The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  Wedderburn and Campbell belonged to a tradition in which the memory of struggle was maintained through oral tradition, passed along by mnemonic devices governed by strict canons of secrecy. One of the values of the Axe Laid to the Root lay in Wedderburn’s willingness to bring this knowledge into print in order to expand the understanding of workers in both Jamaica and England. He worked to establish common origins, connections, and parallels between the struggles in these two parts of the world, starting with the primitive Christians. The beginning, like the end, of Wedderburn’s history was thus communist, a pattern set by the “Christians of old” who had “attempted this happy mode of living in fellowship or brotherhood.” An interim heir to this tradition had been Wat Tyler, the leader of the Peasant’s Revolt in England in 1381, who had opened the prisons and negotiated with the king to abolish serfdom before being assassinated by the magistrates of London. The resistance and the treachery were both important for the maroons and other rebels in Jamaica to remember.60

  The English Revolution also occupied a central place in Wedderburn’s thought. In the year of Despard’s conspiracy (1802), Wedderburn elected to place on the title page of his Truth Self-Supported lines from 1 Corinthians 1:27: “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world, to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world, to confound the things that are mighty.” Wedderburn also made a place in his pantheon for the “primitive Quakers.”61 Of sugar production in the West Indies he wrote in seventeenth-century diction:

  The drops of blood, the horrible manure

  That fills with luscious juice the teeming can

  And must our fellow-creature thus endure,

  For traffic vile, th’indignity of pain?

  He understood that the imperialism and slavery visited upon Jamaica by Cromwell after 1655 had been made possible by the defeat of the radicals, whose battle had then been carried on, overseas, by the maroon ancestors of Elizabeth Campbell. The colonization of Jamaica was closely linked to England’s greedy rush into the slave trade.

  Although Wedderburn never directly mentioned Tacky’s Revolt in his writings, he was undoubtedly influenced by it. Living his early life in Westmoreland and Hanover Parishes, where much of the fighting had taken place, he would have heard surviving veterans tell the tale. Wedderburn carried on one of the ideas that came out of the revolt, the argument first expressed in print by J. Philmore, that slaves had the right to deliver themselves to freedom by rising up and slaying the tyrants. One of Wedderburn’s handbills of 1819 asked, “Can it be Murder to KILL A TYRANT?” to be followed by discussion of the allied question “Has a Slave an inherent right to slay his Master, who refuses him HIS LIBERTY?” One of the spies who attended the meeting reported that at the end of the debate, “Nearly the whole of the persons in the room held up their hands in favour of the Question.” Wedderburn “then exclaimed well Gentlemen I can now write home and tell the Slaves to murder their Masters as soon as they please.” Another spy was sure that the meeting had a double meaning: those assembled “avow their object to be nothing short of the assassination of their Rulers & the overthrow of the Government of England.”

  The Haitian Revolution, the first successful workers’ revolt in modern history, made a deep impression on Wedderburn. Even though he warned his brothers and sisters in Jamaica against the kind of bloodletting that had transpired in Haiti, he knew that rage was an inevitable response to terror and exploitation, and he was not unwilling to use it in a war of nerves against Jamaica’s rulers, advising them, “Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you.” Wedderburn also took note of the defeat in 1798 of the United Irishmen, but he scorned their military tactics at the Battle of Vinegar Hill: maroons and rebels in Jamaica, he explained, “will not stand to engage organised troops, like the silly Irish rebels.” Jamaican rebels did not depend on technology (they used “billhooks” as weapons), nor on the transport of troops by turnpike, nor on the logistics of food supply.

  The rising of hundreds of slaves in Bussa’s Rebellion to deliver themselves from bondage in Barbados was surely part of the Wedderburn’s report on the “Insurrections of the Slaves in some of the West India Islands” at a meeting in 1819. Speakers at the rally made the connection between slavery in the Caribbean and bondage in England, proposing the abolition of both. After this event and the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, Wedderburn called for the arming of the English proletariat. Some were ready, like the Halifax weavers who in 1819 carried a banner that read, “We groan, being burdened, waiting to be delivered, but we rejoice in hopes of a Jubilee.” One outcome of the proposal for armed struggle was the Cato Street Conspiracy, in which the idea was to attack the cabinet at dinner and kill particular tyrants: the lord chancellor, the lord of the treasury, the secretary of war, Castlereagh at the Home Department, the chancellor of the exchequer, the master of the mint, the president of the India Board, and the Duke of Wellington. This action would then spark other attacks in London, at the Mansion House and the Bank of England, and insurrections in the north. Wedderburn might have taken part if he had not been in prison, convicted of blasphemy. In any case, the events of 1816 made Wedderburn see that slave revolt and urban insurrection could produce a great jubilee, the apotheosis of resistance, which would be inaugurated by a work stoppage that would “strike terror to your oppressors.” By 1820, jubilee had become international and pan-ethnic: it was part of the self-activity of the proletariat, associated with insurrectionary prophecy and deeds. It became the basis of the general strike, as articulated by William Benbow.62

  Wedderburn’s conception of the proletariat arose from the experiences of a life spent in the port cities of Kingston and London. James Kelley would write in 1838 that in Wedderburn’s native Jamaica, “sailors and Negroes are ever on the most amicable terms.” Slaves, he noted, had “a feeling of independence in their intercourse with the sailor. . . . In the presence of the sailor, the Negro feels as a man.” In the island’s demography, “coloured births were most common amongst slaves employed on wharves.” R. R. Madden recorded these unions with understanding. In the sailoring districts of East London, “every cove that put in his appearance was quite welcome: colour or country considered no obstacle. . . . All was happiness—every body free and easy, and freedom of expression allowed to the very echo. The group motley indeed;—Lascars, blacks, jack tars, coal-heavers, dustmen, women of colour, old and young, and a sprinkling of the remnants of once fine girls, &c., were all jigging together.”63 Everyone knew Tom Molyneux, the black American sailor and heavyweight boxing champion. Othello was performed by African American sailors in Dartmoor Prison in 1814.64 London, certainly, and other parts of England, Scotland, and Ireland as well, were already motley, or free and easy, by 1820. The authorities watched the combinations carefully, but they could not control them. In the Americas, New Orleans at Congo Square (1817) and New York at Catherine Market (1821) were two spots among many where all jigged together.65

  Sailors were, to Wedderburn, a leading revolutionary force; indeed, he was familiar with Masaniello’s Revolt of 1647. Many of his comrades had dockside or seafaring experience. The Irish Cashman had worked as a fisherman and a sailor and been nine times wounded; the account of his wages at the conclusion of the wars was described by a friend to the Black Dwarf (March 19, 1817), as follows:

  Four years’ pay, at the rate of one pound per month, was due to him from the owner of a transport, in which he served; that seven months’ pay, at the rate of three pounds ten shillings per month, was due him from a ship in which he afterwards served; from another ship, five months’ pay, at five pounds ten shillings per month; that he afterwards served on board the Sea-horse and Maidstone frigates; that he was entitled to prize money from the Sea-horse, but lost all his papers in a schooner, in which he was taken in an action off the coast of America, and carried to Philadelphia; on which occasion he was wounded, and under the surgeon’s hands for a long time.

  His father was killed at
sea, and his mother had to beg for bread, as the pound a month that he requested be sent her from his wages never was. His hanging in March 1817 for participation in the Spa Fields Riots, when a gunsmith shop was looted, occasioned cries of “murder” and “shame.”

  William “Black” Davidson, born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1786, had also been a sailor, as well as a cabinetmaker, a secretary to the shoemakers’ trade union, and a teacher in a Wesleyan Sunday school. Almost six feet tall, he was admired for his courage and his strength. At a demonstration he protected one of the symbols of hydrarchy, a black flag with skull and crossbones and the words “Let us die like Men and not be sold like Slaves.” He was hanged after the Cato Street Conspiracy, as was Arthur Thistlewood, who “had much of the air of a seafaring man.” A city constable testified that during the Spa Fields Riots, the black American sailor Richard Simmonds was “harranguing the mob for half an hour; during the whole time he was the most active man among them.” Apprehended a week later on an outward-bound East Indiaman, he explained that several blacks and mulattos had been involved in the riots; for this reason, city authorities had arrested strangers and detained both “foreign and black sailors.”66 Other men with maritime experience in Wedderburn’s wide circle included the Irishman John “Zion” Ward and Richard Brothers. (Indeed, Wedderburn wondered whether Brothers’s fate of being confined in a madhouse might also be his own.) Government spies noted the prominence of sailors and salty language at Wedderburn’s Hopkins Street Chapel.

  Wedderburn was but one link in a long chain of Atlantic antinomians. By 1802 he had already ascended “from a legal state of mind, into a state of Gospel Liberty.” He had experienced “a deliverance from the power or authority of the law, considering himself not to be under the power of the law, but under Grace.” Once in this state, he was free: “Being thus secure, he was enabled with boldness to examine the various doctrines he heard advanced at different times.” He denied the power of Parliament to make laws that would contravene divine sovereignty in the ownership or distribution of land, and he insisted that there was godly legitimacy in resistance to oppressive laws. He asked his half-sister, “Oh Elizabeth, who first sanctioned the inhuman traffic, canst thou take away my guilt? No, cried a voice from some invisible being, the people should have resisted inhuman laws when proposed.” In High-Heel’d Shoes for Dwarfs in Holiness, written from his dungeon in 1820, he argued for the “armour of grace, the sword of the Spirit, and the shield of faith, to enable us to overcome the world.” Wedderburn may have helped in the 1810s and 1820s to encourage antinomian thinking among Afro-Protestants in Jamaica. To the Native Baptists (sometimes thought of as “Christianized obeahs”), conversion “meant not embracing a strict code of Christian morality but being above morality.” It followed, wrote Mary Turner, that John the Baptist “replaced Christ as the savior figure.” Wedderburn distinguished himself from conservative Baptist and Methodist missionaries by asking, in discussion on Hopkins Street, “Which is the greater crime, for the wesleyan Missionaries to preach up passive obedience to the poor Black Slaves in the west Indies,” or to extort their money?67

  Wedderburn, like almost all of those whom he called, even as late as 1819, “us Jacobins,” had studied the writings of Paine. These made a lifelong impression. “Glory be to Thomas Paine,” he railed at the Hopkins Street Chapel: “His Rights of Man have taught us better” than “that ignorant smock faced stupid fool,” the king. Wedderburn defied the government when he vowed that though Paine’s books “may burn by the hand of the common Hangman,” yet “they cannot burn [them] out of my head.”68 Still, Wedderburn, like Spence, pushed republican revolutionary thought beyond the positions taken by his fellow Jacobin artisanal radicals, who accepted capitalist redefinitions of property and the wage relation and considered The Rights of Man to be their manifesto. Mary Wollstonecraft exposed one limit of those positions in The Rights of Women, and Spence another in The Rights of Infants; Or, the Imprescriptable Right of MOTHER’S to such a Share of the Elements as is Sufficient to Enable them to Suckle and Bring up their Young (1796). Writing in a female voice, Spence attacked Paine as he shamed the men of the English proletariat: “We have found our husbands, to their indelible shame, woefully negligent and deficient about their own rights, as well as those of their wives and infants, [and] we women, mean to take up the business ourselves.”

  In 1817 Wedderburn debated the question “Is the American Government to be applauded or Condemned for the means they have taken to civilize the Indians by giving them a Portion of Land?” Wedderburn argued that “barbarism was better than Christianity. . . . If there was a God he would prevent Christianity from getting among the Indians give us Nature and we don’t want to know God, we can worship the Sun.” Making allowances for the unsympathetic, unpunctuated reporting of a spy, readers of Volney will recognize his ideas in this passage, for it was Volney who gathered the religions of the world in a semicircle (as Mrs. Campbell had gathered her slaves prior to their emancipation) for a mass debate of religious contradiction, before brilliantly demonstrating that Christianity, once its symbols and doctrines were explained by syncretic filiation, was the “Allegorical Worship of the Sun.” Moreover, the origin of heliocentric theology was the Upper Nile, “among a black race of men.”69 Wedderburn summarized Christ’s teaching in three commands: “Acknowledge no King—Acknowledge no priest. Acknowledge no Father.” Wedderburn’s own bitter, lifelong struggle with his wealthy Scottish father over the issues of paternity and inheritance thus broadened his political vision. The same, of course, was true of his transatlantic experiences of slavery and dispossession, which disinclined him to think of white, male, propertied citizenship as a means to revolutionary ends.70

  Wedderburn demanded “in the name of God, in the name of natural justice, and in the name of humanity, that all slaves be set free.” He knew that the most important abolitionists were the slaves themselves, who, like all other Atlantic workers, would of necessity deliver themselves from slavery and oppression by any means necessary. The most important means was direct action, and most emphatically not, he insisted, petitioning: “It is degrading to human nature to petition your oppressors.” Wedderburn was a living testimonial to “the horrors of slavery,” a phrase that served as the title of his autobiography. The power of this link was acknowledged in 1820 by William Wilberforce, who visited Wedderburn in prison and suggested that he write an account of his life for the movement, and earlier by the middle-class abolitionists who climbed up the ladder and into Wedderburn’s poor loft of a chapel to hear his denunciation of slavery.71

  A peep into the City of London Tavern, by George Cruikshank, 1817: Wedderburn (at right) confronts Robert Owen. By permission of the British Library.

  Like the linchpin, a small piece of metal that connected the wheels to the axle of the carriage and made possible the movement and firepower of the ship’s cannon, Wedderburn was an essential piece of something larger, mobile, and powerful. He linked through time the communist Christian in the ancient Near East with the Leveller in England and with the Native Baptist in Jamaica. He linked through space the slave and the maroon with the sailor and the dockworker, with the commoner and the artisan and the factory worker; he linked the evangelical with the Painite; he linked the slave with the working-class and middle-class opponent of slavery in the metropolis. He was the kind of person for whom “the idea of abolishing the slave trade is connected to the levelling system and the rights of man.” He linked the trumpet of jubilee in the enclosed commons of England with the “shell-blow” jubilee of Jamaica. He had been a ship’s gunner, and he knew exactly how a linchpin worked. He knew that without human linchpins like himself, Sam Sharpe and the Baptist War in Jamaica in 1831 might never have been possible. Sharpe, writes Mary Turner, “had formulated justifications for action inspired by the ideology that informed the radicals of the English Revolution and their descendants in the antislavery movement.”72 These justifications—and direct actions—helped to bring first t
he promise (on August 1, 1834) of jubilee and then its reality (on August 1, 1838): an end to slavery in the British Caribbean. Wedderburn lived long enough to witness (and no doubt to celebrate) the first, but not the second.

  CONCLUSION

  Tyger! Tyger!

  ADAM SMITH (1723–1790), the first comprehensive theorist of capitalism, and Karl Marx (1818–1883), its profoundest critic, agreed in their approach to globalization. Both understood its maritime origins, arguing that the discovery of the sea routes to the Americas and the East Indies marked a new stage in human history. And both understood its social consequences, the fact that the expansion of commodity production (Smith called it the extent of the market, Marx the social division of labor) resettled the globe and transformed the experience of work. Smith noted that the accumulation of wealth depended on an increasing division of labor, which in turn caused workers to become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Marx, for his part, argued that the colonial system and the extension of the world market converted “the worker into a crippled monstrosity.” He considered the imposition of factory discipline to be a “Herculean enterprise.”1 In other words, the despotism of the workplace and the anarchy of the global market developed together, intensifying work and redistributing workers in what Marx called a “motley pattern.” This book has shown that the monster had a head—indeed, many heads—of its own, and that those heads were truly motley.

  In the preceding pages, we have examined the Herculean process of globalization and the challenges posed to it by the many-headed hydra. We can periodize the almost two and a half centuries covered here by naming the successive and characteristic sites of struggle: the commons, the plantation, the ship, and the factory. In the years 1600–1640, when capitalism began in England and spread through trade and colonization around the Atlantic, systems of terror and sailing ships helped to expropriate the commoners of Africa, Ireland, England, Barbados, and Virginia and set them to work as hewers of wood and drawers of water. During the second phase, in 1640–1680, the hydra reared its heads against English capitalism, first by revolution in the metropolis, then by servile war in the colonies. Antinomians organized themselves to raise up a New Jerusalem against the wicked Babylon in order to put into practice the biblical precept that God is no respecter of persons. Their defeat deepened the subjection of women and opened the way to transoceanic slaving in Ireland, Jamaica, and West Africa. Dispersed to American plantations, the radicals were defeated a second time in Barbados and Virginia, enabling the ruling class to secure the plantation as a foundation of the new economic order.