This chapter argues that the provision grounds continued to trouble the Victorian imagination. The radical nature of the provision grounds emerged vividly during and after the abolition of slavery in 1834 when newly freed Black people challenged the plantocracy by staying put on their communal provision grounds. Both antislavery and proslavery writers developed strategies for displacing Black Jamaicans from their land. Abolitionist Joseph Sturge, for example, recommended importing provisions from Haiti to weaken Jamaica’s internal markets and make workers dependent on wages. Thomas Carlyle’s notorious “Discourse” seethed with racist rage focused on “Quashee” surrounded by pumpkins, a synecdoche for independent, agriculturally successful Black people. In Carlyle’s essay, the planter picturesque becomes an abolitionist grotesque of “waste fertility,” an environment of seemingly out-of-control plants and animals swarming around free Black people unwilling to participate in Britain’s wage labor economy. Carlyle’s coinage of “waste fertility” inadvertently illustrated the Black geographies championed by Wedderburn.

In 1833, the British Parliament voted to abolish slavery in its overseas colonies, establishing a four-year “apprenticeship” system to gradually transition the slave-based agricultural system to a wage-based economy. This chapter focuses on American responses to British abolition. People on both sides of the slavery issue were keen to observe the outcome of freedom at the heart of Britain’s lucrative plantation economy, and both Americans and the British clamored to witness and record the unfolding of emancipation on the black-majority sugar islands. In the process, this chapter shows, anti-slavery advocates honed various forms of social investigation to prove and publicize their belief that emancipation could succeed in the sectionally divided United States.