Act to end Slavery
March
2007 sees the 200th anniversary of the Slave Trade Abolition Bill.
It was the first stage in a long process. Kirsty Thorpe looks at the
history of the slave trade and its legacy
Some years
have more of a ring about them than others, because they evoke past
events and invite us to remember them. The year 2007 is significant
for marking 200 years since Parliament passed the Slave Trade
Abolition Bill. It was only the first stage in a long process – not
until almost the end of the 19th century would slavery be abolished
by all the countries in the transatlantic slave trade – but the
British decision was a landmark. As well as commemorating the end of
one market in human lives, 2007 is also a chance for Christians and
people of goodwill to recommit to ending the fastest growing
contemporary international crime, that of people trafficking.
Slavery
existed in Africa before the organised trade in lives began in the
mid 15th century, but from then on Spanish and Portuguese traders
brought African slaves regularly to Europe and the islands of the
North Atlantic. The first instance of a British ship carrying slaves
in the opposite direction, to the New World, was the voyage of Sir
John Hawkins in 1562. As the demand for labour in the New World
grew, along with the markets in Europe for the sugar, rice, rum,
cotton, tobacco and coffee produced there, so a three-way trade
developed over the next two centuries.
Ships were
loaded in London, Liverpool, Bristol and smaller ports with cargoes
of manufactured goods, guns and weapons, copper, glassware and
cloth. Along the coastline of West Africa, from modern day Sierra
Leone to Angola, the ships landed their cargoes and took on board
human beings. These men, women and children were crammed into the
ships for the voyage to the colonies of North America, South America
and the West Indies, known as the ‘Middle Passage’. One Liverpool
slave ship of the late 18th century, the Brookes, allowed a space
five feet three inches by four feet four inches for each adult
slave. If conditions were good the crossing took around 30 days but
nobody knows how many slaves died from malnutrition or in epidemics
under the cramped conditions below decks. In all, between 9 and 12
million Africans were shipped to work on the plantations of the New
World in the 400 years between the mid 15th and mid 19th centuries.
The ships which had taken them to slavery would return across the
Atlantic with sought after goods for European consumers – cotton
bales to be manufactured in Lancashire mills, sugar cane to be
processed and rum to be bottled, among other items.
So how did
this trade come to the notice of the great British public, let alone
touch the conscience of the nation? Individual Free Church voices
spoke out against it in the 17th century, such as the Puritan
minister Richard Baxter who declared slave traders were ‘fitter to
be called devils than Christians’. It was an American Puritan,
Samuel Sewall, who published the first antislavery tract there in
1700. In the following century George Whitefield, the evangelical
leader, both attacked the poor conditions in which slaves were kept
and continued to own over 50 slaves in Georgia. John Newton the
writer of Amazing Grace, who was famously converted while captaining
a slave ship in the 1750s, spoke out against the trade but waited
more than 30 years to do so.
As the 18th
century drew to a close a Christian abolitionist movement emerged on
both sides of the Atlantic. John Wesley denounced the slave trade in
writings as well as sermons and in 1787 the Committee for Effecting
the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in London. Prominent
among its members were Thomas Clarkson, who researched details of
the trade, William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull who steered the
abolition Bill through the Commons, and Granville Sharp, who in 1772
had helped to secure a legal ruling outlawing slavery in this
country.
Another
supporter of the Committee was the evangelical Anglican writer
Hannah More. She emphasised that Africans also bore the image of God
and her campaigning inspired other women to become active
protestors. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, described his childhood
in Nigeria, capture at the age of 10 and journey to slavery in
America in his autobiography, published in 1789. By then he had
purchased his freedom, after several failed attempts, and the
success of his memoirs made him both the wealthiest and best known
black man in the English-speaking world. He supported the
abolitionist cause by lecture tours and campaigning.
Things moved
fast and within less than a year of the Committee’s founding there
were rallies, extensive media coverage, a petition, letters to MPs
and all the hallmarks of a mass mobilisation equivalent to that
achieved by Make Poverty History in 2005. This was also the first
time consumer power had been employed in support of a mass boycott
of goods, as an estimated 400,000 Britons stopped buying rum and
sugar from slave plantations in the Caribbean.
The Christian
abolitionists were not averse to arguing their case robustly, by
suggesting that the slave trade actively harmed British interests
and that dismantling it would seriously affect Britain’s colonial
rivals, especially France. Some historians argue that the campaign
gained its goal so quickly because it suited the purposes of
emerging industrial capitalism. Others suggest its speedy success
was linked to the unsettling anxieties created by the American
Revolution. Debate continues about the overall balance of benefits
and costs for Britain’s economy from the slave trade. While Britain
gained more from slavery than any other nation in the 18th century,
and Christians were among those who profited from this, it was also
the country that led the struggle to end the system and Christians
were prominent in that campaign. After the 1807 Act the campaign
continued as groups were established around the country to work for
the immediate abolition of slavery on the ground. Local women’s
committees organised door-to-door campaigns to encourage a boycott
on slave-grown sugar, raised money to free individual slaves,
produced pamphlets and established a network of women campaigning on
this issue.
Some lasting
legacies of the slave trade still echo in our world today. The way
that the British traded guns for slaves led to changes in the
balance of power between African kingdoms, creating instability and
impoverishment that can still be seen in the former slave trade
areas. Abolishing the slave trade, and later freeing former slaves,
did not heal the spiritual and psychological damage done by what had
gone before.
On Sunday
March 25th, Freedom Day, groups around the country will be
commemorating events 200 years ago and acknowledging the damaging
legacy of this history. Many people will give their events a
contemporary flavour, concentrating on highlighting the plight of
the estimated 2.4 million people who have been trafficked across
borders in our increasingly global culture. Add to these the
estimated 8.4 million child victims of extreme forced labour, debt
bondage and trafficking, as well as the 12.3 million people who find
themselves as forced labour, and the scale of this new evil becomes
clear. Slavery in one form may have ended 200 years ago, but in 2007
it is still ‘unfinished business’ on a massive scale, and until we
tackle it we will all be held in bondage.
The Revd
Dr Kirsty Thorpe is Convenor of the Communications Committee
