Despard’s interest in comparative religion would have offended William Hamilton Reid, who in 1800 wrote The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis, a work of heresiography comparable to Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena of 1646. Worried about plebeian clubs of atheists and deists, as well as millenarians and antinomians, Reid sounded the alarm, “This hydra had too many heads to be crushed at once.” The ideas of these heterodox thinkers of Reid’s nightmares went back to the English Revolution a century and a half earlier: they discredited established church authority; they made the human form divine (“The whole godhead is circumscribed in the person of Jesus Christ,” as Muggleton put it); and they did not respect persons, allowing apprentices to preach in the 1790s as in the 1640s. The theological sign of seventeenth-century antinomianism was the “everlasting gospel,” which was defined this way: “That by Christ’s death, all the sins of all men in the world, Turks, Pagans, as well as Christians committed against the moral Law and the first covenant, are actually pardoned and forgiven, and this is the everlasting gospel.”80 African American refugees preached this “everlasting gospel” in London after 1783. One such was John Jea, a sea-cook and preacher from Old Calabar (1773), who married an Irishwoman and spread the word in New York, Cork, Liverpool, and Manchester. Richard Brothers prophesied in 1794, “All shall be as one people . . . The Christian, the Turk, and the Pagan.” William Blake wrote in his Songs of Innocence (1789):
And all must love the human form
In heathen, turk, or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
Blake had participated in the Gordon Riots in 1780, when Newgate was besieged under the leadership of former American slaves, and he knew Ottobah Cugoano, a London servant originally from the Gold Coast who had slaved in Grenada.
Cugoano was an abolitionist, an experienced preacher and writer, a powerful voice of freedom, and a devout believer in the “everlasting gospel.” Written in the copious style of prophetic condemnation, his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787 and 1791) referred to the many shades of the rainbow, rather than to different human races. Cugoano welcomed the “world turned upside down”; he defended American Indians; he opposed the expansion of the death penalty; he insisted that Africans were as “free-born” as English; he repeatedly referred to his “fellow creatures.” He believed that avarice, stock-jobbing, and private property tended to slavery. Further, he preached that “church signifies an assembly of people; but a building of wood, brick or stone, where the people meet together, is generally called so; and should the people be frightened away by the many abominable dead carcases which they meet with, they should follow the multitudes to the fields, to the vallies, to the mountains, to the islands, to the rivers, and to the ships.”81 Despard followed the people to exactly these places, and after he planned the “godlike change” he anticipated in his last speech, the people followed him to the gallows atop Horsemonger Lane Gaol. This was their conception of “church,” appropriate to their conception of the “human race.”
Despard’s idea of the human race took much of its power from its opposition to a contrary conception of race that had emerged in the 1790s. The Orange Order had been formed in Ireland as a terrorist church-and-king mob, creating religious bigotry. Dundas had organized massive expeditions to the West Indies between 1795 and 1797 to protect and secure British interests in slavery; he had succeeded in these goals, as “commerce, finance, and seapower . . . were triumphantly secured,” but only at the price of one hundred thousand British casualties.82 The expeditions thus touched, directly or indirectly, a high proportion of the population of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as for every casualty, grieving relations or friends might pause to wonder what purpose his death had served. John Reeves, head of the Alien Office and of the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, used the experience to impart lessons of racism,83 while Hannah More’s “cheap repository tracts” taught condescension, dumbing down, and racial stereotypes:84
TOM: Pooh! I want freedom and happiness the same as they have got it in France.
JACK: What, Tom, we imitate them? . . . Why, I’d sooner go to the Negers to get learning, or to the Turks to get religion, than to the French for freedom and happiness.
The Association in Saint Anne’s Parish (Westminster) kept in 1794 a house-to-house register that noted the “complexion, age, employment, &c. of lodgers and strangers.” Elizabeth Hamilton wrote in her novel Memoirs of a Modern Philosopher (1800) that radicals believed that new, unthought-of revolutionary energies belonged to the Hottentots.
After each major uprising, the racist doctrine of white supremacy took another step in its insidious evolution. After Tacky’s Revolt (1760), Edward Long lavished pages of attention in his History of Jamaica (1774) to what Joan Dayan calls “surreal precision in human reduction.”85 After the American Revolution, Samuel Smith helped to reconfigure racism in An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure of the Human Species (1787). Racial investigations were conducted with scientific pretension, and human beings analyzed by logic-chopping speciation, classification, and racialization. In April 1794, a Manchester physician named Charles White, who had heard John Hunter lecture on the differential mortality rates of the St. Johns expedition, measured various body parts of Africans at the Liverpool lunatic hospital. He then examined the breasts of twenty women at the Manchester lying-in hospital, conjoining lascivious expression with racial superiority.86 White gave the doctrine of white supremacy “scientific” legitimacy in a lecture of his own in 1795, wherein he concluded that black people belonged to a different gradation of the human race.
From Price’s celebrated sermon of 1790 affirming the right to cashier governors, to Edmund Burke’s powerful rhetorical riposte in his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1791 (in which he labeled the people a “swinish multitude”), to Tom Paine’s equally rhetorical, if plainer, Rights of Man, public debate seemed to be largely “an English agitation . . . for an English democracy,” as E. P. Thompson emphasized. It seemed to remain so as it was developed further in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Thelwall’s The Rights of Nature (1796), and Spence’s The Rights of Infants (1796). Yet there were also other important voices. Wolfe Tone published An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland in 1791; Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative first appeared in 1789 and went through nine English editions over the next five years; and C. F. Volney’s The Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires became available in English and Welsh translations in 1792. What was most vigorous in the debate did not come from any single national experience, English or otherwise. Much came from outsiders, and in this Edward and Catherine Despard were not alone in the cosmopolitan shaping of revolutionary ideals. In 1789 Joseph Brand, the Iroquois leader, provided Edward Fitzgerald, the Irish patriot, with a lesson in the brotherhood of man as they journeyed together through the forests of the Great Lakes; Fitzgerald had served in the West Indies after the Battle of Eutaw Springs (1780), in which his life had been saved by an African American named Tony Small. John Oswald (1760–1793) wrote for the Universal Patriot. At Joanna Isle in the Mozambique Passage, an Abyssinian oracle informed him that “Englishman, Joannaman, were all one brother.”87 In 1791, as a result of a spiritual experience that she expressed as “Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone,” Jemima Wilkinson changed her name to “Universal Friend.” On Seneca Lake in 1791 at a gathering of the Council of the Iroquois Six Nations, she preached on “Hath Not God Created Us All?” Questions on one side of the Atlantic raised very similar questions on the other. “Which Character is the most truly amiable, the FRIEND—the PATRIOT—or, the CITIZEN OF THE WORLD?” debated the speakers at Coachmakers Hall in 1790.88 The Despards helped to advance a “universalism” from below.
Other contributors included Lord Geo
rge Gordon, who discussed slavery as a midshipman in 1772 with the governor of Jamaica. Joseph Gerrard, the Scottish delegate to the convention of 1792 and himself a political prisoner, was born in St. Christopher, the son of an Irish planter. The great barrister Thomas Erskine had danced with Negro slaves and English seamen as a sailor in the West Indies.89 In Portland, Maine, in 1790, a Bristol sailor was hanged in the first capital punishment carried out by the federal government of the United States of America. He had been found guilty of assisting a mutiny aboard a slave ship off the coast of West Africa. Richard Brothers, the contemporary of Despard and Blake, was twelve years with the navy as a midshipman, off the coast of Africa and in the West Indies, before resigning his commission in “Disgust!” because, as he was to tell the workhouse board that would incarcerate him, “I could not conscientiously receive the wages of Plunder, Bloodshed, and Murder!” He prophesied that London would be destroyed by an earthquake on the king’s birthday, June 4, 1795. The king clapped him in an Islington madhouse, where he spent the rest of his life. Despard was executed in February, Toussaint L’Ouverture died in an Alpine dungeon a few months later, and Robert Emmet “ran his race” in September, asking us to wait before writing his epitaph. These men were peaks of the Atlantic mountains, whose “principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice” belonged to a single range. When the ideal was corrupted and the insurgents were defeated, the vanquished again fled; the beautiful pamphlet was stowed in someone’s sea chest; the fighting hymns got anodyne words; the incendiary gesture appeared only eccentric elsewhere. The revolution moved on. What was left behind was national and partial: the English working class, the black Haitian, the Irish diaspora. Edward and Catherine Despard’s conspiracy for the human race thus temporarily failed.
CHAPTER NINE
Robert Wedderburn and Atlantic Jubilee
ROBERT WEDDERBURN was born in Jamaica in 1762, just after Tacky’s Revolt, to an enslaved woman named Rosanna and a slavemaster named James Wedderburn, a doctor whose estates in Westmoreland (Mint, Paradise, Retreat, Endeavor, Inverness, Spring Garden, Moreland, and Mount Edgcombe) were worth precisely £302, 628 14s. 8d. at his death.1 His father “insulted, abused and abandoned” his mother, as Wedderburn wrote in his autobiography. “I have seen my poor mother stretched on the ground, tied hands and feet, and flogged in the most indecent manner though pregnant at the same time!!! her fault being the not acquainting her mistress that her master had given her leave to go to see her mother in town!”2 When his father sold his mother in 1766, Robert was sent to Kingston to live under the care of his maternal grandmother, who worked on the waterfront selling cheese, checks, chintz, milk, and gingerbread and smuggling goods for her owner. Wedderburn would later recall, “No woman was perhaps better known in Kingston than my grandmother, by the name of ‘Talkee Amy.’” When Wedderburn was eleven, he watched in horror as the seventy-year-old woman was flogged almost to death. Her master had died after he and one of his ships, smuggling mahogany, had been captured by the Spanish in 1773. Before the voyage, he had liberated five of his slaves, but not Talkee Amy; his nephew (and heir), convinced that she had bewitched the vessel, punished her savagely in revenge.
What Wedderburn witnessed was discipline typical of the era. The factory overlooker carried a stick. The plantation overseer brandished a whip. Schoolmasters and parents wielded the birch against children. The master and boatswain used the cat or the rattan cane on sailors; indeed, to be whipped around the fleet was a pageant of cruelty. Soldiers were flogged by officers, drummers, and sometimes even other soldiers. The triangle (a tripod composed of three halberds upon which the person to be flogged was bound) was notorious as a means of imperialist repression in Ireland. Disciplinary violence was carefully studied: a surgeon in the British army, whose duty it was to keep torture victims alive, published seventy pages on the subject in 1794.3 In Haiti, meanwhile, a manual on the theory and practice of female flagellation appeared in 1804.4 Cutting, bruising, penetrating, tying, squeezing, holding, and lacerating were all techniques applied by the powerful in the formation of labor power. When William Cobbett complained about the five hundred lashes administered to soldiers protesting for bread (“Five hundred lashes each! Aye, that is right! Flog them, flog them; flog them!” Cobbett cried), he was imprisoned in Newgate.5
The terror visited upon his mother and upon Talkee Amy would stay with Wedderburn for the rest of his life.6 At the age of seventeen (in 1778), Wedderburn joined the Royal Navy during the American Revolution. He took part in the Gordon Riots of 1780, led by the African Americans Benjamin Bowsey and John Glover. Years later, in 1797, he would be connected to the naval mutiny at the Nore.7 Between these two events, Wedderburn, along with thousands of other workers, joined the Methodist Church.8 In the early years of the nineteenth century he would meet Thomas Spence and, with other veterans of the London Corresponding Society, enlarge Spence’s circle of revolutionists. He also knew the struggles of poor craftsmen: though he had acquired the skills of the tailor, these were dishonored by the prohibition against trade-union activity in the Combination Act (1799), and would be sweated by the repeal of the apprenticeship clauses in the Elizabethan Statue of Artificers (1814). He did time in Cold Bath Fields, Dorchester, and Giltspur Street Prisons for theft, blasphemy, and keeping a bawdy house. He saw many of his comrades hanged, and he himself lived much of his life as “though a halter be about my neck.”9 Wedderburn thus knew the plantation, the ship, the streets, the chapel, the political club, the workshop, and the prison as settings of proletarian self-activity.
Wedderburn has been a neglected figure in historical studies, or at best a misfit. He has not seemed a proper subject for either labor history or black history. In the former field he appears, if at all, as a criminal and pornographic character, and in the latter, as a tricky and foolish one.10 In contrast to such views, we argue that Wedderburn was in fact a strategically central actor in the formation and dissemination of revolutionary traditions, an intellectual organic to the Atlantic proletariat. We shall explore his major notion for freedom, the biblical jubilee, in the context of a remarkable correspondence he carried on with his half-sister Elizabeth Campbell, a Jamaican maroon. We shall also consider his understanding of history and his analysis of the people and forces that would, in his view, make a transatlantic revolution. We shall see how Wedderburn overcame the dualities of religion and secularism by synthesizing radical Christianity and Painite republicanism, combining both with a proletarian abolitionism. Wedderburn continued the liberation theology that had originated in the English Revolution, then spread west to the plantation and African America, and finally returned to London in the 1780s and 1790s.
Robert Wedderburn. Robert Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery (1824).
JUBILEE
One of Wedderburn’s main ideas lay in the biblical tradition of jubilee, which represented an attempt to solve the problems of poverty, slavery, the factory, and the plantation. A plan for liberation, jubilee appeared both in the Old Testament, as a legal practice of land redistribution, and in the New Testament, as part of the fulfillment of a prophecy in Isaiah. The concept comprised six elements. First, jubilee happened every fifty years. Second, it restored land to its original owners. Third, it canceled debt. Fourth, it freed slaves and bond servants. Fifth, it was a year of fallow. Sixth, it was a year of no work.
In writing about jubilee in his correspondence with Elizabeth Campbell, Wedderburn joined a wide-ranging debate. George III was to organize a royalist jubilee for himself, marking the fiftieth anniversary of his reign, that would have nothing to do with debt forgiveness, manumission, or land redistribution. Samuel Taylor Coleridge advocated a deceptive jubilee that transformed active liberation into “figurative language”—rhetoric, allegory, and pedantic and cynical criticism that took the revolutionary tooth out of the scriptural bite. In 1794, as a youthful radical, Coleridge had written in “Religious Musings,”
. . . the vast family of Love
Raised
from the common earth by common toil
Enjoy the equal produce. Such delights
As float to earth, permitted visitants!
When in some hour of solemn jubilee
The massy gates of Paradise are thrown
Wide open . . .
which vision, while hopeful, lacked the specificity of the Mosaic agrarian law. Wedderburn asserted a proletarian version of jubilee that had its modern origins in the written and practical work of Thomas Spence on the one hand, and in the anonymous oral tradition of African American slaves on the other. As James Cone has written, “It matters little to the oppressed who authored scripture; what is important is whether it can serve as a weapon against oppressors.”11 Wedderburn, the Methodists, and the Baptists brought these two traditions together, challenging the aristocratic and literary jubilees. Since Wedderburn’s jubilee was a mainstay in the intellectual history of the Atlantic proletariat, leading in one direction to the general strike and Chartist land policy of the 1830s and in another direction to the abolition of slavery in America, we would do well to explore it closely.12
The Leviticus was written at the end of the sixth century, after the Babylonian captivity, when rabbis collected, copied, and edited laws, songs, poems, cultic practices, traditions, and oral memories to create the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. The twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus preserved the memory of an earlier, more egalitarian time, when people lived by agriculture (producing grain, oil, and wine) and a pastoral economy (tending bovine herds, sheep, and goats) amid a process of accelerating class differentiation. Jubilee was important to the visionary politics of the prophets, especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, who sought to turn people away from idolatry and greed and looked to the past for a more virtuous life. Thus Isaiah denounced landlords:
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