MARCH

1. March 2, 1792. The Consolidated Slave Act was passed. The laws contained within it were designed to reassure the plantocracy of their continued prosperity, while pacifying the enslaved by supposedly improving their conditions, thereby, hopefully, preventing the insurrection which they had assumed would naturally follow. Over 50 laws were introduced which determined how the enslaved African should live. Every aspect of his or her life was prescribed, from what they should be provided in terms of annual clothing, to daily rations, as well as when they could break for breakfast, dinner and supper. Determined also were the hours they worked, and where they could travel to, and for how long, as well as how many children a woman should be encouraged to have so as to maintain the prosperity of the planter. 

2. March 27, 1807.  The Transatlantic Slave Trade Abolition Bill was passed. It gave the death knell to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In Britain John Rippon held a special service of thanksgiving at Carter Lane to give people of colour an opportunity to spend “a day of prayer and public thanksgiving to God, in prospect of the grant of this astonishing salvation.” The assembled congregation included some 4-5,000 Africans: “such a body of Africans,” Rippon recorded, “never before assembled for religious worship in any part of Great Britain.”

3. March 3, 1831.  The Colonial Church Union announced it's intent to remove all Dissenting ministers from the island, reasoning that: 

The episcopal government has here been an experiment, which has failed; for under it sectarianism came with that system; let them expire together. We have lately seen the danger of trusting our people to the instruction of those who are not under our own control; let us, therefore, henceforward, hold the purse and power in our own hands.