to turn a blind eye to the pressuring or incentivising of voters. Across the colonies over the 1850s, however, both bribery and coercion were increasingly the centrepieces of attempts to reform both electoral practice and the electors engaging with this form of informal influence. As with violence, bribery was increasingly seen as inimical to ‘free’ and ‘fair’ elections. The growing belief in the vote as a free act of individual conscience was also of critical importance here, raising questions of whether voters’ expectations of hospitality compromised this freedom. Others

4 Orr, ‘Supressing Vote-Buying,’ p. 290. Historians certainly debate the emergence of ideas of the ‘autonomous’ voter, see: Malcolm Crook and Tom Crook, ‘The Advent of the Secret Ballot in Britain and France, 1789-1914: From public assembly to private compartment,’ History 92, no. 308 (2007), pp. 449-471.

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expressed concern that candidates were being chosen based on their ability to incentivise electors to the poll, rather than issues of policy. Campaigns against bribery were also in keeping with Victorian appeals for greater order and regularity, and a resultant desire for the highly imperfect practices of elections – from the highly imperfect systems of registration, to impersonation and double voting – to be rendered less corruptible and more systematic.

The colonies were recipients of debates occurring within Britain and, particularly in the case of the ballot, the United States. In both New South Wales and the Cape, the level of bribery in Britain formed a powerful justification for laws (themselves occasionally identical copies of British statutes) designed to ensure that similar levels of corruption did not take hold. Individuals spoke of the difficulties that had been faced in attempting to prevent bribery in Britain, which had, by the 1850s, already been occurring for many decades.5 Many in New South Wales believed the secret ballot was not necessary because bribery was nowhere near as pronounced as in Britain, while others advocated the secret ballot to prevent this from becoming the case.6 In the Cape, reformers questioned whether a bribery act would work, given the failure of identical statutes in Britain. In Jamaica, reforms in Britain again provided the language and substance for initial reform but, by 1859, the difficulties of preventing bribery in Britain were used as a justification for further restrictions on enfranchisement.

Eliminating Bribery in Post-Emancipation Jamaica

Campaigns against the buying and selling of votes emerged within Jamaica in the late 1840s in line with the expansion of the electorate, and would continue well into the early 1860s. Alongside characterisations of violence studied in the previous chapter, expressions of contempt with bribery were rooted in longstanding prejudices against poorer voters, and were intended to call into question the legitimacy of newer candidates

5 Cape Argus, 9 April 1859, p. 3; Zuid Afrikaan, 11 April 1859, p. 3. 6 ‘Parliamentary Intelligence,’ Empire, 16 January 1857, p. 2.

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and the small freeholders who supported them. Many within Jamaica tied bribery together with a lack of industry amongst non-elite residents, with poorer votes blamed for the non- payment of taxes. In 1851, the Colonial Standard complained bitterly that ‘five-sixths’ of Kingston’s ‘£9,090’ in parochial taxation was paid by the mercantile community, yet it was the small freeholders alone who were deciding all elective offices within the parish.7 Given that such voters could also extract (occasionally significant) financial gain from the vote, the level and form of bribery indicated that far from being an incentive to labour, the ease of enfranchisement and the benefits it could bring lessened the necessities of working.

To some, bribery epitomised the farcical nature of formal enfranchisement at this time, and this was certainly expressed by governors. Recommending the passage of the first laws against bribery to the Colonial Office in 1852, Governor Charles Grey explained ‘the notorious prevalence of the corrupt practices amongst the poor voters, first of allowing their taxes to be in arrear and then of making it a condition with candidates that they should pay the arrears in order to enable the electors to vote for them’.8 Yet, bribery in many ways had its origins in changes to franchise law. As the voting of small freeholders became more pronounced, it was decided to introduce regulations that taxes be paid on property prior to voting, as a means of incentivising formal contribution to the island’s revenue.9 In practice, the tying together of taxation and voting in addition to still-severe competition over seats saw a new culture whereby candidates paid for taxes due on the lands of small freeholders.

By 1851, cultures of vote buying were sufficiently widespread and sufficiently acknowledged by candidates that commentators felt confident to place a price on votes. Writing in 1851, the Colonial Standard noted that ‘two shillings’ was required for the Assembly, while several dollars ‘or a pair of shoes’ might buy favours in elections for the ‘lucrative office of coroner’.10 For the Morning Journal, writing at the same time, the price

7 Colonial Standard, 21 November 1851, pp. 2-3. 8 C Grey to Pakington, 28 April 1852, British National Archives, CO 137/313. 9 Abraham Judah and A. C. Sinclair, Debates of the Colonial Parliament of Jamaica: Volume 3, (Kingston: 1858), p. 99. 10 Colonial Standard, 26 July 1851, p. 2.

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of a vote was as low as ‘two to three and up to six shillings per vote’ within the offices of the parochial government.11 Voters were paid in pre-printed cheques, clothing, tin or other goods. As in New South Wales and the Cape, food, drink and entertainment were all used to entice voters to the poll. But by far the greatest expense incumbent on candidates was that of paying the taxes due on voters’ land. Given that men qualified upon land owned by their wives, there is every chance that women could also benefit from this exchange.

The scorn expressed by the Colonial Standard was in keeping with the journal’s pronounced dislike for the expansion of the Jamaican constituency. Yet, bribery was also denounced by liberal leaders who viewed it as corrupting the electorate. This was a period in which the buying and selling of votes was increasingly associated with moral depravity, and ministers as well as liberal politicians were occupied by the negative impact bribery would have on an already struggling population. This included John E. Henderson, the Falmouth-based Baptist minister, who in 1854 expressed hope that the new governor, Henry Barkly, would abolish the Assembly for the still deeply unequal franchise and the level of bribery it provoked. ‘Could we but get rid of an Assembly altogether the Island might yet thrive,’ Henderson explained to brethren in London, ‘The franchise is very limited and the large majority of those who have it would dispose of their votes for the most trifling sum.’12

Even non-elite Jamaicans spoke out against bribery as being inimical to their position as ‘free subjects’ and a risk to the ‘country’s’ welfare. At the Port Royal election of 1849, when James Porteous had organised a blockade around the courthouse in addition to paying voters, the voter Charles A. Davis used his moment on the hustings to publicly reprimand the actions of Porteous, and speak out for his place as a ‘poor’, but free, male subject:

I am a poor man, but I can labour with the ten fingers God Almighty has given me to support myself, my wife, and six children… this was given to me to sell my conscience and to betray my friends; but if I could sell my conscience I would sell

11 Morning Journal, 26 July 1851, p. 3. 12 Henderson to Rev F. Trestrail, 9 October 1854, National Library of Jamaica, ‘1841-1863 Falmouth Montego Bay Henderson J Letters (35) Baptist Missionary Society,’ M817.

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my Queen, and I consider the man that would betray his friend, is capable of betraying his country – I vote for James Taylor, Esquire.’13

Davis had, in fact, chosen to keep the ten-pound bribe, but gave his vote to another party. Davis was a labourer, who owed his enfranchisement to the property of his wife, but, upon the hustings, his place as a voter and his denial of bribery quite literally became an expression of his manly independence and position as a respectable subject. Indeed, the very idea of ‘bribery’ as a form of ‘bondage’ that should render the voter unqualified had close parallels in longstanding beliefs that only free men should be entitled to a vote.

Edward Jordon and the 1851 Election for Kingston

One of the more significant reformers to advocate an end to bribery and corruption at the island’s elections was Edward Jordon, who increasingly used the platform of his paper, the Morning Journal to speak out against bribery at elections. Jordon was one of a number of ‘free coloured’ liberals who had strongly appealed in the 1820s for their rights as subjects to the same political privileges as European residents and, following emancipation, had become one of the first ‘coloured’ members in the Assembly, later appointed to the Council by Governor Barkly in order to help formulate a new constitution that would allow for the introduction of Responsible Government. Jordon had long campaigned for the interests of black and coloured Jamaicans, and both of his papers, the Watchman and the Morning Journal, edited with Robert Osborn, had provided a key platform for literate non-European opinion. He encouraged the registration of small freeholders, and continued to appeal for franchise reform over the 1850s. Jordon himself relied upon small freeholders for his seat in Kingston, but over the late 1840s and early 1850s showed considerable animosity towards the growing prevalence of bribery.

By the time of Kingston’s 1851 election, Jordon had been appealing against bribery for two years, using his paper the Morning Journal as a platform through which public opinion might be turned against it. The first of these appeals appeared in 1849, and they

13 Morning Journal, 31 December 1849, p. 2.

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continued to appear through 1850 and 1851. Jordon advocated grassroots campaigns against bribery from residents and candidates, as well as Baptist leaders with influence over their congregations.14 ‘Such a society,’ Jordon explained via his paper, ‘would very soon deter bribery, and treating candidates from coming forward, and prevent vote-selling electors from finding a market for their suffrages.’15 Some of Jordon’s proposals were drastic, but they had precedent in attempts to outlaw bribery in parts of Britain.16 He appealed for changes in the law and the adoption of English statutes, and considered the potential disfranchisement of those engaging in bribery – both bribers and the bribed.17 Increasingly, both Jordon and the Morning Journal called out for the disenfranchisement and suspension of the Kingston constituency. His campaigns were initially targeted at election for the municipality and parish of Kingston – deemed to be particularly corrupt. But, by the time of the 1851 election, he was also appealing against the voters for the Assembly.

Jordon’s concern that bribery was endemic to Jamaica’s elections appeared to be confirmed in 1851, when he used an election to test the corruptibility of the electorate. Following the resignation of a longstanding member of Parliament, a candidate came out actively in opposition to any form of incentivising, and Jordon supported him on this basis alone.18 The candidate for the seat, James Davidson, was a conservative merchant. As one of an older class of leaders within the colony who rarely directly canvassed voters, Davidson relied almost entirely upon his agent and on his existing prestige with the city’s respectable residents.19 Initially, he was unopposed, but during his campaign a rival, Foster Henry March, appeared in the field to contest the seat, drawing his support from among

14 Morning Journal, 2 August 1849, pp. 2-3. 15 Morning Journal, 2 August 1849, pp. 2-3. 16 For more on bribery in Britain and policies to outlaw it, see: Anthony E. Smith, ‘Bribery and Disfranchisement: Wallingford Elections, 1820-1832,’ The English Historical Review 75, no. 297 (1960), pp. 618-630; M. A. Manai, ‘Influence, Corruption and Electoral Behaviour in the Mid Nineteenth Century: A Case Study of Lancaster, 1847–1865,’ Northern History 29, no. 1 (1993), pp. 154-164. 17 Morning Journal, 2 August 1849, pp. 2-3; Morning Journal, 26 July 1851, p. 3; Morning Journal, 14, 15 and 16 November 1851, p. 3; Morning Journal, 20 November 1851, pp. 2-3. 18 ‘Representation of Kingston,’ Colonial Standard, 18 November 1851, p. 2; Morning Journal, 17 November 1851, p. 2. 19 ‘Representation of Kingston,’ Colonial Standard, 18 November 1851, p. 2; Morning Journal, 17 November 1851, p. 2.

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the small freeholders throughout Kingston. Shortly after March stepped forward, the campaign itself was realigned by Jordon as a test of the capacity of the Kingston electorate to withstand offers of bribes.

The realignment of Davidson’s campaign around issues of bribery came about via a public meeting held in Kingston’s Commercial Rooms just over a week before the contest.20 It was the first open meeting of the campaign, and was attended by both conservative and liberal leaders from Kingston’s commercial classes, many of whom were already representatives in the Assembly. Jordon opened the meeting by addressing at length the issue of bribery within the colony’s elections. He requested that a formal deputation be sent to Davidson’s opponent to request his withdrawal and, should this fail, that the members of the meeting pledge themselves to do everything in their power to return Davidson. ‘This was the first occasion on which two candidates had taken the field under entirely opposite circumstances,’ Jordon explained, ‘the one depending entirely upon the free, unbought, and unbiased support of those who would come freely to the poll – the other depending principally for his support upon means which must in the end be condemned.’ 21 Jordon stated his intention of using the meeting to sway the opposing candidate, Foster Henry March, but, should this fail, their campaign was to be amongst the Jamaican people. Davidson’s defeat, whether due to March’s refusal to retire or caused by March’s victory at the polls, would be evidence of the depravity of Kingston.

As is common with campaigns of this period, little definitive insight can be given into the canvass of Davidson’s rival, Foster Henry March, nor is it possible to state if, or to what extent, bribery was a part of his campaign. But, regardless of the existence of bribery, March’s popularity should be taken as a genuine reflection of his appeal amongst Kingston’s voters. March was a solicitor who, as Swithin Wilmot has identified, had strong

20 ‘Representation of Kingston,’ Colonial Standard, 18 November 1851, p. 2; Morning Journal, 17 November 1851, p. 2. 21 ‘Representation of Kingston,’ Colonial Standard, 18 November 1851, p. 2; Morning Journal, 17 November 1851, p. 2.

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ties to the black small freeholders of Kingston.22 His son, William Foster, was also a lawyer and provided legal representation to poorer Jamaicans in small claims before the Kingston court, as Diana Paton has shown.23 Prior to March’s election, extensive emblems to demonstrate his popularity had been organised for the day of the contest. When March was successfully elected on November 21, his supporters – who had filled the courtroom – lifted him onto a chair and carried him triumphantly through the crowd bearing signs and banners marked ‘March for Ever!’, ‘The People’s Friend’ and ‘Sons of Jamaica, support Foster Henry March’.24

The recasting of Davidson’s candidacy denied the legitimacy of March’s place as a candidate, and placed both March and his supporters in an impossible bind, however. Here, March was requested to reject a requisition from his supporters to stand, or would serve to prove the unsuitability of his character for a position in parliament.25 Similarly, in stating that voting for March would show that they were not competent to properly exercise the franchise, March’s supporters were expected to choose voluntary disenfranchisement. Either his supporters refused to vote, or, if March won, they would prove that they were not fit to be electors. It was also, in part, an unfair task given the considerable differences in the social position of Davidson’s supporters to those of March. Davidson’s supporters were largely propertied and influential, and did not rely upon the payment of taxes for their enfranchisement. In repositioning the election, Jordon was denying the validity of any claims bar those of Davidson, asserting that the latter gentleman was the only viable leader for the constituency. At the election, 315 voters declared their support of March to 179 who came out in favour of Davidson.26

The election of 1851 raised a number of issues critical to changing attitudes to elections and the functions of the franchise in Jamaica in the mid-century, highly relevant

22 Swithin Wilmot, ‘Black Politics in Free Jamaica, 1838-1865,’ in Ulrike Schmieder, Katja Füllberg-Stolberg, Michael Zeuske (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa and the Americas: A comparative approach (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011), p. 106. 23 Paton, No Bond But the Law, p. 174. 24 Morning Journal, 21 and 22 November 1851, p. 1. 25 ‘Representation of Kingston,’ Colonial Standard, 18 November 1851, p. 2; Morning Journal, 17 November 1851, p. 2. 26 Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, IB/11/23/19, pp. 109-113.

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to this thesis. It showed the extent to which even formal enfranchisement was resting upon a form of informal influence. It suggested how widespread antipathy towards this had grown, as attempts were made to make the franchise a ‘bona fide’ one. It also demonstrated how significant reform could come from below, via out of doors and unofficial meetings, with lasting implications for the suffrage. The ‘test’ set up by Jordon and others was significant in representing a turning point in perceptions of non-elite Jamaicans’ involvement in elections. While resentment was rising, the 1851 election would serve, for some, to prove that bribery was an insurmountable issue with elections in the colony.

The gathering of the ‘honourable’ men of Kingston in the Commercial Rooms to discuss Davidson’s election was attended by many who were themselves Members of Parliament.27 A select group of members of the Assembly used this space to complain of the burdens that had come to be expected of candidates. Andrew Heslop, a wealthy and influential solicitor, rose and argued that if reports of the state of Kingston were true ‘he cared not how soon the electors were deprived of that blessing’. Only two individuals raised opposition to the scheme proposed by Jordon. George William Gordon made a claim for the sympathies of the men in attendance, and argued that no campaign would be successful in preventing bribery. Gordon emphasised the necessity of bribery to many non- elite Jamaicans’ capacity to register, as well as the significance of the advantage that could be extracted from voting: ‘The people of this city are too depressed, too depraved, and too indigent to part with the small sum they have been in the habit of receiving for the electoral franchise’.28 He noted that March had already been canvassing for fifteen days and the meeting had provided ‘no reason’ why he might be persuaded to step down. He also noted the duplicity of members elected via bribery coming out against it.

When Davidson was defeated at the polls, it had the anticipated impact of strengthening the resolve of those opposed to bribery. Following the Kingston meeting, both the liberal Morning Journal and the conservative Colonial Standard had come out in favour of Davidson and the ‘honourable’ residents’ transformation of his campaign. ‘It

27 ‘Representation of Kingston,’ Colonial Standard, 18 November 1851, p. 2. 28 ‘Representation of Kingston,’ Colonial Standard, 18 November 1851, p. 2.

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was a painful, and, at the same time, a degrading sight, to watch the course of yesterday’s Election,’ the Colonial Standard expressed, ‘and to see the class of people by whose votes the wealth, the honesty, and the intelligence of the respectable members of the community, of all complexions, were borne down.’29 But the cause was not lost sight of, and the defeat was sure to have the benefit of ‘strengthening the hands of those who insist upon the necessity of placing the franchise upon a new and greatly reformed basis’:

We must put to a stop the system by which the owner of a hovel, made of saltfish boxes, shall be permitted to declare his freehold of six pounds annual value for purposes of franchise, and no value whatever for purposes of taxation… A check, too, must be put on the bribery arising out of the payment of the taxes of these pauper voters… The Election for Kingston has given them a cue on which they may act, and we earnestly pray the illustration here afforded of the fearful working of the present electoral law will not be lost sight of.30

The Colonial Standard, like others, targeted its attack at the freeholders who had come to represent corruption at elections. Elsewhere, the paper recalled ideas of the ‘degradation’ and ‘demoralization’ that was viewed to taint any community engaging in bribery. It again affirmed the necessity of drawing on British statutes for the eradication of bribery in Jamaica.

In addition to highlighting the culmination of growing sentiment, the 1851 election also had an immediate impact, leading to one of the first changes in law designed to limit enfranchisement since the reforms of the 1830s. The election itself had been contested against the wider context of a scheduled period of electoral reform, with the previous electoral law due to expire. Immediately upon the close of the election, however, both the Colonial Standard and the Morning Journal were speaking out for reforms beyond a renewal of the old law. In Parliament, many of the same men who had been present at the 1851 meeting discussed the possible measures that could be taken to prevent bribery. This included the introduction of a dictation test, in which voters would be required to write out their enfranchisement before a parochial official – a measure thoroughly opposed on the grounds that a large number of voters were only illiterate because they had been denied

29 Colonial Standard, 21 November 1851, pp. 2-3. 30 Colonial Standard, 21 November 1851, pp. 2-3.

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education under slavery.31 Also discussed were regulations that would prevent disturbances, including requirements that elections end within a few hours of opening where there was no competition over the seat.

The 1852 Electoral Law, passed three months after Davidson’s failed election to Kingston, reflected the first attempt of the Jamaican Assembly to target corruption at elections. The law as passed seemed to do little to actively change the franchise and was defended to the Colonial Office and the public on the very grounds that it ‘simply seeks to make the present franchise a bona fide one’.32 It also had very little impact on bribery at elections. Yet, it was also unquestionably intended to break a contract between candidates and voters in which candidates were expected to offer financial assistance to help secure their victory. In addition to providing the island’s first statutes against the purchasing of votes, it required eligible freeholders to be registered six months or more prior to a contest, paying taxes at the point of registration, rather than at the poll.33 By extending the period between registration and elections and by instituting a rule via which taxes must be paid in advance of registration, it was deemed that the few candidates would be prepared to risk paying a voter on the basis that a contest might occur. By removing the incentive for candidates to bribe, it was believed that the burden of candidates paying taxes would be removed and respectable candidates would not face the same necessities of buying votes to secure their return.

Jordon and the Morning Journal’s support of the bill was significant in its passage through Parliament and its approval by the Colonial Office. When the legislation was first tabled, a group of Kingston voters petitioned against the changes, on the grounds that it deliberately intended to disenfranchise non-elite Jamaicans. They requested permission to use the courthouse for a public meeting by which a petition might be composed, but the request was denied by Kingston’s Mayor on the grounds that he was of the ‘opinion that the provisions of the new bill were approved of by all the respectable members of the

31 ‘The Assembly,’ Colonial Standard, 30 December 1851, p. 2. 32 Colonial Standard, 19 January 1852, p. 3. 33 Laws of Jamaica, 1852.

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community, and were necessary to place the franchise on a fair and proper footing’.34 The Morning Journal itself came out against the denial of the freedom to use the courthouse, but insisted that the law merely served to ensure that only entitled voters participated at elections.35 The Morning Journal’s interpretation was also used to support the law when it was transmitted to the Colonial Office. This was a period in which the Colonial Office was still directly looking over Jamaica’s legislation – particularly electoral laws – in order to ensure that they did not contain provisions deliberately intended to impact black or coloured subjects. In forwarding the law, the Governor admitted that it had ‘excited discontent amongst the poorer voters, whose malpractices at elections the measure was directed,’ but he defended it on the grounds that it consisted of no significant change to the franchise.36 To make his case further, he sent a clipping of the Morning Journal’s editorial on the subject as a means of highlighting its support amongst the colony’s ‘respectable’ voters.

The 1852 Election Law resulted in fewer registrations logged by the next return in 1854, although imperfect records make it impossible to determine the full extent of this. In 1854, when Governor Barkly sent in returns requested by the Colonial Office, thirty- one electors were enfranchised in Port Royal, by contrast to the seventy who had participated at the election in 1849.37 Heuman’s analysis of poll books (a more complete data set than electoral rolls for this period), similarly shows a steady decline.38 Yet, in addition to providing a precedent for laws calculated to further restrict the franchise, the 1852 change in law was also significant and defended as representing a turn away from respectable political inclusion based on landownership alone, to one more firmly based in taxation. It was clear to many that freeholds no longer formed a suitable test of the respectability of electors, and against belief that the system was wholly corruptible, the

34 Colonial Standard, 19 January 1852, p. 3. 35 Morning Journal, 22 January 1852. 36 Governor Charles Grey to Pakington, 28 April 1852, British National Archives, CO 137/313 39. 37 H Barkley to Newcastle, 22 March 1854, British National Archives CO 137/322 37; Poll Books, Jamaican Archives, IB/11/23/19. 38 Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, politics, and the free coloreds in Jamaica (Oxford: Clio Press, 1981), pp. 125-128.

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1851 campaigns saw Jordon and others defend an increased emphasis upon taxpaying qualification. This would be further pursued over the 1850s, as new alternatives to the highly imperfect regulations of voters were found. In 1859, a taxpaying qualification alone was mooted as a possible remedy to the issues of the franchise, before the ten-shilling stamp tax was decided upon in its place.

The ineffectiveness of the 1852 change in law and continued appeals against bribery over the 1850s were also significant in adding further justification to appeals for franchise restriction. Infamously, as explored in Chapter One, in 1859 the introduction of a stamp duty on freehold voters and the respective reduction and introduction of taxation and salary qualifications served to radically change the composition of the electorate. It reduced the franchise, but introduced a requirement that freeholders pay a ten-shilling stamp on their land when they registered. In practice, by introducing a payment on the vote, and simultaneously reducing the franchise, it only served to make bribery less avoidable for those who could not afford to pay the tax. Yet, for the members who supported the measure, misappropriation of the franchise and issues of taxation were raised as key points of concern. Members of Parliament recalled the elections for Kingston in 1849, in which ‘some 800 votes were polled’ and at which ‘the cost of the election to successful candidates was from £500 to £1000 each’.39 The difficulties of preventing bribery in Britain were also raised as a justification for the introduction of laws to limit the franchise. For the conservative, Henry Westmoreland, ‘if bribery can exist in England, where there is a board of audit… can anyone imagine that bribery will not exist here’.40 For many, it was bribery that was providing the incentive for small freeholders to make false claims on their property, and a ten-shilling stamp was proposed to ensure that only those who cared sufficiently for their enfranchisement would vote.

The backing of Davidson’s campaign suggested an apparent shift in perceptions of the best means of protecting Jamaica’s non-elite residents. For much of the 1840s, strong appeals had been made for their representation in Parliament, with men such as

39 Abraham Judah and A. C. Sinclair, Debates of the Colonial Parliament of Jamaica: Volume 3, (Kingston, 1858), p. 106. 40 Judah and Sinclair, Debates of the Colonial Parliament of Jamaica, p. 106.

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Jordon well aware that members of the ‘planter’ party would do little to protect the livelihoods of freed Jamaicans. In spite of his own status as a member for Kingston, through these meetings and via his platform in the Morning Journal, Jordon was making the remarkable claim that his own seat should be dissolved if bribery in its elections could not be prevented. For Gad Heuman, who notes Jordon’s support of the 1852 Electoral Law and the 1859 stamp duty, this shift was a clear indication of Jordon’s resentment of the candidates who were increasingly filling the Assembly, and the level of disorder that had come to characterise debates.41 The longstanding campaign against bribery that preceded this support of the law suggested that, for Jordon, such individuals were also not being legally elected.

Jordon’s support of this law has been widely debated by Jamaican historians, some of whom have argued that it represented a reversal of his commitment to the protection of non-elite Jamaicans.42 The 1859 law was unquestionably supported by some for the impact it would have on limiting the participation of small freeholders at elections. In Jordan’s case, though, it was defended on the grounds that it came with a substantial reduction in the monetary level of the franchise. He explained the necessities of a new electoral act due to the expiration of the old one, and highlighted that the funds from the stamp would be used to support the poor. Jordon’s views largely embodied a longstanding concern with the state of non-elite Jamaicans, and were in keeping with a liberal politics that saw poorer Jamaicans better served through their protection from bribery, and the protection of the Assembly from those who engaged in bribery, than via their formal enfranchisement. For Jordon, the reduction in the franchise would allow for a greater portion of the middle-class community to register and taxpaying residents would be free to register without the stamp.

41 Heuman, Between Black and White, p. 197. 42 Gad Heuman in particular has disagreed with Mavis Campbell’s assessment on this. Heuman, Between Black and White, p. 197.

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Bribery and Treating in the Cape Colony

Discourses of protection, corruptibility and concern that elections were being manipulated through treating also drove the first campaigns for electoral reform in the Cape Colony, which occurred only five years after the 1853 Constitution’s passage. Debates within the Cape over this period remained far less marked than those in either Jamaica or New South Wales, but showed the same concern with eradicating and preventing corruption, and ensuring greater regularity. Here, however, changes to the law came almost wholly through perceptions of how elections were being conducted in Cape Town where, by 1858, many were concerned that elections were leading to higher levels of drunkenness – only amplified through the drawn-out nature of the colony’s polls. Following elections for the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council in 1858 and 1859, at which it was deemed the successful candidates had bought their position on the poll through beer, new statues were introduced eradicating all forms of treating and incentivising – from the provision of food or entertainment, to the use of carts, the distribution of party colours, or the payment of agents.

The contest that sparked efforts to change the cultures of electioneering in the Cape was that of the Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly in 1858-9, itself one of the more marked elections of this period. It is likely that alcohol and treating by candidates in an effort to bring voters to the poll amplified the excitement of the contests. But the interest drawn in the elections of 1858-9 and the level of competition between candidates it drew related to longstanding tensions and the centrality of two key areas of policy that were being contested, those of Responsible Government and the ‘Voluntary Principle’: the latter a proposal, devised and led by the Anglicised liberal Saul Solomon, to remove state funding to the church. In spite of considerable agitations for representative government, Responsible Government remained controversial throughout the 1850s. The 1858-9 elections were amongst the quietest for this period in the Eastern Provinces, emblematic of the extent to which interest in elections tended to rise and fall with particular issues at hand. But in Cape Town, both Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly elections remained animated. In addition to the controversies of Responsible Government,

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Solomon’s proposal for an end to state funding to the church sparked animosity between many Dutch residents and Anglicised residents of Cape Town, largely due to the considerable burden it was likely to place on the state-supported Dutch Reformed Church to obtain funding from their members. This was also the election that Henry Vigne had failed to gain sufficient seats in Cape Town to ensure his return to the Assembly, and subsequently made a bid for the votes of Genadendal in order to represent Caledon in the Assembly.

It is unclear how treating worked in Cape Town, although papers noted that canteens were being kept open by candidates throughout the September 1858 poll for the Legislative Council.43 Days prior to the Legislative Council election’s opening in 1858 a scandal erupted when it was made known that canteens were to be used by candidates, with the Het Volksblad noting that ‘The Committees of at least four of the Candidates indulged in systematic treating,’ insinuating that those to blame were the candidates at the head of the poll in the city.44 The ‘scenes’ of the election in 1858 and 1859 were described in considerable detail by the Cape Argus, which prepared ‘pen and ink’ sketches of the elections for a British readership.45 Polling for the 1858 elections was taken in the Supreme Court in Cape Town as had occurred in 1854, but perceptions of disorder within the arrangements of the courthouse (where several thousand had struggled to get to the polling clerks) led to the construction of a hustings and polling booth in the Parade. The Argus viewed the Parade as appearing as ‘a race-day or English fair’: ‘Bands of music, banners flying, crowds of coolies gathered together, and vehicles of all sorts moving about’.46 Candidates also set up their headquarters in tents on the parade, while others took up rooms in the Commercial Exchange, adjacent to the polling place.

‘Systematic’ treating was not the only form of informal influence swaying contests in the Cape at this time. As in colonial New South Wales and, to a lesser extent, in Jamaica, many voters lived on farms and were taken to the poll by their employer. Stanley Trapido

43 Het Volksblad, 9 September 1858, p. 4. 44 Het Volksblad, 9 September 1858, p. 4. 45 Cape Argus, 15 January 1859, p. 2. 46 Cape Argus, 15 January 1859, p. 2.

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has noted reports from the Cape Monitor in 1854, which claimed that ‘Farmers ha[d] resorted to arbitrary acts where Coloured people refuse to vote for their representatives’.47 Reports were also made in the Zuid Afrikaan following by-elections in 1856, but these too did not result in any charges.48 Both the Cape Monitor and the Zuid Afrikaan represented core press opposition to the Cape franchise, however, and it is unsurprising that they picked up on such informalities just as they picked up on high levels of apathy (Chapter Three). Coercion also included the threats made against inhabitants in Genadendal in 1859 (Chapter Two). Particularly in Cape Town it was common for hired ‘touters’ to station themselves near the polling table, where they would wait beside the polling clerks in order to take up any spare votes.49 In Cape Town, where residents could ‘plump’ for both the Legislative Assembly elections and the Legislative Council elections, voters who entered the polling room with a single candidate in mind were often encouraged to give stray votes to another part. They were also often blamed for cases of impersonation.50

It is unsurprising that it was alcohol that drew such widespread critique at these elections, however. Not only were candidates such as Saul Solomon, or the pro- Responsible Government candidates and the commentators who supported them deeply annoyed that their position on the poll had been impacted by those prepared to fund their position on the poll, but the prevalence of canteens within Cape Town were a longstanding point of concern. Andrew Bank’s work on leisure and culture in early nineteenth century Cape Town has noted the extent to which canteens operated as part of the working-class culture of the city, frequented by slaves, labourers, sailors and others whose reduced access to other forms of leisure made canteens an attractive place to socialise, and much of this continued into the mid-century, as did attempts to remove canteens.51 As Robert Ross has

47 Cape Monitor, 28 February 1854; Cape Monitor, 1 April 1854 quoted in Trapido, ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation,’ pp. 395-396. 48 Zuid Afrikaan, quoted in Trapido, ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation,’ p. 396. 49 See, for example: Het Volksblad, 9 September 1858, p. 4; CPP 1868 [SC9], Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Consider and report on the Registration of Voters, pp. 13-14. 50 CPP 1868 [SC9], Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Consider and report on the Registration of Voters, pp. 13-14. 51 Andrew Bank, ‘Slavery in Cape Town, 1806 to 1834’ (University of Cape Town: Masters Dissertation, 1991), pp. 129-134. See, also: Katherine D Elks, ‘Crime, Criminality and Police in Cape Town 1825-1850’ (University of Cape Town: Masters of Arts, 1986), pp. 130-169.

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noted, portrayals of drunkenness, particularly the drunkenness of Khoekhoe or ex-slaves, was part of the stereotyping of lower class culture within the city, and this was also true of voters.52 While canteens were certainly most prominent in towns, the existence of canteens in mission stations was also commonly held up as another way of deriding the respectability of these institutions. Candidates, including E. Bergh, who ran for George in 1854, ran on campaigns of closing down canteens, while the threats made against voters in Genadendal in 1859 included claims that canteens would be established within the station unless particular men were supported.53

While intimidation was not widely noted, the use of alcohol at the 1858-9 elections was almost universally condemned by the press via both editorials and correspondence. One letter-writer in the Argus reported that candidates’ open houses had provoked the aggression of her husband. ‘The brewer and canteen-keepers may feel grateful to Mr. Jarvis, and his supporters may look upon him as the friend of the colony, but I am sure, Mr. Editors, that many wives have had cause, like me, to wish Mr. Jarvis at the bottom of the red sea,’ she expressed. ‘On each night of the elections, I have had to endure the brutal violence of my husband, whom the nasty fellows in the employ of Mr. Jarvis have each day made beasty drunk.’54 Het Volksblad noted that condemnation of bribery had also come from the pulpit, with Dutch Reformed Church ministers condemning the use of alcohol by candidates.55 The use of alcohol was also decried at the hustings, where Saul Solomon made treating the focus of his concluding address. He singled out those in favour of state grants to the church as holding the sole responsibility for bribery, and positioned the campaign of the voluntaries as pure. ‘Now, gentlemen, the voluntaries were quite content to go to the Cape Town elections on that principle alone,’ Solomon explained, ‘But what did the Church grants gentlemen do? … they went to that class of electors who,

52 Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870: A tragedy of manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 125-126. 53 South African Commercial Advertiser, 18 March 1854, pp. 2-3; Cape Argus, 7 April 1864, p. 3. 54 Cape Argus, 11 September 1858, p. 3. 55 Het Volksblad, 16 September 1858, pp. 1-4.

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unfortunately, know nothing about the question, and will wilfully sell their votes for beer or money.’56

Partially because of the centrality of state-supported religion to the election, the pursuit of bribery also roused tensions on national lines. Solomon’s words reflected apparent defensiveness as one who had come close to being defeated over the several days of polling, and there is every chance that his low state on the poll related to the use of alcohol by his opponents. But, by blaming the ‘church grants gentlemen’ his characterisation also further amplified the tensions between Dutch and Anglicised candidates already raised through the election, the former of whom often had strong personal ties to the Dutch Reformed Church. This included men such as Solomon's rival, Petrus Kotze, whose father and brother were both Dutch Reformed Church ministers.57 Others, including the Zuid Afrikaan objected strongly to the characterisation of Dutch- supported candidates by Solomon and the English press, arguing that the bribery of the 1858-9 elections was a function of the constitution and its low franchise. The 1859 election was a contest ‘in true English style’ the Zuid Afrikaan reported.58 Proposals were already being made for the formalisation of laws against bribery, and the Zuid Afrikaan argued that they would have little impact unless the franchise was reformed. Drawing on the same language of ‘venality’ present in debates in Jamaica, the Zuid Afrikaan urged members to pass bills in the next session to increase the restrictions of the franchise.59

Ultimately, however, new laws were sought out to place bans on bribery and treating, and were passed shortly into the next session. The Cape’s 1859 bribery law, passed immediately following the 1858-9 elections, cast a wide net around forms of influence at elections. Fairbairn made it clear that it was his intention to ensure that the Act was ‘comprehensive’.60 It contained standard provisions that outlawed the buying of votes through money, alcohol or favour, and the use of threats of violence to intimidate.

56 ‘A Model Electioneering Speech,’ Natal Witness, 18 March 1859, p. 3. 57 ‘A Model Electioneering Speech,’ Natal Witness, 18 March 1859, p. 3. 58 Zuid Afrikaan, 17 January 1859, p. 3. 59 Zuid Afrikaan, 17 January 1859, p. 3; Zuid Afrikaan, 21April 1859, p. 7. 60 ‘Cape Parliament,’ Graham’s Town Journal, 19 April 1859, p. 3.

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Although already covered by common law, from 1859 residents within the colony could sue for any such indiscretions at elections to the amount of twenty pounds. But the Act also went further, and banned the wearing of any colours, ribbands or ‘marks of distinction’ that could be used by residents or returning officers to identify the intentions of voters. Music and entertainment at the point of polling were similarly deemed ‘undue’ influence inappropriate to campaigns. ‘Meal tickets’ were to be outlawed, as were practices of ‘conveyancing’ or the widespread use of carts to take voters to the poll. Illustrating the extent to which these laws were financially motivated for some, one member went so far as to propose that the bill be extended to include the purchasing of any form of advertisement by candidates during their contests.61

Anti-bribery laws in the Cape, as elsewhere, were part of a wider desire to level the playing field between candidates: to ensure that precedents of paying for food and drink did not force other candidates to corrupt themselves in order to compete. In common with Jamaica, they were also viewed to prevent the corruption of the district. As Solomon stated from the hustings, bribery at the election was so disturbing partially because ‘public opinion seemed to be in its favor [sic] – in favor of the corruptors and the corrupted’.62 It is evident that figures such as Solomon were annoyed by the practices adopted by his opponents to induce them to the poll, and felt it had negatively impacted his campaign. Johan Conrad Silberbauer, the member for Caledon principally elected by Genadendal voters also used his experienced in the recently terminated elections as evidence for the law’s necessity. He accused his rival of offering ‘snuff-boxes and peppermints and bon- bons’,63 but letters between Silberbauer and the Colonial Secretary suggest that alcohol and fireworks were amongst the entertainment and hospitality provided that Silberbauer opposed.64 For Silberbauer, it was not merely that the provision of beer and entertainment

61 Corrupt Practices at Elections Prevention Act (1859). 62 ‘A Model Electioneering Speech,’ Natal Witness, 18 March 1859, p. 3. 63 ‘House of Assembly,’ Cape Argus, 9 April 1859, p. 3. 64 J Silberbauer to the Governor’s Secretary, 31 December 1858, Western Cape Archives CO 4105, S153. See also, J Silberbauer to the Colonial Secretary, 5 February 1859, Western Cape Archives, CO 4111 S15.

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influenced the voters’ decisions, but that such practices risked the corruption of a whole community – and one that the colony had a duty to protect.

Yet, these laws were also part of a wider process by which the nature of electioneering was subject to change, with increasing emphasis being placed on ensuring that only those with a genuine interest in the affairs of an election would participate. Through anti-bribery laws it was often hoped that a more vigorous and independent body of electors would be created. Laws, such as those against ‘conveyancing’ made it illegal for voters to be given assistance to the poll. For men such as Fairbairn, as with Jordon in Jamaica, it was not widely considered to be an issue if laws against bribery reduced the level of participation at elections provided that it also ensured that those who were participating were drawn upon political motives alone. Where successful, anti-bribery laws would serve to substantially alter the manner the atmosphere of elections: banning party colours, or the provision of rides to the poll. Against the already marked apathy of elections in the Cape, anti-bribery laws risked further disincentivising attendances.

Undue influence and the Secret Ballot in Colonial New South Wales

Of the three colonies, however, perhaps the greatest reforms to the processes of elections were to be introduced in colonial New South Wales, where a desire to provide greater independence for voters led to the remarkably early introduction of the secret ballot. The ‘protection’ of voters discussed within these debates contrasted to that of Jamaica, and was more concerned with putting in place safeguards to protect voters from coercion and allow them to act independently. Both bribery and the undue influencing of voters unquestionably came under focus, however, accelerated by the rapid reductions in the franchise over the 1850s, which had led to the doubling and tripling of the number of men entitled to vote over a ten-year period. The increased excitement of elections and the increased competition over seats had certainly also brought about higher levels of corruption in the electorate. Yet, it was in keeping with the strength of working-class communities in colonial New South Wales at this time that the issue that spurred

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significant reforms was not bribery, but rather the coercion of voters by landlords and employers. These debates came to a head in 1858, and, following the failure of laws against bribery and coercion passed in 1851, saw increasing support of greater privacy in voting via the ballot.

Outright vote buying was uncommon within colonial New South Wales, and many were happy to turn a blind eye to cultures of entertainment surrounding an election. High levels of undue influence nonetheless marked the colony’s polling places, not limited to the violence and disorder of polling rooms. In regional areas, particularly, open voting led to the tradition of local inns being held open for voters by candidates – a practice deemed only to amplify chances of violence. The first acts against bribery were passed in 1851, preceding the 1853 Corruption Act in Britain, and rendered the provision of any incentives by candidates illegal, along with their hiring of agents.65 Yet, in keeping with the failures of laws against bribery passed elsewhere, the 1851 act was almost wholly ineffective in preventing bribery and few cases were ever presented. In 1858, the candidate Daniel Cooper, for example, complained vehemently that ‘public houses [had] been thrown open’ by his opponent, Robert Tooth, who was nonetheless unsuccessful in gaining a seat.66 In the 1858 election of Parramatta, as discussed in Chapter Four, bribery, coercion and violence were said to have been combined by the candidate George Oakes, who was accused of touring the town’s prison and threatening voters with the loss of their jobs.67

Issues of voter freedom particularly emerged in 1857-8, following the introduction of Responsible Government, as franchise reforms were debated in Parliament (Chapter One). By 1858, when such debates became particularly acute, most had accepted the low level of colonial New South Wales’ franchise, and many argued that it was ‘practically’ universal. There was nonetheless considerable concern that those already enfranchised were being unduly influenced in their votes, not via bribery, but rather voter coercion. Voter coercion stemmed back to many of the issues identified in the first chapter, with large landholders often viewed as holding undue influence over the electorate. Animosity

65 Electoral Act 1851. 66 Empire, 14 January 1858, p. 4. 67 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, pp. 839-884.

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towards squatters was not dissimilar to the concurrent debates over landlords in Britain, but within colonial New South Wales squatters were often viewed as lacking the legitimacy of a landed gentry. ‘Squatters’ did not technically own the land they controlled, but had rather taken it up for the purposes of raising livestock. Via the Australian Colonies Government Act (1850), the legitimacy of these men as landholders and electors had been controversially upheld by the Crown, when voting rights were given to squatters on the basis of their ‘licences to depasture’.68 The redistribution of seats had seen squatting runs themselves become districts. Areas such as Maneroo, Moreton, Wide Bay and Maranoa and Clarence and Darling Downs held a fraction of the population of larger towns or the city of Sydney, and were principally populated by working-class labourers working under squatters, but often returned the same number of seats as numerically larger electorates. It was also these seats, where thirty or forty percent of the adult population were qualified to vote, where the introduction of a residence-based franchise was likely to be the most substantial in extending the numbers qualified to register as voters.

Speaking to the culture of voting within his district of Maneroo in the Legislative Council in 1858, Daniel Egan conveyed that he was opposed to the secret ballot until he saw how ‘large squatters brought up their servants to the poll, like so many sheep, to vote for his [Egan’s] opponent.’69 William Richman Piddington, member for Northumberland and Hunter, likewise argued that it was objectionable that individuals ‘were made to vote contrary to their conscience’, rendering the franchise ‘a curse instead of a sacred privilege’.70 As Chapter Two has shown, landlords often had considerable influence over the outcomes of elections: not merely being viewed as able to threaten their employees with their jobs but also in determining the very composition of the roll, able to choose which voters were included or not when collectors visited to collect those eligible.

68 Australian Colonies Government Act (1850). 69 ‘Legislative Assembly,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May 1858, pp. 3-4. 70 ‘Parliament of New South Wales,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 6 August 1858, p. 4.

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A considerable amount has been written about the origins of the ballot, both within and outside Australia, and historians have widely debated the impacts of its introduction.71 As with the low franchise, it has been tied into the strength of working-class cultures, and longstanding appeals from Chartist agitators brought into the colony during the period of convict transportation.72 Recently, Sean Scalmer has positioned the ballot as a key mechanism by which ‘political elites made changes to the system of government that explicitly aimed to curb popular involvement’.73 Scalmer is right that many within colonial New South Wales advocated the ballot as a solution to the rowdy culture of elections. Yet, it is nonetheless clear that within New South Wales appeals for the ballot were also coming from working-class voters who viewed it as helping to ensure their own freedom at elections and that these appeals remained essential to the passage of the ballot in spite of its continued controversy in Parliament. It is not my intention to go over the intricacies of the debates over the ballot, covered in considerable detail elsewhere.74 Nonetheless, the distinctive features of the ballot debates in New South Wales spoke to the peculiarities of colony and the considerable strength of working-class populations, with continued commitments made to open cultures of voting in spite of its introduction.

The ballot remained surprisingly controversial within colonial New South Wales, even following its passage in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. Those opposed to the reform expressed concern with the negative impacts changes to the law might have on both voters and candidates. Settlers debated whether the necessities of ensuring that illiterate voters could participate might give too much control to potentially partial

71 The most recent scholarship explores the ballot as a global phenomenon, see: Malcolm Crook and Tom Crook, ‘Reforming voting practices in a global age: the making and remaking of the modern secret ballot in Britain, France and the United States, c. 1600–c. 1950,’ Past & Present 212, no. 1 (2011), pp. 199-237. 72 Paul Pickering, ‘A Wider Field in a New Country: Chartism in Colonial Australia,’ in Marian Sawer (ed.), Elections, Full, Free and Fair (Annandale: Federation Press, 2001), pp. 28-45. 73 Sean Scalmer, ‘Containing Contention: A reinterpretation of democratic change and electoral reform in the Australian colonies,’ Australian Historical Studies 42 (2011), p. 340. 74 For the particular case of New South Wales, see: Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: The foundations of Australian Democracy (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2006), pp. 457-469. For Australia generally, Mark McKenna, ‘The story of the “Australian ballot,”’ in Marian Sawer, Elections, Full, Free and Fair (Annandale: Federation Press, 2001), pp. 45-62.

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returning officers, or if the ballot might place an improper check on illiterate voters.75 Settlers also debated if closed voting might erode the masculinity of voters, since they would no longer be required to expose their choice of representatives to uproarious and potentially oppositional crowds. Perhaps adding to such concerns, the reform was also supported by middle-class women, some of whom argued for it as a prerequisite to their own enfranchisement. As a columnist giving ‘A Woman’s Views on Politics’ explained amidst debates in 1858: ‘If Feminine suffrage should ever manage to slip into the statues of Australia, I know enough of my own sex to be assured that the ballot would be requisite for the purpose of maintaining order.’ The Empire’s columnist continued: ‘If the present system of voting were in fashion, feminine suffrage would be accompanied by a large amount of feminine suffering, in the shape of scratched faces, torn-out hair, and torn-up caps.’76

Where opposed by many members of Parliament, including liberal figures such as the Premier Charles Cowper, the ballot was strongly supported by others, including both the leading liberal daily, the Empire, as well as its conservative counterpart, the Sydney Morning Herald, with the latter unquestionably supporting the measure for the order it would bring to elections – as Scalmer notes.77 Looking on at the scenes of polling rooms and the berating of members on the hustings in the neighbouring colony of Victoria, the Herald advocated the ballot for the protection of voters from intimidation through violence, coercion and bribery: ‘there can be no doubt that the ballot tended to prevent much violence’.78 In the Assembly, others similarly noted supported the ballot on the grounds that ‘several persons were being made to vote contrary to their conscience, through intimidation and violence’.79 Many, including the Sydney Morning Herald, coupled

75 See, for example: ‘Legislative Assembly,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1858, pp. 5-6; Northern Times, 7 August 1858. 76 Empire, 25 August 1858, p. 5. 77 Scalmer, ‘Containing Contention,’ pp. 350-351. 78 Sydney Morning Herald, 18 June 1857, p. 7. 79 ‘Parliament of New South Wales. Legislative Assembly,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 6 August 1858, p. 4.

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the secret ballot’s introduction with an end to the hustings and the uproar, contention and potential embarrassment to candidates it entailed.80

The secret ballot was supported by conservative and liberal members of government, but considerable appeals also came from outside of parliament, where working-class voters advocated the change in order to ensure greater privacy during polling. Unlike the Herald, such groups advocated the ballot alongside the retention of the hustings, allowing voters to question and chastise candidates, but to also obtain greater privacy at the point of the poll.81 The first Electoral Reform Acts, drafted by the conservative Parker ministry in 1857, introduced a mode of balloting strongly supported by the Sydney Morning Herald.82 It put an end to the hustings, advocating nomination ‘by publication’ ahead of the contests. Almost immediately upon its tabling, however, it sparked considerable uproar outside of Parliament. Several thousand met in the streets of Sydney to oppose the bill, described as ‘entirely failing to correct the inequalities’ of representation, with the distribution of seats identified as a key point of concern, alongside the elimination of the hustings and a system whereby men were expected to write their polling number on their vote card.83 As Peter Cochrane has shown, these meetings were themselves part of the further expansion of the working-class public sphere, with similar meetings called in 1858 to put pressure on the liberal Cowper administration, which next attempted to pass the reform.84

When the ballot was finally passed in late 1858, it represented the culmination of longstanding disagreement in Parliament, alongside debates out-of-doors. One of its strengths, and a key reason it did pass, was the manner through which it severed to meet different concerns for reform. For conservative members, as well as the conservative press, the ballot was to be praised as bringing order to elections and ensuring that residents could not sell their votes. For liberal proponents, it would offer a means of protecting voters

80 Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 1857, p. 4. 81 Sydney Morning Herald, 4 September 1857, p. 5. 82 Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 1857, 4. 83 See: Sydney Morning Herald, 2 September 1857, p. 4; Empire, 2 September 1857, pp. 2-3. 84 Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, pp. 457-469.

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from the intimidation and coercion of their employers and landlords, a necessary prerequisite to the desired franchise reform that passed with it. Under the ballot legislation, men would be alone within the polling rooms of the courthouse, where once they had been surrounded by residents. Police were placed on the door to ensure order within the space, which contained only the scrutineers and returning officer.85 Under the New South Wales system, upon giving his name and confirming his identity, uniform ballot papers were then handed over to the voter who was directed to fill out the form behind a calico curtain or in an adjacent room. Papers were then put into a box in view of the scrutineers and returning officers (to ensure that no papers were removed from the polling room) and the voter would leave through a different door as the next man was admitted into the space.

Most crucially, however, the ballot as introduced in colonial New South Wales did not simultaneously eradicate the hustings nomination. The law allowed for the continuation of the practice of candidates being required to present themselves before a meeting of thousands of residents, and kept the binding show of hands – both of which were deemed critical tests of leadership. In this respect, the case of New South Wales epitomises the lasting strength of open cultures of elections. It also highlights the necessity of exercising caution when generalising across the Australian colonies at this time.

The debates and reforms of New South Wales highlight much about the peculiarities of the colony and the manner through which these would substantially shape the application of wider calls for reform. Here, as in debates over the franchise (Chapter One), it is apparent that strength of working-class movements by this point would ensure considerable concessions that differed even from those passed in the neighbouring Australian colonies. Unlike the reforms of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, the pressure and belief in the right of the public to test leaders allowed for the continuation of the hustings even as calls were made for a wider ordering of elections. Concessions were also made in the ballot, with many strongly advocating the necessities of ensuring that

85 See, for example, the New England election of 1859: Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1858, pp. 1009.

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illiterate residents would be able to vote. Whereas, from 1856, new laws were made to ensure that only those sufficiently educated would be able to vote in colonial Victorian elections, within New South Wales the ballot continued to allow for individuals to choose its use. In the early 1860s, when laws were passed partially amending the form of the ballot, it was made an offence to vote publicly unless illiterate, but provisions continued to be put in place to allow illiterate voters to participate.

The Impacts and Limits of Reform

Over the course of the 1850s, questions of the allowances of vote-buying, hospitality and coercion came to the fore of debates across the colonies. At the heart of this was a desire to reduce the extravagant cost of elections, and a belief that voters should not be induced to come to the poll. It also tapped into moral considerations and anxieties regarding the ‘corruptibility’ of the electorate, and a desire that a body of upright voters should be created. While the immediacy of change is often stressed within histories of electoral reform, it should be emphasised that in none of the three colonies were these reforms initially successful, and they did not always substantially reshape the culture of elections. These reforms were, however, emblematic of shifting debates over the best means of holding elections and of what forms of influence were to be permitted. They would also come to have an impact on the forms of participation that could be engaged with within elections and the lines of influence they entailed. In the case of Jamaica, they were particularly influential within debates over whether or not elections were functioning within the colony and whether or not they should continue.

Perhaps the greatest immediate change of the three colonies was that brought about by the secret ballot in colonial New South Wales, a measure intended to avert the coercion of voters and make it more difficult to provide bribes. The ‘treating’ of voters might (and did) continue, but the ballot was to be favoured for removing the incentive, with bribers unable to follow up those they treated. More important, still, was the impact of the secret ballot in protecting voters from the influence of their landlords or employers,

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a measure that became particularly essential with the concurrent introduction of universal male suffrage. At the first elections under the ballot, one Returning Officer wished to highlight the manner through which the ballot ‘ha[d] been very highly appreciated and will be more so, now that its efficiency to protect the voter has now been substantially tested.’86 Nonetheless, elections did continue to be shaped by forms of collective participation – not merely at the hustings but also at the polling booth. Agents were likely still paid, and free food and alcohol could also continue to be gained throughout the election.87 Regardless of the ballot, men gathered outside the courthouse to express their approval or disapproval of voters as they went in.

The first elections under the ballot were held in June 1859, and many were keen to stress the immediacy of the changes in the practice of elections it brought. The Empire asserted the absence of ‘the slightest uproar or disorder,’ arguing that ‘no election in Sydney was ever conducted with such exemplary decorum as the important contest that closed last week.’88 For one candidate, the behaviour of voters who attended the poll in West Sydney was ‘more like a peaceful, orderly, and religious congregation outside a church, waiting for the parson’ and ‘that other parts of the world might look to us of a model’ for the new constitutional freedom the ballot had instituted.89 In addition to its impact on public agitation, public drunkenness was reported as having diminished in Newcastle.90 The changes of the ballot were instituted alongside other reforms that also altered the practice of elections within the colony, including the institution of larger numbers of electorates, reducing the necessities of travelling into towns, and further distributing crowds at hustings in Sydney.

86 Returning Officer of Ipswich to the Colonial Secretary, 25 June 1859, State Records NSW, Box: 4/3413, Item: 59/2744. 87 David Kennedy, Kennedy’s Colonial Travel: A Narrative of a Four Years’ Tour Through Australia, New Zealand, Canada, &c (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 122-123: a memoir of an American tourist, David Kennedy and his father in the 1870s, gives a vibrant account of the hustings nomination and accompanying free entertainment in regional New South Wales in the 1870s. 88 Empire, 13 June 1859, p. 4. 89 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 June 1859, p. 4. Words of John Hubert Plunkett. 90 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 June 1859, p. 4.

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Considerable continuities nonetheless existed in the new law, not merely via the hustings or the violent contention it could be associated with. Although voters were now protected from crowds within the polling place, there was nothing within the law to render it illegal to vote openly. Returning officers at the first ballot election in New England noted that a surprising number of individuals had chosen to ‘repudiate’ the ballot: ‘Many of the men repudiated the ballot, and said “I want none of that – I vote for So-and-So; but the Returning Officer always offered to go away with them.’91 In Eden, similarly, a protest was served when men chose to vote openly, although there was no laws to prevent it.92 Men could still sell their votes if desired, and the law allowed them to choose their own protection. It was only in the early 1860s that voting openly not due to illiteracy or blindness was made illegal, and punishable via fine.93 As late as 1865, when the first man was prosecuted for voting openly, the Empire affirmed the ‘manliness’ of open voting, but cautioned against it, ‘If an elector chooses to dispense with the privilege of concealing his vote, he may be asserting his manliness in doing so; but he does it at the expense of the community,’ noting the risk of causing disturbances.94

While some had expressed fear that the introduction of the ballot might erode the masculinity of voters and, perhaps, pave the way for women’s suffrage, the introduction of the ballot did not immediately allow for the participation of women. The decision to retain the hustings – with the widespread chastisement it provoked, and the masculinity of leadership it was deemed to guarantee, also continued to reinforce the masculine contention of elections, and provided a further affirmation that few considered women’s enfranchisement imminent. Early photographs of hustings nomination highlight the extent to which these meetings continued to retain their masculine associations well into the 1880s (Figure Eleven) and 1890s – a period in which women were participating in municipal, although not general, elections.95 After the denial of formal political inclusion

91 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1859-60, p. 1035. 92 Empire, 14 July 1859, p. 8. 93 Parliament of New South Wales, Sessional Papers 1861, p. 484. 94 Empire, 25 March 1865, p. 4. 95 Crowd at the Dubbo Hustings, New South Wales, c.1880, State Library of NSW, At Work and Play, 05166, 393205, c. 1880.

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in 1858 (Chapter One), the road to women’s suffrage within the colony was to be hard fought, with reforms often the product of mistakes and inconsistencies, as well as continued agitation.

Nonetheless, it remained one of the greater ironies of shifting practices of elections at this time that a platform that at once celebrated the masculinity of voting and the masculinity of political leadership could still serve as an avenue for the influence of women. As women’s movements picked up again in the 1860s, and enfranchisement was (at first inadvertently) held out formally to female ratepayers in municipal elections, both enfranchised and unenfranchised women used and were increasingly acknowledged within the site of the hustings. At a meeting held in 1869, for example, a successful candidate for the municipality of Newcastle thanked the ‘lady voters of the ward’ who had voted for him, but especially ‘those ladies who were non-voters, but who had exerted their powerful influence on his behalf’.96 He stated that ‘if at any future time he should be honoured with a seat in the Legislature of the country, he would promise them he would advocate “women’s rights”.’ In spite of its associations, the hustings was providing a platform for the public acknowledgement and performance of women’s informal political inclusion.

The partial softening of the ballot to ensure that illiterate voters would still be able to participate also prevented it from becoming a literacy test, and ensured that there would be no block to the many hundreds of established and new voters who would be unable to read the names of candidates on the paper.97 During their canvass, candidates encouraged voters not to be embarrassed for the lack of a skill that was not theirs ‘but their parents’ fault’, and to trust in the discretion of the Returning Officer.98 Again, this was a product of the strength of working-class movements and liberals’ belief in their full inclusion as voters. Were it not for the conditions intended to allow for the participation of working-

96 Newcastle Chronicle, 11 February 1869. 97 Marilyn Lake, ‘The Gendered and Racialised Self who Claimed the Right to Self-Government,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, no. 1 (2012); John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 14. 98 Sydney Mail, 8 October 1869.

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class voters, however, Yellow Jimmy would not have been able to participate in the 1859 election in which he was accused of impersonation. Unfortunately, records do not permit any assessment of wider participation, although it is likely that the wider assumption that Aboriginal Australians did not qualify continued to prohibitively restrict their registration as voters.

Within Jamaica, laws against bribery were similarly ineffective and, indeed, could work to increase the necessities of vote-buying. Throughout the 1850s, many continued to gain materially from their right to vote at elections, although accusations of bribery were unquestionably also intended as means through which the legitimacy of candidates could be undermined. There are a number of reasons why campaigns against bribery were largely ineffective in Jamaica. By the 1850s, the culture had increasingly taken root: and, as Gordon himself emphasised, it had long been practice for bribery to be used across lines of political affiliation.99 Many individuals had come to ‘expect’ assistance for their votes.100 Given the known struggle many non-elite Jamaicans were having with taxation in this period, it is unsurprising that many might have taken advantage of, if not relied upon, the payment of their taxes by candidates. Over the course of the 1850s, moreover, the ‘solution’ to bribery continued to be sought out in electoral acts, and punishments were rarely given to bribers or the bribed, even where stipulations including the temporary expulsion of candidates and voters from the roll were passed. Finally, by making voting more expensive, and more restrictive, acts such as the 1859 Electoral Law and the ten shilling ‘stamp’ it introduced on voting only increased the necessity of bribery to some campaigns.

Records from the elections of 1860 highlight the extent to which many voters were relying upon the payment of the stamp duty by agents for their enfranchisement, a practice that continued into the 1860s.101 Yet, one of the differences between the two colonies was

99 ‘Representation of Kingston,’ Colonial Standard, 18 November 1851, p. 2; Morning Journal, 17 November 1851. 100 ‘Representation of Kingston,’ Colonial Standard, 18 November 1851, p. 2; Morning Journal, 17 November 1851. 101 William Brown, Falmouth Post, 28 August 1860, p. 2.

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the extent to which issues with bribery in the island were increasingly deemed to be without any possible resolution, and a sufficient justification to limit any franchise reform. Governors alongside members of the colony’s press continued to emphasise the corruption of many Jamaican electorates, and the extent to which the franchise was being wholly manipulated, while contests themselves were being bought and sold. By the mid- 1860s, months prior to the outbreak of violence in Morant Bay, when petitions were sent from districts across the colony to appeal for greater representation and reforms to the franchise, men such as the Chief Justice, Allan Ker, responded to queries as to whether the franchise could be reformed by noting the ‘desirability’ but impossibility of an extension of the right to vote. ‘The actual negro of Jamaica is utterly unfit for the exercise of electoral privileges. To grant him the franchise would only tend to his demoralization, from the obvious use that he would make of his right of voting, that of selling its exercise to the highest bidder.’102 These, and similar, statements showed very little awareness of the extent to which laws introduced over the 1850s had only served to make bribery a more critical feature of elections, and the extent to which bribery continued elsewhere.

The comments of Ker, affirmed and communicated to the Colonial Office by Governor Eyre, were also suggestive of the manner through which concerns based in liberal questions of education and protection would come to be interpreted around fixed ideas of racial difference. We have already seen how many expressed concern with violence in race-based terms, and it was not unusual for both ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ voters to receive scorn from conservative commentators such as the Colonial Standard. Diana Paton has similarly noted how, already by the 1850s, the failure of post-emancipation prison reform in enacting significant changes in the prevalence of crime led to assertions that the character of emancipated Jamaicans could not be reformed.103 While, for Edward Jordon, who had led reforms against bribery in the late 1840s and early 1850s, engaging in bribery was a question of small freeholders’ education and the depravity of agents taking advantage of them, but for Eyre and Ker, such differences appeared to be a question of character. Even as the Colonial Office continued to uphold commitments to Jamaica’s legislative

102 BPP 1866 [3683-I] Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission: Part II Minutes of Evidence, pp. 219-220. 103 Paton, No Bond But the Law, p. 155.

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independence and the continuation of the Assembly, many settlers’ prejudices against small freeholders were upheld through the assent given to these laws, themselves calculated to limit the power of that section of the electorate.

Within the Cape, the reforms of the 1850s represented only the first of many that were to come over the following decades, most of which were intended to ensure greater regularity at elections. The reforms of 1859 remained far less marked than those of New South Wales or Jamaica. Particularly because it was almost wholly ignored, the 1859 law had limited impact on the shaping of political rights or the lines of influence that were to occur at elections. As early as 1864, the two candidates for the Legislative Council Robert Godlonton and Samuel Cawood were each accused of spending as much as two-thousand pounds on their election, while, in 1869, Godlonton’s agent confirmed that ‘neither effort nor expense’ had been spared by his opponents.104 Money had been spent on carriages to take voters to the poll, dinners as well as other forms of treating, alongside the production of banners, ephemera and advertising as polling across the Eastern Province extended over a month. As these contests suggested, carriages continued to be used across lines of political affiliation to ensure that voters could get to the poll in time. Many continued to turn a blind eye to even blatant vote-buying; while others lodged their strong objections. From the passage of the law, formal accusations would be made against bribery, however, with calls for elections to be overturned.105

Partially due to initial ineffectiveness of these reforms, they continued to be pursued over the nineteenth century, alongside continued attempts to better formalise registration processes and elections as a whole. In a further attempt to prevent the influence of ‘touters’ within the courthouse, inquiries in 1868 called for voters to be received one at a time, with only scrutineers, candidates and the returning officer being

104 ‘Graham’s Town Election,’ Cape Argus, 9 February 1864, p. 3; ‘Graham’s Town,’ Cape Argues, 9 February 1864, p. 3; [Looker-On], ‘Mr. Cawood’s Election Expense,’ Cape Argus, 23 February 1864, p. 3. J Collett to Robert Godlonton, 5 February 1869, University of Witswatersrand Historical Papers, Godlonton Papers, A43 1151. 105 Petition of Peter Weiner, Western Cape Archives, CCP 1/2/2/1/21 A2 1874.

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present with the voter at the point of polling.106 Colours were not to be worn within the courthouse, and from the elections of 1869 polling within Cape Town was to be restricted to a single day. Finally, in 1892, the Ballot and Franchise Act simultaneously introduced the secret ballot and tripled the franchise from twenty-five to seventy-five pounds. The act also replaced open hustings nominations with nomination via publication – the practice in place in elections for the Legislative Council. Passed within years of the termination of ‘hustings’ nominations within colonial New South Wales, the measures were indicative of the lasting legacy of open forms of voting within many colonies, even as other practices – such as the ballot – came prior to this.

In the Cape Colony, as in Jamaica, bribery raised questions of enfranchisement and, as Stanley Trapido has noted, this would continue to be questioned in to the late nineteenth century. For many, the courting and treating of voters – regularly parodied in the press and, increasingly, in illustrations – served to reinforce a perception that non- European voters in the Cape did not sufficiently appreciate enfranchisement.107 Here, as in Jamaica, the failure of laws to prevent bribery could amplify perceptions of the corruptibility and ‘venality’ of the electorate and the unsuitability of the franchise. Yet, at least for the 1850s and early 1860s, the Cape’s twenty-five pound franchise continued to be upheld, and reforms were sought out through changes to the official practice of elections, rather than additional exclusions made on formal registration. In spite of the ineffectiveness of reforms across the colonies, it was principally in Jamaica alone where perceptions of endemic bribery fed into a narrative of the ‘failure’ of elections. Here, the buying and selling of votes was taken by many as evidence that political rights were not sufficiently valued amongst the free population, with elections being won or lost on the basis of vote-buying.

106 CCP 1868 [SC9], Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Consider and report on the Registration of Voters. 107 Trapido, ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation,’ p. 396.

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Conclusion

This final chapter has taken as its focus the early efforts to reform aspects of the ‘undue’ influencing of voters at elections in the colonies. In line with wider appeals for better order and regularity at contests, changes were being made to the types of influence that could be exercised by candidates at elections, which often came in line with considerable reforms to the practice of elections themselves. Acts against bribery were introduced alongside other attempts to better order elections, including increases in police presences, or the allocation of larger numbers of polling places. Such changes were also under pursuit within Britain, where corruption and irregularity as well as violence remained far more widespread than that of the contemporary colonies. It was nonetheless in keeping with greater concerns with ordering and regulating colonial elections that the reforms pursued over the mid-century period often went beyond those of Britain. In colonial New South Wales and the Cape, the first considerable reforms to the practice of elections were introduced within a decade of the introduction of responsible government in each site, initially via acts against bribery respectively passed in 1851 and 1859. Within only two decades of the introduction of elections, the secret ballot was passed in colonial New South Wales, removing open voting, and radically reducing the levels of influence that could be exercised over voters - itself increasingly deemed to be 'undue'. Elections had taken place in Jamaica since the seventeenth century, yet over the 1850s, Jamaica, similarly, saw the first concerted pursuit of bribery at elections.

The changes in these sites varied in their severity and their effectiveness, and in almost every case subsequent reforms would continue to be pursued over the course of the 1860s. Yet differences were also apparent in the priorities being placed on eradication of informality; in the degree of confidence being placed on the capacity of electorates to be reformed and on the extent to which this was deemed to be an issue. Within only a few decades of the removal of race-based restrictions in Jamaica’s franchise and the expansion of the Jamaican electorate, many viewed corruption to be both endemic and incurable, and were using such views to underwrite justifications for franchise restriction for the protection of the Assembly and for the protection of non-elite Jamaicans. While the laws

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passed did little to prevent such practices, their failure did contribute to a narrative that many within the island were not yet ‘ready’ for formal political inclusion. Elsewhere, reforms proved similarly uneven. Even considerable changes such as the introduction of the secret ballot in colonial New South Wales did not immediately privatise voting, nor did it prevent violence or bribery at the poll. Across the colonies, forms of collective participation continued, as did wider cultures of informality surrounding elections.

227 Conclusion

Following the violence of Morant Bay in 1865, news of the rebellion and the subsequent institution of martial law spread across the colonies. In 1866, the Jamaican Assembly passed a new constitution that established Crown Colonial status, which was soon ratified by Westminster with little debate.1 The decision both reflected and reinforced perceptions that the ‘experiment’ of representative government within the post-slave society had ‘failed’, with freed slaves not reaching the status of free citizens, while planters would not let go of coercive systems of labour nor accept freed men as fellow subjects. The same year marked the ten-year anniversary of Responsible Government within New South Wales, while an appropriate frame for Responsible Government continued to be debated in the Cape Parliament until its passage in 1872. In both New South Wales and the Cape, enfranchisement remained unfixed and unstable, and franchise anomalies, inconsistencies and manipulations, as well as formal debate and legislative change, would continue to reshape the meanings of political subjecthood throughout the nineteenth century.

This thesis has argued for the vital place of elections within changing histories of enfranchisement and political participation in the mid-nineteenth century: both as sites in which tensions over formal enfranchisement were exposed and in which formal enfranchisement would be changed. It has done this through a comparative examination of New South Wales, Jamaica and the Cape, at a point when the future governance of all three colonies was subject to critical consideration. By resituating a history of enfranchisement within the space of elections I have considered not merely the significance of these events to those settler, indigenous and emancipated populations who

1 For more on this, see: Catherine Hall, ‘The Nation Within and Without,’ in Keith McClelland, Catherine Hall and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, race, gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 179-233; Ronald V Sires, ‘The Jamaica Constitution of 1884,’ Social and Economic Studies 3, no. 1 (1954), pp. 64-81.

were included in colonial franchises, but also the manner through which they could function as vital spaces through which the boundaries of inclusion were rewritten. This has been shown via five chapters, each of which has taken up a different manner through which participation was shaped: formal enfranchisement, practices of registration, cultures of electioneering, systems of violence, and reforms to undue influence.

Colonial franchises, set out in electoral acts and constitutions under reform from 1850 through to 1860, are often studied as the foundation of political subjecthood. These documents were framed against widespread disagreements over which subjects should be given the vote, influenced not merely by the appeals of settlers but also humanitarian lobbying, imperial policy and agitations from indigenous as well as emancipated populations. Questions were raised as to how and if indigenous and emancipated populations could be protected under colonial governments, as well as how tensions between settler groups could be resolved through colonial franchises. Chapter One examined the debates and agitations by which these were formed, highlighting considerable and growing differences between the franchises of Jamaica, the Cape and New South Wales, as well as inconsistencies in the Colonial Office’s considerations for indigenous and emancipated subject populations and its uneven and contradictory interventions over the course of the decade. One of the outcomes of this was considerable uncertainty and local variation in the meaning of ‘subject’ itself, as jurists and settlers within New South Wales remained uncertain as to whether or not Aboriginal Australians or even ‘West Indian’ immigrants counted as subjects with political privileges within the colony. This situation contrasted starkly to that of the Cape Colony and Jamaica, where earlier statutes and interventions had further formalised the legal status of Khoisan, ‘coloured,’ and ‘black’ residents within the colonial territories.

Equally critical to participation at elections was successful registration: a process that itself rested upon an individual’s conformance to and performance of racialised and class-based standards of respectability expected of voters. Conditions from property valuations, interpretation of land ownership, identification and even whether or not an individual held a last name by which they could be legally identified all played a considerable and demonstrable role in determining whether or not European, Aboriginal

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Australian, Malay or ‘coloured’ voters were able to formally participate at elections across the three colonies in the mid-nineteenth century. Nonetheless, even for those non- European subjects who conformed to such conditions, both existing prejudice and wilful manipulation on the part of candidates and officials could work to create further barriers to successful registration on the electoral roll of each colony. Chapter Two examined two particular cases from the colonies, in which two non-European subjects conformed to the conditions of enfranchisement but were nonetheless required to appeal for their legal right to vote. These cases highlighted the difficulties involved in registration, but they also revealed wider tensions and inconsistencies within settlers’ perceptions of indigenous subjects’ rights as political subjects.

Participation within an election represented far more than the formal casting of a vote: it also represented engagement in an often lengthy, ritual process by which candidates appealed to whole constituencies for support. Chapter Three examined the manner through which candidates structured their campaigns around the expectations of voters and the official practices of elections (the canvass, the nomination, and the poll), highlighting how both served to influence the forms and levels of engagement in elections. Aspects of this interaction were built into the official practice of elections itself: with hustings nominations and open polling based on a perception that candidates and voters should be held to account by electors as well as non-electors. Yet, factors from the distribution of polling places, the existence of multiple languages and the level of competition over seats all impacted the operation of these practices and the extent to which both electors and non-electors were to be brought into candidates’ campaigns and into the election itself.

Across New South Wales and Jamaica, cultures of electoral violence remained a powerful means through which participation at elections was reshaped from below. Armed bands, carefully organised to intimidate and prevent voters’ formal participation were present at elections from New South Wales’ country districts to the parochial courthouses of Saint David and Saint Mary in Jamaica throughout the period. Chapter Four explored uneven levels of violence between the elections of Jamaica, New South Wales and the Cape, and how it could have a decisive influence on results at elections in the former two

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colonies, while remaining notably absent from the latter site. Within the mid-century, violence was increasingly understood as inimical to the ‘free’ conduct of elections, yet violence often remained an expected, if not accepted, element of electoral practice.

Finally, equally important to histories of enfranchisement in the mid-century was the impact of struggles to better defend the boundaries of enfranchisement and define legitimate forms of political influence. Appeals for reform to the practice of elections were more than an attempt to order such contests, they were also discussions over what forms of influence should be permitted, and how this could be achieved. Against widespread bribery, known violence and forms of coercion, the mid-century also saw the first appeals to instil greater order and regularity into elections, coming from candidates and voters alike. Chapter Five examined early attempts to reform and prevent particular types of influence at elections, highlighting the manner through which laws and practices intended to reduce the costs of campaigning and instil greater order at elections were also intended to ensure the independence of voters and reshaped the meaning of participation. This process, both uneven and incomplete, was part of a much longer project of franchise formalisation, an attempt to ensure that elections were won or lost on the political decisions of voters alone.

The mid-nineteenth century remains a key period for histories of liberalism, settler colonialism and political rights. It was a historical moment marked by contradictions; of rapid and uneven changes in systems of governance. Both the palpable irregularity of the Colonial Office’s policies across the British colonies and the contradictions of the period were captured in policy decisions and legislative changes studied in this thesis. Here, the 1853 passage of the Cape’s twenty-five pound franchise, expressly intended to ensure a substantial number of the Cape’s ‘coloured’ population could register, sits against the 1859 introduction of a stamp duty on voting within Jamaica, or continuing silences surrounding the inclusion of Aboriginal Australians as political subjects. These policies have been widely studied for their discontinuities, for their impact on the livelihood of colonial

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subjects, and as part of a growing ‘colour consciousness’ of the British Empire.2 This thesis has built on this scholarship, showing the impact of elections on those subject to changes in the franchise. I have emphasised irregularities and modes of resistance. I have examined disparate meanings attached to elections. I have shown how resentment over inclusivity could also be resisted through manipulation, with lasting consequences.

The tensions and contradictions of 1849-1860 were to resonate throughout elections held within this period and across the colonies. Changing attitudes to race shaped participation at elections both implicitly and explicitly, present in objections to the enfranchisement of ‘coloured’ voters in the Cape, but also in assumptions as to whether or not Aboriginal Australians would qualify under franchise conditions or, indeed, if they qualified as ‘subjects’ at all. In Jamaica, by the 1850s, perceptions of the inferiority of non- European voters were openly discussed by many, while liberal commentators reinforced constructions of difference by asserting that emancipated Jamaicans had ‘failed’ to reach the status of free ‘citizens’, as Diana Paton has similarly noted.3 Claims that non-elite Jamaicans were manipulating or absconding the franchise, based in both ideologies, remained critical to the continued denial of franchise reform within the colony. In the Cape Colony, strong objections continued to be raised against the £25 franchise, even by those Europeans, such as Henry Vigne, who had once sought political advantage through their votes. In Chapter Two, I stressed double standards of voter accountability in the Cape Colony, with both suspicion and resentment surrounding non-Europeans’ registration leading to the disenfranchisement of Malay as well as ‘coloured’ voters on the basis of identification or land values.

2 David Killingray, ‘“A Good West Indian, a Good African, and, in Short, a Good Britisher”: Black and British in a Colour-Conscious Empire, 1760–1950,’ The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 3 (2008), pp. 363-381. 3 Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, race, and gender in Jamaican state formation, 1780-1870 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 152. See, also, Thomas Holt, ‘The Essence of the Contract: The Articulation of Race, Gender, and Political Economy in British Emancipation Policy, 1838-1866,’ in Thomas Holt, Frederick Cooper and Rebecca Scott (eds.), Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 48-74.

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Resistance remained a core mode through which those excluded might ensure their participation, and both violence and franchise manipulation form key remainders of why a history of political participation at this time cannot assume that the boundaries of the franchise always stood in practice. But the participation of emancipated or indigenous subjects was not always the product of resistance – and, on occasion, non-European populations could be left fighting to prove their legal inclusion against the manipulation and resistance of others who sought their exclusion. Historians have widely debated and rightly voiced scepticism to the authenticity of the Cape ‘liberal tradition’, often deemed to be epitomised by the 1853 ‘non-racial’ franchise. This thesis has affirmed the palpable contradictions of its institution and implementation as well as the controversies it evoked. While couched in many of the contradictions of the period, and likely at least partially intended to reinforce a settler order, however, the narrative of liberalism remained powerful in both the application and defence of the Cape’s franchise. Once instituted, men in towns and mission stations claimed their rights to inclusion under the franchise, while candidates appealed for their votes. By 1859 the reluctant acceptance of indigenous and emancipated voters within the Cape Colony contrasted to growing concern with other African populations, whose naturalisation and eventual inclusion as subjects by birth remained a concern.

The situation of the Cape contrasted quite starkly to the case of New South Wales where, as Evans et al have speculated, differences in population and capacity to mobilise organised resistance made it easier for settlers to ignore or, more probably, overlook the potential inclusion of Aboriginal Australians.4 Within colonial New South Wales, settlers were only rarely confronted with the falsity of their assumptions about the exclusion of Aboriginal Australians from the franchise. Yet, this rapid expansion of settlement, with Aboriginal Australians and children of Aboriginal Australians and European settlers often under the employ of settlers, working alongside convict and immigrant workers, occasionally brought into question the borders of political subjecthood. As cases contained in Chapter One and Chapter Two highlighted, when confronted, returning officers, jurists,

4 Julie Evans [et al.], Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous peoples in British settler colonies, 1830- 1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

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collectors and members of parliament were often left unable to draw distinctions between the eligibility of Aboriginal Australians and settlers.

Equally vital to changing histories of enfranchisement within this period were questions of gender, as political subjecthood was increasingly defined as male. Across the colonies, the extension of self-government and enfranchisement – whether through the creation of new parliaments (as in New South Wales and the Cape Colony) or through the expansion of enfranchisement amongst recently emancipated populations (as in the case of Jamaica) – offered new means through which men were brought into public life, and new forums in which they could act. Yet, it remains clear that this position never went wholly unchallenged by women, many of whom continued to exercise an influence at elections or continued to appeal for formal political inclusion. In the 1850s, men in colonial New South Wales were required to define why they should hold the right to vote above women, as working-class settlers appealed for male suffrage based on residence alone. In post-emancipation Jamaica, the longstanding role of women both in commerce and in organised protest meant that women continued to exercise an influence at elections, challenging the assumed position of men, even as political rights served to reinforce growing distinctions between men and women. It was principally in the Cape Colony alone where women remained largely absent from any part of the election.

By 1860, lasting changes had been enacted in each of the three sites, all of which reshaped the meaning of participation at elections. In New South Wales, by 1859, the electorate had expanded from five to twenty-one percent of the total population. Alongside universal male suffrage, the secret ballot was introduced, allowing men to cast votes in private, free from the influence of authorities and other residents. In Jamaica, 1859 saw the introduction of a stamp tax on voting that placed prohibitive restrictions on registration. This change came against the simultaneous introduction of the ballot and universal male suffrage within colonial New South Wales. Changes were less pronounced in the Cape, and major changes would not occur until the 1870s-1890s. Here, representative government was introduced in 1853 on a low colour-blind franchise, which continued to be affirmed against attack over the 1850s. Nonetheless, by the late 1850s, the first indications of the weaknesses of this ‘liberal’ settlement was exposed when, in 1861,

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a naturalisation law was passed that explicitly used literacy qualifications as a mode of exclusion. In all three sites, the first attempts to ensure the independence of voters were introduced, partially reshaping the culture of campaigns and the atmosphere of elections.

Such developments would continue into the 1860s, yet there remained considerable and often longstanding continuities. Women continued to be denied formal political inclusion across the colonies, and such tensions would rise again in the 1860s. Until 1865, men in Jamaica continued to register their vote, often with assistance from candidates prepared to pay the ten-shilling stamp. Hustings were to continue within the Cape, along with forms of open voting, well into the late nineteenth century. So, too, were debates and agitations against the £25 franchise. In New South Wales, the hustings was again retained, meaning that as late as 1880, men were still declaring their policies from a temporary, out-of-doors platform, from which the show of hands would be binding – and forms of collective voting continued to be upheld (Figure Eleven). Finally, against continued agitation of women’s rights movements and the expanding suffrage for men, the status of Aboriginal Australians under the New South Wales franchise would remain uncertain until their exclusion was formalised alongside the introduction of women’s suffrage in 1902.

The most significant immediate change to the practice of elections and the debates explored within this thesis was not to come until 1866, when the Jamaican Assembly acquiesced to the desire expressed by the Colonial Office that Crown Colonial status be introduced with a nominee Council in place of the elective Assembly. The decision came about through a palpable fear of further unrest, yet it also came as the culmination of long term concerns with the future of elections within a post-slave society dominated by freed subjects, with only a small population of settlers. As scholars have shown, it was also a decision that would continue to have resonances in changing attitudes to enfranchisement across the British Empire over the nineteenth century.5 Perceptions that representative government was unstable within Jamaica were reinforced throughout the 1850s, with

5 See, for example: Alan Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship: Colonial inclusions and exclusions,’ in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 381-397.

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episodes of violence and unrest, as well as the prevalence of bribery only further contributing to this view. Such practices were not unique to the colony, but amidst existing concern and increasingly vocalised prejudice, the proliferation of both bribery and violence could also reinforce a perception that elections were not working or were not suitable within Jamaica. The assessments made by officials in 1865 that emancipated Jamaicans were insufficiently appreciative and therefore ‘not ready’ for formal political inclusion via franchise extension exemplified this. But it also came against a more than fifteen-year period in which non-elite Jamaicans had shown their interest in the outcomes of elections, both as ‘respectable’ freeholders and, equally, through violence and franchise manipulation.

This thesis has examined elections as sites in which key questions of political and social inclusion as well as the meanings of ‘subjecthood’ were raised. Its focus has remained deliberately limited in order to offer a spatial comparison across three sites in which similar debates were under consideration. Nonetheless, none of the tensions nor inconsistencies explored in this thesis remain limited to this period, and extending this history would certainly raise further questions worthy of consideration. Critical within this include questions of how informalities continued to mark elections into the 1860s, particularly as women’s rights movements were again pursued with renewed vigour in New South Wales and the Cape Colony, and across the Empire as a whole. Far more could also be said about the role and place of religion and sectarian conflict within a period in which the state was becoming increasingly secular while religion continued to play a part in shaping identity, social networks and daily life. Finally, the cases here remain single instances of a broader phenomenon, largely unstudied within current histories of the British Empire. Broadening out this work to consider the early elections of New Zealand and Canada, where enfranchisement was deeply intertwined with settler sovereignty, and treaties as well as constitutions and electoral acts shaped formal enfranchisement would certainly add valuable depth to the present research.

For many living within the colonies in the mid-nineteenth century, representative government was an achievement to be celebrated, an outward recognition of the maturity and stability of settler societies. Across the colonies, self-government also brought with it

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new levels of control over emancipated and indigenous populations. This was increasingly the case over the 1860s and, in the colony in which the position of settlers was most strongly challenged, that of Jamaica, representative government was in the process of being dismantled within six years. Yet, across these sites, elections remained key sites for the articulation of tensions between colonial groups and between settler, emancipated and indigenous populations. Within contexts in which the franchise remained limited, and often controversial, many took to elections as sites through which its boundaries could be contested. Comparative colonial histories of elections highlight that political subjecthood continued to be negotiated long after the institution of colonial constitutions, both in Parliament, but also by settler, indigenous and emancipated populations. Shifting the focus away from constitutional debates to elections highlights exactly how much was often left to be worked through in practice, and the level to which individuals would take to this space in order to contest their and others’ positions under the franchise.

Figure 11: Crowd at the Dubbo Hustings, New South Wales, c.1880. Source: ‘At Work and Play,’ SL NSW, 05166, 393205.

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259