American Virgin Islands

The American Virgin Islands are a Crown territory of the United Kingdom of America in the north-eastern Caribbean: the islands of St Thomas, St John and St Croix, the small Water Island in the harbour of St Thomas, and about fifty cays, with about 350 square kilometres of land and about 91,000 people. The capital is Charlotte Amalie on St Thomas. The islands were the Danish West Indies for two and a half centuries and were bought from Denmark by the Convention of Copenhagen of 1916, for five million pounds in gold. They were transferred on 31 March 1917, Transfer Day, after a referendum among Danish voters and none among the islanders.

The territory is not a polity of the Realm and is not a federal territory. It is held by the Crown in right of America outside the forty-nine polities, as Guam is, and it has never been counted among them. It is governed under the Virgin Islands Constitution Act 1954: a Governor appointed by the Crown, a single-chamber Legislature of fifteen senators, and since 1970 a Premier responsible to the Legislature. Its people have been citizens of the Realm since the Virgin Islands Citizenship Act 1927, ten years after the transfer, and for those ten years they were the King’s subjects and nobody’s citizens.

For fourteen years after the transfer the islands were governed by the Royal American Navy. A naval officer was Governor, the Danish colonial law stayed in force, and the colonial councils kept a Danish franchise under which about one adult in twenty could vote. Civil government came with an Act of 1931 and universal suffrage with an Act of 1936.

The territory sends one Member to the House of Commons, the Member for the Virgin Islands, who sits outside the 460, speaks in debate, asks questions and serves on committees, and may not vote in a division of the House. The office was created by an Act of 1972 and first filled in 1974. Residents of the islands have no other vote in federal affairs, and none in the House of Lords. A citizen who moves from Charlotte Amalie to the Province of New York is enrolled to vote on arrival; the same citizen moving back loses the vote on the day of the move.

The territory’s economy rests on cruise and resort tourism, rum, and the government itself, which employs about a third of everyone in work. For forty-six years it also rested on the South Shore refinery on St Croix, among the largest in the hemisphere, which fouled the air and water of the estates around it and closed at six weeks’ notice in 2012, taking about a fifth of the island’s jobs. In September 2017 two hurricanes of the highest category, Irma and Maria, struck the islands a fortnight apart, and the federal relief voted for the polities struck in the same season was in place weeks before the territory’s.

Name

The islands were named by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage, in November 1493, for Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, the companions of a fourth-century martyr whose legend the Spanish sailors knew. The name covered the whole chain east of Porto Rico, which the Danes and the British later divided.

Under Denmark the three islands were Dansk Vestindien, the Danish West Indies, and in the Realm’s law of 1917 they were simply “the Virgin Islands”. The Constitution Act of 1954 fixed the formal name as the American Virgin Islands, chiefly to distinguish them from the British Virgin Islands, the neighbouring group to the east under the British Crown, whose largest island, Tortola, is visible from the north shore of St John. The formal name is also the name in ordinary speech, though inside the territory “the islands” is more usual.

People of the territory are Virgin Islanders. Those of each island have a name of their own: St Thomians, St Johnians, and Crucians, from the Spanish and Danish forms of St Croix, Santa Cruz. The distinction is not ornamental. St Croix is larger than the other two islands together, lies about 65 kilometres to the south across deep water, and has a history of plantation agriculture, labour organisation and industry that St Thomas, a harbour town, does not share. A good deal of the territory’s politics is the argument between the two.

History

Before Europe

The islands were settled from the South American mainland in the second millennium before Christ. By the fifteenth century St Croix was held by the Kalinago, whom the Spanish called Caribs, and the northern islands were within the world of the Taíno. The ball courts and petroglyphs at Salt River Bay on the north coast of St Croix and at Reef Bay on St John are the best-known remains.

At Salt River Bay, on 14 November 1493, a boat from Columbus’s fleet fought a Kalinago canoe, and a Spanish sailor and at least one Kalinago man were killed. It is the earliest recorded armed encounter between Europeans and the peoples of the Americas on ground now under the Realm’s law. Slave raiding, disease and flight had emptied the islands by the early seventeenth century.

The Danish West India Company

The Danish West India Company was chartered in 1671 and settled St Thomas in 1672, after an attempt in 1666 had failed. The Company wanted a harbour and a plantation colony, and it brought enslaved Africans from its forts on the Gold Coast almost at once. It settled St John in 1718 and bought St Croix from France in 1733.

St Thomas never became a great plantation island. Its soil was thin and its hills steep, and its harbour was its fortune. The town on the harbour was named Charlotte Amalie in 1691 for the queen of Christian V. Denmark was neutral in most of the century’s wars, and the harbour became a neutral market where the goods of belligerents changed hands, enslaved people among them. Its common language was not Danish but a creole of Dutch, Negerhollands, spoken by free and enslaved alike.

St Croix was the opposite: flat enough in the east and centre to be divided into sugar estates, and divided into them. By the end of the eighteenth century it had about two hundred and fifty plantations, a population that was nine-tenths enslaved, and two towns, Christiansted and Frederiksted. The Danish Crown took over the colony from the Company in 1754, and Christiansted was the capital of the Danish West Indies until 1871.

The St John revolt of 1733

On 23 November 1733, enslaved people on St John, many of them Akwamu captives from the Gold Coast who had been rulers and soldiers before they were sold, seized the Danish fort at Coral Bay and took most of the island. It followed a drought, a famine and a slave code that punished running away with mutilation and death.

The rebels held St John for about six months. It was put down only in May 1734, by French troops sent from Martinique. Many of the last rebels killed themselves rather than be taken. The revolt is remembered in the territory as the first of three risings, with 1848 and 1878, in which the islands’ people moved their own history forward and the colonial government followed.

Sugar, slavery and the free port

Denmark’s ordinance of 1792 banned the slave trade to its colonies with effect from 1803, the first such ordinance of any European state. The decade’s delay was meant to let planters build up a population that would sustain itself, and they used it to import faster, so that the enslaved population of the islands was larger in 1803 than it had been in 1792. Slavery itself continued for another forty-five years.

St Thomas was made a free port in 1764 and prospered as a coaling station for steamships between Europe and the Americas. St Croix declined with sugar, and by the 1840s its enslaved people knew of British emancipation in the islands across the water.

Emancipation, 1848

On the night of 2 July 1848, enslaved people on the estates of western St Croix began to gather, and by the morning of 3 July some thousands had assembled at Frederiksted, under the leadership of a man known as General Buddhoe, Moses Gottlieb, a skilled worker on an estate near the town. They demanded freedom and said they would burn the town if it was refused.

The governor-general, Peter von Scholten, rode from Christiansted, and in the afternoon of 3 July 1848 he proclaimed from Fort Frederik that all unfree people in the Danish West Indies were from that day free. He had no instruction to do so. He acted, by his own later account, to avoid a rising that would have been put down in blood, and he was recalled, tried in Copenhagen for exceeding his authority, and reprimanded. The emancipation stood. Denmark did not abolish slavery in its islands; its islands abolished it and Denmark accepted the fact. Buddhoe was arrested in the reaction that followed and deported. Emancipation Day, 3 July, is the territory’s principal civic holiday.

The labour contracts and the Fireburn

What replaced slavery was the Labour Act of 1849: annual contracts, fixed wages, a ban on leaving an estate without permission, and a single day each year, 1 October, on which a worker could change employers. The freed population regarded it as slavery under another name and said so for thirty years.

On 1 October 1878, Contract Day, workers gathered in Frederiksted to change employers met a rumour that a man had been beaten to death by the police. The town was burned that evening, and over the next days about fifty estates on the western half of the island. The Fireburn was led substantially by women, of whom four are remembered by name and by the title the island gave them: Mary Thomas, called Queen Mary, Axeline Salomon, Mathilda McBean and Susanna Abrahamson. It was suppressed by the garrison and by armed planters with considerable loss of life, and its leaders were tried, sentenced to death and then sent to prison in Copenhagen. The Labour Act was repealed the next year. Queen Mary is the most commemorated person in the territory, and the songs about her are still sung.

The long sale

Denmark tried to sell the islands from the 1860s. Sugar no longer paid, St Thomas’s trade was declining as steamships grew able to make the crossing without coaling, and the colony cost more than it raised. A treaty of sale to the Realm was signed in 1867 and lapsed unratified at the American end in 1870. A second, in 1902, failed in the Danish upper house. On neither occasion were the islanders asked.

The islanders were organising in the meantime. David Hamilton Jackson, a teacher on St Croix, travelled to Copenhagen in 1915 to petition for the abolition of the colonial press law, came home with permission to publish, and on 1 November 1915 brought out The Herald, the first newspaper in the islands free of the Danish censor. The day is kept as Liberty Day. In 1916 he founded the St Croix Labour Union, which struck the sugar estates that year and won the first wage increase on the island in a generation.

The Convention of Copenhagen

The third sale succeeded because of the war. The Realm entered the First Great War in 1916, and the naval staff argued that the harbour of St Thomas, in the hands of a neutral too small to defend it, could be taken by a French squadron and made a submarine base on the approaches to the Panama Canal. Denmark wanted the money and could no longer defend the colony. The Convention of Copenhagen was signed in August 1916, and the price was five million pounds in gold.

The Convention was put to a referendum among Danish voters on 14 December 1916 and approved by about two to one. It was not put to the islanders. Jackson’s union and the merchants of St Thomas petitioned both parliaments for a vote in the islands, and neither replied. The proceeds went into the Danish treasury.

The second paragraph of Article 1 was the one the islanders came to read most closely. It took away their Danish allegiance unless they made a declaration to keep it, and it gave them nothing in its place but a promise that Parliament would decide. A few hundred people, most of them Danish officials and planters, made the declaration. Everyone else became a subject of the King in right of America and a citizen of nowhere.

Transfer Day

The islands were transferred on 31 March 1917, a Saturday, at the barracks in Charlotte Amalie. A Danish guard lowered the Dannebrog, a Royal American Navy guard raised the Realm’s colours, and a band from the cruiser in the harbour played the anthem. The Danish governor read a farewell address in Danish and English. Most of the population watched from the hillsides above the town; the ceremony was held inside the barracks yard, and they were not invited into it.

Transfer Day is a public holiday in the territory. It is kept with a ceremony at Emancipation Garden in Charlotte Amalie, and since 1967, the fiftieth anniversary, it has been kept together with a reading of the names of the Fireburn’s dead.

Naval government, 1917 to 1931

Parliament provided for the islands by the Virgin Islands (Temporary Government) Act 1917, which vested “all military, civil and judicial powers necessary to govern the islands” in a Governor appointed by the Crown on the advice of the Board of Admiralty, and continued the Danish colonial law of 1906 in force until Parliament provided otherwise. The Board appointed serving naval officers, and the Act, written to be temporary, lasted fourteen years.

The first naval Governor, Rear-Admiral Joseph Whitcombe, arrived with the cruiser. He and his six successors governed the islands as the Navy governed a base: by order, from the Governor’s office, with the advice of the colonial councils of St Thomas and St Croix that the Danish law provided, and with no obligation to take it. The councils were elected on the Danish franchise, which required property or an income of a stated amount, and about one adult in twenty could vote for them. The Navy did not change it. The Governor appointed the judges, and appeals ran to a court in the Province of Pennsylvania that rarely heard one.

The naval government did real work, and the islands’ historians record it. It built cisterns and a water supply on St Thomas, opened clinics on all three islands, and in its first decade cut infant mortality by about half. It also brought with it a service whose officer corps was entirely white and whose habits had been formed on the mainland. Officers’ clubs and a good deal of the islands’ new public life were closed to Black islanders, who were nine-tenths of the population, and a St Thomas editor, Rothschild Francis, was prosecuted in 1924 for a criticism of a naval judge printed in his paper, The Emancipator, and imprisoned. The economy collapsed when the ships stopped coaling at St Thomas after the war.

In 1930 a commission appointed by the Home Office to report on the islands described them as a poorhouse the Navy kept, and recommended civil government.

Citizenship, 1927

For ten years after the transfer the islanders were subjects of the King in right of America without being citizens of the Realm. They travelled on papers issued by the naval Governor that foreign consulates did not always recognise, and could not be sure of entering the mainland without leave. The difficulty was not the principle, which nobody opposed in public, but the mainland polities’ objection to an Act that would give tens of thousands of Black Caribbean people an unconditional right to settle in them.

The Virgin Islands Citizenship Act 1927 was passed under the Coolidge ministry, after a campaign in which the Virgin Islands community of Harlem, which had grown to several thousand since the war, lobbied every member from the Province of New York.

Section 1.3 was the price of the Act’s passage, and the islanders understood it. Citizenship was given and the vote that went with citizenship everywhere else in the Realm was withheld in the same section. The American Nationality Act 1965, which consolidated the law of citizenship, left the 1927 Act standing, and the closing words of its section 22.1 were written so that Part VI, which governs subjects outside the polities who are not citizens, would not reach people already made citizens by an Act of their own. Guam’s people were made citizens by an Act of 1950 on the same pattern. Part VI therefore applied to nobody until 2027.

Civil government and the franchise

The Virgin Islands Government Act 1931, passed under the first Roosevelt ministry, ended naval government, transferred responsibility for the islands from the Admiralty to the Home Office, and provided for a civil Governor. The first, Dr Walter Prentiss, a Quaker educator from the Province of Pennsylvania, arrived in 1931 with a programme of homesteading on St Croix, cottage industries and schools, and he was the first Governor to hold public meetings on all three islands. He was also the first to be told at one of them, by a St Croix labourer whose words were printed in The Herald the next morning, that the islands had had a governor’s kindness for two hundred years and would prefer a vote.

The Virgin Islands Act 1936 abolished the property and income qualifications for the colonial councils, admitted women, and gave the islands their first franchise on which most adults could vote. It kept a test of literacy in English, which excluded a large part of the older population of St Croix and almost all of its Spanish-speaking migrants from Vieques and Culebra, and which stood until 1954.

The labour movement became the islands’ politics. The Progressive Party of the Virgin Islands, founded in 1936 by officers of the St Croix Labour Union, won a majority on the St Croix council at the first election under the new franchise and has been one of the territory’s two principal parties ever since.

The Second Great War

The war brought the Navy back. The Realm was not at war until December 1941, but French submarines operating from Martinique sank ships in the eastern Caribbean from 1940, and the Navy reopened the harbour of St Thomas as a submarine base and built an airfield at Bourne Field, west of Charlotte Amalie, which is now the site of the territory’s principal airport. Several thousand Virgin Islanders served in the Realm’s forces. The Navy left the harbour in 1947.

The Constitution Act of 1954

The Virgin Islands Constitution Act 1954, passed under the Eisenhower ministry, replaced the colonial councils and the Danish law of 1906 with a single Legislature of the Virgin Islands of eleven senators elected by the whole territory, abolished the literacy test, fixed the formal name of the American Virgin Islands, and kept the Governor as the head of the territory’s government, appointed by the Crown on the advice of the Home Secretary. It is still the territory’s constitution, amended many times and never replaced.

The first Governor appointed under it, Theophilus Bastian, was born in Charlotte Amalie, the first Governor born in the islands, and served from 1954 to 1961. In 1956 a New York foundation that had bought most of the land on St John gave it to the territory’s government, on condition that it be kept as a park by the government of the islands and not by any other. The Virgin Islands National Park covers about three-fifths of St John, and the condition is the reason it lies outside the Royal American Parks System.

The referendum of 1958

When the West Indies Federation was formed, in January 1958, Porto Rico, the Realm’s other Caribbean possession, was given a referendum on accession to it and voted to go. The federalists asked that the Virgin Islands, which share Porto Rico’s waters and much of its migration, be given the same question, and the Realm agreed.

The referendum of April 1958 was the first occasion on which the islanders were asked anything about their own sovereignty. About 78 per cent of those enrolled voted, and 61 per cent voted to remain with the Realm. St Thomas voted to remain by more than two to one; St Croix, closer to Porto Rico and with a Spanish-speaking population a quarter of its size, by 54 per cent. The reasons given were citizenship, the right to settle on the mainland, and a doubt whether a new federation would give three small islands more voice than the Realm had. The Federation survived, and the islands stayed out of it.

Tourism and the refinery

The jet airliner made the islands’ modern economy. Bourne Field was lengthened for jets in 1959, the first resort hotels were built on St Thomas in the same years, and by the end of the 1960s tourism was the territory’s largest industry. The population of the islands, which had been about 26,000 in 1950, was over 60,000 by 1970.

Most of the new workers came from the islands to the east and south, from Antigua, St Christopher, Dominica, St Lucia and the other states of the West Indies Federation, and came under the territory’s Bonded Labour Scheme, which admitted them for a named employer and made them liable to removal if they left the job. The scheme gave employers a workforce that could not organise and gave the islands a population of long-resident people without status, whose children, born in the islands, were citizens under the Act of 1927 while their parents were not. It was wound up in 1975 after a decade of litigation, and the arguments it caused about who is a Virgin Islander have not been wound up since.

The Industrial Incentive Act 1962, an Act of the Legislature, offered tax exemptions of up to twenty-five years to manufacturers who would build in the islands. Under it a watch-assembly industry came to St Thomas, an alumina plant to St Croix in 1967, and in 1966 the South Shore Refining Company of New York opened a refinery on the filled ground of Krause Lagoon, on the south shore of St Croix. At its height it processed about half a million barrels of crude oil a day, among the most in the hemisphere. It employed, directly and through contractors, about two thousand people, and for forty years it was the reason St Croix had an economy that did not depend on tourists.

Responsible government, 1968

The Virgin Islands (Responsible Government) Act 1968, passed under the Johnson ministry after a petition of the Legislature, enlarged the Legislature to fifteen senators, divided it into two districts, and created the office of Premier: the senator who commands the confidence of the Legislature, appointed by the Governor, heading an Executive Council of ministers responsible to it. The Governor kept defence, external affairs, the Crown’s prerogative and a reserve of powers for good government, and ceased to govern in everything else.

The Act commenced at the general election of November 1970, and the first Premier, Ulric Maynard of the Progressive Party, took office that month. The territory has been self-governing in its internal affairs since. It has not had a Governor born outside the islands since 1993.

Representation, 1972

Responsible government settled who governed the islands and left untouched the question of who spoke for them in New Westminster. The Legislature asked for a member of the Commons in 1969, and the ministry’s answer, after three years and two drafts, was the Virgin Islands (Representation) Act 1972.

The office was filled for the first time at the general election of November 1974. The first Member, Aubrey Hendricks of the Progressive Party, took his seat in January 1975 and made his maiden speech on the subject of section 2.3, which he described as a door built into a wall. The Act has since been amended to give the Member the salary and staff of any other member; section 2.3 has never been amended.

Hugo and Marilyn

On the night of 17 September 1989, Hurricane Hugo crossed St Croix with sustained winds above 220 kilometres an hour and destroyed or damaged about nine buildings in ten on the island. Power, water and telephones were lost for weeks. In the days that followed, stores in Christiansted and at the shopping centres were looted, and the territory’s police could not hold the island. The Governor asked for troops, and units of the Royal American Army were flown in, the first soldiers posted to the islands since the Navy left. The mainland reported the looting at length and the week without food or water less.

Hurricane Marilyn struck St Thomas on 15 September 1995 and destroyed about a fifth of the island’s houses. The territory adopted a building code after it, which most of the houses later destroyed in 2017 had been built before.

The refinery closes

The refinery’s neighbours had complained of it from its first decade: of the smell of hydrogen sulphide on the estates downwind of it, of soot on the washing, of the fuel that seeped from its tanks into the aquifer under Kingshill, from which several of those estates drew their water. Federal environmental regulators found in 2011 that the refinery had released pollutants in breach of its permits over many years, and the company agreed to spend several hundred million pounds on controls.

On 18 January 2012 the company announced that it would close the refinery, citing losses and the cost of the controls. It closed within six weeks. About two thousand jobs ended, directly and through contractors, which was about a fifth of all the jobs on St Croix, and the refinery’s taxes and payments in lieu of them, about a tenth of the territory’s revenue, ended with them. Unemployment on St Croix doubled within the year. Several thousand people left the island, most of them for the Republic of Florida.

The plant was kept as an oil storage terminal. In 2020 new owners restarted part of it under a fresh tax concession granted by the Legislature, and within three months the restarted units twice released a mist of oil over the estates to the north, which settled on roofs and in the household cisterns from which the estates drank. Federal regulators ordered the plant shut in May 2021, and it has not reopened.

Irma and Maria

On 6 September 2017, Hurricane Irma, at the highest category, passed over St Thomas and St John. It destroyed or badly damaged most of the houses on St John and a large part of those on St Thomas, both hospitals’ buildings on St Thomas, the territory’s main school buildings and nearly all of its power lines. On 19 and 20 September, Hurricane Maria, also at the highest category, passed just south of St Croix, which Irma had spared, and did the same there.

The storms killed about a dozen people directly. The months without power killed more, most of them elderly and ill, in numbers that the territory’s health department and the coroner’s office have never agreed. Power was restored to nine in ten customers by the end of January 2018. The hospital on St Thomas worked from temporary buildings for six years, and the territory’s public schools ran on double sessions, two schools sharing one building in shifts, until 2020.

The Realm’s Parliament voted relief for the season in two stages. The first Supplementary Estimate (Storm Relief), carrying the money for the Republic of Texas, struck by a hurricane in August, and for the Republic of Florida, struck by Irma after it left the islands, was passed on 21 September 2017, the day after Maria reached St Croix. It did not include the territory. The Member for the Virgin Islands, Ambrose Petersen, spoke in the debate on it for eleven minutes, was the only member to speak whose constituents were then without power, and could not vote on it. The territory’s relief was carried in a second estimate, passed in November 2017, nine weeks after Irma.

After the storms

The Committee of Public Accounts of the Commons reported on the season’s relief in 2019. It found that the territory’s request for assistance had reached the Home Office on 8 September 2017, that it had been complete, and that it had not been treated as urgent by any department. It observed that the polities whose relief was voted first had more than sixty members of the House between them, and that it had found no other explanation for the order. The ministry’s reply accepted the finding of delay and did not accept the committee’s observation.

At the general election of November 2018 the voters of the territory replaced Petersen with Dr Naomi Joseph-Gumbs, a physician from the hospital on St Thomas, who stood as an independent on a single proposal: that section 2.3 of the Representation Act be repealed. She has introduced a Bill to repeal it in four sessions of Parliament, and none of the four has been given time for a second reading. In 2019 a retired schoolteacher of Frederiksted, Hollis Lettsome, brought a case that reached the Royal American Supreme Court, arguing that the American Rights Act guaranteed him a vote, and lost it the next year; the case is described below.

When the Realm acquired the Territory of Loreto in 2027 and its treaty gave the peninsula five members of the Commons who sit, vote and are counted, the Legislature of the Virgin Islands passed, by fifteen votes to none, an address to the Crown and to both Houses of Parliament. It welcomed the Loretanos to the Realm and asked that the citizens of the Virgin Islands, who had been citizens for a hundred years, be given no less than they had been given within a year. The address was received and printed. It has not been answered.

Geography

The islands

The territory lies about 65 kilometres east of Porto Rico, at the western end of the Lesser Antilles, between the Atlantic to the north and the Caribbean Sea to the south. Its four inhabited islands fall into two groups separated by a trench of deep water about 65 kilometres wide.

St Thomas, about 83 square kilometres, is a ridge of volcanic hills rising to Crown Mountain, 474 metres, the highest point in the territory. Charlotte Amalie lies on its south shore around one of the best natural harbours in the Caribbean. Water Island, about two square kilometres, lies in the mouth of the harbour. St John, about 51 square kilometres, lies three kilometres east of St Thomas across Pillsbury Sound; it is steep, forested and three-fifths park, and its only town is Cruz Bay. Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, is a few kilometres from its north-east shore.

St Croix, about 215 square kilometres, is larger than the other islands together and lies alone to the south. Its eastern end is dry scrub rising to the cliffs of Point Udall, the easternmost point of the territory; its north-west is wet hill forest; and between them a central plain, once the sugar estates, holds the airport, the refinery, the island’s industry and most of its people. Buck Island, off the north coast, is surrounded by a reef protected since 1961.

Climate

The islands have a tropical marine climate, warm all year, with temperatures between about 24 and 32 degrees and a cooling trade wind from the east. Rainfall is low and uneven, and the islands have no permanent rivers. Their water has always come from the sky and the sea: every house built under the territory’s building law must have a cistern under it to catch the roof’s rain, and the rest of the supply is desalinated. The hurricane season runs from June to November.

Environment

The islands’ coral reefs, seagrass beds and mangroves are among the best studied in the Caribbean and are in decline from warming water, coral disease, run-off from hillside building and the anchors of yachts. About a third of the reef cover around St Thomas and St John was lost in the two decades before 2017, and the storms of that year took a large part of what remained in shallow water. Krause Lagoon, where the refinery stands, was a mangrove lagoon until it was filled in the 1960s.

Constitutional status

The instrument

The territory’s constitution is an Act of Parliament: the Virgin Islands Constitution Act 1954, as amended, chiefly by the Responsible Government Act 1968, the Representation Act 1972 and a series of later Acts on the courts and the franchise. Parliament may amend it by an ordinary Act and has never done so without a request or the consent of the Legislature, but nothing in law requires it to ask. The Legislature may itself amend the parts that concern the electoral law and the number and districts of senators.

The territory has no constitution of its own making. The Legislature has called three constitutional conventions, in 1964, 1978 and 2009, each of which drafted a text and none of which was enacted. The draft of 2009 defined a class of native Virgin Islanders, descended from people living in the islands before 1927, and gave them preferences in land and office; the Home Office advised that it could not be enacted consistently with the American Rights Act, and the Legislature did not send it forward.

Not a polity

The territory is not one of the forty-nine polities and has never been counted among them. It is not a federal territory in the sense of the Territory of Loreto, which is held for the purpose of being admitted. It is a Crown territory: held by the Crown in right of America outside the polities, governed under an Act of Parliament of its own, and connected to the federal government through the Home Office, which answers for the Crown territories as it answers for most of what no other department will take. The Realm’s other Crown territory is Guam, ceded by Spain in 1898.

The distinction has consequences that the islanders feel. The territory takes no part in the council of Premiers, has no instrument under the Polity Instruments Act 1889, receives no allocation of seats under the Parliamentary Reform Act 1859, and sends nobody to the House of Lords. Federal Acts extend to it only where they say so, or where they deal with a reserved matter.

Reserved matters

The Act of 1954 reserves to the Crown and Parliament defence, external affairs, nationality and citizenship, the currency, shipping and aviation, and the federal courts’ jurisdiction, and gives the Governor responsibility for them in the territory. Everything else is for the Legislature and the Executive Council. Immigration is shared: the Realm decides who may enter the territory from abroad, and the territory, which is outside the Realm’s customs union, decides who may work in it.

The Crown may disallow an Act of the Legislature within a year of its assent, on the advice of the Home Secretary. The power has been used four times, the last in 1984, when the Crown disallowed the Legislature’s Land Preference Act 1983, which reserved grants of public land to people born in the islands or descended from people resident there before 1927, as discrimination that the American Rights Act forbids. The disallowance was right in law and is remembered in the territory as the last occasion on which New Westminster overruled the islands’ Legislature, which is also true.

Citizenship and Part VI

Virgin Islanders are citizens of the United Kingdom of America, under the Virgin Islands Citizenship Act 1927, and have been since the year it was passed. Anyone born in the territory is a citizen from birth. They carry the Realm’s passport, may live and work anywhere in the Realm, and are counted in the Realm’s federal enumeration, though not in the population of any polity.

Part VI of the American Nationality Act 1965, which governs subjects of the King in territory outside the polities who are not citizens, has never applied to the islands. Its section 22.1 confines it to territory “whose inhabitants are not citizens under any other Act”, and the Virgin Islands’ inhabitants are citizens under the Act of 1927. The territory’s lawyers sometimes point out that Part VI gives its subjects a route to citizenship and withholds the federal franchise, and that the islanders, who have the citizenship, have the same franchise as people who do not.

The Rights Act and the vote

The American Rights Act applies in every place in which the law of the Realm has force, and therefore in the territory. Section 27.1 provides that every adult citizen has the right to vote in elections to the House of Commons and to the legislature of the polity in which they reside. Virgin Islanders are adult citizens, and they cannot vote in elections to the House of Commons.

In Lettsome v Attorney-General for America, decided in 2020, the Royal American Supreme Court held by a majority that section 27.1 confers a right to vote in the elections that Parliament has provided, at a place where Parliament has provided for them, and does not oblige Parliament to provide a constituency where it has not. The right, in the leading judgment’s phrase, “follows the citizen to a constituency; it does not carry one with him”. The dissenting judgment held that the words “every adult citizen” admit no exception that Parliament has not written, and that Parliament had written one only by omission. Both judgments agreed that the position was hard to reconcile with the plain words of the section and that the remedy, if there was to be one, lay with Parliament. Parliament has not provided one.

Taxation

The Realm’s income tax applies in the territory under the Virgin Islands Revenue Act 1922, but it is collected by the territory’s own Bureau of Internal Revenue and paid into the territory’s treasury, not the Realm’s. Residents of the islands therefore pay the Realm’s income tax at the Realm’s rates and fund their own government with it, which is the arrangement the islanders call the mirror. The federal excise duty collected on rum distilled in the islands and sold on the mainland is likewise paid back to the territory, less a small deduction, under an arrangement known as the cover-over, which is the second-largest source of the territory’s revenue.

The territory pays the Realm nothing for defence. Whether the islands are a cost to the Realm or a profit to it depends on whether the mirror is counted as the Realm’s money given away or the islanders’ money kept, and the two governments have never agreed which.

Constitutional system

The Crown and the Governor

The territory’s head of state is the King, George V, in right of America, who acceded on 31 October 2028; Queen Christina is Regent until 2 May 2029. The Crown is represented in the territory by the Governor of the American Virgin Islands.

The Governor is appointed by the Crown on the advice of the Home Secretary, for a term that is by convention about five years. Since 1993 the Home Secretary has consulted the Premier before advising an appointment, though the convention has never been written into the Act. The present Governor, Dame Eleanor Thurland, born in Christiansted, was Chief Justice of the Virgin Islands before her appointment in 2025.

The Governor’s functions are of three kinds. As the Crown’s representative the Governor opens and prorogues the Legislature, appoints the Premier and on the Premier’s advice the ministers, assents to Acts of the Legislature or reserves them for the Crown’s pleasure, and exercises the prerogative of mercy. As the officer responsible for the reserved matters the Governor deals with the Royal American Navy, with foreign consuls, and with the federal departments, and is the channel through which federal relief reaches the islands. And under section 41 of the Act of 1954 the Governor holds a reserve of powers “for the peace, order and good government of the islands”, which may be used only with the Home Secretary’s authority and has never been used since responsible government began. The Governor lives at Government House above Charlotte Amalie.

The Premier and the Executive Council

The head of the territory’s government is the Premier, the senator whom the Governor appoints as the person most likely to command the confidence of the Legislature. The Premier chooses the ministers of the Executive Council, at most seven, all of whom must be senators, and the Council is collectively responsible to the Legislature, which may remove it by a vote of no confidence carried by eight of the fifteen senators. The Governor may dissolve the Legislature early only on the Premier’s advice, or on the passage of a vote of no confidence if no other senator can form a government within fourteen days.

The present Premier is Celestine Rivera-Hodge of the Citizens’ Alliance, a lawyer from St Croix and the daughter of a refinery fitter, who became Premier after the general election of 2022 and was returned at the general election of 2026. Her government depends on the two senators of the Crucian Party, with whom the Citizens’ Alliance has a written agreement on the St Croix hospital, the refinery site and the pension fund. She is the first Premier from St Croix since 2006 and the first of Porto Rican descent.

The Legislature

The Legislature of the Virgin Islands has a single chamber of fifteen senators, who sit in the Legislature building on the waterfront at Charlotte Amalie, a former Danish barracks painted the green it has been since the Navy’s time. Seven senators are elected for the St Thomas and St John district, seven for the St Croix district, and one, the senator at large, by the whole territory, who must be resident on St John. The Legislature elects a President from among the senators, who presides and keeps order and does not vote except to break a tie. The present President is Senator Edmund Quetel of the Citizens’ Alliance, a St Thomas schoolteacher from the French community of the island’s north side, elected President in 2026.

The Legislature passes the territory’s Acts, votes its budget and taxes within the limits of the mirror, confirms the Governor’s appointments of judges, and questions the Premier and ministers.

Elections and the franchise

Every adult citizen resident in the territory for a year may vote, from the age of eighteen, on automatic enrolment. The Legislature and the Member for the Virgin Islands are elected together for four years, at a general election held on the first Tuesday in November, most recently in 2026.

In each of the two seven-member districts the voter has seven votes and may give no more than one to any candidate; the seven candidates with the most votes are elected. This block vote tends to give a party with a modest lead across a district most or all of its seats, and the Legislature has twice voted to replace it, in 1990 and 2014, and twice failed to agree on a replacement. The senator at large and the Member are elected by the whole territory by a simple plurality.

Parties

The territory’s parties are its own and are not branches of the Realm’s federal parties. The Progressive Party of the Virgin Islands, founded in 1936 out of the St Croix Labour Union, is the older and was the territory’s party of government for most of the century; it is close to the Labour and Social Democratic Party on the mainland. The Citizens’ Alliance, founded in 1968 by senators who left the Progressive Party over the Bonded Labour Scheme, began as a party of St Thomas’s merchants and professionals and has become, under Rivera-Hodge, a party of St Croix as well. The Crucian Party, founded in 2013 after the refinery closed, argues that St Croix has been governed from St Thomas and for it since the Danish capital moved in 1871, and holds two seats.

After the general election of 2026 the Legislature stands at seven senators of the Citizens’ Alliance, five of the Progressive Party, two of the Crucian Party and one independent.

The Member for the Virgin Islands

The Member for the Virgin Islands is a Member of the House of Commons, referred to in the House as the honourable Member for the Virgin Islands, elected by the territory’s voters at its own general election for four years. The present Member is Dr Naomi Joseph-Gumbs, an independent, first elected in 2018 and returned in 2022 and 2026.

The Member sits outside the 460, the number fixed for the House’s membership, as the five interim members for the Territory of Loreto do. Under section 2 of the Representation Act the Member may sit and speak in the House and in its committees, ask questions of ministers, table motions and amendments, introduce Bills, and serve and vote on select committees. By convention the Member sits on the Home Affairs Committee. The Member may not vote in any division of the House, on any question, and is not counted for a quorum or for any majority that an Act or Standing Order requires. When the bells ring for a division, the Member stays on the benches while the House empties into the lobbies.

Because the Member is not returned at a general election of the House, a dissolution of Parliament does not end the Member’s term, which runs with the Legislature’s.

The office’s power is the power to speak, and Members have used it. Aubrey Hendricks secured the end of the Bonded Labour Scheme largely by asking the same question of the Home Secretary in every sitting week of 1975. Ambrose Petersen’s speech of 21 September 2017 is printed in the territory’s school history textbook. What the office cannot do is change the outcome of a vote, and the Committee of Public Accounts found in 2019 that at least one ministry had governed accordingly.

Law and the courts

The courts

The territory’s courts are the Superior Court of the Virgin Islands, which tries cases at first instance on St Thomas and St Croix, and the Supreme Court of the Virgin Islands, established by an Act of the Legislature in 2007, which hears appeals from it. Appeals from the Supreme Court lie to the Royal American Supreme Court, by leave. Until 2007 appeals ran directly from the territory’s trial courts to a federal appellate court sitting in the Province of Pennsylvania, two thousand kilometres away, which the territory’s lawyers regarded as an arrangement left over from the Navy and which in fact was.

The territory’s law is the common law of the Realm as received in 1954, the Acts of the Legislature, the federal Acts that extend to the territory, and in property a residue of Danish law that has never been displaced.

The Danish residue

Land in the islands was registered under Danish ordinance from the eighteenth century, and titles registered under it did not cease to exist when the flag changed in 1917. The matrikel, the Danish cadastral register of estates and plots, is still the foundation of the territory’s land registry, and estates are still described in deeds by their Danish matrikel numbers. A title dispute in the islands can turn on a Danish deed of the 1820s, read in Danish, interpreted according to Danish law of the time, and the territory’s Bar includes a small number of lawyers who read it. The colonial archives they work from are in Copenhagen.

Relationship with the Realm

The Home Office

The federal department responsible for the territory is the Home Office, through a small Crown Territories Department that handles Guam and the Virgin Islands together. The department advises on the appointment of Governors, on disallowance and on federal Acts that touch the territories, and it is the territory’s principal channel to every other part of the federal government. The territory’s governments have argued since the 1970s that this is the wrong department, because it is a department of police, prisons and immigration and because its ministers face no question in the House from a member who can vote against them. The Home Office has replied that no other department has offered to take the territories.

Defence and the Navy

The Realm is responsible for the islands’ defence. The Royal American Navy keeps no base in the territory and patrols its waters from the Caribbean base at Guantanamo and from Porto Rico under an agreement with the West Indies Federation. Virgin Islanders serve in the Realm’s forces in numbers far above their share of the population, as they have since 1917.

Federal money

The territory receives federal grants for health, education, roads and housing, and the federal guarantee of health care reaches its residents through the National Health Service of America, administered in the islands by the territory’s own health department under an agreement. Federal pensions are paid in the islands as on the mainland. The formulas for the grants were fixed by Acts on which the territory’s Member could not vote, and the territory’s governments say it shows in the arithmetic.

The British Virgin Islands and the West Indies

The territory’s nearest neighbours are the British Virgin Islands, a British territory outside the West Indies Federation. Families, churches, cricket clubs and ferries cross the line every day, the two governments cooperate on fisheries and on hurricane warnings, and a resident of either group may visit the other without a visa. Porto Rico, to the west, and the islands of the Leeward group to the east and south are states of the West Indies Federation, which shares the Realm’s sovereign in another right. Many of the territory’s people were born in the Federation or descend from people who were.

Economy

The shape of it

The territory’s output is about A£3.9 billion a year, about A£43,000 a head, which is below the Realm’s average and above that of most of its Caribbean neighbours. It rests on three things: tourism, which with the trades that serve it accounts for about a third of output and more of the private employment; rum, which accounts for little employment and a great deal of revenue; and the territory’s government, which employs about a third of everyone in work and is the largest employer on every island. Manufacturing, which in the 1970s included watches, alumina and the refinery, has almost gone; the alumina plant closed in 2001 and the refinery in 2012.

The economy is two economies, divided by the water between the islands. St Thomas and St John live on tourists, with high prices and a shortage of houses that local wages can buy. St Croix lived on the refinery, has not found a replacement, and has an unemployment rate about twice that of St Thomas and a population that has been falling since 2012.

Tourism

About two million cruise passengers land at Charlotte Amalie in a good year, more than twenty for every resident, and on a busy day in the winter season six ships are in the harbour or at the two piers at once. They come for the shops of Main Street, the beaches of St Thomas and St John, and the duty-free allowance, which is the territory’s advantage over the mainland and the reason the jewellery trade of Charlotte Amalie is larger than that of most mainland cities. The cruise trade brings crowds and little money per head; the resort and villa trade of St Thomas and St John brings fewer people and more money, and it is the trade on which the territory’s hotel and restaurant workers depend.

Rum

Rum has been distilled on St Croix since the Danish estates, and two large distilleries on the island’s south shore now produce a large part of the rum sold on the mainland under several brands. The federal excise collected on it is paid back to the territory under the cover-over, and in most years it brings the territory more revenue than any other single source but the mirror. The arrangement has made the territory dependent on the drinking habits of the mainland and on the willingness of Parliament to keep the cover-over at its present rate, which Parliament has twice let lapse for a few months and restored.

Government and the pension fund

The territory’s government is large because the territory has to provide for itself almost everything that a polity, a county and a city provide separately, on a population smaller than that of many mainland towns. Its payroll is about half of its budget. The Government Employees’ Retirement Fund, which pays the pensions of the territory’s public servants, has been underfunded since the 1980s and was projected in 2019 to exhaust its assets within a decade. The territory has borrowed against its future rum revenue to support it, and the question of who will pay the pensions if the fund fails, the territory or the Realm, is one the Home Office has declined to answer in advance.

Prices and the customs line

The territory is outside the Realm’s customs union. Goods arriving from the mainland pass through the territory’s customs and pay its excise; visitors returning to the mainland pass through the Realm’s customs at the airports and the cruise piers, which is the reason the duty-free allowance exists. Almost everything the islands consume is shipped in, and prices for food, fuel and building materials are about a third above those on the mainland. Electricity, generated mostly from imported oil, has been among the most expensive in the Realm since the 1970s.

Demographics

Population

The territory has about 91,000 residents: about 44,000 on St Thomas, about 43,000 on St Croix, about 4,000 on St John, and a few hundred on Water Island. The population peaked at about 110,000 in 2000 and has fallen since, first because of the closure of the alumina plant and the refinery and then because of the storms of 2017, after which several thousand people left and did not come back. It is older than the Realm’s average and getting older faster, because those who leave are mostly young.

Origins

About three-quarters of the territory’s people are of African descent, most of them descended from the enslaved people of the Danish estates and from the migrants who came from the other islands in the twentieth century. On St Croix about a quarter of the population is of Porto Rican descent, most of it from families who came from Vieques and Culebra to work the cane in the 1920s and 1930s; the Crucian Spanish they speak is a recognisable variety of its own. St Thomas has a French community of long standing, descended from families who came from St Barthélemy in the nineteenth century and who live in Frenchtown, by the harbour, and on the island’s north side. There are communities of Palestinian and Jordanian merchants on St Croix, Indian and Lebanese traders on Main Street, and a mainland population, called continentals, of about a tenth.

Languages

The language of government, the courts and the schools is English. Most Virgin Islanders also speak Virgin Islands Creole, an English-based creole with Danish, Dutch and West African elements, which differs between the islands and is the language of home, market and calypso. Spanish is widely spoken on St Croix, and French and French Creole among families from St Barthélemy and from Dominica and St Lucia. The old Dutch creole of St Thomas, Negerhollands, which was the islands’ common language under Denmark, died with its last native speaker in 1987. Danish survives in place names, in estate names and in the matrikel.

Religion

The islands are mostly Christian, in a variety that reflects their history. The Moravian church, whose first mission to the enslaved anywhere in the world was founded on St Thomas in 1732, is one of the largest denominations, and its churches on all three islands are among the oldest buildings in use. The Church of America has a diocese of the Virgin Islands, the Lutheran church keeps its Danish congregations, and the Catholic, Methodist and Pentecostal churches are all large. The synagogue in Charlotte Amalie, with a sand floor, built in 1833 for a congregation founded in 1796, is among the oldest in the Americas in continuous use.

The diaspora

More people of Virgin Islands birth or descent live on the mainland than in the islands, most of them in the Province of New York and the Republic of Florida. Virgin Islanders who live in a polity vote there, and the Member for the Virgin Islands has sometimes said that the territory’s real voting strength in the Commons is the members from New York and Florida whose constituents include its emigrants, and that it is not the same thing.

Culture

Carnival and the festivals

The largest festival in the territory is Carnival on St Thomas, held in April and May, with a month of calypso tents and parades through Charlotte Amalie opened by J’ouvert, the early-morning procession. St Croix holds the Crucian Christmas Festival from December to the start of January, and St John a festival in the week of Emancipation Day. The mocko jumbies, masked dancers on stilts several metres high whose tradition came from West Africa with the enslaved, appear at every festival and at every official ceremony of any size, including the Transfer Day observance.

Music

The territory’s own music is quelbe, the music of the scratch band: banjo, ukulele, flute, a gourd scraped with a fork, a steel triangle, and a bass made of an exhaust pipe or a jug. Its songs carried the news of the estates, satirised the planters and the colonial officials, and recorded the Fireburn, and the oldest that survive are about Queen Mary. The Legislature made quelbe the territory’s official music in 2003. The quadrille, danced to a scratch band, is still taught in the schools of St Croix.

Food

The islands’ food is the food of the Caribbean estates and the harbour: kallaloo, a stew of greens, okra and fish or meat, eaten on Old Year’s Night; fungi, a cornmeal and okra pudding served with boiled fish; pates, fried pastries of salt fish or seasoned meat; johnny cakes; and maubi, a drink fermented from tree bark. Red grout, a pudding of guava and tapioca, is the dessert of 3 July. Rum punch is served at every occasion and the territory’s licensing law has been written around the fact.

Architecture

The Danish towns are the territory’s principal monument. Christiansted keeps its eighteenth-century centre almost whole, with the yellow Fort Christiansvaern, the customs house and the scale house on the wharf, the Steeple Building and the arcaded streets of merchants’ houses, and it is protected as a national historic site. Fort Christian in Charlotte Amalie, red-painted and begun in 1672, is the oldest standing building in the territory. On St Croix the round stone towers of the sugar mills stand in fields all over the central plain.

Memory

In Copenhagen, a statue of Queen Mary seated with a torch and a cane knife, made by a Virgin Islands artist and a Danish artist together, was raised in 2018 outside the old West India warehouse on the harbour, the first public monument in Denmark to a colonial subject. The territory regards it with mixed feelings, as a Danish acknowledgment of a Danish history, and as a monument to the islands’ heroine erected in the country that imprisoned her.

Symbols

Flag

The territory’s flag was adopted by the Legislature in 1969 to replace the flag the naval government had used, which carried the Realm’s arms over the initials of the islands and which islanders had never liked. It is white, with a blue band along the foot. On the band stand three yellow stars, one for each of the principal islands, and in the upper hoist is a sprig of yellow cedar, the territory’s flower, in yellow and green. The flag is flown beside the Realm’s colours on public buildings, below them on Transfer Day, and alone on Emancipation Day, by a practice that the Legislature adopted in 1998 and that the Home Office has never questioned.

Other symbols

The territory’s flower is the yellow cedar, called ginger thomas; its bird is the bananaquit, called the yellow breast; and its song is the Virgin Islands March, written in 1919 by Alton Adams, a St Thomas bandmaster who was the first Black bandmaster in the Royal American Navy, and sung on every civic occasion after God Save the King. The badge on the Governor’s flag and the territory’s seal shows the three islands in green on a blue sea under the Crown.

The vote question

The territory’s oldest constitutional argument is whether its citizens may take part in governing the Realm. There are four answers. The first is a vote for the Member: repeal section 2.3 of the Representation Act and let the Member vote in divisions like any other. It is Joseph-Gumbs’s Bill, and its opponents in the House answer that one voting member for 91,000 people would be the most generously represented seat in the Realm, where a member of the House speaks on average for about 760,000, and that a member who votes on the Realm’s taxes should represent people who pay them into the Realm’s treasury, which the mirror means the islanders do not.

The second is admission as a polity. The territory has about twice the population of the Free City of Philipsburg and a fraction of that of any other polity, and the floor of three Commons seats would give it three voting members, one for about every 30,000 people, unless it were admitted on Philipsburg’s terms, with none. No federal party has supported it, and the islanders, asked about it in the territory’s status referendum of 1993, did not give an answer, because the referendum failed for want of turnout: the Act that called it required half the enrolled voters to take part, and 27 per cent did.

The third is union with an existing polity, under which the islands would become part of the Republic of Florida or the Province of New York for federal purposes, vote in one of its constituencies, and keep their own government for everything else. A federal commission proposed it in 1986, and every party in the territory rejected it within the week.

The fourth is the status quo, which no party in the territory defends as a principle and which most voters in the 1993 referendum appear to have accepted by not voting against it. It is supported by those who fear that any change would cost the islands the mirror and the cover-over, and by inertia.

The acquisition of Loreto in 2027 gave the argument a comparison it had not had. The Territory of Loreto, acquired by treaty, was given five voting members of the Commons within a year. The Virgin Islands, whose people have been citizens since 1927, were given one member who cannot vote after fifty-five years. The Legislature’s address of 2027 said so, and the federal parties have not answered it.

Failings

Naval government

For fourteen years the Realm governed the islands through the Royal American Navy, under an Act that called itself temporary, without the consent of their people and without a franchise on which most of them could vote. The Board of Admiralty appointed the Governors, the Governors appointed the judges, and the islands’ only elected bodies were colonial councils chosen by about one adult in twenty under a Danish property franchise that the Navy kept because it was convenient. The service brought habits of racial exclusion from the mainland to islands that were nine-tenths Black, and it prosecuted the press that criticised it. The improvements to the water supply and to the infant death rate were real and did not require the government that delivered them. Parliament allowed the arrangement to continue for fourteen years because nobody with a vote in the House was governed by it.

The islanders unasked

The islands were sold in 1917 without their people being asked, and the Realm, which bought them, had the means to ask and chose not to. Denmark put the sale to Danish voters. The Realm, which had given a referendum to nobody in the islands and would not give one until 1958, received petitions from the St Croix Labour Union and from the merchants of St Thomas asking for a vote, and did not reply. The Convention then took away the islanders’ Danish allegiance and gave them nothing in its place for ten years, and when citizenship came, the Act that conferred it withheld the federal vote in the same section. The transfer is kept as a public holiday by a people who were not consulted about it, and the Realm has never made any formal acknowledgment of the fact.

The refinery

The territory’s government invited the refinery, exempted it from taxes, extended its concessions three times, and did not protect the people who lived beside it. For forty-six years the South Shore refinery released pollutants over the estates of St Croix’s south shore and leaked fuel into the aquifer from which several of them drew their water, and the territory’s environmental agency, short of staff and dependent on the refinery’s revenue, did not stop it; federal regulators acted only in 2011. When the company closed the plant in 2012 it gave six weeks’ notice, and about a fifth of St Croix’s jobs went with it. The territory had made no provision for the closure of the island’s largest employer and had not required the company to make any. In 2020 the Legislature granted a fresh concession for a restart, and within three months the restarted plant had twice sprayed oil over the same estates. The responsibility for the first failure lies with the company and with the territory’s governments of four decades; the responsibility for the second lies with the Legislature that voted the concession knowing the first.

The storms of 2017

In September 2017 the Realm voted relief for the polities struck by the season’s hurricanes weeks before it voted relief for the territory, which had been struck harder. The first supplementary estimate, passed the day after Maria reached St Croix, carried relief for the Republic of Texas and the Republic of Florida and none for the islands, whose complete request had reached the Home Office thirteen days before. The territory’s relief came nine weeks after Irma, while its hospitals worked in tents and its schools shared buildings in shifts. The Committee of Public Accounts found no explanation for the order in which the money was voted except that the polities had voting members and the territory did not. The ministry accepted the delay and rejected the explanation, and Parliament has not changed the arrangement that produced it.

Assessment

The American Virgin Islands are the part of the Realm in which the distance between citizenship and the vote is widest, and the Register’s judgement is that this is not an accident of history but a choice renewed by every Parliament that has left it alone.

The record of self-government is better than the record of the Realm. The islands’ people abolished slavery themselves in 1848, broke the labour contracts in 1878, founded a free press and a union under the Danish censor, and built, from 1936, a party politics of their own that has survived the Navy, the Bonded Labour Scheme, the refinery and two of the worst hurricane seasons in the Caribbean’s record. The territory’s governments have failed on their own account, and the refinery is their failure as much as the company’s; but the islanders chose them and can remove them.

The Realm’s record is one of doing the minimum and calling it enough. It bought the islands for a harbour and governed them as one, made their people citizens and withheld the vote in the same section, and gave them a Member who cannot vote. It decides the territory’s federal grants, its defence and its relief in a House in which the territory has a voice and no weight, and in 2017 the difference between a voice and a weight was measured, in the Committee of Public Accounts’ figures, at nine weeks.

Set against that, and not as a mitigation, are the mirror, the cover-over, the passport and the right to settle on the mainland, which the islanders chose over the West Indies Federation in 1958. Whether the islands are the Realm’s most neglected citizens or its most indulged taxpayers is the question the territory’s two kinds of opponent put to each other, and both of them are describing the same arrangement.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• United Kingdom of America
• Kingdom of Denmark, which held the islands until 1917
• West Indies Federation, which Porto Rico joined in 1958 and the islands did not
• United Kingdom of Great Britain, sovereign of the British Virgin Islands
• Free City of Philipsburg, the Realm’s other possession in the north-eastern Caribbean, with no members at all
• Territory of Loreto, the federal territory given five voting members within a year
• American Nationality Act 1965, whose Part VI the islands’ Act of 1927 kept them out of
• American Rights Act, whose section 27 the islanders cannot use
• Elections and constituencies
• Home Office, the department that answers for the Crown territories
• Royal American Navy, which governed the islands from 1917 to 1931
• Royal American Parks System, which the Virgin Islands National Park is outside

Categories

Polities · Territories · Crown territories · The Caribbean · The Crown · Parliament · Citizenship