Abolishing Slavery

2

The Fellowship
Unlikely Friends

Thomas Clarkson, the Friends,
William Wilberforce, William Pitt, Olaudah Equiano

THOMAS CLARKSON WALKS AND RIDES 10,000 MILES FOR FREEDOM

Thomas Clarkson looked like Friar Tuck without his cowl when he left Cambridge on horseback in June 1785. He was 25, tall, heavy-set and red-haired. He had recently been ordained a deacon, but like Tuck he was not thinking about his career as a clergyman. As he rode toward London, Thomas Clarkson thought about the horrible thing he had learned at Cambridge.

The revelation

Dr Peter Peckard, vice-chancellor of Cambridge, had set the Latin essay prize question as Anne liceat invitos in servitutem, ‘Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?’ Peckard had become passionately angry about slavery after reading about the trial of the captain of the Zong, who had thrown handcuffed Africans into the sea to collect insurance.

Thomas ‘Tuck’ Clarkson decided to win the prestigious prize, but this necessitated some research, as he knew nothing about slavery or the Atlantic slave trade. There was not much information, but as he read James Ramsay’s essay and the diaries of a slave captain and questioned his younger brother, who had seen slaves in the West Indies, he became increasingly disturbed.

The practices of the slave trade and slavery were monstrous: children torn away from their parents and left to die or sold to others; women violated; men manacled and mutilated and murdered if they resisted.

Clarkson had won the prize, written in his fine Latin, but as he travelled to London, he could not put the images of enslaved men, women and children out of his mind. Dismounting, and walking his horse, he tried to persuade himself that this appalling information must be untrue.

But he knew it must be true, and dismounting from his horse at Wadesmill, he had a revelation.

Wadesmill, Hertfordshire where Thomas Clarkson, riding to London, had his revelation.

Image: Blue Tiger

In addition to the Middletons, Granville Sharp, Ramsay, another group of Christians had set themselves against the slave trade. These were the Friends, sometimes called Quakers. Their belief in human equality and their contemplative search for God’s light and dislike of church ritual had made them socially suspect. Persecuted, they had gravitated toward business, and maintained a network across Britain. They had begun publishing anti-slavery pamphlets, but because they were Quakers they were ignored.

Clarkson had decided to attack slavery with every bone and fibre in his being. His first step was to translate his essay into English. A London publisher who thought it would appeal to “people of taste” offered to print it. Clarkson wanted more than a tasteful appeal, and walked out of his shop.

Serendipity

Serendipity or providence striking again, he immediately bumped into a Quaker who asked him why he hadn't’t published his essay, and took him to see James Phillips and Granville Sharp, who edited his essay. Phillips published it in 1786 as The Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African.

The Friends, who needed an Anglican face for their campaign, were thrilled. So was James Ramsay. He had spent the two years since the publication of his essay defending himself from the violent personal attacks of men invested in the trade in Britain and the West Indies. He felt under siege, and exhausted.

Clarkson spent a month with Ramsay and the Middletons in Teston. With Ramsay he felt as if he had found his father, who had also been a clergyman. His father had died after visiting a poor ill family when Thomas was six, and Thomas carried his lantern stashed in his bag when he travelled.

Strategizing with Ramsay and the Middletons, Thomas realized he had to learn more about the trade’s impact on sailors. The slave trade had been portrayed as good employment for thousands of British sailors. Charles Middleton, now an MP, was certain this was false, and thought it would be an effective weapon in the fight to end the trade. Middleton also had his eye on a young man he thought would champion abolition in the House of Commons: William Wilberforce.

The brutal truth

Clarkson returned to London, and with Middleton’s name as an introduction set up interviews with anyone in the Navy who knew anything about the slave trade. At night he pored over the records of the Customs House, where ship musters were kept. Working as late as 3 am, until his blue eyes were inflamed, then walking home through the silent streets, he faced the extraordinary truth that 20% of crews never returned from slave voyages. They died from yellow fever, malaria, dysentery or injuries.

On May 22, 1787, Thomas Clarkson joined Granville Sharp and the Quaker Friends to launch a public campaign to end slavery. The challenge was vast. “In all human experience there was no precedent for such a campaign” (Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild).

There was little precedent for their campaign techniques, either. Many of them have become modern standbys, from investigative reporting to posters, newsletters, petitions and campaign buttons. But some of their most effective organizing principles have been forgotten.

Community organizing

Shrewd, capable businessmen, the Quaker Friends hired a lawyer, opened a bank account, and rented a room where, after their businesses closed, they met at night. They took no votes. They made decisions as Friends did, by consensus. Those who have experienced this kind of decision-making (Horatio Nelson will employ it at critical junctures) know how effective it can be in arriving at the best decision and building a team.

They established that three would be a quorum. Be there or be nowhere, they would not keep business waiting for more than three members to appear. Besides, they trusted each other, and had confidence that if business delayed them, decisions guided by Christian principles and intelligence would be made.

They developed detailed lists (now in the British Library) of every task and every possible supporter in Britain and who would be their contact. They decided to focus on the slave trade first, figuring that ending the trade would end slavery.

Under attack

Their first task was to seek out information that could be presented to the Privy Council and Parliament. Clarkson said he was their man, but as he rode toward the two slave-trading ports of Bristol and Liverpool, he wondered whether he would “get out of it alive.”

Once in town he worked feverishly at the customs houses, docks and taverns. He learned what had happened to 20,000 sailors who had failed to return and the slave trade’s brutalization of those who survived. He found the implements of the trade – shackles, handcuffs, whips, thumb-screws and the speculum oris used to pry apart a man’s jaws so he could be force-fed. He collected ivory, gum, rice, pepper, cloth, and rice from Africa to persuade the public that an alternative profitable trade existed.

In Liverpool he was violently attacked, but his physical strength saved him. Dr Alexander Falconbridge, who had served on four slave voyages, offered to be a witness to the infamy of the trade. Carrying a concealed gun, he also became his bodyguard.

Thomas Clarkson rode 35,000 miles on horseback. He visited “Manchester, Bath, Gloucester, Worcester, Chester, Lancaster, and Birmingham” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) and many smaller towns. Everywhere he went he found Brits who wanted to hear about the trade, and once they had heard about it, to oppose it. In Manchester, where better working conditions, lower taxes and religious freedom were also hot issues, 10,000 people – one out of every five – signed a petition calling for abolition.

With a large part of the investigative reporting done, and the movement gaining strength, it was to Parliament and William Wilberforce that Clarkson, the Friends, Ramsay, Sharp and the Middletons now turned. The success of the Fellowship will turn on William Wilberforce.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE - NEVER GIVING UP

William ‘Wilber’ Wilberforce liked to have a good time. When he attended Cambridge he gambled, rarely cracked a book, and usually kept “a great Yorkshire pie in his rooms to which all friends were welcome”. He was always generous with money. (He had lost his father and inherited a fortune at the age of nine.) At twenty he would have laughed incredulously if anyone had suggested that what he did with his life would determine whether 700,000 Africans lived or died.

The shrimp who became a whale

In 1780, when he had just turned 21, Wilber decided to stand for Parliament. The diarist Boswell caught sight of him giving a speech to four thousand in the freezing cold in York, and wrote, “I saw a perfect shrimp. . .who swelled into a whale.”

With the dispersal of about £8,000, a large sum at the time, Wilberforce was elected MP for Hull. Pitt, who was Britain’s youngest Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-one, became his best friend. After the House had sat all night, they used to talk politics and fence with swords. The American War of Independence was ending. The wars that would engulf Britain and Europe lay just beyond the guillotines of the French Revolution, which were about to fall.

Meanwhile Wilber maintained his relentless schedule at fashionable balls and gambling clubs. He was hospitable, witty, and irresistibly charming. Those who heard him speak in Parliament thought he had one of the most persuasive speaking voices in the world, but aside from supporting Pitt and sticking up for Hull’s maritime interests, he seemed at a loss. However, his sardonic repartee, flashing like a sword, was devastatingly effective.

His life might have continued in this pleasantly forgettable way except for an accident – unless it was no accident and Wilberforce had unconsciously chosen to follow a track he barely saw. When a friend dropped out of a trip to the south of France, Wilber, who didn’t think he could stomach his mother’s company alone, asked a young Cambridge don to come along.

Isaac Milner, who later held the Lucasian professorship of mathematics, had been a poor weaver who had earned a scholarship to Cambridge. Merry in public, uproarious in private, he was a big, brilliant man. When he and Wilber were climbing an icy hill and Wilber’s loaded carriage and horses began sliding backwards, Milner caught them, and held them fast.

Wilber believed that only the vulgar and uninformed held enthusiastically Christian views. He doubted Christ’s divinity, and he expounded on his beliefs, or rather his lack of belief, as he and Milner rattled in the coach toward Nice. Milner listened silently, then told him if he wanted to discuss the topic in a serious way he would be happy to oblige.

The encounter

To Wilber’s surprise, Milner, who had read the New Testament in Greek, proceeded to explain “the intellectual heart of Christianity.” They argued the rest of the way down and on the way back to London, discussing a book Wilber had borrowed, Philip Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Back in the capital Wilber resumed a life of dinners, cards, theatre, and politics, and their discussion faded from his mind.

Strange then that he should make a second journey across France with Milner the next year, and thrash out the New Testament once again. Wilber became a believing Christian. Another person’s conversion is mysterious even to those who believe. To those who do not, it is inexplicable.

Rumours reached his mother that he had become a mad Christian evangelical. Society was contemptuous of evangelicals, and she prepared for the worst, but when Wilber visited, she found him warm and cheerful and, for the first time, no longer irritated with her. A friend quipped, “If this is madness, I hope he bites us all.” Wilberforce was happy, but struggling with a problem.

Having placed his trust in Christ he thought he had better live a strictly religious life and give up his seat in the House of Commons. He stewed for months. Finally he wrote his friend Pitt, who had become Britain’s youngest Prime Minister, and told him he was quitting politics. Pitt wrote back, asking him not to make his talents “useless both to yourself and mankind”. Wilber stewed some more, and turned for advice to an old parson, John Newton, who had been at various times a sailor, a slave trader, and a slave.

Newton had heard God’s voice in a storm when he thought his ship was going down, had eventually abandoned the slave trade, and had written three hundred hymns, among them one of the world’s most popular, Amazing Grace -

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That sav’d a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Despised by fashionable society, Newton shunned politics as worldly, but he told Wilber what he did not expect to hear – that the Lord needed him to do some good in the House of Commons.

The question was what. Open to ideas, the monstrousness of slavery hit Wilber in the face. How could he have missed it before? Some of us have had the same experience. What was in the shadows, what we were too comfortable to see, lunges out of the dark. We can run or we can do something about it. The question for Wilber was what? What would he do?

In 1786, after reading James Ramsay’s book, he visited Ramsay and the Middletons in Teston. The Middletons urged him to take on the abolition of the slave trade in Parliament. Middleton could judge men, and he thought Wilberforce had the courage and faith to endure a long, hard battle. Wilber's reputation for independence, high principles, and the "singular charm of his character, which made him popular even with his antagonists, marked him out as an ideal leader of the cause (DNB)”.

The pledge

Wilberforce went to visit William Pitt at his farm, Hollwood, in Kent. Though still in his twenties, Pitt was now Prime Minister. Under an oak tree Wilberforce and Pitt and Grenville, who was Pitt's cousin, and an MP who sat on the Privy Council, discussed the abomination of the slave trade. They understood it was supported by the wealthiest, most powerful men in Britain. They pledged each other they would end it.

By the time the three stood up, they were agreed: Wilberforce would lead the charge in Parliament to abolish the slave trade, and Pitt and Grenville would support him. A few days later, Wilberforce told Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and the Friends that he would be their man in the House.

They faced the most entrenched interests in Britain, whole cities based on the trade and violent men. None of the members of the Fellowship, except possibly Middleton, had any idea how long or hard the battle would be.

Olaudah Equiano
His best-selling autobiography shocked readers and revealed the
injustice of slavery from the slave's point of view.

OLAUDAH EQUIANO - ENDURING THE WORST, ACHIEVING THE BEST

Pressing for abolition and promoting a moral revival, Wilberforce had travelled around Britain at a hectic pace. In February, 1788, while on the road, he became dangerously ill, and almost died. In his absence, William Pitt stepped in, and persuaded the House to take up the abolition of slavery at its next session. He hoped Wilberforce would survive, and speak in the measure's defence.

Wilberforce recovered by “a moderate use of opium which he found necessary to take for twenty years, though without increasing the dose” (DNB). He studied Thomas Clarkson's research, and on May 12, 1789, he opened the parliamentary campaign with a blazing speech of three and a half hours. Holding the House silent and mesmerized, he described the effect of the trade on Africans and the horrors of the middle passage, condemned the trade as a moral abomination, and answered critics who argued that abolishing the trade would destroy the British economy.

The Middletons had been coordinating the anti-slavery campaign, and James Ramsay had prepared briefs for Wilberforce and Pitt which contained moral arguments and evidence. During the debate in the House, Crisp Molyneux, a planter from St Kitts, impugned Ramsay's character and professional reputation. Middleton and Wilberforce leapt to his defence. In the tumult that followed, Pitt, Edmund Burke, and Charles James Fox supported the abolitionist cause, but the slave planters said the facts that Ramsay had provided were false, and were able to delay the vote. Ramsay was devastated. On July 20, he suffered a haemorrhage and died.

Audacious Equiano

The first of the members of the Fellowship was gone. Fittingly, a former slave by the name of Olaudah Equiano had arrived to take his place.

According to his autobiography, Equiano was born in 1745 in Africa, and kidnapped at the age of eight by slave raiders. He was taken aboard an Atlantic slave ship, where, like the other Africans, he thought he had fallen in with evil spirits.

Equiano was sold to an English naval officer, Michael Pascal, who sarcastically gave him the name of the first Swedish king, Gustavus Vassa. Equiano served on British ships, and participated in several battles during the Seven Years' War. A young fellow sailor, a boy “who, at the age of fifteen, discovered a mind superior to prejudice" taught him to read and write. At the age of twelve, Equiano saw England for the first time, was thrilled to see snow, and became interested in Christianity, particularly its message of freedom. He was fascinated by “seeing these white people did not sell one another, as we did. . .and in this I thought they were much happier than we Africans.” He was also surprised and pleased to find in the Bible “the laws and rules of my country written almost exactly”.

In 1759, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, Equiano was baptized at St Margaret's Church, Westminster. He had attained the rank of able seaman, and he hoped that Pascal would pay him for his work. Instead, Pascal had him shipped back to the West Indies and sold as a slave. The trauma of this betrayal was intense, particularly as his experiences with several people in Britain had been warm and affectionate. He now faced slavery at its worst – in the West Indies.

In the islands of the West Indies, Equiano saw that slavery debased and tainted everyone it touched. His description of the rapes and violence and relentless exploitation of the Africans, so that even the little fish they caught to eat were taken from them, is shocking. His belief in British liberty and “old England” as the country of freedom is moving.

"Yet how mistaken is the avarice even of the planters? Are slaves more useful by being thus humbled to the condition of brutes, than they would be if suffered to enjoy the privileges of men? The freedom which diffuses health and prosperity throughout Britain answers you — No. When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war; and yet you complain that they are not honest or faithful!" (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano)

Fortunately for him, Equiano had been purchased by a Montserrat-based trader who recognized he was a capable seaman. Sailing between the West Indies and North America, Equiano kept his wits about him, and began trading on the side. He made a friend of his captain, and survived being beaten almost to death in Georgia. Eventually he accumulated enough cash to purchase his freedom.

Freedom and shipwreck

Equiano’s exaltation when he was finally able to purchase his freedom for £40 on July 11, 1766 quickly gave way to the terror of shipwreck. However his determination to survive was, to put it mildly, phenomenal. Eventually, with considerable relief, he left “the American quarter of the globe” and returned to “old England”. There he became a hairdresser, and learned to play the French horn, but the pay did not compare with a sailor’s, so he was soon back on board ship. He sailed to the Mediterranean, Turkey and Greenland, on an expedition on which the young Horatio Nelson was almost killed by a polar bear and they barely escaped death when their ship was trapped in ice.

Back in London in 1774, Equiano watched in horror as an African on his ship was trepanned, and carried off into slavery in the West Indies. He rushed off to obtain a writ of habeas corpus and delivered it to the slave owner, but he was too late to save his fellow African, who was bound for St Kitts.

Desperately seeking help, Equiano went to Granville Sharp. Granville gave him all the help he could, but they were unable to save the kidnapped man. Yet out of this tragedy one good thing came: Granville Sharp introduced Equiano to the Fellowship.

Like Sharp, Equiano sought legal redress for injustice. Like Ramsay, he will write about his slave experiences. Like Wilberforce, he will have a profound spiritual experience.

The searcher of hearts

Equiano had been interested in Christ for years, but it cannot have encouraged him to see so-called Christians keep and mistreat slaves. At the same time, he frequently called on God as his one and only companion in the surge and surf of life. Always clear-eyed about the imperfections of others, Equiano has the rare characteristic of being equally clear about his own. (He admits to breaking two of the ten commandments.) He began to believe that he could see the hand of God in his life.

After appealing "to the Searcher of hearts," and after months of theological wrestling, Equiano has a vision of Christ’s love while on board ship. When he tries to explain what he has experienced to the other sailors, his use of the name of Christ was “to them a rock of offence.” He has no one with whom he can share his feelings, but his experience of love gives him strength.

His next attempt, to help freed Africans by establishing a country in Sierra Leone, is not successful. But on March 21, 1788 Equiano takes the unusual step of sending a petition ‘on behalf of my African brethren’ to Queen Charlotte. Meanwhile he is writing. He asks for and receives prepaid subscriptions from dukes, earls, countesses, admirals, viscounts, and baronets whose names, reading like Burke’s Peerage, introduce his book. In 1789 he publishes his story, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

Every member of the Fellowship – Elizabeth Bouverie, Thomas Clarkson, Lady Middleton, playwright Hannah More, James Ramsay, Granville Sharp, John Wedgewood, and John Wesley – subscribe (all but Wilberforce, who was at death's door).

Equiano's autobiography created a sensation. It proved gracefully, reasonably, courageously, and once and for all that Africans should be free.

For the Fellowship, 1789 is a watershed year. The battles that lie ahead will test them to the core.

THE FELLOWSHIP, Part 3
Powerful Methods

When you contribute to this website,
you support Brits at their Best.

Join the Circle of Friends