The Dangerous Book of Heroes Page 15

  Quaker doctrine in England and the colonies gradually became opposed to the slave trade and slavery. Anglican philosopher John Locke described slavery as a “vile and miserable estate.” In 1688, Aphra Behn wrote the first novel with a slave as its hero: Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave. Methodist John Wesley called the trade “the execrable sum of human villainy,” and poet and satirist Alexander Pope condemned it outright.

  By the 1770s, there were about fifteen thousand black Africans living in England and Wales and several thousand more in Scotland. Slavery was not allowed in Britain, but was there a specific law prohibiting it? Generally in Britain, where there is no constitution, if there is no law prohibiting an act, then it’s not illegal; it is the most liberal of all systems. Constitutions actually restrict liberty. So a test case was required to confirm whether or not slavery was illegal in Britain.

  In 1765, a clerk in the civil service, Granville Sharp, became the first practical slave abolitionist in the world when he issued a writ of assault against a slave “owner” for beating black slave Jonathan Strong. Sharp secured Strong’s release from prison; his “owner” responded with a counter-writ accusing Sharp of robbing him of his property. The grounds for a test case were established. Public outrage about the “owner’s” counter-writ was so immense—showing that the public did indeed consider slavery illegal in Britain—that he withdrew his writ. There was no case. Sharp tried again with fugitive black slave Thomas Lewis, but the jury decided that Lewis’s master had not established his case as “owner” and so Lewis was a free man anyway.

  Sharp was able to pursue a case to its conclusion with another African fugitive, James Somersett. In 1771, Somersett escaped his Boston master while the two were visiting London, then was recaptured in 1772 and imprisoned on a ship about to sail for Jamaica. Under the Act of 1679, Sharp applied for and was granted a writ of habeas corpus. This prevented Somersett from being removed from England, on the grounds that he was wrongfully imprisoned because there was no such legal status as slavery.

  Sharp’s lawyer quoted as precedent a trial two hundred years earlier in Elizabeth I’s reign, where the verdict determined “that England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.” He argued further that a law of another country, even a British colony, had no jurisdiction in England and Wales.

  Judge Lord Mansfield applied the impartial law of England and agreed: “The power claimed [of ownership] never was in use here nor acknowledged by the law. The state of Slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law…. It is so odious that nothing can be sufficient to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from this decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England, and therefore the black must be discharged.”

  Judge Mansfield had confirmed the Elizabethan verdict that slavery was illegal. This judgment was the beginning of the end of slavery throughout the world. In practical terms, it meant that any slave setting foot in England or Wales was immediately a free man. There was jubilation, with Africans dancing outside the court. Scottish law followed suit, when the courts there prohibited the forced return of former slaves to Jamaica. Great Britain was the first country in the world where slavery was actually written into the statute books as illegal. Escaped slaves fled to Britain from Europe and its colonies.

  With the leadership of Granville Sharp, the scattered sentiments against slavery coalesced into the abolition movement. Sharp wrote an incredible sixty-one treatises condemning slavery. The next step was to abolish the slave trade itself.

  In 1776, abolition received unexpected support with the publication of economist Adam Smith’s classic work The Wealth of Nations. Smith demonstrated that slave labor was not as profitable as free labor: over time slaves were more expensive than freemen. Further, the land suffered from lack of care when worked by slaves, whereas freemen cared for the land because they had a vested interest.

  Recent examinations of the contribution of slave labor to the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution have revealed a far smaller impact than previously thought. For example, the port of Liverpool’s profit from the slave trade in the heyday of 1750–1800 was only 7.5 percent of its total profit, while the overall profits from slave industries for Britain amounted to only 1.5 percent of the national investment. It was not slavery but the East India Company—which at its peak controlled more than half the world’s trade—upon which the British Empire was built. Adam Smith’s arguments against slavery were economic rather than moral, but they were important because slavers and their supporters claimed that abolition would ruin Britain economically. Smith showed that argument to be false.

  The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in London in 1787. The chairman was Granville Sharp, and its founding members—all of whom should be remembered for what they achieved—were William Dillwyn, Samuel Hoare, George Harrison, John Lloyd, Joseph Woods, Richard Phillips, John Barton, Joseph Hooper, James Phillips, Philip Sansom, and twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Clarkson. Sharp, Sansom, and Clarkson were Anglicans; the rest were Quakers. Potter Josiah Wedgwood devised the society’s seal, a manacled slave with the legend AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?

  Cambridge graduate Thomas Clarkson trained as a deacon but never practiced. Instead, he devoted his working life to the abolition of slavery. He traveled Britain campaigning for the society, formed antislavery branches in boroughs, towns, and cities, and collected damning information about the trade. In seven years he rode 35,000 miles. To find one witness, he traveled to five ports and visited fifty-seven vessels.

  He sailed to France to persuade the revolutionaries of 1789 to include abolition within their charter of liberties. Despite six months of meetings and submissions, he was unsuccessful. In 1791–92 he took a petition around Britain, gathering 390,000 signatures before presenting it to Parliament. In 1794 his health collapsed and he had to rest from the campaign.

  Clarkson’s most important single act was to recruit to the society the similarly youthful MP for Yorkshire, William Wilberforce. Wilberforce became the abolitionists’ brilliant advocate in Parliament, Clarkson their passionate voice in the country, and Sharp their writer and tactician behind the scenes. It was a formidable trinity.

  Wilberforce’s conversion to abolition took place in stages. The first was meeting former slave captain John Newton, who had undergone a spiritual conversion and been ordained in the Church of England. He knew the slave trade and supplied details and inside information about the business to Clarkson and Wilberforce. The hymn “Amazing Grace” was written by Newton about his redemption:

  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

  that saved a wretch like me.

  I once was lost but now am found,

  was blind but now I see.

  At his wedding, Wilberforce sang the hymn with pride.

  The second stage for Wilberforce was recruitment by Clarkson to the society. The third was a conversation with close friend and visionary, the twenty-four-year-old prime minister William Pitt the Younger. Pitt urged Wilberforce to make abolition his special political cause and promised him his support. Pitt and Wilberforce were the young shooting stars of Parliament.

  Pitt ordered inquiries into the slave trade and forced through an act restricting it and improving standards. The inquiries reported in 1789, and after a Wilberforce speech of three and a half hours, it was agreed that a select committee would report to Parliament with details. A general election interrupted the committee, but it presented its report supporting abolition in 1791. The dying Methodist John Wesley sent his last letter to Wilberforce, urging him to continue the campaign.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  After a four-hour speech by Wilberforce, two evenings of impassioned debate, and support from Pitt and the king, the bill to abolish the slave trade was still defeated, although by only seventy-five votes. It was apparent it was going to be a tough cam
paign. However, the abolitionists had gained the support of another liberal from the opposition party, the hell-raising drinker Charles Fox.

  Pitt and Wilberforce persisted and in 1792 Wilberforce again presented a bill for the abolition of the slave trade. The Commons debate lasted throughout the night, with Pitt speaking so eloquently that for “the last twenty minutes he seemed to be really inspired.” With an amendment to “gradual abolition,” the motion was passed by an incredible 145 votes. Two weeks later, a date for the beginning of abolition was approved: January 1, 1796.

  A bill for the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire—in effect, the world—had been passed by the House of Commons. It was surely only a matter of time before it was approved by the House of Lords and became law. The opponents of abolition were reduced to delaying tactics, which they began immediately. In the House of Lords they moved a postponement to the next parliamentary session and then to the following year; both succeeded.

  Meanwhile, supported by Clarkson and Wilberforce, Granville Sharp established a “province of freedom” in West Africa, a settlement for free Africans living in Britain who wished to return. Black colonial Loyalists who had fought with Britain during the American War of Independence also applied to go to the Freetown settlement. Several thousand had escaped from the United States and were living in Nova Scotia Colony. In 1792, Clarkson’s brother led a fleet of fifteen ships carrying 1,196 free black settlers from Halifax to Freetown.

  After France declared war on Britain in 1793, the threat of French invasion concentrated Parliament’s energies on survival. The date for commencement of abolition came and went against a background of war and elections. Wilberforce submitted motions for a new bill annually, but all were defeated. However, as the Royal Navy began to dominate the seas and as British forces defeated French, Dutch, and Spanish armies outside Europe, confidence returned.

  Following Pitt’s victory in the general election of 1804, Wilberforce presented a new bill for the abolition of the slave trade; it was passed by the Commons but too late for presentation to the Lords. He reintroduced it in 1805, but it was defeated in its second reading. Such frustration took its toll on Wilberforce, who suffered from severe colitis. Opium was then the only pain relief, and he was almost addicted, so great was his pain.

  Wilberforce persuaded Pitt to use an Order in Council to ban all slave trading to the captured Dutch colony of Guiana. After the battle of Trafalgar, with the threat of French invasion virtually gone, the government had time to address issues other than war. With abolition regaining momentum, Clarkson returned to the battle and experienced lawyer James Stephen joined the cause.

  At the age of only forty-six, worn out from orchestrating the defense against France, Pitt died in the new year. A coalition with Lord Grenville as prime minister and Charles Fox as foreign minister succeeded him. In a new tactic devised by James Stephen, Wilberforce reintroduced the Foreign Slave Trade Bill. It banned all Britons from slave trading outside the empire and was passed by both Houses of Parliament. Grenville and Fox had shown their colors; the coalition leaders were in favor of abolition.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  In an agreement with Wilberforce, Fox himself moved a resolution in the Commons in June that “all manner of dealing and trading in slaves” should be “utterly abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful.” It was passed by 101 votes. Then Fox died and Lord Grenville was forced into a general election. He was returned and introduced Fox’s abolition bill to the Lords in January. For the first time, the Lords passed the bill and returned it to the Commons.

  On February 23, 1807, the bill’s second reading in the House of Commons took place, the final reading if passed. The vote was a landslide, 283–16—in favor. At last the bill was passed. Wilberforce was applauded by Commons. Overcome with emotion, he wept at his bench.

  The king signed the royal assent on March 25. Immediately Sharp, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others formed the African Institution, to promote the application of the act and to campaign for abolition of the slave trades of other countries. Ironically, because of the French wars and delays orchestrated by its opponents since 1792 when the bill was first passed, Britain was not the first country to abolish the slave trade. Denmark had abolished it in 1803. Yet—with all respect to Denmark—in global terms that abolition was irrelevant. It was what Great Britain decided that would dictate to the world the future of the slave trade. The navy began policing the ban.

  With continental Europe liberated from France in 1815, Wilberforce led a campaign—including petitions of one million signatures gathered around Britain—to include in the Vienna peace treaty an anti-slave-trade clause. Foreign Minister Castlereagh responded: “The nation is bent upon this object. I believe there is hardly a village that has not met and petitioned upon it. Ministers must make it the basis of their policy.” It was also at Vienna that Britain stopped European nations from dismembering France into small states and principalities as punishment for its twenty-two years of war.

  Defeated France and the Netherlands had no choice but to abolish their slave trades, but allies Spain and Portugal refused. Britain stepped forward and paid them to reduce and to end their slave trades. Despite this, all those countries continued trading slaves illegally. Between 1811 and 1870, some two million more African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic, mostly to the United States, Cuba, and Brazil.

  It wasn’t easy for the Royal Navy to police the Atlantic in the days of sailing ships. Between 1808 and 1845 it lost 1,338 men off the West African coast alone, mostly to disease. Agreements were negotiated with many other countries, giving the navy the right to board and search their ships for slaves; the United States notably refused. From 1825 to 1865, the United States imported a further million slaves.

  The abolitionists genuinely thought that stopping the slave trade would lead the British plantations to free their slaves and employ them, as economist Adam Smith had earlier promoted. The majority of transported slaves had been male. With no more arriving—ever—it was in the planters’ best interests to promote free families for future labor. Through the fears and stupidity of the plantation owners, this didn’t happen.

  Rising again to the challenge, the abolitionists mounted another social and political campaign. Granville Sharp, however, had died in 1813, while Wilberforce was then sixty-seven, with failing health, and Clarkson was sixty-six and going blind from cataracts. Thomas Buxton, a young Anglican MP, led the new campaign under the banner of the Anti-Slavery Society. On May 15, 1823, Buxton moved a resolution in the Commons to abolish all slavery in the British Empire. He saw freedom in the empire as the major step in the wider battle for freedom throughout the world, although he was realist enough not “to suppose that we can at once, by a single effort, solve the problem which lies before us.”

  That year, in the new colony of Guiana (formerly Dutch Guiana), there was an uprising by thirteen thousand slaves in which two overseers were murdered. The Dutch colonists proclaimed martial law, hanged forty-seven slaves, and sentenced to death English missionary and abolitionist John Smith for complicity in the uprising. He was imprisoned and died in jail. Smith’s death, the first abolitionist martyrdom, became a catalyst for the new cause.

  Buxton forced through sweeping reforms for the West Indian and Guiana colonies. They included automatic freedom for all female children born after 1823, abolition of flogging, holidays for religious instruction, a nine-hour working day, savings banks for slaves, and admission of evidence by slaves in court. In 1828 the landmark British ruling was made that “free people of colour in the colonies” have legal equality with their fellow citizens. The planters were not pleased.

  Government in the British Empire was complicated by the fact that each colony had its own separate government. This allowed local representation and administration but also created policy differences with Parliament in London. In 1832, Jamaican colonists threatened to secede and join the United States. Slave condition
s in the United States were then horrific, and this threat prompted an uprising by fifty thousand Jamaican slaves. The Jamaican administration was severe, executing one hundred slaves after peace was restored. Upon a wave of revulsion in Britain, Buxton again moved a motion in the Commons for the abolition of slavery in the empire.

  On July 26, 1833, the final reading of this bill was passed by the Commons; it became law on August 29. At a stroke, some 800,000 people were freed.

  In a clever move, Parliament compensated the planters for half of each slave’s market value. On the one hand it pacified the planters; on the other the money enabled them to continue the plantations and other industries and provide employment and apprenticeships for the freed slaves.

  William Wilberforce died on the morning of July 29 at his home in Chelsea, aware that the abolition of slavery had been secured. He is buried alongside William Pitt in Westminster Abbey. Thomas Clarkson lived until September 26, 1846, age eighty-seven, and was buried at home near Ipswich. His last public appearance was to address the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840.

  Successive British governments in the 1800s sent the navy and the army around the world to stop slavery, particularly in Africa. Antislavery squadrons patrolled the African coasts, and expeditions blazed paths inland, destroying slave markets and liberating slaves at source.

  The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the British Aborigines Protection Society campaigned throughout the world, while Anglican and Methodist antislavery missionaries such as David Livingstone worked at private expense. One missionary, Arthur West, bought the entire slave market of Zanzibar and freed the slaves. Arab sheiks, African chieftains, Turkish emirs, Egyptian pashas, Persian princes, and Sudanese khedives were all coerced by the British to join foreign governments in signing slavery-suppression and abolition treaties. When Zanzibar became British in 1890, the slave market and stockades were blown up and the Muslim slave trade by sea almost totally stopped.