The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  It is true that, in all the big slaving nations, people had begun to talk of abolition, but the concern seemed confined to unorthodox sects, such as the Quakers in Britain and North America, and intellectuals in France. Few anxieties troubled the slaving princes in Madrid, Lisbon, and Rio de Janeiro. Still, there were some disquieting signs. The success of the Abbé Raynal’s book was disturbing; and even in New England, Moses Brown of Providence, as a young man himself active in the family firm of Nicholas Brown, which had sent ships to Africa for slaves, wrote discouraging words to the merchants Clarke and Nightingale, of the same city, after he had heard that they were thinking of moving into the promising new slave trade with Cuba. He wanted them not to do so: “As I have entertained a respectful opinion of your humanity . . . and remembering how it was for me, when our company were engaging in that traffic that, altho’ the convictions of my own conscience were such as to be averse to the voyage, yet in reasoning on that subject with those who were for pursuing it, my holding slaves [myself] . . . weakened the arguments [he had since freed his slaves], that I suffered myself, rather than break my connexions, to be concerned but, as I have many times since thought that, if I had known the sentiments of others, or had their concurring testimonies to those scruples [which] I then had, I should have been preserved from an evil, which has given me the most uneasiness, and has left the greatest impression and stain upon my own mind of any, if not all my other conduct in life. . . . Under these considerations, I felt some engagement for your preservation from so great an evil as I have found that trade to be. . . . You are men of feelings, and abilities to live without this trade, why then should you be concerned in it against your own—against the feelings of your friends . . . ?”3

  But, despite this appeal, Clarke and Nightingale entered the trade, believing, like many other established firms, that the high risks were acceptable, especially if they carried slaves bought in Africa direct to Havana; and the beautiful yellow-painted clapboard house which Nightingale built in Ower Street, next to John Brown’s brick mansion, remains to remind the modern visitor of his financial success. John Brown himself was engaged in a ferocious argument with his brother and others on behalf of the slave traders; and it was no secret that the anonymous polemicist in favor of the slave trade, “A Citizen,” was none other than that substantial merchant.

  Still, the intellectual preparation for abolition continued. Among some in England, after the loss of the American colonies, antislavery became a “means to redeem the nation, a patriotic act.” In 1781, for example, William Cowper published his poem “Charity,” which, inspired by his friend John Newton—the repentant slave captain, by then vicar of Saint Mary’s Woolnoth, in London—denounced the slave merchant who “grows rich on cargoes of despair”:

  Canst thou, and honour’d with a Christian name,

  Buy what is woman-born, and feel no shame?

  Trade in the blood of innocence, and plead

  Expedience as a warrant for the deed . . . ?

  Cowper at that time had, however, little renown, though later the wide distribution of his works would make him almost as well known as the once ultra-popular James Thomson.

  When peace returned after 1783, the persistent though now septuagenarian Anthony Benezet revived his campaign by correspondence. He had some remarkable successes. For example, he persuaded Benjamin West, the fashionable American painter who was president of the Royal Academy in England, to present a letter on the subject, with some pamphlets, to Queen Charlotte, though what that solid Mecklenburg matron made of the documents is apparently unrecorded. No doubt she passed them on to her husband, the king, who never permitted sentiment to hamper his support of the trade.

  Opinion in both Britain and North America was next affected by the case brought in 1783 relating to the Liverpool slaveship Zong. The Zong’s master was Luke Collingwood, and it was owned by William Gregson and George Case, who were well-known merchants of Liverpool (of which city both partners had been mayors).II This ship sailed in September 1781 with 442 slaves from São Tomé. Collingwood mistook Jamaica for Saint-Domingue. Once they had lost the way, water became short. Many slaves died or became ill. Collingwood called together his officers and said that, if the slaves on board were to die naturally, the loss would be that of the owners of the ship; but if, on some pretext affecting the safety of the crew, “they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters.” The first mate, a certain Kelsall, thought that “there was no present want of water to justify such a measure.” But the opinion of Collingwood prevailed, and 133 slaves, most of whom were sick and not likely to live, were flung into the sea. Fifty-four were thrown overboard on November 29, forty-two the next day and, despite the coming of rain (which alleviated the shortage of water), twenty-six on December 1; while another ten jumped of their own accord.

  A case deriving from this scandal came to court in 1783, since the insurers (Gilbert et al.) disagreed with the captain’s judgments about the finances, and refused to pay anything to the owners. The latter brought a suit against the insurers, demanding to be paid thirty pounds for each slave, and were backed by the King’s Bench, whereupon the underwriters petitioned the Court of Exchequer. Lord Mansfield, still lord chief justice, allowing a second trial, remarked: “The matter left to the jury was whether it was from necessity [that the slaves were thrown into the sea]; for they had no doubt (though it shocks one very much) that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.” By the time of the trial, Captain Collingwood was dead. The barrister for the owners argued, “So far from a charge of murder lying against these people, there is not the least imputation—of cruelty, I will not say—but [even] of impropriety.” The persistent Granville Sharp, all the same, tried to “prose cute the murders” before the Court of Admiralty, but failed: the solicitor-general John Lee deplored his “pretended appeal to humanity,” and declared that a master could drown slaves without “a surmise of impropriety.”4, III

  By then Sharp was considered a person of consequence and, as a result of his and Benezet’s fruitful correspondence, he had by now the support of most of the bishops of England in his campaign against slavery. He accordingly sent a copy of the proceedings of this trial to both the new (short-lived) prime minister, the duke of Portland, and the Lords of the Admiralty. Sharp heard nothing from these grandees but, as usual, he was not cast down by the apparent setback.

  Such events as the massacre on the Zong had occurred before, but now there was much more concern about the question of slavery. Thomas Day, the eccentric rationalist, had already composed a poem, The Dying Negro, which denounced the inconsistency of the North Americans in fighting for liberty while maintaining slavery. Now he wrote a “Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes,” making the same point in a more coherent way.5 The bishop of Chester, Dr. Beilby Porteus, preached a sermon before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel adjuring them to free the slaves on the Codrington properties.IV (The bishop knew what he was talking about, having been the eighteenth child of a Virginia planter who had returned to England.) A famous polemical divine, Dr. George Gregory, also included a bitter denunciation of the slave trade, in the manner of Raynal, in his Essays Historical and Moral. (He, too, wrote from experience, having been a clerk to the Liverpool alderman and merchant A. Gore.)

  From then on, the case against the slave trade came to be stated in England with ever-greater effectiveness, by a whole new school of active polemicists and theologians. The enemies of slavery were in touch with one another, and could boast of some successes. Thus, in 1783, a bill was introduced into the House of Commons forbidding officials of the Royal African Company from selling slaves—a motion which caused the ever-active Society of Friends to submit a passionate appeal for a general prohibition on the commerce (Sir Cecil Wray introduced the appeal). Lord North, the amiable home secretary at this time, accepted the spirit in which this document was presented, but said that it was impossible to abolish the trade, since
it was “necessary to every country in Europe.”6 That year, 1783, was the last in which the Liverpool Quaker timber firm of Rathbone and Son supplied timber for the Africa trade—for the third voyage of Thomas and William Earle’s ship, the Preston. The Rathbones thereafter became one of a small group of abolitionists in Liverpool.

  Next year, 1784, the first petition to the House of Commons was presented by a municipality, the city of Bridgwater, in favor of an end of the slave trade. At about the same time, Dr. James Ramsay published two pamphlets, first, the Essay on the Conversion and Treatment of the African Slaves and, second, An Enquiry into the Effects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

  Ramsay, born near Aberdeen, had been a naval surgeon; his vessel encountered a slave ship on which an epidemic of plague was raging. Ramsay went on board, saw the terrible conditions in which the slaves were living, and resolved to do what he could for them. Injury obliged him to seek work onshore, and he became a clergyman on the tiny but prosperous island of Saint Kitts, where several thousand slaves were at work making sugar. Ramsay spent nineteen years there, in the course of which he made himself hated by the planters because of his sermons (an echo of Fray Antonio de Montesinos so long before in Santo Domingo) which denounced both slavery and the slave trade. He then returned to England, to take up a living in Kent, at the village of Teston, where his old naval captain—Sir Charles Middleton, now a retired admiral, a member of Parliament and an agriculturalist (an innovator in the cultivation of hops)—had a property.

  Ramsay’s arguments were curious, since he admired the discipline of sugar plantations, such as those he had seen on Saint Kitts, and liked the relation of master and servant which had often marked them. But he thought that slavery inspired a society “where power becomes right.” His support for the cause of abolition was important for, up till then, the most active opponents of slavery, such as Sharp or Benezet, had had no personal experience of the West Indies.

  Publications in France, where there was no censorship on matters relating to slavery (even if there was in respect of criticisms of the Church), were making much the same points. The Swiss economist Jacques Necker, just dismissed as minister of finance in France, included, in his highly successful study of the country’s finances, a scathing account of “how we preach humanity yet go every year to bind in chains twenty thousand natives of Africa.” That essay sold twenty-four thousand copies in a very short time.7 (All the same, a slave ship bearing that minister’s name would go to Africa from Nantes in 1789, and two others also named Necker left Le Havre and Bordeaux in 1790.)

  Benezet—now old, his work of bringing the enemies of slavery together in a working alliance almost done—published yet another pamphlet, The Case of Our Fellow Creatures, the Oppressed Africans. Over ten thousand copies of this were published, and the English Quakers, who had by now formed a special committee to discuss ways of enlightening the public mind about the slave trade, distributed copies to members of the House of Commons.V Whenever Quakers met, they now talked of the iniquity of the trade; and, profiting from the general mood of tolerance in Britain, they made it their business to lecture at influential schools: Westminster, Winchester, Harrow, Charterhouse, Saint Paul’s, and Eton, for example.

  The climate in Britain with respect to the slave trade was now transformed in a special way. In 1785, the eminent divine Dr. William Paley published his Moral Philosophy, based on his lectures at Cambridge, which included a condemnation of the slave trade in severe terms. As with Dr. Gregory’s pamphlet on the matter, the tone was that of the violent Abbé Raynal, not the ironic Montesquieu. This book, as Thomas Clarkson later wrote, “was adopted early by some of the colleges in our universities into the system of their education . . . [and] found its way also into most of the private libraries of the kingdom.”8 That same year, Clarkson himself, son of a headmaster at Wisbech in the Isle of Ely, a clever and determined graduate of Cambridge, then aged twenty-four, and intended for the Church (his prospects were brilliant, he himself recalled later), won a famous Latin essay prize at his university on the subject of whether it was lawful to make men slaves against their will. The subject (“Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare?”) had been chosen by the vice-chancellor, Dr. Peter Peckard, a Whig theologian who, in a recent sermon at Saint Mary’s Church, had talked of slavery as a crime. To prepare for the essay, Clarkson read Benezet’s Historical Account of Guinea and papers made available by a recently deceased slave trader whom he had known. Seeking to get the prize essay published in English, Clarkson went to London. On the way, at Wades Mill—near Ware, in Hertfordshire—he experienced a revelation: “If the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.” Clarkson took the essay to a Quaker bookshop run in London by James Phillips. Phillips (whose mother, Catherine, had preached the Quaker message throughout the unpromising territory of Carolina) published Clarkson’s work, as An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species; and he introduced Clarkson to many others (such as Dr. Ramsay; William Dillwyn, Benezet’s pupil; and Granville Sharp) who, from different perspectives, were determined to destroy slavery. Clarkson was surprised to learn of the work on the subject close to his heart which had been done by these men. With this meeting, inspired by a Quaker bookseller, of the disparate members of the abolitionist movement in London, the campaign against the commerce in slaves began in earnest. Clarkson determined to “devote myself to the cause,” even dropping his plans to enter the Church, after talking at length to Dr. Ramsay at Admiral Middleton’s dining table in Kent in the summer of 1786.9

  In 1787, a Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in London; Clarkson and his Quaker friends took the lead. Granville Sharp and Ramsay disagreed with the emphasis on the abolition of the trade: they wanted the campaign to deal with slavery too. But the younger, now more energetic, and dedicated Clarkson thought that an end to either the trade or to slavery would finish the other, and his ideas prevailed. He assumed that, if the trade were abolished, planters would immediately take care to look after the slaves well. The abolition of slavery itself would have threatened the institution of property and perhaps, if one remembered how the North American rebellion had begun over taxes, would risk the loss of the British West Indies. This decision was in keeping with the mood of the times; Charles James Fox would tell the House of Commons in 1806, “Slavery itself, odious as it is, is not nearly [so] bad a thing as the slave trade.”10 Further, it was thought open to question whether the British Parliament could legally act on the issue of slavery in the West Indian colonies, each of which had its independent legislature; but it could certainly act with regard to any branch of commerce. The journey of the slave in the trade was rightly seen as the part of his life where he suffered the most.

  In retrospect, this plan seems to have been flawed: if the principle of slavery was accepted, the idea of buying slaves could be made to seem logical.

  The establishment of Clarkson’s committee marked the transition of what had hitherto been the Quaker cause of abolition into a national, even an international, movement. The emblem of the campaign—skillfully made use of by the master potter Josiah Wedgwood, a committed supporter—was an inspired piece of propaganda, worthy of the Roman Church, or of a modern political party. It consisted of a picture of a chained Negro on bended knee with as legend the question: “Am I not a man and a brother?”

  Clarkson was the right man to inspire this movement. He had a nose for both the telling piece of information and for finding the right backing. Thus he gained support in all sorts of circumstances: from the socially influential dandy Benet Langton to the bishop of Chester. Through Ramsay, he had the support of Sir Charles Middleton, who had become Lord Barham and controller of the navy. As a result of the committee’s activity, letters poured in from all parts of the country. Deans and doctors, majors and great businessmen, tutors of colleges, bishops and squires, prebendaries and archdeacons, not to speak of backwoods members of Parlia
ment, such as William Smith of Sudbury, testified their interest.

  In May 1787, Clarkson, then aged twenty-seven, met the politician William Wilberforce, a year older than he and, on the urging of Lord Barham, and through the mediation of Benet Langton, asked him to assume the political leadership of the movement for abolition.

  Wilberforce, member of Parliament for Hull, where he had a property, was, like Clarkson, a Cambridge graduate, as was his equally young intimate friend, the prime minister, William Pitt.

  Wilberforce came from a mercantile family long settled in Hull. That city was not quite unknown as a port in the slave trade, but Wilberforce’s forebears were involved in Baltic commerce. Wilberforce himself was a well-educated and independent man, eloquent, charming, and rich. Madame de Staël once called him “the wittiest converser in England.” Most remarkable, he was as religious in temperament as he was socially successful. On a continental holiday in 1784-85, with a clever divine, Dr. Isaac Milner, president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, he had had a spiritual conversion, prompted by reading the nonconformist Philip Doddridge’s On the Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, one of those influential works whose contemporary success baffles a later age. In 1787, Wilberforce was already a leader of evangelical thought.

  Wilberforce had the advantage of a most agreeable voice, for which he was known as “the nightingale of the House of Commons.” He had read Ramsay’s pamphlets, had met the Reverend John Newton, knew Hannah More (the Bristol-born philanthropic playwright), and had concerned himself, if in a superficial way, with the question of slavery. After some hesitation, he agreed to lead the parliamentary side of the abolitionist movement, though not without having consulted Pitt who, with the best brain that has ever graced English politics, became equally convinced of the evil of the slave trade and the desirability of ending it speedily. (Clarkson thought that Wilberforce, before he talked to Pitt in February 1787, had “had but little knowledge of it.”) The critical conversation between the two—the statesman and the parliamentarian, old Cambridge friends, both young men still under thirty—was “at the root of an old tree at Holwood, just above the steep descent into the vale of Keston,” near Croydon. Many serene and pastoral scenes in England had been financed by the efforts of slaves on sugar plantations in the West Indies. Now a tranquil place would in return ultimately inspire a transformation in those islands.