32 Slavery

“Am I not a man and a brother?” This, the motto of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade established in Britain in 1787, sums up the fundamental and unanswerable moral objection to slavery. The British and American abolitionist movements largely arose from the evangelical revival that occurred in the later 18th century, while in places such as Revolutionary France, abolitionism emerged from the humanitarianism of the Enlightenment, and its concept of fundamental human rights.

Opponents of abolition found it convenient to deny the fraternity of the black man, and argued that being owned by a white man exposed the slave to civilized values to which they would be blind back in Africa. More fundamentally, these upholders of slavery argued—in an era when property rights were regarded by many as trumping virtually all other rights—that abolition would amount to nothing less than theft.

The Atlantic trade Slavery had existed as an institution for thousands of years. The economies of Greece, Rome and other ancient civilizations all depended on slave labor, and slavery appears to be sanctioned in the Bible. In medieval Europe slavery as such was rare; true, there were serfs, peasants who were tied to their lord’s land, but serfs had certain rights that distinguished them from slaves. By the early modern period even serfdom had disappeared in much of western Europe.

The Arabs and later the Ottomans owned and traded slaves, many of them African; alongside ivory and gold, slaves were one of the continent’s most important exports. The Arabs had trading posts down the east coast of Africa, while slaves from West Africa were sent north via the trans-Saharan caravan routes. Barbary corsairs from North Africa also raided the shipping lanes and coasts of Europe for slaves (see The age of empire).

“To abolish [slavery] would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects, but it would be extreme cruelty to the African savages … ”

James Boswell, September 23, 1777, as recorded by him in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

The European trade in slaves from Africa was initiated by the Portuguese in the 15th century, and the demand for slave labor increased dramatically following the establishment of sugar and tobacco plantations in the New World. This gave rise to the notorious and highly profitable “triangular trade” (see The Scientific Revolution), in which, by the 18th century, Britain was the major player, forcing a total of perhaps 3.5 million Africans into slavery in the Caribbean and the southern American colonies, such as Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas. This number equaled the combined total transported by Britain’s European rivals, the Portuguese, French and Dutch. The Africans themselves were also involved in the trade—kingdoms such as Benin and Ashanti flourished on the back of supplying slaves to the insatiable Europeans. The conditions in which the slaves were transported across the Atlantic were appalling: crammed tightly in the fetid air below decks, large numbers—sometimes as many as one in five—succumbed to disease. Their bodies were thrown overboard to the sharks.

The campaign for abolition From the start, some Europeans could see the cruelty of what Africans now call the Maafa, a Swahili word meaning “great tragedy.” “What heart could be so hard,” asked one Portuguese man who witnessed the arrival of a contingent of African captives in 1445, “as not to be pierced with piteous feeling to see that company? For some kept their heads low and their faces bathed in tears, looking upon one another; others stood groaning …” Their anguish only increased when “it was needful to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers …”

Such expressions of abhorrence were rare until the mid-18th century, when the Enlightenment discourse of rights and liberties began to coincide with a sharpening of the Christian conscience. In England, this manifested itself in the emergence of Methodism and other evangelical groupings such as the Clapham Sect, while in America there was the so-called Great Awakening. To these evangelicals, slavery was an abomination before the Lord.

Toussaint L’Ouverture

Some slaves were not content to sit back and let white abolitionists agitate on their behalf. Many ran away, sometimes setting up independent communities in the wilderness, but few actually took up arms against their oppressors. A notable exception was the slave insurrection that broke out in the French colony of Haiti in 1791, led by a freed African slave called Toussaint L’Ouverture. In 1794, after a string of military successes, he made his peace with the French, who that year abolished slavery and appointed Toussaint lieutenant governor. In 1801, contrary to the wishes of Napoleon, Toussaint overran the neighboring Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, freed its slaves, and made himself governor general of the whole island of Hispaniola. In 1802 Napoleon’s forces invaded. Toussaint laid down his arms in exchange for a promise that slavery would not be reintroduced. However, Napoleon went back on his word, and Toussaint was taken prisoner, dying in captivity the following year. Although an ambivalent figure, Toussaint was to many a martyr to liberty. “Thy friends,” wrote Wordsworth in a poem addressed to Toussaint, “are exultations, agonies, / And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”

A key moment came in 1772, in the case of James Somersett, a slave brought to England from Massachusetts by his master. Lord Mansfield presiding over the Court of the King’s Bench ruled that slavery was against the laws of England, and as a result Somersett and thousands of other slaves in England were emancipated. The ruling was based on legal rather than humanitarian arguments, and did not extend to the British empire, but it gave great encouragement to the abolitionists.

“Knock off the chains

Of heart-debasing slavery; give to man,

Of every colour and of every clime,

Freedom, which stamps him image of his God.”

James Grainger, The Sugar Cane, 1764, book 4

In Britain, the most prominent campaigner was William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull and a member of the Clapham Sect. Wilberforce decided that the first object should be the abolition of the slave trade, rather than slavery itself, and to this end worked tirelessly in Parliament, while committees were formed around the country to agitate for abolition. Wilberforce initially met with much opposition on economic grounds, but as the West Indies trade declined, resistance dwindled, and in 1807 a bill was passed that banned the importation of slaves into any British colony. The Royal Navy was given the task of enforcing the ban, but it was not until 1833 that a bill was passed that ended slavery itself throughout the British empire. France followed suit in 1848, but the continued existence of slavery in the Southern states of the USA was a suppurating sore that was only lanced by a bloody civil war (see The American Civil War).

the condensed idea

The abolition of slavery was a crucial milepost in the advance of humanitarianism