by Hugh Thomas
In the early eighteenth century, the indications that some kind of ethical dimension should affect the trade grew more and more frequent. Thus, in 1707, a secretary of the Royal African Company, no less—Colonel John Pery—wrote to a neighbor, William Coward, who was interested in promoting a slave voyage, that it was “morally impossible that two tier of Negroes can be stowed between decks in four feet five inches.” He went on to admit that any limitations would risk the profitability of the expedition: to add one tier in such circumstances was feasible.18
Twenty years later, in 1729, the ship’s surgeon Dr. Thomas Aubrey would recall that his captain on the slave ship Peterborough had asked: “What the devil makes these plaguey toads die so fast? To which I answer: ’Tis inhumanity, barbarity and the greatest of cruelty of the commander and his crew. . . .” He advised slave merchants to be as careful of slaves as if they had been white men. “For, though they are heathens, yet they have a rational soul as well as us; and God knows whether it may not be more tolerable for them in the latter day [of judgment] than for many who profess themselves Christians.”19
The eighteenth century in England was scarcely a sentimental era, yet it produced a positive anthology of poetry which directly or indirectly condemned slavery. These verses were in the style of the famous and successful Scottish poet James Thomson who, in his immensely popular Seasons (first published 1730) would describe a shark, which was following a slave ship,
Lured by the scent
Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death,
Behold! he, rushing, cuts the briny flood,
Swift as the gale can bear the ship along;
And from the partners of that cruel trade,
Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons,
Demands his share of prey—demands themselves!20
The reflection gains poignancy if it be recalled that Thomson was the author, in 1740, of the most famous patriotic verse in English, “Rule, Britannia,” where it is famously stated that (even if they might be slave merchants) the British would never be slaves.
Daniel Defoe, Richard Savage, William Shenstone, and even Alexander Pope asked, just as explicitly,
Why must I Afric’sIV sable Children see
Vended for Slaves, though form’d by Nature free . . . ?
and imagined, as Pope did,
Some happier island in the wat’ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold.21
Sir Richard Steele, in “Inkle and Yarico,” also spoke of the issue of slavery in touching terms. So did Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy.
Yet such allusions were partly persiflage. It was a fashionable thing for these elegant gentlemen to affect outrage at the sufferings of Africans. Their contemporaries were always talking of slavery in one context or another: “the slave of pomp” is a frequent figure of speech in the works of Savage, as is “slave to no sect” in Pope. But they had little idea of the implications of what they were saying, even though such publications as John Atkins’s Voyage to Guinea, Brazil, and the West Indies, of 1735, candidly described the business of slaving (Atkins had been a surgeon in the navy). Defoe, a polemicist more than a poet, did not pursue the subject (which he touched on in Robinson Crusoe): iniquity in England consumed his attention. He himself had been anyway concerned in the creation of one of the largest of slave-trading enterprises, the South Sea Company. The poet Thomson accepted the sinecure of surveyor-general to the Leeward Islands, which included several prosperous slave-powered islands, such as Nevis and Saint Kitts. Yet the contributions of these writers were, in the long run, very important. They helped to create a state of mind in which cultivated people in Europe’s most free country, which was also the biggest slaving nation, began to deplore the institution of the trade in Africans if not of slavery itself.
The Church of Rome continued to make intermittent hostile complaints. In 1683, for example, Alderano Cardinal Cybo, the papal secretary of state, wrote to the Capuchin mission in Angola from Rome, in the name of the Sacred College, that he understood that “the pernicious and abominable abuse of selling slaves was yet continued . . . and requiring us to use our power to remedy the said abuse; which, notwithstanding we saw very little hope of accomplishing, by reason that the trade of this country lay wholly in slaves and ivory.”22 All the Capuchins did was to try to stop Protestants, such as the Dutch and English, from buying slaves. But that venture was equally impossible. It is true that, in 1684, two Capuchin friars did start talking in Havana against the slave trade. The governor sent them home to Spain on the first boat, and the Council of the Indies declared that they should never be allowed to return to America. Then, at the very end of the seventeenth century, the bishop of the Cape Verde Islands, Frei Victoriano Portuense, denounced the frequent failure to baptize slaves: “Knowing the manifest injustices by which the people are made slaves in Guinea, the only excuse . . . is to say that these Gentiles are being taken out to receive the light of the church.” But he added, perhaps speaking ironically: “My scruples are not so great that I totally condemn this trade, seeing that it is tolerated by so many men of letters and great theologians.”23
A curious conversation occurred in the Congo in the late seventeenth century between Father Merolla, an Italian Capuchin friar, and an English captain (the Capuchins were, in those years, the most exemplary of the religious orders, the only missionaries who worked in the fever-stricken interior of the Congo). The latter accused the former of trying to persuade the king of Congo not to sell slaves to him. Father Merolla said the king of Portugal had given orders not to make any such sales to heretics. The English captain said that the duke of York, the president of the Royal African Company, was a Roman Catholic. Fr. Merolla said he was sure that the duke did not want his representatives to sack African towns and kidnap slaves, as one English captain had done the previous year. He thought that he would write and tell his fellow countrywoman Mary of Modena, duchess of York, how badly the English were conducting themselves. The captain became furious. In the end, however, the king of Congo did trade privately with the English, behind the back of the Capuchins.24
Still, the only place where any government actually intervened to ameliorate conditions in the slave trade remained Portugal. Many provisions about the good treatment of slaves had been issued to the governors of Angola, but these usually took the form of general admonitions to protect the slaves, rather than specific standards. In 1664, a law in Lisbon specified the minimum amount of water which should be carried on a slave ship from Angola. In 1684, as has been seen, another decreed formal restrictions on the ratio of slaves per ton of shipping: the slave-carrying capacity of each ship would thenceforth be listed in its registration papers. The figure varied from 2.5 to 3.5 slaves per ton, depending on the character of the ship (if a decked ship, or one with portholes, etc.). Child slaves (molleques) could be loaded at five per ton, but they could only be carried on the open decks. Adequate water—a canada, or a little less than three pints a day—should be provided for each slave. Other clauses of the law concerned the provision of food, and the duration of the voyages. This might have seemed a beginning of better times for slaves, but bribery of officials prevented the enactment of these rules; and anyway, as suggested earlier, a canada was inadequate.V
In all the richer parts of the New World, Dominicans and Jesuits, Franciscans and Carmelites still had slaves at their disposal. The French Father Labat, on his arrival at the prosperous Caribbean colony of Martinique in 1693, described how his monastery, with its nine brothers, owned a sugar mill worked by water and tended by thirty-five slaves, of whom eight or ten were old or sick, and about fifteen badly nourished children. Humane, intelligent, and imaginative though Father Labat was, and grateful though he was for the work of his slaves, he never concerned himself as to whether slavery and the slave trade were ethical. He was required, on one occasion in 1695, to buy twelve slaves from a consignment which had arrived at Basse-Terre from Africa, having been brought by a sh
ip belonging to a Monsieur Maurelet of Marseilles, one of the least active of the French slave ports. Labat made the purchase without self-reproach, though he did later comment on the sad condition of these captives who, he thought, had arrived “tired, after a long voyage.” The only occasion on which he used the word “infamous” to describe what he saw was when he observed an African dance. He was convinced that the Church had a special responsibility to “inspire in the Africans the cult of the true God,” to purge them of idolatry, and to make them “persevere to the death in the Christian religion which we had caused them to embrace.”25
Once again, the Vatican spoke out against slavery at the beginning of the eighteenth century: knowing that the dominions of the king of Portugal still had the largest number of slaves in the Christian world, the saintly and active Umbrian Pope Clement XI caused the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to ask his nuncios in Madrid and Lisbon to act so as to bring about “an end to slavery.” But there was no response whatsoever. Clement had, anyway, offended the Bourbon kings of France and Spain by taking the side of the Habsburgs in the War of the Spanish Succession. The Inquisition was at that time still more concerned about the possibility that some slave dealers were secret Jews than about the trade. For example, with regard to the asiento of the Portuguese Cacheu Company, at the end of the seventeenth century, the Holy Office at Cartagena de Indias denounced to the Spanish Crown three Portuguese agents who were responsible for the traffic there—Felipe Enríquez, Juan Morín, and Gaspar de Andrade—for being “of the hebraic nation.” These three men had allegedly even been seen, in Cartagena, after a delivery of slaves, both killing lambs and keeping the Sabbath in the Jewish manner. But the accusations never bore fruit; the persons concerned were able to escape castigation easily.
In English America, the voices of doubt about, or hostility to, slavery were a good deal more frequent. In 1676, for example, a Quaker, William Edmundson, a wild friend and companion of George Fox, the Society’s founder, dispatched a letter from Newport, Rhode Island, to Quakers in all slave-owning places. He put forward the theory that slavery should be unacceptable to a Christian. It was “an oppression on the mind.” This caused the aged Roger Williams, the father of the colony, to denounce him as “nothing but a bundle of ignorance and boisterousness.”26 Edmundson also justified rebellions of slaves in Barbados, where two Quakers (Ralph Fretwell and Richard Sutton) had been fined by the governor for the crime of “bringing Negroes into their meetings for worship.” There were similar accusations, and similar fines, in Nevis.
Twelve years later, in 1688, in Germantown (Philadelphia), a group of German Quakers originally from Krisheim, in the Rhineland, signed a petition against the idea of slavery, not just the trade.VI In both 1696 and 1711, at the Society’s annual meetings in Philadelphia, “advice” was given to guard against future imports of Africans, and instruction to ensure good treatment of those already bought. Cadwallader Morgan, a Quaker slave merchant, after some soul-searching, decided, “I should not be concerned with them.”27 Can one say that this was the beginning of the abolition movement in Pennsylvania? Scarcely, for the protests were ignored, Friends remained prominent as slave traders as well as owners of slaves, and few took into account the “advice” for years afterwards. Though they had compunction about the matter, Jonathan Dickinson and Isaac Norris, both Quakers of Philadelphia, continued to trade slaves. There was even a ship belonging to members of the sect in the early eighteenth century called the Society. (Her captain was Thomas Monk, who loaded 250 slaves in Africa in 1700, and lost all but twenty-two of them in the Middle Passage.)28
But other Friends made isolated, if neglected, protests in that colony over the next thirty years. In 1716, a Quaker tract written in Massachusetts, arguing that the slave trade adversely affected white immigration, had included the radical statement that the slaves had a perfect right to liberty, and so might resort to armed rebellion. The Friends asked: “Are not we of this country guilty of that violence, treachery and bloodshed which is daily made use of to obtain them?”29 Benjamin Lay, a hunchback originally from Colchester in England—who had settled in Abington, near Philadelphia, after living in Barbados and seeing scenes of cruelty to slaves, “which had greatly disturbed his mind”—was driven, by seeing a naked slave hanging dead in front of a fellow Quaker’s house (killed because he had tried to run away), to a series of eccentric but sensational protests: for example, dressing in homemade cloth to avoid using material made by slaves, and breaking his coffee cups to discourage the use of sugar. Lay once stood at the door of a Quaker meeting house with one leg bare and half buried in deep snow. To those who sympathized, he said: “Ah, you pretend compassion for me, but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields who go all winter half-clad.” He also once filled a sheep’s bladder with blood and then plunged a sword into it at a Quaker meeting, saying, “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow-creatures.”30
All these protests were individual actions by unrepresentative people. A more characteristic reaction was that of some Baptists in South Carolina who wrote home to England to ask for guidance as to how to treat a brother member of their church who had castrated his slave. They received the reply that they should not risk dissension in the movement over “light or indifferent causes.”
Still it was not only these dissenters who were concerned: in 1700, a conventional judge in Boston, Samuel Sewall, wrote a pamphlet, The Selling of Joseph which, despite receiving “frowns and hard words,” made the first reasoned criticism of the slave trade, and indeed of slavery itself. (Sewall, a Congregationalist, was one of the judges who had in 1692 condemned the witches of Salem; he himself may once have been concerned in the slave trade.)
In 1754, the annual meeting of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia at last took a definite step against the traffic in slaves. Recalling in an open letter that it had often been “the concern of our annual meeting to testify their uneasiness and disunity with the importation and purchasing of negro and other slaves,” this time they said plainly that “to live in ease and plenty by the toil of those whom violence and cruelty have put in our power” was inconsistent with both Christianity and common justice. After several paragraphs giving vivid examples, the document appealed to Quakers to make the case of the Africans “our own and consider what we should think, and what we should feel, were we in their circumstances.”31
This change was the consequence of further agitation in the Society coincident with the doubts about how to react to Indian raiding on the colony of Pennsylvania, inspired by such candid, dedicated, and determined Friends as William Burling of Long Island, Ralph Sandiford of Philadelphia and, above all, John Woolman, a tailor from New Jersey who, in 1754, after a visit to Quaker slaveholders in Virginia and North Carolina, had published his candid pamphlet Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. Woolman thereafter devoted his life to visits, usually on foot, to prominent Quaker slaveholders to try to convince them, by calm and rational appeals, of the “inconsistency of holding slaves.”32 He even went to Newport, Rhode Island, the great slaving port of North America, where he addressed his fellow Quakers on the matter, and seems to have had some effect. In 1758, the yearly meeting of Quakers at Philadelphia agreed with Woolman that no Quaker could keep a slave without risking damnation, since no master could be expected to resist the temptation to exploit the slave. That same year, the Quakers in London, at their annual meeting, also condemned both slavery and “the iniquitous practice of dealing in negro and other slaves,” and threatened to exclude from a place of responsibility within the Society of Friends anyone who participated in the trade. Another resolution, at the Quakers’ annual meeting in England in 1761, decided, since “divers under our name are concerned in the un-Christian traffic in Negroes,” to condemn the practice, and to disown those who did not desist. This was strong stuff for Quakers. Once they were committed, there was, however, no drawing back; the yearly meeting of 1763 Philadelphia furthe
r condemned all who invested in the trade or supplied cargoes for it.33
Thus a prominent Bostonian could later write: “About the time of the Stamp Act [1765], what were before only slight scruples in the minds of conscientious persons, became serious doubts and, with a considerable number, ripened into a firm persuasion that the slave trade was malum in se.”
The direct consequence of this Quaker activity was that, in 1767, a proposal was, for the first time, introduced into a real legislature against the slave trade: in the House of Representatives of Massachusetts. Though this bill failed, a substantial duty was laid thereafter on each slave imported.
Another point of view was, meantime, developing slowly in British North America. This was that the import of slaves into the Americas should be restricted, not because of doubts about the morality of the slave trade but from fear of the consequences of having too many slaves: rebellion above all. After 1770, this opinion had as much influence over the growth of the abolition movement as did philanthropy. For example, even in South Carolina, as early as 1698, an act was passed to encourage the use of white servants, because of “the great danger” of revolution and upheaval which the presence of too many slaves might pose. In 1730, William Gooch, lieutenant-governor of Virginia, a Suffolk-born landowner who later fought in the British siege at Cartagena de Indias, wrote home to London that there were thirty thousand slaves in Virginia (in a population of 114,000), “and their numbers increase every day as well by birth as by importation. And in case there should arise a man of desperate courage amongst us, exasperated by a desperate fortune, he might with more advantage than Catiline kindle a servile war.VII Such a man might be dreadfully mischievous before any opposition could be formed against him, and tinge our rivers, wide as they are, with blood. . . . It were therefore worth the consideration of a British parliament . . . to put an end to this unchristian Traffick of making merchandise of our fellow creatures. . . . We have mountains in Virginia to which they may retire as safely . . . as in Jamaica. I wonder whether the legislature will indulge a few ravenous traders to the danger of public safety. . . .”34