Abolishing Slavery

Image: Duncan Walker

The Fellowship
Part One
Horror and Love

Sir Charles Middleton, James Ramsay, Granville Sharp,
and Margaret, Lady Middleton

Introduction

In the world of the 18th century, word on slavery was slow to arrive, slower to be heard. The evil of slavery was growing, but only whispers reached the shires, which were preoccupied with their own problems.

Those who learned about slavery and recognized it as an evil were few in number. They found each other.

They included a brilliant and bold naval commander, a surgeon, a self-taught law scholar, a woman who was a painter, a woman who was a playwright, a very young and rich MP, a brave graduate student, an audacious former slave, and a former slave trader. In the last decades of the 18th century they found each other.

One thing bound them - Christianity and an absolute detestation of slavery.

Each person brought to the fellowship something only he or she could bring, and without which the whole exhausting, dangerous effort that came close to killing several of them might have failed.

Part One (below) begins with Charles Middleton. His life at sea and the woman who is the love of his life will have an immense effect on the abolition of slavery.

Subsequent sections describe the growing strength of the fellowship to end slavery, the forces arrayed against them, the role of the slaves and the role of the Royal Navy.

Image: Classic Sailing UK

CHARLES MIDDLETON, CAPTAIN AND FIRST SEA LORD

Charles Middleton was born in 1726 in Bo'ness on the Firth of Forth. At the age of fifteen, he left home for the sea, and became a servant to the Captain of the Sandwich. The job had possibilities for advancement, not unlike those in a modern venture corporation, which a ship in the Royal Navy resembled in several ways. It's worth following Middleton's life on board ship because in the end it was the men of the Royal Navy who ended the slave trade.

Learning to stare death in the face and falling in love

British author Patrick O’Brian describes what it was like for a midshipman, which Charles Middleton became in a year or two. In his book The Golden Ocean. Peter Palafox is just boarding the Centurion to join her crew of 400 men:

. . .she lay with her yards across, trim, shining with cleanliness even under the grey sky of the morning, her decks a scene of intense activity; parties of seamen in canvas trousers hurried with buckets and mops; a half-company of red-coated Marines performed their exercise with a rhythmic stamping and crash to the beat of a drum.

‘I say, Palafox,’ said FitzGerald, who was first up the side, ‘do you see that –‘

‘You, sir,’ cried an angry voice behind them; ‘you there! Who the devil are you?’ It was the officer of the watch, who knew very well who they were, but who nevertheless stared down upon them with a fierce and disciplinary eye. ‘What is your business? What do you mean by wandering about his Majesty’s ship like a pack of geese on a common?’

Discipline is not the most ferocious lesson they will learn. It’s expected that the young midshipman has already learned algebra. If not, he will learn it here, in the bracing air, along with nautical navigation and the use of his quadrant, parallel rulers, Gunter’s scale, and Halley’s compass deviations.

He will master the complexities of sheet and tack, nurse wounded and ill men, and climb the shrouds and futtock-shrouds as high as the fore-to’garn crosstrees in all weathers on his watch. (When the young midshipmen get out of hand, they are ordered into the shrouds, where they festoon the mastheads, “disconsolate colleagues arranged, like ornaments, high above the sails.”) He will carry messages while the deck of his ship is being raked with gunfire.

By the age of sixteen or younger, a midshipman might have been in action ten times and he would have stared death in the face. He would have cleaned out the squalid ‘tween-decks when men by the score fell sick, because “it is the custom in the Navy for the officers to share in all the very nasty work – the Commodore had carried stretchers. . .when they first unloaded the fetid sick-bay.”

If a midshipman was unlucky, he would have seen service under “a slave-driver captain, that horrible, sometimes half-mad figure that stained the naval record for too long, and made some ships a floating hell.” Middleton loathed captains like this.

Middleton will wear the blue-laced coat and white breeches of the officer, and learn to reckon latitude and climb the fore-topsail yard in a storm. It is on the Sandwich that he met the Captain’s niece, Margaret Gambier. They fell in love with each other as teenagers. Their love would nurture the abolition of slavery, but at the time they might as well have been living on two different planets. She returned to England. Middleton remained on the sea, which was efficient at depriving the world of men.

O’Brian describes the daily hazards British seamen face in a scene that begins when Peter Palafox hears the first lieutenant roar above the thunder of the sea and the harping of the mizzen shrouds, "'Mr Palafox, what do you mean by being late on deck? Go below, sir, and do not present yourself again with your hair uncombed. This is a man-of-war, not the Calais packet. I shall expect to see you again in fifteen seconds, properly dressed and brushed.'" Fifteen seconds later, and properly brushed, Peter returns to deck and races up the shrouds, hanging on the yard in the teeth of a storm, grappling

with the sail that bellies out below you while men on deck haul on the buntlines and clew lines to raise the lower part of the sail up toward the yard, thus helping you to wrap the sail close to it, making all fast with the gaskets and so furling it. It sounds fairly simple; . . .but when the sail has an area of three thousand square feet, and when huge quantities of it balloon with enormous violence into your face, nearly knocking you off your perch and quite ripping all the careful folds of canvas from under your hands (which usually means that the men on either side of you have their hard-won sail torn away too, so that they hate your vitals), and when the wind is so strong that every inch of the canvas is frantically alive. . .then it becomes more complicated, particularly when everything is done in a howling fog.

The ship’s Commodore, however, is unfazed. “Firmly stayed fore and aft, in the act of shaving himself with a gleaming razor,” he calmly says to Peter, "My compliments to Mr Saunders, if you please, and I will be on deck in three minutes." As he spoke, he deftly timed the stroke of his razor to the pitch of the ship.

In 1745, Charles Middleton was promoted to be lieutenant of the Chesterfield with Captain William Gordon. He was just nineteen. By then he was accustomed to moldy rations and weevily biscuits, the piping of the watch that sent him up on deck, and the complexity of sailing a huge ship. The work in all its fugue-like variations went on constantly. Men were all day at various tasks, from butchering meat to holystoning the deck. They were plotting their position, tacking the sails, conning the ship from behind the wheel, taking orders, applying "seamanlike ingenuity" when it was desperately needed, watching for enemy ships, clearing the decks for action.

Through the repeated thunder of gunnery practice and the conclusive splash of the funeral service, through the din of the man-of-war and the exhaustion and exhilaration of the days and nights, Middleton became a professional. He maintained “tone” with just one lapse. Tone meant perfect manners in the heat of battle. Oaths were abhorrent, “disgusting” and “unmanly.” Broadsides might be rocking the ship, but it was ‘If you please Mr –’ and ‘My compliments to Mr -’ as the commander issued orders. Tone meant “cheerful, indefatigable industry” especially during disaster, swallowing down disappointment “with a sailor’s hard-learnt philosophy”, acting fearlessly, and serving efficiently, tirelessly, and selflessly on a team. Tone meant self-control.

Charles Middleton lost his self-control when he was still a young officer, and the crew was quarreling about rum rations. He never lost it again. He would have need of it when he joined the long battle to end slavery. Meanwhile home and Margaret Gambier lay thousands of watery miles away.

He had no money, and his survival was uncertain. Even in his twenties Middleton could not have honourably proposed to her because he had no way to support her on his salary. If he had proposed, her family would have forced her to refuse him. However, they could not force her to marry anyone else.

Captain in war

The end of the war of the Austrian Succession in 1748 put many ships in dry dock and Charles Middleton on half pay. It was not until 1754 that he was appointed to the Anson, and employed on convoy service, guarding merchant vessels sailing to the West Indies. He was twenty-eight. He remained a bachelor.

Two years later the Seven Years War began, drawing in all the European powers and spreading across the Old and New Worlds. The Royal Navy mobilised to protect shipping and to harass the French. In 1758, in May, when he was thirty-two, Middleton was promoted. He became Captain of the Arundel and then Captain of the Emerald.

He had learned how to command. His voice carried “the authentic quarter-deck rasp, unconscious, unemphatic and convincing,” and he genuinely cared for the men on his ship. He became a brilliant strategist and a legendary captain, loved by his men. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in 1761 he “commanded the Emerald frigate in the West Indies, and cruised with success against the enemy’s privateers, many of which he captured or destroyed. For his services in the protection of trade the assembly of Barbados gave him a vote of thanks and a gold-hilted sword.”

It’s here that a venture capital comparison might be made. When Middleton and his men captured a privateer, they owned it and everything on board after a cut had gone to the Admiralty. The prizes were divided to the last shilling with every man earning something depending on a pre-agreed formula. If our information is correct, Middleton's ship had a phenomenal run, capturing at least sixteen privateers. One result was that in 1761, when Charles Middleton was 35, he and Margaret Gambier could finally marry.

The beginning of the fellowship

Their marriage brought them friends. One of them was James Ramsay. In 1759 he had arrived on Middleton’s ship, the Arundel, to serve as his surgeon. When he returns to England, almost broken by his experience of slavery in St Kitts, Lady Middleton gives him the courage to write and bear witness against it.

The island of St. Kitts, where James Ramsay and James Stephen lived, and saw the slavery of Africans close up. The Atlantic is on the left; the Caribbean, on the right. Ramsay found a new world in the West Indies, where warm blue seas washed white beaches below blue-green hills, and exotic flowers seemed always in bloom and only one thing was terribly, monstrously wrong.

SURGEON JAMES RAMSAY

When James Ramsay stepped on board the Arundel and met Captain Charles Middleton, he and Middleton felt an immediate kinship. Ramsay had been born north of Middleton’s hometown, in the port of Fraserburgh, and had joined the Royal Navy in a spirit of adventure after training as a surgeon. Like O’Brian’s fictional characters Captain Jack Aubrey and his ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin, they frequently dined together on board ship with the other officers, and talked at length. They bonded as they travelled together and faced danger. They shared an appreciation for common sense.

Middleton had come by his common sense during years spent at sea. Ramsay, still in his twenties, had discovered common sense while studying with the philosopher Thomas Reid.

Ramsay's odyssey to a beautiful hell

Both Ramsay and Middleton had nerve. Middleton had the nerve of a man who is courageous, cool and effective in battle. Ramsay had the nerve of an 18th century surgeon who must save men by amputating their limbs without anaesthetic.

In 1759 the Arundel was called upon to help a slave ship infested with disease. Ramsay was first to go on board and into the hold. What he saw seared him. In a portrait painted years later, just a few months before he died, his blue eyes still seem to contain the startled horror of his first unforgettable sight of that foul, airless hole where men and women were chained and heaped together, five of them where only one could lie comfortably, their liberty taken from them, their families severed from them, starving, thirsty, degraded, dying. Ramsay looked into their eyes, the eyes of men and women, and felt kinship, and outrage.

After helping as much as he could, he returned to the Arundel, but shortly afterwards, he fell and fractured his thighbone. He became lame as a result, and had to leave the Navy. The blow would prove providential. Ramsay decided to take Holy Orders, and follow the Africans to the West Indies so he could minister to them.

In 1762 the newly ordained priest in the Church of England travelled to the beautiful Leeward Island of St Kitts, which lies in a crescent of islands south of Puerto Rico. Twenty-three miles long and five miles across at its widest point, St Kitts enjoyed a yearly average temperature of 79 degrees and cooling northeast trade winds. Ramsay fell in love with a planter’s daughter, and married in 1763. He also did something slightly unusual: He sat down to analyse his earlier experiences, and wrote an Essay on the Duty and Qualifications of a Sea Officer (1765) that was highly acclaimed.

St Kitts seemed like a balmy Eden, but Ramsay soon saw it was hell for Africans. Serving the plantation owners as both part-time surgeon and full-time pastor, Ramsay was appalled at the pathologies of domination, fear and greed that caused slave masters to work Africans to death, and to punish them violently for small infractions. He wept to see babies exposed to heat and rain while their mothers slaved in the fields. He saw that a slave’s services “were accepted with the same indifference that we express towards a clock.”

This was true all over the world. Servants or slaves handled the domestic services that technology – much of it subsequently invented by Brits – now provides. The men, women and children who were servants and slaves were treated with less care than we bestow on our laptops. But there were a few exceptions.

In America, in 1700, Samuel Sewall denounced slavery in his pamphlet The Selling of Joseph, but he had little effect in the American colonies or in Britain. Four decades later in Pennsylvania, three British Quakers, (Friends), Benjamin Lay, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet had more success. Listening in silence to the voice of God, as the Friends did, they concluded that God hated slavery and they must oppose it.

Woolman travelled through most parts of the colonies on foot, to hold conversations with Friends, and urge them for the love of Christ to free their slaves. Benezet kept a free school at Philadelphia for the education of Africans and published treatises against slavery. These men were so tenacious that Philadelphia Quakers officially renounced the practice of slaveholding. But that breakthrough, which occurred in 1754, a decade before Ramsay’s sojourn on St Kitts, had no effect in the West Indies.

Ramsay, who soon had three daughters and a son and a wife to support, found himself caught in circumstances that only those of us who have faced our own shortcomings and compromises can appreciate. On an island where domestic services were provided by slaves, Ramsay had slaves. By all accounts he treated them with kindness, but he carried the wrongness of slavery like a brand burning inside him as he ministered to the Caucasian members of his parish and nursed ill Africans on the plantations.

He invited the Africans to share in worship at his church. He tried to reduce physical violence against the Africans through the law, but as they were not seen as people but as property, the law carried no weight. He became the subject of relentless attacks from planters and parishioners who resented his views.

On the small island, there was no escape for the slaves or for Ramsay. He saw ever more intensely that Christ’s teachings forbade slavery. “By the coming of our Saviour, all men are become brethren!” he exclaimed, but there was no one on St Kitts who agreed. Increasingly he was treated as a pariah. His West Indies sojourn was ending.

After 14 years, exhausted and sickened by what he had seen and experienced, Ramsay left St Kitts and returned with his family to Britain. He was exhausted and depressed. He had lost his home and his job. He believed he had failed the enslaved Africans on the island of St Kitts.

It was sometime in 1781, when Ramsay was forty-eight, that he met his old captain again. Charles Middleton was now comptroller of the Navy and a baronet. He and Margaret, were living in Teston, Kent. Out of the shambles of Ramsay’s old life, new life was about to spring. In fellowship with the Middletons he was going to create the most important event in the early anti-slavery movement.

When the Ramsays returned to Britain, Nestor, an African slave, came with them. The moment he reached Britain, Nestor became free, as Ramsay knew he would. His liberation, and those of other Africans, was due to the efforts of Granville Sharp, the fourth member of the fellowship.

GRANVILLE SHARP, MUSICIAN AND SELF-TAUGHT LAWYER

Granville and his seven brothers and sisters, their spouses and children were famous in London for their aquatic concerts. As they passed Windsor Castle in their barge, playing Handel in the open air, George III came out to hear them. William Sharp, who played the organ and the French horn, and lived on the barge with his wife most of the year, was the king's surgeon. Granville Sharp played the harp, clarinet, oboe, kettle-drums. Their sisters sang, and played the piano, and the children danced, sometimes on tables.

Rescuing an African slave

William also provided free medical treatment to the poor. One day in 1765, while Granville was visiting his surgery, a young African named Jonathan Strong staggered in. Jonathan had been pistol-whipped almost to death by his master.

William saved Jonathan Strong, and sent him for further repairs to St. Bartolomew's Hospital. (Established in 1123, St Bart's is described here in the Ingenious Timeline.) Both brothers gave him money for clothes and food. Two years later, Jonathan was working when his old master caught sight of him, had him kidnapped, and sold him for £30. Jonathan sent a desperate message to Granville Sharp, who rushed to the prison, and warned the prison warden not to deliver him to anyone until his case had been heard by the Lord Mayor of London.

Jonathan's new owner, the ship's captain, and Sharp appeared before the Lord Mayor. The Mayor, who knew the Sharp clan, declared Jonathan free. The ship's captain seized Jonathan, and Sharp clapped a hand on the captain's shoulder and cried, "I charge you, in the name of the king, with an assault upon the person of Jonathan Strong, and all these are my witnesses." The captain beat a speedy retreat, and Jonathan was again free. His old owner challenged Sharp to a duel, but Granville ignored him.

This event changed Granville's life. Aware that the Council of Westminster had outlawed slavery in 1102, he immersed himself in reading law, searching for a way to establish a definitive legal ruling that would prevent the enslavement of Africans in Britain.

The quest for justice

Granville Sharp had an interesting mind. His parents had educated his older brothers, but he had received very little education when he moved to London at fourteen and became an apprentice. Unenthusiastic about selling cloth, he left the draper's, and took a government job. Sacrificing sleep and his social life, he taught himself Hebrew and New Testament Greek. He experienced real happiness reading the Gospel in Greek, and he acquired a decided belief that the Gospel called for love and justice on earth.

Sharp noted the Common Law precedent of Cartwright (1569) which explicitly stated that slavery could not exist in England. This was confirmed again in Smith v Brown and Cooper (1701), when Chief Justice Holt ruled, "As soon as a negro comes into England, he becomes free: one may be a villein in England, but not a slave." In Shanley v Hervey (1762) the court ruled, "As soon as a man puts foot on English ground, he is free: a Negro may maintain an action against his master for ill usage, and may have a Habeas Corpus, if restrained of his liberty."

But these rulings were being ignored. Instead slave owners relied on the opinion (1729) of Crown officers Yorke and Talbot that slaves are the property of their owners in Britain as well as in the colonies. Sharp debunked the opinion, brilliantly showing in an essay published in 1769 that Yorke and Talbot had ignored the Council of Westminster, the decision in Cartwright, and Sir William Blackstone's influential Commentaries on the Laws of England, which asserted that slaves were free when they came to England. (Blackstone, however, changed his opinion in a subsequent edition.)

Today it is a relatively easy thing to publish an opinion, and to be applauded by someone somewhere. It was not so easy then. Sharp's ideas challenged conventional wisdom and very rich people. He was condemned as a Christian evangelist. He remained undeterred.

In the late 1760s, Sharp made it his mission to find out when slaves were kidnapped in England and put on ships for the West Indies. Boarding the ships he brought the kidnapped former African slaves before magistrates who freed them. But the judges refrained from making a definitive ruling that would set a legal precedent against slavery.

One of those slaves was James Somerset (sometimes spelled Somersett). In 1772 James had been recaptured by his Boston, Massachusetts owner. He was lying in chains on a ship in London that was bound for Jamaica. Granville Sharp obtained a writ of habeas corpus from a judge, and the captain of the ship was ordered to produce Somerset before the court of King's Bench.

The suit was heard before William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, the Chief Justice. Murray was the clear-headed judge who had established the fundamental principles of British mercantile law. When the case was brought before him he considered slavery a legal fact, and he was not eager to rule against it. He was not eager to make any ruling at all.

Though not a member of the bar, Granville had explored all the precedents, talked with legal authorities, and developed the legal case for freeing Somerset, which he described in an essay in 1769 (On the Injustice and dangerous Tendency of tolerating Slavery).

The representing barristers made Granville's brilliant legal arguments, and Judge Mansfield made a 180° turn. He ruled that slavery was "odious", that James Somerset's servitude was not supported by law, and that he must be freed.

Success and nightmare

Though it was not the exact ruling Sharp had looked for, the public thought it was, and it was used to free slaves brought to Britain. But slavery in the West Indies continued in all its misery. For the next fifteen years, Sharp wrote and campaigned against slavery, but he laboured almost alone.

Despite Granville's best efforts, the anti-slavery movement was not making headway. With very few exceptions people in Britain did not think about the slave trade. When they did, they considered it to be the foundation of their commerce and the source of their wealth. It was believed that ending slavery would cause a collapse of the economy. Around the time that James Ramsay was returning to Britain, Granville began to help Africans who had been freed to return to Africa by establishing their own country, Sierra Leone. The effort failed. To those who cared it appeared that the dream of freedom was dying.

It was James Ramsay, without hope or home or job, who would recharge the cells of the anti-slavery movement. He was about to receive the indispensable help and inspiration of Margaret, Lady Middleton.

We have found no portrait of Margaret, Lady Middleton,
who was a painter, and loved for her tenderness to people and animals. Her contributions to the abolition of slavery were vital.

MARGARET, LADY MIDDLETON

Margaret, Lady Middleton helped make possible “the most important event in the early history of the anti-slavery movement,” but she hardly sets foot in the history books. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) confines her to brief mentions in her husband’s, her daughter’s, and James Ramsay’s entries. No one even knows the year Margaret was born, only that sometime around 1741 she stepped on board her uncle’s ship the Sandwich and fell in love with Charles Middleton, who was working as a servant.

Defying her father

She must have been ten, at least. Middleton was fifteen. Even when he became captain of his own ship Middleton could not afford to marry. Margaret defied her father, refusing to marry any other man, and waited for him. She fled to Teston, in Kent, to live with her childhood friend Elizabeth Bouverie.

Marriage and painting

Finally, on December 21, 1761, after Middleton had made his fortune, they married. He was 35. Their daughter was born nine months later.

We have no letters or accounts of their marriage. Their discretion exceeds Jane Austen’s.

We know only that Middleton declined another seagoing appointment and they lived in their London house at Hanover Square and in Teston at Barham Court with Elizabeth, whose house was big enough to share with friends. Middleton expertly farmed Elizabeth’s land while remaining close enough to London and the Chatham dockyard to keep in touch with naval affairs. Margaret painted and took care of the people and animals around her.

Crucial naval reforms

When James Ramsay returned in 1781, the Middletons and Elizabeth arranged to give him the living of Teston and to make him secretary to Middleton. With hischaracteristic energy Charles Middleton was completely revamping the Royal Navy in his new role as comptroller. It was not a moment too soon. Riddled by incompetence and corruption, the Navy’s ships were falling apart, its crews were undisciplined and underpaid, and it was facing a wartime challenge as the Franco-Spanish fleet threatened Britain.

Middleton streamlined and reorganized; ended corruption; increased sailors’ pay; improved ship maintenance and performance; established effective supply lines; outwitted the Franco-Spanish fleet; introduced a new weapon, the carronade, a light naval gun “capable of hurling a large short with great force over a short distance” which would become a mainstay in the Navy’s defence against Napoleon; and reformed the Standing Orders. We mention this because though they are hardly remembered, these reforms will prove crucial to the abolition of the slave trade.

Lady Middleton gathered family, friends, thinkers such as Dr Johnson, and artists around their dinner table. She could not bear to see an animal hurt. She was also, according to the formidably intelligent Dr Johnson, one of the wisest persons he knew.

The rarest act

Lady Middleton had another quality that was quite rare. She listened. It is one of the least used, least understood and most powerful acts that can occur between two people.

James Ramsay was a mild man with a thin skin. He had been relentlessly attacked when he tried to discuss the wrongs of slavery with planters in St Kitts. Though quite capable of drafting a memo on naval policy, he found it difficult to talk of the horrors he had seen. No one seemed to care or understand.

At Barham Court Lady Middleton listened with her mind and heart to the shocking news he brought her. There were no televised reports from Africa and the Caribbean on the terrible treatment of slaves. It was Ramsay who told her what it was like for the malnourished, exhausted and mutilated Africans, who worked at planting and harvesting the tall, knife-sharp cane that could pierce leather, and slashed their unprotected arms and hands. He described the dangerous and exhausting days and nights processing the cane while standing for hours over boiling vats. He spoke of the unspeakable violence they suffered at the hands of plantation owners and overseers.

As Lady Middleton listened, James Ramsay felt his burnt heart begin to heal. Here was someone who understood and empathized and saw the horror and injustice of what was being done. He no longer felt alone.

But Lady Middleton did more. She “urged him to lay his evidence before the nation” (DNB). A Christian, she believed that the Lord had made Ramsay a witness to this injustice so that Britain would end it.

She gently interrogated him, raising the questions that the public would ask. Many would be incredulous, hostile, accusing, scoffing. He would need to persuade them that what he said was true and that slavery was wrong. He would have to guess their objections before they raised them, and answer them. With her help, Ramsay did.

He wrote Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, and showed it to Charles Middleton, who brought his own demanding questions. The essay was improved by his critique, but it would never have existed without her.

In 1784, with her tender and resolute face before him, Ramsay left Teston. He took the essay to London, where J. Phillips published it.

The public’s reaction was intense. Soon the Middletons were clearing the decks for action and strategizing on a public and parliamentary campaign to end slavery with three young, visionary men - Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Olaudah Equiano, a slave who had managed, after astonishing adventures, to free himself.

Abolishing Slavery
THE FELLOWSHIP, Part 2
Sublime Allies

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