The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  In England, Edward and Catherine found a country where workers had embraced the cause of abolition. Seven hundred sixty-nine Sheffield cutlers had petitioned Parliament in 1789 against the efforts of the pro-slavery lobby: “The cutlery wares made by the freemen . . . being sent in considerable quantities to the Coast of Africa, and disposed of, in part, as the price of Slaves—your Petitioners may be supposed to be prejudiced in their interests if the said trade in Slaves should be abolished. But your petitioners having always understood that the natives of Africa”—and here they would have remembered Olaudah Equiano’s talks with them as he lectured on the abolition circuit—“have the greatest aversion to foreign Slavery.” Claiming to “consider the case of the nations of Africa as their own,” and putting principle before material interest, the cutlers took an unusual public stand against slavery, something no English workers had done in almost a century and a half. Joseph Mather, the poetic annalist of proletarian Sheffield, sang,

  As negroes in Virginia,

  In Maryland or Guinea,

  Like them I must continue—

  To be both bought and sold.

  While negro ships are filling

  I ne’er can save one shilling,

  And must, which is more killing,

  A pauper die when old.

  Sheffield was a steel town, manufacturing the sickles and scythes of harvest, the scissors and razors of the export markets, and the pike, implement of the people’s war. The secretary of the workers’ organization, the Sheffield Constitutional Society (formed in 1791), explained its purpose: “To enlighten the people, to show the people the reason, the ground of all their complaints and sufferings; when a man works for thirteen or fourteen hours of the day, the week through, and is not able to maintain his family; that is what I understand of it; to show the people the ground of this; why they were not able.” The Constitutional Society also declared itself against slavery, much like the London Corresponding Society, which, as we shall later see, was founded early in 1792 in discussion of “having all things in common” and committed to equality among all, whether “black or white, high or low, rich or poor.”

  The unity of race and class concerns, however, soon began to fragment. When the Corresponding Society stepped politely into the civic realm on April 2, 1792, its official statement made no mention of slavery, the slave trade, or the commons—and this on the very day of the “April Compromise,” when Parliament agreed to abolish the slave trade, but only “gradually”! By August 1792, the L.C.S. was defining its constituency and its aims among inhabitants of Great Britain: “FELLOW CITIZENS, Of every rank and every situation in life, Rich, Poor, High or Low, we address you all as our Brethren.”55 No more “black or white” here: equality of race had disappeared from the society’s agenda. What had happened? The answer, in a word, is Haiti. In April 1792, in France, the assembly decreed full political rights for people of color, while in Haiti Hyacinth was leading fearless slaves to besiege Port-au-Prince, and Toussaint L’Ouverture had begun to organize degraded slaves into an independent military force of freedom fighters that would defeat the armies of three European empires over the next decade. Similarly, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, expelled from the white church, founded their own African Church in Philadelphia in order to lift up former slaves whose experiences had been abject—to transform, as they put it, thorns into grapes and thistles into figs.56 Race had thus become a tricky and, for many, in England, a threatening subject, one that the leadership of the L.C.S. now preferred to avoid.

  In this confused and rapidly changing situation, what could Edward and Catherine Despard contribute? We have seen that during his last days in prison Edward would be frequently and intensively communicating with Catherine, even under the eagle eye of power. We see their conspiracy as a “breathing together” in conversation, which included the wording of the speech he would give from the scaffold (should he say “the human race”?) and the conveyance of information, if not instructions, to co-conspirators in several lands. Did they anticipate a coup d’état (Napoleon’s 18 Brumaire had been in 1799), or a diversion for a French landing in Ireland, or an insurrection to provoke a general rising, or an extension of the Atlantic slave revolts? To answer these questions, we must first consider the circumstances of the conspiracy, or the social forces from which it sprang and to which it appealed: this is the thèse de circonstance. Then we must explore the ideas and the ideals that motivated the conspirators: that is the thèse de complot.

  Slaves, industrial workers, sailors and dockworkers, and the Irish would provide the main insurgent force behind the conspiracy of the Despards. In the international conjuncture of 1800–1803, slaves were especially active. In 1800, the black Eighth West India Regiment mutinied in Dominica, slaves plotted on the island of Tobago, and Gabriel organized a slave insurrection in Richmond, Virginia, in which French revolutionaries and perhaps United Irishmen were implicated. A New York property holder wrote that year, “If we will keep a monster in our country, we must keep him in chains”; in Jamaica, the governor contemplated genocide. Slaves fought against the expeditionary army under Leclerc (Napoleon’s son-in-law), which invaded Haiti in March 1802, and they rioted against the resumption of slavery in Guadeloupe. In the summer of 1802, many who felt betrayed by their leadership (Toussaint had been captured; Dessalines was still fighting for the French) rose in rebellious combinations of soldiers, peasants, maroons, dockers, and sailors that by February 1803 captured several cities. That same month, a jailbreak by African Americans, coupled with a rash of urban arson, nearly destroyed York, Pennsylvania. Cases heard at the Old Bailey in London in late 1802 involved several black sailors whose transatlantic experience had included sojourns in Providence, New York, Charleston, Kingston, Bridgetown, and Belize City.57 Such men brought news of what Herbert Aptheker called a decade-long wave of slave plots and uprisings in the United States, which culminated in 1802. Arthur, a black rebel in Virginia, appealed in that year to “both black and white which is the common man or poor white people, mulattoes will join with me to help free country.”58

  A second force was the lost commoners of England, those who sought through the Despards’ conspiracy to rise against the “Den of Thieves” (Parliament) and the “Man-eaters” (the government) and “to recover some of those liberties we have lost.” The Board of Agriculture had advocated the abolition of the commons in 1795. Thomas Malthus considered the woodland ecology to be an obstacle to civilization: the woods gave cover to the barbarians, the “hydra-headed monster” that had invaded and destroyed Rome. Hence, to abolish the commons was to slay the hydra, but this was no easy task. Expropriation often seemed to mobilize the disenfranchised. Thomas Spence made the point with Atlantic range: “Abroad and at Home, in America, France, and in our own Fleets, we have seen enough of public spirit . . . to accomplish Schemes of infinitely greater difficulty. . . . The People have only to say ‘Let the Land be ours’ and it will be so.” Despard himself had witnessed violent enclosure and resistance in Ireland and had angered factions by his redistribution of land in Belize.59

  A substantial number of the men arrested with Despard at the Oakley Arms tavern in November 1802 were craftsmen, whose degradation in the 1790s was manifested in increased hours of employment, fewer holidays, and intensified labor across the whole of their collective working day. These were accomplished by the introduction of machinery and by policing. The cotton gin and the steam engine, introduced in the 1790s, gave the plantation and the factory their lease on life by demonstrating that machines, far from abridging labor, actually increased unpaid work. In 1802, wage cuts caused two thousand Thames shipbuilders to “down” their tools. Then the croppers struck in Yorkshire, and the “spirit of Levelling” in Wiltshire was joined to nocturnal attacks upon textile machinery.60 Common rights were criminalized, the workers divided. In the winter of 1802–3, the struggle to retain customary income on the London docks was bitter. Colquhoun, a Scots merchant, Jamaican planter, and founder of the Lo
ndon police, advocated enclosure of the docks and the construction of inland waterways. His system of preventive policing attacked the customary rights of the “aquatic labourers,” or, as he explained, “the hydra in all the different forms it assumed.”61 To slay the hydra was thus to criminalize customary income.

  Despard considered sailors and dockworkers, the third main group, to be especially important to his plan to capture London. There were, after all, some one hundred thousand of them, many Irish and African, and they had been rebellious for years. The mutiny on H.M.S. Bounty took place on a planetary voyage of 1789 to collect food (breadfruit) from the Pacific to feed people imported from Africa who slaved on West Indian plantations, where they made sugar to provide empty calories to the proletarians in Europe. In 1797, H.M.S. Hermione suffered its own mutiny off the coast of Haiti, led by a Belfast republican and a New York African American. At the Nore and Spithead in May and June 1797, when dozens of ships mutinied in home waters, the imperial edifice shook but did not topple, though the Bank was forced to suspend gold payments. Hundreds were court-martialed, but thereafter sixteen ounces, not the purser’s fourteen, comprised the pound. In January 1802 thirteen mutineers of Admiral Campbell’s squadron were tried and sentenced to death; in the same month, sixteen others were executed at Portsmouth. On Christmas Eve, 1802, several ships in Gibraltar mutinied. At the end of January 1803, Yarmouth sailors struck.

  Despard’s future fellow prisoner Thomas Spence wrote a commonist plan, The Marine Republic (1794), addressed specifically to his audience among the aquatic laborers. Spence also serialized a seventeenth-century account of Masaniello’s Revolt, whose conclusion he modified to emphasize the autonomous power of an “injured and exasperated people.”62 Organizing continued on the waterfront even in the face of repression: “Be no longer SLAVES,” enjoined a printed card passed silently from calloused hand to calloused hand. The L.C.S. membership card of 1797 depicted a cartoon of a man’s being escorted to a boat, with a ship anchored in the distance. “Come along thou black Lubber,” says the bully sailor. “O Heavens! can Christians traffic in human Blood?” is the astonished reply.63 Despard was known among the deckhands and dockers as a “person who had been a Governor somewhere and whose Men had been mutinous and he would not punish them, so was turned out of his place.”64

  The Exact Manner of Executing the Mutineers, . . . at Portsmouth, 1802. Robinson, A Pictorial History of the Sea Services. John Hay Library.

  Fourth were the Irish. The Despards’ conspiracy was in one sense a continuation of the Irish Rebellion and its expansion into England, as Irish sailors, soldiers, and laborers figured centrally in it. Slavery and race became a common cause: a parade of Belfast reformers in 1790 featured an antislavery banner depicting a “Negro boy, well-dressed and holding high the cap of liberty.” The United Irish song book Paddy’s Resource (1795) included “The Captive Negro” and “The Negro’s Complaint.”65 In 1795, Irish regiments mutinied against service in the West Indies.66 Thomas Russell inveighed against slavery and landlordism in his Address to the People of Ireland (1796). Blunt and didactic, the United Irishman had as his goal to politicize popular culture rather than to valorize it.67 Still, this worked harmoniously with Gaelic, the language of the oldest traditions of history from below, in which prophecy, millenarianism, and the world turned upside down helped to form saoirse. The United Irish walked and walked. To boxing matches, hurling games, funerals, and collective potato diggings they carried the messages found in Christ in Triumph Coming to Judgment (1795), The Cry of the Poor for Bread (1796), and The Poor Man’s Catechism (1798). This was a “communal store of knowledge, accessible to all,” even to vagabonds such as Vladimir and Estragon en attendant Godot: “You have been told that politics is a subject upon which you should never think: that to the rich and great men of the country you should give up your judgement in the business of government. . . . Who gives this advice?. . . The men who profit by your ignorance and inattention. . . . Why not think of politics? Think of [it] seriously; think of your rulers; think of republics; think of kings.”68

  After the rebellion of 1798, the slaughter was vast: thirty thousand, far in excess of the number dead in Robespierre’s Terror. A large number of United Irish, estimated Castlereagh, were transported to Jamaica, where they were drafted into the regiments: “As soon as they got arms into their hands they deserted, and fled into the mountains, where they have been joined by large bodies of the natives and such of the French as were in the island. There have already been some engagements between this part and the King’s troops: several have been killed and wounded on both sides.”69 William Cobbett reported in 1798 the belief that in Virginia and the Carolinas, “some of the free negroes have already been admitted into the conspiracy of the United Irishmen.”70 These latter were conscious that one reason for their defeat in Ireland had been their failure to seize the capital, Dublin.71 Despard, who in Jamaica had studied the relationship between internal insurrection and external attack, applied the same strategic thinking to London at a moment when invasion by revolutionary France loomed large. But London was saturated with armed shopkeepers—the Volunteers—a fact that Despard acknowledged by saying he needed fifteen hundred men to take the city but fifty thousand to hold it. A leader of buccaneers, husband to an African American, friend to Central American Indians, and an officer of the army of the United Irish, Despard put his hand to the helm of a revolutionary vessel manned by an Atlantean crew.

  How had Despard met the motley crew? Some contacts he had made during his travels, and others through political organizations such as the United Irishmen and the L.C.S. He was active in street demonstrations—for example, in 1795 he was “among the Mob that was breaking Mr Pitt’s Windows” at 10 Downing Street, chanting “No war, No Pitt, Cheap Bread.”72 Others he met in the taverns where the plans for the uprising were laid. But probably the most important meeting place of insurrectionists was the prison, the hydra’s lair in which Despard spent much of the decade of the 1790s. Between 1792 and 1794, he was immured in King’s Bench Prison for debt. He was detained for sixteen months in Cold Bath Fields in 1798 after the suspension of habeas corpus. In 1799 he was removed to Shrewsbury Gaol. In 1801, he was incarcerated in the Tower and then later in the Tothill Fields Bridewell. While he “was confined so long in the Bastille,” he met mutinous soldiers and sailors, Spenceans, artisans, Jacobins, and democrats.73 Despard was in King’s Bench when Joseph Gerrard collected signatures on a petition supporting universal manhood suffrage.74 Several mutineers from the Nore were locked up with Despard in Cold Bath Fields Prison; in fact, seven mutineers had earlier escaped from the cell he occupied. Lord George Gordon paid for dinners in Newgate attended by “all ranks . . . the jew and gentile, the legislator and the labouring mechanic, the officer and soldier, all shared alike.” Included in these occasions was James Ridgway, who published books and pamphlets on abolitionism, Ireland, and the rights of women, as well as Bannantine’s memoir of Despard in 1799.75 Of the boom in building prisons, Burke gloated, “We have rebuilt Newgate and tenanted the mansion.” In contrast, Lord George Gordon, who was compared to Masaniello, wrote, “We have reason to cry aloud from our dungeons and prison-ships, in defense of our lives and liberties, in this advanced period of the world.”76 Despard heard the cries and got to know the criers.

  Portal of the Kilmainham Gaol, c. 1796. Photograph by Peter Linehaugh.

  Catherine Despard heard the cries, too. She worked with the wives and friends of the habeas corpus prisoners and fought to improve the conditions that her husband and many others suffered in prison. She organized a defense campaign in Parliament and in the newspapers. In December 1802, prisoners’ wives wrote to Home Secretary Pelham, “By the Command of our Husbands we Write to Petition your Lordship that their Grievances may be redressed. They being confin’d in Separate Cells & Nearly dead with Cold & Hunger we pray your Lordship that their Irons being heavy Double & exceeding Grievous may be taken off or Lightened.”77 Conditions were c
ruel, as revealed by John Herron’s suit in 1801 against Thomas Aris, warden of King’s Bench Prison: Herron’s cell measured six by eight feet; he was not provided with a chamber pot; “the dirt” was removed from his cell only once a week; he was kept on a diet of fourteen ounces of bread and two draughts of water “through the spout of a tin can.”78

  What were the ideas and ideals of the Despards’ conspiracy? When Judge Ellenborough summarized the state’s case in 1803, he chastised Despard for his “wild scheme of impracticable equality,” echoing the Baymen’s accusation in 1789 that he held the “wild and Levelling principle of Universal Equality.” The suggestion that Despard’s ideas were utopian (in the sense that utopia = no place) was, however, false. It would be more accurate to say that they arose from many places; they were polytopian. The conception of freedom emphasized in Despard’s gallows speech owed something to those who had the “highest ideas of freedom”: the Mosquito Indians of the Nicaraguan coast. His notion of equality owed something to the struggles of the motley crew in the American Revolution. His commitment to justice owed something to the United Irishmen. In another version of his gallows speech, Despard was reported to have said, “Although I shall not live to experience the blessings of the godlike change, be assured, Citizens, that the period will come, and that speedily, when the glorious cause of Liberty shall effectually triumph.” He thus compared the revolutionary struggle of the human race with divine agency. Although averse to the Bible as a child, Despard had since studied theology and sought out other seekers of such truth. Upon his return to London, he had met the shoemaker and rabbi David Levi in Finsbury and immediately commenced millenarian biblical discussion with this well-known scholar and advocate of jubilee.79