On July 3, 1848 the governor of the Danish West Indies, Peter von Scholten, issued the following proclamation:
“Maketh known:
1. All Unfree in the danish westindia Islands are from to-day emancipated.
2. The Estate Negroes retain from three months from date the use of the houses and
provisiongrounds, of which they have hitherto been possessed.
3. Labour is in future to be paid for by agreement, but allowance is to cease.
4. The maintenance of old and infirm, who are not able to work, is until farther determination to be furnished by the late owners.”

On July 4, and on July 5, 1848 the proclamation was read on St. John. The St. John Carnival, celebrated on July 4, commemorates this event.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the authorities on St. John had their own interpretation of what emancipation meant.

On July 5, 1848 a police placard was posted at Cruz Bay and Coral Bay.

...owners and captains of boats and other vessels in St. John...under severe penalty, (are prohibited) to bring persons belonging to the laboring classes away from this island...

On July 10, 1848 another placard was placed at Cruz Bay and Coral Bay. This placard forced the newly “freed” to sign work contracts with their former owners. A July 26 circular dealt with “wages”:

Being free the people must support themselves with labor. The wages in money which they receive for their labor should accordingly supply them with nearly the same quantity of food and laboring clothes which they formerly received as allowance.

The circular went on to say that, as there were no stores to buy food and clothing, actually paying wages would not necessary, and the allowances could be given directly to the laborers.

What this meant was that the “freed” were not free at all. They were not allowed to leave the island, or even the plantation. Instead of being paid wages many of the “laborers” just received the same basic staples of food and clothing that they used to get during slavery.

In 1851 a British publication called The Anti-Slavery Reporter described conditions on St. John:

“The labouring population have nearly the same wages, and are under the same coercive regulation, which, in some late instances, had been exercised with greater severity than the law, severe as it is, could ever have contemplated. Some well-disposed people, helpers in the Moravian Church, had been flogged for slight transgressions of discipline, who had never been flogged as slaves; and we hear of one well-authenticated case, in which a young man, for stealing canes, had been so severely flogged as to die of the lacerations, four days after. The labourers, generally speaking, are abject and crouching, and unwilling to give evidence of the wrongs that come under their notice.”

The post emancipation era on St. John was characterized by a series of rigid, confusing and outmoded labor laws. Workers had to sign yearly contracts with their employers, and a maximum wage of two dollars per month was mandated. Many laborers failed to renew their contracts because other more profitable or desirable options existed.

In St. Thomas, for example, labor laws were not enforced, and much higher wages were paid. Laborers were, therefore, tempted to flee St. John in order to work in St. Thomas. One man, who was returned to St. John after being apprehended in St. Thomas, reported that he had been working at the St. Thomas harbor for $1.25 a day. This was a far better wage than the $2.00 a month paid on St. John.

Another escape option for laborers was Tortola. On that British island it was possible to obtain land for farming. Moreover, right on St. John were hundreds of acres of abandoned sugar plantations, where workers could survive on their own by subsistence activities such as provision farming, charcoal production and fishing.

In addition to running away disgruntled workers offered resistance to the unjust labor law by bringing their grievances to the Danish authorities and by organizing strikes and work stoppages.

In actuality it was the decline of the sugar industry that eventually freed the workers from slavery. Plantations on St. John were abandoned by their owners to be sold at rock bottom prices. The new owners, former workers and immigrants from other West Indian Islands, eked out a meager existence on the once profitable estates, beginning a new chapter in the history of St. John.