by Simon Schama
That was all. And that, John Clarkson felt as he waited in London on the directors’ pleasure one month, then two, hardly met the case. Nor did it escape his attention that although Thornton and the others expressed their appreciation to him in private, they scrupulously refrained from any words of public recognition of the debt he was owed: a debt of honour and gratitude, no more—he would never seek more—but surely no less?
There were other ominous signs that unforced warmth had been replaced by calculated chill. Asked by Thomas Clarkson if he would be so kind as to use his personal closeness with the Pitt brothers (the elder of whom, the Earl of Chatham, was First Lord of the Admiralty) to advance John to the captaincy he had indisputably earned, William Wilberforce made no more than a tepid gesture of support. Thomas, who was under much strain in the spring and summer of 1793, his funds drained for the Cause, his health broken from incessant travelling for the same Cause, snapped at the implied snub and wrote his old friend and comrade-in-arms a letter of strong reprimand: “My opinion is that my Lord Chatham has behaved to my brother in a very scandalous manner, and that your own timidity has been the occasion of his miscarrying in his promotion…Letters will not do, and unless personal applications be made you will not serve him.”12 Stung, Wilberforce wrote that he attributed this intemperateness to Thomas’s commendable concern for his brother, but nonetheless had never expected to hear from his good friend the language of “disappointed suitors.” He ventured to hope nothing would “interrupt the cordiality of our connexion.”13
But something had, and would continue to interrupt it; and that something was the French Revolution. In recognition of their abolitionist labours, the National Convention of the Republic—the same body that had tried and condemned the king—had awarded honorary citizenship to both Wilberforce and Clarkson. Wilberforce, the close friend of William Pitt and Edmund Burke, recoiled from the honour in embarrassed horror; Thomas Clarkson, on the other hand, revelled in it. He had never forgotten his time in Paris after the fall of the Bastille and had (so his more circumspect friends believed, imprudently) joined the English celebrations of its second anniversary in 1791. As the revolution had become more militant and violent, Thomas had conspicuously refused to join the chorus of condemnation. Just a few days before John Clarkson’s arrival in February, republican France had declared war on Britain. In broadsides and caricatures, the French were now portrayed as inhuman regicidal monsters who made no secret of their wish to spread their godless mobocracy from one end of Europe to the other. Accordingly, Britons who, in spite of the manifest evidence of the inhumanity, anarchy and atheism of the French “banditti,” continued to wish them well (or who failed to express patriotic abhorrence at their crimes) were no Britons at all, but accomplices in a monstrous conspiracy to bring down Throne, Church, and Parliament, the entire ancient constitution of freeborn Englishmen.
Their closest friends never thought the Clarkson brothers Jacobins, but they were suspected of flirting with republicanism. At the end of 1792 Thomas had injudiciously expressed his view that republican government in France might be less onerous than the weight of monarchy. When the Manchester abolitionist Thomas Walker, the leading figure of the Manchester Constitutional Society, was besieged in his house by a patriotic mob demonizing him as a Jacobin and was then arrested for sedition, Clarkson, so far from repudiating his friend, made a point of going to see Walker at home before his trial. In the light of this unfortunate dalliance with wicked revolutionism, John’s behaviour to Thornton and the directors, and his impassioned advocacy of the rights of the blacks against the established order of the company, began to seem not just naive but actually dangerous. A bloody rebellion was raging in St Domingue and the last thing the directors wanted was to countenance anything that might encourage the blacks of Sierra Leone in their grievances. As they were mulling over their doubts about the wisdom of renewing Clarkson’s governorship, letters arrived from Macaulay and Dawes confirming their doubts. While heaping praise on Dawes as a paragon of Christian energy and efficiency, “one of the excellent of the earth,” Macaulay poured scorn on Clarkson and DuBois, accusing them of wilfully inciting expectations among the blacks that were inconsistent with anything promised by the company and thus sowing the seeds of contention and slovenly disorder. Henry Thornton was in no doubt whom to believe. Zachary Maculay was his protégé, his neighbour, his fellow Clapham “Saint,” a man of unimpeachable rectitude and judgement. To leave Clarkson in no doubt about what would happen next, he actually showed him Macaulay’s letter. Astounded that, without any of the experience or knowledge that he himself had earned through the trials of Nova Scotia, the ocean crossing and the first year in Africa, Macaulay would pass damning judgement on his competence, Clarkson allowed himself an observation on his critic’s “illiberality.”
On the very day that John Clarkson was leaving London for Norfolk to be married to Susannah Lee he was informed by the directors that, on further consideration, and with all due thanks for past services, he need not trouble himself with returning to Africa. They wished him well and anticipated his prompt resignation. William Dawes would be confirmed as governor in his stead. In a passion, Clarkson refused point blank to oblige. He would not, he wrote to his brother Thomas, “be the first to relinquish an employ wherein my Heart is and has been, so deeply interested in its success.”14 He was then summarily dismissed. But whatever the directors had stopped, they could not stop him caring for the infant colony nor keeping the personal promises he had made. It was typical of John Clarkson that at the moment when he discovered he had been traduced as an incompetent drunk, he continued to go about doing personal errands for the settlers he was most fond of. He had a long shopping list. He would get spectacles for Mary Perth, a loom for Joseph Brown, hooks for Luke Jordan and bolts of linen for Miles Dixon, as well as trying to find the British army officers who had helped John Cuthbert and Richard Corankapone during the war.15 He, at least, would keep his word.
ISAAC AND ANNA MARIA DUBOIS had had more than enough. Estranged from the company men, distressed at the high-handed way the complaints of the black settlers had been dismissed, aghast at the slandering of Clarkson, they decided to return to England to try to recoup some of Isaac’s considerable Carolina fortune that had been lost through his loyalism. That motives could be startlingly mixed, principles inconsistent with practice, is born out by the couple sailing aboard the Jamaica-bound slave ship captained by Anna Maria’s brother-in-law. All the same, Isaac wrote ardently to Clarkson:
You will not be pleased to hear of my leaving the Colony but I hope it is for the best, believe me unless the Directors will listen to truth their Colony is lost—such conduct, such every thing you little dream of—two of the Black Settlers, deputed by the whole, go home in the Amy to represent their grievances, they have been shamefully trampled on since you went away. All the ill-treatment I have received since you left this I am convinced has been due to my not taking a diabolical part which I shudder at—in poisoning the minds of the people against you—but all their efforts have been in vain—the people cry out loudly for your return—Adieu.16
Indeed they did. One of the settlers Clarkson most cared about, Richard Corankapone, one of the little band who had trudged through the snows of New Brunswick to reach the fleet at Halifax, had written to tell him that “the Body of the Colleny is Bent for your honer to Com and Be our governer.”17 In June 1793 Clarkson wrote back expressing his distaste that Pepys “has been making free with my name in an ungrateful and I may say wicked manner,” adding that the people should be told in no uncertain terms that when he had made promises to them in Nova Scotia he had done so with the full authority of both the Sierra Leone Company and the British government. At the same time as telling Corankapone to look out for Pepys and to make sure that settlers safeguarded the certificates of land entitlement he had issued in Nova Scotia, Clarkson went to some lengths not to make his own standing a cause of further dissension in Freetown: “I assure you I will always
support your rights as Men and I will recommend you for not suffering any people to take them from you but you must be obedient to the Laws or the Colony will be at an end.”18
Deference, however, was not on the cards in Sierra Leone. Politics had come to the colony and would not, of its own accord, go away. Not everything from Granville Sharp’s original sketch for a black “Frankpledge” micro-democracy had become redundant. Towards the end of 1792 elections had been held, exactly as Sharp had specified, for “tithingmen” (one per ten households) and “hundredors” (originally one per ten tithingmen, but increased to one per five). Each head of household voted for tithingmen, which meant, as women constituted no less than a third of all heads of household, that they too were enfranchised. Female voting was something that even the French Revolution in its most radical phase had not been able to contemplate. Indeed, the Jacobins were hostile to the idea. It was momentous, then, that the first women to cast their votes for any kind of public office anywhere in the world were black, liberated slaves who had chosen British freedom; women such as Mary Perth from Norfolk, Virginia, and Martha Hazeley from Charleston, South Carolina.
As Sierra Leone evolved into an Anglo-African city state, it was to his credit that, far from discouraging the annual elections, Macaulay actually thought the assembly of tithingmen and hundredors might function as a model of collective responsibility. In 1796 he even wrote a constitution, featuring a “House of Commons” and a “Senate,” a third of which would be elected each year. But Macaulay also took it for granted that this body would contain, not aggravate, local arguments, and that it would be for the most part an agency of innocuous parochial government, empowered to round up stray pigs or legislate a tariff of fines for public drunkenness. But elections, wherever they are held, carry with them their own kind of potent political elixir. The act of voting gives hope of representation, and legitimate authority to the elected. Carried out in a community of four hundred households, among a society of neighbours, the emotive force of an election was, if anything, sharpened. Everything we associate with political campaigns happened in miniature in Freetown. Impassioned speeches were made before improvised meetings, some in public places, some in private houses. Posters and placards were nailed up outside shops and houses, and, since this moment marks the beginning of authentic black politics, congregations in churches and chapels heard campaign rhetoric as well as psalms: the Baptists less militant, the Methodists rather more.
It was not surprising, then, that a Methodist preacher called Cato Perkins, formerly a Charleston slave, was chosen by the assembled body of tithingmen and hundredors to take a petition of grievances that thirty-one of them had signed to Thornton and the company directors in England. With him went a carpenter, Isaac Anderson, also from Charleston, but born a freeman, who had already vented his grievance at the company’s taking waterfront lots. The petition, drafted with help from DuBois, was a list of specific complaints: that the promised laying out of lots had been stopped; that the fort would probably never be built “and we think it is a great pity your Money should be thrown away but Mr Dawes says he would not mind to lose One Thousand Pound of your Honours money rather than not do what he wishes”; that they were overcharged by the company store; that the company bartered provisions against manual labour and paid them poorly “so that we have nothing to lay out for a Rainy Day or for our Children after us.”19 (The fate of their children, in fact, is a repeated, moving refrain in the lament.) But beyond these material grievances, the settlers’ petition was coloured by a sense of affront at the authoritarian paternalism of the new regime. On the one hand, the document was careful to praise the company, and especially Clarkson: “The Promises made us by your Agents in Nova Scotia were very good and far better than we ever had before from White People and no man can help saying Mr Clarkson behaved as kind and tender to us as if he was our Father and he did so many humane acts of tender goodness that we can never forget them.” But on the other hand, there was now a new stiff-necked Pharaoh and he had laid a rod across their backs (and watered down the rum!). “Mr Dawes seems to wish to rule us just as bad as if we were all Slaves which we cannot bear.”
The petitioners were at pains to say they were not about to cause trouble in the colony—but nor should they be thought of as mere supplicants. Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson were, after all, the delegates of an elected assembly, and every so often their words were laced with a telling thread of steel. “We do not wish to make any disturbance in the Colony but would chuse that evey thing should go on quetly till we hear from you as we are sure we will then have justice.” What they were after was self-determination. Had they been allowed to lay out lots themselves, the work would already have been finished. If they could choose their own governor “we would chuse Mr Clarkson for he knows us better than any Gentleman…We are sorry to tell your Honours that we feel ourselves so distressed because we are not treated as Freemen that we do not know what to do and nothing but the fear of God makes us support it until we know from your Honrs what footing we are upon.”20
Even had the petition been a document of docile grovelling, it would still have been unacceptable to Thornton and the directors since it came from an unexpected and unauthorized initiative. But the undertone of menace, the likelihood that DuBois (also dismissed from company service for “disrespect” to Dawes) had had a hand in its composition, and the fact that it sought to reverse their decision about Clarkson evidently incensed the gentlemen of the company. Anna Maria, who, once she had got to England in October 1793, made a point of seeing Anderson and Perkins, reported that after they had landed penniless in Portsmouth, the company agent graciously loaned them £2 to get to London to see Thornton. Initially he seemed receptive to their petition; but shortly afterwards he sharply changed his tune, informing them that letters from Sierra Leone (Anderson and Perkins knew from whom) had dismissed the complaints as unfounded and frivolous. The two men would be lent further money only if they mortgaged their land to the company, and would be put out to work as servants pending their speedy return whence they came. John Clarkson was no longer their concern, so the directors would not, regrettably, be able to pass on to them his present address.
But Anna Maria and Isaac DuBois were only too happy to oblige. John and Susannah Clarkson were then living back in John’s home town of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, and as soon as he had read their petition in early November he wrote back saying that he entirely saw the justice in what they had to say and very much hoped the directors would pay it the attention it certainly deserved. To that end he, Clarkson, would write to Henry Thornton suggesting a meeting of the two delegates, himself, Thornton and whichever other directors were of a mind to attend. “We suppose the Directors did not like to see Mr Clarkson and us face to face,” Cato Perkins told Anna Maria, “for Mr Thornton never answered that letter which obliged Mr Clarkson to write another; this he sent unsealed under cover to us that we might be convinced of his good intentions and integrity towards us.”21
In his fenland fastness John Clarkson was indeed very angry over the discourtesy shown to himself—bordering, he thought, on vindictive hostility—and he was also irate at the shabby way the directors had treated Perkins and Anderson. Ever since he had set foot in Halifax a year and a half earlier Clarkson had tried to live up to the exalted expectations that the blacks had of their “Mosis,” and every time they wrote him that “we look upon you so much our Friend that we think you will us done Justice by”22 his impotence cut him to the quick. It was also evident to him that if the brusque fashion in which the directors were treating Perkins (sent to a theological college) and Anderson was meant to browbeat them into submission, it was having the reverse effect. “They will not give us any Answer,” they wrote to Clarkson, “but send us back [to Sierra Leone] like Fools and we are certain, Sir that if they serve us so, that the Company will lose their Colony as nothing kept the People quiet but the thoughts that when the Company heard their Grievances they would see Justice done them.”
23
When Thornton did finally agree to see the two delegates again (without Clarkson, of course), it was only to inform them that complaints must be made in writing. This in turn produced the sharpest retort yet from Perkins and Anderson—the first shot, in fact, of what was about to become a long revolt against company rule. In the last, stunning irony of their epic history the black loyalists, even as they continued to profess their love for the king (“God bless him”) and their hope that he would himself appoint their governor, were about to turn rebel. They were breathtakingly free of deference. It would be tempting to say that they sounded American, did not the taproots of their righteous indignation, their instinctive sense of betrayal, run much deeper—all the way back to the godly apostles of liberty in Oliver Cromwell’s armies and parliaments. Perhaps they did not know it at the time (though London was brimming with such language in 1793), but Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson were speaking with the voices of seventeenth-century commonwealthmen, made over into modern, radical, rights-driven politics. As much as any Manchester weaver or London tailor, Isaac Anderson the Charleston carpenter had become a British revolutionary.