If this were not enough, while free black settlers paid taxes, served in militias and on work crews, they were shut out of the full privileges of citizenship. They were denied trial by jury and the right to vote, pushed into segregated communities, banned from holding dances or other social gatherings, and paid a quarter of the wages of white workers. Their lower wages in turn angered poor whites who decried the competition represented by the arrival of the refugees. Violence, long the tool of racial oppression, was not long in coming. In the courts, justice was segregated. White offenses were punished with fines, while black refugees faced whipping and other physical punishment for the same infractions.
Within a year of their arrival, the refugees became the explicit target of white rage. In Shelburne in July 1784, a group of former British soldiers who had settled in Nova Scotia after the war, leveled twenty or more refugee homes in an attempt to drive out their economic rivals. Benjamin Marston, an eyewitness of the events, recorded that “the disbanded soldiers have risen against the Free negroes to drive them out of the Town, because they labor cheaper than they . . . The soldiers forced the free negroes to quit the town—pulled down about 20 of their houses.” The riot, the first race riot in Canadian history, lasted for ten days, eventually spreading to nearby Birchtown where Boston King watched as a mob of white laborers and artisans set fire to black people’s dwellings as part of a growing protest against black refugees. The disturbances would continue to rage for a month or more.30
In the face of such conditions, King, like many other refugees, turned to religion. He already had some experience of Christianity from his days in America and may well have heard the famous slave preacher and fellow refugee George Liele when he was at Charleston, but it was in Nova Scotia that King found himself compelled to take up a religious calling. For all that it was the religion of their persecutors and enslavers, Christianity proved a great comfort to many African Americans, slave and free alike. There was a persistent belief among slaves that conversion or baptism imparted freedom from slavery and protection from re-enslavement. It was not true, but it was a comforting misapprehension nonetheless. Regardless, the message of Christianity—at its heart a religion of the poor and downtrodden—with its tales of a chosen people freed from captivity in a foreign land, and its promise that present suffering would pave the way for blessed relief in the hereafter, was deeply appealing to slaves and former slaves, providing solace, hope, and direction.
In Nova Scotia, King found an abundance of ministers, black and white, ready to teach and preach to the refugee community. He heard the impassioned sermons of Moses Wilkinson, a “Blind and lame” former slave who had escaped bondage in Nansemond county, Virginia, and David George, who was born a slave in Sussex county, Virginia, and converted to Christianity after hearing George Liele preach to slaves in a cornfield. When the war broke out, George fled his brutal master only to be re-enslaved by Creek Indians before escaping once more for British-occupied Savannah. After the war, he remained a close correspondent of George Liele, who had been evacuated to Jamaica, but like King, George had fled Charleston for Nova Scotia, where he made his way to Shelburne to preach, as he said, to “my own color.” King also met Freeborn Garretson, a missionary and former slave owner from Maryland who had freed his slaves when he embraced Methodism, and William Black, a Methodist missionary from Yorkshire.31
King too saw the appeal of evangelicalism and opted to join the Methodists. By 1791, he had even begun to preach the gospel and was sent by William Black to minister to the small black Methodist community at Preston. But even the refugee embrace of Christianity ran afoul of white Nova Scotians. David George and other refugee preachers were repeatedly threatened, attacked, and beaten, driven from town to town by white neighbors still fearful of black gatherings of any kind and jealous of the popularity of black preachers among the white community. In 1790, seven years after they had arrived in Nova Scotia entranced by a spirit of optimism, a report delivered in Britain’s Parliament described the refugee community in Nova Scotia as “unimproved and destitute.” Within the refugee community itself, many had become disillusioned with their lives in Canada. Freedom in Nova Scotia, it seemed, was little different than slavery in America.32
11
AFRICA, ABOLITION, AND EMPIRE
On October 12, 1791 Boston King received a call from an unlikely visitor. He was a stranger to Preston, indeed a stranger to Nova Scotia, a white man in his mid-twenties, but it was no salesman or missionary who knocked at King’s door. King would have known something of the man, or at least guessed at the reason for his presence in Halifax’s black suburb. For the past few weeks the talk among the hundred or so refugee families in Preston had been fixed upon this man and what he had traveled across the Atlantic to offer the beleaguered community. Accounts of his mission had been published in local newspapers before he even landed at Halifax, but now he had come personally to Preston, going door to door in the black community to explain his purpose more fully. His name was John Clarkson, a former British naval officer who had served in the Caribbean until he resigned his commission when the pursuit of such a violent trade began to clash with his pacifist religious scruples. His time in the West Indies had a profound effect on his worldview, the first-hand encounter with the brutality of Caribbean slavery transforming him into a committed abolitionist. He had come to Preston in 1791 as part of this new commitment, to offer the refugees of Nova Scotia the opportunity to take part in a radical new British colonial project on the coast of Africa.
As the representative of the newly formed Sierra Leone Company, Clarkson was authorized to offer Nova Scotia’s black refugees the opportunity to join in a new effort to form a colony on the coast of West Africa near the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. If prospective settlers could provide testimonials of their good, sober character, they would be transported to across the Atlantic free of charge and given “not less than” 20 acres of land for each head of household and an additional 10 acres for every family member, along with sufficient supplies to see the colonists through the lean early years. The refugees had heard such promises before, but the Sierra Leone Company hoped to succeed where the authorities of Nova Scotia had failed. To that end, Clarkson promised equal distribution of land, equal distribution of provisions, equal commercial rights, and equal taxes and duties between black and white settlers. With an eye toward the Nova Scotians’ renewed fear of re-enslavement and to alleviate their concerns about settling in the heart of slave-trading country, the Company also gave “full assurance of personal protection from Slavery,” and explicitly vowed not “to deal or traffic in the buying or selling of slaves,” or to “have, hold, appropriate, or employ any person or persons in a state of slavery.”1
This assurance was central to the mission of the proposed colony. Concerned as they were about the plight of the American War’s black refugees, the Sierra Leone Company had a greater purpose in mind beyond the alleviation of the suffering of Nova Scotia’s Black Poor. Their larger aim was use the settlement of former slaves on the African coast as a means of undermining the slave trade and burnishing the movement for its abolition. The Company was just the latest in a growing wave of anti-slavery institutions and societies created in the wake of the American War. The war had caused a profound transformation of British attitudes toward slavery and the slave trade. Critiques of the slave trade had existed from the moment Britain became involved in it, growing steadily as Britain’s role in the trade expanded over the eighteenth century. Men such as James Oglethorpe, and groups such as the Bray Associates pressed the British government to abandon the trade, but though many were convinced of its immorality, the profits made from slavery were too great to seriously consider banning the trade. If anything, the years before the outbreak of the American War saw an expansion rather than a contraction of the volume of human beings sold into bondage in the Atlantic world. There were certainly growing numbers of committed abolitionists before the war, but their cause seemed rather hopeless
in the face of the British Empire’s economic interests—that is until the American Revolution intervened.
Before the American War, abolition was not merely unpromising and unlikely; one could hardly even speak of a coherent abolition movement. There were certainly individuals ready to publicly condemn slavery and the role it played in propping up Britain’s expanding empire. Though no radical, Ignatius Sancho could still decry “the unchristian and most diabolical usage of my brother Negroes, the illegality, the horrid wretchedness of the traffic, the cruel carnage and depopulation of the human species,” as well as the “contempt of those very wretches who roll in affluence from our labours.” Such criticism was not unique, but the many isolated instances of anti-slavery rhetoric failed to gain much traction with the wider public. To create a movement, it was necessary both to unify public opinion against slavery and to transform this “moral opinion” into concerted “moral action.” The American Revolution provided the main impetus for both. Perhaps the most important single event in the early history of the abolitionism, the event more than any other that galvanized the movement and transformed public opinion was a legal case over marine insurance.2
On November 11, 1781, the crew of the British slave ship the Zong gathered pensively on deck under a blistering Caribbean sun to discuss their options. They were running desperately low on water, with perhaps only enough remaining to quench the thirst of the sun-beaten crew and the sweltering, heat-choked men and women cramped and shackled in the cargo hold for another four days. Jamaica, their destination, still lay 120 miles to the east, a journey of at least ten days, perhaps two weeks, against the prevailing winds and strong currents of the Caribbean Sea. It was clear to the crew, now reduced to eleven men and bereft of their captain after a long disease-ridden crossing, that they did not have enough water to make it to Jamaica as things stood. There were simply too many thirsty mouths to quench, for in addition to the eleven crew and their stricken comrades, the Zong carried 380 slaves, men, women, and children, for sale in Jamaica. In peacetime, the crew would have had available a wide range of options for refuge and resupply, but now, with the American War raging, all of the nearby islands were off limits as enemy territory.
The Zong had originally been a Dutch ship christened the Zorgue, but she had been captured by a British privateer and renamed when Britain declared hostilities against the Dutch in 1780, in retaliation for persistent Dutch efforts to aid the rebellious American colonies. When the Zorgue was seized by the Alert in December 1781, it was already carrying a cargo of 244 slaves. As contraband captured during war, the Alert’s captain sold the ship and its human cargo on to a representative of the Gregson syndicate, a slave-trading firm based out of Liverpool. Like most British slavers, the Gregson syndicate had seen its commerce disrupted and profits decimated by the American War, especially after France and Spain joined the war. Dodging hostile ships was too dangerous and potentially ruinous for most traders, leading to a 60 per cent decline in the volume of slaves shipped across the Atlantic during the years of the conflict. It had certainly been a lean couple of years for the Gregson syndicate, as they had been prevented from sending a single cargo across the Atlantic for more than three years. The Zorgue, however, provided a tempting opportunity to break this dry spell, by taking advantage of a captured ship already funded, stocked, and outfitted by its Dutch owners. So in March 1781, the syndicate decided to risk a run across the Atlantic to British Jamaica, purchasing more slaves to raise the number to 442 and cobbling together a makeshift skeleton crew led by a former ship’s surgeon and first-time captain named Luke Collingwood.3
Collingwood and his crew opted for an unusually long, southerly route across the Atlantic, hoping that this less trafficked passage would allow them to avoid the swarms of French, Spanish, Dutch, and American ships prowling the sea-lanes for British prizes. On November 27, after seventy-one days at sea, and already low on water, the crew of the Zong spotted land on the horizon. The decision to take the longer southern route had been a calculated risk, but now the crew made a fatal error. With navigation imprecise, and both the captain and first mate unavailable, the crew mistook the coast of Jamaica for French St. Domingue. Since entering the war in 1778, the French had adopted a highly aggressive posture in the Caribbean, attacking a capturing British ships and islands in quick succession. Already on high alert because of the dangers posed by the war, the crew of the Zong now feared that they had sailed into the very mouth of the beast, and so hurriedly decided to skirt south and west around what they thought was St. Domingue to reach Jamaica. By the time they realized their error they had sailed 120 miles past their destination without the supplies to make it back.
And so on November 29 the crew gathered to debate their options. Someone suggested that the only viable recourse if anyone was to survive was that “Part of the Slaves should be destroyed to save the rest and the remainder put to short allowance” of water. Some of the crew later claimed to have been appalled by the suggestion, but if any of them raised their voice in protest, they were soon persuaded, for the crew voted unanimously to murder a portion of the slaves in order to save themselves and the rest of their human cargo. They wasted little time in going about their grim task. At 8 p.m. on the night of the vote, the crew selected fifty-four women and children liable to fetch lower prices in Jamaica and forced them one by one “through the Cabin windows” and into the jet black abyss. Two days after the first mass killing, a second culling was made. Once more, the crew were deliberate in their selection of victims, choosing forty-two ill and weak men and saving the more valuable, healthy men. The marked men, still “handcuffed and in Irons” to make their murder more manageable, were dispatched in batches, cast over the side of the ship to sink beneath the waves. Over the next few days a further thirty-eight Africans were sacrificed in the name of profit. The slaves still crammed into the hold were well aware of their comrades watery demise, and at least ten of them opted to deny the crew the satisfaction of their lives by seizing their own fate and jumping overboard to their deaths. By the time the Zong limped into Jamaica on December 22, only 208 of the original 442 enslaved Africans remained, many having died of disease, exposure, and starvation, but as many as 150 deliberately murdered by the desperate crew.4
As gruesome as it was, the story might well have ended with the delivery of 208 slaves in Jamaica. After all, the Middle Passage had always been a deadly affair, with hugely high rates of mortality, brutal punishment, and frequent suicide. The fate of the Zong’s unwilling passengers might have been just one in a long litany of all too familiar horrors. However, the Gregson syndicate was not willing to let matters stand. Like all overseas traders, especially those dealing in slaves, the syndicate had taken out an insurance policy on the Zong and its cargo. In their eyes, they had lost more than half of their valuable property, and so pursued a claim against their insurers. Claiming slaves lost at sea to shipwreck, disease, or starvation was a well-established practice among slave traders, but few if any had had the gall to make a claim on slaves deliberately killed en route. The insurers, with more of an eye to their own profit margin than to the dictates of humanity, balked at paying out the claim, and thus the disputing parties went to court to settle the matter.
The affair might have remained a closely guarded secret, if not for the efforts of Olaudah Equiano. Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa as he was known throughout his life, came from the Igbo people of what is now Nigeria, but spent most of his life as a slave in South Carolina and the Caribbean before purchasing his own freedom in 1767 and relocating to England. Here he became an influential figure in the black community and a pioneering abolitionist, helping to found the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist society of former slaves and other black Britons. Equiano had heard about the Zong trial, and the massacre of at least 130 slaves, in March 1783. Outraged, and sensing an opportunity to shine a more public light on the brutality of the slave trade, Equiano brought the case to the attention of Granville Sharp, a clerk in the Ordnance Office, an
d one of England’s foremost advocates for abolition. Through Sharp’s network of reforming and abolitionist contacts the Zong affair rapidly became the talk of the town, reported in detail in London’s voluminous news press.
The trial became headline news, a call to arms, the subject of stories and pamphlets denouncing the gross inequities of the slave trade. Like no other event in British history, the trial and its testimony brought the Middle Passage vividly to life in all its inhumanity, and catalyzed a mass movement demanding change. In J.M.W. Turner’s achingly evocative The Slave Ship, based on the Zong affair, the shackled, outstretched arms of Africans desperately claw at the heavens as they sink into a blazing, almost blood-red sea. Such potent images charged the minds of Britons with the violence and depravity of the slave trade. Most chillingly, the Zong tragedy demonstrated, for perhaps the first time in such a public way, that violence was not merely an unfortunate byproduct of slavery, but intrinsic to its very logic. Violence begat profit, and profit begat violence in an endless cycle. There could be, the Zong affair illustrated, no slavery without violence. The only way to end this cycle of violence was to end the trade in slaves. As its most prominent historian has argued, the Zong affair “helped spark a seismic shift in public mood,” which in turn transformed the abolition movement into public cause célèbre, based not on economic or political calculations but on moral imperatives.5
To Begin the World Over Again Page 49