outside. The Danish colonial authorities also were fearful of the colony's demise as a
 result of the settlers simply abandoning it. Additionally, they were worried about the
 reliability of the labor force of indentured servants and enslaved Africans.

 The Emancipation Proclamation of July 3. 1848

 The Historical Context

 Slavery was the most dehumanizing and cruel epoch in the history of the
 Virgin Islands. It lasted from the beginning of the permanent settlement of the Danish
 West Indies in the early 1670's until the forced emancipation of the slaves in 1848 as a
 result of a slave rebellion.

 During the Age of Slavery, thousands of Africans were forcibly uprooted from
 their homeland, enslaved, and brought across the Atlantic Ocean under the most
 horrible of conditions to perform most of the hard work in the colony. Most of this hard
 labor took place on the various sugar plantations. St. John and most particularly
 St. Croix developed full-blown plantation societies. As a consequence of unfavorable
 soil and topographical factors, St. Thomas did not become prosperous in plantation
 agriculture. On the other hand, trade and commerce became profitable and the
 St. Thomian slave owners had their slaves toil in these endeavors.4

 Slavery affected every aspect of Danish West Indian colonial society.
 Draconian laws and cruel and insensitive practices and customs kept the enslaved
 Africans at the very bottom of the society.5

 The Danish West Indian plantocracy continued to insist on the maintenance of
 slavery in the Danish islands even after it had been abolished in 1834 in the
 neighboring British West Indies, including the next-door British Virgin Islands.6

 For the duration of slavery, the slaves created several forms of protest
 including (1) disobedience, (2) idling, (3) feigning sickness, (4) stealing, (5) destruction
 of their master's property, (6) self-mutilation and suicide, (7) infanticide, (8) covert and
 overt acts of violence and harm against whites, (9) running away, and (10) open
 rebellions, revolts and insurrections. The most serious open uprisings were the
 St. John Revolt of 1733 and the St. Croix Rebellion of 1848.7

 In the last decades of the 18th century and the early decades of the 19th, a
 number of historical developments had far-reaching effects in the Islands. These
 developments included the proclamation of new political and social philosophies, the
 growth of anti-slave trade and anti-slavery movements in Europe and the Americas,
 the Haitian Revolution, and the abolition of the African slave trade by several
 countries, with Denmark being the first European country with slave colonies to do so.
 During the 1820's Great Britain ended all legal restrictions against the Free Colored in
the British West Indies, and abolished slavery in 1834.8