5. Abolition: what the English
did
The official
accounts usually credit William Wilberforce (MP for Hull) for freeing the slaves. Wilberforce was responsible for pushing
the bill for abolishing the slave trade through parliament, but the role of campaigning
fell to more radical figures. It is not true to say
that the British working class were hostile to abolition. For example, in 1794, a huge public meeting
was held in
Sheffield, swelled by thousands of local metal workers. The purpose was to
reform the corrupt parliamentary system, and to call for the
“total and unqualified abolition of Negro slavery”.
American
writer, Adam Hochschild
in his book 'Bury the Chains' gives due credit to the slaves themselves and their life and death
struggles for gaining their liberty. Slave
rebellions shook the British state to the core.
The campaign against the slave trade started out in 1787 when a dozen like minded
men met in premises in the City of London.
Like all mass movements it started out as an
idea floated by a few committed folk, headed by one Granville Sharp
(who had befriended a runaway slave in 1765)
and his “organiser” Thomas Clarkson. Hochschild writes of
Clarkson, “His 16-hour a day campaigning against slavery would take him
by horseback on a 35,000 mile odyssey, from waterfront pubs to an audience
with an emperor, from the decks of navy ships to parliamentary hearing
rooms. People would threaten to kill him and on a Liverpool
pier in the midst of a storm, a group of slave officers nearly
succeeded.”
Petitions
The abolition movement invented campaign
tools such as mass petitions, badges, pamphlets and speaking tours. This was a time when only one
in ten men had the vote while women were excluded altogether.
One of the few ways people could influence parliament was through petitions.
In 1787 Clarkson visited Manchester
which sold
£200,000 of goods to the slave colonies each year (equivalent to over £25 million
today). To his surprise, he found the people receptive to the idea of
petition - a mass petition against
slavery was already being organised.
When the petition from Manchester arrived at
parliament it contained 10,000 names, one out of every five people in the
city. A year later parliament had received 103 petitions for abolition,
signing up to 100,000 people. And for the first time then petitions had a
“democratic” and even working class flavour. “At least two dozen of the
petitions had their start at public meetings against the slave trade, and
one at Leeds explicitly invited signatures from ‘the lowest labour’.”
The planters tried to organise their own
pro-slavery petitions—but could only drum up four. The planters'
social base was narrow but it was powerful and influential. In 1791
Wilberforce first tabled a bill to end the slave trade but commercial
interests ensured that it was easily defeated.
The defeat took place
against a background of rising militancy sparked by the 1789 French
Revolution. While Clarkson was for revolution, Wilberforce was
utterly opposed to any similar uprising in England.
The example of St Domingue
A boycott of the principal export from the
slave plantations — sugar, which made tea the “blood sweetened beverage” —
gathered pace. Masses of people refused to buy sugar from the
West Indies. “Fair trade” sugar grown in India became a fashionable
alternative.
It was the island of
St Domingue that produced 30 percent of the world’s sugar and more than
half of its coffee.
This jewel in the crown of the French economy
also had the largest slave population
in the West Indies. Fired by the French revolution of 1789, the slaves
revolted in
1791. A
guerrilla army was assembled by the
slave general Toussaint L’Ouverture and this force was able to crush both the
French army and a British military expedition sent to prevent rebellion
spreading.
“There was no way British planters could
contain news of the uprising. Within a month, Jamaican slaves were singing
songs about it, and rumours spread that slave blacksmiths were secretly
forging cutlasses.” A psychological barrier had been broken on both sides —
the slaves now knew it was possible to gain their liberty, and the slave
owners could never again feel safe in their beds. There is no doubt that
the St Dominigue revolution led the way for ending the slave trade.
In 1792, the bill for the gradual abolition
of the slave trade was defeated in the House of Lords. Clarkson was not sure
that the mass support was there when, in 1807, he prepared for another
parliamentary bill to abolish the slave trade.
He got on his horse and toured Britain again.
He found that support was strong. In 1805, the abolition bill passed
in the Commons but was rejected in the Lords. Finally, on 25 March 1807, the
bill to abolish trade was passed in both houses. The US followed in 1808.
The abolition bill cut off new supplies of
slaves to the plantations but slavery itself persisted. Wilberforce had always been against total
emancipation of slaves, putting it off until some time in the future, but for
activists such as schoolteacher Elizabeth Heyrick this was not good enough.
-------------------
The following comments
are taken from an article Amazing Disgrace by
Peter Linebaugh in CounterPunch 28 Feb
2007. Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the
author of two,
The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker)
The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
Wilberforce was a leader of both a political and a
cultural counter-revolution. As the head of Society for the Suppression of
Vice he opposed stage dancers, ballad singers, gingerbread fairs, nude
swimming, and favored imprisonment for adultery. In 1802 alone the Society
clocked 623 prosecutions for Sabbath-breaking. Wilberforce had a direct hand
in the suppression also of the Constitutional Society of Sheffield where the
graffiti writing on the walls were Liberty, Equality, and No King. A
government
spy noted "thousands of Pittmen, Keelmen, Waggonmen and other labouring men,
hardy fellows strongly impressed with the new doctrine of equality".
Wilberforce was their
magistrate in Yorkshire as well as Member of Parliament. He approved of the
burning in effigy of Tom Paine, and to suppress democratic urges he proposed
a national day of fasting and humiliation. He helped to draft the Sedition
Act in 1795 making it treason to write or speak against the King or
government. In 1799 William Pitt brought in a bill against the millwrights
of London, the machine designers and makers, which Wilberforce promptly
extended to all working people. This was the Combination Act which forbade
the workers of England from combining to reduce the hours of toil or to
increase the remuneration of labor.
___________
In 1824, Heyrick published a popular pamphlet entitled Immediate, Not Gradual
Abolition. She defended slave revolts and called on
women to spearhead anti-slavery societies. Heyrick led another sugar boycott
and called for election candidates for parliament to be vetted on whether or
not they supported slavery. Heyrick was undoubtedly inspired by a new
mood against tyranny at home, one which would directly lead to the setting
up of the Chartist movement, the first working class mass movement in
history. In 1830 a mass meeting in London re-launched the abolition campaign.
News quickly reached Jamaica, helping to
spark a huge revolt in 1831 across 200 plantations led by slave Sam
Sharpe, a Baptist deacon. Although brutally suppressed and Sharpe hanged, it was the final nail in the coffin for
slavery. Planters blamed the white missionaries for the revolt, manhandled
them and
burnt or demolished nearly 20 of their chapels.
News of their maltreatment reached Britain and further fuelled abolitionist
sentiment. In 1832, 5020 petitions signed by 1,310,000 people were submitted
to parliament. This was also the year when the Reform Act was passed,
dealing a massive blow to the plantocracy. In 1833 a bill abolishing slavery in
the British empire was passed and took effect on 1 August 1834. But it was followed by a 4-year
apprenticeship scheme that forced ex-slaves to work for their former masters without pay.
Following massive resistance to this scheme, it
was abolished in 1838 and 750,000 slaves freed. the slave masters were
generously compensated to the tune of £20 million. John Gladstone received
£85,000 for his 2183 slaves. The Church of England received nearly £9000
while the Bishop of Exeter received even more - £13,000. The
slaves got nothing.
The campaign had taken 51 years. As the clock ticked
towards midnight 31 July 1838 a Jamaican congregation placed in a coffin an
iron punishment collar and whip and chains. “As midnight drew near, the congregation
sang: The death-blow is struck — see the monster is dying...”
References
1. John Newsinger,
The Blood Never Dried: a People's History of the British Empire
(Bookmarks 2006)
2. Adam Hochschild,
Bury the Chains. - the British Struggle to
Abolish Slavery (2005)
3. Peter Linebaugh, Amazing Disgrace,
(CounterPunch 28 Feb 2007)