Historical Snapshot

The West India Regiments and the Middle Ground

Figure 1. ‘A Private of the 5th West India Regiment’ in Charles Hamilton Smith, Costumes of the Army of the British Empire, According to the Last Regulations 1812 (Colnaghi and Company, 1815). Courtesy of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library.

The West India Regiments (WIR) were raised by the British Crown in 1795 in an effort to solve their manpower issues in the West Indies during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.  Disease ran rampant through the European ranks in the Army and Royal Navy, killing thousands of soldiers and sailors.  Citing examples of African soldiers serving as irregulars during the American Revolution and the long practice of using enslaved African men as pioneers supporting the British military during campaigns in the West Indies, the government under Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger made provisions to purchase and enslave 12,400 African men to serve as soldiers. Prior to 1795, efforts to raise slave soldiers in the British West Indies were met with stiff resistance by the white plantation elite.  Even though arming the enslaved during crises was common, resistance against a permanent force was strong.  Planters stated fears were that enslaved men would run away to the regiments, depriving the plantations of their labour.

Other complaints included the threat of an armed insurrection to topple the slave societies in the West Indies.  To alleviate these concerns, the British government agreed on several limits in their “recruitment,” policy.  First, the only population from which soldiers could be pulled from were the recently enslaved arriving from African in the West Indies.  Individuals who were already in the West Indies were not considered for the regiments.  Second, the regiments would be officered by white British officers and noncommissioned officers to oversee training and discipline.  Leadership rolls would not be attainable for the enslaved soldiers. Starting in 1795, twelve regiments were raised, and a total of approximately 13,000 men were enslaved by the British government to serve in the West India Regiments across the region. 

Trained in the same way as British soldiers, with the same styles of uniforms and weapons, the soldiers served throughout the Napoleonic Wars, participating in invasions of French, Dutch, and Spanish islands, and acting as garrison troops in British islands.  Under the British Army rules, the WIR soldiers received the same rations and were officially treated the same as their white counterparts.  But, they were enslaved, and unlike European soldiers, the African men served for life. In 1808, with the ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the change in politics in Britain, the WIR soldiers were quietly freed, no longer held in bondage, but still had to serve for life.  Also, with the official recruiting source, the transatlantic slavers, ending, the British military needed a new source of conscripts.  Carved into the law ending the Transatlantic Slave Trade was a clause which stated that if a slaver was interdicted in the eastern half of the Atlantic, the vessel would be sent back to Africa and the newly freed people released.  If the vessel, however, was met in the western half of the Atlantic, the vessel would continue and the newly freed people disembarked in the West Indies.  There, the freed people would be given apprenticeships to “help” them adjust to their new life.  One “option” was conscription into the WIR as a soldier. 

As war in the West Indies came to an end, the WIR were reduced from twelve regiments to two regiments.  Companies from these regiments were stationed across the region.  During the WIR occupation of Antigua, the 1^st, 4^th, 8^th, and 11^th WIR Regiments served here, garrisoned around English Harbour.  Archaeologically, buttons, badges, and shako plates from these regiments have been recovered across Middle Ground, Shirley Heights, and Monk’s Hill. Soldiers from the 1^st West India Regiment was stationed at the Middle Ground Barracks from 1816 to 1833 before moving to the old Naval Hospital on Hospital Hill.  During this occupation, the soldiers also formed relationships and attachments with the Middle Ground community while keeping many of their African lifeways alive.  When they died, they were buried in the Middle Ground cemetery: the only known West India Regiment Cemetery in Antigua and Barbuda. The West India Regiments served continuously through the nineteenth century, with elements sent to Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa to fight for Britain.  In the 20^th Century, the WIR fought in World War I before the unit was disbanded in 1927.  The last years were spent mainly in Jamaica and West Africa.