by Hugh Thomas
So there seemed in England in the 1760s no clear law on the matter: one judge had said one thing, another another. There was no Code Noir as there was in France, explaining the way that slaves were to be treated. The opinion of Yorke was, however, so well known that it was spoken of as if it had been a judgment. In 1788, an inquiry in the House of Commons into the condition of slavery in Barbados led to the following declaration being made: “The general power which a master exercises . . . over his slaves is rather by implication (from slaves being bought as chattels in the same way as horses or other beasts) than by any positive law defining what the power of a master shall be in this island.” In practice, therefore, the law of a master over a slave was “unlimited.” The further question “What is the protection granted by the law to slaves in Barbados?” received the answer “Effectually none.”15
That lack of “positive law” about slavery seemed to obtain in England too. The matter was important, for all the black slaves in London might sue if they thought that they were free. Some people of African origins were free: Francis Barber, for example, Dr. Johnson’s servant, was so, having been emancipated by his previous owner, Colonel Bathurst; a black valet in the service of Sir Joshua Reynolds was also free. Some were, however, not free. Had not King William III, of “glorious memory,” owned a favorite black slave whose bust was still to be seen at Hampton Court? Slaves as such were often put up for public sale in Bristol or Liverpool. There was some ambiguity about the legal status of the black domestics in the homes of returning West Indian planters, such as the Halletts of Stedcombe, a property outside the minor slaving port of Lyme Regis. But when John Hallett had died in 1699 and gave freedom to “my boy Virgil” on his deathbed, he presumably believed that he was granting something real.
Most black slaves then in England had been brought back by sea captains. But, whatever their status, there had been a constant increase of them to England in the early eighteenth century, and many were rented out by their masters to shipowners, or even slave captains, as casual labor.
Granville Sharp acted as if the judgments of Attorney-General Yorke had no authority. He based his arguments on the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, and insisted that a master only had rights in a slave if he could prove that the captive in question had in writing willingly “bound himself, without compulsion or illegal duress.” Whatever might be the custom in the colonies, in England, he argued, an African slave immediately became entitled to the king’s protection.
Sharp’s arguments made headway, and his opponents in the case of Jonathan Strong did not press their suit. His success, and his subsequent pamphlet, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in England, published in 1769, made him a natural recipient of other complaints by blacks in England who were either kidnapped or threatened with kidnapping.16 Sharp put this matter further to the test in the case of the slave Thomas Lewis who, belonging to a West Indian planter, escaped in Chelsea. When he was recaptured, and shipped to begin the journey to Jamaica, Sharp served the captain on his boat with a writ of habeas corpus. The case came before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who put to the jury the question whether the master had established his claim to the slave as his property. If they decided affirmatively, he would rule whether such a property could persist in England. The jury decided that the master had not established his claim. So the main question was left unsettled. Lord Mansfield said, rather curiously, that he hoped that the question whether slaves could be forcibly shipped back to the plantations would never be discussed.
In 1772, Sharp acted similarly, as indicated above, on behalf of the slave James Somerset, who had been brought from Jamaica to England by his master, Charles Stewart of Boston, in 1769. He escaped in 1771, was recaptured, and was then put on board the Ann and Mary, whose captain was John Knowles, bound for Jamaica, where he was to be sold. On this occasion, there could be no doubt about the master’s right to the slave. But Sharp succeeded in arranging the transfer of the case to the Court of King’s Bench. There, after a long trial which spread over several months, in which the fundamental questions were well put by defending counsel, Lord Mansfield decided that there was no legal definition as to whether there could, or could not be, slaves in England. He was not the most convincing of friends of liberty, since he evidently wished to avoid pronouncing on the fundamental question; to begin with, he urged a settlement out of court, and even suggested that Parliament might introduce a law to secure property in slaves. When none of these things availed, after further procrastination, Mansfield decided the case on the simple ground that slavery was so “odious” that nothing could be suffered to support it even if positive law about the matter did not exist. Somerset therefore was freed. Mansfield, as he himself said in 1779, “went no further than to determine that the master had no right to compel the slave to go into a foreign country.”17 He did not make a general declaration of slave emancipation in England. Blacks continued to be kidnapped in Britain and taken back to Jamaica or elsewhere if their masters could so arrange it.
Admittedly, the agent of the North American colonies in LondonIX taunted the English for freeing old slaves in England while continuing to make new ones on the African coast. Yet the new judgment affected public opinion. Provincial newspapers, including even the Liverpool General Gazette, carried good accounts of the case.
After the “Mansfield judgment,” there was, of course, general celebration among the many blacks present in the Court of King’s Bench, which was then in Westminster Hall. But little changed in the Caribbean, or in Africa. A young sugar planter who went out to Nevis or Jamaica in the late 1770s would have written much as John Pinney did ten years before, when, after his first visit to a market where slaves were being sold, “I can assure you I was shock’d at the first appearance of human flesh exposed to sale. But surely God ordained ’em for the use and benefit of us. Otherwise, his Divine Will would have made itself manifest by some particular sign or token.”18
The case of Somerset had, all the same, the consequence of putting Granville Sharp and Anthony Benezet in touch with each other, and they now embarked upon correspondence. The latter came to London in 1773 and argued publicly that, if the trade in slaves could be abolished, “I trust the sufferings of those already amongst us . . . would be mitigated.”19 The visit of Benezet to London, as also that of John Woolman (he would die of smallpox in York after addressing the Quakers there), testified to the growing transatlantic dimension of the opposition—a thing made easy by the English origins of several of the leading North American Quakers. In 1774, William Dillwyn, a pupil and amanuensis of Benezet, also came from North America with the declared aim of helping the English Quakers to organize their movement in favor of abolition. The same year, inspired by letters from Benezet (indeed, he used Benezet’s words in extenso), John Wesley published his Thoughts upon Slavery. Influenced by his own memories of Georgia, where he had lived forty years before, as by conversations with the German Moravians there, he castigated the slave trade. He also eulogized the Africans. They seemed to him capable of a sensibility which the captains of slave ships could not approach. He asked those captains rhetorically: “Do you never feel another’s pain? Have you no sympathy? . . . No pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides or tortured limbs of your fellow beings, were you a stone or a brute . . . ?” In America—Georgia, no doubt he meant—one saw “mothers hanging over their daughters, bedewing their naked breasts with tears and daughters clinging to their parents till the whipper soon obliges them to part.” Was that not a proof of Africans’ humanity? Wesley said that it would be better for the West Indies to be sunk “in the depth of the sea, than that they should be cultivated, at so high a price.”20
Where Wesley, as the great Methodist, struck a new note was his prediction that the time for repentance would soon come for England, whose worst crime, he insisted, was its indulgence in the slave trade. Given the appeal of Methodism, which already ext
ended much farther than that of the Quakers, and the attention which anything written by Wesley received, this pamphlet constituted the most serious onslaught on slavery, as well as the trade, that had yet been made.
Dr. Johnson had been keenly interested in the growing controversy. He dictated to Boswell a note on the matter: “It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal. A man may accept life from a conquering enemy on condition of perpetual servitude; but it is very doubtful whether he can entail that servitude on his descendants. . . . The sum of the argument is . . . [that] no man is by nature the property of another. [So] the defendant is by nature free. The rights of nature must be seen [to be] . . . forfeited before they can be justly taken away. . . . That the defendant has by any act forfeited the rights of nature we require to be proved.”21
Boswell spoke, however, for what was still conventional opinion when he commented that he entered his “most solemn protest against [Johnson’s] general doctrine with respect to the slave trade. For . . . his unfavourable notion of it was owing to prejudice, and to imperfect or false information. . . . To abolish a status which in all ages God has sanctioned . . . would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow subjects, but it would be extreme cruelty to the African savages, a portion of which it saves from massacre or intolerable bondage in their own country; and introduces into a much happier state of life. . . . To abolish this trade would be,” he added with a surrealistic extravagance, “to shut the gates of mercy on mankind.”22
Still, Johnson had always opposed slavery, and once, when he was with “some very grave men at Oxford,” his toast had been, “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” Boswell professed himself shocked. Johnson’s “violent prejudice against our West Indian and American settlers,” wrote Boswell, “appeared whenever there was an opportunity.” Towards the end of the doctor’s Taxation No Tyranny, he wrote, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty [in the American colonies, from the British] among the drivers of negroes?” In conversation with John Wilkes, he once mockingly asked, “Where did Beckford [lord mayor of London] and Trecothick learn English?” Both were from famous West Indian as well as West Country families.23
A different but even more effective criticism appeared in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Though, curiously enough, that work did not mention the trade in slaves at all, Smith recognized that the discovery of America was one of the two greatest events in history (the other was the discovery of the route to India), and he did speak of slavery. Following his Theory of Moral Sentiments of seventeen years before, Smith argued that the institution was just one more artificial restraint on individual self-interest. If a man had no hope of gaining property, Smith thought, he would obviously work badly, for “it appears . . . from the experience of all ages and nations . . . that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.” That sentence was immensely influential, but it was even less sustainable than Smith’s curious contention that Irish girls had good complexions because they ate potatoes.24
In 1775, prompted by Quakers, a commission of the House of Commons was appointed to take evidence on the slave trade. After it had done so, in 1776, David Hartley, member of Parliament for Hull, son of a doctor who, like Pope, had written an Essay on Man, introduced a debate on the theme “that the slave trade is contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men.” He was seconded by a philanthropist, Sir George Savile. The subject was thus clearly put on the political agenda in England, though Hartley was an inappropriate standard-bearer for a great cause: a dull, self-opinionated, vain, charmless, and naïve bore, it was he who inspired the comment, “No one can have a complete idea of a bore who has not been in Parliament.”25
On the other side of the Atlantic, the American Revolution delayed a full debate on the matter. That upheaval, of course, began as a tax rebellion: a revolt against paying taxes imposed by a distant, unrepresentative legislature. It was unrelated to the matter of slavery. After all, there were still fewer slaves in the mainland British colonies than in the “islands”: only 22 percent of the population of the thirteen colonies in 1770, whereas, in “the islands,” the percentage was over 90. About 80 percent of the slaves in the mainland colonies, too, had been born in America. In contradistinction to the rest of the Americas, natural increase seemed already, in the mainland colonies, the determining element in the size of the slave population.
Still, from the point of view of the abolitionist Quakers, the language used by the rebels against the Crown had an uneasy ring. In December 1771, the weekly Boston Gazette published a letter “from an American” to King George III. This included an attack on the doctrine that the acts of the British Parliament could bind North Americans; “to say the contrary is to say that we are slaves, for the essence of liberty is to be subject only to laws made by ourselves; and, being subject to laws made by other people, is the essence of slavery.” This surely dangerous language was repeated incessantly: “the endless and numberless curses of slavery”; “my sons scorn to be slaves”; the “British plan of slavery”; “abject slaves as France and Poland can shew in wooden shoes”; or “to receive them is worse than death—it is SLAVERY!” These comments by such contemporary leaders as Joseph Warren of Massachusetts, or John Dickinson of Delaware, were an interesting reminder, as Dr. Johnson realized, of how men could use metaphors without reflection: especially since Dickinson came from a family concerned in slaving, and his father-in-law, Isaac Norris, was concerned in the trade, too.
The rebellion began with a decision by the so-called Association, a union of the colonies, to end commercial intercourse with the mother country. Since the slave trade was an important part of that, it was one of the first branches of business to come to an end. This was a move opposed by the merchants of Liverpool and Bristol, sustained by the president of the Board of Trade in London, the earl of Dartmouth, who said, “We cannot allow the colonists to check or discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation.”26, X
After several declarations by the assemblies of individual colonies, the Continental Congress in October 1774 resolved that no more slaves should be introduced into the United States after December 1 of that year, and trade with other nations engaged in the traffic would be prohibited. But this statement was swiftly forgotten and—except in Georgia, whose leaders were so naïve as to suppose that it would be acted upon—it was indeed hardly commented upon.
The events in Massachusetts were interesting. There, before the war, the Assembly had made two attempts to stop the import of slaves, on the usual ground that to have too many might risk a black rebellion. But the idea was thwarted by the governor, General Thomas Gage. The colony, or commonwealth, therefore, entered the War of Independence with no law limiting the trade. Then, on September 13, 1776, a resolution was introduced into the new House of Representatives there which declared—in a direct echo of the French philosophes—that the “selling and enslaving of the human species is a direct violation of the natural rights vested in all men.” If any sale were to be made henceforth, it would be “null and void.” (The author must have read Diderot’s Encyclopédie.) But on September 16, a second draft was written. That transformed the original phraseology, and merely stated, “Any blacks taken on the high seas and brought as prisoners shall not be allowed to be sold.”27
Slavery was in truth taken for granted by most American rebels. So was the slave trade. Thus Samuel Phillips Savage, who presided at the famous meeting in Old South Church in Boston which decided that tea should not be landed if duty had to be paid, was an insurer of slave ships, though, to be sure, of other ships as well. Prominent slavers or ex-slavers, such as Philip Livingston or Henry Laurens, our constant point of reference, and the merchants of Newport and Philadelphia, supported the revolution with their purses: at their head, Robert Morris, the Liverpool-born “financier of the revolution” who, as a partner of Willing and Morris of Phil
adelphia, had himself been concerned in slaving in the 1760s.XI The board of naval commissioners of the Eastern states included, as its senior member, William Vernon of Newport, one of the best-known slave merchants of that city.
Several seamen who now enjoyed their hour of glory had also been concerned in the slave trade; for example, Esek Hopkins, a slave captain of Newport, who had sailed to Africa and Surinam for the Browns of Providence, became, first, commander-in-chief of the Rhode Island forces in 1775, and later the first chief of the American congressional navy, even though it was an office from which he was dismissed in ignominy. The brave John Paul Jones, captain of the famous Bonhomme Richard, had had a long service as a mate or second mate on board slavers sailing from Fredericksburg, on the Rappahannock River, in Virginia. James de Wolf of Bristol, Rhode Island, carried out operations at sea against the British which made him a hero; and so began one of the great slave-trading careers, and fortunes. Even Benjamin Franklin, the most thoughtful of North Americans, was cautious about abolition: “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature,” he rather curiously said, “that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.”28 The Quakers were, meantime, discredited in these years because of their refusal to support armed action in the war against the English, even if they did, in 1776, call on all Quaker slaveowners to resign from their community.
Still, the discussion leading to the Declaration of Independence included critical talk of the slave trade, and Jefferson’s first draft of that document contained, among other general statements, a condemnation of King George III as waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere”: a statement as historically inaccurate as it was unfair, even though the king would later appear enthusiastic for the trade. Jefferson eventually explained that these words were finally omitted “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it.” He added, “Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for, though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” The Articles of Confederation were in the end silent on the question of the slave trade.29
