by Hugh Thomas
• • •
A few days after the second parliamentary discussion in London of the slave trade, in early 1790, Thomas Clarkson set off for Paris as the representative of the English abolitionists. The revolution in France had begun, and was still enjoying its “illusion lyrique.”IV He was received with enthusiasm by all the friends of liberty of Africans: La Rochefoucauld, Lavoisier, Condorcet, Petion de Villeneuve, Clavière, Brissot, Lafayette. All these men were now engaged in French Revolutionary activities. La Rochefoucauld had even raised the question of the liberty of slaves in the States-General of June 1789, while Lavoisier was busy on the commission working out a new system of weights and measures, and Condorcet was commissioner of the money supply. Petion de Villeneuve was at the height of his influence in the National Assembly, while Clavière was financial adviser to Mirabeau, apparently the man of the future. Brissot was the editor of the famous Le Patriote français, and Lafayette was talking grandiosely of a scheme for an “ideal” plantation in Cayenne. Clarkson saw them all, and showed them the diagram of the slave ship Brookes. When Mirabeau saw this, he ordered a mechanic to make a model of it in wood. It was a ship in miniature, about a yard long, and “little wooden men and women, which were painted black to represent the slaves, were seen stowed in their proper places. . . . The Bishop of ChartresV . . . told me that . . . he had not given credit to all the tales which had been related of the slave trade, till he had seen this diagram after which there was nothing so barbarous which might not readily be believed. . . .”14 The effect was, indeed, prodigious: a first example of political propaganda using a visual aid to create a scandal. Clarkson was everywhere well received. After all, the Declaration of the Rights of Man of August 1789 had stated plainly “Men are born free and are equal before the law.” Article VII had declared that nobody could be seized except by due process of law. How then could slavery be justified? Necker, back in power, talked of Clarkson to the king, who, however, was thought to be in too poor health to be able to stand seeing the picture of the Brookes. Clarkson also saw veterans of Africa such as Geoffroy de Villeneuve, who had been aide-decamp to the humane Chevalier de Boufflers at Gorée (he had been sent to that exile because of a love affair with the delightful Madame de Sabran), had been up the Sénégal with Dr. Wadström, and also had been “all over the kingdom of Cayor on foot.”
A Société des Amis des Noirs had, it will be remembered, already been founded in Paris. It included both La Rochefoucauld—“the most virtuous man in France,” in Lafayette’s phrase—and Lafayette himself, as well as Mirabeau. It now gathered much support. One of its leaders was still Condorcet, who urged France to follow the example of America, whose leaders, he believed, already knew that they would “debase their own pursuit of liberty if they continued to support slavery.” In Bordeaux, André-Daniel Laffon de Ladébat, son of a great négrier, had, in August 1788, bravely denounced the slave trade as “the greatest public crime.”15 This view gained some backing, but not enough to interest the Constituent Assembly when it first met. The société was represented by its planter-enemies as a nest of British agents. Members were threatened with death if they persisted in their activities. Ex-Secretary of State for the Marine Massiac organized a club to carry out these and other menaces. Clavière told Clarkson that he was being accused of conspiring to foment an insurrection in Saint-Domingue. Clarkson believed that two senior members of the Committee on Abolition were agents of slave traders in Nantes; and Mirabeau told him that all the members of the Assembly with whom he had talked of abolition had been canvassed by the slave traders. Clarkson in France was also discouraged by the strange affair of Samuel de Missy, an honest Rochelais, who had been a négrier and joined the Société des Amis des Noirs, but resigned from it when denounced by the Chamber of Commerce at La Rochelle, saying that he could see that his membership might plunge the port into misery.
In March 1790, the matter of the slave trade was at last debated in the Constituent Assembly, some weeks after Clarkson had gone back to London. Inspired by information largely deriving from the English—France had as yet carried out no inquiry into the slave trade—the Société put forward three Girondin speakers: Vieuville des Essarts, Petion de Villeneuve, and Mirabeau, the so-called “Shakespeare of eloquence,” who prepared a powerful speech. He described in great detail the more brutal aspects of the slave trade and then mockingly asked his audience, in the spirit of Montesquieu, “Et ce commerce n’est pas inhumain?” The repetition several times of this ironic statement had the effect of a refrain. But Mirabeau unwisely chose to rehearse the speech at a meeting of the Jacobin Club. It was a triumph but, afterwards, his enemies, led by the demagogue Antoine-Pierre Barnave (often a friend of liberty, a word he would indeed die proclaiming, on the scaffold in 1793), managed to prevent the orator from speaking in the Chamber. They secured the passage of a decree which included the alarming phrase: “Whosoever works to excite risings against the colonists will be declared an enemy of the people.”16
Still, the matter was eventually discussed in the Assembly. Ten deputies came from the West Indies. Mirabeau asked why such small islands should send so many members. The reply he received was that, in the French empire (in emulation of the three-fifths clause in the Constitution of the United States), the slaves were counted in apportioning representation (though they could not vote). If that argument was accepted as valid, Mirabeau demanded, why should not the horses of France also be reckoned?
Some free mulattoes were among these West Indian deputies. They were rich men who had done well in business, but both slave merchants and planters thought that they should not sit. Arthur Dillon, soldier and scion of an ancient Irish family who represented Martinique, said that the colonies would revolt in fifteen minutes if the mulattoes were seated. The matter was shelved.
Shortly afterwards, a delegation from the newly founded and revolutionary Armée Patriotique of Bordeaux reached Paris and told both the Jacobin Club and the Assembly that five million Frenchmen depended on the colonial commerce for their livelihood, and that both the slave trade and West Indian slavery were essential for the prosperity of France. Another committee was then entrusted to make a report on slavery. That body, however, did little more than denounce attempts to cause risings against the colonists. Mirabeau was shouted down when he tried to oppose this. The assembly voted for the committee’s proposals for inaction and, until 1793, the French slave trade continued to receive a subsidy in the form of a bonus for every slave landed. Nantes in fact enjoyed its best year ever as a slave city in 1790, sending forty-nine ships to Africa. For the slave merchants in that politically radical city, the word “liberty” seems to have signified the idea that the slave trade should be open to all.
There was tumult in the West Indies in consequence of these events, and Vincent Ogé, a radical mulatto, appealed to the authorities in Saint-Domingue to insist that the mulatto members in Paris should be seated. (“Périssent les colonies plutôt qu’un principe,” he told the Assembly in Paris when he was allowed briefly to address it.) When he was not listened to, Ogé, who had political ambitions and had obtained weapons from the North Americans, raised a standard of insurrection in Saint-Domingue, near Cap François. After several skirmishes, he was defeated. He fled and escaped to the Spanish end of the island, where he was arrested and handed back to the French governor, who had him broken on the wheel. This disaster gave new support for the mulatto petitioners in France, and that in turn increased turmoil in the colonies. The debates in Paris on the matter became impassioned. Robespierre entered the discussion with an advocacy of full freedom for slaves, himself adding, “Eh, périssent vos colonies si vous les conservez à ce prix . . . !”
Early in 1791, the National Assembly condemned slavery in principle, but insisted that any immediate extension of the rights of man to slaves would be certain, at least at that stage, to be accompanied by many evils; all the same, the children of all free parents, regardless of color, would be looked upon as full citizens. The
colonists saw that concession, modest as it was, as a betrayal. This was the first such condemnation in any European legislature.
The leaders of the free blacks and some of the slaves in Saint-Domingue had themselves been following these arguments, insofar as they could. As a result of the large-scale imports of slaves by French traders in the 1780s, they constituted an immense majority of the population in the rich colony: say, 450,000 blacks compared with fewer than 40,000 whites, and 50,000 mulattoes. The free blacks and the mulattoes were prepared to strike again at the colonial government, but the slaves made their rebellion first. They did so on August 22, 1791. Henceforth the machete and the firebrand ruled. The sugar plantations were set ablaze.
Too late, on August 28, the Constituent Assembly in Paris declared anyone who arrived in France to be free, whatever his color. This was twenty years after Lord Mansfield’s decision, in England, but 220 years since a judge in Bordeaux had first made a similar judgment. A deputy for the latter city, Béchade-Casaux, anxiously wrote home: “The States-General are still occupied by the declaration of the Rights of Man which must serve as a preamble to the Constitution. I am fearful lest that may lead to a suppression of the slave trade.”17 Thereafter, though, events moved so fast in Paris as to cause complete neglect of affairs in Saint-Domingue. The worst outrages in Paris in August 1792 were admittedly preceded by a riot in the city over shortages of sugar, themselves caused in part by events in Saint-Domingue. But few appreciated the interconnection and, in the colony, events moved ever more swiftly to catastrophe. The slave traders of Nantes, who had about sixty million livres’ worth of property in the colony (the Bouteillers, the Drouins, the Charauds, the Arnous had been the big investors of the 1780s), lost all they had there in the only completely successful slave revolution in history.
Eventually, in 1794, on February 4, the Convention in Paris declared the universal emancipation of slaves (though not actually outlawing the trade). The event was celebrated in the Temple of Reason (Notre Dame), as in many great “fêtes révolutionnaires” up and down the country. Hundreds of engravings denouncing slavery were published; and songs were composed. In Nantes, a black officer eloquently gave his thanks to the Republic. The most elaborate celebration was at Bordeaux. The Convention’s representative, the implacable Tallien, made a wonderfully enthusiastic speech in Bordeaux’s Temple of Reason (before and afterwards, the cathedral of Saint-André). Two hundred black people were present. Afterwards, the organizers of the meeting took one of these men or women by the arm, and walked with them in a procession to the Hôtel Franklin, where a colossal banquet was held.18, VI
By this time, the pioneers of the French abolition movement, Mirabeau, Clavière, La Rochefoucauld, Brissot, Lavoisier, Condorcet, and Petion had all died, the first in his bed, the second by his own hand in prison, the third at the hands of an assassin, the fourth by suicide, the fifth and sixth under the guillotine, and the last eaten by wolves during an escape from sanctuary. All that can be said of their achievements is that the French bounty on the carriage of slaves had been abolished.
But France had become engulfed in such terrible events that it was no longer easy for men to consider great moral issues. “The revolution,” Clarkson had to admit, “was of more importance to Frenchmen than the abolition of the slave trade.”19 Mirabeau had had at the end other pressing considerations though, “a host in himself,” according to Lafayette, to his death he maintained his interest in the question of slavery. That did not prevent Bernard Aîné et Cie from dispatching from Nantes a slave ship bearing his name, five months after his premature death in April 1791, with the purpose of carrying three hundred slaves from Angola to Martinique.
• • •
The French Revolution and its attendant outrages greatly helped the friends of the slave trade in Britain. Any change in the status quo could now be easily presented by them as potentially subversive of public order. Enlightenment was easily represented as certain to lead to barbarism. The legal reformer Samuel Romilly wrote: “If any person be desirous of having an adequate idea of the mischievous effects produced in this country by the French Revolution . . . he should attempt some reform on humane and liberal principles. . . .”20 So it was scarcely surprising that when, in April 1791, after many months of gathering more evidence (in the course of which Clarkson visited no fewer than 320 ships, in different English ports, traveling nearly seven thousand miles in 1790), Wilber-force’s motion to introduce a bill into parliament to abolish the slave trade was at long last introduced, it should have been obstructed.
Yet there was no reasoned justification of slavery, or of the traffic. The speeches concentrated on the impracticability and unwisdom of abolition, rather than, as in 1789, on the benefits of the trade. Thus “tunbellied Tommy Grosvenor,” an elderly member of Parliament for Chester, acknowledged that the slave trade was “not an amiable trade but neither was the trade of a butcher an amiable trade, and yet a mutton chop was, nevertheless, a good thing.” Alderman Watson of London, a director of the Bank of England, argued as so many had done, that the natives of Africa were taken from a worse state of slavery in their own country to one more mild. Banastre Tarleton pointed out that the African monarchs themselves had no objection to the continuance of the slave trade. John Stanley, the agent for Nevis and member for Hastings, spoke strongly against abolition, which he described as unjust to planters and traders, injuring them without recompense. There were many allusions to France: whether she would steal the British trade if the British abolished it, or whether Britain should wait till France acted.
Some inspiring speeches were also made: “While we could hardly bear the sight of anything resembling slavery, even as a punishment among ourselves, should we countenance the exercise of the most despotic power over millions of creatures who, for aught we know, were not only innocent but meritorious?” James Martin, a banker who was member for Tewkesbury, teased the House of Commons for being so eager to condemn the proconsul, Warren Hastings, for his bad conduct in the East, while doing nothing about this abominable practice in the West. The trade was carried out with humanity? It was a new species of humanity, said John Courtenay, member for Tamworth, an erudite Irish wit of “the school of Diogenes.” Both Fox and Pitt spoke for Wilberforce. The former called on the House to “mark to all mankind their abhorrence of a practice so enormous, so savage, and so repugnant to all laws human and divine.” He made fun of the fact that many slaves captured in Africa were said to be being punished for adultery: “Was adultery then a crime which we needed to go to Africa to punish? Was this the way in which we were to establish the purity of our national character? . . . It was a most extraordinary pilgrimage, for a most extraordinary purpose.” Burke said that “to deal and traffic, not in the labour of men but in men themselves, was to devour the root, instead of enjoying the fruit, of human diligence”; yet, in Burke’s constituency of Bristol, when the vote was lost (88 to 163 against Wilberforce) in the House of Commons, church bells rang, cannon were fired on Brandon Hill, there was a bonfire and a fireworks display, and a half-holiday was granted to workmen and sailors.21 “Commerce chinked its purse,” Horace Walpole wrote to Mary Berry, “and that sound is generally prevalent with the majority.”22
The year 1791 was a good one, in fact, for the English slave trade. English shippers were making substantial inroads into the now open Cuban slave market. We find thirty English ships registered as having delivered slaves in Havana that year, including, in September, Captain Samuel Courtauld (of the Delaware branch of that Huguenot family) on the Vela Ana; and, in March, Captain Hugh Thomas on the Hammond.23, VII
The campaign continued, however, despite the parliamentary reverse. In 1792, no fewer than five hundred petitions against the slave trade were prepared from all over Britain. In Birmingham, a prominent Quaker raised the question whether it was right to accept financial support for the rebuilding of the Friends’ meeting house from the gunmakers Farmer and Galton, who had been concerned with the supply of weapo
ns for the slave traffic, and indeed in the traffic itself. A campaign for a national boycott of slave-grown sugar was even launched.
Wilberforce, Clarkson, and the abolitionists were also much cheered by astounding news from Denmark. In March 1792, after a report from their Great Negro Trade Commission (three of whose members were directors of the Danish monopoly Baltic-Guinea Company), the Danish government abolished the import of slaves from Africa to their islands. The Danes had, for 150 years, participated on a small scale in the slave trade, although, on balance, it had been unprofitable, and although the forts in West Africa were only maintained in order to serve three tiny colonies in the West Indies. In the previous fifteen years Denmark had sent about a hundred ships to Africa. The Danish West Indian sugar islands had, however, been of importance to many merchants of Copenhagen, including the powerful Schimmelmann family, of whom Ernest was, in 1792, the humane, farseeing, and able minister of finance; he was also, influenced by his love of England, the leading promoter of abolition (even though he still owned four plantations on Saint Croix). Before the establishment of the commission, he had unavailingly sent a professor of divinity, Daniel Gotthilf Moldenhawer, to Madrid to offer an exchange of Denmark’s forts on the coast of Guinea; in return, the Spaniards would cede Crab Island (Bique), in the Caribbean, to Denmark. The Danes had also launched several intelligent schemes to create cotton plantations on the Gold Coast, thereby rendering the middle passage unnecessary.
The cautious royal statement in Copenhagen on abolition was definitive: “We, Christian VII, . . . from the result of . . . enquiries, . . . are convinced that it is possible, and will be advantageous to our West India islands, to desist from the further purchase of new negroes, when once the plantations are stocked with a sufficient number for propagation and the cultivation of the islands.” The trade, therefore, was to be prohibited after 1803. There were to be no taxes on imports of female slaves between 1792 and the deadline, and no more taxes were to be levied on female field slaves already in the country.24
