Newspapers often announced rewards for runaway slaves. One from the Kingston, Jamaica, Daily Advertiser, on January 29, 1790, said:
RAN AWAY
From her owners, about the month of Sept. last, a short creole wench named
DILIGENCE, alias JUNK
has a large scar on her breast, occasioned by a burn, with a toe off each foot, for which she wears slippers. Speaks very slow and artful.
In the early seventeenth century, Brazilian soldiers were offered gold as a reward for finding runaways. Sometimes they returned with innocent slaves who had simply been on an errand for their owners. Captured runaways were branded with the letter F to show that they were fugitives, but that didn’t stop them. Some tried a second time, risking the loss of an ear if they were found, and even a third time, though the punishment would be death.
The artist who drew this elderly spiritual healer had watched her at work, and left us a description of the way she used her powers in an effort to cure someone of an illness. Such healers were often old women called Mama Snekie, or Mama of Snakes.
Photo Credit 7.6
Slaves who had a trade and managed to escape to cities stood a chance of blending in, but most runaways looked for safe haven in the forests and swamplands, where other escapees had started colonies called quilombos. One quilombo, Palmares, survived for seventy years in northeastern Brazil. At first the residents raided nearby villages for food, but eventually they became self-sufficient and created a vibrant community where as many as twenty thousand people lived. Most of them were from what is today Angola, on Africa’s southwest coast, and they brought their Angolan way of life to Palmares. They lived in several settlements surrounded by a larger village, and were ruled by a king. Palmares lasted until 1695, when the Portuguese conquered it with an army of seven thousand soldiers.
In the Dutch colony of Surinam most plantations were along rivers bordered by swampland or forests. Slaves easily escaped into the interior of the country, where few whites lived. Some plantations lost their entire workforce. The runaways were known as maroons, from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning “wild.”
The owners asked the Netherlands for volunteers to help the local troops capture deserters, but still the maroons could not be conquered. Eventually the government negotiated agreements with them. In Jamaica, in 1739, the government gave the maroon leader Cudjoe rights to the west of the island, in exchange for the maroons’ help in ending local slave revolts.
The sad fact, however, is that most slaves died in captivity. Freedom would not come until slavery was ended in South America and the Caribbean. For millions, that would be too late.
Graman Quassie visited John Gabriel Stedman, a Dutch soldier stationed in Surinam, wearing the gold-laced coat and gold medal that he had received from William V, Prince of Orange. Quassie had helped in the fight against bands of runaway slaves. In recognition of his services, Surinam’s colonial governor had sent him to the Netherlands to meet the Dutch ruler.
Photo Credit 7.7
A CELEBRATED SLAVE
Slaves did not receive any education, but the medical discovery of one slave in Surinam lives on in its botanical name, Quassia amara. Physicians there couldn’t find a cure for high fevers that were ravaging the population, but in 1730 the slave Quassie Graman discovered a remedy using the bark of a local tree. The masters were so impressed with his cure that they asked for his help. Quassie told his secret cure to a plantation owner who was interested in botany (the study of plants). That owner told the secret to a noted Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, who named the tree after the slave. This discovery is not Quassie’s only claim to fame. He was also renowned as a healer and a maker and seller of magical amulets.
CHAPTER 8
“THE MONSTER IS DEAD!”: BRITISH ABOLITION
Late one afternoon in 1765, a line of people waited outside the office of William Sharp in London. Dr. Sharp was known for offering medical care to people who couldn’t afford to pay for it. One of the men in line stood out; his face was bloody, beaten beyond recognition, and his skin was black. Black people were not totally unknown in London – there were several thousand of them – but they were not common, either.
The young man’s name was Jonathan Strong, and his story was a pitiful one. He was a slave from Barbados, living in London with his owner, David Lisle. Lisle beat Strong so hard and so often that he walked with a limp. But this time, Lisle had become so furious with Strong that he had pistol-whipped him until his gun had broken. Thinking he had beaten his slave to the point of uselessness, Lisle had then abandoned him. Fortunately, someone had directed the young man to the doctor’s clinic.
William Sharp’s brother Granville happened to step out of the office and see Strong. Both Sharp brothers would become saviors to the young man, in different ways. For the moment, Strong needed medical care, which would require more than four months in the hospital. He had suffered permanent eye damage, but he was healthy enough for the brothers to find him a job with a nearby pharmacist, a Mr. Brown. Now he was an employee – no longer anyone’s slave.
Granville Sharp, 1820
Photo Credit 8.1
Two years later, Lisle spotted Strong working as a footman for the pharmacist’s wife. A slave – even one whom Lisle had no use for – was worth money, and Strong was a lot healthier than when Lisle had left him for dead. So he had Strong picked up by the Lord Mayor’s officers and thrown into prison. Lisle planned to keep him there until he could be sold to a sea captain and shipped off to one of Britain’s colonies in the Americas.
Strong, who had learned to read and write during his two years of freedom, immediately sent notes to people who might help him, including Granville Sharp. When Sharp arrived in the gloom of the prison, he was enraged. The authorities had no right to hold the young man, who had done nothing wrong, he said. Moreover, Strong had the right to a hearing by the Lord Mayor. And indeed the Lord Mayor agreed that “the lad had not stolen anything and was not guilty of any offence and was therefore at liberty to go away.”
As word spread among London’s Africans that a man named Granville Sharp had helped free a slave, more of them came to see him. In 1768, he secured a court order to ship a woman slave back from the West Indies to Britain on the grounds that she had been illegally deported. In 1770, he helped free another kidnapped African before he could be shipped off to Jamaica.
Then came the case of James Somerset – a trial that changed history. Somerset visited Sharp the morning of January 13, 1772. He’d arrived in England with his owner, had escaped and been recaptured, and had then been released by a court order until his appeal could be heard by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. This was just the case Sharp was looking for. Way back in the 1500s, a court had decreed that the moment slaves “put their foot on English ground, that moment they became free.” Yet there were thousands of black slaves in England. Somerset’s case would force the courts to answer this question once and for all: Was slavery legal on English soil?
Sharp prepared a twenty-eight-page pamphlet that he sent to Somerset’s lawyers and the judges. At the hearings, which began in February 1772, one of Somerset’s lawyers reminded the court of that long-ago decision. “In those days,” he noted, “it was resolved that England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.” But the lawyers for Somerset’s owner predicted dire economic consequences if every black slave in England was set free.
The case lasted for months, and caught the public’s fancy. People read long articles about it in the papers, and so many came to watch the proceedings that there were not enough seats to hold them all.
In the end, the Lord Chief Justice ruled in favor of James Somerset, saying that a master had no right to force a slave to go into a foreign country. Although his decision did not state that slavery was illegal in England, most people understood him to mean just that. And when, on June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled that “the Man must be discharged,” the Africans watching from the court’s public space bowed dee
ply to the justice and shook hands with each other.
Thomas Clarkson
The abolitionists in England, and later in the United States, were not people who had been slaves like Spartacus, fighting for their own freedom. They had nothing personal at stake. They were determined to abolish slavery simply because it was wrong. Granville Sharp had taken individual cases to court. Now someone was needed to organize a movement to abolish slavery. The person turned out to be Thomas Clarkson, who was studying to be an Anglican clergyman at the University of Cambridge. His interest in slavery began in 1785 when he entered an essay-writing contest with a paper, written in Latin, on the topic “Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their wills?”
He didn’t enjoy working for the prize. How could he, he asked himself, when the work was colored by all the human suffering he had uncovered in his research: the violent capture of slaves, the separation of families, the miserable voyages across the Atlantic?
“It was one gloomy subject from morning to night,” he wrote. “I no longer regarded my essay as a mere trial for literary distinction. My great desire was to produce a work that should call forth a vigorous public effort to redress the wrongs of injured Africa.” Still, he threw himself into the subject, reading as much as he could get his hands on. He won the essay contest.
Thomas Clarkson
Photo Credit 8.2
On the way home from reading his essay aloud at the award ceremony, he got off his horse and began to think, “if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.”
Over the course of the next sixty years, Clarkson fought these calamities almost without letup. He logged 35,000 miles (56,000 km) of travel through Britain, mostly on horseback, gathering evidence, interviewing witnesses, setting up local committees, and speaking at meetings. He kept notes and diaries, published pamphlets calling attention to the mistreatment of slaves, and wrote letters to political figures and fellow activists. Sometimes he risked his health, even his life.
Clarkson soon made contact with the Quakers, and they published his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African in 1786. He also learned about Granville Sharp’s activities, and met James Ramsay, an Anglican minister back from the West Indies who could describe slavery firsthand. The three men banded together with others, and on May 22, 1787, their group, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, held its first meeting.
With these three solid Anglicans on board, the new society had an aura of respectability. The members came to a practical compromise with their ideals. Although all of them hated slavery, they decided to first concentrate on convincing Parliament to abolish the slave trade, not slavery itself. They knew that two groups would fight them every step of the way: wealthy merchants in London, Liverpool, Bristol, and Manchester, whose businesses made huge profits on the slave trade, and Caribbean plantation owners, who got rich on the cotton, tobacco, rice, and indigo (blue dye) grown on their estates. Some of these merchants and landowners lived in Britain, and some even had seats in Parliament. It was simply not realistic to try to end slavery – not yet.
But the members had faith that eliminating the trade in human beings would be a first step toward abolishing slavery itself. If the fresh supply of Africans was cut off, slave owners would have to treat their slaves better to keep them healthy enough to work. Soon the owners would discover that it was more profitable to pay slaves for their labor than to keep them in bondage. Then, they believed, slavery would wither away.
To bring an end to the slave trade, Parliament would have to pass a law, and it might well be voted down. So Clarkson’s next step was to find an ally to spearhead the campaign in Parliament. He was introduced to William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament (MP) with a reputation as an eloquent speaker. Clarkson would supply him with the information he needed, and Wilberforce would make the case in Parliament. Clarkson would also find ways to swing public opinion behind the campaign. Although only one in ten British men (and no women) could vote in elections, MPs read the newspapers and were keenly aware of which issues were capturing the public imagination.
QUAKERS MAKE THEMSELVES HEARD
Many of those who fought for abolition did so because of their personal religious beliefs, but in Britain and America the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, worked for abolition as a group. The religion is rooted in a belief that all people own an element of God’s spirit, and all are therefore equal in God’s eyes.
Shortly after George Fox started the religion in seventeenth-century England, he wrote to American Quakers who “have Blacks and Indian slaves,” reminding them that all people were equal. After a visit to Barbados he observed, “If you were in the same condition as the Blacks are … you would think it … very great Bondage and Cruelty.” Over the next century, the Religious Society of Friends condemned slave trading; they disowned any Quaker who kept slaves, and finally, in 1772, they called publicly for total abolition.
The Quakers realized that most English people considered them to be oddballs. Among other things, they looked different; they wore simple clothes instead of the fancy silks and satins of the day, the women left their bonnets untrimmed, and the men refused to carry weapons. The Quakers knew they would have to reach sympathetic Anglicans, people the British public would take seriously. Anthony Benezet helped make this happen by writing pamphlets and letters that touched hearts in Europe. He had grown up in England and had become a Quaker in Pennsylvania. His pamphlet Some Historical Account of Guinea, published in 1771, tells of a recently arrived slave “who appeared thoughtful and dejected, frequently dropping tears when taking notice of his master’s children.” No one understood his sadness until the man learned English and could share his story: “He had a wife and children in his own country; … some of these being sick and thirsty, he went in the night time to fetch water at a spring, where he was violently seized and carried away by persons who lay in wait to catch men, from whence he was transported to America.” Benezet was outraged. “When, and how, have these oppressed people forfeited their liberty? … Have they not the same right to demand it, as any of us should have, if we have been violently snatched by pirates from our native land?”
The Enemies of Abolition
With their organization in place, Clarkson set out to collect evidence about slavery and the slave trade. His investigations took him to ports where slave ships docked. The tall, red-headed Clarkson was easy to spot, and his opponents were quick to find him. He had many frightening encounters with them. Once, he had just started walking away from the end of a Liverpool pier when he noticed eight or nine people walking toward him:
I expected that they would have divided to let me through them; instead of which they closed upon me.… [It suddenly struck me] that they had a design to throw me over the pier head. Vigorous on account of the danger, I darted forward. One of them against whom I pushed myself, fell down. Their ranks were broken and I escaped not without blows amidst their imprecations and abuse.
That he had opponents was not surprising. Almost everywhere he traveled, people’s livelihood could be traced, directly or indirectly, to slavery. Warehouses in Bristol were teeming with West Indian goods – tobacco, cocoa, and sugar, which was refined in Bristol. As for Liverpool, more than 300,000 slaves were shipped from there between 1783 and 1793, many of the slave ships were built there, and the salaries of many laborers, from sailmakers to barrel makers, depended on this trade. Clarkson received threatening letters telling him to leave the city on his own, or he would not leave alive. But he was a brave man, and he stayed.
Antislavery campaigners used this shocking diagram of the slave ship Brookes, with 482 human beings stacked up like cargo, to inflame the public against the slave trade. The drawing appeared everywhere – in newspapers, books, pamphlets, even on the walls of taverns.
Photo Credit 8.3
He boarded ships to measure the slaves’
quarters. He tried to speak to captains or crew members, but most of them avoided him for fear of losing their jobs. He had more luck with the surgeons who worked on board the overcrowded ships. These doctors treated the diseases that sickened or killed so many, and helped the captains select healthy slaves for purchase in Africa. Two surgeons, James Arnold and Alexander Falconbridge, were uneasy about this work. Arnold had taken the job because he was in debt, and planned to go on only one more voyage. He agreed to keep notes for Clarkson. Falconbridge, who had gone on four trips, had quit because he was sickened by the human suffering he had witnessed. He assured Clarkson he’d be willing to testify before a parliamentary committee about what he’d seen. A member of Clarkson’s society compiled Falconbridge’s observations into a booklet published in February 1788. Now the public could read about the Middle Passage:
The place allotted for the sick Negroes is under the half deck, where they lie on the bare planks. By this means, those who are emaciated, frequently have their skin, and even their flesh, entirely rubbed off, by the motion of the ship, from the prominent parts of the shoulders, elbows, and hips, so as to render the bones in those parts quite bare.… The surgeon, upon going between decks, in the morning, … frequently finds several dead.
Africans were not the only unwilling passengers on the slave ships. British men were often tricked into signing on as sailors and then cheated out of their pay. On board, they were often brutalized. One sailor had hot pitch (tar) poured on his back, another was chained to the deck for days, and floggings were common. Some caught tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever. Inspecting the records of the Customs House in London, Clarkson discovered that, on average, only eight out of every ten white sailors survived a voyage on the Middle Passage. This would be useful information; people might care more about slave trading if they knew how many white Englishmen were among the victims.
Five Thousand Years of Slavery Page 10