by Hugh Thomas
Sir William Dolben, the much-respected if aged MP for Oxford University, had, meantime, visited a ship in the Thames which had been used for carrying slaves. No captives were there, but he could see the “equipment.” He saw that, “when the slaves were transported, they were chained to each other hand and foot, and stowed . . . like herrings in a barrel.” Appalled by the evidence, Dolben, a high-minded Anglican, introduced into the House of Commons a bill restricting their number by tonnage of the carrier. The Portuguese, after all, had had such restrictions for a hundred years, as he no doubt knew from a mention in the Report of the Privy Council commissioned in 1788 of that fact. Dolben was powerfully supported by Henry Beaufoy, member for Yarmouth, who came from a Quaker family, though he was by then an Anglican. Bamber Gascoyne attacked the idea of restriction, and he was supported by a fellow member for Liverpool, Lord Penrhyn, as well as by one of the two members for Bristol, Matthew Brickdale, a clothier and undertaker, and by the member for Dorchester, William Ewer, an ex-governor of the Bank of England.XV All thought that to insist that ships carry anything less than two men per ton would ruin the trade. Penrhyn denied that cruelty even existed. It was absurd to think that “men whose profit depended on the health . . . of the African natives would purposely torment and distress them during their voyage.”29
During the hearing of evidence at the bar of the House of Commons, witnesses from Liverpool did all they could to discredit the bill, suggesting not only that the existing mode of transport was suitable for the Middle Passage, but even that the voyage to the West Indies from Africa, with so much merrymaking on the deck, was “one of the happiest periods of a Negro’s life.” Dolben’s bill was carried in the Commons, however, with Pitt making a statement that he considered the slave trade an iniquity; but the House of Lords amended it severely, after receiving many petitions from slaving interests.
In the course of these debates, some curious statements in favor of the slave trade were heard. The great Admiral Lord Rodney (master of a devoted black servant, who had long attended him) said that, in all his victorious years in the West Indies, he had seen no evidence to show that the Africans were treated with brutality. Africans on ships complained more frequently of cold than of heat, Rodney thought. He added that “he should rejoice exceedingly” if he heard that the English laborers were “half so happy as the West Indian slaves”: a statement which led Lord Townshend to suggest ironically that Parliament should set about putting “the English yeoman on a footing with the West Indian negro slave.” A general, Lord Heathfield, the defender of Gibraltar in the late war, said that the bill was unnecessary, since his soldiers had been allowed seventeen cubic feet of air in tents, whereas African slaves had thirty in their ships. Lord Thurlow, the lord chancellor, then made a speech which left the impression—or so it seemed to Clarkson—of “taking the cause of the slave merchants conspicuously under his wing.” Lord Sandwich, who had been First Lord of the Admiralty, also said that he did not think that one slave the less would be carried across the Atlantic were the British to abolish the trade.
The bill passed the House of Commons thereafter, in its amended form, by 56 to 5, and the House of Lords (thanks to Pitt’s intervention, in the background) by 14 to 12, though not before the duke of Chandos, who may have had the same financial interests in slaving as his grandfather, had asserted that, when the slaves (who, he thought, must read the English newspapers avidly) heard of the measures taken to ameliorate the conditions of the Middle Passage, “they would burst out into open rebellion” leading to a “massacre of the whites.”30
In the debate in the House of Lords, Thurlow, disgusted by Pitt’s attitude, sneered at “a five days’ fit of philanthropy which had sprung up.” The remark was misleading, not least because the slave trade had begun to obsess public opinion. The extent to which the anti-slavery committee, through its Quaker connections, had awoken opinion was astonishing. The abolitionist movement in Liverpool even held meetings. Two-thirds of Manchester’s male population signed a petition demanding an end to the slave trade. Another hundred towns followed. The Reverend, and ex-Captain, John Newton published his Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade with success. In March 1788, John Wesley delivered another famous sermon in the New Rooms at Bristol on the immorality of slavery: an oration interrupted by an inexplicable shaking of the building, surely a sign of divine wrath, it was supposed, which stopped the proceedings for six minutes. That same year, the painter George Morland exhibited The Slave Trade (also called The Execrable Traffic), the first depiction of the commerce in visual form, at the Royal Academy; its sentimental picture of weeping Africans saying goodbye to their families brought tears to many fashionable eyes.
All the same, opposition to reform was also organizing itself. In Liverpool the town council paid a hundred pounds to a local Spanish resident, the sometime Jesuit “Raymond Harris,” really Raimundo Hormoza, for his curious pamphlet Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave Trade. John Tarleton, member of Parliament for Seaford, from a family of Liverpool slaving merchants, who failed to convince Pitt in a conversation of the merits of his views, wrote to Lord Hawkesbury, to reemphasize his and his friends’ unaltered support of the traffic, though he cheerfully added that his own firm would engross the largest share of trade even under Dolben’s conditions. (Tarleton himself, with his partner David Backhouse, invested in thirty-nine Liverpool ships between 1786 and 1804, of which half were slavers.)
The Privy Council’s committee of inquiry, meantime, had made progress. Captain Perry, of the Royal Navy, visited Liverpool on behalf of the committee and looked at several ships, including the Brookes, whose master was Clement Noble; this vessel—of 297 tons, and capable of carrying 609 slaves—belonged to its builder, James Brookes. (It may be recalled how Noble had armed some of his slaves to fight the French off Barbados in the late war.) Perry sent his description of it to Clarkson, who had a meticulous sketch made of how the slaves, during the Atlantic crossing, were fitted into their places at night, as if they were sardines in a tin. The diagram was much used. A rising young clergyman, Thomas Burgess, compared the design to Dante’s Inferno. The picture inspired William Grenville, later prime minister, a cousin of Pitt’s, to say: “In the passage of the negroes from the coast of Africa, there is a greater portion of human misery condensed within a smaller place than has ever yet been found in any other place on the face of this globe.” Many years later, Wilberforce caused the sketch to be shown to Pope Pius VII, who was also much affected. The fact that the design was slightly erroneous, since it omitted the space needed for gaining access to the slaves in order to feed them or to remove the dead, was irrelevant to the impact it made.
In fact, the passage of Dolben’s act had a decisive effect on the British slave trade, for it reduced the slaves-per-ton ratio. This, and the subsequent bonuses offered to captains and surgeons who reported a modest loss of life had a benign effect. It did not mean, however, that fewer ships participated in the trade. On the contrary, the new law led to an increase in the number. But each English ship now carried a smaller number of slaves than French ships did.XVI
The idea of the abolition of slavery or of the slave trade was still confined to the European and American nations. There were at least 4,000 slaves in Egypt, and a minimum of a hundred new ones were imported every year, but no one yet thought that their plight could be mitigated by Quaker philanthropy. The same was true of the three or four thousand slaves imported annually into Tunis from Timbuktu across the Sahara in these years (they came, the British consul-general in Tangier reported, largely from Bambara on the middle Niger, where the king would still “give from twelve to twenty eunuchs for a horse”). The slave trade to Tripoli was also prospering. Hiring French, occasionally Venetian, and sometimes English ships, the traders sold extensively to Chios and Smyrna, to Constantinople, and even to Athens, Salonika, and the Morea. We should suppose an average annual sale of these slaves, originating in Fezzan, of two thousand in the 1790s, each fetchi
ng seventy sequins—with eunuchs selling best. Indeed, the evidence is that the slave trade to North Africa increased in these years, since prices began to fall in West Africa at the end of the century. Slaves from sub-Saharan Africa were found in Morocco tending date palms, mining salt, and looking after camels. The East Africa slave trade was also growing. It used to be thought that the coming of Mehmet Ali to Egypt after Napoleon’s invasion of that country was a stimulus to the slave trade there; but there was a rise in imports before Napoleon arrived. When Jeremy Bentham sailed from Izmir to Constantinople in 1785 he reported that “our crew consists of 15 men besides the captain . . . beside 18 young negresses (slaves) under the hatches.”31 The pioneer of philosophical radicalism did not seem in any way surprised.
* * *
IHe had also, as early as 1729, published a pamphlet by Ralph Sandiford, the early Quaker opponent of slavery.
IIGregson, mayor in 1762, was for long one of the most prominent men in his city; he was a member of the council from 1760 till 1800, and he held the corporation account in his bank. His partner, George Case, also his son-in-law, was a member of the council for fifty-seven years, and mayor in 1781.
IIIThe tragedy of the Zong influenced Turner in 1840 to embark on his most impassioned painting. Perhaps he learned of the event in his father’s barbershop in Maiden Lane. (He was, after all, seven years old in 1783.) The painting, Slave Ship, now hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
IVThe society was at that time firm in its support for slavery. When Anthony Benezet wrote to them asking them to abandon slavery, he received the answer, “Though the Society is fully satisfied that your intention in this matter is perfectly good, yet they most earnestly beg you not to go further in publishing your notions, but rather to retract them. . . .”
VThe members of the committee were William Dillwyn, George Harrison, Samuel Hoare, Thomas Knowles, John Lloyd, and Joseph Woods (author of a famous pamphlet, Thoughts on the Slavery of the Negroes).
VISee page 405.
VIIClarkson’s visit to Paris is discussed on page 320 ff.
VIIICaptain Thompson was later made a baronet, fought at the Nile and Copenhagen, where he lost a leg, and became controller of the navy.
IXA system of law in which all members of a community take responsibility for the achievements of, or the damage caused by, the others.
XRush had been converted to the cause of abolition in the 1770s by Benezet, and published two pamphlets on the matter before the War of Independence.
XIMeantime, Moses Brown himself was interested in new things: in 1789, he agreed to finance Samuel Slater of England, who had worked with Jedediah Strutt, a partner of the great Arkwright, to set up a water mill to make cotton textiles. Thus began the industrial revolution in Rhode Island.
XIIGascoyne’s mother was Mary, daughter of Isaac Green of Childwall Abbey. His father, another Bamber Gascoyne, had been an MP most of his life and was himself son of Sir Crisp Gascoyne, a London brewer. Gascoyne’s daughter, Frances, married the second Marquis of Salisbury, who took the additional name of Gascoyne, in view of the fortune which thereby passed. As a result, Bamber Gascoyne was grandfather of the Lord Salisbury who became prime minister in the 1880s.
XIII Pitt’s most recent biographer, John Ehrman, suggests that the prime minister did try to secure abolition’s presentation as a government measure in 1800, but failed to carry the idea through.
XIVProfessor J. A. Rawley has argued that Pitt’s conduct might be explained by his government’s purchase of over thirteen thousand slaves, from Africa as well as from the Caribbean, to make up for a shortage of men in its West Indian regiments between 1795 and 1807. That could have been so, though had it been, it would surely have been noticed explicitly, or Pitt would have mentioned it to George Canning, or one of his other younger followers. Further, the crucial year was 1791, not 1795. John Ehrman, in a personal letter to the author, thought that Pitt did not owe anything much to the king in 1791.
XVPenrhyn (it was an Irish title, if a Welsh place) was Richard Pennant, son of another Richard Pennant of Penrhyn Hall, a merchant of Liverpool, and grandson of Edward Pennant, chief justice of Jamaica, and Bonella, daughter of Joseph Hodges, also of Jamaica. Lord Penrhyn was also known for his road-building in North Wales.
XVIThe act provided that vessels should only carry five slaves per registered ton of shipping up to 201 tons and one slave only for every ton beyond that; every slaver had to carry a surgeon, who was to keep a register of slaves shipped; and a premium of £100 was to be paid to the master and £350 to the surgeon on each vessel whose cargo showed a loss of less than 2 percent; half were to be paid if the mortality was between 2 and 3 percent.
26
Men in Africa of As Fine Feelings As Ourselves
“Why, might there not be men in Africa of as fine feelings as ourselves, of as enlarged understandings, and as manly in their minds as any of us?”
Charles James Fox, in the House of Commons, April 1791
IN 1789, JUST BEFORE THE FALL of the Bastille transformed the political history of the world, debates on slavery and the slave trade were held in the legislatures of both the United States and Britain, ex-enemies whose interest in both the slave trade and in abolition was coincidentally stronger than anywhere else. The two debates by chance began within one day of each other but, given the slowness of communication, neither paid attention to the other.
The first and most important of these debates, taking into account the level of participation in the traffic, was that in the House of Commons to discuss the report of the Privy Council on the subject of the slave trade. Those who had read that admirable two-volume document, with its wealth of detail, its muster rolls of sailors, its statistics, and its testimony from participants, gained an intimate knowledge of how slaves were obtained in Africa, how they were transported to the Americas, and how they were treated there. Much of the information in the report was the consequence of the inquiries of the tireless Clarkson, who never allowed inconvenience to interrupt his pursuit of truth. No scholar in search of an explanation of the Maya glyphs, no explorer of the source of the Nile, has devoted more trouble than he to a great cause: “O Man!” he once allowed himself to reflect. “How often, in these solitary journeyings, have I exclaimed against the baseness of thy nature, when reflecting on the little paltry considerations which have smothered thy benevolence, and hindered thee from succouring an oppressed brother.”1 By that time, though, Clarkson was far from solitary, for he was the captain of a great army of philanthropists, the largest until that date ever to have been gathered to voluntary service in a great cause.
The debate in the House of Commons was introduced on May 12 by Wilberforce, in a fine speech lasting three and a half hours which set out to show how all the evidence gathered supported the case against the trade. We should imagine him, small in build, rising from the front bench of the chamber, the daylight coming in from the west window. Wilberforce began by declaring that, if guilt existed for the slave trade, all the people listening to him “were all of them participators in it.” He did not argue against slavery as such but suggested that the abolition of the trade would lead to planters being forced to treat their slaves better. It was nonsense that the slave trade was the nursery of the navy, as Lord Rodney had insisted during discussion of Dolben’s bill; rather, it was the grave. The orator dwelt at length on the middle passage: “So much misery condensed in so little room was more than human imagination had ever before conceived. Think only of six hundred persons linked together, trying to get rid of each other, crammed in a close vessel with every object that was nauseous and disgusting, and struggling with all the varieties of wretchedness . . . yet . . . this transportation had been described by several witnesses from Liverpool to be a comfortable conveyance.” Wilberforce made fun of the way in which some witnesses who had spoken in favor of slavery had depicted the crossing. Could it really be true that, when sailors had to be flogged, that punishment was administered out of t
he hearing of the Africans, lest it should depress their spirits? Was it usual for the “apartments” where the slaves slept to be “perfumed after breakfast with incense”? Wilberforce thought that France would soon follow Britain in abolishing the trade, so any suggestion that, after abolition, that country would take up the British trade was nonsensical.
But there was opposition: from members who again exhibited all the prejudice, and expressed all the received opinions, which had grown up over generations. Bamber Gascoyne even said that he was “persuaded that the slave trade might be made a much greater source of revenue and riches . . . than it was at present.” His fellow member for Liverpool, Lord Penrhyn, said that, were the Commons to vote for abolition, “they actually would strike at seventy millions of property, they ruined the colonies and, by destroying an essential nursery of seamen, gave up the dominion of the sea at a single stroke.” The members of Parliament for London also strongly opposed abolition, a reminder that the capital still had a substantial stake in slaving. For example, Alderman Newman, a banker and sugar grocer, grotesquely said that, if the trade were to be abolished, the City would be filled with men suffering as much as the poor Africans. Alderman Sawbridge, a stalwart of metropolitan radicalism in his youth, opposed Wilberforce on the ground that abolition would not serve Africans: “If they could not be sold as slaves, they would be butchered and executed at home.” George Dempster, member for the Scottish seat of Perth Burghs, insisted (despite his friendship with Scottish liberals such as Hume and Adam Ferguson) that neither Wilberforce nor Pitt nor anyone else who did not own plantations had any right to interfere with the interests of those who did. John Drake, member for Amersham, thought that abolition would be “very prejudicial” to the interests of the nation. Crisp Molineux, a West Indian planter, and member for Garboldisham, thought that his fellow entrepreneurs were really the greatest slaves—to their high responsibilities. If abolition became law, he thought, all sensible merchants would go to France, where they would be well received.I John Henniker, member for New Romney, read out in the House of Commons a long letter from the ruthless but effective King Agaja of Dahomey to the first duke of Chandos, which showed, to his satisfaction at least, that, “if we did not take the slaves off their hands, the miserable wretches would suffer still more severely.” He concluded with a quotation from Cicero.