Emancipation Day
By Nina York
Coincidentally, two major holidays in the Virgin Island calendar come back to back - Emancipation Day, marking the date in 1848 when the enslaved population of the then Danish West Indies gained their freedom, and the American July 4 Independence Day, celebrating the birth of the United States as a nation in 1776. While both holidays celebrate freedom, Emancipation here became more symbolic than actual, as the large number of enslaved field workers gained little by now being responsible for their own sustenance on very low wages, in part because of failing sugar cane harvests and lower prices for cane sugar, which now competed with beet sugar.
This unfortunate outcome had been anticipated by the Governor of the Danish West Indies at the time, Peter von Scholten. In an effort to prevent it, he had instituted an education system for the children of the enslaved throughout the three islands. Starting in 1841, eight handsome schools designed by architect Albert Lovmand were built on St. Croix, all of the same design, as well as five on St. Thomas and two on St. John. You can see several of these buildings today - at Estate Diamond on the Queen Mary Highway, at Peter's Rest near the Coca- Cola plant, and especially at La Grande Princess ( Route # 75), where Theodora Dunbavin School continues as a learning institution. In von Scholten's time, young children of the enslaved from the age of 6 to 12 had to attend school five days a week for three hours, whereas the older children only attended on Saturdays. Still, this was a bold and unique experiment, with the objective of teaching the children the skills that would enable them to gain a livelihood later as free persons. This move revealed that emancipation was his ultimate intention for that suppressed large segment of the population of the islands. In this effort he was no doubt encouraged by his consort Anna Heegaard, a local free woman of mixed blood.
