Profits lost, honour gained

Sam Leith

BURY THE CHAINS: THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT by Adam Hochschild Macmillan, £20, pp. 432, ISBN 0333904915 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The history of the Atlantic slave trade raises two quite contradictory questions. The first is: how on earth could something so manifestly barbaric have been so universally tolerated? The second is: how on earth could something so universally tolerated have been so quickly stopped?

It is with the second of these questions — seeing the British abolition campaign as the prototype for grass-roots human rights movements ever since — that Adam Hochschild is principally concerned. But his grippingly detailed opening chapters, describing the conditions under which slaves lived and were transported, can’t but leave you, imagination well and truly beggared, pondering the first. Flogging, dismemberment, branding with hot irons, casual murder, suicide, scalding, mangling, burnings alive, routine rape ... all human life is there.

There was, in the minds of good, slaveowning, ‘Rule Britannia’-singing Christians well acquainted with the Babylonian woe, what Americans would call a disconnect. Slaves weren’t people. They were property. Of course, we knew this in theory, but the examples here slap you in the face with it.

In the early 1780s the captain of a slave ship called Zong cocked up the journey to Jamaica, and realised that by the time he arrived his cargo would be half dead and that his share of the profits wouldn’t add up to much. He ditched the cargo, throwing 132 living human beings off the side of the boat. It was quite a scandal: he was prosecuted, in a civil case, for insurance fraud.

Then there’s John Newton. The romantic version has it that Newton wrote ‘Amazing Grace’ after an epiphanic realisation that slavery was wrong. Actually, despite having himself spent time as a white slave, which he did not enjoy, he was an extremely late convert to the cause. He either traded in or invested in slaves for most of his life. ‘Amazing Grace’ commemorated his realisation that swearing was wrong. A revolting old humbug, he died convinced that his greatest shame was his youthful propensity for blasphemy. The Church of England, Hochschild reminds us, invested wisely in slaves.

A groundswell of anti-slavery opinion from what the David Blunketts of the day would have called the ‘liberati’ started small. Granville Sharp, an eccentric musician who plied up and down the Thames with a floating orchestra, ran by chance across a badly beaten teenage slave in London, and was moved to indignation. He got involved. Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave of extraordinary brilliance and resourcefulness, befriended Sharp in London. His self-published memoir in due course became a powerful recruiting tool for dissent. Another man, Thomas Clarkson, only started looking into the matter in the hopes of winning a classical essay prize at Cambridge, but was so horrified by what he discovered that he couldn’t leave off. ‘Someone,’ he decided, ‘should see these calamities to their end.’ He dedicated his life to the abolitionist cause and was probably its most effective and devoted campaigner.

On the other side were some formidable vested interests, among them most rich men, the Church of England and the town of Liverpool. Campaigning in Liverpool (Hochschild risks another Spectator-style debacle with his disapproval of this ‘alemad’ slaving port), Clarkson was lucky to escape with his life. Scousers hated him. But one Mancunian in five pledged him support. It was Liverpool that returned the most notable pro-slavery MP, too: an eight-fingered hero of the American war, Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who boasted of having ‘butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army’.

Less colourful but probably most persuasive in the pro-slavery camp were, of course, the ‘realists’, like the MP who remarked that the slave trade was ‘not an amiable trade, but neither was the trade of a butcher an amiable trade, and yet a mutton chop was, nevertheless, a very good thing’. Free slaves? Madness: trade would go elsewhere; the economy would collapse.Tea would be bitter. And so on.

Many of these arguments sound familiar, and Hochschild allows himself the occasional contemporary political dig. ‘Like all revolts,’ he writes, ‘the one in St Domingue [now Haiti] was blamed on outside agitators.’ When, after the bloody overthrow of the French there, the British piled in in the hopes of conquering the island themselves, Hochschild notes the loftiness of the stated war aims:

Dundas [Secretary for War] said — sounding like many an American president since then — that it was ‘not a war for riches or local aggrandisement, but a war for security’.

Dealing with the ‘realists’ was a serious problem. The history of the abolition movement includes the utopian — sending freed slaves, for example, to found a weird feudal paradise in Sierra Leone — but it was the pragmatism what won it. Even if the long-term agenda was to see slaves emancipated, it was the ‘moderate’ position — abolition of the trade — that they started with. They stressed the profitability of alternative African goods; they encouraged a consumer boycott of slave-grown sugar; they made great play of how badly treated not the slaves, but the white sailors on slave ships were.

Emancipation, back then, was rather a military tactic than an ideal. In the American war, the British sought to undermine the enemy by promising that the slaves of rebel farmers would be given their freedom and enrolled in the British army. (After the settlement, George Washington spent years petitioning in vain to be given his slaves back.) In Guadeloupe, the French played the same trick on us. Not fair! Does Hochschild have, himself, an agenda? Somewhat. A liberal secularist, he is concerned to rescue the history of the abolition campaign from the pious, socially conservative myth constructed around it by, principally, the descendants of William Wilberforce. In that version, the heroically vigorous preacher and pamphleteer Thomas Clarkson barely figures. Abolition and, finally, emancipation, were the parliamentary expression of a benevolent paternalism among ruling-class Anglican evangelicals.

Actually, it wasn’t Anglicans but Quakers who got the movement going. It wasn’t speeches in Parliament that gave it force, but speeches in meeting houses and from pulpits, discussions in coffee-houses, and petitions to Parliament. Wilberforce emerges as an eloquent and indispensable friend to the cause, but a fainthearted one. Clarkson was the one who rode like Jehu up and down the country, travelling untold miles in parallel lines, gathering information and organising the resistance.

Wilberforce may have steered the parliamentary ship, but the wind that filled its sails was public opinion: opinion held against the basic interests of the propertyowning classes, and held by many people, women, Quakers, free blacks and the working class, who had at the time neither hope of representation nor the vote.

The case, suggested in the subtitle, that it may be regarded as a ‘human rights movement’ is arguable. Levels of support for abolition, contrary to the initial hopes of the campaigners, rather ran counter to, than in tandem with, the rise of popular agitation for suffrage or improved industrial relations. The French Revolution and the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man were, in practical terms, setbacks for the abolitionists: when there were reds under their beds, most people stopped worrying about blacks under their thumbs.

Hochschild suggests that ideas of liberty will tend to spread, and that successive campaigns of emancipation learnt their moral principles as well as their campaigning techniques from this one. I hope he’s right. But people aren’t, as his own book demonstrates, too good at noticing their own contradictions. After the French Revolution they were merrily naming slave ships Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité.

However one niggles about the precise weighting of his conclusions, though, Hochschild seems to me to have produced here a model of what popular narrative history should be. It is discriminating, packed with anecdote and quotation, and really well written.

It is in the detail that it really sings; not least in the moment, when after Parliament in 1807 at last passed the abolition bill, Wilberforce turned to his cousin Henry Thornton and said, ‘Well, Henry, what shall we abolish next?’ Thornton, a solemn evangelical, replied, ‘The Lottery, I think.’ Good call.