In his campaign on behalf of the dispossessed Xhosa, Buxton, prompted by Anna Gurney, took pains to ensure that what was debated was the morality of British colonization per se. He did so, first, because he had the support of the Colonial Secretary, Lord Glenelg (son of the Clapham Sect luminary Charles Grant), and secondly because he made the war in the Cape the occasion for a parliamentary inquiry into British settlement throughout the Empire. James Stephen, Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office from 1836, also had Clap- ham connections; his father-in-law, John Venn, was Rector of Clapham. Unsurprisingly, Buxton considered Glenelg and Stephen as allies. On hearing of the Cape frontier war, Buxton wrote to Philip, ‘It will be of great importance to get the ear of the Ministers before they shall have time to form an opinion on the Governor’s Despatches on this subject, and one word from you in the present state of England will be enough to prevent them taking the wrong course.’ Anna Gurney compiled a digest of Philip’s letters for the Colonial Secretary, which Buxton anticipated would be used ‘to save a nation of 100,000 beings and several flourishing missions from destruction’. Buxton also introduced Glenelg to the LMS Secretary, William Ellis, who was receiving his own independent stream of letters from Philip and the other South African missionaries.
Buxton had first agitated for a Select Committee to inquire into the humanitarian allegations about Cape frontier policy in 1834, before the outbreak of the war, asking Philip to ‘furnish [him] with facts’. As Chairman of the Aborigines Committee, established in 1835, Buxton had authority to investigate colonial policy throughout the overseas Empire as well as in New Zealand and the South Sea Islands, where many Britons resided. Buxton set the tone of the inquiry: ‘What have we Christians done for [the indigenous peoples]? We have usurped their lands, kidnapped, enslaved and murdered themselves. The greatest of their crimes is that they sometimes trespass into the lands of their forefathers; and the very greatest of their misfortunes is that they have ever become acquainted with Christians. Shame on such Christianity!’ After hearing testimony from colonists, officials, and above all missionaries from the widely scattered territories, Buxton invited Philip, Anna Gurney, and Priscilla Buxton to help him write the Committee’s Report. It supplied the definitive humanitarian, missionary-informed, analysis of the evils of settler-led colonialism. The Report concluded that all over the globe ‘the intercourse of Europeans in general, without any exception in favour of the subjects of Great Britain, has been, unless when attended by missionary exertions, a source of many calamities to uncivilized nations’.
To get the Report accepted by the end of the 1837 parliamentary session, Buxton had to tone down his scathing criticisms of the Cape’s colonial authorities and the British settlers. Nevertheless, the hearings had already influenced Glenelg, who told Governor D’Urban, ‘it is a melancholy and humiliating... truth that the contiguity of the subjects of the nations of Christendom with uncivilized tribes has invariably produced wretchedness and decay and not seldom the utter extermination of the weaker party’. Glenelg then restored the short-lived Queen Adelaide Province to Xhosa chiefly rule. This act of retrocession, described by Buxton as ‘life itself, and liberty, and lands and tenements to a whole nation’, was to be perhaps the most significant policy initiative arising out of missionary and humanitarian influence during the first half of the nineteenth century. British settlers in the Cape accused the humanitarians and the Colonial Office of betraying them and endangering the security of the Empire as a whole. Nonetheless, Dr Thomas Hodgkin was inspired by the Committee to establish in 1837 an ongoing British and Foreign Aborigines Protection Society with Buxton as President. The Society aimed ‘to assist in protecting the defenceless and promoting the advancement of Uncivilized Tribes’ by guiding colonial policy through the publication of materials and the mobilization of ‘popular opinion’. The Committee also prompted offshoots in the colonies, with John Saunders, for instance, launching an Aborigines Protection Society in Sydney in 1838. Such trans-imperial institutional humanitarianism would continue through the remainder of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, intervening critically, if not always particularly powerfully, in British colonial affairs.