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  By the time of Benezet’s death, Quakers had become the most vociferous opponents of the slave trade and had converted abolition into a political movement in North America and Britain. Until 1787, British abolition was in effect still a Quaker campaign. What had begun in and around Philadelphia had now taken on a British complexion. Its ambition was to whip up a national feeling of antipathy, channel it at Parliament, and then oblige the legislature to act against the slave trade. They petitioned the House of Commons, and formed anti-slavery societies across Britain and in Philadelphia. They also published cheap abolitionist tracts – a trickle that later became an astonishing flood. At the heart of that literature lay the writings of Anthony Benezet, whose words became the texts used by a swelling band of new abolitionists, and the bulk of the literature flew off the London presses of the Quaker printer James Phillips.

  The Quakers’ abolition campaign did not abate after the death of Benezet. In fact, the mid- to late 1780s saw British Quakers more obviously break with their own tradition of quietism stretching back to their founding fathers. They had steadfastly resisted the temptation to join in public politics, except in defence of their own interests. They were inward-looking, withdrawn and deeply cautious about the world of public politics (they had, after all, emerged from the fire and brimstone of English Civil War and were scarred by their postwar sufferings). Quakers had secured a special place for themselves in Britain; and were tolerated – unlike other dissenting groups – in return for a quietism and a dogged refusal to agitate or speak out politically. All that changed after 1783 and the Zong trial, and henceforth the Quakers not only became a highly politicised organisation, but they emerged as an exceptionally influential group. In the brief interval between the end of the American War and the outbreak of the French Revolution, British Quakers exercised a political influence that swayed unprecedented numbers of people (and not merely Quakers). They obliged Parliament to pay attention, and forced ministers to rethink their attachment to the slave trade. In the process, the Society of Friends in effect created a campaigning blueprint that was to be followed by many other reforming groups in the nineteenth century (including parliamentary reformers, Chartists, women’s campaigners and Catholic emancipists).

  The British defeat in the American war had not only exposed British imperial frailties, but had raised the question of moral culpability. The North Atlantic’s major slaving power had been humbled, and many of the devout took this as evidence of the Lord punishing the unjust for their sins. What greater sin could there be, in Quaker eyes, than slavery itself? In addition to this religious support for abolition, the Quakers’ push for abolition was aided by the American Revolution itself. Colonial complaints against Britain had developed into a full-blown declaration of rights, which were to echo down the years as basic human and social principles. Denunciations of the imperial system inevitably involved condemnation of slavery. After all, slavery was at the heart of Britain’s imperial standing and prosperity. Opposing the British, and demanding colonial freedom, involved at least a tacit criticism of slavery. In addition, the vernacular of the revolution – denouncing the King and his ministers, insisting on American rights – provided a ready-made vocabulary for a parallel criticism of slavery.

  The obvious and glaring problem remained: many of the leading American revolutionaries and patriots were themselves slave owners. This created a political and moral tension that was to be built into the very fabric of the American republic, and that has troubled the USA from that day to this.

  British Quakers were nudged towards more overt political activity by the British policies in America. Any number of Quaker businesses conducted lively trade with America, and the various British taxes imposed on the colonies before 1776 alarmed British Quakers as much as Americans. Prominent British Quaker businessmen lobbied ministers both to avert economic damage to Quaker interests, and to preserve the peace.[8] They failed, of course, but their activities (many of them hidden and behind the scenes) began to break the traditional Quaker mould of political independence and quietism.

  The war itself made open criticism of the British government difficult and, despite their economic security, Quakers continued to worry about their marginal status, and remained conscious of the need to tread carefully in public. Peace in 1783, however, swept away many of those concerns, and it was then that nascent Quaker abolition took on a new, public and more aggressive life. The Quakers quickly emerged as the most important activists behind demands for an end to the slave trade. The hope was that the slave trade would succumb to the irresistible pressure of the rising public clamour against it. But that clamour needed to find its strength from the slaves themselves. The Quakers were joined by a small band of ex-slaves living in Britain. It was their stories – their sufferings – that became the critical element in the arguments. Those accounts were to be told most persuasively by a small band of Africans in London, who blended Benezet’s work with their own personal experience to produce an irrefutable account of the horrors of slavery.[9] It was a black community and voice that exercised an importance far beyond their numbers, and their words and activities were to have ramifications at the highest level of legal disputes, and in the emergence of public outrage against slavery.

  For years, England had had its own eccentric critic of slavery. Granville Sharp, a member of a large family of music-loving Anglicans, was a self-taught man of prodigious energy. From the 1760s, Sharp became the major defender of slaves and freed slaves living in England: people who found themselves caught in the legal complexities of slavery in England itself. In 1765 he cared for an injured black youth, Jonathan Strong, who had been badly beaten by his owner, David Lisle, in London. Two years later, Lisle attempted to seize Strong and take him back to slavery in Jamaica. When Sharp – outraged by the incident – consulted lawyers, he was alarmed to learn that slave owners were legally entitled to remove slaves, against their wishes, back to the slave colonies. Sharp promptly immersed himself in legal texts, refashioning himself both as a legal expert on slavery and a draughtsman of a string of important and persuasive pamphlets on slavery and related issues. He became a serious thorn in the side of slave owners, and of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who presided over a number of the subsequent legal cases.

  Sharp was convinced that slavery in England was illegal, and set out to prove it in English courts. It was an important issue, not only for the growing ranks of black people living in late eighteenth-century London, but for the broader question of slavery at large. The critical case – Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s judgement relating to the slave James Somerset in 1772 – was that blacks could not be removed from England against their wishes (as guaranteed by the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679). Mansfield’s decision, much discussed then and since, left open the bigger issue: was slavery legal in England? Though it was widely believed that the Somerset case abolished slavery in England, Mansfield’s carefully chosen words show that this was not the case and the legal status of slavery in England remained unclear. Mansfield died in 1793, and his will ensured that his black servant and the child of his nephew, Dido Elizabeth Belle, was legally free: ‘I confirm to Dido Elizabeth Belle her freedom.’

  Why would Mansfield make this provision if his judgement of 1772 had freed all slaves in England? In fact, we know of other people brought to Britain as slaves long after 1772.[10] Fugitive slaves escaping from owners in England periodically came before the courts in search of freedom, years after the Somerset case. Though their numbers were small, the social and legal issues at stake were enormous.

  Granville Sharp had, then, established his name as the most dogged and prominent defender of black people in England long before the American War. His research into the law and slavery, and his encounters with aggrieved blacks in London, not only revealed individual cases of black suffering, but exposed the multiple outrages of the slave system. Sharp’s reputation spread, especially among fugitive slaves in England, who learned that Sharp was the man to turn to for help.
The problem went much deeper than the woes of individuals – however grievous their sufferings. The most outrageous – scarcely believable – illustration came to Sharp’s attention in 1783 when Olaudah Equiano (to become the most famous of England’s ex-slaves) knocked on Sharp’s door with a horrifying tale about the murder of 132 Africans. They had been thrown overboard from the Zong, a Liverpool ship heading to Jamaica, in the hope of claiming compensation for their deaths as an insurance loss. Even by the wretched standards of the Atlantic slave trade, the Zong killings took the story to a new level of horror.

  When Granville Sharp heard of the Zong massacre from Equiano, he flew into a furious rage of activity and publicity, bombarding his associates, clerics, ministers, law officials, Admiralty officers – indeed anyone who might carry weight – with news of the Zong murders. What compounded the horror of that event was the determination of the Liverpool ship owners to seek compensation for the murdered Africans. (Indeed, it is unlikely we would have learned about the case had the ship owners not brought their demand for compensation to court.) Those who learned of the Zong – especially London’s black community – were outraged, though many people realised that this was only an extreme example of what happened on slave ships on a regular basis. Resistant, rebellious Africans were often killed on slave ships, and English maritime law (of which Lord Mansfield was the master) accepted that such deaths, along with African deaths in shipwrecks, would be compensated by the insurers.

  The insurance claim for the murdered Africans on the Zong was contested by the insurers, and in May 1783 the terrible details of the Zong story were paraded before Lord Mansfield’s court in Westminster Hall. This was the murderous background to the post-war revival of interest in the slave trade, and it generated a sense of outrage for abolitionists to draw on. Granville Sharp, with twenty years of agitating about slavery behind him, dashed off lengthy missives to his extensive network of old and new contacts. He pressed high-ranking clerics, Oxford academics, admirals and any number of reformers.

  Sharp’s correspondence fizzed with anger about the Zong, and about the apparent impunity of the guilty men on that ship. His letters to the Prime Minister and others, to newspapers, his copies of the shorthand version of the Zong trial itself – all insisted on ‘the absolute necessity to abolish the Slave Trade and West-India slavery’. Yet, for all this post-Zong anger, the British slave trade continued to boom. The voracious appetite of the Caribbean islands for Africans slaves was unabated. Between 1780 and 1810, the British ships delivered more than 900,000 Africans to the Americas.[11] There was little sign that slave trading was about to succumb to its outraged opponents. It was as profitable as ever, and slave labour in the sugar islands remained vital to the old plantocratic order.

  The African Olaudah Equiano, from whom Sharp had first learned of the Zong murders, is today the best-remembered black activist from the early days of British abolition. There had been others before him, notably Ignatius Sancho, who had cultivated a correspondence with friends in high places in the 1760s and 1770s. Sancho’s Letters had returned time and again to the plight of Africans, but he was not formally abolitionist – though his letters were an eloquent posthumous denunciation of slavery. Twenty years later, the dramatically changed circumstances of the 1780s galvanised Equiano. The plight of Africans became ever clearer and more public, thanks to the grim evidence in the Zong case, the arrival in London of large numbers of poor black loyalist refugees from the American war – and the efforts of Granville Sharp and the Quakers. Equiano and a small coterie of other ex-slaves turned writers and activists now added an African voice to the abolitionist cause. It was to make a profound difference to abolition. Equiano’s autobiography, published in 1789 (and today viewed as an iconic testament to the enslaved experience), instantly became part of the campaign against the slave trade. His industry and self-promotion were channelled largely through abolitionist (primarily Quaker) networks, enabling him to convert his self-published book into a profitable enterprise. Equiano’s was a distinctive black voice which spoke to the major issues of slavery and the slave trade. Like others, he had used Benezet’s early work when drafting his autobiography.[12]

  Equiano’s experiences of slavery, on both sides of the Atlantic, were now directed into political activism. In 1785 he led a delegation of London blacks to thank the Society of Friends for their work against the slave trade. He also wrote pieces in the London press to support the abolitionist petitions arriving at Parliament. Even before he published his memoir in 1789, Equiano had established his name as a critical black figure in London. But he was not alone: his work was paralleled by another African, Ottobah Cugoano, whose Thoughts and Sentiments . . ., published in 1787, adopted a much more root-and-branch critique of British slavery. Cugoano denounced the British, from the Crown downwards, for their complicity in slavery. He also went further than Equiano was to do, demanding an end to slavery itself and insisting that the Royal Navy be employed to prevent the Atlantic slave trade. These were militant proposals that went far beyond anything British abolitionists discussed in the 1780s.

  What Cugoano and Equiano wrote in the late 1780s was worlds removed from the Letters of Sancho drafted only twenty years earlier. The most prominent black men in London in the 1780s were writing with a political assertiveness that was new to abolition. More important still, they brought an African dimension to the discussions about slavery. The experience of exiled Africans added incalculable value and weight to the abolitionist demands and broadened the platform.

  Thomas Clarkson, a brilliant mathematics student, was to prove one of the most transformative figures in the entire history of the campaign against the slave trade and slavery. What became his full-time career as abolitionism activist was launched as an intellectual exercise: a scholarly essay, in Latin, by a young man who previously had not given a moment’s thought to the slave trade. News of the Zong killings had persuaded the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University to set a prize essay on the topic: ‘Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?’, which Clarkson won in 1785.

  Clarkson found the evidence he needed for his Cambridge essay on the slave trade in Benezet’s publications. He was amazed, soon after, to discover, in London, a band of Quakers and sympathisers who were already busy and active on the same mission. In 1786 they agreed to publish his revised essay as a tract (Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African), which was distributed through Quaker meetings across the country. Clarkson had joined a small group of committed people, mainly Quakers, who were to become the basis of the Clapham Sect and who were to form the heart of British anti-slavery sentiment and agitation. Clarkson took to the road to promote abolition, covering tens of thousands of miles on horseback, criss-crossing the country with his anti-slavery message. By 1794 he had travelled an astonishing 3 5,000 miles in the cause. He attracted ever-growing crowds to his lectures and distributed anti-slavery tracts that came spitting off Quaker presses. He also helped to drum up abolitionist petitions, signed by as many people as possible. This was to prove one of the most potent expressions of popular feeling and one of the most persuasive means of winning Parliament backing for abolition.

  The campaign against the slave trade quickly got into its political stride after the formation of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) in May 1787. (It was essentially a Quaker organisation, with the addition of a few other sympathisers.) They faced an uphill struggle. The owners of the Zong, for example, continued to trade profitably in African slaves: between 1785 and 1788 they fitted out two more slave ships, and, year after year, British ships continued to deliver ever more Africans to the colonies. Critics confronting this industry in 1787 must have felt like David tackling Goliath.

  Thomas Clarkson’s essay set the pattern; crisp missives, printed in their tens of thousands, distributed mainly via Quaker networks, aimed at an eager popular readership. All this was bolstered by hundreds of public meetings and
lectures, spearheaded by the indefatigable Clarkson. The aim was to win over parliamentary support, by exerting public pressure, to change the law by outlawing the slave trade. The campaign was lucky to recruit William Wilberforce as their parliamentary leader and spokesman. To this day, Wilberforce personifies the campaign against the slave trade, and it is true that he undertook the lion’s share of the work inside Parliament. But his efforts were directed primarily at fellow MPs, peers and ministers (notably his old friend, the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger). What Wilberforce needed – and what Clarkson generated in abundance – was the power of popular feeling, expressed through the flurry of petitions that periodically descended on Westminster. By the end of 1787, demands for the abolition of the slave trade were regularly heard in the Commons and the Lords (where they faced a much more resolute opposition) and were forcefully expressed at large, crowded public meetings across the country, and in the subsequent petitions which made their way to Parliament. The focus of all this popular antipathy was the conditions endured by the African slaves.

  The abolitionists regaled the British public with the factual details of the slave ships. The Zong was, of course, the most graphic and horrifying example of the inhumanities that haunted those ships, but the campaign concentrated on the exact details of the Africans’ sufferings. The facts were clear and undeniable. Clarkson’s own research, among sailors and in the evidence from the slave ships, created a rich body of abolitionist evidence. Although the campaign presented an emotional appeal, it was anchored in hard, factual data. Clarkson not only provided data about the slave trade – the numbers of deaths and levels of sickness – but he displayed, almost like a travelling conjurer, a box of tricks: a chest that accompanied him containing a host of African products and commodities (woods, peppers, leathers, seeds). Here were items that could form the basis for profitable trade with Africa – if only Britain would trade in commodities rather than humanity. Equiano, too, picked up on the potential for normal trade to Africa; why not develop a commerce in Africa’s multitude of products rather than the insatiable demand for African humanity? [13]