The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Pitt’s support for the cause may need some explanation. Was it, as was argued by Dr. Eric Williams, that Britain’s economic interests were now concerned with the East, not the West, Indies? Could it be that the West Indies were in decline, after the American War of Independence? Those economic arguments neglect the fact that statesmen are as often influenced by idealism as by ambition. Nor were the West Indies in a poor condition: both imports to, and exports from, the British West Indies were increasing during the 1780s. The British Africa trade was also at its apogee. The British share of the European slave traffic was higher than ever, and many merchants were doing well. Then the portfolios of several outstanding opponents of abolition, such as Pitt’s dear friend Henry Dundas, as well as Alderman Newman, and William Devyanes, included shares in East, not West, Indies trade. All three, indeed, were directors of the East India Company, and the last-named became its chairman. Moral conviction was the determining element in the unusual chapter of British parliamentary history about to begin.

  When, on May 24, 1787, Clarkson, the heart and soul of the campaign for abolition, presented the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade with evidence on the unprofitability of the business, he used rational arguments: an end of the traffic would save the lives of seamen (he had obtained much detail from a scrutiny of Liverpool customs records), encourage cheap markets for the raw materials needed by industry, open new opportunities for British goods, eliminate a wasteful drain of capital, and inspire in the colonies a self-sustaining labor force, which in time would want to import more British produce.

  Clarkson set himself to gathering further information and spent the autumn of 1787 doing so. Though no one thought that the government would in the foreseeable future introduce a bill for the abolition of the trade, individual members, including officials, were (thanks to the help of Pitt) encouraging, and gave him access to invaluable state documents, including customs papers of the main ports. Clarkson went to Bristol. He described how, on coming within sight of the city, just as night was falling, with the bells of the city’s churches ringing, he “began now to tremble at the arduous task I had undertaken, of attempting to subvert one of the branches of the commerce of the great place which was then before me.” But his despondency lessened, and he entered the streets “with an undaunted spirit.”11 He inspected a slave ship, he talked to seamen, and he met Harry Gandy, a retired (and repentant) sailor who had been on a slave ship; but all retired captains avoided him as if he “had been a mad dog.” The deputy town clerk of Bristol obligingly told him, however, that “he only knew of one captain from the port in the slave trade who did not deserve to be hanged.” Clarkson followed up the case of the murder of a sailor, William Lines, by his own captain. From Quaker informants, Clarkson found evidence of the brutalities committed on a recently returning slaver, the Brothers, whose captain had tortured a free black sailor, John Dean. He received the testimony of a surgeon named Gardiner, about to sail to Africa on the ship Pilgrim. He talked to a surgeon’s mate who had been brutally used on board the slave ship Alfred; and he gained information at first hand of the terrible affair of the Calabar River in 1767.VI He also saw the inns where young men were made drunk, indebted, or both, and then lured to serve as sailors on slavers.

  Clarkson went to Liverpool, too. In contrast to his experience in Bristol, Ambrose Lace and Robert Norris, both retired slave captains, did talk to him; the former had commanded the Edgar at the massacre at Calabar twenty years before. Clarkson talked to slave merchants. He held a curious court in his inn, the King’s Arms, at which, by now well informed, he engaged in argument with practitioners of the trade. Here, too, he pursued a murder case: in this instance, the affair of the steward, Peter Green, a flute-player, who had been whipped to death by his captain in the Bonny River with a rope, for no good cause. Clarkson was once threatened with assault on the quay, but his foresight in hiring a retired slave-ship surgeon from Bristol, Alexander Falconbridge, as his assistant and bodyguard preserved him from death.

  The activities of these abolitionists secured an interest in France. The worthy Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville—the celebrated writer into whose hands the attackers of the Bastille would deliver the keys of that prison—and Etienne Clavière, who had much money at his disposal from speculation, announced their intention of establishing a society similar to that existing in England, even though, they explained, it might take some time. But Marshal Lafayette, then at the summit of his reputation, gave his support and suggested that a French committee should be formed there and then. Within months, the Société des Amis des Noirs was indeed set up; the enlightened aristocrats, the duke de La Rochefoucauld and the marquis de Condorcet, the traveler Volney, the chemist Lavoisier, and the two most famous radical priests, the Abbé Sieyès and Père Grégoire, all became members. The Swiss pastor of Lyons, Benjamin Frossard, echoing Adam Smith, wrote in a book, La Cause des esclaves nègres, published in 1789, that the slave produced less than the free man, “despite the whip.” But these men did little till visited by Clarkson.VII

  The consequence of Clarkson’s agitation in London was that, in February 1788, a committee of the Privy Council was set up to investigate the slave trade. To secure such a committee was a great victory, and Clarkson himself prepared the case for the abolitionists, working with both Pitt and Wilberforce. Some witnesses testified in favor of the trade, several describing at length the benefits to the Africans, while one witness even described the holds of slave ships as “redolent with frankincense.” To Clarkson’s astonishment, one of those whom he had interviewed extensively in Liverpool, and expected to speak on his behalf, the captain and merchant Robert Norris, testified in favor of the trade; no doubt he had been bribed to change his attitude. The main thrust of his argument was the same as had been used so often through the centuries: that the slave trade saved Africans from a worse fate in their own countries. Another witness—Samuel Taylor, one of the biggest Manchester cotton manufacturers—claimed that the value of the goods, principally cotton checks and other East Indian imitations, supplied by his city “for the purchase of Negroes only,” accounted for £180,000 and “employed immediately about 18,000 of His Majesty’s subjects. . . . This manufacture employs a capital of at least £300,000.” He added that about three-fourths of his own trade was in goods for Africa and, with the profits from it, he had “raised and supported a family of ten children.”12 Meantime, the Boston Gazette commented, a little prematurely: “The African trade is come into the House of Commons, it is, of course, to go as soon as come. For to those who make a comprehensive judgement on the subject, how is the argument for the abolition of the slave trade to be maintained?”13 Clarkson, for his part, devoted much attention to the sufferings of the crews on slave ships which, with a sure ear for politics, he believed would be the best argument to move the imagination of the members of both the House of Commons and the Lords.

  Simultaneously, the Committee for Abolition began further to arouse “the general moral feeling of the nation” by a wide distribution of pamphlets and books by Benezet, Clarkson, and Ramsay and a study of the slave trade by the Reverend John Newton, as well as the poems The Black Slave Trade by Hannah More, and Cowper’s The Negro’s Complaint. Local abolitionist committees were founded, innumerable high-minded men recruited, and remarkable journeys of inquiry carried out. This was the first major public campaign in any country for a philanthropic cause. That it coincided with celebrations of the centenary of the Glorious Revolution gave a happy sense of good timing.

  A proposal was made that a new African colony should be founded to receive some of the freed slaves to be seen in London. These constituted a serious concern, for the West Indian planters would not accept them: they thought that they would stimulate rebellion. Nova Scotia was tried out, but most of the slaves who had been sent there, because they had fought on the side of Britain during the American Revolution, hated the climate. A botanist, Dr. Henry Smeathman, who had spent three years on the isla
nds off the estuary of Sierra Leone, as the guest of Richard Oswald and his associates, proposed that the rivers there, with “their extraordinary temperature and salubrity of the climate,” rendered the place ideal for a colony of freed slaves. A year before, incongruously, he had pronounced the unsuitability of the place as a penal colony: the convicts would die, he thought, at the rate of a hundred a month.

  The discrepancy between these two judgments did not disturb Granville Sharp, the most enthusiastic friend of the idea of such a colony, who hoped to found a society free of the evils of a monetary economy. The government agreed to give support. In 1787, just as Clarkson was beginning his campaign, “the Sierra Leone plan” was, therefore, launched: the government gave £12 per African towards the cost of transport, a ship was chartered, the war sloop Nautilus was commissioned as a convoy and, on April 8, the first 290 free black men and forty-one black women, with seventy white women, including sixty prostitutes from London (women “of the lowest sort in ill health and of bad character”), left for Sierra Leone under the command of Captain Thomas Boulden Thompson of the Royal Navy.VIII A stretch of about nine or ten miles by twenty miles, “a fine tract of mountainous country covered with trees of all kinds” between the famous slaving rivers Sherbro and Sierra Leone, in the words of Sharp, was bought for about £60 in goods from the local overlord of the Bulom shore, a Temne chief known to the English as “Tom.” Here, in the expectation of the ever-idealistic Sharp, would be set up a “free settlement,” where “the ancient English frankpledge”IX would be the basis of all regulation. There would be nothing so imperial as a governor: the ruler would be selected by free vote.

  Adam Smith had insisted that freemen would work better than slaves. But he was confounded, for malaria, drink, idleness, war with the local Africans, and above all rain ruined this high-minded enterprise. Half the settlers died in the first year. Frankpledge or no, settlers deserted and, worst of all, some went to work for nearby slave dealers. Agriculture did not flourish. From London, Sharp wrote to the settlers: “I could not have conceived that men who were well aware of the wickedness of slave dealing, and had themselves been sufferers (or at least many of them) under the galling yoke of bondage to slave-holders . . . should become so basely depraved as to yield themselves instruments to promote, and extend, the same detestable oppression over their brethren.”14 Even Henry Demane, one of the Africans whom Sharp had rescued from slavery by sending a writ of habeas corpus to a vessel already under sail from Portsmouth to Jamaica, became a dealer in slaves.

  Worse was to follow. Voltaire, not Burke, would have felt justified. Encouraged by slave traders, who resented the new settlement, King Tom’s successor, “King Jemmy,” gave the settlers three days to leave their town, and then burned down the place (the quarrel occurred because an American slave captain had kidnapped a number of Temnes). The colonists fled and re-established themselves at a new “Granville Town.” A Sierra Leone Company was founded, the directors being leading abolitionists (such as the benign host of the “Clapham Sect,” Henry Thornton, and Wilberforce, Admiral Sir George Young, and Clarkson, as well as Sharp). Over a thousand of the blacks who had been quartered in Nova Scotia went out to Sierra Leone in 1792, with another hundred white people, under the leadership of Lieutenant John Clarkson, a brother of the philanthropist.

  Sierra Leone now ceased to be a “province of Freedom” and became a colony under a governor, even if one appointed by Sharp’s committee. Of course, the personality of this official counted for everything. The first to be named was William Dawes, who had been a subaltern of marines at Botany Bay—an experience which suggested somewhat gloomy conclusions for the “hundredors and tithingmen” who, by Granville Sharp’s inspiration still constituted the free society of the frankpledge. But matters changed for the better when, in 1794, Zachary Macaulay—the pompous yet effective and humane son of the minister at Inverary, Argyll, a bookkeeper when young, afterwards a manager on a sugar estate in Jamaica—took command in Sierra Leone, which he enthusiastically reported to be “a more agreeable Montpellier.” His feelings for the sufferings of slaves had been awoken in Jamaica and, on his return across the Atlantic, without humor, taste, or a moment’s relaxation, he devoted the rest of his life to seeking to ameliorate their conditions. But very difficult times continued in Sierra Leone; and, in 1794, a French flotilla, guided by a New York slave trader, Captain Newell, bombarded, then pillaged, the city of Freetown, despite the protest by Macaulay that it was a humanitarian colony. He received the reply: “Citoyen, cela peut bien être, mais encore vous êtes anglais.”15

  Zachary Macaulay was a successful governor. He rebuilt the place after the French onslaught, and surrounded himself with interesting men, such as the Swedish botanist Adam Afzelius; the missionary Jacob Grigg, who came to Africa in order to convert the heathen to Christ but died as a slave trader; and John Tilley, who managed a nearby slave factory yet worked with Macaulay as a patriot in times of war. A botanical garden was established, on the initiative of Sir Joseph Banks, in collaboration with the director of the newly founded one in Kew Gardens.

  After Macaulay left in 1799, the thriving community which he had built up declined. In 1800, the colony was saved from chaos only by the arrival of a contingent of 550 Jamaican blacks (Maroons), whose ancestors had taken to the hills after the British capture of Jamaica in 1655, and whose independence had long been recognized informally by British governors on the condition that they returned runaway slaves.

  Sierra Leone became a full dependency of the Crown in 1808. The Reverend Sydney Smith, the curate of the Whigs, would say later that this colony had always two governors—one who had just arrived and one who had just returned—for the death rate was notable.

  • • •

  The same year that Clarkson met Wilberforce and Pitt in England, 1787, the new Constitution was signed in the United States, and then adopted, with its odd circumlocutions on the issue of slavery as well as the slave trade.

  This famous document delayed a discussion in the new republic on the principle of the slave trade for twenty years. It provided—in article I, section 9—that the “Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year 1808, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.” That provision, of course, was intended to apply to slaves as well as immigrants.

  The wording meant, on the one hand, that the slave trade received a federal lease of life for twenty years; but, on the other, it did mean that the matter had to be discussed. Many of those who supported the compromise spoke, like James Iredell (author of the famous “Marcus” letters, in favor of the Constitution), of the slave trade as something “which has already continued too long for the honour and humanity of those concerned in it.” (Iredell was the English-born nephew of a merchant of Bristol.) James Wilson, a Scotch-born delegate from Pennsylvania, one of the most influential members of the Constitutional Convention, pointed out that the clause would allow the United States Congress to prohibit the slave trade after 1808. George Lee Turberville, a Virginian planter and friend of Washington, in a private letter to Madison, did refer to the trade at this time as “another great evil”; while Luther Martin of Baltimore thought it absurd that the United States should permit states to continue to carry on “the only branch of commerce which is unjustifiable in its nature and contrary to the rights of mankind.”16

  The compromise on slavery occurred because the delegates as a whole, and especially the leaders, agreed with Roger Sherman of Connecticut, the most experienced of those present, who made the simple observation that it was “better to let the southern states import slaves than to part with those states.” The “morality and wisdom” of slavery, declared another delegate from Connecticut, Oliver Ellsworth, a future chief justice of the Supreme Court, “are considerations belonging to the states themselves.” Let every state “import what it pleases,” he
continued. The leaders of South Carolina and Georgia had made it evident before that they “would not perhaps otherwise have agreed to the new Constitution.”17

  In addition, as had become clear in the “special committee,” with one member from each of the thirteen states, the Northern states were “very willing to indulge the Southern ones at least with a temporary liberty to prosecute the slave trade, provided that they would in their turn gratify them, by laying no restriction on the navigation acts.” Finally, the states which were interested in a continuation of the slave trade were united, whereas the friends of liberty were divided. At that time, the latter were “animated by no very strong and decided anti-slavery spirit with settled aims,” whereas the delegates from Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, as well as those from South Carolina and Georgia, were quite opposed to the inclusion of any philanthropic sentiment in the matter of the slave trade in the Constitution, even though Virginia and Maryland had closed their ports to slaves from Africa in 1778 and 1783 respectively, North Carolina had done the same in 1786, and South Carolina had done so, as an experiment, in 1787.