The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  Resistance to expropriation was strong in her home region, dating back to Captain Pouch and the Midlands Revolt of 1607 and to the Digger colonies of the English Revolution. Thomas, for his part, had been forced to leave his ancestral tenancy as capitalist farmers enclosed fields, consolidated runrig strips, and took in the commons, leaving the “gude-man” and cottar to join the landless.16 “Ah, man was made to mourn!” sighed the Scottish poet Robert Burns.

  Having lost the commons, all three then saw their labors undergo devaluation. Olaudah experienced the terrors of merchant capitalism aboard the slave ship that transported him (among some 1.4 million other Igbo) across the Atlantic. He labored at sea, amid the cane fields, and in the tobacco rows. He observed but could not stop the terror against his fellow creatures, off whose labors the Bank of England, the Houses of Parliament, and much of the nation thrived. Lydia, meanwhile, became pregnant six times in London, where 74 percent of all children died before the age of five.17 She attempted to nurture five infants to childhood, but amid circumstances of penury, dearth, insecurity, and infestation, they all died young. Thomas found work as a brickie at the Carron armaments works not far from his birthplace. The “carronades” that gave the men-of-war of merchant capitalism their destructive firepower were produced amid volcanic conditions of darting flames, glowing coals, and molten iron. Severely injured when some scaffolding collapsed beneath him, Thomas recovered and sailed to London in 1774 with eighteen pence in his pocket.

  Thus grounded in common experiences of expropriation and exploitation, the three friends shared rooms and ideas. Olaudah reached back to the antinomian abolitionism of the English Revolution to express through Milton’s Paradise Lost (2:332–40) his own experience of American slavery:

  . . . for what peace will begiv’n

  To us enslaved, but custody severe,

  And stripes, and arbitrary punishment

  Inflicted? and what peace can we return,

  But to our power hostility and hate;

  Untamed reluctance, and revenge though slow,

  Yet ever plotting how the Conqueror least

  May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice

  In doing what we most in suffering feel?

  Wherever Olaudah carried this “untamed reluctance,” miracles of social alliance followed, for he played a catalytic role in the making of the United Irishmen, the English working class, and the Scottish convention movement. His life story, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, was “the most important single literary contribution to the campaign for abolition.”18 While living with Lydia and Thomas, he prepared the fourth edition of the book, which he took with him on a journey to Ireland in May 1791. The sixty Irish subscribers to the Interesting Narrative included a large number of radicals who would become United Irishmen later in that year.19 Wolfe Tone came to Belfast about the same time as Olaudah and wrote his Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, which shared common ideas with Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.20

  Lydia Hardy was, like other women, active in the abolitionist movement, not in lobbying members of Parliament or participating in the deliberations of the national committee of the abolitionists, but at the parish pump or kitchen hearth. On April 2, 1792, she would write to Thomas and report on the progress of abolitionism in her hometown of Chesham: “Pray let me no how you go on in your society and likewise we [illegible word] as been donn in the parlement house concurning the slave trade for the people here are as much against it as enny ware and there is more people I think hear that drinks tea without sugar than there drinks with. . . .” The inclusive “we” here refers to the sugar boycott, one of the movement’s most effective campaigns, which had been launched the previous autumn. In the same letter, Lydia would ask Thomas to give Olaudah her best wishes for “a good jorney to Scotland” (he had been working in their common quarters on the fifth edition of his book, which he would carry with him). Her acquaintances in Chesham, she bid Thomas to pass on, were “very fond of Vassa book.”

  Thomas Hardy had arrived in London when the unfolding American Revolution was the subject of every political discussion. Influenced by the organizational and intellectual innovations of the motley crew (the committees of correspondence and abolitionist literature), Thomas explained that “his heart always glowed with the love of freedom, and was feelingly alive to the sufferings of his fellow creatures.” He developed a concern for the “future happiness of the whole human race.” By 1790 he kept a shoemaker’s shop located just a few yards from their rooms in Covent Garden, in Piccadilly, the embarkation point for coaches going to the west—to Bath or Bristol—and from there for ships headed for the West Indies. Here he formed the London Corresponding Society, which was egalitarian by income (membership cost one penny) and by status (titles were forbidden), though it excluded people “incapacitated by crimes.” After the first meeting, in January 1792, Hardy and the other founders repaired to a tavern, the Bell in the Strand, for supper, and listened to a parable by William Frend about “certain brethren dwelling together in one house and having all things in common.” Thus, at the very beginning of its deliberations, the L.C.S. considered the commons and slavery, the ideal of the one and the evil of the other. It began to seek out similar societies elsewhere for correspondence. But where? Olaudah suggested Sheffield—“a damn bad place,” according to George III.21

  Thomas pursued the suggestion. On March 8, 1792, he wrote to the Reverend Thomas Bryant of Sheffield, “Hearing from Gustavus Vassa that you are a zealous friend for the Abolition of that accursed traffick denominated the Slave Trade I inferred from that that you was a friend to freedom on the broad basis of the Rights of Man for I am pretty perswaded that no Man who is an advocate from principle for liberty for a Black Man but will strenuously promote and support the rights of a White Man & vice versa.” Equiano opened for Hardy the doors to the steel and cutlery workers of Sheffield. The Reverend Bryant led a congregation that would soon be labeled the “Tom Paine Methodists,” and many of its members were up in arms. In June 1791, six thousand acres of land in Sheffield and its vicinity had been enclosed by an act of Parliament. The commoners, the colliers, and the cutlers reacted in fury, releasing prisoners and burning a magistrate’s barn.22 A witness at Hardy’s 1794 trial for treason laid the ax to the root: “The original cause of discontent was the inclosing a Common, which was opposed by the populace.”23 The struggle for customary rights was common to both field and manufacture; a song of 1787 illustrated the interrelationship between expropriation and criminalization. Jonathan Watkinson and the masters of the Cutlers Company calculated their compensation and decreed that thirteen knives thenceforth be counted to the dozen, since among the twelve “there might be a waster,” a customary taking for the workers. The people sang in protest,24

  That offspring of tyranny, baseness and pride,

  Our rights hath invaded and almost destroyed,

  May that man be banished who villainy screens:

  Or sides with big W——n and his thirteens.

  The reference was, of course, to common rights. The ballad thumped along, comparing Watkinson to Pharoah:

  But justice repulsed him and set us all free,

  Like bond-slaves of old in the year jubilee.

  May those be transported or sent for marines

  That works for the big W——n at his thirteens.

  Jubilee thus meant the restoration of manufacturing rights.

  When Hardy wrote to Bryant, he mentioned the “broad basis of the Rights of Man,” referring to Tom Paine’s book, whose second part had just been published. The Rights of Man demonstrated the economic feasibility of public education for all children, social security for those over fifty, and health care for everyone. The rights encompassed by the phrase “rights of man” were growing; they would soon include the rights of women and the rights of infants. Dr. William Buchan, a physician in Sheffield, considered air, water, and sunshine to be “among the most essent
ial articles of the knowledge and rights of man.”25 Hardy’s own “vice versa” suggested that any advocate of workers’ rights to bread, commons, fresh air, clean water, and representation in Parliament must stand against slavery and advocate the same for the black person.

  In April, Hardy wrote, “There is an absolute necessity for us to unite together and communicate with each other that our sentiments and determinations may center in one point, viz., to have the Rights of Man reestablished especially in this nation but our views of the Rights of Man are not confined solely to this small island but are extended to the whole human race, black or white, high or low, rich or poor.”26 Like J. Philmore before him and the Despards after, he sought the liberation of the whole human race. The idea arose from his roommates, from his reading, from London Dissent, and from his knowledge of the gathering slave revolts in the Caribbean.

  April 2, 1792, was a historic day. It was announced that “the London Corresponding Society with modesty intrudes itself and opinions on the attention of the public.” The delicately worded proclamation, however, said nothing about slavery, the slave trade, or the commons. On the same day, Lydia, visiting family, wrote Thomas her letter from Chesham, politely inquiring about his society but emphasizing abolition and her news for Olaudah. Early the next morning, Parliament agreed to what, in the history of English abolitionism, is called the April Compromise. Wilberforce had asked Parliament on April 2 to resolve that the slave trade “ought to be abolished”; after midnight, the home secretary moved to amend the resolution by adding the word gradually. In the wee hours, the prime minister waxed eloquent. Then, after debating all night, not least about levelling principles, the members of Parliament went to breakfast, one or two of them perhaps blithely humming the hit tune of the year, “Oh, Dear! What Can the Matter Be?”27 The way was now clear for an expansion of the slave trade.28

  The coincidence of these events suggested a betrayal, which became more obvious with the passage of time. In May, Olaudah, who had joined the L.C.S., wrote to Thomas and expressed “my best Respect to my fellow members of your society.” The confusion of pronouns indicated a deepening problem. By summer Hardy had begun to worry that the abolitionist movement might sidetrack the society from its main objective, parliamentary reform. Looking back on the history of the organization from the vantage point of 1799, Hardy omitted any mention of the equality of race in observing of the society’s charter, “There was a uniform rule by which all Members were admitted high and low, rich and poor.” The three friends soon separated. Olaudah married and dropped out of the movement; Lydia died in childbirth after being harassed by a church-and-king mob; Thomas was attacked by the government, went to prison, was acquitted, and survived to publish, in 1832, his memoirs, which minimized Olaudah’s role as midwife to the birth of the L.C.S.

  As we have seen when considering Despard’s situation, the ramifications of the Haitian revolt undermined the revolutionary possibilities epitomized by the three friends, because it divided the abolitionist movement. In November 1791, a debate took place at Coachmakers’ Hall on the Haitian slave insurrection. “People here are all panic-struck with the transactions in St. Domingo,” wrote Wilberforce, but to him “people” meant the middle class.29 The idiom of monstrosity sanctioned violent, steady repression. In debate in the House of Lords, Abingdon argued that “the order and subordination, the happiness of the whole habitable globe is threatened” by abolition: “All being equal, blacks and whites, French and English, wolves and lambs, shall all, ‘merry companions every one,’ promiscuously pig together; engendering . . . a new species of man as the product of this new philosophy.”30 Abolish the slave trade, he warned, and other abolitions will pop out of Pandora’s box: the transporting of felons to Botany Bay, the flogging of soldiers, the pressing of seamen, the exploiting of factory workers. London bankers and merchant houses embraced the Baconian argument of monstrosity, urging the government fully to prosecute the attempt to repress the Haitian Revolution and eagerly supporting the exiled French planters in their city. Seventeen banking firms soon petitioned the Duke of Portland to annihilate and exterminate the insurgent slaves.31 Meanwhile, the poor mechanics of Leeds acknowledged the effects of propaganda in 1792: “We are behald more like Monsters than Friends of the People,” they wrote to the L.C.S. in 1792.32 Henry Redhead Yorke, who had been born in the West Indies, spoke against slavery at a mass meeting in Sheffield in the spring of 1794. The speech got him arrested, imprisoned, and tried. At his trial he brilliantly defended himself by turning the rhetoric of monstrosity back against the authorities, promising, “The more sacrifices, the more martyrs you make, the more numerous the sons of liberty will become. They will multiply like the hydra, and hurl vengeance upon your heads.”33

  VOLNEY’S MOTLEY CROWD

  In 1791 the revolutionary savant Constantin François Volney published his Ruins; Or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, a learned, sensible, and rhapsodic work of religious anthropology and world history.34 Its most famous passage is a dialogue between the “People” and the “Privileged Class”:

  PEOPLE: And what labor do you perform in our society?

  PRIVILEGED CLASS: None; we are not made to work.

  PEOPLE: How, then, have you acquired these riches?

  PRIVILEGED CLASS: By taking the pains to govern you.

  PEOPLE: What! is this what you call governing? We toil and you enjoy! we produce and you dissipate! Wealth proceeds from us, and you absorb it. Privileged men! class who are not the people; form a nation apart, and govern yourselves.

  The Privileged Class sends its lawyer, its soldier, and its priest to plead their characteristic arguments with the People, but none prevails. Then it plays the race card: “Are we not men of another race—the noble and pure descendants of the conquerors of this empire?” But the People, who have studied the historical genealogy of the Privileged, burst out in gales of laughter. Finally, the Privileged Class concedes, “It is all over for us: the swinish multitude are enlightened.”

  Written in an accessible, liberating style, Volney’s Ruins was as important to the age of revolution as Paine’s Rights of Man. First published in Paris, it was translated into German and English in 1792, with American editions appearing shortly after, and numerous fly-sheets, pamphlets, and abridged editions distributed elsewhere. It was printed in Sheffield, and in Welsh translation. Its fifteenth chapter, a vision of a “New Age,” was reprinted often. On the very day in May 1794 when habeas corpus was suspended and Tommy Spence was dragged off to Newgate, he included “The New Age” in the second volume of his Pig’s Meat; Or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude. The L.C.S. reprinted chapter 15 under the title The Torch, a circumstance “made use of to countenance the report of an intention to set London on fire.”35 In Bahia, Brazil, a copy was found in the hands of a mulatto in the midst of the 1797 conspiracy of whites, browns, and blacks.36 The United Irishmen reworked it as a chapbook and distributed it to Belfast mill workers.37 A second or third English translation, prepared by Joel Barlow with anonymous assistance from Thomas Jefferson, came out in 1802, when Volney may have been visiting England.38

  Volney voted in the French revolutionary assembly to abolish slavery. He foresaw a new age, and like Tom Paine and the United Irishmen, he saw it dawning in the west: “Turning towards the west . . . a cry of liberty, proceeding from far distant shores, resounds on the ancient continent.” He assailed the ruling logic of nationalism, having his Privileged Class say, “We must divide the people by national jealousies, and occupy them with commotions, wars, and conquests.” He critiqued the patriarchal family: “The King sleeps or smokes his pipe while his wife and daughters perform all the drudgery of the house.” He stood against the cupidity that “fomented in the bosom of every state an intestine war, in which the citizens, divided into contending corps of orders, classes, families, unremittingly struggled to appropriate to themselves, under the name of supreme power, the ability to plunder every thing.” From this “arose a distincti
on of castes and races, which reduced to a regular system the maintenance of disorder” and perfected the science of oppression.39

  Volney explained that civilization had begun in Africa: “It was there that a people, since forgotten, discovered the elements of science and art, at a time when all other men were barbarous, and that a race, now regarded as the refuse of society, because their hair is woolly and their skin is dark, explored among the phenomena of nature, those civil and religious systems which have since held mankind in awe.”40 Volney was a planetary wanderer who observed the variations inherent in humankind: “I contemplated with astonishment this gradation in color, from a bright carnation to a brown scarcely less bright, a dark brown, a muddy brown, bronze, olive, leaden, copper, as far as to the black of ebony and jet.” He wondered “who causeth his sun to shine alike on all the races of men, on the white as on the black, on the Jew, on the Mussulman, the Christian, and the Idolater”? He believed in a grand family of the human race. He wrote,

  A scene of a new and astonishing nature then presented itself to my view. All the people and nations of the globe, every race of men from every different climate, advancing on all sides, seemed to assemble in one inclosure, and form in distinct groups an immense congress. The motley appearance of this innumerable crowd, occasioned by their diversity of dress, of features and of complexion, exhibited a most extraordinary and most attractive spectacle.

  Volney raised the motley crowd to a universal ideal.

  Although he escaped the guillotine under Robespierre, Volney, like Tom Paine, landed in prison. He was released, along with Paine, on 9 Thermidor 1794. He soon sailed to America, taking his first English lessons from a Venetian sailor. In the winter of 1795–96, he lived in Philadelphia, across the street from the African Church, which was crowded with refugees from revolutionary St. Domingue. Volney admired the inscription over its portal, “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 42). He made contacts in “enlightened” circles, but his behavior apparently transgressed the norms of white supremacy. He visited Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in the summer of 1796 and later wrote about a personal encounter he had there with slavery: