The trader, the owner, the slave by James Walvin
Cape, £17.99
William Wilberforce: A Biography by Stephen Tomkins
Lion Hudson, £8.99
The slave trade by Jeremy Black
Social Affairs Unit, £10
320pp £16.19 (free p&p) ; 224pp £8.54 (free p&p)
0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst ; 160pp from
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IT WAS A THRIVING TRADE, AS newspaper advertisements from 1787 can testify.
“To be sold for want of employment. A healthy Negro wench of about
twenty-one years old...she has a female child of nigh three years old, which
will be sold with the wench if required.” Or the reader might have preferred
“a well-made good-tempered black boy, he has lately had the smallpox, and
will be sold to any gentleman”.
Two hundred years after the House of Commons voted for the abolition of the
slave trade (although not of slavery itself) a number of books are being
published to celebrate the anniversary. If their focus is largely on
England, that is because slave trading became a thoroughly English business.
Half of the ships crossing the Atlantic with their infamous cargo came from
English ports, the three most prominent being London, Bristol and Liverpool.
They left carrying goods for African merchants; in return they acquired
slaves, the remnants of conquered tribes. Once the human merchandise had
been sold in the Americas, the ships returned laden with sugar and tobacco.
In the 1780s alone, 794,000 Africans were transported. It can safely be
estimated that many tens of millions made the fatal journey.
Not all of them arrived. Approximately 15 per cent of them died during the
Atlantic voyage. They were chained together in the holds of the ships,
trussed up like bundles of kindling wood. They died from dysentery and a
host of other infectious diseases. They died of thirst, when the drinking
water ran out. They died of despair. Those left alive were often in mortal
peril. There is a famous case of one English captain who threw overboard
many living slaves, so that he could claim on insurance.
Who were these traders in human flesh? In The Trader, the Owner, the Slave,
James Walvin describes one in some detail, largely because he remains an
interesting case. John Newton went to sea at the age of 11, and suffered a
number of almost fatal misadventures. Having been saved from shipwreck in a
great tempest, he found God — or, rather, evangelical Christianity. But
after this conversion, he became a slave trader.
By brute force and intimidation he had to control more than 200 slaves, as
well as a crew open to all the dangers of sickness and despair that engulfed
the Africans. His diary confirms that his methods were not humane. On
suspicion of a plot, Newton selected certain slaves and “punished them with
the thumb screws and afterward put them in neck yokes”. All the while he was
conducting religious services on deck.
In 1754, at the age of 29, he suffered a stroke and left the trade. He earned
his living as a surveyor of tides and became acquainted with groups of
evangelical Christians in Liverpool. From slave-trader he became preacher.
He earned much fame from his exertions in the pulpit, lacing his sermons with
anecdotes of sea-life. His previous career did not hurt him. In many ways,
it advanced his standing in the evangelical world. Then, slowly and
hesitantly, he became an abolitionist and disowned his part. He also wrote
hymns in his spare time. That is why the name of John Newton has endured. He
wrote Amazing Grace”, a song that has gone around the world. It was a
dealer in slaves who wrote: “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind,
but now I see.”
The owners of slaves were no less brutal. They raped, mutilated or murdered
the human beings in their charge. We know this from their own testimony. One
of their number, Thomas Thistlewood, arrived in Jamaica in the summer of
1750; he kept a diary, in which inadvertently he left a record of his slow
degradation. “Had him well flogged and pickled," he wrote on May
26, 1756, of a slave who had been caught eating sugar cane. “Then made
Hector shit in his mouth.” To be “pickled” was to have raw wounds marinated
in a concoction of pepper and lime juice.
The bodies of all the slaves were at Thistlewood’s disposal. He whipped and
tortured the recalcitrant, raped any woman who caught his eye and, as a
matter of routine, maltreated every slave as if by right. The bodies of the
abject and dispossessed were simply another commodity to be bought and sold.
It was a matter of commercial economy. Yet he feared his slaves. Blacks
outnumbered whites by a ratio of ten to one. Any successful uprising would
have led to great slaughter on both sides. So the whole system was of fear
compounded by brutality. It was corrosive and destructive.
There were early protests against the trade, most notably from Methodists and
other evangelicals. Among these was a boy of 14, William Wilberforce, who
wrote to a newspaper in York condemning the slavers. It heralded a campaign
that would last as long as his life. Stephen Tomkins’s William
Wilberforce: A Biography is succinct and economical but conveys a very
powerful impression of its subject. He was short at 5ft but “the shrimp”, as
he was called, was a powerful orator and campaigner. On his feet, the shrimp
became a whale.
In the autumn of 1780, at the age of 21, he was elected MP for his home town
of Hull. Thus began one of the most important parliamentary careers in
English history. He had a natural eloquence (and apparently a very good
singing voice) that he used to great effect in defining what he called “the
public good”. He wanted influence rather than office, and eschewed the
trappings of power for the sake of the causes he supported.
At the age of 27, he became an evangelical Christian and thus joined the broad
movement of the age towards piety and reawakened conscience. He established
the Society for the Reformation of Manners but, more significantly, decided
to support in Parliament the case for abolishing the slave trade.
From that time forward, he never wavered. It became Wilberforce’s “great
object”, pursued at the cost of his health and wealth. He worked without
pause, making speeches and interviewing witnesses, and was quite undeterred
by parliamentary obfuscation.
The bill for abolishing the slave trade was continually deferred or “carried
over”, but Wilberforce was not to be thwarted. He put forward nine Bills in
ten years. He knew, too, that public opinion in England was slowly taking
his side, with any number of petitions, pamphlets and letters lending
strength to the cause.
He became the great “saint” of the era, intent upon spreading evangelical
piety through all levels of society. In domestic politics this had
unfortunate consequences, when Wilberforce’s natural paternalism took an
authoritarian turn, but in the international arena of slavery it was a force
for goodness in a world that had grown complacent or indifferent to the
evils of the trade.
Eventually, on February 23, 1807, the Bill for Abolition was passed.
Wilberforce sat in the Commons, dazed and in tears. The work of 20 years was
finally completed. But the abolition of slavery itself in the British
dominions was not agreed by Parliament until July 26, 1833, Wilberforce died
two days later.
The nature of the change in public and parliamentary sentiment is difficult to
interpret. It has been said that the economics of the trade had
deteriorated, opening the way for Wilberforce’s crusade, but it is not as
simple as that.
There does seem to have been a genuinely moral dimension to the struggle, part
of the liberal and middle-class polity that was even then struggling into
the light. It was also a convenient token of the English respect for
liberty, at a time when Napoleon was threatening the shores of the country.
Above all, it seemed the right thing to do.
Yet of course, the trade continued, most notably in the Americas. As late as
the 1860s thousands of Africans were dispatched to Brazil and Cuba. The
serfs of Russia were slaves under another name, until their system of
bondage was ended in 1861; nevertheless they did not fully gain their
freedom until the Revolution of 1916.
It can be stated with some certainty that slavery has always been part of the
human scheme. In his admirably astringent book The Slave Trade,
Jeremy Black documents the extent of the slave trade in Islamic as well as
Christian civilisation; he widens the scope of the debate from the Atlantic
trade to the slavers of the African and Arab worlds. In this context it
should be pointed out that the white slavers bought their goods from African
chieftains, who often prosecuted wars against their rivals to obtain the
living bodies of captives.
And slavery is not over yet. Tomkins points out that there are still 12.4
million people reduced to a state of slavery, whether in debt bondage, sex
trafficking, state work farms or caste labour. The systems of exploitation
and despair are still in place.
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Peter Ackroyd has omitted a crucial word from his statement, "It was a dealer in slaves who wrote: 'I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.'"
Please insert "former" at the appropriate point.
Paul Laidler, SALFORD, UK
In its infancy, it was Pitt that supported Wilberforce, sustained the putative Bill. In an age when we could conscience two armies sleighing each other at close range with swords and muskets and when public hanging was still a sport, the attention to the slave trade was an immense piece of foresight and humanitarianism. Today, in place of progressive policies and radical thinking, we have the divisive 'apologies' of this generation to one that is beyond any living person's recall. A sort of faux humanity that is borne of the ratings than of the rantings, the sort of disruptive, recognisable and excruciatingly rehearsed desperation that personifies the meticulousness falsehood that is modern day politics, celebrity and more; social justice, or its shadow, looks good on the CV of a public figure along with kissing babies; best that we do not apologise but constantly remind ourselves of what we have been capable and still are. Apologise and forget, brush away? We should not attempt it.
Malcolm Turner, Alsager, England