by Simon Schama
The horror of the Zong drownings and the stir created by Ramsay’s and Woods’s tracts even woke up the politically drowsy academic world. That same summer of 1784, in Cambridge, the vice-chancellor, Dr Peter Peckard, another conscience-stricken divine who had begun as a chaplain in the Grenadier Guards, chose as the subject of the Latin essay for senior bachelors Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare? Can men be lawfully made slaves against their own will? It was won by a twenty-four-year-old ordained deacon studying for his MA in divinity, Thomas Clarkson, evidently no fool, since he had graduated as a mathematician and had already won one of the university’s Latin prizes. The cleverness of Clarkson, the son of a Wisbech schoolmaster who had died when Thomas was just a small boy, was never in doubt. But until he began to apply himself to Dr Peckard’s question, Thomas Clarkson had paid scant attention to the evils of slavery.16 All this changed as he laboured on his Latin essay. An academic exercise turned into a mission. He had supposed, Clarkson later wrote, that, as was his habit, he would derive pure intellectual “pleasure from the invention of the arguments, from the arrangement of them.” But unaccountably, in the manner of romantic moral panic, he found himself slipping over the edge of an abyss. “It was but one gloomy subject from morning to night. In the daytime I was uneasy. In the night I had little rest. I sometimes never closed my eyelids for grief. It became now not so much a trial for academical reputation as for the production of a work which might be useful to injured Africa.”17 The subject had already possessed the man.
In June 1785 Thomas Clarkson was summoned to read his prize essay in the University Senate House before a convocation of dons. He left with their acclaim ringing in his ears. And that might have been that. Known to the right people, Clarkson might well have climbed the ladder for which he had been destined, rung by rung all the way to a bishop’s seat. But riding along the old Ermine Street in Hertfordshire near the village of Wadesmill, just north of Ware, Clarkson had a roadside epiphany. Tormented by the sense that he had begun something he had no idea how to finish—something that ought never to be boxed within the confines of an academic exercise, however gravely wrought—he got off his horse. He walked a little way, leading his mount by the reins; then hiked himself up again on the stirrups, rode a little further and dismounted again. Finally, “I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse…If the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to the end.” It would be him. He had become, as one of his admirers would put it, “the slave of the slaves.”
Impending saints were starting to see the light. Five months after Clarkson sat down on the Hertfordshire grass and faced the truth another twenty-five-year-old Cambridge graduate, William Wilberforce, a small, trim, clever man known for his witty banter, his smart social connections, his sure hand at cards, his graceful dancing and the tenor voice that had earned him, now that he was MP for Hull, a reputation as the “nightingale of the Commons,” confided to his diary: “True Lord, I am wretched and miserable and blind and naked. What infinite love that Christ should die to save such a sinner.” If those sentiments sound suspiciously like lines from “Amazing Grace,” it is because they were. Twelve days after writing them Wilberforce went to see the author of the hymn, the erstwhile slave trader John Newton, now vicar of St Mary Woolnoth in London, at his house in Hoxton. He had already met Ramsay at the Middletons’ in 1783 and heard from him at first hand of the cart whips and the brandings. But Wilberforce left Newton’s house in Charles Square a different man. “I found my mind in a calm, more tranquil state, more humbled and looking up more devoutly to God.” Newton too was emboldened by the new fraternity. He and his friend the poet William Cowper, co-author of the Olney Hymns, were beginning to sound a music of indignation.
The Dover road must have seen a lot of hard spiritual riding, for much travelling was done between London and Kent as the marshals began to mobilize their godly army. In the capital, preparing an extended English translation of his essay, Clarkson was introduced to James Phillips who in June 1786 published on his behalf the Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species.18 Clarkson’s grand survey of slavery in antiquity was retained, but the essay now included a footnote on the Zong and other decidedly un-donnish anecdotes such as that of the unsold slave who, returning to ship but at a walking pace not smart enough for the accompanying ship’s officer, was beaten to death on the spot with a rattan stick for dragging his chains so sluggishly. The body had then been slung into the harbour where it was promptly eaten by sharks.19 Lost in admiration at what he read, James Ramsay came up from Kent to congratulate Clarkson in person.
Back at Teston, Ramsay could scarcely wait to spread the word to the Middletons about what he had discovered in Clarkson: intelligence, toughness, eloquence, virtue without humbug. In July 1786 the pieces of the campaign fell into place. Clarkson was brought down to Teston, and at the Hall found that the Middletons had brought together the veterans of the campaign: Granville Sharp and Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of Chester and London, who had long been preaching the conversion and redemption of slaves. At Middleton’s dinner table, his own moral fire stoked by the flattering enthusiasm of his elders, Clarkson made an unembarrassed declaration that his life would henceforth belong to the cause. He later wrote that he had no choice. “I was literally”—he meant virtually—”forced into it…All the tragical scenes…passed on horrible review before me and my compassion for their suffering was at that moment so great, so intense, so overwhelming, as to have overpowered me and compelled me to form the resolution which I dared not resist…of attempting their deliverance.”
In the vision of Ramsay, Sharp and the Middletons, Clarkson and Wilberforce were to be complementary generals of the campaign. With his entrée into the world of the quality, even the court, his parliamentary standing, and his easy relationship with William Pitt, the prime minister, also a serious young man in his twenties, Wilberforce was to take the cause to the decision-makers. Clarkson, his reputation made by the Essay, would be both the organizational leader, its commanding intelligence and the face of the battle to the troops out-of-doors. And Sir Charles Middleton offered immediate—and rather astonishing—official assistance. The records of the Royal Navy on the slave trade would be made available to him, as would his many influential London friends and associates. With the additional encouragement of Sharp and the Quaker London Committee, Clarkson now set about systematic research. His brother John, now a lieutenant on half-pay, was turned from an indifferent witness of the world of slavery into one of Thomas’s best sources of its practices. The older brother roamed the docks, snooping into the holds of Triangular Trade ships bound for Africa or coming from the Indies; peering through the gratings at the darkness where he knew slaves had been packed in suffocating closeness; talking to seamen who had been on the slavers and discovering, to his amazement, that the fatality rate amongst the crews was even greater than that of the slaves themselves! One black sailor aboard a slaver, a man named John Dean, had, he learned, committed some trivial misdemeanour and then had hot pitch poured on his back, after which incisions were made with tongs in order to rub it in. Another black steward, Peter Green, had died aboard the Alfred, and Clarkson felt sure it was from mistreatment.20
Yet there was one interested party whom Thomas Clarkson, it seems, never thought to sound out: the thousands of black Londoners who had themselves once been slaves. But most of them were not, like Olaudah Equiano or his friend Ottobah Cugoano, articulate celebrities who could be summoned to fashionable parlours to inspire the troops. Nor were they the powdered and liveried body servants of the quality. They were, instead, the importunate black beggars who swept the crossings before the feet of the well-to-do in the bitter winter of 1785–86. They were not heroes; they were just an unsightliness on the streets.
GETTING HIMSELF HANGED was just the start of Benjamin Whitecuffe’s problems. Once, he had had serious prospects. His father, a freeborn mulatto, like many blacks aroun
d New York, had made a living from coastal trading around the Sound—a good living, too, since he owned a sloop. But the Jeffersonian dream visited Pa Whitecuffe and he had traded the boat for a farm at Hempstead, King’s County in Long Island—and not a mere scrap of waste either, but over sixty acres of prime, lush pasture, a two-acre orchard and some land in the village besides. And there was a team of good plough oxen to work it. So he had evidently been very much his own man: the model of a sturdy, independent smallholder on which the new republic was supposed to be based. His son Benjamin learned the trade of saddler, a handy enough occupation in the Whitecuffes’ rural world.
Come the revolution, this little felicity disappeared. Whitecuffe senior had heeded the patriotic call, joined the Continental army and risen to the rank of sergeant. He had also taken Benjamin’s brother along with him in the American cause. But Benjamin himself was stubborn, and had taken the opposite view, thinking to do better by the king than by the revolution. The divided family, no doubt with a heavy heart but also with a prudent eye to the future, decided that, should the British come to Hempstead, Benjamin should claim it as his own.
Whether Benjamin’s allegiance was determined by principle or opportunism is impossible to gauge. But his loyalism went well beyond prudent self-interset. As a free black, he had no need of Sir Henry Clinton’s incentive to join the army but did so anyway—and, what was more, in the dangerous office of spy. During the erratic pursuit of Washington’s army across New Jersey he delivered intelligence to Sir William Ayscough about American troop movements and was credited with saving a force of two thousand from marching into an engagement against overwhelmingly superior odds. But during his two years’ spying, Benjamin took one chance too many and was captured by the Americans near their lines. Only one fate was deemed proper for a spy, and Benjamin was duly strung up near Cranbury, New Jersey. There he swung for three minutes while the noose failed, as they sometimes did, to break his neck. He was still hanging and still alive (though barely) when a troop of the 5th Light Horse arrived and cut him down from the gibbet. His father and brother had not been so fortunate. The one was killed during the skirmish at Chestnut Hill, the other done for at the battle of Germantown.
So Benjamin was now the outright owner of the Hempstead farm and the yoke of plough oxen. But he was not about to sit out the war and hope for the best. Undeterred by his brush with the hereafter, he boarded a ship at Staten Island bound for Virginia to offer his services again in the Southern theatre. But the ship was intercepted and taken to the Grenadines islands, where, now notorious, he was once again sentenced to be hanged. En route to Boston, where the execution would be carried out, the ship on which Whitecuffe was held prisoner was attacked and taken as a prize by a Liverpool privateer, the St Phillips Castle. Whitecuffe was happy to stay aboard when the ship sailed east, since he must have felt that in England he might receive fair consideration for all he had suffered. And still that service was not done since, like most of the blacks who had come from America, he found himself in the middle of the naval war, seeing fierce battle at Port Mahon and Gibraltar. In 1783, when the war was finally over, he arrived back in London but with neither land nor the Royal Navy to give him a living.
Benjamin, however, had no choice in the matter. His family was either dead or had moved away from the farm at Hempstead. With his career well known in New York, there was no possibility of his returning to Long Island, much less regaining his land. And now he had a white English wife, Sarah. So in June 1784 he told his story and, with the help of a lawyer (for he was illiterate), had it written down for the five commissioners appointed by Parliament to hear loyalist claims and, if merited, to offer compensation for losses. Benjamin must have been optimistic. Since his father had traded his sloop, worth perhaps £300, for the land, the farm must have been worth, conservatively, £120. And he managed to find a sailor, one Thomas Stiff, who could swear that indeed the Whitecuffes had owned fifty or even sixty good acres in King’s County. Then there were the oxen and the cart, worth another £11. Whitecuffe hoped and prayed that “yr Memorialist may be enabled under your report to receive such aid or relief as his losses and services may be found to deserve.”21
What Whitecuffe eventually got was scant reward for everything he had gone through for His Majesty: £10. But since many of his comrades received nothing at all, this award still made him one of the more fortunate of the forty-seven blacks petitioning the commissioners for help and redress. By adding his £10 to Sarah’s modest dowry he could set up again as a saddler and chair-caner.22 A few others received more sizeable pensions, one of the most generous being (eventually) awarded to Shadrack Furman from Acamac County, Virginia, who, after his house had been burned down by the Continental army in January 1781, had joined Cornwallis’s campaign as a spy and guide. Caught by the Americans, Furman was tortured (there is no other proper term) to extract intelligence: he was given five hundred lashes and left, tied up in a field, so badly beaten about the head that he was virtually blinded, then cut with an axe on his right leg, just enough not to sever it but to cripple it permanently. “His health is so much impaired from the wounds in his head,” Furman’s petition to the commissioners stated, “that he is sometimes bereft of reason.”23 Mutilated and sight-impaired though he was, Furman had continued to serve the British, first on a privateer, then with the Pioneers around Portsmouth, unmasking American double agents. In Nova Scotia, after the war, he had been too sick to attend the board hearing loyalist claims. Improving a little, he had shipped to London to put his claim directly, invoking General Leslie’s promise to him “that if [he] were not cured he should be maintained out of the royal Bounty.” But, alas, he and his wife had since fallen into “the lowest poverty and distress.” All that came between Shadrack and an anonymous end in the rookeries was his fiddle, for he could still “scrape the gut” for a few pennies. Yet the commissioners failed to be moved by his story, at least initially. It was only in 1788, after enduring hard winters on the London streets, that he was certified loyal by both a sergeant in the 76th Regiment and a serjeant of police in New York. Shadrack Furman was now judged to have “suffered great cruelties in America on account of his Attachment to Great Britain” and was finally awarded the relatively liberal pension of £8 a year.24
Scipio Handley of Charleston must also have had good testimonials to confirm that he had taken a musket ball in the right leg while carrying grapeshot to the defences in the siege of Savannah, a wound that escaped amputation but that had never properly healed, since he was awarded the princely sum of £20 compensation for loss of his property.25 Many of the petitioners, most of whom were in London rather than Nova Scotia because they had ended up serving on British warships and had returned with the fleet, got much less. The upper limit was £20, whatever their story and however serious their wounds, whilst even the poorest of the white loyalists received at least £25 and usually much more.
The commissioners, sitting in their panelled chamber overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields, were sensible of the hardship, but what, pray, could they do? They must, as one of their number, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, declared, be stringently faithful to the law. And the law demanded proof before they could justly act—proof of the same kind as if the petitioner had been a supplicant or a plaintiff from the shires. Had the petitioners been slaves until they joined the army? Well, then, it followed that they could not possibly have had any property for which to be compensated! Indeed, it should be enough for them that they had received their liberty, been permitted to come to Old England where the air was “too pure for slaves to breathe,” and been delivered from the American state where they would be vulnerable to re-enslavement! Their proper attitude ought surely to be one of unalloyed gratitude and devotion. A man named Jackson, who had been a last-maker in New York and had lost his tools and stock-in-trade, had been taken prisoner by the Americans, but had escaped to serve on HMS Shrewsbury under Admiral Keppel, was nonetheless rejected since he
belonged to that category of blacks who “instead of being sufferers of the wars, most of them have gained their liberty and therefore come with a very ill-grace to ask for the bounty of government.”26
By the lights of the commissioners, then, only those blacks who said (and could prove) that they were freeborn were likely to receive serious consideration. And the fact that petitioners were given only one month from their initial submission to come up with supporting testimony, sometimes from officers who were far away in Nova Scotia, only increased their dependence (especially since many were illiterate) on any white Londoners who offered help. Two of these—written off by the commissioners as petty confidence tricksters—were Jonathan Williams and Thomas Watkins, lodging house keepers who offered their services for a consideration and with whom six of the petitioning blacks—Moses Stephens, George Miller, Henry Browne, Prince William, Anthony Smithers and John Baptist—were residing.
Certainly, the claims for property compensation filed on behalf of these petitioners were pitched, the commissioners thought, suspiciously high: nearly 90 acres, 15 cows, 3 horses and a 120 head of poultry for Moses Stephens, for instance, and 100 acres for George Miller. The commissioners decided that Williams and Watkins “have an interest in representing a falsity to us as many of the blacks lodge with them and if they should obtain any money from the treasury, probably these men are to have a considerable share in it.”27 But whilst Jonathan Williams demanded a share for his services from the blacks, it is not true, as the commissioners claimed, that the formulaic way in which the petitions were drafted necessarily meant that they were mostly fabricated. The commissioners implied that such claims betrayed their fraud by being virtually identical, but patient reading reveals that they were not. Anthony Smithers claimed to have lost his father’s fourteen acres in Gloucester County, New Jersey, when he joined the British army in Philadelphia as a sixteen-year-old, whilst John Baptist, from the same area, claimed only three acres, a house, and some livestock and poultry. That two blacks should hail from the same area and have both joined the British in Philadelphia did not necessarily indicate fraud but was, rather, a commonplace of their social history.