by Simon Schama
Or was it when I – the lapsed Jew – found myself standing in the pulpit of All Saints Church, Fulham, on the invitation of its parish vicar Joe Hawes, who had decided, 194 years after the burial of the abolitionist Granville Sharp, to give the patriarch of the campaign the church funeral he’d been denied by the parish priest of the day? There had, apparently, been no love lost between Sharp and the vicar, the latter suspecting the former of Dissenter views about the liturgy even while professing allegiance to the Church of England. So in July 1813 the church funeral was abruptly cancelled, and Sharp was permitted a summary few words by the graveside in the churchyard. To the vicar’s intense vexation, all of abolitionist London – black and white – came anyway. The service this year was an act of reparation for the affront; the eulogist was the aforesaid Jew, and the congregation about as ethnically mixed as you could imagine – among them, however, being members of the prolific Sharp family, looking (how tenacious these British genes are) exactly like their evangelical forebears. When the ceremonies began with one of Granville’s own duets played on his own English horns, preserved – aptly enough – in the Horniman Museum, the centuries just folded in on themselves in a quantum way and we were not so much commemorating as virtually re-enacting. (Rather in the way Collingwood thought all history had, in some sense, to be imaginative re-enactment before it could ever be analytical interpretation.)
But commemoration of the British abolition of the slave trade there most certainly has been – during March of this year, it seemed almost 24/7: a day of ‘Resistance and Recollection’ at the British Museum (readings to schoolkids as well as grand utterances by the likes of Wole Soyinka); a fine exhibition in Westminster Hall of documents and artefacts, including the travelling box used by Thomas Clarkson on his peregrinations around Britain, shackles, yokes, coffee beans grown by ex-slaves in free Sierra Leone, and the famous Am I Not a Man and a Brother Wedgwood medallion reproduced by the abolitionist entrepreneur in tens of thousands; the print of the Liverpool slaver Brookes, with its sardine-can-packed African bodies, which we know likewise made its way into thousands of homes around the country; two new museums of slavery – one in Liverpool, another about to open in the Docklands in London; my own book about the fate of the escaped slaves who sided with the British in the revolutionary war turned first into a ninety-minute television film and then into a stage play, which has run in London and is currently touring in the North of England.
Now obviously this saturation coverage isn’t to be explained merely as an act of historical piety – and the tone of the proceedings has often been (this has to be a good thing) clamorously self-interrogatory. Issues of reparations and apologies have indeed come up (for what it’s worth, if one of my German contemporaries came up to me and said, ‘Tremendously sorry about Auschwitz, won’t happen again, I promise’, and all that, I’d say, ‘Well, if it makes you feel better, right, but it doesn’t really cut it’). More important, though, the commemorations have been an occasion on which to ask serious questions about national identity and allegiance in Britain; the legacy of empire; and in particular unsentimental questions about being black and British over the last 200 years.
But in all this vocal theatre of memory, in all the waves of sound and fury, one rather remarkable fact has been completely ignored: Thomas Jefferson signed an Act prohibiting the slave trade to the United States, and by American traders, into law three whole weeks before George III gave the British equivalent the formal royal assent. But you can hardly blame the British for overlooking this, since the commemoration has gone entirely missing on this side of the pond. Google it, and you’ll find nothing at all, not even the commemorative stamp that I was told was planned – in the age of universal email about the most exiguous form of tribute imaginable. In fact when Charles Rangel, the New York Congressman and one of the leaders of the Black Caucus, proposed a motion of commemoration and congratulation, it was to the British Parliament, not to his own legislature that preceded it! This recalls perhaps the fact that in 1808 congregations of black churches in Philadelphia sang anthems to the British abolition of 1807, hoping that ‘Columbia’s chains’ would follow – not noticing that they already had. When the General Assembly of the United Nations formally marked the anniversary on 26 March, the American delegate, Richard Terrell-Miller, a white career diplomat whose Senate confirmation preceded the anniversary by nine days, actually failed to mention that the United States had done likewise.
This dramatic contrast between contemporary fanfares and alarums on the one side and deafening silence on the other repeats the pattern set 200 years ago. Researching the debates on the subject in the Ninth Congress in late 1806 and early 1807, Matthew Mason noticed just how much the dog failed to bark in the night. President Jefferson, who – schizophrenic as always on matters of race – was heartily glad to see it pass, referred to it very little in his letters and private papers. What was on his mind – and that of Congressmen and most of the American press – was something they thought much more dramatically important: the capture of Aaron Burr and the unravelling of his conspiracy to detach the western territories from the Republic; and the interference with American commerce posed by the mutual commercial wars of the French and British Empires. Attendance in the House of Representatives and Senate when the abolition of the slave trade was discussed was thin, and the debates themselves were almost never over moral fundamentals, but rather skirted the ethics for intensive examination of the pragmatic details of enforcement. Was slave trading to be a felony or a misdemeanour (with very different penalties prescribed as a result)? What was to be the fate of slaves taken from apprehended ships? Were they to be automatically manumitted? Or treated, in effect, as contraband? Would the measure extend the prohibition to coastal inter-state traffic? On all these questions, exactly as you would expect, representatives from the Lower South were militantly intransigent. Government interference with inter-state trade was taken to be an extension of federal power so gross as to be tantamount to a violation of the constitution, and provoking from John Randolph an explicit threat – in 1806 – of secession. If trading in slaves was to be treated – as northern proponents like Senator Stephen Row Bradley from Vermont, and Representative John Smilie of Pennsylvania wanted – as a felony, the implication was that convicted persons might be subjected to the death penalty. No southerner, said Randolph and others, would ever assent to the execution of one of their number for committing a deed which they would never consider a crime. And since, of course, the vast majority of likely illegal trading ventures would take place at southern ports and in southern waters, the outlook for enforcement was not auspicious. Most ominously of all, for the fate of the Bill, southern representatives set their face against any possibility of liberating slaves taken from captured ships, thus releasing large numbers of black freedmen into their own slave societies. (Remember that from the 1790s onwards states in the Lower South – and some areas of the Upper South – had been doing their utmost to rid themselves by expulsion of troublesome populations of free blacks.) To admit more was, southerners like Peter Early of Georgia insisted, to light the fires of insurrection. It would be, he said, ‘an evil greater than slavery itself’. The only recourse beleaguered southerners would have, said Early, was ‘self-defence – gentlemen will understand me – [we must] either get rid of them or they of us; there is no alternative . . . Not one of them would be left alive in a year.’
It’s important to remember that many of the most forthright and articulate assailants of Jefferson’s Act – or rather those who wanted to amend it into harmlessness – were actually either Virginians like John Randolph or Virginians by origin like Peter Early, even though he had moved to and spoke for the Lower South. What the debate – such as it was – at the end of 1806 implied was an early fracture within the leadership of the South itself, and not always just along regional lines. Madison was, as usual on this issue, uncomfortably in the middle – endorsing the Act, provided it did not cause too much ‘inconvenienc
e’ to his fellow plantation owners like the President, who sustained his moral schizophrenia to the end. Not least, of course, because Jefferson and Madison – not to mention their faithful correspondent in Massachusetts, former President Adams – well knew that the price, first of Confederation, then of making a Union, then of enacting a constitution, had been deferring to the Lower South on both the trade and the institution of slavery itself. Postponing legislation concerning the slave trade for twenty years had been the condition of making the constitution possible (and there were in 1807 those who refused to accept the law as valid, considering that Jefferson had anticipated by a year the end of that moratorium even though the law was not to come into effect until 1808). This had been the Faustian bargain that had made the United States, and (to mix metaphors) the poisoned chalice that the temporising Virginians – Jefferson and Madison – knew very well would be passed along to their posterity.
Jefferson had a peculiarly corrupted and tortured conscience about all this. His original draft of the Declaration of Independence had included a ferocious paragraph attacking the slave trade – ‘cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people . . . captivating and carrying them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportations thither’. That paragraph had been duly stricken from the final draft, ‘in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia’, but Jefferson had in any case made this one of the colonists’ grievances against Britain by blaming the whole trade on the King – ‘the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain’! Responsibility for the glaring inconsistency between the ‘self-evident’ truth that ‘all men are created equal’ and the fact of slavery thus was conveniently displaced onto the person of the offending monarch and his culpable ancestors. Nothing to do with us of course – heavens, no! And now the King and his ‘courtiers’, as Jefferson liked to call them, were compounding the evil by actually conspiring to foment armed insurrection among the slaves by promising them their liberty if they remained loyal to the Crown. Such diabolical Machiavellianism!
Behind this rich exercise in historical disingenuousness lay the nagging anxiety of the Founding Fathers that to face squarely up to the contradiction between the promises of the Declaration and the reality of the slave economy was to bring the Union down before it ever had a chance of consolidation. This was, of course, merely to postpone what Jefferson and Madison and Adams and many others predicted would be the inevitable conflict, which indeed came to pass a half-century later. It’s a matter of deep poignancy, as Pauline Maier saw in her book on the Declaration, that subsequent pragmatists like Stephen Douglas contorted themselves in knots to make the promise of equality something like a utopian principle – a nice idea – never actually to be implemented, or intended for whites only, while for the young Abraham Lincoln, even in his law-practice days in Springfield, it always meant precisely what it said. Not only did Jefferson, as it were, move on to other matters – the Louisiana Purchase – while hoping for the best, but it was during his presidency that an all-time record number of slaves were imported into the United States (many of them on British ships) precisely in anticipation that perhaps the trade would be subject to eventual prohibition.
In some fundamental sense, then, directly broaching the issue in 1806 and 1807 was to toy dangerously with what was perceived as a fragile union. To add sectional bitterness to the divisions that already beset the United States – between Federalists and Republicans over the extent of central power, and to do it at a time when the country was beset with dangers from abroad and at home – was to do damage to an already vulnerable body politic. No wonder Jefferson soft-pedalled it and conceded many of the South’s demands. Slaving after January 1808 would not be a felony and would be punished by fines. There was to be no interference with inter-state commerce in humans, and scant provision was made for any sort of naval enforcement of the prohibition. The navy, such as it was, had its hands full keeping American waters free of privateers, or British and French ships taking prizes, without taking further duties on itself. The poisoned chalice was passed quietly on.
Historically, then, the abolition of the slave trade in the United States pointed in every respect to a future of disunion; of national disintegration, a reckoning to be paid in blood. And I suppose that’s why there’s been so little disposition to celebrate or commemorate it in this anniversary year. But there’s something else at work here in some larger sense about the selectivity of public memory in this country, the tendency, especially at a time of – what shall we call it? – military perplexity, to use history for consolation. I was reminded of this by watching episodes of Ken Burns’s egregiously titled PBS documentary series The War (as if only the American experience counted): an immense exercise in elegiac self-congratulation. Whatever our troubles, there was at least one war which was fought for indisputably noble motives and which by and large turned out well. The consolatory and redemptive pay-off – history as lullaby – is unmistakable. But this was not what the first authentically critical historian of our tradition – Thucydides – had in mind for us at all. He was, after all, a general who had taken part in the conflict he chronicled and that made him not an elegist, but a gadfly for the complacent. I’m always struck by the passages from the Peloponnesian Wars for use in American core curricula – almost always Pericles’s funeral oration, hymning the liberty for which Athenian men sacrificed themselves – a speech text which may be the only compromised passage in that history since Thucydides, a rebarbative critic of Herodotus’s playing fast and loose with the sources, conceded it was based on the report of someone who might have heard the Dear Leader. The real telos of the work, as you know, is quite different, a damning indictment of the Athenian imperial hubris that leads them to Syracuse and catastrophe. The march to self-destruction is the point of the book and it immediately establishes as a birth-text, Western history as an exercise in merciless self-criticism; its temper cautionary, its intelligence sceptical, its pay-off – as often as not – tragic. History is the memory of comeuppance for the next generation; its integrity bound up with its honesty and its abhorrence of patriotic self-ingratiation. Thucydides’s history – our history – is no one’s cheer-leader.
Which brings me, inevitably, to my own countrymen across the ocean and the place of the moment of abolition in British cultural memory. Now it’s true that the British are hardly exempt from the kind of patriotic self-congratulation – history as moral reassurance – that I’ve implied is an issue in its American popularity. It’s equally true, though, that disasters like Dunkirk are as likely to be meat and drink for writers and readers as Trafalgar and D-Day. From Dr Johnson’s famous epithet about patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel to the ingrained scepticism against hero-worship in British history, it’s also true that the cautionary temper has on the whole served British commemoration reasonably well. So although there was certainly an element of back-patting going on in the commemorations of abolition – especially since it led, after a generation, directly to the parliamentary abolition of slavery itself in 1833 (rather than the opposite in the American case), with figures like Thomas Clarkson agitating for and presiding over both – it’s also true that this year has been an occasion for looking into the glass of time darkly, in particular for a re-engagement in the debate over the relationship of slavery to economic power.
What’s been impressive, I think, though, is the degree to which the moment hasn’t just been a reheating of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, the ur-text which a half-century ago attacked abolitionism as a movement of convenience, made possible only when the Atlantic sugar economy was in decline, made irrelevant by the new laissez-faire manufacturing economy. No scholars (to my knowledge) would seriously try and argue that any longer, nor the indisputability of the timing of abolition occurring at the zenith of the slave and sugar economy, rather than during its decline.
It’s precisely because the
instrumentalist argument from social expediency (once, but no longer, put by David Brion Davis) can’t possibly be empirically sustained that the bicentennial has prompted historians – and the common culture more generally – to engage again with abolition as a moral act; one in which it’s just conceivable that the protagonists meant what they said, especially when figures like Granville Sharp, the archdeacon’s son, and Thomas Clarkson, intended for the ministry (and who took up abolitionism as a kind of Pauline conversion when he learned about the Zong from a sermon preached by Dr Peter Peckard in the Cambridge University Church of St Mary’s), invoked Christian religion.
The essential reason why, I believe, the commemoration of abolition became so much an event in the national culture in this year of 2007 is because the debate performed very much the same function 200 years ago. Linda Colley, in Britons, has written about the role that the agitation against the slave trade played in creating a kind of national politics, and one which included as political actors for the first time hitherto-excluded constituencies like women. That’s absolutely right, but I want to push the argument further and, in contrast to the American sense that anti-slave-trade campaigning was a nation-breaker, suggest that in Britain it was a nation-maker; perhaps, along with the romanticism of the past that took place during the wars against the French, the single most powerful force in the making, or rather the remaking – the re-formation – of Britain.
And this was, paradoxically, the fruit of defeat. American victory – won at the price of not pushing the contradiction between the Declaration of Independence and the social reality to the point of threatening the union – made a powerful incentive to let that particular sleeping dog lie, for at least twenty years. In Britain, defeat led to bitter soul-searching, in the first instance on the part of critics of the American war like Granville Sharp, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox. But the sense in which Britain was the new Nineveh or indeed Sodom, punished for its manifold sins – its corruption, its profanity, but above all its inhumanity to fellow men, reduced to chattels and beasts of burden – was a common refrain in the early rhetoric of the abolitionists. Whereas the fate of the United States depended on not grasping this particular nettle, the fate of Britain, the castigators of slavery insisted, was conditional on its doing just that.