Oh, the master run, ha ha!
And the darkies stay, ho ho!
So now must be the Kingdom comin’
And the year of Jubilo
—finally reaching a kind of conclusion with the postwar Fisk Jubilee Singers.26 Robert Wedderburn, a Methodist and Spencean, was perfectly situated to understand and advance the Atlantic revolutionary tradition of jubilee.
THE WEDDERBURN-CAMPBELL CORRESPONDENCE
Wedderburn wrote about jubilee to Elizabeth Campbell, his half-sister and a maroon in Jamaica. His main purpose was to discuss with Campbell the freeing of her own slaves as a prelude to an island-wide emancipation. First published in The Axe Laid to the Root, or a Fatal Blow to Oppressors, Being an Address to The Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica, a newspaper written and edited by Wedderburn in London in October 1817, the correspondence is a unique source of knowledge about the Atlantic proletariat.27 The arrival of thousands of slaves and free blacks in the aftermath of the American Revolution and the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 had created a new impulse for agitation and organization among Afro-Jamaicans, who by 1792 had begun to form secret societies and engage in correspondence such as the Wedderburn-Campbell letters. By the early nineteenth century, explained Campbell, “the free Mulattoes [were] reading Cobbett’s Register, and talking about St. Domingo.” Revolution in America and St. Domingue opened the way for other movements, as the motley crew carried its news and experience to Europe and Latin America. The letters between Wedderburn and Campbell crossed divides of continents, empire, class, and race.28
The Axe might be compared to another radical publication of 1817, Thomas Wooler’s The Black Dwarf. Did the title refer to the European sage or the Indian savage? Wooler teased, “We are not at liberty to unfold all the secrets of his prison-house.” Here was the motley in both its forms, rags and fooling. The black dwarf was a trickster against throne and altar, “secure from his invisibility, and dangerous from his power of division”—Wooler might be describing the hydra—“for like the polypus, he can divide and redivide himself, and each division remains a perfect animal.” (Linnaeus had given the name Hydra to a genus of freshwater polyps in 1756.) The Black Dwarf was international and multiethnic, featuring reviews of Oroonoko, news of the wild abolitionist dances of Barbados, the latest on struggles in South America. The dwarf of the frontispiece had his right hand raised in a fist of victory, and his left firmly on his hip in a further gesture of determination. A barrel-chested Pan clasped the dwarf’s arm in comradely alliance and pointed to the symbols of vanquished powers—a royal scepter, a stack of money, a lord chancellor’s periwig—while the handcuffs and shackles of slavery lay open in the dust. The paper symbolized a tricontinental coalition of profane figures against the Holy Alliance. The worst fears of the prude and the propertied, the royalist and the rich, were realized in the allegory of sexuality, Africa, and monsters. Two other journals, the Medusa and the Gorgon, likewise invoked invisible and dangerous many-headedness.
Two rebellions—one in the Caribbean, the other in England, both against slavery—provided the background for Wedderburn’s correspondence. On Easter, 1816, Bussa’s Rebellion engulfed Barbados. Nanny Grigg, a domestic worker on the Simmons plantation, read newspapers and informed the other slaves of developments in Haiti and England. One important piece of news concerned the Imperial Registry Bill of 1815, actually passed by Parliament to prevent the smuggling of slaves into British colonies but transformed by slave rumor into an act of emancipation: “high buckra” (the king), the rumor had it, had sent a “free paper,” but the local planters were refusing to obey it. Hundreds rose up, burning almost a quarter of the sugar-cane crop and demanding their freedom. A planter alleged that William Wilberforce and the abolitionist African Institute had “pierced the inmost recesses of our island, inflicted deep and deadly wounds in the minds of the black population, and engendered the Hydra, Rebellion, which had well nigh deluged our fields with blood.” Horace Campbell has written that “the widespread nature of the revolt and the organizational skills which went into the planning [were] the result of a new kind of leadership; this was the leadership of the religious preacher, literate in the English language and in the African religious practices, who combined the ideas of deliverance and resistance.” Deliverance from slavery was not to be realized in Barbados in 1816, however, as almost a thousand slaves were killed in battle or executed after the rising.29
A few months later, the Spa Fields Riots in England were led by Spenceans and waged by canal diggers, porters, coal and ballast heavers, soldiers, sailors, dockworkers, and factory workers. Among the leaders was Thomas Preston, a Spencean who had traveled to the West Indies and considered himself an “unregistered slave.” James Watson the younger, another Spencean, argued with a servant wearing the livery of Chancellor Leach just before the riots: “He was like a negro,” said Watson, “that had run away, and had a mark of disrespect; and that very soon the time would come, when his master might lose his estate, and that he might be as good a man as his master.” At Spa Fields, Watson asked the ten thousand assembled, “Will Englishmen any longer suffer themselves to be trod upon, like the poor African slaves in the West Indies, or like clods or stones?” The riots simultaneously raised the issues of the “abolition and regulation of machinery” and the abolition of slavery.30 These were Luddite years, when, on the one hand, steam engines and textile machinery were introduced to abridge and cheapen labor, and on the other hand, the workers who were degraded as a result protested by direct, violent action against the mechanical means of their oppression. Like Byron before 1816 and Shelley afterward, Wedderburn opposed mechanization when it was employed to dehumanize work. Lord Byron’s maiden speech in the House of Lords (on February 27, 1812, when he was twenty-four) was on a bill providing the death penalty for Luddites: “You call these men a mob,” he said, “desperate, dangerous, and ignorant; and seem to think that the only way to quiet the ‘bellua multorum capitum’ is to lop off a few of its superfluous heads.” He reminded the peers that those heads were capable of thought. Moreover, “it is the mob that labour in your fields and serve in your houses,—that man your navy, and recruit your army,—that have enabled you to defy the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair.”
The Black Dwarf, 1819. The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
Universal Suffrage or the Scum Uppermost—!!!, by George Cruikshank. Private collection. Photograph by Rodney Todd-White.
Bussa’s Rebellion and the Spa Fields Riots helped Wedderburn to see that the circulation of information had become dangerous to West Indian planters—hence his decision to publish the Axe Laid to the Root, which apparently reached both of its intended audiences, planters and slaves. A merchant had warned the Jamaican Assembly about such publications, “in which were found doctrines destructive of the tranquillity of this island, containing direct incitement to the imitation of the conduct of the slaves of St. Domingo, and loading the proprietors of slaves with every odious epithet.” In his first letter to Campbell, Wedderburn responded to the news that she had manumitted his aged mother and his brother with an enthusiastic denunciation of slavery, an exhortation to his half-sister to free her remaining slaves, a recollection of history—of the Hebrew flight from Egyptian slavery, of the early Christians, of the freedom-loving maroons—and an endorsement of the more recent ideas of Thomas Spence. In reply, Campbell described her freeing of her slaves, their restitution to the land, and her efforts to record these transactions with the governor’s secretary, who had referred the matter to the governor himself, who had in turn dismissed her with mutterings about Haiti. In the third letter, Campbell explained that the governor had taken the news of her emancipation to the Jamaican Assembly, where one Macpherson had risen to speak against the doctrines of Thomas Spence and to recommend revolt against the authority of the Crown unless the licenses of Dissenting mis
sionaries were revoked. He moved that Campbell be treated as a lunatic and that the government confiscate her slaves and lands. He also suggested that Jamaican planters import “starving Scotchmen to manage the slaves” and servants “dying for want” in England to be used “against the Blacks.” The assembly then nullified Campbell’s manumission, since “slaves and lands set free by an Spencean enthusiast should not be entered on the records”—but neither should the record of the assembly itself be published, for fear that “it should fall into the hands of the slaves.” Worry that the Axe Laid to the Root had already reached the wrong hands impelled the rulers of the island to offer rewards for copies turned in: for slaves, freedom; for freemen, a slave from the estate of Elizabeth Campbell. The Wedderburn-Campbell correspondence ended with the words “To be continued,” as the Axe Laid to the Root ceased publication.31
Wedderburn prophesied that “the slaves shall be free, for a multiplied combination of ideas,” which the Axe Laid to the Root was meant to embody. Although lacking the urbane tone of Wooler’s Black Dwarf or the confident command of Cobbett’s Political Register, Wedderburn’s newspaper nonetheless gave life to a transatlantic intellectual dialogue that synthesized African, American, and European voices. “The axe laid to the root” had special meaning for the hewers of wood and drawers of water. The words came from the books of Luke and Matthew, where they were part of the curse that John the Baptist invoked against class arrogance. They were also part of his annunciation of the Messiah and of the coming baptism by fire. The phrase was readily appropriated in the English Revolution; for example, Abiezer Coppe, having commanded the great ones to deliver their riches to the poor, answered his critics by laying “the Axe to the root of the Tree.”32 The revolutionary meanings of John the Baptist and “the axe laid to the root” were revived in the 1790s on both sides of the Atlantic, among both evangelicals and secular radicals. In Jamaica, the American preacher Moses Baker taught African slaves the Baptist version of Christianity, emphasizing John the Baptist and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, which proved congenial to Akan and Yoruba practices of riverine spirits and their mediumship. The resulting religion, called myalism, became a “hotbed of slave rebellion” and a means of transmitting the memory of resistance.33 In New York, George White, who had run away from slavery, heard a sermon on John the Baptist and “the axe is laid to the root.” He fell prostrate on the floor, had night visions of the torments that would befall the rich, and converted to Methodism. Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason in prison in 1794 in order to “lay the axe to the root of religion.” Thomas Spence repeated the phrase in The Restorer of Society in 1801 and at the beginning of his last publication, The Giant Killer, Or, Anti-Landlord (1814). Also in the former year, the American Baptist minister John Leland expressed his opposition to slavery in A Blow to the Root.34 And Shelley explained in Queen Mab,
From kings, and priests, and statesmen, war arose,
Whose safety is man’s deep unbettered woe,
Whose grandeur his debasement. Let the axe
Strike at the root, the poison tree will fall;
And where its venomed exhalations spread
Ruin, and death, and woe, where millions lay
Quenching the serpent’s famine, and their bones
Bleaching unburied in the putrid blast,
A garden shall arise, in loveliness
Surpassing fabled Eden.
The American-born former slave George Liele had in the 1790s introduced into Jamaica the class-leader system, in which the black ministers washed the feet of their disciples.35 “Slaves who could read the Bible . . . had thrust into their hands the sanction and inspiration of English protest movements from Wycliffe to the Levellers, and some found lessons there the missionaries did not teach,” wrote historian Mary Turner. Methodists and Baptists taught scriptures aloud, by means of hymn singing and lining out. Wedderburn wrote and published hymns of his own in his early pamphlet Truth Self Supported (1802); John Jea wrote a book of hymns in 1817. Methodist hymnody in particular was rich with references to jubilee. Moses Baker, the Baptist, was arrested on a charge of sedition in 1796 for including in his sermon the hymn
We will be slaves no more,
Since Christ has made us free,
Has nailed our tyrants to the cross,
And bought our liberty.
One black Baptist in Jamaica was hanged and another transported for fomenting rebellion in 1816. A Jamaican king of the Igbos was elected and celebrated in song:
O me good friend, Mr. Wilberforce, make we free!
God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty thank ye!
God Almighty make we free!
Buckra in this country no make we free:
What Negroe for to do? What Negroe for to do?
Take force by force! Take force by force!
The singer of the song explained that “he had sung no songs but such as his brown priest had assured him were approved of by John the Baptist . . . [who] was a friend to the negroes, and had got his head in a pan.” The Spenceans in England had a similar penchant for subversive singing, matching revolutionary lyrics with popular tunes such as “Sally in the Alley” or, inevitably, “God Save the King.”36
In his letters to Campbell, Wedderburn presented a radical account of early Christianity. In this he was much influenced by his fellow Spencean Thomas Evans, who himself had witnessed “the effect of enclosure after enclosure, and tax after tax; expelling the cottager from gleaning the open fields, from his right to the common, from his cottage, his hovel, once his own; robbing him of his little store, his pig, his fowls, his fuel; thereby reducing him to a pauper, a slave.” In Christian Policy, the Salvation of the Empire (1816), Evans maintained that the answer to expropriation and slavery lay in the communism of the early Christians; a new era must now be “HAILED AS A JUBILEE.” Wedderburn wrote, “The Christians of old, attempted this happy mode of living in fellowship or brotherhood, but, after the death of Christ and the apostles, the national priests persuaded their emperor to establish the Christian religion, and they . . . took possession of the Church property. . . . They have taken care to hedge it about with laws which punish with death all those who dare attempt to take it away.” For her part, Campbell signified the broad-based approval of the ideas of Evans by saying that she knew that he and his son had been imprisoned and that the freed slaves “are singing all day at work about Thomas Spence, and the two Evans’ in Horsemonger Lane prison, and about you too, brother, and every time they say their prayers, they mention the Evans’, they say that God Almighty will send the angels in his time, and let them out, in answer to our prayers.”37
The last of the letters between Wedderburn and Campbell contained a discussion about the Methodists. Campbell had argued with the governor’s secretary, who accused her of having listened to the Methodists. Behind his worries lay secret nightly meetings held on estates in eastern Jamaica in 1815 by brown Methodists, who taught that the regent and Wilberforce wanted the slaves to be free. Some years earlier between (1807 and 1814), authorities had closed the Wesleyan Chapel in Kingston. The British and Foreign Bible Society had been formed in 1804, and its Jamaican branch in 1812, but just a month before the first issue of the Axe Laid to the Root, a Baptist missionary had spoken out in favor of the slaves and been dismissed from his position. It thus took courage for Campbell to reply to the secretary, “I say, God bless the Methodists, they teach us to read the bible.” They helped to make jubilee possible.38
The Bible was one source of the “multiplied combination of ideas” that would lead to freedom; others were the maroons in Jamaica and the Spenceans in England. The Jamaican maroons were important to Wedderburn personally, as his extended family, but even more so historically, as a force for freedom. He began his first letter to Campbell by appealing to her ancestors: “You have fallen from the purity of the Maroons, your original, who fought for twenty years against the Christians, who wanted to reduce them again to slavery, after they had fled into t
he woods from the Spaniards.” Here Wedderburn was referring to the first Maroon War, which he conceived as an equivalent to the movement for freedom promoted by the Diggers and Levellers, whose defeat in the English Revolution had made the Cromwellian conquest of Jamaica possible and the struggle of the maroons necessary. Cromwell and his supporters had asserted a limited “rights of man at home,” Wedderburn told his half-sister, but had busied themselves “destroying your ancestors then fighting for their liberty.”39
The recounting of this history served as a practical introduction to the acts of manumission—the jubilee—that Campbell was to perform:
Then call your slaves together, let them form the half circle of a new moon, tell them to sit and listen to the voice of truth, say unto them, you who were slaves to the cruel Spaniards stolen from your country, and brought here, by Cromwell, the great, who humbled kings at his feet, and brought one to the scaffold, sent a fleet out, whose admiral dared not return without performing something to please his master, came here and drove the Spaniards out; the slaves, my people, then fled to the woods for refuge, the invaders called to them to return to bondage, they refused; they contended for twenty years, and upwards; bondage was more terrific than death.
The history of the maroons was a necessary prelude to freedom, which had been won and renewed in three wars, in the 1650s, the 1730s, and the 1790s.40
“I, who am a weak woman, of the Maroon tribe, understood the Spencean doctrine directly: I heard of it, and obey, and the slaves felt the force directly,” wrote Campbell. It is not clear why she referred to herself as a “weak woman.” She may have been ill, or perhaps she was being ironic, malingering, signifying. It may have been a pose that she had to assume with the governor, who condescendingly answered her by saying, “Well, child, I will hear you on this head at a more convenient time.” Campbell and the governor both knew, however, that the women workers of Jamaica never submitted without a fight. Indeed, within very recent memory was a strike in (1816) in which the women of one plantation had, “one and all, refused to carry away the trash”—that is, the crushed sugar cane whose removal was essential to the operation of the “factory in the field.” The mill stopped, the driver drove, and “a little fierce young devil of a Miss Whaunica flew at his throat and endeavoured to strangle him: the agent was obliged to be called in, and, at length, this petticoat rebellion was subdued.”41
The Many-Headed Hydra Page 35