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To William Hey he wrote that this cause ‘is of the utmost consequence, and worthy of the labours of a whole life’.
Such an all-encompassing campaign was certainly likely to require the labours of a whole life. England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was rife with every activity of which Wilberforce now disapproved. In London, brothels had become fashionable and acceptable, and ‘prostitution is so profitable a business, and conducted so openly, that hundreds of persons keep houses of ill-fame, for the reception of girls not more than twelve or thirteen years of age, without a blush upon their integrity’.
According to Sydney Smith, ‘Everyone is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.’
In the Gordon Riots of 1780, many deaths had been caused when a distillery had been broken into and people had drunk unrefined gin from the gutters. A commentator earlier in the century had written:
What an intolerable Pitch that Vice is arriv’d at in this Kingdom, together with the astonishing NUMBER OF TAVERNS, COFFEEHOUSES, ALEHOUSES, BRANDY-SHOPS, &c. now extant in London, the like not to be paralleled by any other City in the Christian world … If this drinking spirit does not soon abate, all our Arts, Sciences, Trade, and Manufacturers will be entirely lost, and the Island become nothing but a Brewery or Distillery, and the Inhabitants all Drunkards.
A House of Lords debate in the 1740s had heard that ‘You can hardly pass along any street in this great city, at any hour of the day, but you may see some poor creatures, mad drunk with this liquor [gin], and committing outrages in the street, or lying dead asleep upon bulks, or at the doors of empty houses.’
Ministers and Members of Parliament seemed to be as bad as anyone, with George Rose, the Secretary to the Treasury, writing to Wilberforce on one occasion: ‘I have actually been drunk ever since ten o’clock this morning, and have not yet quite the use of my reason, but I am, Yours most faithfully and cordially, George Rose.’
As to crime, ‘The most barefaced villains, swindlers, and thieves walk about the streets in the day-time, committing their various depredations, with as much confidence as men of unblemished reputation and honesty.’
A comprehensive analysis of crime in London in 1796 produced ‘a shocking catalogue of human depravity’, along with the calculation that 115,000 (out of a population of little more than a million) supported themselves ‘in and near the metropolis by pursuits either criminal, illegal, or immoral’. Nearly half of these were thought to be ‘unfortunate females of all descriptions, who support themselves chiefly or wholly by prostitution’, but the other categories mentioned in the remarkably detailed and oddly precise calculations included eight thousand ‘Thieves, Pilferers, and Embezzlers’, 7,440 ‘Swindlers, Cheats, and low Gamblers’ who lived ‘chiefly by fraudulent transactions in the Lottery’, three thousand ‘Spendthrifts, Rakes, Giddy Young Men, inexperienced and in the pursuit of criminal pleasures’, two thousand ‘Professed Thieves, Burglars, Highway Robbers, Pick-pockets and River Pirates’, a thousand ‘Fraudulent, and dissolute Publicans who are connected with Criminal People’ and ‘allow their houses to be rendezvous for Thieves, Swindlers and Dealers in Base Money’ – all the way down to sixty ‘Professed and known Receivers of Stolen Goods of whom 8 or 10 are opulent’.
It was against this daunting background that Wilberforce unfolded his plan to Porteus, who considered that ‘the design appeared to me in the highest degree laudable, and the object of the greatest importance and necessity; but I foresaw great difficulties in the execution of it unless conducted with great judgement and discretion … My advice therefore was to proceed in the beginning cautiously and privately, to mention the Plan in confidence, first of all to the leading men in Church and State, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr Pitt to engage their concurrence … and then by degrees to … obtain if possible the assistance of the principal and most respectable characters among the nobility, clergy and gentry in and about London and afterwards throughout the Kingdom.’
Wilberforce proceeded precisely along these lines, winning the ‘entire approbation’ of the Prime Minister and the Archbishop,
and, via the Archbishop, the approval of the King and Queen. By the end of May, he could hope that ‘The persons with whom I have concerted my measures, are so trusty, temperate, and unobnoxious, that I think I am not indulging a vain expectation in persuading myself that something considerable may be done.’
It was thus largely at Wilberforce’s behest that on 1 June 1787 King George III issued a new Proclamation, observing ‘with inexpressible concern, the rapid progress of impiety and licentiousness and that deluge of prophaneness, immorality, and every kind of vice which, to the scandal of our holy religion, and to the evil example of our loving subjects, have broken in upon this nation’, and commanding the ‘Judges, Mayors, Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace and all our other subjects’ to set about the prosecution of all persons guilty of ‘excessive drinking, Blasphemy, profane Swearing and Cursing lewdness, Profanation of the Lord’s Day, or other dissolute, immoral, or disorderly Practices; and that they take Care also effectually to suppress all publick Gaming Houses and other loose and disorderly Houses, and also all unlicensed Publick Shews, Interludes, and Places of Entertainment’.
While the population at large greeted the Proclamation with the customary indifference, Wilberforce’s objective was to mobilise leading figures to pursue the aims expressed in it over time rather than to achieve instant results. Throughout the late spring and summer of 1787 he was to be found circulating his plan to people of influence, persuading the Duke of Montagu to become President of the ‘Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality’ and visiting Bishops as far afield as Worcester, Hereford, Norwich, Lincoln, York and Lichfield. He met with much approval and sympathy, some of the aristocracy seeing his plan, as he did, as something which could ultimately lead to more humane and proportionate punishments; the Duke of Manchester wrote, ‘if you and other young men who are rising in the political sphere would undertake the arduous task of revising our code of criminal law … I mean largely the number of capital punishments, I am satisfied it would go far towards bettering the people of this country’.
But others were more cynical or mistrustful. When Wilberforce was bold enough to visit Earl Fitzwilliam, who had tried to prevent his election for Yorkshire in 1784, Fitzwilliam laughed in his face and argued that the only way to avoid immorality was to become poor – ‘I promised him a speedy return of purity of morals in our own homes, if none of us had a shilling to spend in debauchery out of doors.’
Involving outwardly respectable people in pressing on with such ideas, according to Fitzwilliam, would only expose their hypocrisy in due course. Another nobleman apparently expressed similar scepticism, responding to Wilberforce’s proposals by pointing to a painting of the crucifixion as an example of how idealistic young reformers met their end.
Nevertheless, when the names of the forty-nine founding members of the Society were published, they included four Members of Parliament (including the Prime Minister), ten peers, six Dukes and a Marquis, along with seventeen Bishops and the Archbishops of both Canterbury and York. While such impressive leadership had the advantage of showing that this was a powerful movement in which leading figures in society intended to display both activity and example, the disadvantage was that critics could easily point out that it was mainly poorer people who would have to change their behaviour if the great swathe of restrictions mentioned in the Proclamation were enforced. In the words of Hannah More: ‘Will not the common people think it a little inequitable that they are abridged of the diversions of the public-house and the gaming-yard on Sunday evening, when they shall hear that many houses of the first nobility are on that evening crowded with company, and such amusements carried on as are prohibited by human laws even on common days?’
Years later, when the work of the Proclamation Society had been overtaken by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Sydney Smith would characterise them as having the aim of ‘suppressing the vices of persons whose income does not exceed £500 per annum’.
It is certainly true that, while Wilberforce had by now withdrawn himself from the pleasures and gaming tables of gentlemen’s clubs, he avoided making a direct assault on their members’ habits, writing to Dudley Ryder in September 1789, ‘Don’t imagine I am about to run amuck and tilt at all I meet. You know that on many grounds I am a sworn foe to the Clubs, but I don’t think of opening my trenches against them and commencing open war on such potent adversaries. But then I honestly confess to you that I am restrained only by the conviction that by such desperate measure I should injure rather than serve the cause I have in view; and when ever prudential motives do not repress my “noble rage” I would willingly hunt down vice whether at St James’s or St Giles’s.’
In making this judgement, Wilberforce was demonstrating what would become an obvious attribute: his idealistic objectives were always pursued by means which took into account practical and political constraints. Rather than denounce the activities of the better-off, but conscious of the possible charge of hypocrisy, he set out to involve senior national figures in order to change the prevailing fashion and habits of the times, at all social levels including their own. He believed that those who could set an example had adopted an inverted pride in which they claimed their behaviour to be worse than it actually was: ‘We have now an hypocrisy of an opposite sort, and I believe many affect to be worse in principle [than] they really are, out of deference to the licentious moral [sic] of the fashionable world.’
The founding of the Proclamation Society was thus a forerunner of the many projects and causes Wilberforce would pursue throughout his life: in his methods, objectives and weaknesses, the same pattern would emerge again and again. His method was to win over leading figures in politics and society by the force of persuasion and the power of example, never failing to show due respect to their rank and to take enormous trouble over assuaging their doubts and fortifying their consciences. His objectives would always centre on using spiritual improvement to ameliorate the human condition by practical steps rather than dramatic transformation; in this case he was seeking a higher moral climate for the betterment of rich and poor, law-abiding and law-breaking alike, but not the social and political revolution which others would soon be advocating. He wanted to improve society rather than render it unrecognisable. Such methods and objectives would always have the weakness of being open to charges of excessive caution or conservatism, and be easily subject to mockery. In his book The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt would write: ‘Mr Wilberforce’s humanity will go to all lengths that it can with safety and discretion, but it is not to be supposed that it should lose him his seat for Yorkshire, the smile of Majesty, or the countenance of the loyal and pious.’
His proposals were easily seen as being either puritanical or hypocritical. When the great playwright and opposition MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan was found years later lying drunk in a gutter and was asked to give his name, he famously replied, ‘Wilberforce!’
Yet Wilberforce would also display, in his efforts to reform the nation’s manners, other attributes which would become lifelong characteristics of a great campaigner: steady persistence and a step-by-step accumulation of small additions towards his goal. The Proclamation Society duly succeeded in broadening its membership and support among the magistracy and gentry, and disseminating a great deal of instruction and guidance on enforcement – as in this attempt to help judge the state of intoxication:
Particularly as to drunkenness to use caution and prudence in judging whether a man is drunk. Though a man that cannot stand upon his legs, or that reels or staggers when he goes along the streets and is heard to falter remarkably in speech, unless in the cause of some known infirmity or defeat, may ordinarily be presumed to be drunk.
In the later view of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Proclamation Society ‘set going a national movement’ which actually produced a marked lull in rioting, disorderly conduct and brutal amusements, and became ‘an important contributory cause of the remarkable advance of “respectability” made by the English working man during the first two decades of the nineteenth century’.
Such a ‘lull’ is difficult to validate statistically, although it appears from the records of convictions for murder in London throughout the eighteenth century that violent crime was certainly on a downward trend which continued through this period. It may well be that British society was becoming less drunk, less violent and less disrespectful after a bout of mid-century excess, but it is also hard to deny that the Proclamation Society achieved practical results: convening conferences of magistrates to try to improve prison government and the regulation of vagrancy, and obtaining court judgements or Acts of Parliament which allowed brothels to be closed or the special nature of Sundays to be observed. As Britain began to move from Hanoverian excess to Victorian self-discipline, Wilberforce’s Proclamation Society would become one of the many forces propelling it on its way.
Busy as Wilberforce had been in conceiving of and launching the Proclamation Society, it was by no means his sole preoccupation in late 1786 and throughout 1787. For most of the rest of his life he would simultaneously pursue several issues in parallel, flitting between the mountains of correspondence and long lines of visitors which each issue aroused. Continually finding outlets for his public philanthropy, he was often also busily attending to the spiritual or financial condition of friends and relatives. Still close to Pitt, he became an intermediary to Robert Smith, later Lord Carrington, who had offered to sort out Pitt’s chaotic domestic finances. This would prove to be an impossible task at any stage in the next two decades, and would often call for Wilberforce’s intervention. ‘Indifferently as I thought of our friend’s domestic management,’ Smith wrote to him in 1786, ‘I was not prepared for such an account as the box contained … the necessity, however, of bringing his affairs into some better order is now so apparent, that no man who is attached to his person, or values his reputation, can be easy while he knows it is undone.’
The following year Wilberforce received a series of entreaties from his sister in Hull, usually demanding an answer by return of post, requesting advice on Christian conversion or his judgement about what entertainments she was permitted to be involved in. Asked to determine whether his family should attend the theatre, he confessed in his reply to agonising over the pain he would cause his mother, a consciousness that he would have to ‘account for my answer to it at the bar of the great Judge of quick and dead’, and concluded: ‘in one word, then, I think the tendency of the theatre most pernicious … You talk of going only to one or two plays, and of not staying the farce … how will the generality of those who see you there know your motives for not being as frequent an attendant as formerly, and for not remaining during the whole performance? … Will not, then, your presence at the amusements of the theatre sanction them in the minds of all who see you there?’
The need to combine political action, Evangelical principles and personal example meant that Wilberforce always had to fight on many fronts. And even as he wrote such letters, the greatest concern and most central campaign of his life was opening up.
While Wilberforce was with his family in Yorkshire in 1786 he had received a letter from Sir Charles Middleton MP which led him to promise to visit the Middleton family home, Barham Court at Teston in Kent, that autumn. He had many reasons for going. He already knew Middleton well, and had a high regard for him: Middleton was the father-in-law of Wilberforce’s friend Gerard Edwards, and was at that stage one of the few other Evangelical Members of Parliament. He was also serving as the highly effective Comptroller of the Navy and Head of the Navy Board, implementing the much-needed reforms demanded by Pitt to strengthen the Royal Navy and root out corruption in the dockyards after the failures of the American War. Furthermore, Middleton’s indomitable wife Margaret was an early Evangelical, a friend of Hannah More, Dr Johnson and Garrick, whose mind was ‘so constantly on the stretch in seeking out opportunities of promoting in every possible way the ease, the comfort, the prosperity, the happiness temporal and eternal, of all within her reach that she seems to have no time left for anything else and scarce ever appeared to bestow a single thought upon herself’.
Their combination of naval experience and Evangelical beliefs had given the Middletons emphatic views about what they considered to be the greatest outrage of the eighteenth-century world. Those views were fully shared by another man who Wilberforce would have seen when he stayed at Teston, and who he had met before, James Ramsay, who had served in the navy, become a rector, and was now serving as vicar of the local parish. Two years earlier, Ramsay had written his seminal Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. Wilberforce knew from Middleton’s letter that this would be the subject of the discussion when he stayed at Teston. For his hosts had in mind for him a simply stated but vastly complicated task: to lead in Parliament a campaign to abolish the slave trade.
The site of this house is now a grassed area with a statue of George V opposite St Stephen’s entrance to the Houses of Parliament.
6 The Trade in Flesh and Blood (#ulink_b659f7bf-6d3d-5da1-862b-2e004dcb122d)
From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.
ARISTOTLE, Politics (350BC)
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, 1746
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.’
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.’
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’.
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’
– 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,
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’.
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.’
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 …
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’
). 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’.
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.
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.
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.’
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.’
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.’
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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’.
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.’
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.’
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.
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.
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’.
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.’
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’.
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 …’
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.’
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.
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’.
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.’
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,’
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.’
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.’
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.
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.’
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.’
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.’
