The Zong incident, with its horrendous callousness and its avaricious postscript, thus captured the imagination of a British public in many ways inured to the suffering of slaves and the moralizing of abolitionists. In part this was a result of the sheer calculated enormity of the killings and the manner in which mass murder was intertwined with a greedy financial calculus. However, the outrage that the Zong case engendered, and the impact it had on the abolition movement, would likely have been much more muted if not for the American Revolution. In the early days of the dispute with the American colonies, Britons had been receptive to American criticisms of the British Empire. They might not have approved of their subsequent rebellion, but their charges that the British Empire was based on immoral premises, that it operated in favor of elites and to the detriment of the greater public, rang as true in London as in Boston or Philadelphia. Even opponents of the American rebellion began to see that the direction and function of the empire needed to be reconsidered and reformed. Many began to see a link between slavery and a corrupt political system, between the act of denying the liberty of slaves, and the trampling of the liberties of British subjects. The American War, and its discourse of imperial critique, provided room to debate and reimagine the British Empire on a new moral foundation of free labor and free trade.
Many of the reformers, especially those who were, like Granville Sharp, most sympathetic to the American cause, came to believe that the American War was divine retribution for the sins of the British Empire. In their minds, no sin was greater than the slave trade, and its evil was most hauntingly symbolized by the Zong tragedy. For Sharp, it was “proof of the extreme depravity which the Slave Trade introduces amongst those that become inured to it.” If Britain did not rid itself of the sin of slavery it would infect everyone and everything. In the wake of the war and the Zong affair, the arguments of abolitionists began to take on a new moral tone. A British Empire built on slavery only served to enrich a few wealthy merchants while sullying the rest of the population with the collective taint of the slave trade. Slavery corroded the morals of the entire nation. The disastrous defeat in the American War only confirmed this moral truth, that the sins of the empire must be expiated if Britain were to avoid further chastisement.6
By the time the Zong affair was becoming headline news, other potent symbols of the immorality of empire were beginning to appear on British soil. When the war ended in 1783, the cash-strapped British were forced to demobilize tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors. Among this horde of newly unemployed military men were hundreds of the former slaves who had escaped bondage to join the British armed forces. Many of these refugees made their way to London, already home to an African community perhaps 10,000 strong, where their numbers were augmented by the arrival of black refugees who had escaped bondage during the war but who had not joined the British army. In all, as many as a thousand former slaves now joined the heaving mass of the capital, most settling in the poorer areas, especially in the chronically impoverished East End and the maritime districts such as Stepney, Wapping, Shadwell, and Deptford. For these former slaves now cast into the swirling chaos of post-war London, the prospects were slim indeed. The city, already a cramped and crowded warren of glittering wealth and desperate poverty, stinking with the fetid effluvia of three-quarters of a million people, was now teeming with demobbed soldiers and sailors, and American loyalists, all looking for employment and relief.
Like Boston King, Samuel Burke had been evacuated from Charleston in 1782. Born into slavery in South Carolina, Burke had been taken to Ireland in 1774, and then to the Bahamas in 1776 as a servant of Monfort Browne, the colony’s new governor. When Browne was transferred to New York during the American War, Burke accompanied his master and became a recruiting agent for Browne’s loyalist regiment. Like many black loyalists, he had taken part in Sir Henry Clinton’s southern campaign and was present at the British capture of Charleston in 1780, but was grievously wounded at the battle of Hanging Rock. When the British abandoned Charleston in the wake of the Yorktown debacle, Burke, as a wounded veteran, was discharged and sent to London rather than joining King and other refugees in New York and Nova Scotia. Burke’s ship, however, was captured by French forces, and he spent the last months of the war in prison in France before at last making his way to London, where he hoped to find relief and compensation for his losses and his sacrifice.
Upon arrival in the capital, Burke and his wife found lodging in a cramped boarding house in Goodmans Fields with at least twelve other refugees. Burke found transient work as a paper flower seller, roaming London’s twisting streets desperately hawking counterfeit blooms for a scant penny a day. This was hardly enough money to survive, especially with a chronically ill wife, so Burke and five of his fellow tenants submitted a joint petition to the recently established Loyalist Claims Commission in hopes of finding succor. The commission had been established to hear and adjudicate claims made by loyalists, and provide compensation for property lost or confiscated as a result of their service to the British Empire during the war. Burke and his fellow petitioners could not write and did not know the proper forms, so they turned to one of their former officers, Colonel Edmund Fanning, who composed the petition on their behalf. In the petition they informed the commission that the war had left them “unemployed, unprotected and homeless objects of poverty, want and wretchedness,” and yet despite their condition and their service, they had as yet received no “reward, recompense, or emolument.”7
The Commissioners, however, were suspicious—not necessarily out of racial animus, but because the sheer mass of fraudulent petitions from both black and white refugees prompted them to require extensive documentation and testimonials to prove lost property. Few of London’s “Black Poor” had access to such evidence and as many as a third of black people’s petitions sent to the Loyalist Claims Commission were denied. Most of Burke’s joint petitioners were denied, but Burke had the good fortune to possess testimonials from Monfort Browne and succeeded in securing compensation of £20. This only proved a stop-gap for Samuel Burke, and, like most refugees, his situation rapidly deteriorated as consistent employment and government support failed to materialize. Within two months of his windfall, Samuel Burke was once more in dire straits, his money spent and his wife dead.
He was not alone in his suffering. For poor Britons, relief was available, but only through a system in which one was only eligible for relief in the parish of their birth. As most refugees had been born in Africa or in America, they were thus shut out of the traditional poor relief system, and were forced to look to other sources to ensure their survival. Some refugees found work as domestics or street-sellers. Many begged on the streets or sought refuge in the notorious workhouses—during the harsh winter of 1784, three former slaves died in the workhouse at Wapping alone. Rather than starve, others, like Joseph Scott, turned to crime. Scott had been a slave in the West Indies before joining the British navy in the early years of the war. He served loyally for seven years aboard the Antigua, the Favorite, and the Cornwall until he lost both his feet and the use of his hands in a naval engagement. Discharged in England bereft of friends, family, and options, Scott was confined to a hospital and reliant on what charity he could find. Eventually, he forged documents in an attempt to secure the back wages of another sailor, leading to his arrest, conviction, and execution in September 1783. Joseph Scott’s case may seem remarkable on its face—surely his level of need was unique—but so common was the sight of maimed refugees that a witness who identified Scott at trial had to be asked a second time if he was sure he had the right man. After all, as the deponent was reminded, “there are more black men without legs in the city of London.”8
If official sources of relief were not forthcoming, the plight of the “Black Poor” did not go unnoticed. Many Britons agreed that the public suffering of men who had sacrificed everything for the British Empire was a national disgrace. The Times thought that their “appearance in such numbers” had f
or too long “disgraced our streets.” Indeed, their visible suffering helped to transform attitudes toward black Britons and even toward abolition. As with the Zong affair, the immediacy of the suffering of London’s refugee community and the context of the American War roused the sympathy and indignation of many Britons who had previously been able to turn a blind eye to Britain’s deep complicity in the slave trade. Britain may have offered freedom to America’s slaves for strategic reasons, a necessary measure taken under trying circumstances. However, offering freedom to enslaved people willing to serve the British Empire set an important precedent, by redefining citizenship, even Britishness, as something based on service and loyalty rather than race. The offers made to America’s slaves transformed bondsmen into Britons, into individuals to whom the British government, and by extension the British people, owed a debt of gratitude and a responsibility to protect them and relieve their suffering. By bringing the plight of former slaves to Londoners’ doors, by demonstrating their fragile humanity, by remaking perceptions of Africans, and reconfiguring the relationship between the state and its formerly enslaved subjects, the Black Poor helped contribute to the rapid rise in the popularity of abolitionism.9
But sympathy is not the same thing as action, and moral outrage still had to coalesce into moral action if Britain was to be purged of the evils of the slave trade. American and British critiques of empire and imperial policy in the 1760s and 1770s, however, had forced Britons to reconsider the purpose, structure, and moral basis of the British Empire and its institutions. As such, the crisis of imperial authority that surrounded the American Revolution made “slavery matter politically in ways it had never mattered before.” Already disgusted by the horrors of slavery, the American War now gave Britons room to reimagine their empire on a new moral footing, as an empire free from the sin of slavery. The tools and tactics for transforming popular outrage into a political movement were also to be found in the history of the American War. The emerging abolitionist movement took its strategic cues from the networks, petitioning campaigns, and boycotts of the Wilkites in the 1760s, the American Patriots in the 1760s and 1770s, and the Association movement in the 1780s. In the past the wealthy and influential West Indian planter lobby had ensured that there was little serious consideration of anti-slavery policies. However, though the war left the British Caribbean and its slave economy intact, it fatally undermined the image and power of the West Indian lobby, giving new space for critics of Britain’s imperial policy. By the war’s end in 1783, a true abolition movement had at last been born.10
As the abolition movement gathered greater moral force, the British public, conditioned by the war to reimagine the role of the empire, were increasingly drawn to the cause. The result was a massive growth in abolitionist societies and a cascade of petitions calling for an end to the slave trade that had mired Britain in immorality and defeat. In June 1783, a group of Quaker abolitionists unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament to end the slave trade, the first of many such petitions in a growing movement. Crucially, at the same time the spirit of abolitionism also began to invade the upper echelons of British society. What had been a movement largely limited to Quakers and other religious non-conformists, began to be adopted by the Anglican clerical establishment who began to espouse the moral imperative of the arguments against slavery. That same year, the influential Bishop of Chester Beilby Porteus preached against slavery, denouncing the Anglican Church’s role in propping up the system and its ownership of slave plantations in the West Indies. Porteus’s sermon marked a turning point in Anglican attitudes toward slavery, and he would remain an influential proponent of the moral cause of abolitionism, both from the pulpit as Bishop of London and in the House of Lords. The American War and the Zong affair had helped to turn a fringe cause into the cause of the righteous.
Central to this transformation was a well-designed publicity campaign that sought to force Britons to confront their role in the horrendous suffering of the enslaved. Led by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which had been founded in 1787, abolitionists crisscrossed the country gathering information about the slave trade, publishing accounts of its horrors, and convening public lectures, all designed to humanize Africans and publicize the oft ignored abuses of the system. Thomas Clarkson, a founding member and driving force behind the Society, traveled some 35,000 miles around Britain researching the slave trade and promoting abolition. He interviewed some 20,000 sailors and ships’ surgeons about their experiences of the slave trade, acquired the gruesome tools of the trade—branding irons, shackles, thumbscrews—for public display, and bought samples of African manufactures as evidence of the sophistication and common humanity of African civilization. Clarkson and his colleagues hoped that publishing first-hand accounts of slavery and confronting the populace with images of slave ships and their instruments of torture would shock the British public into action. To this end, they also printed pamphlets advocating abolition and featuring the life stories of former slaves. Perhaps the most important of these publications was The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which proved enormously popular, going through eight editions within eight years of its publication in 1789. Equiano’s account, one of the first to detail African society, the Middle Passage, and slavery from the perspective of a former slave, presented the fate of a living, breathing, feeling human being to devastating effect.11
In 1787, abolitionists peppered Parliament with 100 petitions demanding the end of the slave trade. In 1792, the annual number of petitions had grown fivefold, by which point over 1.5 million British men and women—one out of every eight Britons—had signed an anti-slavery petition. In addition to the flood of petitions, some anti-slavery advocates adopted more active means of rousing the conscience of the nation and shaming the public into action. Boycotts of sugar and other products that relied on slave labor were advanced. The anti-slavery climate was so charged that some even turned to more forceful measures. In April 1793, John Hatton, a notoriously quarrelsome former colonial official and slave-holder from New Jersey woke to find that a “ridiculous, ludicrous, scandalous monstrous . . . Effigy” had been erected outside his door. Hatton, a loyalist during the war who had suffered similar treatment at the hands of vengeful Patriots, had relocated to London, but his knack for inciting a mob had not been dissipated by distance or time. But instead of being targeted for loyalty to the crown, in 1793 John Hatton was being attacked for his perceived opposition to Britain’s new moral crusade. Over the space of two weeks, his neighbor John Tye twice attracted crowds in Hatton’s garden with effigies of Hatton in chains, and shouts that he would sell the likeness of the “damned Scoundrel” for 200 guineas. It is tempting to hope that John Tye was a relative of Colonel Tye come to continue his vengeance on New Jersey’s slave-holders; the iconography of the shaming ritual certainly suggests that Hatton’s role in the slave system was the source of his trouble and that London crowds that had once smashed windows in support of “Wilkes and Liberty” were now willing to torment neighbors for their support of slavery. This is not to say that all Britons had at last seen the light—many, especially those with interests in the empire, defended slavery just as vigorously as abolitonists now opposed it—but the moral tide was at least beginning to turn.12
Abolitionists, who explicitly connected the plight of the post-revolution Black Poor and the evils of the slave trade, used this growing public sympathy to advocate on behalf of London’s refugees. Granville Sharp met regularly with refugees and provided what money he could, but by the beginning of 1786, it was clear that government channels had failed the refugees, that individual charity was insufficient, and that something more—on a larger scale—had to be done to alleviate their suffering. To that end, on January 6, 1786, a “Committee of Gentlemen,” most of them Quakers and Anglican evangelicals, and all opponents of the slave trade, created “the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor.” The committee was chaired by Jonas Hanway—one of the great advocat
es for prison reform—and included Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and the bankers Samuel Hoare and Henry Thornton as members. In their advertisement, the committee declared their intention to raise money for black refugees now in “extreme distress” who had “served in the late war.” The committee’s call for donations quickly saw results—luminaries such as William Wilberforce and Prime Minister William Pitt donated—and within a few months £890 was raised for clothing, food, and medical care.13
The donations raised by the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor were a vital life-line for London’s beleaguered refugee community, but they were not a long-term solution and did not address the underlying causes of their poverty. What refugees needed was land of their own. Land, however, was not forthcoming in England or, so it seemed, in Nova Scotia. The solution came from an unlikely source. In 1786, Henry Smeathman, a naturalist who had spent four years in West Africa chasing after insects and scouting possible sites for penal colonies, published a pamphlet touting the potential benefits for Britain and the Black Poor of a new settlement in Sierra Leone. After the American War, many in Britain had begun to look for new markets for British commerce and new venues for Britain’s undented imperial ambitions. Attempts had already been made to settle British convicts on the African coast, and though these proved disastrous, there was still considerable interest in gaining British footholds in Africa. Granville Sharp had been considering just such a plan since as early as 1783, but he lacked the expert knowledge of Africa to convince others of its viability. Sharp and his colleagues were intrigued by Smeathman’s proposal, especially when its viability was confirmed by a former slave who was a native of the region, and published a recruitment advertisement offering land, free transportation, three months’ provisions, and farming equipment to any refugee who joined the colony. The British government saw the potential benefits of a British colony in Africa, and approved the plan. The offer was clearly appealing: 600 refugees initially responded to the ad, and nearly 500 made their way to Plymouth to board ships sailing to Africa. In an ominous augury of things to come, fifty would die before they even left the harbor.14
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