Читать книгу William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner - William Hague - Страница 11

From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

ARISTOTLE, Politics (350BC)¹

The Negro-Trade and the natural Consequences resulting from it, may be justly esteemed an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation.

MALACHY POSTLETHWAYT, 1746²

SLAVERY HAS NEVER BEEN ABSENT from the record of human civilisation.^* The ancient Egyptians owned and traded in black slaves; the armies of Persia’s great king Xerxes contained slaves from Ethiopia; and Greek and Roman civilisations were characterised by the ownership of slaves on a vast scale. Athens boasted sixty thousand slaves in its prime; Rome perhaps two million at the end of the Republic: these included black slaves such as the one depicted serving at a banquet in a mosaic at Pompeii, but also Celts and Saxons from the northern fringes of the Empire. For the whole of the first millennium AD slavery was an accepted part of northern European life, with the slave markets at Verdun and elsewhere doing a busy trade in the empire of Charlemagne, and only the arrival of an effective system of serfdom putting an end to slavery around the eleventh century.

It was in the countries of southern Europe and northern Africa that slavery continued to flourish in the Middle Ages. While the Christians held Spain they used Muslim slaves; after the conquest of Spain by the Moors tens of thousands of Christians were in turn enslaved, with as many as thirty thousand Christian slaves working in the kingdom of Granada as late as the fourteenth century. At the same time, slavery remained common in the Arab world, fed largely by the trans-Saharan trade in black slaves taken from West Africa. There, African kings collected slaves for the lucrative export market but also employed thousands of their own as palace servants or soldiers.

Against such a background, it is not surprising that as the Portuguese ventured down the west coast of Africa and Columbus made his celebrated voyages across the Atlantic in the fifteenth century, a new form of slave trade sprang up simultaneously. By 1444, slaves from West Africa were on sale in the Algarve. Slaves joined gold and ivory among the rich pickings that could be obtained on voyages to the south, the leader of one early expedition reporting: ‘I herded them as if they had been cattle towards the boats. And we all did the same, and we captured on that day … nearly 650 people, and we went back to Portugal, to Lagos in the Algarve, where the Prince was, and he rejoiced with us.’³ The first transatlantic slave voyage was sent on its way by none other than Columbus himself, although, strangely in view of what would later transpire, it was in a west-to-east direction, and consisted of Caribbean natives sent for sale in Europe. It was evident almost immediately that such a trade would not be a success. Half of the second consignment died when they entered Spanish waters due to ‘the unaccustomed cold’, and a Genoese observer reported: ‘They are not people suited to hard work, they suffer from the cold, and they do not have a long life.’⁴ Not only did South Americans turn out to be unsuitable for export to Europe, but their numbers in their own lands were about to be devastated by the diseases which the Spanish and Portuguese brought with them across the Atlantic.

By 1510, King Ferdinand II of Spain was giving permission for four hundred slaves to be taken from Africa to the New World: he could not have known it was to be the beginning of one of the greatest involuntary migrations in human history. Goldmines soon created a demand for tough and expendable labourers, but it was the discovery in the early sixteenth century that sugarcane could be grown as easily in the Caribbean as any indigenous crop that would create, over time, an insatiable demand for African slaves. With Europeans unwilling to perform the backbreaking drudgery involved in tending and growing sugarcane, and the native population still reeling from disease and in any case less physically strong than their African counterparts, the solution was obvious. In the first half of the sixteenth century, what was to become the familiar triangular slave trade thus began: ships from Portugal would carry manufactured goods to the Guinea coast or the Congo, sell them in return for slaves, and carry their new captive cargo across the Atlantic. The third leg of the journey was completed with a cargo of hides, ginger, pearls and, increasingly, sugar for the home market.

It was not long before buccaneering Englishmen wanted to try their hand at the same game. In 1562 Captain John Hawkins, ‘being, among other particulars, assured that Negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that [a] store of Negroes might easily be had upon the Coast of Guinea’, decided ‘to make trial thereof’.⁵ Although Queen Elizabeth I combined her approval for the expedition with the hope that slaves would not be taken against their will –something ‘which would be detestable and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers’⁶ – it was certainly not possible to take them in any other way, although the three hundred slaves taken on board by Hawkins on his first voyage had already been rounded up by the Portuguese. Hawkins ‘made a good profit’ for his investors on this and later voyages,⁷ despite a series of bloody encounters with the Spanish. And behind the English came the Dutch, who, having decided that it was morally unacceptable to sell slaves in Rotterdam or Amsterdam, nevertheless also sent expeditions to buy slaves in West Africa and sell them in the Caribbean. This was to become the hallmark of British and European attitudes to slavery for the following two hundred years: while it could not be sanctioned at home, it was an acceptable institution overseas, out of sight of governments and the general population alike.

In the early seventeenth century, Portuguese ships were still the main carriers of slaves, but with British colonies being developed in the Americas the British slave trade developed steadily alongside them. In the 1620s, black slaves were taken by British ships to North America, where they were ‘bartered in Virginia for tobacco’.⁸ With African slaves costing up to £20 a head, they seemed a better investment than the £10–15 cost of an indentured labourer from Europe, since they were capable of harder work and more tolerant of tropical diseases. Even so, the Atlantic slave trade in the first half of the seventeenth century was still small in scale, involving the transporting of about eight thousand slaves a year across the Atlantic. It was the surge in European demand for sugar which transformed slavery and the slave trade from the scale of small enterprise to that of a massive industry. In Barbados between 1645 and 1667, land prices increased nearly thirty times over as small tobacco farms were replaced by large sugar plantations, and the number of slaves on the island was increased from six thousand to over eighty thousand. As coffee, tea and chocolate became part of the staple diet in London, Paris and Madrid, so the plantations boomed. For the owners this meant profits akin to finding goldmines, but for the slaves it meant that whatever trace of normality or family life they had previously been allowed disappeared into barrack-style accommodation and the endless grind of mass production. Even at the beginning of this period, in 1645, the Reverend George Downing,^* chaplain of a merchant ship, had written: ‘If you go to Barbados, you shall see a flourishing island, [with] many able men. I believe that they are bought this year no less than a thousand Negroes and, the more they buy, the better able are they to buy for, in a year and a half, they will earn (with God’s blessing) as much as they cost.’⁹ The slave trade was becoming an integral part of the growth in British trade and wealth. In 1672 King Charles II granted a charter to the Royal African Company:

We hereby for us, our heirs and successors grant unto the same Royal African Company of England … that it shall and may be lawful to … set to sea such as many ships, pinnaces and barks as should be thought fitting … for the buying, selling, bartering and exchanging of, for or with any gold, silver, Negroes, slaves, goods, wares and manufactures …¹⁰

With the escalating demand for sugar, combined with the gold rush which began in Brazil in the late 1690s, the beginning of the eighteenth century saw the slave trade growing rapidly: perhaps 150,000 slaves were carried to Brazil alone in the first decade of the century. Furthermore, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, signed at the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, Spain ceded to Britain not only the strategic possessions of Gibraltar and Minorca, but also the much-prized Asiento – the contract to import slaves and other goods to the Spanish Indies. The fact that this contract was sold on by the British government to the South Sea Company for the truly vast sum of £7.5 million is evidence of the commercial excitement it generated, and the confidence that enormous profits were at hand. Such confidence was somewhat misplaced, since many slaving voyages made losses and the trade would become less profitable later in the century, but there was no doubt that lucky or skilful traders could make a spectacular return. In the 1720s British ships carried well over 100,000 slaves to the Americas, mainly to Jamaica and Barbados, with 150 ships, principally based in Bristol and London, fully engaged in the trade. In the 1730s British ships carried around 170,000 slaves, overtaking the Portuguese for the first time. This was the decade that saw a great increase in slave traffic to North America: in 1732 South Carolina became the first English colony on the American mainland to register a black majority. It was also the decade that saw the rise of Liverpool as Britain’s foremost slaving port. Well positioned on England’s west coast for Atlantic traffic, Liverpool also had the advantages of being well away from the French navy in time of war, paying crews lower rates than competing ports and being able to evade duty on the goods carried on the homeward voyage by landing them on the Isle of Man (which became ‘a vast warehouse of smuggled goods’¹¹). Several Liverpool families who plunged heavily into the trade were able to fund commercial dynasties partly as a result, ploughing their profits into banking and manufacturing as the slave trade continued to grow.

In the 1740s, British ships transported no fewer than 200,000 African slaves. Furthermore, the triangular trade this facilitated was fuelling the rapid growth of domestic manufacturing. Some 85 per cent of English textile exports went to Africa at this stage, helping the export trade of cities such as Manchester to soar, while the demand for slaving ships in Liverpool made it a world leader in shipbuilding. With the vast profits coming back from the sugar plantations, cotton exports soaring, and the slave trade itself usually yielding a profit, it is no wonder that it could be written in 1772 that the African slave trade was ‘the foundation of our commerce, the support of our colonies, the life of our navigation, and first cause of our national industry and riches’.¹² On taking office in 1783, William Pitt would estimate that profits from the trade with the West Indies accounted for 80 per cent of the income reaching Britain from across the seas. And such was the expansion of colonial production and demand for slaves that in the 1780s, as Wilberforce and Pitt began their political careers, slave traders would carry the truly colossal total of three-quarters of a million people across the Atlantic against their will, with around 325,000 being carried in British ships. Massive in its scale and long-established in its habits, the Atlantic slave trade seemed to many to be crucial to Britain’s prosperity and an indispensable component of her Caribbean empire.

While the statistical record of the slave trade is impressive or horrifying enough, reaching a cumulative total of eleven million people imprisoned and transported across the ocean between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, few people in Europe at the time could have made an accurate guess as to the scale of the trade their nations fostered. More importantly, they would have been entirely unaware of the nature of the human tragedy which every single one of those millions represented. Each one was a child torn from a family, a sister separated from a brother, a husband from a wife or a family removed from the only place in the world they knew or loved. It is only when the slave trade is examined in its individual human consequences that it moves from a study in economic history to a tale of indefensible barbarity.

A glimpse of the heartrending circumstances in which slaves were taken is afforded by the autobiographical writings of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–97), a slave who was captured as a child in the 1740s in what is now Nigeria, but who subsequently earned his freedom and wrote his story in the English language. His first-hand account of the brutalities of the slave trade played a major role in informing and influencing popular opinion and became a roaring success, with nine editions printed during his lifetime alone.^*

One day, when all our people were gone out to their work as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both; and without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, and ran off with us to the nearest wood. Here they tied our hands, and continued to carry us as far as they could, till night came on, when we reached a small house, where the robbers halted for refreshment and spent the night … The next morning we left the house, and continued travelling all the day. For a long time we had kept to the woods, but at last we came into a road which I believed I knew. I had now some hopes of being delivered; for we had advanced but a little way before I discovered some people at a distance, on which I began to cry out for their assistance: but my cries had no other effect than to make them tie me faster and stop my mouth; they then put me into a large sack. They also stopped my sister’s mouth, and tied her hands; and in this manner we proceeded till we were out of the sight of those people … The next day proved a day of greater sorrow than I had yet experienced; for my sister and I were then separated, while we lay clasped in each other’s arms. It was in vain that we besought them not to part us; she was torn from me, and immediately carried away, while I was left in a state of distraction not to be described.¹³

Such kidnapping was common. A nineteenth-century study of the origins of subsequently freed slaves suggested that 30 per cent of them had been kidnapped (by other Africans), while 11 per cent had been sold after being condemned by a judicial process (for adultery, for example), 7 per cent had been sold to pay debts and a further 7 per cent had been sold by relations or friends.¹⁴ The largest proportion of all, 34 per cent, had been taken in war, but John Newton was probably being too sanguine when he argued that ‘I verily believe, that the far greater part of the wars, in Africa, would cease, if the Europeans would cease to tempt them, by offering goods for slaves.’¹⁵ African kingdoms fought wars against each other and enslaved each other’s people long before the Europeans arrived to make matters worse, but there seems little doubt that the lure of the slave trade sometimes contributed to the outbreak of conflict. One observer of the time wrote: ‘The wars which the inhabitants of the interior part of the country … carry on with each other are chiefly of a predatory nature, and owe their origin to the yearly number of slaves which [they] … suppose will be wanted by the vessels which arrive on the coast.’¹⁶ On the other hand, a Royal Navy captain, John Matthews, argued that ‘the nations which inhabit the interior parts of Africa … profess the Mahometan religion; and, following the means prescribed by their prophet, are perpetually at war with the surrounding nations who refuse to embrace their religious doctrines … The prisoners made in these religious wars furnish a great part of the slaves which are sold to the Europeans; and would … be put to death if they had not the means of disposing of them.’¹⁷ At minimum, the feeding of the slave trade became a way of life for tens of thousands of Africans and a source of power and wealth for trading networks which stretched deep into the interior of the continent, such as that of the Aro traders, and kingdoms which supplied huge numbers of slaves, such as the Lunda empire. It was the supplying of slaves which gave such people access to large quantities of copper, iron and, perhaps above all, guns. One cargo list of a ship setting out to purchase 250 slaves in 1733 included a certain amount of textile products, but showed that the vessel carried most of its estimated value in metals and arms, including four hundred ‘musquets’, forty pairs of ‘Common large Pistols’ and forty ‘blunderbuses’, along with fourteen tons of iron, one thousand copper rods and eighty bottles of brandy.¹⁸ Whatever benefit the African tribes derived from the sale of slaves, it was most unlikely to make them more peaceable.

Since most slaves originated far from the coast, perhaps hundreds of miles inland, the first part of their journey involved a long trek on foot, usually yoked together and underfed, with a consequently high rate of mortality. The original kidnappers might have received only a small fraction of the final price of the slave by the time they had paid tolls and duties in the course of a journey and sold on their captives to intermediary traders, at large fairs held specifically for that purpose. In the words of Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon aboard slave ships who would later give evidence to Parliament:

The unhappy wretches thus disposed of are bought by the black traders at fairs, which are held for that purpose, at the distance of upwards of two hundred miles from the sea coast; and these fairs are said to be supplied from an interior part of the country. Many Negroes, upon being questioned relative to the places of their nativity, have asserted that they have travelled during the revolution of several moons (their usual method of calculating time) before they have reached the places where they were purchased by the black traders … From forty to two hundred Negroes are generally purchased at a time by the black traders, according to the opulence of the buyer, and consist of all ages, from a month to sixty years and upwards. Scarcely any age or situation is deemed an exception, the price being proportionable. Women sometimes form a part of them, who happen to be so far advanced in their pregnancy as to be delivered during their journey from the fairs to the coast; and I have frequently seen instances of deliveries on board ship.¹⁹

Despite the constant supply of slaves thus proceeding to the coast, such was the competition among European traders that they often had to anchor for many weeks while slowly filling their decks with slaves amidst much haggling. John Newton’s diary for the year 1750 gives some flavour of what was involved.

Wednesday 9th January … the traders came onboard with the owner of the slave; paid the excessive price of 86 bars which is near 12£ sterling, or must have let him gone on shoar again, which I was unwilling to do, as being the first that was brought on board the ship, and had I not bought him should have hardly seen another. But a fine man slave, now there are so many competitors, is near double the price it was formerly. There are such numbers of french vessels and most of them determined to give any price they are asked, rather than trade should fall into our hands, that it seems as if they are fitted out not so much for their own advantage, as with a view of ruining our purchases. This day buried a fine woman slave, number eleven, having been ailing sometime, but never thought her in danger till within these two days; she was taken with a lethargick disorder, which they seldom recover from …

Thursday 17th January … William Freeman came onboard with a woman girl slave. Having acquitted himself tolerably, entrusted him with goods for 2 more.Yellow Will sent me word had bought me a man, but wanted another musquet to compleat the bargain, which sent him.

Wednesday 23rd January … Yellow Will brought me off a boy slave, 3 foot 10 inches which I was obliged to take or get nothing. Fryday 25th January … Yellow Will brought me a woman slave, but being long breasted and ill-made refused her, and made him take her onshoar …²⁰

Sometimes the traders resorted to simple trickery to fill their cargoes, as in this eyewitness account of Falconbridge:

A black trader invited a negroe, who resided a little way up the country, to come and see him. After the entertainment was over, the trader proposed to his guest, to treat him with a sight of one of the ships lying in the river. The unsuspicious countryman readily consented, and accompanied the trader in a canoe to the side of the ship, which he viewed with pleasure and astonishment. While he was thus employed, some black traders on board, who appeared to be in the secret, leaped into the canoe, seized the unfortunate man, and dragging him into the ship, immediately sold him.²¹

For most slaves, the moment of being taken on board a ship was one of utter terror. Very often they were convinced they were to be eaten – Equiano recalled that when he saw ‘a large furnace of copper boiling and a multitude of black people, of every description, chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate’.²² Newton remembered how the women and girls were taken on board ‘naked, trembling terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue and hunger’, only to be exposed to ‘the wanton rudeness of White savages’. Before long they would be raped: ‘The prey is divided upon the spot, and only reserved till opportunity offers.’²³ It was said that a slave ship was usually ‘part bedlam and part brothel’. Newton recorded that while he was on shore one afternoon one of his crew ‘seduced a women slave down into the room and lay with her brute like in view of the whole quarterdeck, for which I put him in irons. If anything happens to the woman I shall impute it to him, for she was big with child. Her number is 83.’²⁴ Not surprisingly, it was at this point that many slaves made desperate attempts to escape or to kill themselves, something which their captors were unable to comprehend. As another British captain recorded:

the men were all put in irons, two and two shackled together, to prevent their mutiny or swimming ashore. The Negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of canoes, boat and ship into the sea, and kept under water until they were drowned to avoid being taken up and saved … they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbados than we have of hell though, in reality they live much better there than in their own country; but home is home.²⁵

If the slaves did indeed have a premonition of hell, then they were not far wide of the mark, for, unbelievably, the worst part of their ordeal was yet to come. The economics of the slave trade required the maximum number of slaves to be carried in the smallest possible space, with the result that they were forced into a hold, usually shackled together and often without space to turn round, in which some of their number would have already resided for several weeks. Equiano recalled that:

the stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time … now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number of the ship, being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.²⁶

Of course, it was in the interests of slave traders to keep their slaves in some degree of health, and during the day they would be taken up above decks and encouraged to ‘dance’, which generally meant jumping up and down with the encouragement of a whip. But in rough weather they would be confined below decks, with the portholes closed, in a scene of sometimes unimaginable horror. Falconbridge explained that the movement of the ship would cause the wooden planks to rub the skin off shoulders, elbows and hips, ‘so as to render the bones in those parts quite bare’.²⁷ The result was that they not only suffered from excessive heat and the rapid spread of fevers, but that ‘the deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination, to picture a situation to itself more dreadful or disgusting.’²⁸

At this stage only the Portuguese had made any effort to regulate the conditions in which slaves could be carried. Amidst the terrible overcrowding and putrid stenches of the slave ships, an average of around one in ten of all the slaves carried on the ‘middle passage’ across the Atlantic during the eighteenth century died before reaching the Americas, but on ships which were hit by bad weather or severe fevers the death toll was far higher. The journey across the ocean normally took at least five weeks, but it could take many months, with disastrous consequences: the captain of one French ship which lost 496 of its 594 slaves in 1717 blamed his appalling rate of loss on the ‘length of the voyage’ as well as ‘the badness of the weather’.²⁹ It is not surprising that many of those confined in these circumstances lost the will to live: ‘Some throw themselves into the sea, others hit their heads against the ship, others hold their breath to try and smother themselves, others still try to die of hunger from not eating …’³⁰ Consequently, force-feeding was added to the list of brutal treatments. Falconbridge reported that ‘upon the negroes refusing to take sustenance, I have seen coals of fire, glowing hot put on a shovel and placed near to their lips, as to scorch and burn them. And this has been accompanied with threats of forcing them to swallow the coals, if they any longer persisted in refusing to eat.’³¹ While there were certainly slaving captains who tried to be humane, others behaved brutally and lost their temper with the slaves in their charge, as in this eyewitness account of a ship’s captain trying to force a child of less than a year old to eat:

the last time he took the child up and flogged it, and let it drop out of his hands, ‘Damn you (says he) I will make you eat, or I will be death of you;’ and in three quarters of an hour after that the child died. He would not suffer any of the people that were on the quarterdeck to heave the child overboard, but he called the mother of the child to heave it overboard. She was not willing to do so, and I think he flogged her; but I am sure that he beat her in some way for refusing to throw the child overboard; at last he made her take the child up, and she took it in her hand and went to the ship’s side, holding her head on one side, because she would not see the child go out of her hand and she dropped the child overboard. She seemed to be very sorry, and cried for several hours.³²

There were many instances of the slaves fighting back and rising against their captors if the opportunity arose, particularly if they were still within sight of Africa. On rare occasions such mutinies were successful, and led to the murder of the entire crew; more usually they were brutally put down and the ringleaders treated with pitiless harshness. Newton recalled seeing rebellious slaves ‘sentenced to unmerciful whippings, continued till the poor creatures have not had power to groan under their misery’, and others ‘agonising for hours, I believe for days together, under the torture of the thumbscrews’.³³

Those who survived the grotesque horrors of the middle passage were by no means at the end of their torment. They still had to experience the process of being sold in the markets of Jamaica, Barbados or Rio de Janeiro. A visitor to Rio described how ‘There are Shops full of these Wretches, who are exposed there stark naked, and bought like Cattle.’³⁴ Others were sold by ‘scramble’, with several hundred of them placed in a yard together and available at an equal price to whoever could get to them first when the gates were opened. Falconbridge noted: ‘It is scarcely possible to describe the confusion of which this mode of selling is productive,’³⁵ and Equiano, who was himself sold by this method in Barbados, recalled that ‘the noise and clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers serve not a little to increase the apprehensions of the terrified Africans … In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see one another again.’³⁶

This was the Atlantic slave trade: brutal, mercenary and inhumane from its beginning to its end. Yet in British politics the assumption had always been that its abolition was inconceivable. Even Edmund Burke, as he thundered out his denunciations of colonial misrule in India and called for the radical reform of the British state, concluded in 1780 that a rough plan for the immediate mitigation and ultimate suppression of the trade could not succeed, as the West Indian lobby would prove too powerful in Parliament. Three years earlier, another MP, Thomas Temple Luttrell, had given voice to the received wisdom of the times when he said, ‘Some gentleman may … object to the slave trade as inhuman and impious; let us consider that, if our colonies are to be maintained and cultivated, which can only be done by African Negroes, it is surely better to supply ourselves … in British bottoms.’³⁷ This, until the mid-178os, was the general and settled presumption. But no MP of that time could fully perceive the power of the new ideas that were beginning to take hold in many minds, or that those ideas would shortly become the inspiration of some remarkable and brilliant individuals.

Even while the slaves were being forced into ships on the African coast in record numbers in the second half of the eighteenth century, a major shift was taking place in moral and political philosophy which would open the door to the slave trade being questioned and attacked. For the eighteenth century saw the arrival of what has subsequently been termed the ‘Age of Enlightenment’: a rapid growth in human knowledge and capabilities, accompanied by new beliefs concerning the relationship of individuals to the state and to each other, coming together to create a sense of progress and modernity which in turn allowed traditional views and hierarchies to be challenged. The scientific and mathematical revolution precipitated by Sir Isaac Newton earlier in the century gave huge momentum to the development of new thinking based on rational deductions and ‘natural law’. Soon, political philosophers would be arguing for a rational new basis to the understanding of ethics, aesthetics and knowledge, setting out the concept of a free individual, denouncing the alleged superstition and tyranny of medieval times, and paving the way for modern notions of liberalism, freedom and democracy. This gathering change in philosophical outlook came alongside a quickening pace of economic and social change: the dawn of the Industrial Revolution saw the arrival of new manufacturing techniques, such as the ‘spinning jenny’, which revolutionised the production of cotton goods in Britain from the 1760s onwards, and allowed newly prosperous merchants and industrialists to compete with the aristocracy for political power; a rapid growth in population in urban settings, comprising people who were less willing than their rural predecessors to accept old notions of class and authority; a huge expansion in the availability of newspapers and pamphlets, which allowed political ideas to be communicated to a vastly greater number of people than ever before; and a maturing of imperial possessions and conquests which brought greater debate about the appropriate treatment of native peoples who had become colonial subjects.

It was changes such as these that would release intellectual movements which would underpin some of the epoch-changing events of the late eighteenth century, including the French and American Revolutions and the independence movement in Latin America; but an important offshoot of Enlightenment thinking was the belief that in a rational world, institutionalised slavery could not be defended. In his celebrated L’Esprit des lois, published in 1748, Montesquieu brilliantly summed up what would become the Enlightenment case against slavery:

Slavery in its proper sense is the establishment of a right which makes one man so much the owner of another man that he is the absolute master of his life and of his goods. It is not good by its nature; it is useful neither to the master nor to the slave: not to the slave, because he can do nothing from virtue; not to the master, because he contracts all sorts of bad habits from his slaves, because he imperceptibly grows accustomed to failing in all the moral virtues, because he grows proud, curt, harsh, angry, voluptuous, and cruel.³⁸

It was not long before other French thinkers, whose work would be fundamental to the upheavals of the subsequent Revolution, would go further, with Rousseau arguing in 1762 in Le Contrat social that men were born with the right to be free and equal, and that ‘The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive.’³⁹ It was not only the view of radical and revolutionary writers that slavery stood condemned. The Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson argued in 1769 that ‘No one is born a slave; because everyone is born with all his original rights … no one can become a slave; because no one, from being a person, can … become a thing or subject of property.’⁴⁰ He was following in the tradition of a previous professor of philosophy in Scotland, the Irishman Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who had argued in A System of Moral Philosophy that ‘All men … have strong desires of liberty and property,’ and that ‘No damage done or crime committed can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all right.’⁴¹ Yet another Glaswegian professor who would subsequently add massively to the intellectual case against slavery was Adam Smith, whose words carried all the more significance because they were part of his general justification for capitalism and market economics. He argued that slavery was inefficient economically because it was an artificial constraint on individuals acting in their own self-interest, and was thus an obstruction to maximum economic efficiency. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) he argued that

the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only and not be any interest of his own.⁴²

Other hugely influential British writers followed in Smith’s wake, with William Paley mocking slavery in Moral Philosophy (1785), which was widely circulated as a textbook:

But necessity is pretended; the name under which every enormity is attempted to be justified. And after all, what is the necessity? It has never been proved that the land could not be cultivated there, as it is here, by hired servants. It is said, that it could not be cultivated with quite the same conveniency and cheapness, as by the labour of slaves; by which means, a pound of sugar, which the planter now sells for sixpence could not be afforded under sixpence halfpenny; – and this is the necessity!⁴³

The views of such figures as Smith and Paley are of huge significance since they meant, in more modern terms, that the intellectual attack on slavery came from the right as well as the left; it was not necessary to believe in an entirely new social order or in inalienable rights of man in order to accept that slavery could not be economically justified or pragmatically accepted. For young, conservative-minded British politicians such as Pitt and Wilberforce, the works of Adam Smith and William Paley were high on their list of reading materials.

The changing intellectual climate of the late eighteenth century helped to awaken a Christian concern about slavery which had occasionally surfaced in earlier centuries, to little effect. Vatican rulings against the keeping of slaves in the seventeenth century had been understood to refer to natives of the Americas rather than to African Negroes, and the call for ‘an end to slavery’ by Pope Clement XI early in the eighteenth century was greeted with total indifference in Lisbon and Madrid. Yet while established Churches, whether in Rome or Canterbury, were too politically constrained and philosophically complacent to mount a serious challenge to such a widely accepted institution as slavery, the subject was a natural one for Christians of a more reforming or Evangelical disposition. As early as 1671 George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, had called on slave-owners not to use cruelty towards Negroes, and ‘that after certain years of servitude they should set them free’.⁴⁴ By the late eighteenth century, as the scale and growth of slavery became more widely acknowledged and the moral climate of the times moved against it, it became a natural target for Evangelicals and Methodists. Moreover, their beliefs in applying Christian principles to the whole of life, in the importance of Providence and their accountability to God, gave many of them a sense of unavoidable responsibility to combat slavery, rather than a choice of whether or not to do so. By 1774 John Wesley was railing against the slave trade and all who took part in it, threatening slave traders with a worse fate than Sodom and Gomorrah and reminding them that ‘He shall have Judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy.’ He told plantation-owners that ‘Men-buyers are exactly on a level with Men-stealers,’ and merchants that their money was being used ‘to steal, rob, murder men, women and children without number’; ‘Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human law can deprive him of that right, which he derives from the law of nature.’⁴⁵ It was on the basis of such thinking that in due course British Evangelicals would eventually become an indispensable component of the campaign against the slave trade.

It was, however, the Quakers who would lead the way in setting out the Christian case against slavery and the slave trade, bringing to bear an influence far beyond their numbers, partly because they included highly active and respected individuals, and partly because they constituted a genuinely transatlantic community. The Quakers included many influential traders and merchants, and when the annual meeting of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia in 1754 came to the conclusion that ‘to live in ease and plenty by the toil of those who violence and cruelty have put in our power’ was incompatible with Christianity, it was a decision of more than token significance.⁴⁶ The decisions of the Philadelphia Society of Friends led within a short time to their London counterparts coming to the same conclusion. Similarly, when the Quaker Anthony Benezet’s anti-slave-trade tract Observations on the Enslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes was published in America in the 1760s the London Quakers responded by ordering 1,500 copies and distributing them to every member of both Houses of Parliament. Benezet’s powerful arguments against slavery not only rested on Christian principles but were wholly in tune with Enlightenment ideas: ‘Nothing,’ he wrote in 1767, ‘can more clearly and positively militate against the slavery of the Negroes than the several declarations lately published that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”’⁴⁷

The arguments of the Quakers were one of several powerful forces at work in North America in the 1760s and 1770s which would contribute to opening up the debate over the slave trade in Britain. A second factor was the growing fear in some of the North American colonies that the continued importation of large numbers of slaves would create an uncontrollable population prone to revolution in the future. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, ‘Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the State, and there is therefore some difference between them and sheep; sheep will never make insurrections.’⁴⁸ This concern led some states, such as New Jersey in 1769, to impose a prohibitive level of duty on the import of slaves. Once the American Revolution was underway, the second Continental Congress passed a resolution opposing slave imports in 1776, and many of the northern states went on to act against slavery itself – Pennsylvania, for instance, passed a law in 1780 ensuring that all future born slaves would become free at the age of twenty-eight. Within a year of the end of the American War of Independence, all of the New England states had made legal provision for the abolition of slavery on their territory.

The British reaction to the American Revolution was a third factor which may have helped to inculcate the idea that the institution of slavery was no longer immutable. While Samuel Johnson taunted the Americans with the question, ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’,⁴⁹ British generals seeking every possible weapon to use against the colonists made extensive promises of freedom to slaves held in North America. In 1775 the Governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunmore, offered freedom to all slaves who would bear arms against the rebellion: the subsequent years of war saw tens of thousands of slaves desert their owners, and some of them did indeed serve alongside the British Army. Sometimes the population of entire plantations managed to run away, with some states losing over half their slaves. At the end of the war, these desertions would leave the defeated British with the problem of what to do with large numbers of former slaves who had come under their protection, many of them congregated in still-loyal New York, with the eventual result that thousands of them would be unsatisfactorily resettled in Nova Scotia.

One of the effects of the American Revolution was, therefore, to create a significant free black population in the nascent United States, but it also left behind it a sharp political disagreement over the future of slavery and the slave trade, which would divide the United States and influence debate in the rest of the English-speaking world. While northern states responded to American Independence by emancipating slaves, southern states, which were much more heavily economically dependent on slave labour, responded to the end of the war with a surge of slave imports to make up for the large numbers of deserters. Within a remarkably short time the future battle lines of the American Civil War of eighty years later were drawn, facilitated by the historic compromise at the constitutional convention which declared that: ‘The importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited prior to the year eighteen hundred and eight.’⁵⁰ The future President James Madison would defend the compromise as ‘a great point gained in favour of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever within these States a traffic which is so long and so loudly upbraided as the barbarism of modern policy’,⁵¹ but the result was that the period from 1787 to 1807 saw more slaves sold into the United States than any other two decades in history. By the end of the century, opinion in the southern states had turned firmly against the anti-slavery assumptions of the Founding Fathers, and abolitionist sentiment was once again largely confined to the ranks of the valiant Quakers.

In the meantime, Quaker campaigners such as Anthony Benezet had been discovering useful allies across the Atlantic. In his work specifically directed at a British audience A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies (1766), Benezet asked British Christians:

Do we indeed believe the truths declared in the Gospel? Are we persuaded that the threatenings, as well as the promises therein contained, will have their accomplishment? If indeed we do, must we not tremble to think what a load of guilt lies upon our Nation generally, and individually so far as we in any degree abet or countenance this aggravated inequity?⁵²

1773 saw Benezet bring his arguments to London, followed soon afterwards by his pupil William Dillwyn, whose declared purpose was to help the English Quakers organise a campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. There they were introduced to another figure who shared their steadfast persistence and beliefs, and who would come to occupy a central role in the forthcoming campaign against the trade: Granville Sharp.

The grandson of an Archbishop of York, Sharp had become involved in the issue of slavery in 1765, when he had befriended a slave in London and tried to rescue him from being re-sold and returned to the West Indies. His views were reinforced by his contact with Benezet, and were similarly based on strong religious convictions. He was the first in a series of extraordinarily determined and talented individuals in Britain who were to give their time and energy to the anti-slavery cause over the following decades. He was said to have ‘a settled conviction of the wickedness of our race … tempered by an infantile credulity in the virtue in each separate member of it’,⁵³ but his chief quality was indefatigable perseverance in any cause he adopted. Told when he was working as an apprentice to a linen draper that his ignorance of Greek made it impossible for him to understand a theological argument, he went on to gain such a mastery of Greek that he was able to correct previously unnoticed errors in the translation of the New Testament. When a tradesman whom he knew found that his claim to be the rightful heir to a peerage was scornfully dismissed, Sharp pursued the matter until his friend was duly seated in the House of Lords. For seven years from 1765 he applied this quality of determination to trying to prevent plantation-owners from forcibly removing their slaves from England. This work culminated in 1772 with the case of James Somerset, an escaped slave who had been recaptured and was being held on board a ship in London preparing to sail for Jamaica. Since there was no dispute that a Virginia slave-owner held legal title to Somerset, Sharp now had the test case he had been looking for, which could show that slave-ownership was incompatible with the laws of England, irrespective of any legal claim valid elsewhere.

It was a legal point which the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, had struggled for years to avoid. Now, despite a series of adjournments and efforts to settle the matter out of court, Sharp pursued the case until Mansfield was forced to give a definitive judgement. That judgement was that a slave-owner had no right to compel a slave to leave England for a foreign country. Slavery, Mansfield found, was not provided for in English law, and was something ‘so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law’. Such a ruling was, partly inadvertently, a death blow to slavery within the British Isles themselves, where it is thought some thousands of slaves were being held or maintained at the time. Sharp would be disappointed if he thought the ruling would have legal ramifications in British colonies, but he had chalked up an important victory which had the practical effect of ending slavery on British soil. Working with Benezet, he continued his opposition to slavery. In The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God (1776) he presented his argument in biblical terms, arguing that the Israelites were ‘reminded of their Bondage in Egypt: for so the almighty Deliverer from Slavery warned his people to limit and moderate the bondage … by the remembrance of their own former bondage in a foreign land, and by a remembrance also of his great mercy in delivering them from that bondage’.⁵⁴

As he did so, the circle of committed Christians who agreed with him and were prepared to act was quietly growing.

It is an irony of history that David Hartley, one of the very few MPs to attack the slave trade in the House of Commons in the course of the 1770s, was the very man unseated by William Wilberforce when he stormed to victory at Hull in 1780. In defeating him, Wilberforce later recalled that ‘I expressed my hope to him that the time would come when I should be able to do something on behalf of slaves.’⁵⁵ In the same year he apparently asked a friend travelling to Antigua to collect information for him, and again expressed ‘my hope, that some time or other I should redress the wrongs of those wretched and degraded beings’.^56* While there is no reason to doubt that his interest was genuine, the slave trade did not become a topic of parliamentary debate in the early 1780s, and Wilberforce did not attempt to raise it. Yet as Wilberforce turned to devouring books in the summer of 1786, he would have found among many of his chosen authors – Montesquieu, Adam Smith, William Paley – a universal condemnation of slavery. And in the preceding two or three years he would certainly have read a number of new publications which stated the case against the slave trade more effectively and authoritatively than ever before.

One such publication was likely to have been the record of the court proceedings in 1783 concerning the slave ship Zong, circulated by Granville Sharp. The Zong, owned by Liverpool merchants, had sailed from São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea in 1781 with more than four hundred slaves on board. Poor navigation by the captain, Luke Collingwood, led to them overshooting their destination and water on board becoming scarce, with many of the slaves dying or falling ill. Calculating that if the slaves died on board the loss would be borne by the owners, but that should there be a sufficiently sound pretext of the crew being in danger, ‘If the drowned were to be paid for by the insurers, they still constituted a part of the value of the cargo, and the master retained his whole profits,’⁵⁷ Collingwood decided to throw 133 slaves overboard. They were thrown over the side in three groups. The third group of twenty-six, realising what was happening to them, fought back and were consequently thrown into the sea with their arms still in shackles. Only one of the 133 survived, climbing back on board when no one was looking and stowing himself away.

The efforts of the owners to sue the underwriters were a failure, since the shortage of water was not satisfactorily proved, but Lord Mansfield made clear at the time that in legal terms ‘the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard’.⁵⁸ Equally, the efforts of Granville Sharp to launch a prosecution against the owners met with no success: there was no law against a master drowning slaves if he wished to do so. While Sharp suffered a legal defeat, the effect was a moral victory: the terrible story of the Zong became widely known in Britain, and fed a growing sense of outrage.

The same year that the case of the Zong came to court saw the creation of the London Quaker Abolition Committee, and the publication of a flurry of poems and pamphlets denouncing the slave trade. The following year, 1784, the Reverend James Ramsay published two powerful pamphlets – An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies and An Inquiry into the Effects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The importance of Ramsay’s work was that it was based on twenty-two years’ actual experience of living in the West Indies, at a time when hard facts about slavery and the slave trade were difficult to establish and British people with first-hand knowledge were unwilling to speak out. Brought up in Aberdeen, Ramsay had been a surgeon during the Seven Years’ War on the British warship Arundel, captained by Sir Charles Middleton. Ordered by Middleton to go aboard a slave ship recaptured from the French, Ramsay would never forget the desperate scenes he found there, with diseased and plague-ridden slaves dying in the hold. Going on to become a clergyman on the island of St Kitts, where he stayed until 1781, he developed a revulsion for the slave markets and the punishment meted out to slaves which made him into an enemy of the entire system. Unpopular with the whites of the West Indies as a result, but always held in high esteem by the Middletons, he was given the living of Teston in Kent by a wealthy friend of Lady Middleton, and settled down to live alongside his old friends in a more peaceful setting.

Ramsay’s publications developed many of the arguments which would be used by the abolitionists in the years ahead, reasoning that slavery could be dispensed with gradually, and be replaced by the immigration of free people, with a beneficial effect on the businesses and profits of the plantations. In particular, he called for an immediate end to the slave trade, since this would force slave-owners to treat their existing slaves better, and to refrain from the brutalities he had witnessed on St Kitts. Africa too would benefit from the end of the slave trade, perhaps able to develop sugar plantations itself, and ‘The improvement of Africa is a compensation which we owe for the horrid barbarities we have been instrumental in procuring to be exercised on her sons.’⁵⁹