by Simon Schama
Clarkson, standing in Moses Wilkinson’s pulpit, had done his duty. He had been as stern and cautious as he had promised himself he should. Yet every so often, as he said something about their land or about Africa, cries and shouts of joy and exultation had gone up as if he were a prophet. And at the end—he could not help himself—he had to offer himself indeed as their father-patriarch, their white Moses. As soon as they had all got themselves to Halifax, he said,
…they must look up to me as their friend and protector; that I should at all times be happy to redress their grievances and ready to defend them with my life, in return for which I expected their good behaviour during their passage, that they would give me as little trouble as possible and lend a willing hand whenever their assistance might be required, giving them, however to understand that this last request would be entirely voluntary on their parts, for they must consider themselves in every respect as passengers not slaves!], no compulsive methods would be adopted towards them, nor would a white sailor upon any account be suffered with impunity to lift up his hand against them.35
When they got to Africa, Clarkson solemnly promised, he would personally see that they each got their allotted land “and declared I would never leave them till each individual assured me he was perfectly satisfied.”36
No white man had ever spoken to them like this. They had endured captivity, then degradation. They had been sold, flogged, made to labour like beasts. Then they had endured the terrors of flight; had seen smallpox-wasted bodies lying untended and unburied on the shore, and soldiers and Pioneers shot about; had frozen in the wastes of the Nova Scotian winter and had had their entitlements stolen from them; and somehow, through their ministers and men of God, they had still not entirely abandoned hope. And here was this pale young officer in his blue coat, thin as a swaying birch, saying these things that opened their ears, their eyes, their hearts. Clarkson was done now, and again there was a burst of great exultation from the congregation, with shouts of praise and affirmation. Coming down from the pulpit he was swamped by effusive, rowdy joy. “They assured me they were unanimous in their desire for embarking for Africa, telling me their labour was lost upon the land in this country and their utmost efforts would barely keep them…that being sunk to the lowest pitch of wretchedness, their condition could not otherwise be meliorated and as they had already made up their mind for quitting this country, they would not be diverted from their resolution though disease and even death were the consequence.” Some of them who had been born there, said, alluding to the pepper trees they remembered from their childhood, that they would be going “to their dear Malagueta.”37
One of them put it in his own fashion when he came to see Clarkson in his Shelburne lodgings in the morning hours (nine to one) he had allotted for interviewing prospective emigrants.
Well, my friend I suppose you are thoroughly acquainted with the nature of the proposals offered to you by His Majesty…
No Massa me no hear nor no mind, me work like slave, cannot do worse Massa in any part of the world therefore am determined to go with you Massa if you please…
You must consider that this is a new settlement and should you keep your health you must expect to meet with many difficulties if you engage in it…
Me will know that Massa, me can work much, me care not for climate, if one die had rather me die in me own Country than in this cold place.38
Not everyone in Birchtown wanted to leave. Stephen Blucke, in fact, had taken the whole business as something of an affront to his own leadership. Stephen Skinner and other Shelburne notables had urged him to do what he could to dissuade potential emigrants. An offer of sheep and a cow had been made to those wishing to stay. About fifty had taken it up, and Blucke had written down their names and sent the list to Governor Parr.
But the scene both inside and outside Clarkson’s rooms in Shelburne, every morning between the 27th and the 30th of October was extraordinary: the rooms themselves were crowded with people and, as Stephen Skinner inscribed their names on a roll, the long line of people waiting patiently outside gradually took their places within. For all his doubts about the enterprise, Skinner, a tough loyalist, was moved by the spectacle, and at dinner with Clarkson after the first day’s interviews made an uncharacteristic declaration of personal appreciation, saying that whatever should come their way and whatever should become of this venture, he, Skinner, would always defend Clarkson’s conduct as just, equitable and above reproach. Indeed most, if not all, Shelburnians he had spoken to felt much the same. David George, still deeply fearful for both himself and Clarkson, took a less cheerful view since he was being personally and (as usual) violently threatened for taking his Baptists en masse.
Over the next few mornings Clarkson found it difficult to keep his composure. Many of the blacks who came to see him told him they must go, not for their own sakes but for that of their children who deserved better. And this unselfishness, expressed so naturally, was often painfully heroic. A black man by the name of John Coltress, still a slave, had decided to resign himself to parting from his wife and children, for they were free and entitled to go.
With tears streaming down his cheeks he said that though this separation would be as death to himself, yet he had come to a resolution of resigning them up forever, convinced as he was that such a measure would ultimately tend to render their situation comfortable and happy—he said he was regardless of himself or of the cruelties he might hereafter experience, for although sunk to the most abject state of wretchedness, he could at all times cheer himself with the pleasing reflection that his wife and children were happy. Much more he said which is impossible to convey in language adequate to our feelings upon this occasion. The room as usual was crowded, hearing this pathetic address and every individual both Black and white were struck with the noble and elevated sentiments of this poor Slave, joining in paying a willing tribute of tears to such an unparalleled instance of heroism. I was so much affected with this same that admiring the man and commiserating his condition told him I would purchase his freedom if I could do it and wrote to his master immediately upon the business.39
Skinner, however, informed Clarkson that the law’s “intricacies” made this impossible, at least in the brief time he would be at Shelburne, since Coltress was part of a complicated property dispute in which the master, Greggs Farish, was embroiled. Reluctantly, Clarkson resigned himself to being unable, for the time being, to make Coltress free. Although he persisted in his case, the owner, remained obdurate. The Coltresses would stay together, but none of them would go to Sierra Leone.
Clarkson rapidly learned that the dilatoriness of the courts would not help the blacks, so on some occasions he was prepared to ignore them altogether. At Birchtown he had heard from a black whose son was indentured as apprentice to a Shelburne butcher, a man “of the most vile and abandoned character,” who had decided to return to America and take up residence in Boston. The boy would come too, torn from his family and a future in Sierra Leone. Indignant, Clarkson applied to the Shelburne magistrates but was told that, under the terms of indenture, the butcher was indeed free to take him wherever he liked. Worse, Clarkson was convinced that, once in the United States, the butcher would sell the boy as a slave. The issue seemed simple—British freedom or American slavery? The ship was loading cargo and passengers in the harbour. There was no time to lose. So what was the counsel offered to the father by the representative of HM government and the Sierra Leone Company? Kidnap your own son. Hide him in the woods until the ship has sailed. Do it. We shall worry about a trial once the butcher has gone. And the father came in secret to John Clarkson one afternoon and said: it is done.40
It was the right thing. “Having obtained the best legal opinion in the business I secured the boy and came forward openly to justify the measure, but no-one appearing against him, he continued with his family and was enrolled for embarkation.”
IT HAD BEGUN to snow. Aboard the Deborah, on his way back to Halifax, Clarkson felt
the deep chill. On the 4th of November, two days before his departure, David George, whom he now called friend, had been to see him. George was more anxious than ever that some sort of physical force would be used to stop the Baptists from leaving. But it was too late for their intimidation. Despite Clarkson warning against precipitate action, he had sold his fifty acres, had told Phyllis and the six children that their future was in Africa, and was now impatient to be off. Clarkson brooded that he had been too successful at Shelburne and Birchtown; that some of the blacks, panicking at the return of American masters to the free port, had acted over-hastily and sold their land cheap to unscrupulous speculators happy to snap up bargains. It was all happening too impetuously. He and the company had imagined that two or three vessels would be adequate for any emigration. But 514 Birchtowners (150 men, 147 women and 217 children) had been inscribed on the rolls in just three days, so Clarkson now had to think of chartering and fitting out an entire fleet for his black exodus. In Halifax he would need all the help he could get.
Instead, he found hindrance on every side. A fierce attack on him and the Sierra Leone scheme had been published in the Halifax press under the name “Philanthropos.” It declared the scheme at best misguided and at worst a malicious design to destroy the prospects of loyalist Nova Scotia. Should they be so foolish as to depart, the writer claimed, the blacks would face certain re-enslavement, sickness and speedy death. A delegation of blacks from Preston came to see Clarkson in his rooms expressly to warn him that whites were going about reading aloud to the blacks this and other articles designed to dissuade, and to reassure him that they held such men and their utterances in the greatest contempt. The Weekly Chronicle conceded that “a very considerable proportion of the sooty Brotherhood” seem determined to emigrate and begged the company to take applicants indiscriminately so that the province would not be left merely with “the maimed, the halt, the blind and the lazy.”41 More seriously, Clarkson discovered that Governor Parr had decreed the application rolls at Shelburne closed. On the 12th of November, when the two men dined together, Parr explained that he had done this in the blacks’ own interests, so many of them being “infatuated with the notion of a change of situation which he thought would be the means of sending many of them to their graves.”42 Clarkson took umbrage at the notion that he had wilfully misled the blacks, although he said it was indeed his personal opinion—never expressed to any black man, either in private or in public—that, having seen what they had to endure in Nova Scotia, they could only be happier in Sierra Leone. Moreover, he went on, it was an affront to the blacks as well as to the company’s policy to suppose the blacks were incapable of deciding their future for themselves. “The Governor replied I might think so but he was of a contrary opinion.”
Two weeks later John Parr was dead, aged sixty-six, felled by a violent attack of gout. On the 29th of November there was an elaborate funeral that Clarkson uncharitably dismissed as extravagant considering Parr’s “inferior abilities…in my opinion not calculated for the situation he filled.”43 Parr’s duties were temporarily assumed by the president of the Governing Council, Richard Bulkeley; but the sudden death of the governor undoubtedly weakened the obstruction of Clarkson’s enterprise precisely at the time when he most needed to assert his authority.
Emigrants were now beginning to arrive in Halifax in numbers that were transforming the entire character of the venture. The roll at Shelburne had risen to 560 (although Clarkson thought that not all of them would be allowed to leave). Virtually the whole of black Preston, at least another 250, was bent on going. He himself had travelled to Windsor, about forty miles northwest of Halifax, to announce the proposals to isolated blacks. Wading through the deep snow, Clarkson had briefly suspended his managerial anxieties by losing himself in the romantic sublimity of the scene: pyramids of densely packed spruce rising and falling over the hillsides, all wreathed in curtains of freezing mist.44
On the day of Parr’s funeral Thomas Peters, whom Clarkson had not seen since they both left London, arrived in Halifax, bringing with him more than ninety people from the Annapolis area and from New Brunswick. He had endured much, not least defamatory rumour that he was guilty of entrapping blacks who would then be sold by the company; Peters would supposedly collect a commission for each one re-enslaved. Whilst he was assembling the people who remained impervious to the slander in Digby, Peters had been insulted and knocked down in the streets. For once, the law was unequivocally on his side, but knowing his assailant was drunk, Peters magnanimously decided, on returning to the town, not to proceed with a prosecution.45
Stories such as the attack on Peters confirmed Clarkson in his desire to accelerate the exodus. But every day the enterprise was becoming more ambitious. Even by the most conservative count he would have at least eight hundred and probably over a thousand souls under his protection. Winter was coming on fast, and even if he managed to sail, as he hoped, before the 20th of December he needed to find temporary shelter in Halifax for these people, many of them close to destitute and lacking warm clothes, while he chartered, provisioned and scrupulously inspected what would now have to be a substantial fleet. With the Shelburne people about to leave en masse, he frantically tried to get detailed instructions to David George and the other leaders as if he were Noah guarding the entrance to the ark. There would be a quota of one dog per six families (although, typically, he softened the rule for puppies). No pigs were allowed on board, although poultry were to be permitted; there could be small beds and bedding, but no tables or chairs for they took up too much room. Pots and pans had to be properly secured in sealed barrels so they did not go cannonading around the holds in rough seas, banging into passengers.46 Clarkson was also beginning to give attention to the physical needs of his black passengers. Some of them, he knew, had begun their journeying as slaves taken from Africa, and almost certainly had never forgotten the horror of the passage. He was determined that those traumatic memories should never be reawakened by conditions aboard his ships. With the print of the slaver Brookes in mind, Clarkson specified that the space allotted to each passenger should be at least five feet wide and that on double-decked ships there should also be at least five feet of good clearance between decks. On vessels that lacked them, ventilation scuttles would have to be cut to enable foul air to be fanned out of the compartments. Diet should not be the usual hard tack and weevily biscuit, but include ample brined or cured beef, pork and fish.
All this would cost money, for which the directors may not have originally budgeted. (The expenses rose in the end to nearly £16,000, or three times the annual cost of the Nova Scotia civil government.) Clarkson’s letters to Henry Thornton and Wilberforce took on a new and increasing urgency through November, not least because since his arrival he had received not a single communication from London. Now, in the light of reality, Wilberforce’s teasing about him being the “Admiral” had lost its humour. “I am sure you will feel for me when I tell you that I am to have the command and direction of not less than eight vessels,” Clarkson wrote, “all of which I hope will be ready to sail by December 20th.” Had he had any inkling of the magnitude of this duty, he was not at all sure he would have accepted it, but as he was now committed, he would certainly persevere. He reassured the directors that the people he would be taking were, just as they had hoped, “the majority…better than any people in the labouring line of life in England. I should match them for strong sense, quick apprehension, clear reasoning, gratitude, affection for their wives and children and good will towards their neighbours.” Yet it would be of the greatest help to him in his proceedings, not least with recalcitrant white Nova Scotians or dubious contractors, if the directors would furnish him with some further guidance before the sailing.
JOHN CLARKSON may not have heard from the directors (including his own brother), but they certainly knew all about him. News that there would be more like a thousand than a hundred black Nova Scotians making the journey to Sierra Leone electrified the company and
did wonders for its funds. The original capital of £42,000 rose first to £100,000 and then to £235,000, all fully subscribed. In between promoting the Anti-Saccharine Campaign Thomas Clarkson went about the country with his peppercorns, singing the praises of a colony that would not only redeem commerce from the loathsomeness of slaving, but begin an inevitable transformation of the entire continent of Africa. Doubtless he glowed with quiet satisfaction at what his brother had already accomplished. Henry Thornton suspended his engagement in the banking business in order to devote his time and energies to the same cause. What had begun as a consolation for the loss of the anti-slave trade had now taken on a life of its own. Even Granville Sharp, still one of the directors, seemed to have reconciled himself to it in the cause of the greater good. There would, he was told, still be elected black tithingmen and hundredors in Freetown, even though they were to be merely local officers of the peace.