Despite the prevalence of British shipping in the slave trade, slavery had always sat uneasily with British law. An Act of 1750 forbidding the abduction of blacks was not enforced, but a key legal judgement of the Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield in 1772 made clear that a claim to a slave as property was not acknowledged by the law of England, and that ‘the claim of slavery never can be supported’.6 Any slave held on English soil was thereby set free, but this did nothing to stop British ship-owners from continuing the trade overseas. It was non-conformist groups in Britain and America who developed the crusade against slavery throughout the eighteenth century. Quakers were particularly at the forefront, starting from 1727 when the London Meeting of the Society of Friends passed a resolution condemning the slave trade and the owning of slaves. By the 1750s the Quakers of Philadelphia had joined in, refusing for instance to transcribe wills for those who intended to bequeath slave property. By this stage Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws had been published in London, arguing that ‘The state of slavery is bad of its own nature: it is neither useful to the master nor to the slave; not to the slave, because he can do nothing thro’ a motive of virtue; not to the master, because he contracts all manner of bad habits with his slaves.’ Yet it was the Christian evangelists who kept the debate alive, including the American theologian Jonathan Edwards and the English founder of Methodism, John Wesley. Their arguments in turn would motivate a new generation, Granville Sharp, James Ramsey and Thomas Clarkson, who together would take active political steps to attack the trade through pamphlets and in Parliament.
1783 was an important year for this work. The Quakers began the first petition to Parliament calling for the total abolition of the slave trade, and a survivor of the terrible events aboard the slave ship Zong brought his story to Granville Sharp. Two years earlier, the Zong had suffered an epidemic and run low on water while crammed with slaves. The captain, Luke Collingwood, could either sell the sick survivors at low prices in Jamaica, taking the loss himself, or he could make the underwriters pay if the slaves had been lost while the safety of the ship was being secured. For financial gain he decided to throw the slaves alive into the sea, far out in the Atlantic, many of the last batch having to be shackled because they knew what was about to happen.
The story of the Zong caused an outcry in Britain among a public who knew little or nothing of the evils of the slave trade. The burgeoning newspaper industry which had enabled Pitt to draw on popular support in his great confrontation with Fox in 1783–84 allowed such reports of the slave trade and the vocal opposition to it to be carried across the country. The following year, James Ramsey wrote two powerful pamphlets denouncing the trade, and the year after that Thomas Clarkson, another brilliant Cambridge graduate, joined the cause. He had won a prize for his essay on slavery and, like Wilberforce, he determined on his life’s work in what we imagine as the rural idyll of eighteenth-century England: ‘Coming in sight of Wades Mill in Hertfordshire, I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.’7 It was this combination of brilliant young men with deep religious faith who would form the nucleus of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade set up in May 1787, which Wilberforce was asked to help. They decided to focus on abolishing the trade in slaves rather than slavery itself, since it provided a far more easily attainable target and threatened neither an immediate attack on property nor a revolution in the West Indies.
By 1787, therefore, the abolitionist cause was well organised, and Wilberforce was moving to its forefront. His opposition to slavery was not new – at the age of fourteen he had written a letter on the subject to his local newspaper – but his utter dedication to the cause now gave him a new focus and responsibility. His first move would be to persuade the Commons to establish a Committee of Inquiry the following year; to that end he and his colleagues began in advance to assemble all the information they could about the economics, practicalities and inhumanities of the trade. Pitt’s support meant that information held by the Customs was made available, even though, as George Rose commented, ‘It is quite unprecedented to allow anyone to rummage the Custom House Papers for information who have no Employment in the Revenue.’8 Clarkson began his great journeys across Britain, which would eventually entail interviewing 20,000 sailors and obtaining examples of the equipment used on the slave ships such as branding irons, leg shackles, thumbscrews and instruments for forcing open the jaws of the slaves.
Pitt approached the subject with his usual optimism, encouraging Wilberforce and trying to follow up the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty by getting Eden to persuade the French government ‘to discontinue the villainous traffic now carried on in Africa’.9 He seems to have had in mind a quick agreement with France to act against the slave trade together, which would reduce domestic opposition to its abolition in Britain and remove the argument that if Britain ended the trade the French would take it up.
On 7 December 1787, Pitt wrote to Eden from Downing Street: ‘The more I reflect upon it, the more anxious, and impatient I am that the business should be brought as speedily as possible to a point; that, if the real difficulties of it can be overcome, it may not suffer from the Prejudices and interested objections which will multiply during the discussion … If you see any chance of success in France, I hope you will lay your Ground as soon as possible with a View to Spain also. I am considering what to do in Holland.’10 But Pitt’s hopes of speedy international agreement to knock the slave trade on the head were far wide of the mark: opinion was turning against slavery in other countries, but they lacked the popular and parliamentary channels through which opinion could be brought to bear; they also had no equivalent of the Quakers and Britain’s Abolitionist Committee. In January 1788 the French government sent a sympathetic but discouraging reply. No international agreement, even in principle, was available. The long grind of the efforts to persuade the British Parliament to act unilaterally would now begin.
In February 1788 Pitt set up a Committee of the Privy Council to inquire into the slave trade. Wilberforce was due to move for a Parliamentary Inquiry in May. As it happened he fell seriously ill, probably with what we now know as ulcerative colitis, and in March doctors feared for his life. Still convalescing in May, he asked Pitt to move his motion for him, giving notice of a motion for Abolition of the Slave Trade to be moved the following year. Wilberforce would never forget his delight at Pitt’s undertaking to do so ‘with a warmth of principle and friendship that have made me love him better than I ever did before’.11 And so it was Pitt himself who on 9 May 1788 moved for an Inquiry into the Slave Trade. He did so with great caution, deliberately avoiding giving his own views: a tactic which brought some mockery from Fox and Burke but succeeded in securing the passage of the motion without dissent.
Why was Pitt proceeding so cautiously when he knew his own mind and the case was so strong? The answer is that he faced a situation analogous to his experience on parliamentary reform three years before, and on that subject he had been badly beaten. While he and the leading members of the opposition favoured change, many of his senior colleagues in the government and a likely majority of the country gentlemen of the House of Commons were unpersuaded. They feared the economic and international consequences of renouncing the slave trade. The proponents of the trade were now mobilising their forces and marshalling their arguments: the evidence they presented to the Privy Council Inquiry emphasised the barbarities practised on each other by African tribes, and claimed that slaves were now thankfully saved and transported from situations in which they were previously killed. Pitt faced opposition to any serious move against the slave trade from members of the Royal Family and much of his own Cabinet, including Sydney, who was responsible for the colonies, and, inevitably, Thurlow. Even Pitt’s closest confidant in the government, Dundas, was opposed to abolition because of the tens of millions of pounds of
assets involved in the West Indies and his view that a ban would be an encroachment on the legislative rights of the colonies. Exactly as in the case of parliamentary reform, Pitt could put forward the case, but he could not insist that the government be collectively committed to it without destroying the government altogether. While he was criticised at the time for not being ‘zealous enough in the cause of the Negroes, to contend for them as decisively as he ought’,12 in fact at this stage he was doing as much as he could without actually bringing down his ministry, an action which would not in any case have produced success.
Pitt’s commitment to the cause and the difficulties it would have to surmount were vividly illustrated by the events of that summer. A senior MP, Sir William Dolben, one of the Members for Oxford University, had inspected for himself a slave ship lying in the Thames. Horrified by the narrow spaces and shackles he saw, he immediately brought in a Bill to limit the number of slaves who could be conveyed in any one ship to one for each ton of the vessel. The Bill passed easily through the Commons, supported by Pitt, but then hit very rough water in the House of Lords. With wartime heroes attacking the measure and Cabinet Ministers opposing it or sitting on their hands, Thurlow abandoned all restraint and attacked the Bill as the result of a ‘five days fit of philanthropy’. Pitt was outraged, so much so that he was indeed prepared to risk the government. He told Grenville that if the measure was defeated in the Lords, ‘the opposers of it and myself cannot continue members of the same Government’.13
It duly went through, but only narrowly and with many amendments. With Pitt’s help, a replacement Bill was rammed through the Commons in a single day (and then again in another day because they had made a mistake); fresh amendments moved by Thurlow were narrowly defeated in the Lords, Pitt apparently refusing to let Parliament rise for the summer recess until the measure was passed. He had got his way, but it had been a pyrrhic victory. If so much political capital was required to get such a minor measure through Parliament, what hope could there be of outright abolition?
The hope lay in eloquence and inquiry. The inquiries of the Privy Council and the Commons’ Committee on Trade produced evidence which Pitt thought ‘irresistible’. For all the disappointments of the last few years, he still harboured a belief in the power of reason. As for eloquence, it was bestowed in great measure on the principal supporters of abolition: each of three great debates, in 1789, 1791 and 1792, would produce from one of them a specimen of parliamentary eloquence rarely matched through the ages. In the debate of 12 May 1789, postponed by the Regency crisis, Wilberforce delivered his most celebrated speech against the trade. According to Burke, it was ‘not excelled by any thing to be met with in Demosthenes’.14 He brought before the Commons the compelling evidence presented to the inquiries, argued that an end to the trade would make West Indian slave-owners treat the existing slaves better, maintained that the growth of other trade would come to the aid of Liverpool and other ports, and appealed, perhaps naively, to a sense of right and wrong:
Sir, the nature and all the circumstances of this Trade are now laid open to us. We can no longer plead ignorance, we cannot evade it, it is now an object placed before us, we cannot pass it. We may spurn it, we may kick it out of our way, but we cannot turn aside so as to avoid seeing it. For it is brought now so directly before our eyes that this House must decide, and must justify to all the world, and to their own consciences, the rectitudes of their grounds and of the principles of their decision.15
Pitt gave strong support to his friend, but the suspicion that the French would take away British trade if Parliament abolished it remained very strong. Wilberforce had sufficient support for evidence to be heard in the next session at the Bar of the House, but by no means enough to push the matter to an immediate vote. It was tragically unfortunate for the tens of thousands of slaves being shackled in irons each year on the west coast of Africa that the crime against humanity which their treatment represented was brought to the attention of the British Parliament just at the moment that events crowded in on the political world. As we have seen, 1789 brought the outbreak of revolution in France; 1790 brought a general election in Britain and unrest in the French West Indian colony of Saint Domingue, which created fears for the safety of European planters if the much larger slave populations broke free.
The public debate in Britain had continued, with much popular hostility to the trade. William Cowper had published his poem ‘The Negro’s Complaint’,* and Josiah Wedgwood had produced his medallion showing a slave in chains with the inscription ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ Grenville had replaced Sydney as the Secretary of State responsible for the colonies, and he was a staunch ally of Pitt on slavery. Yet no progress was made in securing commitments from other countries, and when Wilberforce rose again nearly two years later, on 18 April 1791, with a motion ‘To prevent the further importation of slaves into the British Colonies in the West Indies’, MPs were not yet convinced. Once again, Pitt backed Wilberforce unequivocally: of all the subjects he had had to consider in Parliament, ‘There never had been one in which his heart was so deeply interested as the present … The slave-trade was founded in injustice; and it is therefore, such a trade, as it is impossible for me to support, unless gentlemen will, in the first place, prove to me, that there are no laws of morality binding upon nations.’16 But it was Fox’s turn to reach the greatest heights of eloquence. He spoke of rape, robbery and murder, detailing shocking instances of the ill-treatment of slaves, challenging the House to ‘sanction enormities, the bare recital of which is sufficient to make them shudder’. He summed up: ‘Humanity … does not consist in a squeamish ear. It belongs to the mind as well as the nerves, and leads a man to take measures for the prevention of cruelty which the hypocritical cant of humanity contents itself in deploring.’17
Fox’s speech was much admired, but it is a characteristic of the House of Commons down to the present that it can be full of admiration for a particular speech without the slightest intention of agreeing to the recommendations contained in it. Those speakers ranged against the oratory of Wilberforce, Pitt and Fox were far less striking parliamentary performers, but they spoke for a sullen majority. One said he declined to ‘gratify his humanity at the expense of the interests of his country, and … thought we should not too curiously inquire into the unpleasant circumstances with which it was perhaps attended’.18 Others once again argued that France, Spain and Holland would step in to take any trade from which Britain desisted. This issue remained the great problem for the abolitionists; Pitt had been right to seek to resolve it at the very beginning, but wrong as it turned out to think it could be done. At the end of the debate eighty-eight Members voted for Wilberforce’s motion, and 163 against it.
The abolitionists were not deterred, and determined on a huge effort for the following year. Their campaign would see half a million signatures delivered to Parliament in 519 petitions from all over Britain. Events, however, were not moving their way. The violence and radicalism of the French Revolution were exploding, and the presence of radical elements among the abolitionists made their case more suspect in the eyes of many. Worse still, the slaves of Saint Domingue, encouraged by the ideals of freedom proclaimed in the French Revolution, rose up in revolt and took pitiless vengeance on their former masters, precipitating a war which would continue for twelve years. None of these events reduced in any way the powerful logic of the arguments for abolition of the slave trade, but in practice they made the atmosphere deeply unpromising. Pitt advised Wilberforce to postpone putting a further motion before the House. Wilberforce wrote of people being ‘panic-struck with the transactions of St. Domingo, and the apprehension or pretended apprehension of the like in Jamaica, and other of our islands. I am pressed … to defer my motion till next year.’19 Nevertheless, he pushed ahead: on 2 April 1792 the Commons would again debate the abolition of the slave trade.
In spite of Pitt’s doubts, he remained true to his friend, and the honours of eloquence that night wou
ld rest with him when he delivered ‘one of the richest specimens of his own uncommon powers’.20 Yet before he spoke, Dundas, acknowledged as a defender of the slave trade over many years, rose to propose that the word ‘gradual’ be inserted into Wilberforce’s motion for abolition. His doing so has often been seen by commentators and historians as at loggerheads with Pitt, who later that night would give full-hearted and passionate support to outright abolition. Yet Dundas was Pitt’s greatest ally, in conference with him over port almost every working evening. It is surely unlikely that the ‘gradual’ option had not been discussed or even agreed between them. By speaking for total abolition, Pitt demonstrated his sincerity (which had been much questioned in recent months), maintained his integrity, stood by his friend, and maximised whatever slight chance there might have been of the motion being passed. But by allowing Dundas to propose the compromise, if that is what he did, he allowed the abolitionist cause to escape another direct defeat. The compromise provided a home for the majority of MPs who could no longer defend the slave trade in their hearts but remained fearful of the consequences of immediate abolition. There is no documentary evidence that Pitt and Dundas colluded on this point, nor has there been previous speculation about it, but it would have been neither surprising nor irregular for them to have done so. Such a tactic would have been classic Pitt: maintaining his own ‘character’ while finding some means of getting his way. The insertion of the word ‘gradually’ was approved by 193 votes to 125, while outright abolition was heavily defeated by 230 to 85. In subsequent weeks, Dundas would move resolutions naming 1800 as the date for abolition, which after debate became 1796. If Pitt did indeed put Dundas up to his manoeuvre, he could briefly consider himself well satisfied with the outcome. The British slave trade would be abolished, albeit in four years’ time, provided the House of Lords or war did not get in the way.
William Pitt the Younger: A Biography Page 35