William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner

It was, however, the Quakers who would lead the way in setting out the Christian case against slavery and the slave trade, bringing to bear an influence far beyond their numbers, partly because they included highly active and respected individuals, and partly because they constituted a genuinely transatlantic community. The Quakers included many influential traders and merchants, and when the annual meeting of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia in 1754 came to the conclusion that ‘to live in ease and plenty by the toil of those who violence and cruelty have put in our power’ was incompatible with Christianity, it was a decision of more than token significance.46 The decisions of the Philadelphia Society of Friends led within a short time to their London counterparts coming to the same conclusion. Similarly, when the Quaker Anthony Benezet’s anti-slave-trade tract Observations on the Enslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes was published in America in the 1760s the London Quakers responded by ordering 1,500 copies and distributing them to every member of both Houses of Parliament. Benezet’s powerful arguments against slavery not only rested on Christian principles but were wholly in tune with Enlightenment ideas: ‘Nothing,’ he wrote in 1767, ‘can more clearly and positively militate against the slavery of the Negroes than the several declarations lately published that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”’47

The arguments of the Quakers were one of several powerful forces at work in North America in the 1760s and 1770s which would contribute to opening up the debate over the slave trade in Britain. A second factor was the growing fear in some of the North American colonies that the continued importation of large numbers of slaves would create an uncontrollable population prone to revolution in the future. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, ‘Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the State, and there is therefore some difference between them and sheep; sheep will never make insurrections.’48 This concern led some states, such as New Jersey in 1769, to impose a prohibitive level of duty on the import of slaves. Once the American Revolution was underway, the second Continental Congress passed a resolution opposing slave imports in 1776, and many of the northern states went on to act against slavery itself – Pennsylvania, for instance, passed a law in 1780 ensuring that all future born slaves would become free at the age of twenty-eight. Within a year of the end of the American War of Independence, all of the New England states had made legal provision for the abolition of slavery on their territory.

The British reaction to the American Revolution was a third factor which may have helped to inculcate the idea that the institution of slavery was no longer immutable. While Samuel Johnson taunted the Americans with the question, ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’,49 British generals seeking every possible weapon to use against the colonists made extensive promises of freedom to slaves held in North America. In 1775 the Governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunmore, offered freedom to all slaves who would bear arms against the rebellion: the subsequent years of war saw tens of thousands of slaves desert their owners, and some of them did indeed serve alongside the British Army. Sometimes the population of entire plantations managed to run away, with some states losing over half their slaves. At the end of the war, these desertions would leave the defeated British with the problem of what to do with large numbers of former slaves who had come under their protection, many of them congregated in still-loyal New York, with the eventual result that thousands of them would be unsatisfactorily resettled in Nova Scotia.

One of the effects of the American Revolution was, therefore, to create a significant free black population in the nascent United States, but it also left behind it a sharp political disagreement over the future of slavery and the slave trade, which would divide the United States and influence debate in the rest of the English-speaking world. While northern states responded to American Independence by emancipating slaves, southern states, which were much more heavily economically dependent on slave labour, responded to the end of the war with a surge of slave imports to make up for the large numbers of deserters. Within a remarkably short time the future battle lines of the American Civil War of eighty years later were drawn, facilitated by the historic compromise at the constitutional convention which declared that: ‘The importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited prior to the year eighteen hundred and eight.’50 The future President James Madison would defend the compromise as ‘a great point gained in favour of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever within these States a traffic which is so long and so loudly upbraided as the barbarism of modern policy’,51 but the result was that the period from 1787 to 1807 saw more slaves sold into the United States than any other two decades in history. By the end of the century, opinion in the southern states had turned firmly against the anti-slavery assumptions of the Founding Fathers, and abolitionist sentiment was once again largely confined to the ranks of the valiant Quakers.

In the meantime, Quaker campaigners such as Anthony Benezet had been discovering useful allies across the Atlantic. In his work specifically directed at a British audience A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies (1766), Benezet asked British Christians:

Do we indeed believe the truths declared in the Gospel? Are we persuaded that the threatenings, as well as the promises therein contained, will have their accomplishment? If indeed we do, must we not tremble to think what a load of guilt lies upon our Nation generally, and individually so far as we in any degree abet or countenance this aggravated inequity?52

1773 saw Benezet bring his arguments to London, followed soon afterwards by his pupil William Dillwyn, whose declared purpose was to help the English Quakers organise a campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. There they were introduced to another figure who shared their steadfast persistence and beliefs, and who would come to occupy a central role in the forthcoming campaign against the trade: Granville Sharp.

The grandson of an Archbishop of York, Sharp had become involved in the issue of slavery in 1765, when he had befriended a slave in London and tried to rescue him from being re-sold and returned to the West Indies. His views were reinforced by his contact with Benezet, and were similarly based on strong religious convictions. He was the first in a series of extraordinarily determined and talented individuals in Britain who were to give their time and energy to the anti-slavery cause over the following decades. He was said to have ‘a settled conviction of the wickedness of our race … tempered by an infantile credulity in the virtue in each separate member of it’,53 but his chief quality was indefatigable perseverance in any cause he adopted. Told when he was working as an apprentice to a linen draper that his ignorance of Greek made it impossible for him to understand a theological argument, he went on to gain such a mastery of Greek that he was able to correct previously unnoticed errors in the translation of the New Testament. When a tradesman whom he knew found that his claim to be the rightful heir to a peerage was scornfully dismissed, Sharp pursued the matter until his friend was duly seated in the House of Lords. For seven years from 1765 he applied this quality of determination to trying to prevent plantation-owners from forcibly removing their slaves from England. This work culminated in 1772 with the case of James Somerset, an escaped slave who had been recaptured and was being held on board a ship in London preparing to sail for Jamaica. Since there was no dispute that a Virginia slave-owner held legal title to Somerset, Sharp now had the test case he had been looking for, which could show that slave-ownership was incompatible with the laws of England, irrespective of any legal claim valid elsewhere.

It was a legal point which the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, had struggled for years to avoid. Now, despite a series of adjournments and efforts to settle the matter out of court, Sharp pursued the case until Mansfield was forced to give a definitive judgement. That judgement was that a slave-owner had no right to compel a slave to leave England for a foreign country. Slavery, Mansfield found, was not provided for in English law, and was something ‘so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law’. Such a ruling was, partly inadvertently, a death blow to slavery within the British Isles themselves, where it is thought some thousands of slaves were being held or maintained at the time. Sharp would be disappointed if he thought the ruling would have legal ramifications in British colonies, but he had chalked up an important victory which had the practical effect of ending slavery on British soil. Working with Benezet, he continued his opposition to slavery. In The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God (1776) he presented his argument in biblical terms, arguing that the Israelites were ‘reminded of their Bondage in Egypt: for so the almighty Deliverer from Slavery warned his people to limit and moderate the bondage … by the remembrance of their own former bondage in a foreign land, and by a remembrance also of his great mercy in delivering them from that bondage’.54

As he did so, the circle of committed Christians who agreed with him and were prepared to act was quietly growing.

It is an irony of history that David Hartley, one of the very few MPs to attack the slave trade in the House of Commons in the course of the 1770s, was the very man unseated by William Wilberforce when he stormed to victory at Hull in 1780. In defeating him, Wilberforce later recalled that ‘I expressed my hope to him that the time would come when I should be able to do something on behalf of slaves.’55 In the same year he apparently asked a friend travelling to Antigua to collect information for him, and again expressed ‘my hope, that some time or other I should redress the wrongs of those wretched and degraded beings’.56* While there is no reason to doubt that his interest was genuine, the slave trade did not become a topic of parliamentary debate in the early 1780s, and Wilberforce did not attempt to raise it. Yet as Wilberforce turned to devouring books in the summer of 1786, he would have found among many of his chosen authors – Montesquieu, Adam Smith, William Paley – a universal condemnation of slavery. And in the preceding two or three years he would certainly have read a number of new publications which stated the case against the slave trade more effectively and authoritatively than ever before.

One such publication was likely to have been the record of the court proceedings in 1783 concerning the slave ship Zong, circulated by Granville Sharp. The Zong, owned by Liverpool merchants, had sailed from São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea in 1781 with more than four hundred slaves on board. Poor navigation by the captain, Luke Collingwood, led to them overshooting their destination and water on board becoming scarce, with many of the slaves dying or falling ill. Calculating that if the slaves died on board the loss would be borne by the owners, but that should there be a sufficiently sound pretext of the crew being in danger, ‘If the drowned were to be paid for by the insurers, they still constituted a part of the value of the cargo, and the master retained his whole profits,’57 Collingwood decided to throw 133 slaves overboard. They were thrown over the side in three groups. The third group of twenty-six, realising what was happening to them, fought back and were consequently thrown into the sea with their arms still in shackles. Only one of the 133 survived, climbing back on board when no one was looking and stowing himself away.

The efforts of the owners to sue the underwriters were a failure, since the shortage of water was not satisfactorily proved, but Lord Mansfield made clear at the time that in legal terms ‘the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard’.58 Equally, the efforts of Granville Sharp to launch a prosecution against the owners met with no success: there was no law against a master drowning slaves if he wished to do so. While Sharp suffered a legal defeat, the effect was a moral victory: the terrible story of the Zong became widely known in Britain, and fed a growing sense of outrage.

The same year that the case of the Zong came to court saw the creation of the London Quaker Abolition Committee, and the publication of a flurry of poems and pamphlets denouncing the slave trade. The following year, 1784, the Reverend James Ramsay published two powerful pamphlets – An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies and An Inquiry into the Effects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The importance of Ramsay’s work was that it was based on twenty-two years’ actual experience of living in the West Indies, at a time when hard facts about slavery and the slave trade were difficult to establish and British people with first-hand knowledge were unwilling to speak out. Brought up in Aberdeen, Ramsay had been a surgeon during the Seven Years’ War on the British warship Arundel, captained by Sir Charles Middleton. Ordered by Middleton to go aboard a slave ship recaptured from the French, Ramsay would never forget the desperate scenes he found there, with diseased and plague-ridden slaves dying in the hold. Going on to become a clergyman on the island of St Kitts, where he stayed until 1781, he developed a revulsion for the slave markets and the punishment meted out to slaves which made him into an enemy of the entire system. Unpopular with the whites of the West Indies as a result, but always held in high esteem by the Middletons, he was given the living of Teston in Kent by a wealthy friend of Lady Middleton, and settled down to live alongside his old friends in a more peaceful setting.

Ramsay’s publications developed many of the arguments which would be used by the abolitionists in the years ahead, reasoning that slavery could be dispensed with gradually, and be replaced by the immigration of free people, with a beneficial effect on the businesses and profits of the plantations. In particular, he called for an immediate end to the slave trade, since this would force slave-owners to treat their existing slaves better, and to refrain from the brutalities he had witnessed on St Kitts. Africa too would benefit from the end of the slave trade, perhaps able to develop sugar plantations itself, and ‘The improvement of Africa is a compensation which we owe for the horrid barbarities we have been instrumental in procuring to be exercised on her sons.’59

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