Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  Terra Nullius has also not been without its critics, chief among them white Australians who feel that all this history of the shameful treatment of Aboriginal peoples is familiar news by now. To some extent that’s true, but unfortunately, as Lindqvist shows us, not true enough. He reminds us of how people in a country we normally consider enlightened thought so much like Nazis. What would we say, for instance, about a German theorist who, a mere half-dozen years before Hitler took power, wrote, “The survival of the Jews will only cause trouble”? We’d say that this person paved the way to Auschwitz. In Terra Nullius, Lindqvist introduces us to George H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers, a British anthropologist, who wrote in 1927 of Australia, “The survival of the natives will only cause trouble.” By contrast, Pitt-Rivers added, “there is no native problem in Tasmania for the very good reason that the Tasmanians are no longer alive to create a problem.” Hauntingly, Lindqvist quotes an earlier report from similarly minded researchers who described the typical Aborigine as “a naked, hirsute savage, with a type of features occasionally pronouncedly Jewish.”

  In other ways as well, he subtly examines how white Britons and Australians have looked at Aborigines, showing us how their perceptions and theories are so often a projection of white fantasies. Because women used the same form of address in talking either to a husband or his brother, for example, early anthropologists theorized that the Aborigines practiced group sex, with brothers owning several women in common. Because Aborigines, unlike whites, used no corporal punishment on their children, their child-rearing was judged inexcusably lax, and their children, half-castes in particular, were often seized and taken from them in order to be reared in state institutions in ways less “primitive.” That practice was replicated in the notorious Indian boarding schools of the United States and Canada.

  Above all, whites eagerly promoted the reassuring illusion that, because so much of central and western Australia looked like desert, it couldn’t possibly belong to anyone and so was terra nullius—no one’s land. “There was little appetite for admitting that every stone, every bush, and every water hole had its specific owner and custodian, its sacred history and religious significance.” It was far more convenient to believe that the land was no one’s, which meant it could be used for everything from open-pit mining to testing long-range missiles and British atomic bombs.

  Lindqvist’s work leaves you changed. “Exterminate all the Brutes” first made me fully aware of one of the real-life models for Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz and set me looking for more. Two books later, I found myself writing about the Battle of Omdurman as a step on the way to the First World War. And no one who reads A History of Bombing will ever again feel that the Allies of the Second World War, ignoring international law and dropping bombs that killed some half million German civilians, fought the “Good War.” Lindqvist opens a world to us, a world with its comforting myths stripped away. You read him at your own risk.

  2014

  NINETEEN

  Sunday School History

  FROM THE MID-1700S ON, roughly half the captive Africans taken to the Americas in chains were transported by ships based in Liverpool, Bristol, London, and a few other English ports. And so when Britain abolished its Atlantic slave trade in 1807, it was a historic turning point. Parliament’s votes to end the ocean traffic in human beings and then, a quarter-century later, to end British slavery itself—which affected, above all, those who worked the lucrative sugar plantations in the British West Indies—have long fascinated historians, because the country acted against its economic self-interest. According the scholars Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, these two steps cost the British people roughly 1.8 percent of their gross national income annually over some six decades. How can they be explained?

  For many years, almost all the credit for ending the slave trade and British slavery was given to William Wilberforce, the eloquent, widely respected leader of the abolitionist forces in the House of Commons and a convert to the new evangelical strain of Anglicanism. Centering the story on Wilberforce offered great comfort. It allowed Britons to acknowledge that their ancestors had been involved in something horrendous, while at the same time giving Wilberforce credit for inspiring an unprecedented act of national benevolence. From throughout the nineteenth century you can find paintings and engravings showing the kindly figure of Britannia on her throne, in her gown, proclaiming to the world the end of slavery. At her feet are often one or more grateful, kneeling slaves receiving the news of this wonderful gift. Forgotten are the whips, the chains, the twelve-hour days of being worked to death in the sugar fields. For the Victorian age and after, Wilberforce, the inspiration behind Britannia’s great gift, made a good schoolbook hero. He was rich, philanthropically generous, and deeply religious; and in a raucous, hard-drinking, high-living era, he was faithful to his wife, with whom he had six children.

  Many American politicians of the Christian right have adopted Wilberforce as a model. Republican Congressman Mike Pence* of Indiana calls Wilberforce one of his personal heroes, often quotes him, and has declared that Wilberforce’s “words hold equally true to abortion as they did to slavery.” Congressman Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, says, “If we can get the word out about Wilberforce’s life and legacy, we can change this country.” Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas talks about the man so much that the Economist recently dubbed him and others “Wilberforce Republicans.” Their agenda is much the same as that of many on the far right, with a few twists, such as an interest in prison reform (Wilberforce himself used to visit prisoners and ask them to repent).

  Even the unsavory political consultant Dick Morris portrays himself as an admirer. Of Wilberforce, Morris told Fox News, “His whole crusade was a reformation of manners. No cock fighting. No dog fighting. No bull baiting. No abusing of horses. . . . And of course no slavery.” (Morris did not mention various other things Wilberforce opposed, which ranged from the theater to bathing in the Thames to “the progressive rise of Wages.”)

  In 1933, England marked the centenary of Wilberforce’s death with parades, church services, wreath-layings, and memorial lectures; a ceremony in his home city of Hull included twenty thousand spectators, Negro spirituals, a trumpet fanfare, the unfurling of the flags of fifty countries, and an aircraft fly-by. Several dozen biographies of Wilberforce have appeared since then, almost all of them by evangelicals, with such titles as God’s Politician, A Hero for Humanity, Statesman and Saint, and The Man Who Freed the Slaves.

  As with many myths, parts of this one are true. Wilberforce doggedly promoted the antislavery cause in Parliament for more than three decades. When the House of Commons banned the trade in 1807, it gave him a rare standing ovation, and he deserved it. From the accounts of his friends, he was a man of deep personal kindness and great charm: he sang magnificently and was a splendid mimic. He was famous for never having the heart to let an elderly servant go; one visitor counted thirteen of them tottering about his dining table, attending Wilberforce, his wife, and three guests. He gave away much of his money and lowered the rents of tenants on his land. And although deeply reactionary by modern standards—he felt that labor organizers belonged in prison and that the poor should accept “that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God”—his views were no worse than those of most of his fellow MPs. Otherwise, they wouldn’t eventually have listened to him about slavery.

  Today, however, we’ve come to see British abolition as involving far more than one man’s personal virtue. In 1787 and 1788, during the heady period between the American and French Revolutions, a huge grassroots movement against the slave trade and slavery burst into life in Britain, startling abolitionists and slave traders alike. It lasted decades and sometimes included a solidarity across racial lines that often seems elusive in our own time. As the years passed, radicals began to point out similarities between the plights of slaves and British factory workers, some of whom in Yorkshire marched under a banner calling for “the immediate abolition of
slavery both at home and abroad.” Antislavery fervor spread quickly in Ireland, where people felt that they, too, knew something about oppression by the English. In 1792, more Britons signed petitions to Parliament against the slave trade than were eligible to vote. In the same year, more than three hundred thousand people refused to buy slave-cultivated West Indian sugar. This was the largest consumer boycott the world had yet seen, and it was driven by women, for they were the ones who did the household food shopping. British women had no vote, and the boycott was their first mass political act. Without boycott, petitions, and other popular pressure, Wilberforce could have done nothing in Parliament.

  Leading the antislavery movement was an extremely imaginative, hard-working committee of activists who pioneered tactics that are still used by human rights groups today. Their movement created the first political logo—a kneeling slave in chains, surrounded by the legend, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”—and the first political poster: you’ve seen it, the often-reproduced top-down diagram showing how hundreds of bodies were crammed into a slave ship like rows of sardines. Indeed, the committee created the very prototype for the kind of political organization we take for granted today, with headquarters in a nation’s capital and dozens of local chapters around the country. This was all virtually new at the time, as was the idea of members of different religious sects—primarily Quakers and Anglicans—working together for a secular end.

  The committee’s moving spirit and traveling organizer, Thomas Clarkson, was for much of his life a staunch radical who kept in his living room a stone he had proudly removed from the ruins of the Bastille a few weeks after its fall. Clarkson, who estimated that he covered thirty-five thousand miles by horseback in the movement’s first half-dozen years, didn’t get the full, scholarly biography he deserved until 1989. Historians now also give credit to the fiery Quaker pamphleteer Elizabeth Heyrick (1769–1831), who inspired the formation of some seventy women’s antislavery societies, which were generally more outspoken than men’s. Another important stimulus to popular feeling came from the eyewitness testimony of two former slaves living in Britain, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, each of whom wrote books and traveled extensively throughout the country promoting them—Equiano for five years. Equiano’s autobiography, a best seller in its time, has been rediscovered and is now often assigned in American college courses.

  A further force behind the ending of British slavery, today widely recognized at last, was a long string of West Indian slave revolts, which intensified during the 1790s. The Haitian Revolution of 1791–1803 was the greatest slave uprising in history. First, the slaves successfully threw off their French masters. Two years later, Britain, at war with France, tried to seize for itself this most populous and lucrative of all Caribbean territories. After five years of hard fighting against the former slaves, British troops gave up and pulled out. Britain’s army fought rebellions elsewhere in the Caribbean as well during this period, and several officers came home from these campaigns to write and speak (and, in one case, publish caricature drawings) against slavery. A later revolt by some twenty thousand slaves in Jamaica in 1831–32 was only barely contained by the British army after five weeks of fighting, and military officers and colonial and plantation officials testified before Parliament that more revolts were likely. It was no coincidence that in 1833 Parliament voted to free the empire’s slaves.

  • • •

  We might expect, then, that a new film released for the bicentenary of British abolition of the slave trade would reflect some of the new, broad-ranging research and awareness—in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa—of these historical currents. Particularly since Amazing Grace is directed by the talented and accomplished Michael Apted, the creator of the superb Up series of documentaries that have sensitively followed the lives of a group of Britons at seven-year intervals for half a century. And Apted’s scriptwriter was Steven Knight, author of the screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things, a memorably bold look at the gritty underside of immigrant life in today’s London. The cast of the film, which opened to generally enthusiastic reviews, includes some of the finest British actors, starting with Albert Finney.

  Amazing Grace is a visual treat. We see the familiar lush landscape of Jane Austen’s England: grand country houses, mist-covered sheep meadows, formal gardens, wood-paneled rooms with roaring fires, frock coats for men and plunging lace-trimmed necklines for women. “It’s pretty much all true, certainly in spirit and essence,” Apted told the New York Times about his film. “It had to be very accurate or else it would have lost its power.” But he is using, to say the least, a very Hollywood definition of accuracy. The wigs and stagecoaches may be authentic, but “in spirit and essence” the movie could have been made a hundred years ago. It gives the impression that William Wilberforce brought the slave trade to an end almost single-handedly. A biography published as the official companion to the movie calls Wilberforce “simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world.”

  In years past, lionizers of Wilberforce have painted that rosy picture by simply leaving out other parts of the story, like the slave rebellions. Amazing Grace does so with far more subtlety and sophistication. It gives short glimpses of some of the other important people and events—Clarkson’s epic travels, Equiano’s book tour, the sugar boycott, the mass petition campaigns. But it implies, completely falsely, that Wilberforce orchestrated or supported all of these.

  Much of the movie unfolds as flashbacks. This allows the film’s Wilberforce, played appealingly by Ioan Gruffudd, to recount the beginnings of the antislavery movement to the young woman he is falling in love with, Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai). And so we see Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell) galloping down a picturesque country lane, and we see Olaudah Equiano (the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour) selling copies of his book to eager buyers. Clarkson is also shown, oddly, somewhat drunk. But we are hearing Wilberforce’s voice describing their work to his beloved, as if it were he who had dispatched them on their missions. At one point, when the antislavery movement revives after a hiatus, it is the film’s Wilberforce who personally comes to fetch Clarkson, saying, “We need you back in London straight away.”

  In fact, the very sober Clarkson mounted his horse and set off on the first of his great organizing trips some two years before Wilberforce said a word against the slave trade in Parliament. Thirty-seven years later, in his sixties, Clarkson finished his last, thirteen-month trip around the country by stagecoach. And always on these journeys he was reporting to the largely Quaker abolition committee, not to Wilberforce. Early on, Clarkson bought some slave shackles at a ship chandler’s shop on the Liverpool docks and displayed them to shocked audiences on his travels; in the film, it is Wilberforce who does this. And far from Wilberforce being a friend of Equiano (in the film the two have dinner and tour a slave ship together), there is no evidence that they ever met. Nor, as far as we can tell, did Wilberforce ever read Equiano’s book; in his view, the proper role for freed slaves, he wrote in 1823, was to act as “a grateful peasantry.”

  In yet another misleading episode, Wilberforce, talking to his future wife, appreciatively mentions the sugar boycott and the way she is taking part in it. In real life, however, deeply uneasy with any uncontrolled expression of popular will, he opposed the boycott. He also believed women should obey their husbands and should have nothing to do with politics or the movement. The rise of women’s antislavery societies dismayed him. “For ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions,” Wilberforce wrote to a friend, “. . . appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture.”

  In a similar reversal of reality, the film’s Wilberforce dramatically unrolls a huge petition against the slave trade on the floor of the House of Commons and declaims to a pro-slavery MP, “No matter how much you shout, you will not drown out the voice of the people!” The real Wilberforce cared about many things, but the voice of the peo
ple was not one of them: he opposed all the various reform proposals that would have increased the less than 5 percent of the population, all male, eligible to vote. For him, government was strictly a matter for a small elite of well-born, educated men like himself. The Wilberforce of Apted’s film does something else that would have shocked the real one: he includes ex-slaves and a woman in a planning session about parliamentary strategy. On one of the few occasions where we know Wilberforce was even in the presence of people of color, an 1816 dinner he chaired of something called the African and Asiatic Society, the handful of Africans and Asians present ate at one end of the room, behind a screen. This curious movie seeks to lionize Wilberforce by portraying him as something he decidedly was not: a modern liberal.

  But not too liberal. Just to be sure we don’t get any foolish ideas that the antislavery movement was an integral part of the age of revolutions, the film shows us a wise Wilberforce cautioning a hot-headed Clarkson about to head off to revolutionary France. Sounding like a proto-Leninist, Clarkson says, “We must fight! For a perfect order!”

  Another character on the screen, the writer of the beloved hymn after which the movie is named, is distorted in a different way. In 1785, after Wilberforce’s conversion to evangelicalism, he was trying to decide whether to remain in Parliament and went to consult the clergyman John Newton. Newton had been a slave-ship captain in his youth. In the traditional telling of the story, it is often implied that this great hymn and the many others Newton wrote were his atonement for a disgraceful past. Hollywood loves nothing better than repentant sinners, and so in the publicity material sent to film critics, the makers of Amazing Grace say: “Newton was captain of a slave ship for many years, until he underwent a dramatic religious conversion while steering his vessel through a storm. Repenting and regretting the misery he had inflicted on the thousands of human cargo he had transported across the Middle Passage . . . he devoted his life to the Church.”