by Simon Schama
IT WAS JUST POSSIBLE, then, fighting against steep odds and deep prejudice, to make it in British America and stay a free black. But Thomas Peters, now in New Brunswick, evidently did not think so. He had fared no better in Fredericton and St John than he had in Digby and Brindley Town, and Governor Thomas Carleton had been no more responsive to his complaints and petitions than had Governor John Parr. Land had still not been given as asked. Or when it had it had, as at St John, it was at an outrageous distance—nearly eighteen miles—from the town lots where the settlers kept their homes. Some of the grander white people in New Brunswick, such as Stair Agnew, Beverley Robinson and the Reverend Jonathan O’dell, had come from exactly the kind of planter country he had fled, Virginia and Maryland, along with their full complement of slaves.46 So it was hardly surprising that whilst black people were denied a voice and fair dealing in the courts, they were still made to pay taxes and to labour on the roads. To stay alive they had been forced to hire themselves out for a pittance, and even that had not been paid—and for more years than had ever been set down in the indentures. When, driven near to starving and utterly in despair, they took a loaf, the lash was laid across their backs, women as well as men, so that the blood poured from their torn flesh, or worse, they were hanged. Was this not slavery?
Unlike David George and Boston King, Thomas Peters could not see all these troubles as having been sent by God as part of his mysterious plan for the people. But he still had faith in the king, in the gift of his British freedom. But he had no trust in the men whom the government had set up over them in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. So the illiterate but redoubtable Peters turned politician—the very first acknowledged leader of African-Americans. Petitions regularly went from “Thomas Peters, a Black Man Serjt of the Late Black Prs who Servd His Majesty 7 years” to Governor Thomas Carleton (who sometimes even responded).47 Peters wrote on everything affecting the blacks: their land assignments or lack thereof; the charity schools; relief, during times of distress, from labour service and taxes. Why, after all, should the blacks, themselves so impoverished, be charged with paying the poor tax rather than receiving it? Gradually his energy and determination made him recognized in the province as the “One Person nominated and Appointed to Act for and in behalf of the whole of us; in all matters both Civil and Religious.”48
Yet, for the most part, in New Brunswick Peters encountered the same barriers of hostility and procrastination that he had found in Nova Scotia. Nothing would change, he decided, unless he could somehow get the ear of government—in London, rather than in Halifax and St John. Some time in 1790 he drafted his “Memorial” to William Wyndham Grenville, the Secretary of State, setting out the services the blacks had rendered in the war, reminding the government of what had been promised, and cataloguing the failure of those promises to materialize. Then he took the petition in person back and forth across the Bay of Fundy, managing in the end to get the marks of 202 free black families in the two provinces and to appoint him their duly commissioned delegate to seek redress for their afflictions. Peters then took his commission, his petition and the precious passport signed by Captain Stewart with him to Halifax, there to find a ship bound for London. Doing so, of course, put him in great peril, for Nova Scotian blacks were constantly being seized for sale, whatever scraps of paper they imagined would defend them. But Thomas Peters was not short of courage and he was burning with determination. He may even have worked his passage across the ocean.
Once in London he was probably in touch with Equiano and Cugoano, both now hugely celebrated as authors and witnesses to the tragedy of slavery. Peters certainly sought out his old officers from the Pioneers, and with their help wove his way through the network of the great and the good. Although he was not lionized like other exotic visitors, such as the Tahitian prince Omai, or the Creek Indians currently in town to petition for trade to the West Indies, the arrival of Thomas Peters out of the blue turned him into a courier from an epic tragedy, the bearer, as General Clinton wrote to Secretary of State Grenville, of “a melancholy tale.” But quite independently, and early in the stay, Peters would naturally have sought out Granville Sharp. And after he had finished reciting the grievances of his people, and Sharp had done reassuring him that they would be addressed in the highest quarters, the two wearied fighters considered each other and Sharp asked Peters if, by any chance, he had heard of this place in Africa, the Province of Freedom. And yes, as it happened, Peters had.
It had been at a dinner, somewhere in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick. The blacks, as always, waited on table; stood against the wall, treated as though they were deaf, dumb and invisible. As the decanters moved smoothly over the mahogany, there was talk of Sierra Leone and of the man whose most peculiar fancy it was to take the negroes back to Africa: Granville Sharp. Suddenly, behind the chairs, ears opened and eyes widened. There was hardly a black, free or slave, in North America who did not know those two words: Granville Sharp. Word was got to the people and then to the man who had become their champion and delegate, Thomas Peters.49 His first business had always been to right the wrongs there in British America, but this story of Sierra Leone set him wondering. Was he to understand, if you please, that there was to be a going home?
Part Two
JOHN
IX
NEW PALACE YARD, Westminster, the 26th of April 1791: a sombre conclave assembled in a room above the Parliament Coffee-House. The gathering of soberly dressed men, thirteen of them, was doing its best not to be utterly downcast, but not altogether succeeding. How close they all were to Parliament, yet how far from making it do its duty before the bar of God and of British history!
The Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was meeting one week after William Wilberforce’s motion to arrest the importation of slaves to the West Indies had been denied, at three thirty in the morning on the 19th of April, and by the dispiriting tally of 163 votes to 88. William Pitt, Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke had all spoken in favour of Wilberforce’s motion. William Smith’s speech to the House had been so eloquent that Fox had burst into tears and had had to hide himself behind the Speaker’s chair until he had regained his composure.1 They were the giants of the House, as one of the motion’s adversaries conceded, adding, however, that “the minor orators, the dwarfs, the pigmies…would [nonetheless] carry the day.” Watching from the gallery, Thomas Clarkson gloomily agreed. How galling it was that the eloquence of Pitt and Fox (seldom in concord) had gone unheeded, whilst the crackpot ravings of the Lord Mayor of London who protested that an end to the slave trade would entirely ruin the market for rotten Newfoundland codfish (the diet, he supposed, of slaves) had been listened to with even a modicum of respect. The committee put a brave face on the disaster. It was a “retarding,” they declared, rather than a defeat, and lest any apologists for the Accursed Thing delude themselves, they would “renew their firm protestation, that they will never desist from appealing to their Countrymen till the commercial intercourse with Africa shall cease to be polluted with the blood of its Inhabitants.”2
But the truth was that, for Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp and the rest of the committee, the vote on the 19th of April was a crushing blow, for it had come after four years of the broadest mobilization of public opinion Britain had ever seen. Clarkson, relentless, had ridden the length and breadth of the country, crucified by piles, seldom getting more than four hours’ sleep a night. He had brought out the righteous in their thousands, made converts, got mass petitions signed, distributed literature, exhibited his “specimens” of shackles, branding irons and the speculum oris, which forced the mouths of slaves open to push down food, and handed out boxloads of “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” medallions. After the vote Clarkson suddenly felt the full measure of his exhaustion, and friends began to fret over his health. Yet he would not desist now, however hard the rejection of Parliament.
As the mouthpiece of the committee in Parliament, Wilberforce must have felt t
he rejection even more painfully. He had broken his health for the cause and for some weeks in 1788 had collapsed altogether, yet he had somehow rallied to deliver three-hour orations against the impolicy as well as the inhumanity of the trade. Alluding to the great stir in the country of which the evidence was, every day, more unmistakable (as well as to campaigns for parliamentary reform that attacked the Commons as a sink of corruption), Wilberforce had challenged the House: “Let not Parliament be the only body that is insensible to the principle of natural justice.”3 But that had been in May 1789, when the exhaustive Privy Council report had been set before the Commons for debate, and the committee was deluging MPs with prints of the conditions on the Brookes and narratives of slaving on the Guinea Coast. Notwithstanding this saturation, or possibly because of it, opponents of Wilberforce’s “Propositions” to end the trade argued that with “insufficient” evidence the Commons still needed to commission its own inquiry. With Pitt’s Cabinet deeply divided on the issue, making it impossible for the prime minister to adopt it as a measure of government, the forces of temporizing inevitably prevailed.
Procrastination, that most polished vice of British politics, worked its morphic spell. The lumbering machine of evidence-gathering lumbered again, brushing aside the committee’s efforts to hurry, and staggering on until (as was, of course, the idea) that session of Parliament was over. A new Parliament would not assemble until November 1790. During the intervening election campaign in Liverpool, defenders of the trade, such as Banastre Tarleton, were so confident as to appear at the hustings with a banner featuring a negro in chains.4
In the meantime, the founding patriarch of abolitionism, James Ramsay, had died on the 20th of July, still the scourge of the “murdering Guinea captains” and “oppressing sugarplanters” who had accused him on his sick bed of “over-strained humanity” to the Africans. He died, probably of stomach cancer, in Sir Charles Middleton’s house, Teston Hall, not knowing whether the parliamentary measure would succeed, but expressing, so Clarkson wrote, “great satisfaction at having been made an instrument in the hand of his merciful Creator in promoting his beneficent purposes towards an afflicted portion of his creatures.”5 Wilberforce put it more succinctly in his diary. “Heard that poor Ramsay died yesterday at ten o’clock. A smile on his face now.”6 Perhaps Ramsay was smiling at the recollection of being told by Hannah More, the formidable Evangelical, that Teston would be considered by future generations as the “Runnymede of the Negroes.”
Something more serious happened in the long interval between Wilberforce’s first great speech in the spring of 1789 and his second in April 1791: the collapse of the French monarchy. To the friends of humanity, among whom Clarkson and Sharp especially numbered themselves, this was a cause for great rejoicing, as a matter both of principle and of interest. A predictable objection of their opponents to the closing down of the British slave trade had always been that it would hand an immensely lucrative commerce over to the arch-enemy, whose empire would flourish as that of Albion shrivelled. Although the committee’s public position was that sugar produced by free labour would undercut that produced by slaves and so capture the world market, in private they acknowledged the effect that this mercantilist argument against abolition had on those in power. Foregoing a British stake in the slave trade would merely be to concede the business to the old transatlantic enemy. So there was great interest, in both senses of the word, in reports of a budding French campaign against the slave trade in the years after 1787. In the winter of 1788–89, as the elections to the Estates General were taking place, Thomas Clarkson sent his younger brother John, who had served in the Caribbean with the navy, to Le Havre, the busiest of all the French slaving and sugar entrepôts, to gather more evidence on the cruelty of the trade to deliver as testimony to the Privy Council.
But Thomas Clarkson had another motive for his brother’s Channel crossing: the cultivation of fraternal links with the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of Blacks), recently founded by the young lawyer Jacques-Pierre Brissot. The Frenchman had been in London in 1787 and had become a convert to Clarkson’s way of thinking. Back in France he had recruited to the cause the grandest aristocratic names of enlightened reform: the Marquis de Lafayette, the Vicomte de Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet. Should the French move towards abolishing the slave trade at the same time as the British, the argument of the planters, that the old enemy would profit from abolition, would be confounded.
Until the spring and summer of 1789, this view of cross-Channel abolitionist fraternity might have seemed unduly sunny—not least because French sugar merchants had never enjoyed such a boom in both production and profits as in the last years of the ancien régime. But the creation of a National Assembly at Versailles, and the fall of the Bastille changed everything. Thrilled by what he had heard and read, hoping to do what he could to persuade the National Assembly to take up the cause, Thomas Clarkson, who spoke very little French, decided to embark on a pilgrimage. He arrived in Paris in the second week of August 1789, at the moment when the city was in the full rhapsody of its revolutionary euphoria. The tricolor cockade had just been introduced by Lafayette’s National Guard and was instantly put into political mass production: already there were tricolor sashes, ribbons, pins, badges and, finally, flags. The big, bull-like Englishman moved through this jubilant festival of liberty with his senses pleasurably shaken, wandering wantonly (for him) amidst fire-eaters and dancing bears as his ears rang with the music of hope. At the heart of those festivities was the great demolition. “Patriote” Palloy’s work gangs, reinforced by crowds of excited volunteers, were beginning to pull down the Bastille stone by stone.7 The site had already become the most frequented place of public celebration in Paris. Drinks were served to tourists, while new-minted citizens heaved stones into the redundant moat. Following the throngs into the murky, stifling cells, Clarkson found scratched into one wall a Latin inscription that read: “[An illegible name] wrote this Line in the anguish of his heart.” Moved, he paid two of Palloy’s workmen to dislodge the stone for him as a souvenir.8
Thomas Clarkson was an instant and wholehearted convert to the cult of universal possibility. On the 4th of August the nobility of France, transformed into citizens in the National Assembly, had ostentatiously surrendered their feudal prerogatives to the bonfire of history. No more seigneurs; why then should there still be slaves? Since Clarkson’s closest allies in this cause happened to be the two most influential men in France at this moment—Lafayette and Mirabeau—he had reason to be sanguine. At Lafayette’s generous table he encountered six “Deputies of Colour,” mulattos from St Domingue in the French West Indies, proudly cockaded and wearing the Order of St Louis, who were in Paris to demand equal representation with whites.9 When asked by Clarkson whether they too (for some were slaveowners) would favour abolition of the trade, they called it “the parent of all miseries” in their island and the cause of “hateful distinctions” between whites and people of colour. One of those deputies who came to visit Clarkson was Vincent Ogé, who, on returning to St Domingue and being outraged by the killing of fellow creoles for seeking the rights of citizens, armed his slaves and started a rebellion. Ogé was caught and broken on the wheel, inaugurating a long and bloody war that would end in the creation of Haiti.
A thousand copies of the famous slave-ship print, together with hand-coloured illustrations, had been imported for Clarkson, who distributed them freely to well-disposed members of the National Assembly. When given his own copy of the print of the Brookes, Mirabeau turned playful propagandist, commissioning a three-foot-long wooden model as a conversation piece for his dining table, complete with removable, tiny, black slaves crammed into the decks. But when the great Demosthenes of the revolution sounded out his colleagues in the National Assembly he found that only three hundred out of twelve hundred deputies supported abolition, and that pragmatism intervened just as decisively as it would at Westminster two years later—and for precisely the
same reason. Put fraternité and the Indivisible Rights of Men and Citizens up against the national-imperial interest, and even the most grandiloquent friend to humanity would retreat into the shell of a hardened chauvinist. The first priority, Clarkson was told over and over, was to secure the revolution, and anything that might, however unjustly, be deemed to undermine it would be viewed with suspicion. Clarkson himself began to be targeted for attack by militants, and was even accused of being a British spy.10 Lafayette waxed fulsome in writing to Clarkson, just before the latter returned to London in February 1790, that “He hoped the day was at hand when the two great nations, which had hitherto been distinguished only for their hostility, would unite in so sublime a measure [abolition] and that they would follow up their union by another still lovelier, for the preservation of eternal and universal peace.”11 In the mutual embrace of freedom the two nations, Lafayette suggested, might even become one! But it was precisely this fear that Lafayette was an aristocratic cosmopolitan that demonized him in the eyes of narrower revolutionary militants, especially in Paris. The hard fact was that, for all its professions of universal brotherhood among men, the revolution was always, fundamentally, about the remaking of France toute seule.
Back home, precisely the same doubts about allegiance now shadowed Clarkson, complicating his work, and it would only get worse after he rashly joined the London Bastille Day celebrations in 1791. Much had happened in France to tarnish, in some English eyes, the original lustre of the summer of 1789: lynchings from the lanternes; the scenes at Versailles when crowds of market women and other citizens had burst in on the king and queen in their private apartments, forcing them into a public embrace of the tricolor and an ignominious march back to Paris. Lurid and exaggerated reports of physical assaults on the person of Marie Antoinette and the massacre of the Swiss Guards were what had finally turned the romantically tempered Edmund Burke from a warm supporter into a permanently outraged enemy of the revolution, much to Clarkson’s distress. Although Burke still gave his support to the Committee for Abolition, others were given pause by the sugar lobby’s accusation that abolishing the slave trade was tantamount to encouraging “revolutionism.” When a bloody rebellion broke out in St Domingue, they claimed to be vindicated in their argument that any interference with the status quo would be bound to end in massacre and destruction. Clarkson pointed out that there had been rebellions in the West Indies long before the campaign for abolition had started, and that not to do something about it was to court catastrophe of precisely the kind unfolding in the French sugar islands. But the argument fell on deaf ears. Instead, perennial considerations of expressly British imperial welfare and security, menaced, so its guardians said, by misguided utopian interference, had their effect on the parliamentary vote of the 19th of April 1791. By this time, the French friends of abolition in France were in no position to do their bit for a common campaign. Lafayette was a beleaguered figure believed to have connived with the queen for the restoration of royal power. Mirabeau, who had fallen under the same suspicion, was dead, and so, for the moment, was the grand vision of a French imperial abolition that would be more than just rhetorical lip service. Why, then, the anti-abolitionists asked, give an even more dangerously bellicose and fanatical France the gift of a destroyed British sugar trade?