Freedom Read online

  5

  The Friends of Black Freedom

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF African slavery in the Americas had few critics at first. Although both Spain and Portugal had complex theological discussions about the enslavement of Indians, they paid little attention to African enslavement and it was to be a supreme irony that Bartholomé de las Casas (Bishop of Chiapas) supported the enslavement of Africans as a way of protecting local Indians.[1]

  The Catholic Church sanctioned both the early Atlantic slave trade and the use of African slaves in the Americas. When the nations of northern Europe also embarked on their own slaving empires, they too felt unrestrained by moral or religious doubts about slavery. They faced few major institutional or individual objections to the enslavement of Africans. Early French slavers were expected to convert enslaved Africans to Catholicism, while Flemish, Dutch and English slaving ventures generally went untroubled by the questions, rehearsed at home, about the freedom (or otherwise) of Africans landing in European ports. Thus, as the various European settlements in the Americas evolved, neither church nor state thought to prevent or restrain the emergence of African slavery in the colonies. Nor did they seek to stop the growth of the maritime trade in African slaves. All soon accepted that the raw conditions of colonial settlement required enslaved labour; and equally, that such labour could only be adequately supplied by a long-distance oceanic trade in Africans, first to Brazil, then to the Caribbean and North America. By the mid-eighteenth century the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery were securely embedded as pillars not only of colonial development, but of Western wellbeing and power. Both were central to the wider Atlantic economy, and both had blossomed with barely a squeak of opposition. Who could dispute the raw economic facts of empire – even when it was anchored in slavery?

  When critics did emerge, and when Africans finally began to have friends speaking up for them, such voices grounded their objections in the brutal evidence that, along with the profits, began to spill forth from the slave ships and the plantations. Long before the political blossoming of abolition (after 1787 in Britain), critics had begun to collect and publicise the chilling human evidence that emerged from accounts of Atlantic slavery. Portuguese and Spanish (often clerical) observers had travelled much the same route two centuries earlier, but the rapid development of the world of print in the eighteenth century made available a growing body of data about maritime and colonial life, which revealed the brutal realities of slavery to an expanding readership. As that century advanced, authors from various political and religious positions began to criticise slavery, denouncing its inhumanity, claiming it to be contrary to Christianity and even arguing that slavery involved a denial of the African’s right to liberty.[2]

  Above all, it was the shocking accounts from the slave ships and plantations that provided ammunition for the early attacks on slavery. The range of literature involved was astonishing and embraced travel accounts, narratives of trade and empire, theological discussion, and political and economic debate. A mounting curiosity about the wider world was stimulated by newspapers, journals, broadsheets, pamphlets, magazines and books. Slavery was a dominant theme, mentioned time and again, and it was the eye-watering accounts from men who had seen it on the slave ships and plantations that brought home its brute realities. Such accounts prompted moral qualms about slavery among both writers and readers, but in the colonies opposition was easily bypassed by crude economic realities: profits from slavery simply swamped any moral concerns. Nonetheless, scenes from the enslaved Americas made a deep impression on readers, and their feelings of outrage began to spread.

  The early British eyewitness accounts of slavery were authentic and visceral, though they did not offer a philosophical or even an economic critique of slavery. Bondage on such a widespread and brutal scale was unknown in Britain itself, notwithstanding naval press gangs and enslaved Scottish miners, and such accounts provoked indignation; comparisons with ancient villeinage and serfdom simply failed to convince. American chattel slavery, passing from mother to child in perpetuity, with no legal remedy and characterised from childhood to old age by a brute violence was, quite simply, utterly different from anything in British memory or historical experience.[3]

  The irony was that colonial slavery developed at the very time the British began to think of themselves as a people uniquely blessed by their freedoms. The parliamentary victories of the seventeenth century and the rise of common law as the safeguard of every citizen – as enshrined in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 – helped to mould a sense of nationhood that was rooted in legally guaranteed personal and political liberties. When they looked to their European neighbours, the British considered themselves distinctly privileged – with liberty. Yet at the same time, the British were shipping ever more Africans into perpetual bondage and were benefiting hugely from that enslaved labour. Though this irony was later used to great political advantage by abolitionists. Who, say in 1750, so much as paused to consider the irony when they enjoyed the abundant pleasures and benefits of slavery? Who was troubled by the legal or political inconsistencies when they lit their pipe of slave-grown tobacco, sweetened their tea with Caribbean sugar or dined at a mahogany table made from timber felled by gangs of African slaves?

  One small group who did worry about the inconsistency, and who had direct dealings with slavery, were North American Quakers – even though many of them, by the mid-eighteenth century, were direct beneficiaries of enslaved labour. Soon after the creation of the Society of Friends, in the wake of the British Civil War, a group of Quakers settled in the relatively new colony of Barbados. By the time George Fox visited the island in 1671, they had formed the largest Quaker community outside the British Isles. When Quakers began their settlements in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, there were at least fourteen Quakers in Barbados who owned plantations worked by sixty or more slaves.

  Slaves quickly followed Quakers and other Europeans to their new settlements in North America. In 1671 George Fox urged Friends to treat their slaves well and deal kindly and gently with them’.[4] He did not, though, demand freedom for the slaves, nor did Quakers living close to slavery in North America. There was, however, a growing unease among North American Quakers about the spread of slavery (and of the involvement of Quaker businesses with slavery). Quaker meetings and individuals expressed disapproval, but it took the influence and writings of two remarkable men, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, along with the Philadelphia Quakers, to push the Society towards supporting formal abolition in the 1750s. In 1758, the London Yearly Meeting urged Friends to avoid the slave trade; to ‘keep their hands clear of this unrighteous gain of oppression. That same year, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting formally condemned slave holding. Three years later, the London Yearly Meeting followed suit.

  The problem for American Quakers who were already commercially successful in a variety of fields was that some of them owned slaves. Slavery had crept into all corners of American life, from domestic service in towns through to the better-known field labour in major agricultural industries. Quakers who prospered from slavery were initially reluctant to heed the Society’s call on behalf of the slaves, and even the early Quaker abolitionists felt that slaves could only be weaned gradually from slavery towards full freedom. Despite such complications, the criticism of slavery by the Society of Friends proved a seminal force in the emergence of a more broadly based attachment to abolition in the late eighteenth century. No single person proved more influential than Anthony Benezet.

  Born Antoine Bénézet to a French Huguenot family who migrated first to England then, in 1731, to Philadelphia, Benezet rejected the commercial life of his father for the more scholarly life of teaching and preaching. He married into and joined the Society of Friends, became an energetic teacher, educating local blacks in his home before founding what became the hugely influential African Free School. Benezet was now on his chosen path: of educating blacks in the expectation of ultimate emancipation.

  Benezet loath
ed the pursuit of wealth and of luxury, and he came to see the Atlantic slave trade as the very worst example of both. He also anchored his intellectual opposition in a range of secular literature, making use of Friends’ private libraries and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Though biblical sources liberally peppered his writings, he made great use of legal and philosophical sources. He found support, for instance, in Baron de Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (1748): ‘The state of slavery is in its own nature bad. It is neither useful to the master, nor to the slave.’ Benezet also turned to the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, with Francis Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy (1755) proving a rich source for his ideas: no endowments natural or acquired, can give perfect rights to assume power over others, without their consent’.

  Benezet – a Quaker wedded to non-violence – parted company with Hutcheson in his belief that slaves had a right to use violence to secure their freedom. Benezet was also influenced by the Scottish jurist George Wallace: ‘Men and their liberty are not “in commercia” they are not either saleable or purchasable.’ Wallace argued that ‘liberty is the right of every human creature . . . And no human law can deprive him of the right, which he derives from the law of nature.’[5]

  Via extensive reading in all the appropriate literature – in English, French and Dutch – Benezet gradually developed an argument against slavery. He delved into travel literature: accounts from mariners on the slave ships and adventurers on the coast of Africa. The result was a series of publications between 1759 and 1771 that not only had a major impact on contemporary attitudes to slaves and slavery, but left a corpus of literature, which historians have been feasting on ever since. His was a studious and sympathetic appreciation of Africa and its myriad societies and was totally at variance with prevailing views, which consigned Africa and Africans to a realm of barbarity (thus serving to justify Europeans in their rapacious dealings with the continent). But Benezet also went further. His research into shipping records in English newspapers enabled him to make estimates of the numbers of Africans annually transported on board the slave ships. He made similar forays into the evidence about the treatment of slaves in the Americas. In effect, Benezet made himself the master of the contemporary data of the British slave trade – at all three points of the Atlantic system: Britain, Africa and the Americas. It was a remarkable, innovative feat, and testimony to his industry and single-minded commitment. It also pointed the direction in which the slave trade has been studied by scholars ever since. Benezet located the essential sources, extracted the statistical evidence and drafted a persuasive argument – against the slave trade.

  Both Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush were greatly influenced by Benezet. So too was the Virginia House of Burgesses (which petitioned George III in 1772 for an end to the slave trade). Not satisfied simply with publications, however, Benezet wrote countless letters to politicians and preachers on both sides of the Atlantic. Like Dr Johnson in London, during the drift to American independence in 1776 Benezet was alert to the striking contradiction that the language of liberty was proclaimed loudest by men who were themselves slave owners. Nor was Benezet’s abolitionist work merely literary or by correspondence. He agitated for the freedom of slaves passing though Philadelphia, and demanded the same rights for black people that American revolutionaries were claiming for themselves. He was out of step on one major issue, however; as a pacifist he continued to refuse to concede the colonists’ right to a violent break from the British.

  Benezet’s initial target was North American slave traders and owners, but in the late 1760s he began a correspondence with sympathisers in England. In the years before the outbreak of the American War in 1776, English Quakers responded to Benezet’s ideas by quietly agitating against the slave trade. In the long term, these transatlantic links were crucial in disseminating abolitionist ideas on both sides of the Atlantic, and in encouraging English Friends to publish and circulate cheap (or free) literature against the slave trade. English Quakers had an effective national headquarters (in the form of the London Yearly Meetings), and also had a network that spanned the entire country, stretching from Plymouth to Newcastle. Crucially, too, they had a committed publisher, and prosperous Quaker backers happy to finance any Quaker campaign. This nationwide network was organised and run in an efficient and prudent fashion by men whose business acumen had propelled them to commercial success in a string of businesses. Even before 1776, Quakers were well placed for abolitionist agitation: as well as their formal network, they had powerful individual spokesmen writing and preaching against the slave trade, and had strong transatlantic links that ensured the flow of abolitionist ideas back and forth. What seems at first glance to be a relatively small voice in the wilderness – a sect of perhaps no more than 20,000 Quakers in England and Wales – was poised to become the major catalyst for a full-scale onslaught on the relatively unchallenged slave trade. The entire problem of slavery was transformed by the British defeat in North America.

  English Quakers also faced difficulties about slavery. Like their American counterparts, some had a direct or indirect stake in the slave system. Between 50 and 75 per cent of British metal manufacture was in Quaker hands, and how could the ironmasters avoid entanglement with the Royal Navy or the slave ships (both requiring huge volumes of ironware for armaments and ships fittings)? And should Quaker pharmacists refuse to dispatch medicines to the sugar planters to treat their slaves? Even the apparently innocent production of metal pots and pans by Quaker manufacturers raised problems, because huge volumes were shipped to Africa to be exchanged for African slaves. The enormously wealthy Quaker, John Hanbury, made his fortune from the tobacco trade to the Chesapeake – and that tobacco was cultivated by slaves. The simple truth was that slavery had so infiltrated British economic and social life by the mid-eighteenth century that even its Quaker opponents found themselves enmeshed.

  The Quakers’ abolitionist ideas began to spread. Benezet’s publications were to prove especially important for the work of the man who became the indefatigable foot-soldier for British abolition – Thomas Clarkson. William Wilberforce also quoted Benezet at length in trying to persuade Parliament to end the slave trade. And Benezet also had a lively correspondence with sympathisers in France, notably with the leaders of the Société des Amis des Noirs, and with a range of men drawn into the upheavals in France after 1789. His influence extended much further than formal political links, notably to Africans living in London. All were former slaves or born of slave parents, and for them the slave trade was not merely an abstract, moral issue. Benezet’s account of Africa gave them a context for their own writing about their enslaved experiences.

  Though it is hard to exaggerate the influence of this one simple Quaker, today his importance is rarely fully recognised, even though the key abolitionist pioneers openly admitted their debt to Anthony Benezet. In addition to the rich corpus of literature, Benezet effectively established the central principle of the campaign that followed. Although he ranged far and wide in his study of Atlantic slavery, his concentration and his point of attack was on the slave trade itself. Slavery was at its most violent in the belly of the slave ships, and those ships were effectively the umbilical cord for slavery in the Americas. With a few exceptions (most notably in North America), slave societies continued to depend on the regular arrival of new supplies of Africans from the slave ships. Benezet established a method of confirming the pivotal fact that, if slave owners were denied the Atlantic slave trade, slavery itself might wither and die. Benezet was among the first to realise that this reliance on the slave ships was the slaveholders’ Achilles’ heel. They were highly vulnerable – if only the slave trade could be stopped. Abolishing the slave trade was, however, the most daunting of prospects. The first step was to raise public awareness of the problem.

  With that in mind, Benezet petitioned the British royals (as early as 1783) against the slave trade. He pointed out to Queen Charlotte that the slave traders had taken Africans
and ‘forced them into your ships, like a herd of swine’.[6] He urged slave captains and their commercial backers to desist, and to have nothing more to do with the slave trade. He attacked the planters who bought Africans from the slave traders, accusing them of being ‘the spring that puts all the rest in motion’. Benezet denounced everyone involved; from the initial slave kidnappers through to the merchants whose commercial machinations orchestrated the entire system. Aware of the planters’ claims that their industries – especially sugar and tobacco – would simply collapse without slave labour, Benezet argued (optimistically) that there was plenty of free, white labour available. He also warned slave owners of the dangers they faced; unless they altered their ways, slaves would surely seek their revenge. If the slave trade continued, an ‘impending catastrophe’ would inevitably follow. The slaves would revolt and lay waste to the slave colonies.

  This was an astonishingly prophetic observation. Although Benezet was not the only one to predict a cataclysmic end to slavery (planters had nightmares about it), his warning came a mere decade before the slave upheavals totally destroyed slavery in St-Domingue. Everything Benezet had warned against happened: it was the grimmest realisation of a bleak prediction. He did not live to see his warning come true, however: he died in Philadelphia in 1784. The people who indeed fully grasped his importance and his value – a large crowd of mourners weeping for the passing of their greatest and most influential friend – followed his coffin to the grave: ‘hundreds of Negroes testifying by their attendance, and by their tears, the grateful sense they entertained of his pious efforts on their behalf’.[7]