Chapter VIII: Abolition and Emancipation of Slavery
8. Introduction
8.1 The Rise of Christian Abolitionism
The role of religious people vis-à-vis Christians in the course of abolition will be highlighted in this section. As far as British slave trading is concerned, which had begun in the late 16th century and grew astronomically during the 17th and 18th centuries, by 1807 about 3 million slaves had been transported to the Americas on British ships. Though some Christians denounced the slave trade, for example Richard Baxter, who declared that slave traders were ‘fitter to be called devils than Christians’, and the Puritan Samuel Sewall, who published America’s first antislavery tracts, The Selling of Joseph (1700), but they still accepted slavery as a part of life. The evangelist, George Whitefield deplored the cruelty of slave owners in the American south but owned over fifty slaves in Georgia. The Anglican Evangelical, George Newton, who was converted to Christianity while capturing a slave ship in the 1750s, did not see anything bad about slave trade until 3 decades later. 689
687 Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870, 1997, pp. 423, 514, 517, 526, 529, 530, 536,537-38, 539-41, 556, 585-86, 590, 592, 600, 636, 650, 776 and 797.
688 Davis, D. B., Slavery and Human Progress, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 108.
689 Newton, John, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, 1788.
The Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts owned many slaves in the Caribbean – in fact the word ‘SOCIETY’ was branded on their chests with a red-hot iron to identify them as property of the SPG. For most Britons, the brutality of the slave trade was out of sight, out of mind. British slave traders were carrying almost 40,000 slaves from Africa to the New World every single year, yet there was no public outcry.
The Christian abolitionist movement began to take shape from the mid 18th century and beginning with American Quakers. Three distinguished figures, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, refused to accept the further existence of slavery. As a result of their critic and opposition to slavery, in 1754, the Philadelphia Quakers officially renounced the practice of slaveholding.690 Philosophers like Montesquieu and Rousseau also gave impetus to the abolition of slavery, but it were Christian activists who initiated and organized abolitionist movement.691
From the 1760s, the Anglican Evangelical campaigned with some success on behalf of Black Britons. In the Somerset case of 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled that once in Britain, slaves could not be compelled to return to the colonies.692 During the 1770s, the Evangelicals inspired by Benezet and Sharp, the British Methodist, John Wesley and the American Presbyterian, Benjamin Rush, condemned the slave trade in notable and influential pamphlets. With these exposures, the horrors of the traffic in human beings were being exposed to human view and the atrocity involving the slave ship Zong, whose captain had thrown 130 slaves overboard in order to claim insurance for their deaths became known.693In 1788-92, there was a media blitz and petitioning campaign aimed to coincide Wilberforce parliamentary bills.
Thomas Clarkson had assembled enough evidence before parliament against the trade and the abolitionist pioneered many of the tactics of modern pressure groups: logos, petitions, rallies, book tours, letters to MPs, a national organization with a local chapter and the mass mobilization of the grassroots agitation.694 There were also boycotts of consumer goods particularly rum and sugar, that came from slave plantations in the Caribbean.
690 Shenstone, William, Complete Works, Edinburgh, 1852, p. 233; Pope, “Essay on Man”, 1, p. 107; Compare Wax, Darold, Quaker of Merchant and the Slave Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography LXXXVII, 1962, pp. 143-59.
691 Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870, 1997, pp. 449, 464, 465-66.
692 Wise, Steven M., Though the Heavens may Fall: The Landmark Trial that led to the end of Human Slavery, Pimlico, 2006.
693 http://www.hullwebs.co.uk/content/j-georgians/people/william-wilberforce/slaveship-zong.htm.
694 National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 16, 1870; National Standard, May, 1870, pp. 46-48.
Christians of the Methodist church were also asked to sign petition against the slave trade, which they did.695 Within a generation, a dramatic change on the attitude towards slavery was recorded. “Thirty years ago’, wrote the American Jonathan Edwards Jr., ‘scarcely a man in this country thought either the slave trade or the slavery of Negroes to be wrong’.
His own father, the famous theologian and revivalist, Jonathan Edwards Sr., had owned slaves. But the practice could no longer be excused. ‘Our pious fathers’, wrote the younger Edwards, “lived in a time of ignorance, which God winked at but now he commandeth all men everywhere to repent of this wickedness.”696
There had been divergent views of the dramatic rise of abolitionism at this time in history; while some postulate the impact of cultural change and the new bourgeois cult of sensibility, others still advanced that abolitionism served the interests of the new industrial capitalism and the most recent analysis argues that the key lies in the anxieties and dislocations created by the American revolution.697 The various campaigners, particularly Clarkson and the Evangelical James Steven, did convince the parliament that dismantling the Atlantic Slave Trade would undermine the colonial power of Britain’s rivals, especially France. Parliament therefore abolished the trade in 1806-1807 after abolitionists exploited an unpredictable and fortuitous conjuncture of political-economic circumstances.698 However, the grass-roots support against slavery was motivated and mobilized by overwhelming majority of the Quakers and dissenting church members.699 According to Davis “the fall of new world slavery could not have occurred if there had been no abolitionist’s movements”. This was a moral achievement that has no parallel”.700 The various groups and organisations, and particularly Clarkson, presented to parliament a water-tight argument and evidence of the injustice done to fellow human beings, of course using their Holy Bible as the yardstick.701
Slave emancipation movements in the light of the abolitionists’ philosophy developed into the principal means by which the abolition of slavery would be accelerated, piecemeal by piecemeal. The dramatic cases of Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica appear to be the most representative violent protests and revolts, collective escape, individual
695 Bradburn, Samuel, An Address to the People called Methodist concerning the Evil of Encouraging the Slave Trade, 1792, pp. 13-14.
696 Edwards, Jonathan Jr., The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade, 1791, pp. 29-30.
697 Carey, B., British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 1760-1807, Palgrave, 2005; Davis, D. B., The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, Cornell University Press, 1975; Brown, C. L., Moral Capital Foundations of the British Abolitionism, University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
698 Anstey, R., The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1807, Macmillan, 1975, p. 412.
699 Davis, D. B., Slavery and Human Progress, 1984, p. 139.
700 Davis, D. B., Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 331.
701 Hochschild, A., Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery, Pan, 2006, p. 366.
reactions, presumed submission, destruction of property, cane fields set on fire, e.t.c. 702 One must take greater account of intellectual change in the 18th century and study in detail the interplay between the moral purpose of the political nation, muted as it was by a strong and deep-rooted sense of national importance of the West Indies, and the high moral purpose, daunting perseverance and political skill and for the most part warmly Christian inspiration of the abolitionists.703 One of the motivating factors for the emancipation was the news, laws, incidents, and common arguments prevalent at this time. Through public channels, passing whispers of group conversation, and among the slave huts, on the plantation, in the house, in the city, on the country estate, in the mines - in all these places, bands of workers traded views on the Haitian Revolution, the debates in the Assembly of Cadiz, the British Parliament, or the American Parliament. 704