Freedom Read online

  Abolitionist publications flew off the presses in astonishing numbers: an estimated 51,432 pamphlets and 26,525 reports and papers in 1788 alone, in addition to pieces in newspapers and magazines around the country. What had begun as a London movement quickly spread across the country. Even more surprising – certainly to Clarkson – was the size of the crowds turning up to hear abolitionist lectures. Clarkson sometimes had to elbow his way to the front of the crowd to speak to the assembled throng. The huge number of people signing abolitionist petitions was equally unexpected: 103 petitions descended on Parliament in the first wave of 1787–8. From the Prime Minister down, contemporaries were astonished by the power of public feeling about the slave trade, among all sorts and conditions of people. The campaign had hit a popular nerve and the slave lobby was alarmed, recognising, by the summer of 1788, ‘The stream of popularity runs against us.’ Abolition sentiment popped up everywhere. In the words of Lord Carlisle, ‘the question of the Slave Trade has engrossed the attention of every part of the kingdom’.[14]

  The early abolitionist petitions were planned to arrive at Parliament to coincide with the first parliamentary scrutiny of the slave trade. Prompted by Wilberforce, a Committee of the Privy Council spent a year scrutinising the details of that trade, poring over the data provided by Clarkson and others, and interrogating witnesses (many of them sailors with first-hand experience of the slave trade). The slave traders lobbied furiously in their own defence, but they were, from the first, on the back foot, and permanently defending a beleaguered position. Their major problem was that the evidence Clarkson and friends had marshalled for the hearings was incontestable. The statistics about life, death and sickness on the slave ships (among Africans and the crew) were irrefutable. What Clarkson had perfected in his initial work, and which was now extended for parliamentary scrutiny, was a new methodology; the gathering and analysis of statistics to provide the shank of political argument. What emerged, from this abundance of evidence, both within the parliamentary analysis and in the country at large, was a deep-rooted sense that the Atlantic slave trade was wrong – an abomination – and a national outrage. Yet, for all that, it continued to be a very profitable trade.

  In the wake of the Zong trial Granville Sharp had set out, in a fury, to tell as many people as possible about the horrors that had unfolded on a Liverpool slave ship. He hoped that ‘hundreds can come and say that they heard the melancholy evidence with tears’. A mere four years later, 60,000 people signed petitions against the slave trade. It seemed barely credible that the issue should have surged to such popularity, so soon after the American War, and so soon after the infamous Zong trial. It even appeared, in 1788, that the abolition campaign was on the cusp of success. It enjoyed an unprecedented level of popular backing in the country at large, it had taken root in the House of Commons (though not in the resistant Lords) and it had won over key figures in government. Popular abolition was surging ahead, dragging parliamentary opinion in its wake. By 1792 seven times the number of people signed abolition petitions than in 1788.[15] The trade in African humanity was under serious threat. Yet it was to be another twenty years before the trade was ended.

  British abolition was in the ascendancy just when revolutionary turmoil swept first across France and then across its slave colonies. The seismic slave upheavals in St-Domingue/Haiti after 1791, the success of French revolutionary armies threatening to export revolution clean across the face of Europe, and the emergence of Britain as the pivotal nation in the European-wide battle against France (not fully ended until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815), put paid to abolitionism’s immediate prospects. Year after year, Wilberforce’s motion for the abolition of the slave trade had gained support in the Commons, but support began to drain away in the face of revolutionary turmoil in Europe and the Caribbean. Time and again, its opponents pointed to Haiti as proof of the dangers of tampering with the slave system. Word from other Caribbean colonies suggested that news of the Haitian revolt had ‘sunk so deep in the minds of all Negroes, that wherever the greatest precautions are not taken they will rise’.[16] A new reactionary mood settled on the British nation, and moderate reformers took shelter. Reforming organisations were harassed and banned, their leaders jailed and dispatched to Australia. Popular politics halted and fell silent, its spokesmen denounced as agents of a bloody Jacobin disease contracted from France. Even the godly Wilberforce was condemned as a Jacobin.

  The buoyancy and optimism of the initial attack on the slave trade peaked in 1791. It had been sustained by outrage and sympathy: by a growing public feeling that the slave ships were the cause and occasion of unspeakable outrages. When the Africans rose in defiance, they were brutally cut down. Some were even discarded, like flotsam and jetsam, when a slave ship was in danger. Moreover, this was not a distant form of trade, but a slave system that was sustained and strengthened by British politics and law. The sufferings of the Africans could even be seen in London itself, in the form of the plight of fugitive slaves from North America. And it surfaced regularly in law courts and in legal arguments about the status of black people in Britain and on British ships.

  Africans in England asked some simple questions. Were they really things: mere items of trade? Were those black faces – so common as servants and domestic helpers in eighteenth-century family portraits – simply images of an object with a commercial value? Or were they, as Equiano argued (echoing Sanchos earlier claims), to be recognised as people possessed of the rights of any other? Equiano died in 1797 and did not live to see the slave trade abolished, though it came soon afterwards, thanks largely to the change in political and international climate. Napoleon restored French colonial slavery in 1802 and war broke out again between France and Britain. Following a change of British government, British abolition revived and was greatly helped by a new government that was sympathetic to abolition. When the British trade was abolished in 1807 (the Commons voted 175 for, 17 against) – there was much self-congratulation and moral breast-beating in Parliament. Abolitionists applauded and turned to the figure of William Wilberforce, weeping silently in his seat in the chamber. A year later the USA also abolished its own slave trade (though by then North America had little need of new Africans: its slave communities were expanding by natural growth).

  The British slave trade had gone, but slavery itself was not outlawed. British colonial slavery lived on for another generation and continued to provide profitable business for the colonies and Britain. We need also to remind ourselves that some three million Africans crossed the Atlantic on slave ships in the sixty years after the British and Americans banned the trade. Nonetheless, the abolition of 1807 was an extraordinary volte-face by Britain and forms a major turning point in modern Western history. It was as if the English-speaking world had turned its back on its own history of the past two centuries. Thereafter, Europe’s most powerful and bellicose nation – Britain – and the emergent power of the USA were formally wedded to ending the slave trade. Both began to gird up their naval and diplomatic loins for what must have seemed an impossible task – to stop others shipping Africans to the Americas. The heart of the problem lay in Cuba and Brazil, where demand for Africans continued to thrive. Persuading other European slave-trading nations of the importance and justice of abolition was, as we shall see, to prove a difficult and protracted affair.

  In 2007, the British took immense pride in commemorating the bicentenary of the events of 1807, prompting many critics to point to an obvious puzzle: the North Atlantic’s great slave trader of the late eighteenth century had become the worlds aggressive abolitionist of the nineteenth century. How do we explain the slaving poacher turned abolitionist gamekeeper? This immensely complex issue was often simplified by distilling the story into an account of virtue triumphing over evil. Casting aside such simplicities, however, is not to deny the remarkable upheaval that abolition involved: an upheaval not merely in the practical issues of maritime trade and investment, but in deep-seated cultural attitudes a
nd values. The British ended the slave trade not because it had become a loss-making venture (the slave traders fought to the end to maintain their trade in humanity) but because slave trading had come to be seen, by huge bodies of people, as a moral and religious outrage.

  What is less obvious – but critical – is that they had come to that opinion thanks to the lives and the words of the slaves themselves. Opinion turned against the slave trade when people learned about African sufferings on the slave ships. It was helped by African accounts of the slave experience: African voices began to matter. Most important of all, but much less obvious, was evidence about Africans from beyond the grave: the anonymous lives and deaths of huge numbers of Africans cast overboard – mere figures in the records – by a rapacious slave system. Not long before, they had gone unnoticed and unremarked. Now they were memorialised in the publicity of the abolition campaign: still anonymous – but remembered. The evidence from the slave ships – collected, tabulated and presented in irrefutable detail – might seem at first sight to be mere statistics: the simple data of life and death on the slave ships. What that data revealed was the extent of the African sufferings. It was as if the data breathed life into the lost Africans, giving them a presence and an incalculable influence.

  Here, then, was the most damning and persuasive African influence on the emergence of abolition sentiment before 1807. The Africans – the living and the dead – had begun to test the fabric of British slavery. Though the miseries of their lives seem hidden beneath the welter of detail presented to Parliament and the public, they came to form a critical mass that swung opinion against the slave trade. It was the start of a protracted process: of slave lives and experiences laying down the foundations of damning evidence against slavery. This was the background against which slave defiance morphed into something more disruptive in the nineteenth century, when slaves in all corners of the Americas began to challenge their own miserable bondage.

  6

  Freeing Britain’s Slaves

  BRITISH CARIBBEAN PLANTERS and their friends felt sure that the abolition of the slave trade was meant to harm them by undermining their essential supplies of African slaves. For their part, abolitionists hoped that the ending of the trade would force planters to treat their slaves better: starved of new supplies, they now had to rely on the slaves already in the islands. The planters were determined to hang on to slavery: abolitionists were keen to bring it down – eventually. In the event, it was a further generation before British slavery finally fell – under pressure from forces neither planters nor abolitionists had imagined (though planters came closest to guessing what might happen). The final push that brought it down came from the very people who had demanded freedom since time out of mind – the slaves. What happened in the slave communities created an irresistible force that brought down the entire system. But, for years, it must have seemed it would never happen.

  From the earliest days, British abolitionists had been in favour of gradual emancipation. After 1807 they concentrated on improving conditions for the slaves in the Caribbean while pressing for the total abolition of the entire Atlantic slave trade. Like many others, Wilberforce felt that the slaves needed to be prepared for freedom and that immediate freedom would be a mistake. This ‘gradualism’ characterised British anti-slavery for twenty years. But how could anyone know precisely what was happening in the slave islands? Were Africans being smuggled in illegally and had the end of the slave trade actually improved the lot of the slaves already there? The only certain way of knowing was to have a slave census – what became known as ‘Slave Registration’ – a government measure supported by abolitionist leaders. Devised by James Stephen, a lawyer at the Colonial Office, in 1812, it emerged from the growing interests in demographic data (the English had their own first census in 1801). Not surprisingly, colonial authorities – and the sugar lobby – disliked the idea. It seemed yet another step towards freeing the slaves. After a prototype was tested in Trinidad in 1813, the Slave Registration scheme was introduced throughout the islands in 1820 – and undertaken at three-year intervals thereafter.[1]

  When British abolitionism was revived after 1823, it was largely thanks to the work of a Liverpool abolitionist, James Cropper – yet another Quaker activist. The new Anti-Slavery Society, like its predecessor forty years earlier, was formed by Quaker backers. And, just like the campaign against the slave trade, it had in Thomas Fowell Buxton a powerful leader in Parliament, and enjoyed the support of influential backers in the country at large. Once again, the Quaker business model was put in place: a national network, which enjoyed people’s trust and which had sound finances making possible the flow of free abolitionist literature and the convening of multiple mass meetings. And once again, the campaign quickly established itself as a popular movement, which caught a national mood and expressed that mood forcefully to Parliament. This time, however, the aim was an end to slavery itself.

  From 1823 onwards, the debate was about the nature of black freedom. Should it be immediate or gradual? And should there be earlier or intermediate forms of freedom – for children, for example? The British government eventually opted for gradual emancipation, with different possible solutions for different islands. Throughout, it was accepted that slave owners’ views had to be accommodated in any final settlement of the slave question. The obvious question – who should represent the three-quarters of a million slaves? – seems not to have entered the debate and its outcome. Even so, slaves had their own way of affecting the debate, though their methods were not always to other people’s satisfaction. The two sides were poles apart: planters determined to resist slave emancipation, the slaves anxious to promote it – as best they could. The entire debate was changed when a new weapon, quite unlike anything before, came into the hands of the slaves – and it was to prove decisive in bringing slavery down.

  Defenders of slavery had always believed as an article of faith that, because slaves had been plucked from non-Christian societies, enslavement provided an opportunity to win them over to Christianity. In fact, it was mainly Catholic colonies that seemed interested in converting slaves – even if in the most rudimentary fashion. British slave colonies were notorious for resisting efforts to convert the enslaved. Bishops and local clerics kept slavery at arm’s length, and by and large seemed happy to leave the slaves to the tender care of their owners. The end result was that, in the late eighteenth century, as for the past century and a half, the British slave populations remained attached to the beliefs and practices they had carried with them from Africa, though often modified by the peculiarities of life in the islands. Ending the slave trade, and the subsequent question of ‘slave amelioration’, brought the issue of slave baptism and conversion to the fore. Many came to believe that converting slaves would be a good way both of improving their lives and of preparing them for freedom. The planters, of course, saw this and they fought it to the last.

  Planters directed much of their ire (and their physical assaults) at the missionaries, active on the islands, especially the Methodists and Baptists who were making considerable inroads among the slaves in all the slave colonies (Moravians had been the initial pioneers). Although their work had begun in the 1780s, it only began to bear fruit in the 1820s. Throughout, it was carried along by the dramatic rise of non-conformity in Britain itself. The proliferation of chapels, the emergence of powerful Baptist and Methodist central organisations, and the growing concern about the plight of the slaves produced a heady brew that no amount of plantocratic resistance could withstand. When slave rebellions erupted in the years between 1816 and 1831, it was easy for planters to make the link between slave unrest and the emergence of enslaved Christianity. They blamed the missionaries.

  By 1830, missionaries had permeated the slave colonies. In the British West Indies there were sixty-three Moravian missionaries, fifty-eight Methodist, seventeen Baptist and about a dozen others. There were an estimated 47,000 communicant members of island chapels, and perhaps 96,000 a
ttenders at local congregations (from a slave population of 776,000). The efforts of the evangelicals in Britain to persuade the Anglican Church to pay attention to the slaves via the London Missionary Society now meant that about a hundred ministers were at work in the islands, and upwards of 200,000 slaves attended Anglican churches. There was, however, hostility between Anglican and dissenting missionaries, largely about the question of supporting the local social order. What few of the missionaries recognised (whatever their theological stripe) was that slaves had their own reasons for turning to the chapels and churches. Whatever the aims of the missionaries, slaves had their own agendas.

  The new black churches revolutionised slave life. Congregations, chapels and public gatherings for worship provided a place for slaves to meet, away from their plantation homes. In effect, the churches lured them away from the close scrutiny of their owners. In addition, they had a new kind of leader in the preachers, who spoke to them in a language and with an imagery that addressed their earthly condition – but with the added spice of offering better things to come. They offered a promise of salvation. Much of that message was extracted from the Bible, and the story of the Gospels began to disseminate a vision and the prospect of a different and better world – one utterly untouched by slavery. Missionaries were dispatched from their British organisations to take a hopeful message to the enslaved, though the missionaries were instructed not to tamper with the slave system, and to urge slaves to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s: ‘ not a word must escape you in public or in private,’ the Revd John Smith was told in 1816, which might render the slaves displeased with their masters or dissatisfied with their station’.[2] Inevitably, and just as the planters feared, their work proved disruptive. The chapel, the preacher and the Bible – together and individually – created a hazardous mix, which both planters and colonial government found impossible to handle.