by Simon Schama
In September 1811 Cuffe sailed back through yet more brutal storms to Sierra Leone, where he landed Manchester cotton manufactures and iron pots, tobacco and English pottery. In return he took on camwood and palm oil. William Allen had entrusted him with various seeds and even more precious silkworms for the colony, but was told by the governor that the people in Sierra Leone had better learn how to grow cotton before they tried their hand at silk.
1812
BY FEBRUARY 1812 Cuffe was ready to sail back to America with his cargo of Sierra Leone exports. It was, he hoped, the seed of something glorious. He had in mind, as he wrote to Thomas Clarkson, a commercial and settlement partnership between the United States and Great Britain to sustain the noble experiment in Sierra Leone and “assist the Africans in their civilization.” He learned of several Afro-American families “that have made up thear minds to go to Sierra Leone.”6
But the two countries were not minded to collaborate. Instead, they were at war. Once again, the British offered liberty to any escaped slaves able to reach the British lines or ships. Despite a much more difficult campaign in terms of geography, tens of thousands once again took them up on the offer. After the war a few thousand were once again shipped off, in freedom and extreme poverty, to Nova Scotia. The village of Preston, virtually empty since the exodus of the black loyalists, filled up with this second wave of African-Americans. Their descendants still live there today. Some of them have created a Black Loyalist Heritage Museum and Web site; the museum and history centre stand by the side of the road on which John Clarkson and Lawrence Hartshorne rode out to the hamlet in the brilliant autumn of 1791. In Preston the first thing you see are churches and schools from which black kids in sweats and trainers emerge every afternoon. Nova Scotia and the rest of Canada are still unsure about Preston. In Halifax they tell you it produces great boxers.
The inevitable gales blew Paul Cuffe into Westport rather than New Bedford. It was his home town, but that failed to prevent the United States Customs Service from confiscating his ship and cargo for having done business with the enemy. To liberate his vessel, Paul Cuffe travelled to Washington and, remarkably, got to see both Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of State, and President Madison. According to The Friend’s Intelligencer, Cuffe, the straightforward black Quaker, addressed Madison thus: “James, I have been put to much trouble and have been abused.” Madison was sympathetic and ordered the property to be released.
On his way back to Massachusetts from the capital Cuffe was made brusquely aware he was not in Britain, much less Freetown. He was dealt with roughly in stagecoaches by white passengers who were incredulous that a black should presume to share carriage space with them. They attempted to evict him, but Cuffe, a dignified old gentleman in his flop-brimmed Quaker hat, stayed put.
Not long afterwards the British took Washington and burned the White House. More slaves escaped.
SUMMER 1814
GRANVILLE SHARP had become a bit of a wanderer. It was as though he was still looking for important matters but was no longer quite sure where to find them. He was almost eight years beyond his allotted three score and ten. A half-century had passed since he had been startled into zeal by the sight of Jonathan Strong’s bloody face. The Satanic business had been cast down—he could go to his grave with that satisfaction; yet there were still slaves toiling in America and the West Indies. Well, others would have to see that infamy off. He was keenly conscious that whatever he had done had been the work of brothers, sisters, confederates in God’s cause. They had been a concert. Now they were gone, like Mr Haydn’s players at the close of the Farewell symphony, each putting out their light and vanishing into the shade. James’s brass serpent had lain mute since his passing twenty years earlier. Four years ago the lid of the harpsichord closed along with the eyes of his sister Eliza, and scarcely a few months later his dear brother William had gone. The horns of paradise would surely greet his entrance. Granville himself no longer had the wind for his double-fluting; but every morning and most evenings he went to his harp, summoned the ghost of David and sang psalms and Hebrew melodies.7
He had suffered what each man must, the steady dwindling of powers—but no one could ever accuse him of idleness. Lately there had been the Bible Society and the Protestant Union and the African Institution; and he had done his best to put his memories and his correspondence in order, to make a history of the bundle. The Duke of Gloucester had assured him of his pleasure at receiving the manuscript.8 Still, there was so much more to order before he could decently retire from his exertions. But every so often, sometimes in the middle of speaking urgently on some important topic, he was suddenly—and he knew not why—a little baffled; his famously sturdy power of recollection became unable to seize the matter it sought, so that his sentences sometimes trailed off without proper resolution.
As long as William had been alive Granville had shared the house at Fulham with his brother. Even after his death he liked to rattle around there, communing with memory, peering at the tide that had borne their harmonies. William’s widow didn’t seem to mind. But Granville had also taken a chamber in the Temple, where his books and papers were kept, and where he could keep his own company with not so much as a servant to disturb his meditations on the scriptures. In June 1813 he had offered some choice items documenting his long engagement in the law to the library of that Inn of Court. They had been gratefully accepted, but Granville insisted that he must go in person to the Temple to ensure their safe delivery. The Fulham nephews and nieces, looking at their frail and increasingly vague uncle, attempted to dissuade him but failed. Anxious lest he get lost, they then ordered the family coachman not to let Granville have the use of the carriage.
But Sharp had lost none of his tenacity. When the family assembled for breakfast the next morning there was no Granville. After a general enquiry among the servants, one of them revealed that Mr Sharp had got up early enough to take the stagecoach to London. Someone was dispatched right away to the chambers in the Temple, but found no Granville there either. He was on his way back, and later that afternoon appeared again at Fulham looking dishevelled and exhausted, and admitting to having eaten nothing since his dawn departure. On enquiry, it turned out that the coachman who had taken Sharp to London, worried by his appearance and behaviour, went in search of him at the Temple and found him at the door of his chambers “wandering about in a state of incertitude, being unable to guide himself to the part of town that he designed to reach. He was easily persuaded by the warmhearted coachman to go back with him to Fulham and was thus happily preserved from more distressing accidents.”9
From then on until his death, the gentlest imaginable, in July 1814, Granville Sharp stayed put, or was made to stay put, at Fulham. It was high summer, the season of the family’s waterborne excursions long ago on the Apollo or the Union; of their concerts for the king and for the people on the riverbanks; of Miss Morgan the organ, Roma the musical hound, tea and Handel, the boats sailing along amidst clouds of gnats. Every so often, as if he had something to impart, Granville would come suddenly into a room where the nieces and nephews and their children were gathered. But he never opened his mouth. He would seat himself close by to enjoy their company and remain in the summer light for hours at a time. Now and again a trace of a smile stretched the gaunt jaw, so the family had no reason to suppose he was not content. But not a word came from him; not a word.10
1815
AT THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo Thomas Clarkson, now turned pacifist, met the Tsar of All the Russias, Alexander I. It turned out that the emperor knew all about the Clarksons and Sierra Leone. “If I can at any time be useful to the Cause of the Poor Africans,” Alexander told Thomas, “you may always have my Services by writing me a Letter.” Three years later he supported Thomas’s proposal to declare the slave trade a form of international piracy. Grateful, Thomas gave the tsar the usual African dagger.11
1816
IN LONDON the So
ciety for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace announced its foundation. It was pre-eminently the child of shared Anglo-American idealism. Quakers such as William Allen and (in Philadelphia) Benjamin Rush were its prominent advocates. Rush, ever the optimist, hoped to persuade the American government to create a Secretariat of Peace. The Clarkson brothers were, of course, numbered among its founders. John Clarkson, who two decades earlier had declined to take the command finally offered to him by the navy on the grounds of its inconsistency with Christian principles, became the Peace Society’s first treasurer. Nine years later, in 1825, an African Peace Society was formed in—appropriately enough—Philadelphia.12
In February 1816 Paul Cuffe returned to Sierra Leone with thirty-eight prospective black settlers. Even for the old sailor, this crossing had been a horror. “I Exspearenced 20 days of the most Trimindous weather that I ever remember exspearencing of. The Ship and Crew were Seemingly in Jepordy, but through mercy we were preserved.”
When they had safely landed, the governor, Charles MacCarthy, received Cuffe and the settlers cordially. But a letter from Macaulay & Babington, the leading trader with Sierra Leone, refused permission for Cuffe to land his cargo of flour on the grounds of improper competition with his own exports.13
While in Sierra Leone, Cuffe observed the apprehension by the Royal Navy of slave ships, many of them from the republic that had outlawed the traffic. In two months, three American brigs and three schooners carrying slaves were captured by Royal Navy patrols and brought to Sierra Leone. Cuffe also knew that a substantial clandestine trade for the United States was carried on by Americans under other national flags, especially the Spanish. He was deeply depressed by this betrayal of Jefferson’s Abolition Act, as he was by news of slave rebellions and brutal reprisals in South Carolina. On the other hand, Cuffe was happy that Governor MacCarthy provided both town and country lots for the nine American black families he had brought to Sierra Leone, most of them from Boston. He died in 1817, a little disconsolate that his Triangular Trade of freedom—between Sierra Leone, Britain and the United States—had not yet materialized.
The American Colonization Society began its work to transport free blacks to what would become Liberia. When the Anti-Slave Society of New York published a biography of Granville Sharp in 1846 the author, Charles Stuart, went out of his way to distinguish the foundation of Sierra Leone from the efforts of the American Colonization Society to transport free negroes to Liberia. In the British case, Stuart implied, settlement was the harbinger of abolition; in the American case it was a pernicious alternative to it:
Love, impartial brotherly christian love, was the source of Sierra Leone. Hatred and contempt for color…were the great source…of Liberia…The settlement of Sierra Leone cherished the best feelings of the English nation—sympathy for the oppressed, and benevolence towards desolate strangers, whom the proud world spurned and persecuted. The founding of Liberia cherished the worst feelings of the people of the United States; the idol-sin which distinguishes them from all other civilized people, color-hatred…14
Stuart exaggerated the virtues of the British and the vices of the Americans. But he was not alone in this invidious distinction.
1826
THE NEWLY APPOINTED Governor of Sierra Leone, Sir Neil Campbell, attempted to levy quit rents, but died within a few months, after which the contentious tax was finally laid to rest. The “Nova Scotians” now constituted no more than 10 percent of a population overwhelmingly made up of “Liberated Blacks” taken from the slave trade and the West Indian Maroons. But their presence was conspicuous in the churches and schools. At the Freetown Fair, the old “Negro Frolics” banned in Shelburne had been reborn as Sierra Leone’s annual carnival. High hats, long printed skirts and bulky petticoats were still de rigueur at the horse and canoe races.
1828
ON THE 2ND of April John Clarkson lay down on his sofa to read the Anti-Slavery Reporter. Dislodged in 1820 from the management of the Purfleet limeworks by a new owner, Clarkson had been living in Wood-bridge, Suffolk, as the senior partner of a country bank. The last he had heard from the Nova Scotians had been in 1817, when Hector Peters had written hoping “that we may behold each other face to face once more before we depart hence to be no more.”15 Through the Sierra Leone Gazette, edited by a second-generation Nova Scotian, Clarkson had managed to keep abreast of news from the colony. A version of the founding, based on his diary and notes, had been published in 1815, but the great drama of his life in 1791 and 1792 remained locked in the manuscript copies of his journal and in the memories of the now placidly amiable man; the Clarkson family’s “fountain of innocent mirth.”16
On this particular day he was feeling not especially mirthful. In his sixty-fourth year—John had made a will that January—he was feeling more than usually wintry about his future. A leg had been troubling him and he had found himself often short of breath. The discomfort was such that he asked for choice items from the Reporter to be read to him. Its matter filled him with melancholy. Both he and his brother Thomas had supposed that, with the slave trade choked off, the institution would itself atrophy; but it was plain that nothing of the sort had happened. Their work had been but half done. Stopping the reading, with its recitation of West Indian miseries still uncorrected, Clarkson said, exerting himself a little, “It is dreadful to think, after my brother and his friends have been labouring for forty years that such things should still be.”17
And then without more ado John Clarkson died.
1829
IN BOSTON the black tailor David Walker published his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, an incendiary attack on the hypocrisy of the United States for purporting to establish itself on the principles of liberty and equality while continuing to deny them to 3 million slaves. At the same time, he described the “English” as the “best friends” black people had in the world. Walker was aware of the persistence of slavery in the British West Indies, but evidently believed their days were numbered.
1831
DAVID WALKER was right. News of a slave insurrection in Jamaica and its brutal repression galvanized abolitionism in Britain. The Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1830 in Freemasons’ Hall in London with a commitment to end the institution, abandoned gradualism. Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and Samuel Hoare were among its veteran campaigners. The cause was incalculably helped by the runaway success of The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave Related by Herself, which went through five editions in its first year. “When we are quite done up,” Mary wrote, “who cares for us, more than a lame horse? This is slavery. I tell it to let the English people know the truth; and I hope they will never leave off to pray to God and call loud to the great king of England, till all the poor blacks be given free and slavery done up for evermore.”18 But King William IV seemed as indifferent to the urgency as did his Tory ministers. However, there was another agitation in the country—for the reform of Parliament—and the two campaigns become ravelled up both in their moral passion and in their political and economic expediency. Parliamentary reform would save Britain from revolution; abolition would save the West Indies from carnage and the kingdom from perdition. Zachary Macaulay’s son Thomas, a young MP, believed this to be the case, although he found the excessive fervour of the abolitionists slightly repellent.
1833
THREE HUNDRED and fifty thousand women signed one of the more than five thousand petitions sent to Parliament for the ending of slavery.19 In May a bill was introduced by the Colonial Secretary of the Whig government and passed through the reformed House of Commons by a handsome margin. Its passage was eased by generous provisions of compensation for the owners and a two-year transition period (later abandoned) from slavery to outright freedom. In August the Emancipation Bill was signed by King William IV.
A month earlier, Wilberforce had died. But not before he had become reconciled with Thomas Clarkson, despite their deep, long-standing differences over the French Revolution
and the war. “My dear old Friend,” Wilberforce had written in his last letter, “…tho it is so long since there has been any intercourse between us, you and yours still occupy a constant place in my friendly remembrance.”20 After Clarkson had been told the sad news, his wife, Catherine, heard him lock the door of his study before abandoning himself to weeping.
1846
HE was the last of them all. Not just the patriarch of the Cause but, more improbably, the tenant of Playford Hall near Ipswich, let to him by an abolitionist admirer, the Earl of Bristol. There Thomas lived, deep into his eighties. When not making appearances at Anti-Slavery Conventions, he played the benevolent squire, making sure that none of his villagers and labourers went without sides of beef and flitches of bacon. In the Hungry Forties his patch of Old England would, at least, be Merrie. And since there was still much to do by way of speeding American slavery to its end, he continued to write, looking up from his desk now and again to watch his wife potter about the flower gardens.
Old as he was, Thomas Clarkson was still a force to be reckoned with; his own voice was strong, his mind still surprisingly vigorous, and he seemed more than ever seer and sage. Abolitionist crusaders came from all over the world to Britain to concert their anti-slavery campaigns, and could not leave without paying their respects to the old man. Especially not the Americans, who importuned Clarkson so often and so insistently for his autograph and locks of his white hair that his wife, Catherine, feared there would soon be none left.