by Simon Schama
And in striking contrast to Congress, skirting around the big moral principles of national self-definition in its debates, those in Parliament were almost nothing but. The orations made in the late summer of 1806 – and perhaps precisely because it was under attack from reformers demonising it as nothing more than the unclean temple of ‘Old Corruption’ – transformed the Houses of Commons and Lords into a rhetorical theatre for the redefinition of the legislature, and by extension the British constitution – King in Parliament, the Law and the Church working together to extirpate the abomination. Fox – who was junior to Lord Grenville in the government, but its senior spokesman in the House of Commons – began his speech with encomia, not just to Wilberforce, but to his most famous political adversaries, William Pitt and Edmund Burke, both of whom were conveniently dead. (Fox was shortly to follow in September of that year, leaving Grenville to steer the legislation through its final readings the following March.) Waxing magnanimous, Fox quoted Burke: ‘to deal and traffick not in the labour of men but in men themselves, was to devour the root, instead of enjoying the fruit, of human diligence’. The 1791 speech of Pitt (his bitterest foe in precisely that year of revolution) was: ‘the . . . most powerful and convincing eloquence that ever adorned these walls, a speech not of vague and shewy ornament but of solid and irresistible argument founded on a detail of indisputable facts and unquestionable calculations . . .’ Fox summoned the ghosts of the past masters of the House in a demonstration of cross-party unity on this one great matter. A succession of extraordinary speeches followed, including two of them – by the one-armed hero of the American war, Banastre Tarleton, and General Isaac Gascoine, both of Liverpool – against the motion. But it was left to the brilliant Solicitor General Samuel Romilly to be the most uncompromising of all about what was at stake, which was nothing less than the integrity of Parliament and the honour of the nation. Romilly upbraided the two Houses for delaying as long as they had, since Wilberforce’s original motion was introduced in 1791, exhorting them to come to a more ethically proper conclusion. Like other orators in the House, he dismissed the argument that slavery and the traffic had existed in all cultures and societies since antiquity as being no reason at all why Britain should not step forth (he implied especially in the light of American hypocrisies) to embrace the mantle of moral dignity and end it. (In the Lords, Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London, one of the staunchest of the abolitionists, made the point that to argue from custom, to argue from is to ought, might as well justify the Chinese practice of mass exposure of infants to die.) Neither the fate of the Atlantic economy (or of Bristol and Liverpool), Romilly said, nor the possibility that abolition might simply be a gift to the French or the Spanish empires at a time when we were at war with them, could possibly justify perpetuating a malum in se, this unconscionable evil. The year 1796 had been set by the House as ‘the utmost limit allowed for the existence of that most abominable and disgraceful traffick and yet it still subsists’. (It was the fault of the Lords, he said, that the Act had not gone through earlier.) ‘I can very well understand that nations as well as individuals may be guilty of the most immoral acts from their not having the courage to inquire into their nature and consequences.’ But in 1789 Parliament had so inquired and it was:
established by a great body of evidence that the African slave trade is carried on by rapine, robbery and murder and by fomenting wars . . . thus are these unhappy beings in order to supply this traffick in human blood torn from their families . . . Now sir after all this has been proved, after it has been ascertained by indisputable evidence that this trade cannot be carried on without the most iniquitous practices, that murder, rapine and robbery are the foundations of it . . . that wars are fomented to support this traffick; that most disgusting cruelties attend it in the passage of this unhappy part of our species from their native home to the place of their slavery, that they are there subjected to a cruel and perpetual bondage, I do say that this trade ought not to be suffered to continue for an hour; it is a stain upon our national reputation and ought to be wiped away.
When it was claimed that merchants would have to be compensated, Romilly replied, ‘ought the debts of the people of England to be paid with the blood of the people of Africa? . . . the people of England are not to consent that there should be carried on in their name a system of blood, rapine, robbery and murder . . . because we must make some compensation to some individuals’.
This was also the nub of Wilberforce’s argument – that the issue spoke to ‘the inestimable advantages of a free constitution’. When others said the timing was poor because of Britain’s continuing involvement in the wars with Napoleon and his allies, Wilberforce (and this was before Trafalgar, and while Napoleon had established an invasion camp on the Channel) retorted to the contrary:
if ever there was a period in which this country, circumstanced as we are, had an opportunity of setting a glorious example to all the other nations of the earth and of giving a proof of the inestimable advantages of a free constitution, of an enlightened policy and of all the blessings Providence has bestowed upon us, the present is that moment and we ought to hail it with joy as giving us an opportunity of shewing the world that we are not . . . a sordid race looking exclusively to our own interest and pursuing it through the oppression of others . . . but that we are a nation governed by the rules of justice, which are dictated by true wisdom . . . no society any more than any individual can be long upheld in prosperity upon any other principle.
The subtext of this flamboyance, and the targets of its righteousness, were of course the false prophets of liberty – American and French – who paraded their ostensible devotion to freedom before the world while countenancing servitude and despotism. (Napoleon encouraged the slave trade and would formally reintroduce it two years later.)
The motion passed by an overwhelming majority in both Houses, and the final bill by 289 to 16 – in contrast to the exact 60–60 division in Congress over the ban on inter-state commerce, a tie broken against the motion by Speaker Macon from North Carolina. But the alteration of the position in the British Parliament was of a piece with the evangelical reform movement that was attempting to create a new empire, a Christian empire in fact, established, as Romilly said, on virtue rather than interest, or rather through strenuous attempts to redefine the national and imperial interest so that it squared with evangelical notions of virtue and, perhaps even more important – and certainly as popular – newly romantic notions of English (rather than British) history.
This had always been the driving force of the principal campaigners. Granville Sharp had taken up the cause of abducted blacks in the streets of London – in the 1760s – certainly because he believed the plight of slaves was a violation of Christian ethics (there was a great deal of Talmudic hair-splitting in the debates about whether the Israelites had or had not countenanced bondage), but also because he believed passionately in something at least as sacred, that is the unbroken integrity of the English Common Law by which he held (from an Elizabethan case) ‘the air of England was too pure for a slave to breathe’ – or that once upon these shores all men and women had the same rights to the King’s justice. Hence Sharp’s unremitting tournament with Lord Chief Justice Mansfield over the status of escaped slaves that had been recaptured by former masters, with the intention of forcible deportation and sale in the West Indies. Sharp’s campaigns in the 1770s – fortified at least by his correspondence with American abolitionists like Anthony Benezet and Benjamin Rush – were a reformer’s tour of the British constitution. After the law came the Church, whose indifference to the ‘accursed thing’ (as he called the slave trade) appalled him. Bishops and archbishops were deluged by memoranda and booklets until they capitulated and were converted. After the prelates of the Church, Sharp wanted to recover what he imagined in his Gothic romance to be the pristine forms of democracy: the ‘frankpledge’ elections of householders to local offices of ‘tithingmen’ and ‘hundreddors’, and so on up the
chain of governance to a reformed and morally cleansed national representation.
It wasn’t just Sharp, of course, but the saints of the Clapham Sect – Zachary Macaulay, Henry Thornton, Hannah More and Wilberforce himself – who saw the campaign against the slave trade as the first act in a great national purification. After the Act went through on 25 March 1807, it was said that Wilberforce turned to Thornton and said, ‘Well, Henry, what shall we abolish now?’ – and the answer was the lottery! But attacks were launched not just on electoral corruption, but on all manner of social evils, from prostitution to climbing boys and demon gin. Prompted by Malachy Postlethwayte, erstwhile propagandist for the Royal African Company, turned early critic of the trade, then by Adam Smith and finally by the Quaker merchants and bankers – Samuel Hoare and Joseph Woods – an intensive debate was joined as to what was, and what was not, a moral form of commercial activity. In their campaigns to persuade supporters to refrain from using ‘slave-made’ products, they made much of the addictive and ‘enslaving’ quality of tobacco and rum that corrupted the freedom of the consumer as much as it was purchased by the blood of those who had laboured to produce it.
And if all this seems somehow marginal now to the main act – the transformation of Britain into an industrial and military empire – that judgement seems, to me at any rate, the anachronistic projection back from a perspective of social science. What the campaign to remake British national identity turned on was as much bound up with moral judgements as the Protestant Reformation and the seventeenth-century Puritan moment. The evangelical movement was the descendant of both of those earlier reformations, and it was of course the nursery of Victorian self-belief that they had indeed managed to reconcile the demands of power, money and Christian morals. That one might think them deluded in this conviction doesn’t in any way diminish the force of its original coherence. The fact, too, that after the Irish union of 1801, Great Britain was an indivisible constitution made the reformers believe that what was enacted in Westminster would hold good for the whole country. The centralisation of the British state worked to optimise reform, just as the confederated nature of the American constitution worked against it.
But there was, of course, one respect in which the British reformers of 1807 were no more certain than their American counterparts: whether the abolition of the trade was the harbinger of emancipation, or whether it pre-empted serious consideration of it. In the United States, the horror at freeing blacks from captured slavers was in part a matter of precaution against insurrections, but also because politicians from the Lower South argued it would lead to unrealisable expectations of general emancipation throughout. Both Jefferson and Charles James Fox were at pains to deny any such thing was anticipated, much less taken for granted. Fox went out of his way to treat any such imputation as an anti-abolitionist canard. Even William Wilberforce, notoriously, was at best an extreme gradualist, who believed that prior property rights could not be interfered with, and that there had to be a period of education and apprenticeship before slaves could possibly be trusted with their liberty. Only Granville Sharp – to his dying day – and the Clarkson brothers were immediate emancipationists, and it was the re-publication of Thomas’s great history of the abolition of the trade which kick-started, in the 1820s, the campaign for emancipation itself that culminated in the Act of 1833–4.
That campaign, historians are beginning to emphasise, was a trans-atlantic one in many respects. It was in London that the great international Abolitionist Congress was held in 1840, patronised by the Prince Consort and for which Turner painted his notorious and doomed Slave Ship. It was in Britain that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin found its most rapturous and extensive readership. It was in Newcastle upon Tyne that Frederick Douglass found his personal emancipators, so that it was logical that the lecture tour, which established him as the great charismatic orator of abolitionism, took place in 1845 in Ireland and Britain. Speaking to rapt assembly rooms in the places where the Clarksons had first agitated for the abolition of the trade in blood – in Manchester and Leeds, Birmingham and London, even in Liverpool – Douglass imagined a British Empire which lived up to its promises and which, since 1838, and especially beneath the ensign of the Royal Navy combing the African coast for slavers, was the true benefactor of enslaved Americans. He exaggerated enormously the colour-blind character of the British, so overwhelmed was he by being taken into Parliament, to stately homes and cathedrals. (Had he gone visiting, say, Thomas Carlyle, he might have come away with an entirely different and less rosy view.) But in one respect he was right: in the strenuousness of their determination to make their own moral revolution in Britain, the saints had refused to sweep under the carpet the most repugnant and morally catastrophic issue of the day. A pity, then, that he couldn’t have been in Westminster Abbey to hear the Queen yelled at by her Anglo-African subject, for that would have confirmed for Douglass that, for all their selective sanctimoniousness, the British are, sometimes, capable of taking the truth on the chin.
A League of Its Own
Red October
Guardian, 29 October 2004
It was the opening of Catch-22: love at first sight. Yossarian? Me. The Chaplain: a grungy hole of a baseball ground called Fenway Park. A chilly Boston night in April 1982, the Red Sox playing the Oakland A’s, managed by the somewhat recovering drunk, ex-Yankee Billy Martin. What was I doing there? No idea.
Cricket and football (our football) were my games and would stay that way, never mind that I was living in Boston. Every month my dad had taken me to Lords to see Middlesex – the Comptons, Freddie Titmus, Alan Moss – and I’d happily inhaled the mix of beer tankards and fresh-cut grass while Arthur Schama went blissfully to sleep as the county lost yet again to Sussex (Ted Dexter). In winters it was White Hart Lane – starting early – when Alf Ramsey played for them in his long baggy black shorts, and then into the glory glory years of Nicholson, Blanchflower, Mackay and the dashingly undependable Greaves. So why would I want to waste my time watching glorified rounders in what looked like a terrible dump, its drab paint a bilious grey-green and peeling, just like the girders on the elevated freeway?
Because my friend John Clive had nagged and nagged and I had given in. He was an unlikely Sox fan himself: my colleague in the Harvard history department; biographer of Macaulay; originally Hans Kleyff from Jewish Berlin: big, round, soft and exuberant with dark-brown eyes, and a hoarse chuckle. He loved great historical writing, Apple Brown Betty (a pudding, not a call girl) and the Red Sox. So (grudgingly bemused) I went along for the ride, all innocent of the imminent and irreversible Change in Life, the coup de foudre; the date with fate that was about to hit.
My nose got it before the rest of me did. Walking among the mass of the Sox Nation converging on the ballpark, up Yawkey Way, the nose surrendered to the smell of Italian sausage and frying onion peddled from the street stalls. You eat them sandwiched in hot doughy rolls, with screaming yellow mustard dripping out the end, and we did. Holy shit, there was something in those sausages; something that obviously made people happy, for happy this crowd surely was: kids and grandpas; lots of loud Boston women with insecure dye-jobs and square shoulders encased in warm-up jackets that had seen many years of heartache; dads with six-year-olds riding on their shoulders. A crowd pouring through the gates from tough Irish Southie, patrician Marblehead or, like us, from bosky Lexington.
Inside, Fenway was unpromising: a mass scurrying up and down dark and dirty ramps; programmes hawked, the notorious horse-trough toilets already brimming horribly from hours of Yawkey Way beer. But then, the climb up the steps into ballpark heaven: a blaze of golden light; grass as damply brilliant and as soft as a meadow in County Donegal; men in blue-and-red jackets gently warming up; a thuck-thuck as the baseball hit the mitt; an ancient organ that sighed and groaned and wheezed and sang while welcoming us to the inner sanctum of the cathedral; an even more ancient announcer, the late, great Sherm Feller, who from the depths of his avuncu
lar baritone declared, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Fenway Park’, and from the ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls a soft roar of mass pleasure that rippled round the stands, and my cricket-loving, football-doting self was a hopeless, helpless goner; Middlesex and Spurs were yesterday’s passions. This, I thought, as I improbably caught the bag of peanuts chucked at me from fifteen feet by the vendor, was where I had to be. This was home.
The Red Sox won that evening: veterans (as I rapidly learned) charging round the bases, such as ‘Yaz’ Yastrzemski, a high-octane hulk; taciturn Jim Rice, the slugger leaping at the edge of the outfield to hoist in what seemed sure home runs; Dwight ‘Dewey’ Evans, natty in his trim moustaches, an elegant stance at the plate, cracking line drives through the emerald grass. So we went home happy, but being the Red Sox Nation, morning-after moodiness replaced the brief euphoria. Catch-22 – we won, but actually we should have lost – began in earnest. There were anxieties about the veterans. How long could this bunch hack it? Was it Yaz’s last hurrah? And indeed I had noticed the air of slightly decrepit gentility – like much of Boston – hanging over the team as they chawed their chewing tobacco.