by Hugh Thomas
By this time, the combination of popular poetry and of journalism was beginning to have its effect on cultivated imaginations in England and in North America on the subject of slavery. Several authors were critical of the institution in the periodical press in the mid-eighteenth century. The existence of that press was the main reason for the circulation of these ideas, which soon began to be taken up in elected assemblies. The fourth estate began to discuss the matter of slavery before the other three did. The relative freedom of expression in Britain explains why, despite the imaginative force with which French philosophers wrote, “abolitionism” prospered first in the Anglo-Saxon countries (though under Louis XV and Louis XVI criticism of the slave trade was not as a rule itself censored, any criticism of the Church or the established order of things in France risked persecution). The ease with which correspondence could be carried on in North America and Britain was another important explanation for the rise of the movement.
Thus, in 1738, the English Weekly Miscellany published an article which declared that, if Africans were to seize people from the coast of England, one could easily imagine the screams of “unjust” which would be heard. In July 1740, the Gentleman’s Magazine included a letter by a certain “Mercatus Honestus,” addressed to “the Guinea merchants” of Bristol and Liverpool. It declared that men were born with a natural right to liberty; that they could only forfeit that by taking away the property of another; that the loss of liberty by a parent was no reason that a child should be enslaved; that the merchants in Guinea dealt with men, women, and children; that they stimulated war among Africans; that the blacks in Africa were more virtuous there, at home, than after they had been brought to America; and that the treatment of the Africans in the West Indies was shocking. The cheerfulness which the slaves showed in dying, the letter continued, proceeded not from ignorance but from “a natural nobleness of soul.” The writer suggested that some who carried on the trade—“among whom there are no doubt wise and good men,” he added with a good dose of English hypocrisy—should give their reason for it.2
A reply appeared in the London Magazine. The inhabitants of Guinea, the writer argued, “are in the most deplorable state of slavery under the arbitrary powers of their princes both as to life and property. In the several subordinations to them, every great man is absolute lord of his immediate dependents. And lower still; every master of a family is proprietor of his wives, children and servants, and may consign them to death or a better market. . . . Such a state is contrary to nature and reason, since every human creature hath an absolute right to liberty . . . yet it is not in our power to cure the universal evil and set all the kingdoms of the world free from the domination of tyrants. . . . All that can be done in such a case is to communicate as much liberty and happiness as such circumstances will admit, and the people will consent to: and this is certainly by the Guinea trade. For by purchasing, or rather ransoming, the negroes from their national tyrants, and transplanting them under the benign influences of the law and Gospel, they are advanced to much greater degrees of felicity, tho’ not to absolute liberty. . . .”3
There was a further rejoinder in the December issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Thomas Astley, who had edited a famous collection of voyages in 1745, wrote, in relation to Captain Snelgrave’s argument,II that, if the Africans benefited from slavery in the Americas, then they themselves should be asked to make the decision as to whether to go there. But as yet there was no public controversy on a large scale, for, though influential, the Gentleman’s Magazine had a tiny circulation, as did the London Magazine. No parliamentarian as yet touched the issue.
In 1750, as has been explained,III and despite some forceful statements by certain Georgians about the iniquities of the institution, the trustees of the colony decided to allow slavery and the slave trade after all. Many prudent people at home in England were pleased at that decision, though others were critical, Horace Walpole among them. “We, the temple of liberty, and bulwark of Protestant Christianity,” he wrote to his favorite correspondent, Sir Horace Mann, the British envoy in Florence, “have this fortnight been [in Parliament] pondering methods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of selling negroes. It has appeared to us that six and forty thousand of these wretches are sold [annually] in the English colonies alone. It chills one’s blood.”4
Walpole’s comments show what an educated Englishman of the mid-eighteenth century was beginning to think. They suggest, if not opposition to the trade, a clear sign that the morality of the matter, that “morally speaking,” in the words of Captain Pery earlier in the century, was now discussable. The same implication might well have been drawn from a British naval report of 1750, which insisted that government money would be well spent in sending out good instructors to the forts of the Gold Coast, “for the Africans are very tractable to learn trades.”
The issue of the legality of freedom was thus already on the agenda, so to speak, of English public opinion: and in 1755, Professor Francis Hutcheson’s A System of Moral Philosophy was published. The author, an Irish Protestant who had become professor of philosophy at Glasgow, had actually died some years before. His main interest was the definition of happiness; and it was he who coined the phrase made famous by Bentham concerning the desirability of ensuring the “greatest happiness of the greatest numbers.” The originality of his work with regard to slavery lay in his conclusion that “all men [without exception] have strong desires of liberty and property,” and that “no damage done or crime committed can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all right.”5, IV Four years later, another professor at Glasgow, Adam Smith who, when young, had been to Hutcheson’s well-delivered lectures, wrote, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not . . . possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is scarce capable of conceiving.” Many of Smith’s pupils at Glasgow, like Hutcheson’s, absorbed these views.6
But the arguments were not always so straightforward. Five years later still, the Gentleman’s Magazine published an article complaining that Africans in the neighborhood of London “cease to consider themselves as slaves . . . and no more willingly perform the laborious offices of servitude than our own people.”7 Late-eighteenth-century London had, after all, many “Saint Giles’ blackbirds”—from the region near Saint Giles’ Church. When the Gentleman’s Magazine said that slaves could not breathe in Britain, it implied that they, and all blacks, should be required to leave.
Other Scottish intellectuals took up the matter. One of them was George Wallace, a lawyer who published his System of the Principles of the Laws of Scotland in 1761. He was influenced by Montesquieu, as he admitted, and he was almost paraphrasing L’Esprit des lois when he wrote, “An institution so unnatural and so inhuman as that of slavery ought to be abolished.”8 Another Scotsman of considerable influence was Adam Ferguson, professor of philosophy at Edinburgh. In his Institutes of Moral Philosophy, based on his lecture notes and published in 1769, he argued that “no one is born a slave; because everyone is born with all his original rights. [Further], no one can become a slave; because no one, from being a person, can, in the language of the Roman law, become a thing, or subject of property. The supposed property of the master in the slave, therefore, is a matter of usurpation, not of right.”9, V
What Wallace did for Montesquieu in Scotland, Sir William Blackstone did in England. That judge’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in Oxford between 1765 and 1769, stated the case against slavery more directly than Montesquieu had done.VI Thus he derided the three causes of slavery named in Justinian’s Code of Laws—slavery following on defeat in war, by selling oneself, and by being born a slave. He declared, too, that the law of England “abhors and will not endure the state of slavery within this nation,” and went on to insist that “a slave or a negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws and, with regard to all natural rights, becomes, eo instan
ti, a freeman.”10 The effect of this firm statement was, however, much weakened by the qualification in the second edition of the book that, even so, “the master’s right to his service may probably still continue”; and “probably” was itself altered to “possibly” in the fourth edition, published in 1770.11 These changes were almost certainly due to the influence of Blackstone’s friend and benefactor Lord Mansfield, at the time chief justice of England, a tolerant but cautious man. (Mansfield himself had in his household a mulatto girl, Dido, daughter of his nephew, Rear Admiral Sir John Lindsay, by a slave mother, whom he had captured in a Spanish vessel during the siege of Havana.)
Blackstone’s fluent work had immediate success. His remarks about slavery probably influenced Isaac Bickerstaffe when he wrote his immensely successful play The Padlock, performed in 1768. A song, sung by Mungo, a slave, includes the verse:
Dear heart, what a terrible life am I led,
A dog has a better, that’s shelter’d and fed,
Night and day ’tis de same,
My pain is dere game.12
In the same mood, in 1766, Horace Walpole wrote his “Account of the Giants Lately Discovered,” which mocked the slave trade by suggesting that a newly discovered tribe of Patagonian giants should be enslaved and used in the sugar trade, bearing in mind the experience of planters in North America that a slave could be worked to death after four years, because by then he would have earned his purchase price.13
Perhaps more important, though, in the late 1760s was the clear sign that the Quakers, who had already pronounced against their members’ participation in the slave trade, were beginning to carry the argument about slavery beyond their own movement. Friends still traded slaves, and certainly still owned them. But Anthony Benezet, a “worthy old Quaker” as Granville Sharp called him, from Philadelphia (if born in Saint-Quentin in France, and briefly educated in England), was talking to the world beyond Friends’ House, and to England as well as to North America, when, between 1759 and 1771, he wrote a series of works such as A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies and then Some Historical Account of Guinea. These and other studies were remarkable for their use of material taken from far outside the normal range of Quaker reading. For example, the first cited Montesquieu, Wallace, and Hutcheson; it also used numerous firsthand accounts of trading slaves in Africa, including those of Bosman, Barbot, and Brüe. Benezet, a tiny ugly man with no presence, was also influenced by his reading of Wallace’s work. He was affected too by the determination and dedication of John Woolman. Benezet had begun to work on the question of the slave trade in the 1750s, and the decisions of the Quakers in Philadelphia owed a good deal to his persuasion. The quiet persistence of these two men led Quakers to form “little associations in the middle provinces of North America, to discourage the introduction of slaves among people in their own neighbourhoods”: including people who were not members of their Society. Perhaps the energies of these two men were specially fired by the knowledge that, in the late 1750s and the 1760s, the import of slaves into Philadelphia was higher than it had ever been; or perhaps the wide experience of Benezet, himself from a persecuted minority, was the prime cause of the ignition of his exertions.VII
A retired teacher when, only in 1766, he began his work of agitation, Benezet had as a young man been in business in Philadelphia, though not the slave business. In the second edition of A Caution and Warning, published in 1767, he quoted (and took as his theme thereafter) a West Indian visitor’s comment that “it is a matter of astonishment how a people [the English] who, as a nation are looked upon as generous and humane, . . . can live in the practice of such extreme oppression and inhumanity without seeing the inconsistency of such conduct.”14
Benezet did, it is true, argue, falsely, that the troubles of Africa all derived from the Atlantic slave trade. But, as Las Casas knew, and many others have realized since, exaggeration is the essence of successful propaganda. Benezet embarked upon a campaign of converting fellow Quakers to his way of thinking, largely by correspondence. Nor did he confine his letters to Quakers; for he wrote to Edmund Burke and the archbishop of Canterbury, as to John Wesley.
Dr. Benjamin Rush—a Presbyterian, not a Quaker—on Benezet’s encouragement wrote some admirable and still-readable pamphlets in the 1770s, and helped to form, in Philadelphia, the first society devoted to abolition.
In the history of abolition, Benezet, like Aphra Behn and the half-forgotten Tomás de Mercado, should have a place of honor. He was not only a link between the writings of the moral philosophers, such as Montesquieu and the Quakers, but also one between America and Britain; and indeed the Anglo-Saxons and the French.
Still, for the moment, the thrust of the humane influences in England was legal, not religious; and it is in the context of someone who had read Blackstone, not Benezet, that the case of the slave Somerset, heard in 1771 before Lord Mansfield, should be considered. The judgment determined unsensationally, it is true, that there could be no slaves in England. Though the case had nothing directly to do with the slave trade, and though the significance of it has been dismissed by some modern historians as sentimental, the occasion was, all the same, a turning point in the history both of the traffic and of the institution.
The story is well known, so need only be summarized. The case was initiated by Granville Sharp, then a junior clerk in the Ordnance Office, who came from a family of successful Anglican clergymen. Grandson of an archbishop of York, Sharp is a good example of those patient English philanthropists whose capacity for dull, hard, meticulous and above all effective work is so striking an aspect of English public life.
Sharp had in 1765 befriended a slave, Jonathan Strong, in the streets of London. He had been badly wounded by his master, David Lisle of Barbados. Sharp and his brother William, a surgeon, helped to restore Strong to health, and he went to work for an apothecary. But then he was accidentally seen by Lisle who, without physically repossessing him, sold him to a planter in Jamaica, on the understanding that the price of £30 would not be paid till Strong was on a ship ready to sail to Kingston. Two slave hunters captured Strong and took him to a private prison, the Poultry Compter. Sharp secured Strong’s release on the ground that he had been confined without warrant. The Jamaican planter who had bought Strong then sued Sharp, while Lisle challenged him to a duel. Sharp was left to his own devices. This obliged him to investigate the law of slavery. He was disturbed to find that English law did not really deal with the matter.
In the days of Queen Elizabeth, a certain Cartwright had brought back from Russia a slave, who was declared free, on the ground that “England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in”—a view which was remembered in 1772 by one of the lawyers, Serjeant Davy, during discussion of the case of Somerset. But that judgment may have been spurious, and certainly black slaves were to be seen in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. It was true that, in 1672, Edward Chamberlayne had written, in The Present State of England, “Foreign slaves in England are none since Christianity prevailed. A foreign slave brought into England is, upon landing, ipso facto free from slavery but not from ordinary service.” That work was, however, a copy of a similarly titled book about France, where the same statement, similarly false, was made.
There were several late-seventeenth-century judgments on the matter, inspired by the increase in the slave trade. The Court of King’s Bench and the Court of Common Pleas both found that slaves could be reclaimed in England. But, in the case of Smith v. Brown and Cooper, in 1706, the Chief Justice Sir John Holt apparently determined that “one may be a villein in England, but not a slave”; and even “as soon as a negro comes into England, he becomes free.” But Holt’s judgment received little attention, and one of those who sat with him, Mr. Justice Powell, thought, on the contrary, that “the laws of England take no notice of a negro.” The judgment was anyway, as it seemed, reversed in 1729, when Sir Robert Walpole’s attorney-general and solicitor-general, Sir Philip Yorke and Mr. Charles Talbot (a patr
on of the poet Thomson), gave it as their opinion, in reply to a deputation of West Indian planters, that a slave in England was not automatically free, nor did baptism “bestow freedom on him, nor make any alteration in his temporal condition in these kingdoms.” A master could also legally compel “a slave to return to the plantations.” These were decisions which Yorke confirmed twenty years later in a judgment, when lord chancellor (and Lord Hardwicke), in the case of Pearne v. Lisle.
Yorke had the reputation of being one of the hardest men ever to become lord chancellor, as his conduct in relation to the execution of the Jacobite peers showed, as also in the case of Admiral Byng.VIII But Talbot was known as a man of wit and charm. Their decisions are difficult to explain. It also became evident that even baptism did not make a man free, as had come to be assumed (by, for example, the slave Olaudah Equiano who in 1761, two years after being christened, was sold at Gravesend and then spirited away by Captain James Doran on his vessel, the Charming Sally.