Josiah Wedgwood, a brilliant English potter, was an early supporter of the campaign to end the slave trade. His company designed this logo of a chained slave with the slogan “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” Abolitionists had the logo printed on leaflets or cast into medallions for people to wear.
Photo Credit 8.4
The Campaign Begins
On his way back to London, Clarkson stopped in Manchester, a booming industrial city whose factories manufactured cloth from slave-grown cotton. He expected to meet hostility there, but to his surprise a group of citizens was already hatching a plan to petition Parliament against the slave trade; they invited him to preach on Sunday. He chose as his theme the biblical words “Thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt,” and was moved to see “a great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit.” Sometime after his visit, Manchester’s antislavery committee sent a petition to Parliament with the signatures of more than ten thousand people, one-fifth of the city’s population.
Clarkson returned to London armed with facts, figures, displays, and the names of eyewitnesses willing to testify. The society sent out newsletters and asked for donations, all to arouse public sentiment. Soon, the slave trade question seemed to be on everyone’s lips. Public debates were popular entertainment at that time, and in February alone London saw seven on the question of abolition of the slave trade.
Handcuffs and leg shackles such as these infuriated Thomas Clarkson, as did thumbscrews – used to torture slaves by squeezing their thumbs – and a device for prying open the mouth of any slave attempting suicide by refusing food. When he saw these objects for sale in a naval supply shop in Liverpool, the abolitionist purchased them to expose the cruel practices of slave traders.
Photo Credit 8.5
Women’s Voices
Women were not allowed to vote or to hold public office, but they had opinions; many were appalled by slavery and carried the antislavery message into their own parlors and dining rooms. Since West Indian sugar was tainted by the suffering of the African slaves who produced it, they decided that they would simply refuse to buy it.
A poem by Mary Birkett, a young Quaker, told women they had a choice: use sugar and continue to harm slaves, or reject the “bloodstained luxury” to help them gain their freedom:
If we no more the blood-stained lux’ry choose …
Say not that small’s the sphere in which we move, …
Not so – we hold a most important share,
In all the evils – all the wrongs they bear.
The anti-sugar campaign caught on. As Clarkson traveled around Britain, he kept track of how many people were boycotting sugar and estimated that “no fewer than three hundred thousand persons had abandoned the use of sugar.”
This poster advertised sugar bowls with the words “East India Sugar not made by Slaves,” so that people could assure their guests that the sugar they were putting in their tea had been produced by free laborers in the East Indies, not West Indian slaves.
Photo Credit 8.6
BLACK ACTIVISTS
Although many former slaves were living in London, Clarkson never invited any of them to speak at parliamentary hearings. Why? Even the most humane abolitionists of that time gave more weight to the observations of whites than to the actual experiences of blacks. Yet many blacks did influence public opinion through their writings.
PHILLIS WHEATLEY
Phillis Wheatley was kidnapped from Africa when she was only eight, and bought by John Wheatley, a merchant and tailor in Boston. The Wheatleys treated her like a member of the family and taught her to read the Bible. She taught herself to write. Soon she was composing poetry, and in 1773 she visited England, where her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published. It created quite a sensation, since many English people doubted that an African could develop her mind as a white person could. After the publication of her poems, her master freed her, and she became a speaker at public antislavery meetings. Her poem on being kidnapped by slave traders was published in 1789, as the abolition movement caught fire in Britain:
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate,
Was snach’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat;
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parents’ breast?
Phillis Wheatley’s popular poems were not only about slavery. She wrote verses of comfort over the death of a child, and even addressed a poem of praise to the British king.
Photo Credit 8.7
OTTOBAH CUGOANO
Ottobah Cugoano became a slave when he was kidnapped in Africa and sold for a gun, a piece of cloth, and some lead. His book, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and wicked Traffic of the Human Species, published in 1787, details the heartless treatment of slaves in Grenada, where “for eating a piece of sugar-cane, some were cruelly lashed, or struck over the face, to knock their teeth out.” Cugoano asks his readers why the British, “who ought to be considered as the most learned and civilized people in the world … should carry on a traffic of the most barbarous cruelty and injustice, and [why] many think slavery, robbery and murder no crime?” He even insists that slaves have as much of a duty to escape and resist as anyone who is robbed, since “the enslaver is a robber.”
Photo Credit 8.9
OLAUDAH EQUIANO
Olaudah Equiano was first a slave to a British naval officer, who named him Gustavus Vassa and took him on many sea voyages; then to a sea captain, who took him to the West Indies; and finally to a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia, who let him buy his freedom for forty pounds when he was about twenty years old. His book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, which he published in 1789, was a potent weapon in the fight against slavery. It chronicles the horrors of slavery that Equiano observed firsthand.
It was Equiano who told Granville Sharp about the captain of the Zong, who threw 133 living slaves off his ship to cash in on the insurance money.
Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative describes “a black woman slave… cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast she could scarcely speak; and could not eat nor drink.”
Photo Credit 8.8
Women rarely gave public speeches in the late 1700s, but the slavery issue began to draw them out. Some appeared in antislavery debates. Others used their pens to attack slavery. Famous playwright and poet Hannah More wrote “Slavery, a Poem” to evoke the horrors of an African slave raid, from the “burning village and the blazing town” to the separation of a “shrieking babe” from its mother.
Slow Progress in Parliament
Pamphlets, books, poems, the sugar boycott, and petitions to Parliament – 102 in 1788 alone – were preparing the ground for the parliamentary vote. But in Parliament, things moved slowly. In 1789, a year after debate on the slave trade had begun, Wilberforce’s bill against the trade was defeated by a vote of 163 to 88. His opponents said that a British law wouldn’t end the slave trade at all; it would only let the French pick up the business dropped by the British, and make them rich.
The abolitionists did not give up. Wilberforce continued to introduce bills against the slave trade. If one passed in both sections of Parliament – the House of Commons and the House of Lords – it would become law. In 1792, one of his bills garnered a huge majority in the House of Commons – 230 votes to 85 – but it was rejected by the House of Lords.
At that point, just as abolition began to seem within reach, disaster struck.
Terror Takes Over
On July 14, 1789, French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, a prison in Paris, igniting a bloody ten-year revolution that would take the lives of many upper-class people, including the king and queen. The revolutionaries’ cry for “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” rang far beyond France’s borders. As word of the revolution began to reach St
-Domingue (today’s Haiti), a Caribbean island where half a million Africans toiled in French sugar plantations and mills under some of the worst conditions in the New World, the slaves began to hope that the revolution would bring them freedom as well. But the new French government was not ready to extend liberty that far; the sugar plantations produced too much wealth for France.
The government’s refusal to free the slaves prompted the largest and most violent slave revolt in the Americas. In 1791 the slaves burned cane fields, sugar mills, and their masters’ estates; they wrecked machinery; and with their machetes they slaughtered white men, women, and children. So terrified were the whites of St-Domingue that ten thousand fled to the United States.
Toussaint L’Ouverture is sometimes called the “Black Spartacus” for his part in the revolt. He didn’t begin the rebellion, and he wasn’t even a slave anymore. In fact, he himself was a slave owner who managed an estate worked by slaves. At first he tried to protect his owner’s property, but after his owner escaped to safety, Toussaint joined the revolt against the French.
Spain and Britain were trying to take advantage of France’s weakness to capture the colony for its riches. For Toussaint, this was the way to end slavery: the rebels would side with France’s enemies. Even the French praised his brilliant tactics. The French were defeated and St-Domingue’s slaves were freed in 1794.
Toussaint switched sides again, back to the French this time. They realized that he was a popular leader who commanded respect so they appointed him governor general. With a third of the slave population dead and hundreds of plantations destroyed, Toussaint knew he had to revive the sugar industry. He made an unpopular decision: he would not drive out the old plantation owners, or divide the plantations into smaller plots for the people; he was afraid they would not produce enough wealth for the island. Instead, he forced former slaves to work for their old masters, though he reduced the working hours and forbade owners to whip their workers. Although he succeeded in restoring two-thirds of the plantations to production, the ex-slaves were upset. After all the bloodshed, why did they still have to live on white-owned plantations?
Meanwhile, the French decided to launch a new invasion of Haiti, secretly planning to take over the government from Toussaint and reintroduce slavery. With his popularity weakened, they found it easy to kidnap Toussaint and throw him into a French prison, where he died of ill treatment in a cold, damp cell. In the end, though, the French could not win against yellow fever and the Haitian people. Having lost sixty thousand soldiers and sailors, they left the island, and Haiti proclaimed its independence in 1804.
The French complained that Toussaint L’Ouverture’s troops were everywhere. As one soldier said, “Each tree, each hole, each piece of rock hid from our unseeing eyes a cowardly assassin.” But William Wordsworth, the famous English poet, celebrated Toussaint’s triumphs: “Live and take comfort. Thou hast left behind / Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies….”
Photo Credit 8.10
In Britain there was fear that slave revolts would spread throughout the other islands in the Caribbean, and they did: to Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Jamaica. Here was an argument that the slave owners and slave traders could use against the abolitionists: Show our slaves any weakness, and they will turn on us.
But the cry of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” was heard in Britain too. Organizations of radical workers popped up, and as reports began to arrive of the murder of two thousand French aristocrats in September 1792, Britain’s ruling classes were gripped by fear. Would they too be stripped of wealth and power, perhaps even murdered?
In February 1794, the French revolutionary government abolished slavery in all its colonies, making France the first European country to do so. In Britain some people blamed the hated French for abolitionist ideas, while others blamed British abolitionists for the slave revolt in St-Domingue. Thomas Clarkson, who made no secret of his sympathies for the French Revolution, was accused of being a dangerous radical. Mobs burned radicals’ books and even their homes. The government passed two bills against speech that might “excite or stir up the people to hatred or contempt of the … constitution of this realm” and required a magistrate’s approval for any public meeting of more than fifty people. Though Wilberforce continued to introduce his bills year after year, from 1794 through 1799, the time was not ripe for abolitionism.
Abolitionism Revived
It was not until 1804 that the abolition movement regained its momentum. France’s leader, Napoleon, had declared himself emperor, and had reintroduced slavery. Since the British detested Napoleon – he had threatened to invade Britain – it was now acceptable for them to oppose slavery.
Once again, pamphlets were published, women boycotted sugar, and Wilberforce took up the cause in Parliament. Abolitionist committees were revived. Support in the House of Commons was growing as well. Finally, in January 1806, Parliament renewed its debate on abolishing slavery.
This time the atmosphere was different. St-Domingue had defeated the French and become independent, so no one could argue that the French would pick up the slave trade once the British pulled out. And now eyewitness reports on slavery were heard by the full House of Commons, not just by committees. Sir John Doyle, a former officer in the West Indies, told the House of hearing terrible groans coming from a hut. When he and his troops stepped inside, they found a slave chained and “stretched upon the ground, where for four days he had remained without being able to change his position.… The rats had actually eaten off the greater part of both his ears.” In February 1807, this bill passed: “That this House, conceiving the African Slave Trade to be contrary to the principles of justice, humanity, and sound policy, will, with all practicable expedition, proceed to take effectual measures for abolishing the said trade.”
Like many abolitionists, Clarkson believed that they had done God’s work by ending the slave trade. The next day he wrote to a friend,
I want words to express the joy I feel on the occasion. In favour of the Motion there were 203. Against it 16… . I shall leave London with a heart full of gratitude to the Parent of all mercies [God], that he has been pleased thus far to render a portion of my life useful to my oppressed fellow creatures.
Making Freedom a Reality
Meanwhile, slaves were still hoeing the sugar-cane fields of Barbados and crushing cane in the mills of Jamaica. As the supply of fresh slaves dried up with the end of the slave trade, some planters began to feed their slaves better food, and even installed safety devices to protect them against accidents. Still, slavery did not wither away as the abolitionists had hoped.
In 1823, veteran activists from the old antislavery society, together with some help, formed the London Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions. They thought the country would not accept more rapid change. Once again Clarkson hit the road, covering ten thousand miles (16,000 km) twice within a year, and organizing 230 branches that presented 777 petitions to Parliament. This time, the public was one step ahead of the committee. As Clarkson wrote, “Everywhere People are asking me about immediate abolition.”
Women’s Voices Again
Now women took the lead. Elizabeth Heyrick was one of them. The title of her pamphlet was clear and straightforward: Immediate, not Gradual Abolition. Heyrick was a Quaker schoolteacher who believed that “truth and justice make their best way in the world when they appear in bold and simple majesty.” She saw no reason for delay.
With characteristic directness, she urged grocers to refuse to stock slave-grown products, comparing this to receiving stolen goods from a thief. In the 1826 parliamentary elections, she encouraged people to vote only for candidates who supported immediate abolition.
Women organized their own antislavery clubs. In Sheffield, where the men’s antislavery society was urging gradualism, the women’s clubs called for immediate abolition. Today’s politicians and activists often go door to door t
o promote their ideas; it was female abolitionists in Birmingham who introduced the practice. They knocked on doors to present their ideas to 80 percent of the households in that city. One man, an antislavery activist himself, marveled at their efficiency:
Ladies Associations … did everything. They circulated publications: they procured the money to publish; they dunned & talked & coaxed & lectured: they got up public meetings & filled our halls & platforms when the day arrived; they carried round petitions & enforced the duty of signing them.… In a word they formed the cement of the whole Antislavery building – without their aid we never should have kept standing.
Slave Revolts
The abolitionists’ voices carried throughout England and beyond, to the Caribbean islands, where slaves were heard singing:
Oh me good friend Mr. Wilberforce mek me free
God Almighty thank ye! God Almighty thank ye!
God Almighty mek me free!
Those slaves who worked in the ports met sailors who shared the news from overseas, and those who served their masters and mistresses heard talk at the dinner tables. What they learned about Wilberforce and the abolitionists gave them hope, and sometimes spurred them into action.
Five Thousand Years of Slavery Page 11
