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Autograph Document, “Disposiciones tomados el Gobierno de S.M. el Rey de Dinamarca en favor de los Negros esclavos en las Antillas danesas fecha de 18 de febrero de 1844”.  Official Spanish copy (with embossed stamp of the “Overseas” [Colonial] Ministry, Madrid) of an 1844 proclamation by the King of Denmark ordering minor reforms for slaves in the Danish West Indies. 3pp. 8½x13. 

Now best-known as the Virgin Islands after their 1917 purchase by the United States, the “Danish Antilles” had, for over a century, “imported” 1000 African slaves annually to work the sugar plantations, the slave population eventually outnumbering white residents by more than 10 to 1. The end of slavery in the neighboring British West Indies prompted newly-crowned King Christian VIII, who favored gradual emancipation, to issue this very “conservative” proclamation, most of which detailed rules transferring the slaves’ one free day a week from Saturday to Sunday, compensating plantation owners for any “sacrifices” this might entail and allowing them to punish “lazy” slaves by Sunday labor (though any “unfairly punished” might complain to the Governor General). The most controversial provision was left to the final paragraphs, in which the Governor, in collaboration with Lutheran priests, was directed to establish a rudimentary school system  by which slave children over the age of 9 would receive Sunday “religious” – and other – education. This modest experiment was vehemently opposed by plantation owners who failed to foresee that, four years later, Danish officials, fearing an open slave rebellion, would entirely abolish slavery on the islands. This copy was undoubtedly sent by Spanish officials in Madrid to the colonial Governor of Cuba – the largest European colony of the Caribbean to preserve slavery for years to come. We could find no ad verbatim copy of this proclamation in any English-language history; the one 1992 scholarly study which mentions its ramifications erroneously dated the document in 1843. A rare and important historical source on one forgotten slave institution of the Americas.