Description

William MANNING (1763 – 1835) / COUNCIL OF BURGHERS OF ST. CROIX / VARIOUS BRITISH CROWN OFFICIALS et al.

Manuscript, London, 1808 – 1814.

 

The Danish West Indies (Dansk Vestindien), or the Danish Virgin Islands (which were sold by Denmark in 1917, to become United States Virgin Islands), was a colony gradually established by the Danish West India-Guinea Company, a private enterprise chartered by the Danish crown.  It assumed control of the Virgin Islands of St. Thomas (83 sq. km) in 1673, Saint John (19 sq. km) in 1718, and purchased St. Croix (220 sq. km) from France in 1733.

The Danish West India-Guinea Company fostered a sugar-slave plantation economy on the islands, while making them a freeport (open to all international shipping, with no customs duties) making the Danish Virgin Islands a busy nexus of trade, both legal and black market, in what was otherwise a region of mercantilism.  This allowed the islands to maximalize its profits from the Triangle Trade, which its lax regulations making it favoured entrepôt for the exchange of slaves.

While the Danish West India-Guinea Company should have been hugely profitable, its administration was plagued by gross mismanagement and corruption and it went bankrupt in 1754, leading the Danish crown to assume direct rule over the Danish Virgin Islands.  The royalist government maintained the established freeport and slave trading policies.

The Danish Virgin Islands attracted a wide array of foreign residents, mainly merchants and planters, such that its upper classes came to feature many non-Danes, with British subjects having a particularly heavy presence, a state of affairs that the Danish crown was apparently content to tolerate (ex. Alexander Hamilton (1755/7 – 1803), the future American Revolutionary War hero, and a native of Nevis, spent most of his childhood in St. Thomas).  Serving below the colony’s governors and lieutenant governors, each island had as its representative assembly committee, a Council of Burghers, appointed by the king from the island’s leading planters and merchants (and which always included several foreign subjects).

 

The Second British Occupation of the Danish Virgin Islands (1807 – 1815)

 

Denmark and Britian found themselves on opposite sides of the Napoleonic Wars, leading the Royal Navy to unleash its awesome might against Denmark and her overseas holdings.  In this vein, the British first occupied the Danish Virgin Islands from 1801 to 1802.

In December 1807, a sizeable British fleet descended upon the Danish Virgin Islands.  It encountered no resistance, such that the Danish forces surrendered without a shot being fired by either side.  St. Thomas was taken on December 22, while St. Croix was seized by the British on December 25.

Unlike their relations with the French and the Dutch, the British harboured no ill will towards the Danes, as they believed that they had been coerced into joining Napoleon’s side, while they identified with them as a fellow Protestant maritime nation.  Moreover, Britain had very strong familiar and economic ties to the Danish Virgin Islands.  As such, the capitulation agreements made upon the British takeover of the islands were relatively lenient towards the Danes.  The Danish POWs were to be paroled in British-held territory (as opposed to being imprisoned) until agreements were made to repatriate them to Denmark, whole the local Danish court system and cultural customs were maintained.

The British officials tended to personally sympathize with plight and problems of the residents of the Danish West Indies, as opposed to punishing or exploiting them (as the they often did on the captured French islands).  While all Danish crown property on the islands was to be seized by the British state, this was more to hold it for security as opposed to expropriating it for financial gain.

However, in big blow to the island’s economy, the Danish Virgin Islands were no longer to be a freeport and were to be subject to the far more restrictive British mercantilist trading system.  Moreover, the islands’ lucrative involvement in the black-market slave trade was firmly extinguished by the British, who formally banned the Transatlantic slave trade earlier in 1807.

 

Enter William Manning

William Manning (1763 – 1835) was throughout the critical period from the 1790s through the 1820s one of the biggest movers and shakers in both London’s financial world and the sugar-slave economy of the West Indies.

Relevant to our story, he served as the Agent for St. Croix during the period of the Second British Occupation (1807-15).  The legislative assembly of each British colony (or on the case of the St. Croix, its ‘Council of Burghers’) appointed an agent to act as their official representative in London and to lobby Parliament and various ministries on their behalf.

Such agents tended to be esteemed members of the British upper class and were often Members of the Parliament (like Manning).  While they were careful not to compromise their good relations with key stakeholders, they sometime advocated for stances that were against government policy, hoping to sway the powers that be to come around.  In general, the Agents for the British West Indian islands (as St. Croix was for a time) generally believed in promoting as free trade as possible, while protecting the local sugar market, as well as trying to secure the best protection from the Royal Navy.

As the Agent for St. Croix, Manning, who had close personal and business ties to the island, lobbied Westminster doggedly to advance the interests of its planters and merchants, as well as normal Danish subjects and POWs.  Far for being of the attitude of a conquering, exploitative power, Manning approached St. Croix’s people with kindness and sympathy, even if not all his efforts on his behalf met with success.

As for his life and background, Manning was the son of William Coventry Manning (1729 – 1791), a successful West Indian merchant and plantation owner in St. Kitts, and Elizabeth Ryan, heir to plantations in St. Croix.  From various relatives, Manning inherited several properties in St. Kitts, Nevis, Granada and St. Vincent, as well as two-thirds of the valuable Ryan estates of St. Croix (he soon purchased the remaining third).  He was a massive slave owner, ‘possessing’ thousands of unfortunate African labourers.

While only in his late 20s, Manning had established himself as a titan of finance.  He served as a Director of the Bank of England from 1790 to 1831, including as its Governor from 1810 to 1812.  In 1791, he took over his father’s successful West Indian trading house, Manning & Anderdon.  Manning was also a major investor in colonial ventures in Australia and New Zealand, as well as the President of London Life Assurance from 1817 to 1830.

Manning was one of the most prominent advocates for West Indian planters in London, and he worked tirelessly to oppose moves to abolish or limit slavery.  He served, in addition to his role for St. Croix, as the Agent for St Vincent (1792-1806) and for Grenada (1825-1831), as well as being a director of the ardently pro-slavery West India Committee.

Manning was a smooth operator, something that comes through in his writings in the present letter book.  He was a highly successful lobbyist, who used charm and the perfect balancing of the ‘give and take’ necessary to ensure that for many years the powers that be at Whitehall usually honoured his requests.

However, the tide of current events eventually caught Manning and brought him down.  Traditionally, his core business, Manning & Anderdon, made most of its money by loaning funds to West Indian plantation owners, secured by mortgages on their estates.  The 1820s collapse of sugar prices led to a severe recession throughout the British West Indies, causing Manning’s clients to default on their loans, saddling him with huge losses and innumerable heavily devalued properties.  Several years of massive deficits led Manning to declare bankruptcy in 1831, causing him to entirely withdraw from public and financial life.  Supported by friends, he lived a modest existence in a flat in London’s Gower Street until his death in 1835 – two years after the abolition of slavery was declared across the British Empire.

WILLIAM MANNING’S ST. CROIX LETTER BOOK IN FOCUS

Present here is William Manning’s original manuscript letter book from his time as the Agent for St. Croix in London.  It was traditionally customary for all office holders to maintain exact copies of all their outgoing official correspondence in such a letter book.

Manning’s St. Croix letter book includes the full text of 99 outgoing letters, key documents and memoranda, including 3 pages of red-ruled statistical tables, written in very neat secretarial hand, dating from March 1808 to May 1814.  Owing to Manning’s great wealth and the importance in which he considered his role as Agent, the letter book is bound in the most expensive and fine gilt red morocco.

The plurality of the letters was written by Manning to the Burgher Council of St. Croix, his direct client, whereupon he provided updates on the progress of this lobbying efforts in London, as well as news from the imperial capital.  As an MP, tycoon and leading light of the Bank of England, Manning was able to communicate St. Croix’s issues directly with the top-flight of the British establishment.  Manning’s correspondents included cabinet members such as Lord Castlereagh (Colonial Secretary), Spencer Percival (Chancellor of the Exchequer and future PM), and the Earl of Liverpool (Colonial Secretary), as well as senior mandarins from various departments.  Manning also exchanged letters with the British-appointed lieutenant governors of St. Croix, as well as numerous key Danish luminaires in both St. Croix and England.

The key topics addressed in Manning’s correspondence, include the articles of the Capitulation Agreement made that surrendered St. Croix to Britain (December 25, 1807); Manning’s efforts to at least partly liberate the island from the British mercantilist system by allowing it to resume its traditional trade with the United States for desperately-needed provisions (ex. timber, grain, etc.); securing access to the large (albeit highly taxed and over-regulated) British market for St. Croix’s sugar crop (ex. getting British spirits distillers to  substitute local grains and corn for West Indian sugar); securing the repayment of loans and bonds owed to the Danish plantation owners and merchants by Dutch and Danish entities; sorting out the proprietorship of slaves in St. Croix that were previously owned by the Danish crown; as well as Manning’s deeply heartfelt effort to gain the British crown’s permission to allow Danish POWs from St. Croix to be repatriated to Denmark (a project he co-quarterbacked with William Wilberforce, Britain’s foremost Abolitionist – this was curious as Manning was an arch-proponent of maintaining slavery in the West Indies).  Additionally, the letters contain intriguing vignettes about the trials and tribulations of stakeholders in both St. Croix and England.

Manning’s St. Croix letter book is a vital primary source on the history of what is today the United States Virgin Islands, covering the critical period of the Napoleonic Wars and the twilight of the West Indies sugar-slave economy.  The letters, most of which likely only survive here, are worthy of extensive academic study.

PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR A SUMMARY OF ALL THE ENTRIES IN MANNING’S ST. CROIX LETTER BOOK!:

References: N/A – Letter Book seemingly unrecorded.