by Gerald Therrien
The Unveiling of Canadian History, Volume 3.
The Storming of Hell – the War for the Territory Northwest of the Ohio, 1786 – 1796.
During the American Revolution, when General Washington had asked General Wayne to undertake an extremely perilous enterprise – the storming of Stony Point, Wayne replied : “General, I will storm Hell, if you will only plan it.”
Part 2 – The Canadian Frontier
Chapter 13 – The Beginnings of an Abolitionist Movement
Much of the following chapter was gleaned from reading two very interesting and under-appreciated books on Granville Sharp and the English anti-slavery movement : ‘Bury the Chains – Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves’, by Adam Hochschild (2005); and ‘Rough Crossing – Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution’, by Simon Schama (2006). [Block quotes are taken from these two books].
Granville Sharp
Franklin and Sharp
‘Bury the Chains’ by Adam Hochschild, (happily) begins by exposing a myth about John Newton, the composer of that infamous hymn – Amazing Grace.
After having worked in the slave business of Western Africa for a few years, while returning to England, Newton had his great conversion after surviving a severe North Atlantic gale. The following year, 1749, as first mate, and the next four years as captain, Newton was engaged in the triangle trade – carrying trading goods to Africa, then slaves to the Caribbean, and finally sugar, coffee, rice and rum back to Britain. Ten years after leaving the sea, 1764, he was ordained an Anglican minister.
“Yet during the better part of a decade in the slave trade, and for some thirty years afterwards, John Newton seems never to have heard God say a word to him against slavery.”
Popular along the rivers and canals of southern England at this time, was chamber music played from a large barge, towed slowly by a pair of horses on a waterside path. At the centre of this orchestra were eight brothers and sisters of the Sharp family; most notable were William, Surgeon to the King, who played the organ and the french horn, and his younger brother Granville (who signed his name as a G-sharp on the treble clef), who played the clarinet, oboe, kettledrum, plus an unusual harp of his own making.
In 1765, an African slave, Jonathan Strong, was severely beaten by his owner and left on the streets. Strong somehow found his way to William Sharp, who gave free treatment to the poor every morning at his office. After patching him up, the brothers, William and Granville, got him admitted to a hospital to recover, gave him money for food and clothes, and found him a job. Two years later, his former owner saw him recovered, sold him to a Jamaican planter, hired two men to kidnap him, and had him jailed until he could be shipped to Jamaica. Strong was able to contact Granville Sharp, who sought the Lord Mayor, who after a hearing, declared Strong free.
“The thirty-two year-old Granville Sharp became by default the leading defender of blacks in London, and indeed one of the few people in all of England to speak out against slavery”.
To defend himself and his brother against a new suit filed by Strong’s new owner, Sharp would write one of his pamphlets – ‘On the Injustice and dangerous Tendency of tolerating Slavery’. Dr. Benjamin Franklin joined with his friend in the debate, by writing ‘A Conversation on Slavery’ in January 1770. Sharp would win several other cases, by proving that an owner had freed or abandoned a slave before changing his mind, or that the victim’s status as a slave was otherwise unclear.
In 1772, James Somerset, an African slave from Virginia, brought to England by his owner, had escaped, been recaptured and rushed on board a ship bound for Jamaica, but temporarily freed until his case had been decided. Sharp would take up his defence, to test whether slavery itself was unlawful in England. Lord Mansfield determined that the state of slavery could only be introduced by ‘positive law’ and that since slavery had never been authorized by statute in England, ‘I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged’. Mansfield ruled that a person, regardless of being a slave, could not be removed from England against their will. Though Somerset won the case, it was such that Somerset was freed without automatically freeing other slaves.
Sharp’s next famous case was in 1783, when 132 slaves were thrown alive into the sea from an English slave ship, the Zong, by the captain to try to collect the insurance on the slaves, as a way to make his trip profitable. Although Mansfield ruled that the insurers were not liable from the losses, and despite Sharp’s efforts, no crew member was prosecuted for murder.
However, in between these two cases occurred something that would tell us about the real Granville Sharp. He had already written a pamphlet insisting that Americans should not be taxed without being represented in Parliament and had given 250 copies to his friend, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, then living in London (Franklin lived in England 1757-62, and 1764-75). Thousands more had been eagerly reprinted in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Now he was disturbed to find that his work at the Ordnance Office involved sending cannon and other materiel to British troops fighting the rebels. “I cannot return to my ordnance duty whilst a bloody war is carried on, unjustly as I conceive, against my fellow-subjects,” he wrote to his superiors, and resigned.
The British during the American Revolution
In April of 1775, two important events occurred – the battles of Concord and Lexington, and the starting of the first American anti-slavery society in Philadelphia. The British, however, viewed slavery as something that could simply be used and manipulated as part of their plan to crush the rebellion.
‘Rough Crossings’, by Simon Schama, recounts how,
“by the summer and early autumn of 1775 a full-scale panic about the imminence of a black uprising, armed and sustained by the British, was under way from tidewater Virginia to Georgia.”
“In fact, for several months the governors of Virginia and North Carolina, Lord Dunmore and Josiah Martin, along with General Thomas Gage in Massachusetts, and in full consultation with Lord North’s government in London, had been considering exactly such a strategy” [i.e. an armed slave rebellion].
“Whatever damage would be done to the property of wicked rebels would be repaired and restored after the war, Dunmore supposed, along with their right allegiance. There was never any question in his mind, after all, of freeing the slaves of loyalists.”
“During the debate on the throne in October 1775, William Lyttelton, who had been governor of South Carolina during the French and Indian War of 1756-60, had said forthrightly that, as far as he was concerned, should a ‘few regiments’ be sent to America ‘the negroes would rise and embrue their hands in the blood of their masters’, making pretty smart work of rebellion.”
On November 7th 1775, Dunmore declared martial law and issued his proclamation to “declare all indented Servants, Negroes or others (appertaining to Rebels) free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops.”
“On the 30th of June 1779 at Philipsburgh, Sir Henry Clinton had issued a proclamation warning that negroes taken in arms fighting for the rebels would be bought for public works.”
At least the African-American soldiers were decently fed, dressed and, most important of all, inoculated. On the British side, however, in mid-October 1781 at Yorktown, Cornwallis, who had already cast off the sickest to fend for themselves in the woods, and who had ordered the slaughter of horses to pre-empt their death by starvation, now took the brutal decision to expel the freed African ex-slaves from the camp, driving them back to face the reward of their former masters.
Even after Yorktown, the British Lord Dunmore endorsed plans to mobilize and equip no fewer than ten thousand African slave troops, drawn from the estates of the enemy, as well as from loyal masters who would be compensated, and General Leslie carried out British cavalry actions to stop slaves on loyalist plantations from being taken by the Americans and to take other slaves from rebel plantations.
By the end of the war, at least fifteen thousand and perhaps as many as twenty thousand African-Americans were living in the three British enclaves – New York, Charleston and Savannah. Carleton issued a directive that all slaves would be returned to their American masters except those who, for whatever reason, had rendered themselves obnoxious to their owners (i.e. runaways) or those who had been granted their freedom by the Crown for wartime service. This agreement quickly broke down.
The British evacuated Savannah and Charleston in July to December 1782. Loyalists who had been given slaves from confiscated rebel estates were determined to resist demands for their restitution from southern American planters who were petitioning Congress and demanding restoration of their property. Instead the African-American slaves were to be taken, still enslaved, to wherever the loyalists ended up.
Other freed African-American emigrants were tragically misled and cynically exploited by profiteers, who packed them on ships and resold them in the West Indies.
With the draft treaty of peace ready for signing (in November 1782), the American negotiators – Jay, Franklin, and Adams – were belatedly joined by Henry Laurens, who insisted on inserting an additional article, specifying that the British withdrawal was to be effected ‘without the destruction or carrying away of American property, Negroes, etc.’ Previously, Laurens had been taken from a ship bound for France and had spent fifteen months in the Tower of London until granted bail pending a prisoner exchange, for Cornwallis.
Laurens may have been influenced by one of his more frequent visitors in the Tower: ‘so-called’ friend to America, Richard Oswald, who was appointed by the Rockingham-Shelburne government to negotiate the peace treaty with Franklin, Jay and Adams. It had been Oswald who, with a word in the ear of the powerful, had expedited Laurens’ release.
Oswald had another life – that of a slave trader who had made a cool fortune from his domination of the slaving entrepot of Bance Island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. And when those human cargoes had docked at Charleston on route to being auctioned for the low country plantations of South Carolina, it was none other than Henry Laurens who took a nice 10 percent on the transactions.
However, after the war, Laurens manumitted all of his 260 slaves!
When the evacuation of New York to Nova Scotia was finished in November 1783, loyalists there would not permit their servants to be uncoupled from their bondage, free African-Americans would be forced into indentures so punitive that they might as well be in chains, and land promised them was not delivered.
1783 “marked the beginning of a boom in the British slave trade, for with the end of the American Revolutionary War, slave ships could sail unimpeded once again”.
Sierra Leone
London’s poor ex-slaves, who had been granted their freedom for fighting for the British against the Americans, received little or no compensation for losses suffered during the rebellion, and, also did not qualify under the Poor Law – because it should have been enough for them that they received their freedom and been permitted to come to Britain and their attitude should have been one of un-alloyed gratitude and devotion (!?!)
In January 1786, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was started by a British philanthropist Jonas Hanway, along with others such as George Peters, governor of the Bank of England (!?!), and John Julius Angerstein, who owned slaves in Grenada and was one of the major Lloyds’ underwriters (!?!), to provide them with some food and a little allowance to survive the winter. As spring arrived and the queues got longer (since the relief was not intended to be permanent), Hanway mooted the idea that perhaps the ex-slaves might be better off somewhere else (perhaps joining fellow ex-slave loyalists then in Nova Scotia).
Henry Smeathman, an expert on ants, had been sent by the future president of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, to Sierra Leone for three years (1771-74) to collect specimens for Banks’ collection. Smeathman, in his ‘Plan of Settlement’, now proposed that the climate and soil there made it ideal for the cultivation of cash crops, such as cotton and sugar, and was an ideal place for settling these ex-slaves.
“These staples might be produced by free labour and (in harmony with Adam Smith’s and David Hume’s economic and philosophical arguments), since the steep rise in the price of slaves was notorious, more cheaply than by slave labour”.
However, just the year before, Smeathman, before a parliamentary committee, had advised AGAINST using Gambia as a suitable location for a penal colony (of British prisoners) because of the deadliness of the climate – “without a physician and drugs, not one in a hundred would be alive in six months”. The Royal Navy, which was to transport the colonists, with provisions for (only) four months, was at the same time assigned to protect the busy British slave-trading depot on Bance Island, a little up-river from the proposed settlement!
Perhaps the British Empire’s motive was “to be rid of the blacks as irksome beggars, petty criminals and a threat to the purity of white womanhood (since inter-racial marriages were becoming commonplace and noticed)”. The Committee then placed a deadline, after which the allowance would be discontinued, unless agreeing to be settled on the Grain Coast of Africa, when required.
Granville Sharp, meanwhile, in correspondence with his friends in America had read that some of the recently freed Africans in New England had expressed a desire to re-establish themselves in liberty in their native Africa. For this other reason, Sharp now joined the Sierra Leone project, after Smeathman died in July 1786, and Hanway died in September 1786. Sharp donated 25 guineas for the ‘present’ to be given to the King of the Temne, in exchange for land at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River (400 sq. mi.) and spent £800 redeeming pawned goods for the ex-slaves, and paying off arrears of debt to get them out of jail.
In May 1787, 380 free ex-slave Britons arrived at Sierra Leone, along with some (British) artisans and professionals. However, the slavers at Bance Island had been told to ‘make trouble’. The fierce storms, tornadoes and deadly fevers took their toll. With supplies gone, the colonists traded their tools and clothes with the slavers. Most of the British tradesmen/settlers left to take work at Bance Island. Some of the ex-slave colonists were abducted and resold as slaves. In the summer of 1788, Sharp spent £900 outfitting a ship to bring relief supplies and 50 new settlers to the settlement. In November 1789, due to actions of the British navy, the King of the Temne ordered the burning of the settlement (called Granville Town).
At the end of 1790, Sharp again dispatched a ship with tools and equipment for the colonists. Then Sharp would meet Thomas Peters, who had heard of the Sierra Leone project and had travelled to London, commissioned by fellow ex-slaves in Nova Scotia, to voice their grievances that fewer than half of the 3,500 ex-slaves had been given any land (although two-thirds of the loyalists relocated to Nova Scotia were ex-slaves), that they were given only enough food to last 80 days instead of the promised three years (and this only to those who agreed to work building roads) and that this was deliberately engineered so that the loyalists could exploit the ex-slaves as cheap labour (since being made landless and hungry, they were forced into indentures). Peters would return to Nova Scotia in October 1791 with John Clarkson (brother of Thomas Clarkson) to recruit settlers for Sierra Leone, eventually leaving there January 1792 with a 15 ship convoy of almost 2,000 tons, carrying 1,196 people (!).
Meanwhile in 1791, the British government would agree to provide passage to Africa for free ex-slaves, but the British would incorporate a new company – the Sierra Leone Company – to run the new settlement – to be called Freetown, and have the control they needed to remove Sharp’s influence and end the dreams of an African republic.
Note: In 1800, the directors of the company would finally move to put an end to democracy and the settlers’ discontent by writing a new charter and sending 550 Moroons from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, who were then used to crush the settlers’ revolt. The Moroons had been escaped slaves in Jamaica that had fought against the colonial government in 1796 and had been deported to Nova Scotia – to villages emptied by those ex-slaves who had departed for Sierra Leone in 1792, and now the Moroons themselves were sent to Sierra Leone.
The ‘real’ English Abolitionist Movement
In 1785, the Cambridge Latin essay contest, ‘Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?’ was won by Thomas Clarkson, who “had relied heavily on the writings of an American Quaker, Anthony Benezet”. The essay was translated into English and published by James Phillips, a Quaker, and “when that was published the American abolitionist sympathizer Benjamin Rush sent a copy to the governor of every state”.
Phillips would introduce Thomas Clarkson to Granville Sharp. At Phillips’s house, a group of Quakers and Clarkson agree to form a new organization. A committee of a dozen men, nine Quakers – including James and Richard Phillips, and William Dillwyn (a Quaker businessman from Pennsylvania who had gone to the American South to study slavery firsthand, then lobbied the New Jersey legislature for slave freedom, and then moved to London); and three Anglicans – including Thomas Clarkson, and Granville Sharp, who as elder statesman of antislavery efforts would be chairman, would meet on May 22, 1787, as the ‘Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade’.
As the movement’s sole full-time organizer, Clarkson would travel to find witnesses, organize sympathizers, and gain information from the two big slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool. A new member was Josiah Wedgwood, who asked one of his craftsmen to design a seal for stamping the wax used to close envelopes. It showed a kneeling African in chains, lifting his hands beseechingly, encircled by the words ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’
The image was reproduced everywhere. Dr. Benjamin Franklin declared the impact of the image ‘equal to that of the best written pamphlet’. The Marquis de Lafayette, recently returned from helping the American colonists fight for liberty, sent word that he was starting an abolition group in Paris, the ‘Societe des Amis des Noirs’. This would answer the objection that if British slaves stopped carrying slaves, the French would simply pick up the business.
Clarkson, in one of his many meetings, joined M.P. William Wilberforce to the cause. Wilberforce was ready to raise the issue of the slave trade in Parliament’s 1788 session. But before he could do so, he fell ill. Then, with Wilberforce recovering, their plans were again derailed by illness – King George III went mad, bringing British political life to a virtual halt towards the end of 1788 and continuing into the next year, when he recovered. All legislation was put on hold, because no bill passed by Parliament became law until signed by the King.
Meanwhile, Clarkson found his best support in the manufacturing centre of Manchester. The antislavery spirit was so strong in Manchester that the people wanted to send a petition to Parliament, which they did containing ten thousand names, one out of every five people in the city!!! They also resolved that a letter be sent to the mayor or other chief magistrate of every principal town throughout Great Britain urging similar anti-slave trade petitions. They also wrote to respectable individuals around the country. They placed notices of their unprecedented petition in newspapers in the capital and throughout the British Isles.
By the time the 1788 session of Parliament adjourned, 103 petitions for abolition or reform of the slave trade had been signed by between 60,000 and 100,000 people. During the 1788 session, hearings began before the ‘Committee on Trade and Plantations’ of the Privy Council (and would continue for a year, until the Privy Council finally issued an 850-page report in April 1789). It was during these hearings that Clarkson and other committee members presented the now-famous, top-down schematic view of the ‘Brookes’ slave ship.
It was only now, in 1788, with the anti-slavery movement coming to life around him, that John Newton (whose church was two blocks from Phillips’s printing house) would write a pamphlet, ‘Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade’.
“That Newton shuddered now is a testimony to the way a strong social movement can awaken a conscience”.
With the King now considered sane, in May 1789, Wilberforce made his speech in Parliament against slavery, and hearings were to be held by the House of Commons.
With the fall of the Bastille in July, and Lafayette becoming leader of the National Guard, Clarkson was sent to Paris for six months, to coordinate with the French abolitionists, in hope of banning the slave trade in France (since France had 675,000 slaves in its Caribbean islands to produce sugar).
“Over dinner at Lafayette’s house, Clarkson met Vincent Oge, a free mulatto and goldsmith from the French colony of St. Domingue, and five other mulattos, (who) had arrived to demand seats in the new assembly”.
Later, Clarkson would provide Oge with the money for his return trip to St. Domingue [i.e. Haiti], where he led a mulatto revolt in October 1790, in response to which the National Assembly of France granted political rights to all mulattos who were born of free parents.
When the parliamentary hearings ended two years later, in early 1791, Clarkson helped edit the 1,700 pages of testimony and the 850 pages of the Privy Council report of 1789, into an account that was short enough to give to each British Member of Parliament.
When in April 1791, the House voted 163 to 88, AGAINST abolishing the slave trade, the response was to organize a boycott of sugar. Abolition petitions now flooded into parliament – 159 petitions bearing at least 390,000 names. Debate began in April 1792 and the House passed an amended proposal to end the slave trade by 1796. The House of Lords, which also had to pass any measure, wanted no abolition at all, and insisted on their own lengthy hearings and effectively stopped any bill from becoming law.
However, all eyes were now on France. Clarkson tried to raise money to support the French National Assembly, and spent a few weeks in France in the summer of 1792. After the execution of Louis XVI, France declared war against Britain in February 1793. With this war, the prospects for abolition disappeared. Political repression would paralyze local abolition organizing. The British government pushed through the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act, that targetted abolitionists and others who advocated for universal male suffrage and other reforms. The group in Manchester, once the most vigorous outside the capital, would not meet after 1792. In London, the abolition committee itself gave up its office space in 1794.
Note: In early 1796, Clarkson married, and moved to the Lake District to take up farming, becoming fond of his new neighbours – Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
[next week – chapter 14 – Slavery in Canada]
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For those who may wish to support my continuing work on ‘The Unveiling of Canadian History’, you may purchase my books, that are available as PDFs and Paperback (on Amazon) at the Canadian Patriot Review :
Volume 1 – The Approaching Conflict, 1753 – 1774.
Volume 2 – Forlorn Hope – Quebec and Nova Scotia, and the War for Independence, 1775 – 1785.
And hopefully,
Volume 3 – The Storming of Hell – the War for the Territory Northwest of Ohio, 1786 – 1796, and
Volume 4 – Ireland, Haiti, and Louisiana – the Idea of a Continental Republic, 1797 – 1804,
may also appear in print, in the near future, while I continue to work on :
Volume 5 – On the Trail of the Treasonous, 1804 – 1814.