by Simon Schama
To secure any kind of serious consideration, then, presupposed a rock-solid testimonial from a white officer or loyalist, or a well-known reputation. Colonel David Fanning, a North Carolina Tory who lived in New Brunswick, was able to write on behalf of six of his men, including Samuel Burke, who had been servant to Brigadier General Mountford Browne (who also wrote to support his claim) but had seen active combat, too, was badly wounded at Danbury and then even more seriously at Hanging Rock in South Carolina, where he claimed to have killed ten rebel soldiers. As a result of these firm testimonials, Burke received £20 and went on to work at “an artificial flower garden.”28
Those who were less lucky—left out in the cold to fend for themselves after choosing to come to what they must have imagined as the fountainhead of freedom rather than take their chances in the Bahamas or Nova Scotia—must have felt cruelly betrayed. So the picture painted by the loyalist Benjamin West for Sir John Wilmot, featuring a group of his fellow loyalists gathered to the bosom of a welcoming Britannia, commits what, even by the romantic standards of the late eighteenth century, is an outrageously self-serving fiction. For in the midst of the grateful throng is a “sturdy black,” his chains struck, his posture upright, his countenance noble, holding out his arms to his British benefactor. The truth of the matter was rather different. The truth was Peter Anderson, a sawyer who had been working for John Griffin in the Virginia tidewater before being pressed to join Dunmore’s Ethiopians. Anderson had been among the blacks captured at the climactic, bloody battle of Great Bridge. But even after the defeat, Anderson had made his choice, and it was not America. Escaping from his American captors, he had returned to Dunmore’s regiment, with “Freedom to Slaves” emblazoned on their coats and stayed with it, losing “all that I had in the World: four chests of cloaths, twenty hogs, four feather beds and furniture.” He had then survived the hell of the smallpox-and typhus-ridden ships and island camps, the nightmare of the siege of Yorktown and the even greater nightmare of the surrender. Finally he had made it all the way to London, where, from his sad note to the Commission, it seemed he would perish of hunger. “I endeavoured to get Work,” he told the gentlemen of Lincoln’s Inn, “but cannot get Any I am Thirty Nine Years of Age & am ready & willing to serve His Britinack Majesty While I am Able But I am realy starvin about the Streets Having Nobody to give me a morsel of bread & dare not go home to my Own Country again.” Dunmore himself intervened to vouch for Anderson and got him his £10.29
Two very different kinds of blacks, then, impressed themselves on the sensibilities of the British in the winter of 1785–86. For the high-minded philanthropists, there were the “Poor Blacks” who needed delivering from the wicked trade. In their imagination the crusaders saw noble, tortured Africans being herded on to the ships or mercilessly beaten on the plantations, but in any case suffering far away on a burning shore. But then there was another population altogether, the “Black Poor” who were uncomfortably close at hand, in the East End and Rotherhithe: tattered bundles of human misery, huddled in doorways, shoeless, sometimes shirtless even in the bitter cold, or else covered with filthy rags, consumptive or attacking their sores and scabs and sticking out bony hands for help. One lot needed help from pamphlets and parliamentary motions; the other needed help, rather more urgently, from bread, broth and physicians. And their plight was all the more serious because the Poor Law then in operation required indigents to return to their parish of origin to qualify for relief. But the “parish” of the Americans who had been slaves and sailors, powder monkeys and army drummers, carters and cooks was on the high seas or back in the plantations of the American South. Baptism, of course, could change that by linking them with the parish where the deed was done; and at least one humane clergyman, the Reverend Herbert Mayo, rector of St George in the East at the Wapping end of Stepney, where its campaniles and turrets looked down on the rope-walks and tar-boilers, did what he could to bring the destitute and distressed blacks into the fold.30 Mayo gave them first instruction, then water from the font, and at last soup.
In January 1786, when the winter was at its harshest, someone other than the amiable rector felt something ought to be done. After all, Jonas Hanway had done something for just about everyone else in London who needed it: the small climbing boys who died of asthma or cancer of the scrotum contracted through working in soot-caked chimneys; the sexually diseased for whom he founded the Misericordia Hospital, many of whom were prostitutes who could then be sheltered and reformed in his Magdelen Society House for the Reception of the Penitent—eleven ounces of meat, three ounces of cheese, four pounds of bread and one and a half gallons of beer every day to help them stagger their way to a cleansed life; and foundling boys who might be taken into his Marine Society schools for the better supply of seamen to crew the Empire.31 After this tireless life in philanthropy, not to mention penning countless would-be helpful manuals—Advice to a Farmer’s Daughter; Moral and Religious Instructions Intended for Apprentices; The Sentiments and Advice of Thomas Trueman, A Virtuous and Understanding Footman; The Seaman’s Christian Friend, and many more that all said more or less the same thing: abhor vice, pray, get up early—Hanway had come to represent a certain kind of busy, charitable Englishman. This was partly so because he had strong views about two items that, to foreigners, defined Englishness: tea and umbrellas. The first he thought so pernicious that he ran a public campaign against it (the definition of an uphill battle); the second he introduced into middling society, being the first man to carry his own umbrella, made of green silk, about the streets. In January 1786 this industrious man was elderly, exhausted and sick. But he was not prepared to depart until he had done what he could for the suffering black poor.
Hanway made sure that he was not alone. As a young man he had been a venturer in the Russian trade, and now he called in some of his long-standing business connections to launch a charitable subscription designed to tide blacks and “lascars” (poor Indians and half-caste Asians, usually unemployed seamen) over the worst of the season. Early in that month a Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was established, and met, first in Bond Street and then at Batson’s coffee-house in the City, opposite the Royal Exchange, a place better located to pull in the businesslike and charitably minded. Joining Hanway on the committee were, among others, George Peters, governor of the Bank of England; John Julius Angerstein, born in St Petersburg, rumoured to be a bastard of Catherine the Great (but then, who wasn’t?) and now one of the major Lloyds’ underwriters, a good friend of the prime minister, William Pitt, and a voracious art collector of spectacularly good taste; and, less flashily, the Quaker banker Samuel Hoare. Angerstein owned slaves in Grenada, whereas Hoare was an avowed abolitionist, but they both saw the relief of the black poor as a humane emergency.32
The committee men who sat at Batson’s were, in their turn, able to mobilize the great and the good as subscribers to the relief fund. Duchesses (Devonshire), countesses (Essex and Salisbury) and marchionesses (Buckingham) were eager to demonstrate their love of suffering humanity with their famously bounteous purses. The prime minister, the Reverend Mayo and, of course, Granville Sharp all gave, and Samuel Hoare made sure that the Friends, his co-religionists, were the biggest collective donor of all, subscribing £67. But the charity, as intended, struck a chord with much humbler givers, one of whom sent a bowl and spoon and another her “Widow’s Mite” of five shillings.33 It was not just the spectacle of destitution that set off this surge of giving. No one was proposing to do the same for white beggars. It was, rather, the history of these particular blacks, the Americans who had stayed true to Britain but had been rewarded with poverty and suffering. They were truly on the national conscience. “They…have served Britain,” one correspondent to a newspaper complained, “have fought under her colours and after having quitted their American masters, depending on promises of protection held out to them by British Governors and Commanders, are now left to perish by famine and cold in the sight of that people for whom th
ey have hazarded their lives and even (many of them) spilt their blood.”34
The £800 collected by the committee was used for food, medical care and clothes: shirts, shoes, stockings and trousers. From the third week of January, those who applied to Brown’s the bakers in Wigmore Street would be given a quarter-pound twopenny loaf twice a week, and at the Yorkshire Stingo tavern in Lisson Green in Marylebone and the White Raven in Mile End the needy got bowls of broth and a piece of meat as well as bread. An infirmary in Warren Street cared for blacks suffering from “very bad ulcerated legs,” abscesses or a condition identified, imprecisely but graphically, as “foul disease,” and some of the worst cases were admitted to St Bartholomew’s Hospital on the committee’s account.
But as winter softened into spring, the queues outside the White Raven and the Yorkshire Stingo, contrary to the committee’s expectations, got longer, not shorter. The hoped-for work failed to materialize, and by May some four hundred were regularly receiving food and their tiny allowance of sixpence. The committee had never intended the relief campaign to become permanent, and since Hanway was a great enthusiast for colonial settlement, it was no surprise that as early as March he had already mooted the idea that perhaps the blacks might be better off somewhere else, where they would be more likely to get work.
Once this thought had been entertained, the spectacle of blacks shivering on the streets of Stepney led naturally to a second thought: that they might be happier and do better in some place where the climate suited them. But were they Africans or were they Americans? If the latter, then perhaps they should (as some had already suggested themselves) join their fellow black loyalists in Nova Scotia, or in the adjoining new province of New Brunswick. If that were too chilly, then perhaps a Bahamian island such as Great Anagua? If, however, they were truly African, then surely the best solution would be a return to their native country, not as slaves but as free men, a colony of liberated black Britons who, by their honest toil and enterprise, would create an exemplary alternative to the degraded world of the slave economy.
This was certainly what another friend of Hanway’s was telling him. To his friends, and to some who were not, Henry Smeathman was “Mr Termite.” No one knew more about ants, red and white: how they constructed their mounds and pinnacles; the hierarchy of their formidable social organization (with both a king and a queen at its head, Smeathman made clear to a shocked readership); even how they tasted: “most delicious and delicate eating. One gentleman compared them to sugared marrow, another to sugared cream and a paste of sweet almonds.”35 But then the epicurean possibilities of the Grain Coast of West Africa were, according to Smeathman, just the start of its countless delights and prospects. In fact, his knowledge of the climate, flora and fauna and soil fertility of Sierra Leone, the territory he was recommending to the committee as the ideal place for settling the blacks, was far from exhaustive. In 1771 he had been sent by the scientist and future president of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, to the offshore Banana Islands to collect botanical specimens for Banks’s collection at Kew. He had stayed there for three years, turning himself from botanist to entomologist, convincing himself that the Grain Coast was not just a wonder of natural history, but that its climate and soil made it ideal for the cultivation of the cash crops currently in such heavy demand in Europe and the Americas: rice, dyewood, cotton and sugar. With the right investment, these staples might be produced by free labour and (in harmony with Adam Smith’s and David Hume’s economic and philosophical arguments), since the steep rise in the price of slaves was notorious, more cheaply than by slave labour.
On his return from Africa, however, Smeathman had failed to interest any kind of serious investment. In the 1780s he had pottered along giving his insect lectures, a harmless but slightly marginal figure in all three communities where he reckoned himself a figure: scientific, commercial and philanthropic. But then, in 1786, the cause of the black poor gave him a sudden, belated opportunity, and Smeathman set before the committee and, by extension, the Lords of the Treasury who would have to foot the bill his “Plan of Settlement” for the creation of a thriving free black colony in “one of the most pleasant and feasible countries in the known world.” It was, he assured them, a place fanned by balmy zephyrs and with a soil so rich that the merest prod of a hoe would guarantee a bumper crop. Given such natural blessings, each settler should “by common consent” be allowed to “possess as much land as he or she could cultivate.” Surely the blacks would see that “an opportunity so advantageous may perhaps never be offer’d again for they and their posterity may enjoy perfect freedom settled in a country congenial to their constitution” and one where they “will find a certain and secure retreat from former suffering.” And all this could be done for a mere £14 per capita. He, Smeathman, would see to it, upon his word.
But the word of Smeathman, whether on the toothsome eating of white termites or the benign climate of Sierra Leone, was to be taken with a grain of salt. Just the previous year, in 1785, appearing before a parliamentary committee inquiring into suitable locations for penal colonies, Smeathman had expressly advised against the Gambia, a little further north on the West African coast, because of the deadliness of the climate. Without a physician and drugs, he warned, “not one in a hundred would be alive in Six Months.” True, he had thought principally of its effects on white Europeans. His own assistant, the Swede Anders Berlin, had died of fever only a few months after arrival, and every so often his own body would weaken and shake from the residual effects of putrid fever contracted there, although he maintained that the high European mortality rate was the result of poor diet and indulgence in strong spirits. But between his fly-catching and termite-gathering, Smeathman must also have had ample opportunity to see just how deadly a toll malarial fevers could exact on blacks as well as whites. Like most of his contemporaries, and despite being an entomologist, Smeathman assumed that malaria was caused by the miasmal vapours rising from rotting vegetation and stagnant water. But then again, the torrential rainstorms, which began in May and continued through until September, all but guaranteed a six-month rot.
There was another glaring discrepancy between Smeathman’s ebullient salesmanship and the truth. The “Land of Freedom,” as Sierra Leone was to be called, also happened to be the province of slavery. The Royal Navy, which was to escort and possibly protect the infant colony of the free, was at the same time assigned to protect the busy British slave-trading depot on Bance Island, a little way up-river from the estuary. Smeathman’s view, whether sincerely held or not, was that somehow the two systems could and would co-exist, until such time as the evident superiority of free agriculture over slaving would, by the pure force of economic logic, secure its own happy future. That neither the slavers of Bance Island nor the Temne people who supplied them with captives would have viewed the irruption into their world with equanimity must have occurred to Smeathman. But, urgently needing a go-ahead from the committee and the government for his plan, he had no interest in dwelling unduly on this difficulty. Since he himself was to go with the expedition and would directly face the issue, impatience and myopia rather than outright deceit seem to have been his most glaring faults.
There were some, including Hanway, who continued to wonder whether Nova Scotia, with no slave trade threatening a settlement of free blacks, might not, after all, be a more suitable place for the great experiment. But the advocates of the warm but worrying option prevailed over those of the cold but free. First the committee, and then, in mid-May, the government signed on to the scheme. At a cost of £14 per person, the Treasury would bear the expense not just of free transport to Africa but also of provisions, clothes and tools for four months.
To many historians, this entire operation has seemed more like social convenience than utopian idealism. If Smeathman’s own motives for promoting the settlement are now seen as something short of altruism, the reasons impelling official support have been judged by its severest historical critics as even more scandal
ous: a poisonous combination of hypocrisy and bigotry.36 In this view, what both the committee and the administration wanted was just to be rid of the blacks as irksome beggars, petty criminals and (since inter-racial sexual liaisons were becoming commonplace and noticed) a threat to the purity of white womanhood. As Stephen Braidwood, who argues for a more mixed assessment of the motives, concedes, this ugly vein of race prejudice was indeed among the reasons given by some of its supporters, including some of the most vitriolic defenders of slavery, such as Edward Long. But Long and others among the hired pens of the West India Association would also have favoured the scheme as a way to rid themselves and Britain of some of the most likely foot soldier recruits to the gathering abolitionist crusade.
The involvement of slaveowners such as Angerstein and Thomas Boddington in the Sierra Leone plan, and the approval of Long, who may indeed have thought of it as an experiment in social hygiene, does not, however, make it the conspiratorial racist deportation of recent historical writing. For every Long, there were ten dedicated abolitionists. Some, for instance Thomas Steele, one of the two Treasury men assigned to administer the expedition, were gradualists, in favour of doing away with the trade but not the institution of slavery. Others, such as his Treasury colleague overseeing the plan, George Rose, were heartfelt, militant abolitionists, committed to closing down the whole sinful institution. Nothing, moreover, could have happened without the wholehearted collaboration of the Comptroller of the Navy, who had to approve the arrangements for the naval escort and the outfitting of the ships; and he, of course, was Sir Charles Middleton, the patron of James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce.