William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner

Nevertheless, when the names of the forty-nine founding members of the Society were published, they included four Members of Parliament (including the Prime Minister), ten peers, six Dukes and a Marquis, along with seventeen Bishops and the Archbishops of both Canterbury and York. While such impressive leadership had the advantage of showing that this was a powerful movement in which leading figures in society intended to display both activity and example, the disadvantage was that critics could easily point out that it was mainly poorer people who would have to change their behaviour if the great swathe of restrictions mentioned in the Proclamation were enforced. In the words of Hannah More: ‘Will not the common people think it a little inequitable that they are abridged of the diversions of the public-house and the gaming-yard on Sunday evening, when they shall hear that many houses of the first nobility are on that evening crowded with company, and such amusements carried on as are prohibited by human laws even on common days?’55 Years later, when the work of the Proclamation Society had been overtaken by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Sydney Smith would characterise them as having the aim of ‘suppressing the vices of persons whose income does not exceed £500 per annum’.56

It is certainly true that, while Wilberforce had by now withdrawn himself from the pleasures and gaming tables of gentlemen’s clubs, he avoided making a direct assault on their members’ habits, writing to Dudley Ryder in September 1789, ‘Don’t imagine I am about to run amuck and tilt at all I meet. You know that on many grounds I am a sworn foe to the Clubs, but I don’t think of opening my trenches against them and commencing open war on such potent adversaries. But then I honestly confess to you that I am restrained only by the conviction that by such desperate measure I should injure rather than serve the cause I have in view; and when ever prudential motives do not repress my “noble rage” I would willingly hunt down vice whether at St James’s or St Giles’s.’57 In making this judgement, Wilberforce was demonstrating what would become an obvious attribute: his idealistic objectives were always pursued by means which took into account practical and political constraints. Rather than denounce the activities of the better-off, but conscious of the possible charge of hypocrisy, he set out to involve senior national figures in order to change the prevailing fashion and habits of the times, at all social levels including their own. He believed that those who could set an example had adopted an inverted pride in which they claimed their behaviour to be worse than it actually was: ‘We have now an hypocrisy of an opposite sort, and I believe many affect to be worse in principle [than] they really are, out of deference to the licentious moral [sic] of the fashionable world.’58

The founding of the Proclamation Society was thus a forerunner of the many projects and causes Wilberforce would pursue throughout his life: in his methods, objectives and weaknesses, the same pattern would emerge again and again. His method was to win over leading figures in politics and society by the force of persuasion and the power of example, never failing to show due respect to their rank and to take enormous trouble over assuaging their doubts and fortifying their consciences. His objectives would always centre on using spiritual improvement to ameliorate the human condition by practical steps rather than dramatic transformation; in this case he was seeking a higher moral climate for the betterment of rich and poor, law-abiding and law-breaking alike, but not the social and political revolution which others would soon be advocating. He wanted to improve society rather than render it unrecognisable. Such methods and objectives would always have the weakness of being open to charges of excessive caution or conservatism, and be easily subject to mockery. In his book The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt would write: ‘Mr Wilberforce’s humanity will go to all lengths that it can with safety and discretion, but it is not to be supposed that it should lose him his seat for Yorkshire, the smile of Majesty, or the countenance of the loyal and pious.’59 His proposals were easily seen as being either puritanical or hypocritical. When the great playwright and opposition MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan was found years later lying drunk in a gutter and was asked to give his name, he famously replied, ‘Wilberforce!’60

Yet Wilberforce would also display, in his efforts to reform the nation’s manners, other attributes which would become lifelong characteristics of a great campaigner: steady persistence and a step-by-step accumulation of small additions towards his goal. The Proclamation Society duly succeeded in broadening its membership and support among the magistracy and gentry, and disseminating a great deal of instruction and guidance on enforcement – as in this attempt to help judge the state of intoxication:

Particularly as to drunkenness to use caution and prudence in judging whether a man is drunk. Though a man that cannot stand upon his legs, or that reels or staggers when he goes along the streets and is heard to falter remarkably in speech, unless in the cause of some known infirmity or defeat, may ordinarily be presumed to be drunk.61

In the later view of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the Proclamation Society ‘set going a national movement’ which actually produced a marked lull in rioting, disorderly conduct and brutal amusements, and became ‘an important contributory cause of the remarkable advance of “respectability” made by the English working man during the first two decades of the nineteenth century’.62 Such a ‘lull’ is difficult to validate statistically, although it appears from the records of convictions for murder in London throughout the eighteenth century that violent crime was certainly on a downward trend which continued through this period. It may well be that British society was becoming less drunk, less violent and less disrespectful after a bout of mid-century excess, but it is also hard to deny that the Proclamation Society achieved practical results: convening conferences of magistrates to try to improve prison government and the regulation of vagrancy, and obtaining court judgements or Acts of Parliament which allowed brothels to be closed or the special nature of Sundays to be observed. As Britain began to move from Hanoverian excess to Victorian self-discipline, Wilberforce’s Proclamation Society would become one of the many forces propelling it on its way.

Busy as Wilberforce had been in conceiving of and launching the Proclamation Society, it was by no means his sole preoccupation in late 1786 and throughout 1787. For most of the rest of his life he would simultaneously pursue several issues in parallel, flitting between the mountains of correspondence and long lines of visitors which each issue aroused. Continually finding outlets for his public philanthropy, he was often also busily attending to the spiritual or financial condition of friends and relatives. Still close to Pitt, he became an intermediary to Robert Smith, later Lord Carrington, who had offered to sort out Pitt’s chaotic domestic finances. This would prove to be an impossible task at any stage in the next two decades, and would often call for Wilberforce’s intervention. ‘Indifferently as I thought of our friend’s domestic management,’ Smith wrote to him in 1786, ‘I was not prepared for such an account as the box contained … the necessity, however, of bringing his affairs into some better order is now so apparent, that no man who is attached to his person, or values his reputation, can be easy while he knows it is undone.’63

The following year Wilberforce received a series of entreaties from his sister in Hull, usually demanding an answer by return of post, requesting advice on Christian conversion or his judgement about what entertainments she was permitted to be involved in. Asked to determine whether his family should attend the theatre, he confessed in his reply to agonising over the pain he would cause his mother, a consciousness that he would have to ‘account for my answer to it at the bar of the great Judge of quick and dead’, and concluded: ‘in one word, then, I think the tendency of the theatre most pernicious … You talk of going only to one or two plays, and of not staying the farce … how will the generality of those who see you there know your motives for not being as frequent an attendant as formerly, and for not remaining during the whole performance? … Will not, then, your presence at the amusements of the theatre sanction them in the minds of all who see you there?’64 The need to combine political action, Evangelical principles and personal example meant that Wilberforce always had to fight on many fronts. And even as he wrote such letters, the greatest concern and most central campaign of his life was opening up.

While Wilberforce was with his family in Yorkshire in 1786 he had received a letter from Sir Charles Middleton MP which led him to promise to visit the Middleton family home, Barham Court at Teston in Kent, that autumn. He had many reasons for going. He already knew Middleton well, and had a high regard for him: Middleton was the father-in-law of Wilberforce’s friend Gerard Edwards, and was at that stage one of the few other Evangelical Members of Parliament. He was also serving as the highly effective Comptroller of the Navy and Head of the Navy Board, implementing the much-needed reforms demanded by Pitt to strengthen the Royal Navy and root out corruption in the dockyards after the failures of the American War. Furthermore, Middleton’s indomitable wife Margaret was an early Evangelical, a friend of Hannah More, Dr Johnson and Garrick, whose mind was ‘so constantly on the stretch in seeking out opportunities of promoting in every possible way the ease, the comfort, the prosperity, the happiness temporal and eternal, of all within her reach that she seems to have no time left for anything else and scarce ever appeared to bestow a single thought upon herself’.65 Their combination of naval experience and Evangelical beliefs had given the Middletons emphatic views about what they considered to be the greatest outrage of the eighteenth-century world. Those views were fully shared by another man who Wilberforce would have seen when he stayed at Teston, and who he had met before, James Ramsay, who had served in the navy, become a rector, and was now serving as vicar of the local parish. Two years earlier, Ramsay had written his seminal Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. Wilberforce knew from Middleton’s letter that this would be the subject of the discussion when he stayed at Teston. For his hosts had in mind for him a simply stated but vastly complicated task: to lead in Parliament a campaign to abolish the slave trade.

* The site of this house is now a grassed area with a statue of George V opposite St Stephen’s entrance to the Houses of Parliament.

6 The Trade in Flesh and Blood

From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

ARISTOTLE, Politics (350BC)1

The Negro-Trade and the natural Consequences resulting from it, may be justly esteemed an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation.

MALACHY POSTLETHWAYT, 17462

SLAVERY HAS NEVER BEEN ABSENT from the record of human civilisation.* The ancient Egyptians owned and traded in black slaves; the armies of Persia’s great king Xerxes contained slaves from Ethiopia; and Greek and Roman civilisations were characterised by the ownership of slaves on a vast scale. Athens boasted sixty thousand slaves in its prime; Rome perhaps two million at the end of the Republic: these included black slaves such as the one depicted serving at a banquet in a mosaic at Pompeii, but also Celts and Saxons from the northern fringes of the Empire. For the whole of the first millennium AD slavery was an accepted part of northern European life, with the slave markets at Verdun and elsewhere doing a busy trade in the empire of Charlemagne, and only the arrival of an effective system of serfdom putting an end to slavery around the eleventh century.

It was in the countries of southern Europe and northern Africa that slavery continued to flourish in the Middle Ages. While the Christians held Spain they used Muslim slaves; after the conquest of Spain by the Moors tens of thousands of Christians were in turn enslaved, with as many as thirty thousand Christian slaves working in the kingdom of Granada as late as the fourteenth century. At the same time, slavery remained common in the Arab world, fed largely by the trans-Saharan trade in black slaves taken from West Africa. There, African kings collected slaves for the lucrative export market but also employed thousands of their own as palace servants or soldiers.

Against such a background, it is not surprising that as the Portuguese ventured down the west coast of Africa and Columbus made his celebrated voyages across the Atlantic in the fifteenth century, a new form of slave trade sprang up simultaneously. By 1444, slaves from West Africa were on sale in the Algarve. Slaves joined gold and ivory among the rich pickings that could be obtained on voyages to the south, the leader of one early expedition reporting: ‘I herded them as if they had been cattle towards the boats. And we all did the same, and we captured on that day … nearly 650 people, and we went back to Portugal, to Lagos in the Algarve, where the Prince was, and he rejoiced with us.’3 The first transatlantic slave voyage was sent on its way by none other than Columbus himself, although, strangely in view of what would later transpire, it was in a west-to-east direction, and consisted of Caribbean natives sent for sale in Europe. It was evident almost immediately that such a trade would not be a success. Half of the second consignment died when they entered Spanish waters due to ‘the unaccustomed cold’, and a Genoese observer reported: ‘They are not people suited to hard work, they suffer from the cold, and they do not have a long life.’4 Not only did South Americans turn out to be unsuitable for export to Europe, but their numbers in their own lands were about to be devastated by the diseases which the Spanish and Portuguese brought with them across the Atlantic.

By 1510, King Ferdinand II of Spain was giving permission for four hundred slaves to be taken from Africa to the New World: he could not have known it was to be the beginning of one of the greatest involuntary migrations in human history. Goldmines soon created a demand for tough and expendable labourers, but it was the discovery in the early sixteenth century that sugarcane could be grown as easily in the Caribbean as any indigenous crop that would create, over time, an insatiable demand for African slaves. With Europeans unwilling to perform the backbreaking drudgery involved in tending and growing sugarcane, and the native population still reeling from disease and in any case less physically strong than their African counterparts, the solution was obvious. In the first half of the sixteenth century, what was to become the familiar triangular slave trade thus began: ships from Portugal would carry manufactured goods to the Guinea coast or the Congo, sell them in return for slaves, and carry their new captive cargo across the Atlantic. The third leg of the journey was completed with a cargo of hides, ginger, pearls and, increasingly, sugar for the home market.

It was not long before buccaneering Englishmen wanted to try their hand at the same game. In 1562 Captain John Hawkins, ‘being, among other particulars, assured that Negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that [a] store of Negroes might easily be had upon the Coast of Guinea’, decided ‘to make trial thereof’.5 Although Queen Elizabeth I combined her approval for the expedition with the hope that slaves would not be taken against their will –something ‘which would be detestable and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers’6 – it was certainly not possible to take them in any other way, although the three hundred slaves taken on board by Hawkins on his first voyage had already been rounded up by the Portuguese. Hawkins ‘made a good profit’ for his investors on this and later voyages,7 despite a series of bloody encounters with the Spanish. And behind the English came the Dutch, who, having decided that it was morally unacceptable to sell slaves in Rotterdam or Amsterdam, nevertheless also sent expeditions to buy slaves in West Africa and sell them in the Caribbean. This was to become the hallmark of British and European attitudes to slavery for the following two hundred years: while it could not be sanctioned at home, it was an acceptable institution overseas, out of sight of governments and the general population alike.

In the early seventeenth century, Portuguese ships were still the main carriers of slaves, but with British colonies being developed in the Americas the British slave trade developed steadily alongside them. In the 1620s, black slaves were taken by British ships to North America, where they were ‘bartered in Virginia for tobacco’.8 With African slaves costing up to £20 a head, they seemed a better investment than the £10–15 cost of an indentured labourer from Europe, since they were capable of harder work and more tolerant of tropical diseases. Even so, the Atlantic slave trade in the first half of the seventeenth century was still small in scale, involving the transporting of about eight thousand slaves a year across the Atlantic. It was the surge in European demand for sugar which transformed slavery and the slave trade from the scale of small enterprise to that of a massive industry. In Barbados between 1645 and 1667, land prices increased nearly thirty times over as small tobacco farms were replaced by large sugar plantations, and the number of slaves on the island was increased from six thousand to over eighty thousand. As coffee, tea and chocolate became part of the staple diet in London, Paris and Madrid, so the plantations boomed. For the owners this meant profits akin to finding goldmines, but for the slaves it meant that whatever trace of normality or family life they had previously been allowed disappeared into barrack-style accommodation and the endless grind of mass production. Even at the beginning of this period, in 1645, the Reverend George Downing,* chaplain of a merchant ship, had written: ‘If you go to Barbados, you shall see a flourishing island, [with] many able men. I believe that they are bought this year no less than a thousand Negroes and, the more they buy, the better able are they to buy for, in a year and a half, they will earn (with God’s blessing) as much as they cost.’9 The slave trade was becoming an integral part of the growth in British trade and wealth. In 1672 King Charles II granted a charter to the Royal African Company:

We hereby for us, our heirs and successors grant unto the same Royal African Company of England … that it shall and may be lawful to … set to sea such as many ships, pinnaces and barks as should be thought fitting … for the buying, selling, bartering and exchanging of, for or with any gold, silver, Negroes, slaves, goods, wares and manufactures …10

With the escalating demand for sugar, combined with the gold rush which began in Brazil in the late 1690s, the beginning of the eighteenth century saw the slave trade growing rapidly: perhaps 150,000 slaves were carried to Brazil alone in the first decade of the century. Furthermore, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, signed at the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, Spain ceded to Britain not only the strategic possessions of Gibraltar and Minorca, but also the much-prized Asiento – the contract to import slaves and other goods to the Spanish Indies. The fact that this contract was sold on by the British government to the South Sea Company for the truly vast sum of £7.5 million is evidence of the commercial excitement it generated, and the confidence that enormous profits were at hand. Such confidence was somewhat misplaced, since many slaving voyages made losses and the trade would become less profitable later in the century, but there was no doubt that lucky or skilful traders could make a spectacular return. In the 1720s British ships carried well over 100,000 slaves to the Americas, mainly to Jamaica and Barbados, with 150 ships, principally based in Bristol and London, fully engaged in the trade. In the 1730s British ships carried around 170,000 slaves, overtaking the Portuguese for the first time. This was the decade that saw a great increase in slave traffic to North America: in 1732 South Carolina became the first English colony on the American mainland to register a black majority. It was also the decade that saw the rise of Liverpool as Britain’s foremost slaving port. Well positioned on England’s west coast for Atlantic traffic, Liverpool also had the advantages of being well away from the French navy in time of war, paying crews lower rates than competing ports and being able to evade duty on the goods carried on the homeward voyage by landing them on the Isle of Man (which became ‘a vast warehouse of smuggled goods’11). Several Liverpool families who plunged heavily into the trade were able to fund commercial dynasties partly as a result, ploughing their profits into banking and manufacturing as the slave trade continued to grow.

In the 1740s, British ships transported no fewer than 200,000 African slaves. Furthermore, the triangular trade this facilitated was fuelling the rapid growth of domestic manufacturing. Some 85 per cent of English textile exports went to Africa at this stage, helping the export trade of cities such as Manchester to soar, while the demand for slaving ships in Liverpool made it a world leader in shipbuilding. With the vast profits coming back from the sugar plantations, cotton exports soaring, and the slave trade itself usually yielding a profit, it is no wonder that it could be written in 1772 that the African slave trade was ‘the foundation of our commerce, the support of our colonies, the life of our navigation, and first cause of our national industry and riches’.12 On taking office in 1783, William Pitt would estimate that profits from the trade with the West Indies accounted for 80 per cent of the income reaching Britain from across the seas. And such was the expansion of colonial production and demand for slaves that in the 1780s, as Wilberforce and Pitt began their political careers, slave traders would carry the truly colossal total of three-quarters of a million people across the Atlantic against their will, with around 325,000 being carried in British ships. Massive in its scale and long-established in its habits, the Atlantic slave trade seemed to many to be crucial to Britain’s prosperity and an indispensable component of her Caribbean empire.

While the statistical record of the slave trade is impressive or horrifying enough, reaching a cumulative total of eleven million people imprisoned and transported across the ocean between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, few people in Europe at the time could have made an accurate guess as to the scale of the trade their nations fostered. More importantly, they would have been entirely unaware of the nature of the human tragedy which every single one of those millions represented. Each one was a child torn from a family, a sister separated from a brother, a husband from a wife or a family removed from the only place in the world they knew or loved. It is only when the slave trade is examined in its individual human consequences that it moves from a study in economic history to a tale of indefensible barbarity.

A glimpse of the heartrending circumstances in which slaves were taken is afforded by the autobiographical writings of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–97), a slave who was captured as a child in the 1740s in what is now Nigeria, but who subsequently earned his freedom and wrote his story in the English language. His first-hand account of the brutalities of the slave trade played a major role in informing and influencing popular opinion and became a roaring success, with nine editions printed during his lifetime alone.*