The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  How could a woman of the maroon tribe “underst[and] the Spencean doctrine directly”? The answer lay in the provisioning, or agricultural production for immediate use, that was common to both the maroons and the Spenceans. The maroons practiced a subsistence agriculture that was much admired by the agrarian communists in England: “Fruit and vegetables were to be found in every band, for the first thing every Maroon group did, as a prerequisite of survival, was to plant provision ground” with plantains, cocoa, bananas, pineapples, sweet corn, and cassava. Both maroons and Spenceans advocated strict, collectively set limits on individual accumulation. Cattle grazed in communal pastures, and the allotted lands were held in common. Wedderburn thus emphasized a commonality of interest between the workers of Jamaica and those of England, one that had begun a century and a half earlier in a common history.42

  How would a woman such as Campbell have learned about the Spencean doctrine in the first place? And how, in turn, could the Spencean in England have learned the history of the maroons? The governor of Jamaica knew that the Spencean doctrine circulated via the printed word, by pamphlet and by newspaper. Robert Southey wrote about Spence’s Plan in the Quarterly Review of October 1816; the Courier and the Political Register also published the plan, with the former source’s claiming that the Spenceans had some three hundred thousand people ready to revolt. Campbell had read, with some surprise, newspaper accounts opposed to the Spenceans; she asked Wedderburn for the opinion of the Parliamentary reformer Sir Francis Burdett.43 Throughout this period, the most important and most subversive news networks were maritime. When the governor’s secretary tried to dissuade Campbell from freeing her slaves, she explained that word of her intentions had already got around: “I told them [her slaves] not to speak of it, but they talked of it the more. The news is gone to Old Arbore and St. Anns, to the Blue Mountains, to North Side, and the plantain boats have carried the news to Port Morant, and Morant Bay.” Thomas Thistlewood described such coastal communication in greater detail: “The way to go was by water, along the trenches, canals and rivers, and along the coastline, from one estate’s barcadier or jetty to another, in all manner of small craft, manned by slaves who heard and carried news.”44

  In fact, the strategic link in Wedderburn and Campbell’s own correspondence was a sailor. Campbell explained the protocol: “I send this letter by a black cook: I dare not trust it to the Post, for they open people’s letters.” By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, roughly a quarter of the Royal Navy was black, and the proportion was probably only a little smaller in both the English and American merchant shipping industries.45 John Jea, born in Calabar before being enslaved to a New Yorker, was himself working as a ship’s cook aboard the Iscet of Liverpool when it was captured by the French in 1810. The black cook was so common as to become a stereotype in nautical fiction, reaching its apogee in Frederick Marryat’s Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836). This figure, who was as important to pan-African communication in the age of sail as the sleeping-car porter would be in the age of rail, carried the news of jubilee.46

  In his first letter to Elizabeth Campbell, Wedderburn assured her that a jubilee would come to Jamaica, and he assumed that she would know exactly what he meant: “The slaves begin to talk that if their masters were Christians they would not hold them in slavery any longer than seven years, for that is the extent of the law of Moses.” Some of the Mosaic law of jubilee was already part of transatlantic labor policy.47 Many servants who emigrated to America indentured themselves for a period of seven years, for example, and manumitted people of color were issued certificates of freedom that were valid for seven years.

  Wedderburn quoted Isaiah in condemning those who were “adding house to house, and field to field, that is turning little farms into great ones, swallowing up widows’ children and their heritage.” Campbell freed her slaves as required by jubilee, then took the next step toward liberation by redistributing her land: it was reported that “Miss Campbell then cried, the land is yours . . . for I have read the word of God, and it says, the Lord gave the earth to the children of men.” She added, “I am now instructed by a child of nature, to resign to you your natural right in the soil on which you stand, agreeable to Spence’s plan.” She stressed that her deed was not unique, merely neighborly: “I will manage it myself, as your steward, my brother will assist us, we shall live happy, like the family of the Shariers in the parish of St. Mary’s, who have all things common.” Perhaps she was referring here to a family name (according to the Almanac for Jamaica for 1818, three plantations were owned by the Shreyers), or perhaps she was thinking simply of unnamed “sharers.” In either case, there was at least one other jubilee practiced on Jamaica in 1817, when “Monk” Lewis implemented a jubilee from above on his sugar estates in Westmoreland to prevent inequitable accumulation of property among his slaves: “I made it public, that from henceforth no negro should possess more than one house with a sufficient portion of ground for his family, and on the following Sunday the overseer by my order looked over the village, took from those who had too much to give to those who had too little, and made an entire new distribution according to the most strict Agrarian law.”48

  The period from 1790 to 1820 was one of social engineering and reorganization of villages and provision grounds by Jamaica’s big planters. The actions taken by Lewis and by Elizabeth Campbell were consistent with themes of Jamaican agrarian history in this era, as shown by Barry Higman in his study of maps and plans of estates, which were largely regular and linear until 1810 and more irregular thereafter because of struggles over space between slaves and planters. Spence and Wedderburn anticipated the postemancipation transformation of agriculture to smallholding settlements in free villages, either founded by missionaries within the north coast estate zone or formed by squatters on abandoned estates or underutilized back lands. Some of these free villages even predated emancipation, establishing customary practices that lasted into the twentieth century as “family land.” Claud McKay’s novel Banana Bottom is about jubilee in just such a village.49

  HISTORY AND REVOLUTION

  Having explored the Wedderburn-Campbell correspondence and the history of jubilee that lay at the heart of it, let us now pose some questions about Wedderburn as a theorist of the Atlantic proletariat. First, what was his understanding of history? Second, how did he conceive of the revolutionary tradition? Third, what constituents did he see as composing the social and political force that would make the revolution? And finally, how did he combine Christianity, republicanism, and abolitionism? Wedderburn understood, perhaps as well as anyone of his day, that the fates of workers on the two sides of the Atlantic were linked. He would be a lifelong teacher of this truth, through his actions, his sermons, and his writings, including The Axe Laid to the Root. He was part of the postwar radical milieu and was thus familiar with both Shelley’s Queen Mab and Volney’s Ruins.

  Wedderburn saw history as an international process of expropriation and resistance. The rich of all countries used their economic and political power first to steal the land and then to crush the people who had once occupied it, using terror to set them to work in circumstances of slavery. Wedderburn wrote that “the great majority in every nation are dispossessed of their right to the soil throughout the world.” The resulting resistance he called “universal war.” In 1819, at Wedderburn’s Hopkins Street Chapel, the question for discussion was, “Which of the two parties are likely to be victorious, the rich or the poor in the event of Universal War[?]” Wedderburn opened with the proposition that “there were but two classes of people in England.” He then extended to the assembled an invitation to historical analysis: “How did this happen?” How, we may ask, would Wedderburn have answered his own question?50

  In his first address to the slaves of Jamaica, Wedderburn explained the centrality of the struggle over the land:

  Above all, mind and keep possession of the land you now possess as slaves; for without that, freedom is not worth possessing; for if you once
give up the possession of your lands, your oppressors will have power to starve you to death, through making laws for their own accommodation; which will force you to commit crimes in order to obtain subsistence; as the landholders in Europe are serving those that are dispossessed of lands; for it is a fact, that thousands of families are now in a starving state; the prisons are full: humanity impells the executive power to withdraw the sentence of death on criminals, whilst the landholders, in fact, are surrounded with every necessary of life. Take warnings by the sufferings of the European poor, and never give up your lands you now possess, for it is your right by God and nature, for the “earth was given to the children of men.”

  The starting point for Wedderburn was the idea that the Earth belonged to God, who gave it to “the children of men,” allowing “no difference for colour or character, just or unjust.” Then came the violence and terror, as the encloser and engrosser turned the land into private property and created slavery: “He that first thrust his brother from his right [to the soil] was a tyrant, a robber, and a murderer; a tyrant because he invades the rights of his brother, a robber, because he seized upon that which was not his own, a murderer, because he deprives his brother of the means of subsistence. The weak must then solicit to become the villain’s slave.” The system of terror was perpetuated as landowners, who possessed no “title deed . . . consistent with natural and universal justice,” nonetheless sold or willed “that which was first obtained by force or fraud” to their children. Wedderburn’s message to his brothers and sisters in Jamaica was based on his own generation’s experience of massive theft in England, where between 1801 and 1831 alone, 3,511,770 acres of common land were legislated from the agricultural population, an instance of class robbery by the Parliament of landlords. Arthur Young likened the process to a man’s stealing another’s handkerchief and then employing him to embroider the new owner’s initials on it.51 Conditions of rural life were so terrible in 1816 that the government attempted to suppress the annual report entitled The Agricultural State of the Kingdom. Many were actually hanged for protesting the enclosures and the high price of bread. (At the sentencing of twenty-four of them at a special assizes in Ely Cathedral, Handel’s Air was played, with its lyric “Why do the Heathen so furiously rage together?”)

  Wedderburn considered it wrong that “a few should have the power to till or not to till the earth, thereby holding the existence of the whole population in their hands. They can cause a famine, or create abundance.” The travesty was perhaps clearest among the Irish: “How can anyone account for the gigantic strides that death has taken through Ireland, a country that was able to supply your navy and army, all your colonies? And now the inhabitants are dying for want?” He exclaimed, “Oh! ye poor of Ireland, your death, through starvation, will be a perpetual, yea, and eternal monument of disgrace to the landholders, it will be an immortal book, wherein will be read the wicked system of private property in land.” In answer to the new science of demography, which tried to disguise such murder, Wedderburn wrote, “Malthus has said, to please the rich, that the superabundant population is doomed to perish by the laws of nature, which are the laws of God. The Spenceans say the Deity gave the earth to the children of men, he is no respecter of persons”!52

  Wedderburn emphasized that tyrants, robbers, and murderers operated not only in England and Ireland but also in Africa and America, seizing not only land but also labor. African slaves, he insisted, were “Stolen Men,” “stolen persons,” “stolen families,” people who were then “sold, like cattle, in the market.” He quoted Exodus 21:16: “He that stealeth a man and selleth or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” He condemned “all potentates, governors, and governments of every description with felony, who does wickedly violate the sacred rights of man—by force of arms, or otherwise, seizing the persons of men and dragging them from their native country, and selling their stolen persons and generations.” A spy reported that Wedderburn denounced the slave traders, who “would employ blacks to go and steal females—they would put them in sacks and would be murdered if they made an alarm. Vessels would be in readiness and they would fly off with them.” This, he explained, “was done by Parliament men—who done it for gain,” just as they made slaves in their cotton factories, which was how they had got the “money to bring them into Parliament” in the first place.53

  Wedderburn wanted the slaves of Jamaica to know that as the rich swept the people off the land, they made laws to protect themselves and to criminalize the dispossessed, whose efforts to subsist would now earn them the lash, the prison, or the gallows. English prisons were full of the expropriated and the criminalized. In the Axe Laid to the Root, he warned the slaves who would be emancipated to “have no prisons” as they organized a better society, as “they are only schools for vice, and depots for the victims of tyranny.” He went on to compare the prison to the slave experience, warning the planters, “I will inform you for your present safety, and for the future good of your offspring, to let the slaves go free immediately, for in their prison house a voice is heard, loose him and let him go.” As for the prisons that already existed in England, Wedderburn favored opening them. He would have agreed with the sentiment addressed by a member of the “Tri-Coloured Committee” to “Our Fellow Countrymen suffering Incarceration” in 1816, as reported by a government spy: “The prison doors will be opened [and] your lofty Bastiles be reduced to Ashes.”54

  Wedderburn also stressed the role that hanging played in the crushing of proletarian movements and the establishment of class discipline. He remembered three militants on whom the hangman’s noose had tightened: Edward Marcus Despard; the Irish sailor Cashman, executed for his part in the Spa Fields riots; and John Bellingham, the assassin of Spencer Perceval, the prime minister.55 He learned from Elizabeth Campbell the latest news about hangings in Jamaica: “There is a law made by the assembly to hang a slave. One has been hung for preaching, teaching, or exhorting, another has been hung for throwing up his hoe and blessing the name of King George, through mistaking the abolition of the slave trade for the abolition of slavery.” Wedderburn expressed his own fears at the end of his autobiography: “I should have gone back to Jamaica, had I not been fearful of the planters; for such is their hatred of any one having black blood in his veins, and who dares to think and act as a free man, that they would most certainly have trumped up some charge against me, and hung me.”56 Despite the claim that the planters “can do little, for the leaven is laid too long in the dough, and as the slaves are their bread, they must not hang them all,” British policy remained murderous, on a large scale if necessary, as a private and confidential message from Downing Street to a previous governor, Sir George Nugent (1801–6), had made clear in 1804: “The influence of a Free Black Government in Saint Domingo may be always dangerous, the extinction therefore of that class of slaves in whose fidelity there is no reason to rely, and the propagation of those alone who by the habits of infancy childhood and education are susceptible of the attachment, appear to be the securest system.”57

  A new stage in the historical process was suggested by Wedderburn’s pamphlet Cast-Iron Parsons, or Hints to the Public and the Legislature, on Political Economy (1820). During a visit to Saint Paul’s Church, Shadwell, on the London waterfront, he had asked the parson whether the church was built of brick or stone. “Of neither,” came the reply, “but of CAST-IRON.” An old apple woman who overheard the conversation added, “Would to God the Parsons were of Cast-Iron too.” Wedderburn considered this to be an excellent idea: “Finding that the routine of duty required of the Clergy of the legitimate Church, was so completely mechanical, and that nothing was so much in vogue as the dispensing with human labour by the means of machinery, it struck me that it might one day be possible to substitute A CAST-IRON PARSON.” It could be oiled and kept fresh in a closet, to be rolled out on Sundays. In fact, the idea had broader application, as it might also be possible to make a clockwork schoolmaster to teach the
sciences. This invention Wedderburn called a “TECHNICATHOLICAUTOMATOPPANTOPPIDON.” As a postscript, he suggested making a cast-iron king and cast-iron members of Parliament, and was promptly jailed for his blasphemy. He understood machinery, politicians, and the source of all wealth: “Slaves and unfortunate men have cultivated the earth, adorned it with buildings, and filled it with all kinds of riches. And the wealth that enabled you to set these people to work, was got by hook or crook from society.—Pray, was ever a solitary savage found to be rich? No; all riches come from society, I mean the labouring part of it.”58

  If Wedderburn viewed the capitalist side of history as expropriation, he saw the proletarian side as resistance. He had had the history of resistance burned into his consciousness at an early age, and it was this history that he most wanted to impart to workers in England and the Americas. This autodidact who called himself a “poor disinherited earth-worm” reached back to antiquity and brought history forward to his own day: jubilee was central to it, as were radical Christianity, peasant rebellion, slave revolt, mob action, urban insurrection, military mutiny, and strike. Within Wedderburn’s own lifetime, these were the sources of proletarian power and the elements of revolution, the means by which he and others would “convert the world from a charnel-house to a paradise.”59