WILLIAM HARDIN BURNLEY, the wealthiest plantation owner in Trinidad, was one of the most vocal opponents in the journey towards emancipation.
African Emancipation Day, observed annually on August 1, celebrates the hard-won freedom of enslaved Africans in Trinidad and Tobago.
This pivotal moment in history came after years of resistance, struggle and abolitionist advocacy against the powerful forces, of the sugar plantation owners – led in this colony by Burnley, owner of the largest number of estates and the people who worked and suffered on them.
Burnley was born in New York in 1780 into a prosperous family, the son of a British merchant. He was educated in the United Kingdom at the prestigious Harrow School before relocating to Trinidad in 1798, just a year after the British took control of Trinidad from Spain.
It was here in Trinidad that Burnley found his new home, gradually becoming the most successful plantation owner in the nation and a powerful figure in local and West Indian history.
[caption id="attachment_1090313" align="alignnone" width="1024"] St Mary's Anglican Church on what was the Orange Grove Savannah. - Photo by Angelo Marcelle[/caption]
Prof Selwyn Cudjoe, author of The Slave Master of Trinidad: William Hardin Burnley and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, said Burnley was instrumental in shaping local policy between 1810 and 1850.
Cudjoe says in his book: “During the first half of the nineteenth century, he was considered one of the most learned and influential men on the island and a prominent personality in the discussion of colonial affairs...
"During his time, he dominated the island's economic and political life..."
Burnley acquired vast amounts of wealth through slavery and the sugar industry. He owned 14 estates, of which the Orange Grove sugar estate in Tacarigua was the largest. Cudjoe says the estate measured 2,600 acres, worked by over 200 enslaved people. Cudjoe notes that Burnley owned approximately 1,500 enslaved people at the time of Emancipation.
At Orange Grove Burnley built a grand mansion, said to have 101 windows – even more than the home of the governor at St Ann’s – an impressive symbol of his wealth and status.
Burnley moved up in society, acquiring friendships and strategic positions in influential political spaces. He held the position of acting depositor-general, and he and his colleague Chief Justice George Smith were able to acquire numerous properties. Burnley made his fortune with this practice and is said to have been worth about half a million dollars through questionable means of acquiring land.
Deemed the “natural leader of the planters on the island,” according to Cudjoe, it was inevitable that Burnley became a member of the Council of Government (the name of the Legislative Council at the time), where he was a staunch lobbyist for the plantocracy (planter class).
[caption id="attachment_1090314" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The eastern side of the Orange Grove Savannah. - Photo by Angelo Marcelle[/caption]
His Orange Grove
