by Melvyn Bragg
One relative of the Prime Minister Lord North gained the see of Winchester and received £1.5 million over his lifetime and secured thirty livings for other members of his family. The work in the parishes was done by lower clergy who would receive a shilling a day and supplement this by farm work, teaching or any other way they could. This was widespread. The Church of England was a smug, unassailable scandal which dressed itself in establishment respectability: many of its leading figures were no better than scoundrels primped out as benefactors.
Jane Austen gives us a glimpse of this. Later in the nineteenth century, Trollope was to manufacture an enjoyable satirical world out of these corruptions. The Church remained for the well-off just another way in which to get richer. In his wild oats young manhood, Wilberforce saw none of that: indeed he went along gaily with the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ clergyman whose rectory often dwarfed the village church. The execution of holy office was as much theatrical as theological and had very little to do with preaching on the shores of Galilee.
We are all coloured by the company we keep and Wilberforce’s metropolitan clique circled around the fashionable gentlemen’s clubs. William Wilberforce belonged to the Goosetree, perhaps the most exclusive. The chief occupations were drinking and gambling, gambling above all, night and day. In one uninterrupted seventy-two-hour session, the famous politician Charles James Fox, twenty-five, and his younger brother lost £32,000. Young aristocrats lost their entire estates through this fashionable addiction to gambling which for a time besotted many of the aristocracy and the wealthy. Walpole wrote: ‘the young men lose five, ten, fifteen thousand pounds in an evening. Lord Staverdale, not one and twenty, lost £11,000 last Tuesday but recovered it by one great hand at Hazard.’ They would gamble on anything and clubs kept a Betting Book for the more outrageous and bizarre bets.
This was the Enlightened world of the young William Wilberforce. Tempered, it must be said, by political company including William Pitt, his closest friend, a man very soon to become the youngest ever Prime Minister. But for most of them, political discussion appears to have been the diversion in the intervals between the serious business of hedonism.
This was made more gaudy and uncontrolled by the prevalence of prostitution in the capital – about 50,000, many of them children, lining the streets in regiments outside the gentlemen’s clubs. Add to that number the recorded assortment in 1796, of ‘Thieves, Pilferers, Embezzlers . . . Cheats, Rakes, Burglars, Highway Robbers, PickPockets, River Pirates, Swindlers and Dealers in Base Money’ and you have over 15 per cent of the London population engaged in crime, most often starved into depravity. It was ‘Babylon’. But Wilberforce had experienced an alternative London.
Wilberforce had a crucial childhood experience of the kind and dutiful face of Christianity in Methodism in an outer London suburb. Though his mother as she saw it rescued him from a Methodist fate (which, she thought, would have made him an outcast in high society), there was always an attachment to the industry and godliness of the people of that childhood time in the south of England. But when he was taken back north to his home, as he wrote: ‘as much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make anyone else studious.’
The establishment thought Methodism lower class, but its fear was that it would take over. Its distaste for Methodism lay in an abhorrence of enthusiasm. An example of this is a sentence from the Duchess of Buckingham, who said of the Methodists: ‘It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl upon the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and at variance with high rank and good breeding.’
The turning point came when Wilberforce was a roué of twenty-five. He set out on a Grand Tour of Europe with his mother, his sister, two sick cousins and a remarkable scholar Isaac Milner, whom Wilberforce took along as a companion and tutor. Isaac was the younger brother of the headmaster who had taught so successfully for two years in Hull Grammar School. He had lost his place in Hull society and his job in the school when he declared himself to be a Methodist.
Isaac, son of a journeyman weaver, went to Cambridge where he became the first Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy, and, according to some, it was believed ‘the university, perhaps, never produced a man of more eminent abilities.’ He was not a rich man and Wilberforce’s offer gave him the unexpected chance to see Europe. Over weeks of travel, their conversation appears to have been an education for Wilberforce. When he persuaded Milner to discuss religion, it became a revelation.
Wilberforce came across a book by Philip Doddridge – The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Milner told him: ‘It is one of the best books ever written. Let us . . . read it on our journey.’ Many years later, Wilberforce wrote to his daughter: ‘you cannot read a better book. I hope it was one of the means of turning my heart to God.’ Doddridge based his work on that of Richard Burton, an English Puritan minister in the seventeenth century, who saw the Bible as the source and strength of life.
Wilberforce went back to Tyndale’s Greek translation of the New Testament and then he turned to the King James Bible. He suffered agonies not as it seems of doubt but of guilt and strain as he fought to slough off the old skins. He emerged as a devout, rigorous student of the Bible, a disciplined Christian. From what we read of his illness it had symptoms in common with a severe nervous breakdown.
He consulted others. John Newton, the slave-ship owner turned priest, author of ‘Amazing Grace’, and William Pitt his friend, who supported him in this unexpected but implacably serious endeavour. Eventually, he saw his way through and he wrote: ‘surely the principles as well as the practices of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.’
It is impossible to locate the impulse for the reconstruction of character and the exceptional release of energy undergone by Wilberforce. I sketched in the society in which he had immersed himself to show how far he had to move and how deep was the slough out of which he had to heave himself. It was his own version of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It also brought to him the energy and the compulsion to act. His newborn Anglicanism was dynamic. A key element was a disciplined daily reading and study of the King James Version which seems to have given him such strength that he turned against the morals and the manners of the age in which he lived and set out to change them.
He helped organise the Bible Society and spoke at its first meeting in 1804 and stayed in the society until his death. He helped found the Church Mission Society. He forced the rich, mighty and arrogant East India Company to change its charter, in law, so that it would provide for teachers and chaplains for missionary work. He supported the work of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. His correspondence was mountainous; his workload prodigious. It is the contemporary fashion to provide psychological explanations for such a change but Wilberforce himself and his contemporaries had no doubt whatsoever that he had seen the Light and found God. Thereby he had found the way to a true Christian life, in faith and in works.
His first cause was nothing less than to mobilise the whole country against vice. He saw moral improvement as the only way to redeem and fortify the country and he founded the Proclamation Society for the Reformation of Manners. He enlisted the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the King, the Queen, several bishops whom he visited in their distant dioceses, ten peers and six dukes. He was satirised by Sydney Smith and William Hogarth but this remarkable release of Christian zeal would not be easily stoppered and his Proclamation Society ploughed on. To the astonishment of many observers, it became a force, eventually, in helping to move the licentious Hanoverian society to the sober and more civic-minded Victorian. Perhaps his success helped impede the recognition of the worth of Mary Wollstonecraft.
He is remembered and honoured for his opposition to the slave trade. The historian G.M. Trevelyan wrote that it was ‘one of the turning circumstances in the history of the world’. Wilberforce needed to be persuaded of his fitness for the essen
tial role which he would be required to perform. This was to become the parliamentary spokesman and public leader of what, at the outset, seemed even more hopeless than reforming the manners of the people. This time his success had an impact which rang around the world.
Between 1600 and 1800 about 11 million slaves had been transported from Africa to the Americas. The trade had a long line from the Arab slavers who brought the slaves across Africa to the west coast, to the African traders who bartered with the European traders, the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French and Dutch who carried the slaves across the Atlantic to the American traders who bought them and used them and their offspring as property with no rights.
By the end of the eighteenth century the commercial sea power of Britain, with the armoured protection of the world’s most powerful fleet – the Royal Navy – put it in the dock as the key culprit in that long line of abuse, violence and injustice. British cities and industries and traders benefited greatly from the slave trade. Other countries did too but Britain’s overall booming post-Industrial Revolution wealth made it the target, then and since, often the sole target, for criticism and obloquy. All the more dangerous, though, for someone to take up arms against what was seen as a vital pillar to the economy. All the more need to do so, some thought. A movement began in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which would seek and find the only way to stop the trade – to secure an Act of Parliament for which they needed a champion. Wilberforce became their man.
His opening speech on the subject is still considered to be among the greatest acts of oratory recorded in the Houses of Parliament. It was a speech that lasted four hours in a packed House of Commons in 1789. It impressed parliamentarians and public alike. Yet it was not until 1807, after eighteen years of embattled persistence during which his life was threatened, he had to hire bodyguards, his name spat on by among others Admiral Nelson, that he succeeded in getting the British Atlantic slave trade abolished. Moreover he got the British navy to enforce this. From a starting point at which the idea of abolition was unthinkable, he won through. Many had worked for that day. But it was Wilberforce, through his speeches in Parliament, the crucial forum, who won the day.
His arguments in that four-hour speech were grounded in the morality of Christ’s teaching in the New Testament. His research and his passion gave a picture of horrors which no Christian could support. ‘Let us put an end to this inhuman traffic – let us stop this effusion of human blood.’
‘The true way to virtue,’ he said, ‘is by withdrawing from temptation . . . wherever the sun shines, let us go round the world with him diffusing our benevolence . . . total abolition is the only cure for it.’
Wilberforce drew on all his resources. His wealth went into the campaign as did his contacts in society from the court to the Prime Minister. His ease in the fashionable world opened up the cause. The small group of dedicated and politically suspect nonconformists (who could not sit in Parliament) who had initiated the movement would never have had the necessary social clout to roll up the influential support which Wilberforce brought in. There were the expensive Wedgwood brooches, for instance, depicting African slaves with the words ‘Am I not a man and your brother’ which became advertisements as well as ornaments fashionably worn by young women.
It would be a long trek to the abolition of slavery itself. But after the 1807 vote, the Atlantic trade was abolished by the United States in 1808, and by 1838 throughout the British colonies. There still remained the matter of slavery itself. Wilberforce just lived to see it abolished in the British Empire in 1833. The planters were unbelievably richly compensated by the British government and turned their hand to developing what became a thriving internal slave trade in America itself.
But a new dawn had arrived. ‘Thank God that I have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of Slavery,’ Wilberforce said, three days before he died. It is impossible to imagine he would have done all that without his conversion to Christianity and his faith in the words he knew so well in the King James Version.
But slavery and the King James Bible and the American people still had an account to settle. The final outcome would reshape America and change the perceptions of the world.
PART THREE
THE IMPACT ON SOCIETY
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SLAVERY AND THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA (1)
One of the greatest blots on American history is slavery. One of its greatest triumphs is the liberation of the slaves. Their progress through American society, from enslavement to full equality, is the triumph of humanity and courage over prejudice and savagery.
The slave trade between Africa and America and the treatment of the slaves in America tested the King James Version to its limits. The sickening story of horror and brutality has been often told. That it ended in triumph is every bit as remarkable a story. That such victory should come from such beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have seemed unimaginable.
The captured or kidnapped slaves were treated as things. No rights, no release, neither family nor liberty allowed. The ‘Middle Passage’ – the journey across the Atlantic on barbarically crowded ships prone to disease, subject to malnourishment, resulted in death at sea for many. It has been described and revisited many times from the graphic speech of Wilberforce in 17 89 onwards.
The slaves’ existence on many of the plantations was often made even more unendurable by the deployment of iron face masks, shackles, mouth clamps, and other instruments of torture. Their accommodation was bestial, their food minimal, their exploitation total. The purpose of the slaves was to reap harvests of cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, rice and other goods, much of which would go back to the European countries on the boats which had shipped them over from Africa.
If strongest proof were needed of the crucial role played by the Bible in modern English-speaking history, it is here in the American experience of slavery. It was coupled with the integral part the Bible played in the American Civil War which became a battleground for the liberation of the slaves.
The Bible in the debates over slavery and democracy was overwhelmingly the King James Version. Would other versions have had the same impact? To some extent, in the first half of the seventeenth century, the Geneva Bible did have a strong impact. But the overlapping of Geneva and King James has been noted. More importantly, as the seventeenth century progressed, the King James Version became the sovereign book. It was the book of the English-speaking nations. It achieved the status of being a holy object. The unequalled number of copies, the growing literacy (mostly through the study and reading of the King James Bible) and the veneration for what this version had achieved gave it an unrivalled authority. In the key developments of the argument on slavery and democracy, it was from the King James Version that people drew their examples and ideas.
Slavery seems to have been embroidered into the tapestry of civilisation. The Babylonians had slaves as did the Jews; the Assyrians had slaves and so did the Indian and Chinese warlords; the Greeks had tens of thousands of slaves; the Romans had, it has been estimated, more than 2 million. As did the Arabs. The Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons had slaves, as did the Africans. Christians kept slaves in the Roman Empire and after the fall of that empire, Christians were enslaved by the Moors in the Middle Ages. Slavery reveals an exceptionally early and profound division of opinion in Christianity. St Augustine in the fourth century was a supporter of slavery. A few generations later there was St Patrick who opposed it.
The Afro-American experience stands out as the apotheosis and the nemesis of the slave trade. Perhaps because it was so heavily documented, certainly because it was on such a scale, it showed plainly then and now the evils of that practice. The unshackling of slavery and the success of the Afro-Americans in enduring, defying and destroying the system that had enchained them is a beacon to the world.
There can be change, the Afro-American experience tells us, and it can be
on a deep and global level if the spirit and the strength of the cause are relentlessly determined. In this case they were. In the end, the slaves and the ex-slaves themselves ended slavery. But nothing comes of nothing and along the way there were allies – like Wilberforce, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, like the black Baptist preachers; and there was always the lantern, the guiding light, the Book of Books, the King James Version.
In both the Old and the New Testaments, slavery is taken for granted. It is difficult now to retrieve and imagine that state of mind: but to own slaves was seen as commonplace as in later ages it was to employ servants and in more contemporary times to rely on ‘helpers’. Slavery was simply and unquestioningly part of the daily lives of many of our ancestors for centuries.
The Bible reflected that. But it also provided lines of help to the slaves. The Bible could be read as both pro and anti slavery. Noah cursed Canaan, son of Ham, and all his offspring to slavery. Muslim and Christian slave traders took that as their validation: thereby they stood on holy ground. The fatal shift was when the fact of slaves, among religious Christians and Muslims, became bound up with the fact of being black. The Canaanites cursed by Noah were not black. Many slaves in the first millennium AD were black. It became the ignorant opinion of the slave traders that the black ‘race’, as they saw them, were born to be slaves.
This convenient ignorance might have died out after it had run its commercial course but it became registered in what was considered to be acceptable scholarship.
Diarmaid MacCulloch points out that ‘the link between blackness and slavery reached the Christian West late and it was ironically via Judaism.’ Isaac ben Abravanel, a Portuguese-Jewish philosopher, suggested that Canaan’s descendants were black. Therefore, under the curse of Noah, all black people were liable to be enslaved. Genesis gives no support to this, but it proved extremely convenient for some Christians, Muslims and Jews.
