Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

The most effective and remarkable of these had been the almost surgical excision of slavery and the slave trade from the histories of Britain of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here geography, coupled with a strong urge to focus on abolition rather than slavery, had made the process easier. The cotton plantations of the American South existed on the soil of the United States itself; British slavery took place an ocean away on the islands of the Caribbean or the plantations of the North American colonies. As a result even today many people in Britain have a more vivid image of American slavery than they do of life as it was for enslaved Africans on the British plantations of the Caribbean. Slavery for them conjures up images of cotton fields and whitewashed plantation houses at the end of long avenues of tall trees – the imagery of Roots, Gone With the Wind and 12 Years a Slave. Fewer people find their mind’s eye drawn to images of the semi-industrial process of sugar cultivation in Jamaica, Guyana or Barbados in the eighteenth century, and fewer still think of the British slave fortresses like Bunce Island through which the Africans who worked those plantations were channelled.

Our mental image of the British in Africa is so firmly fixed in the so-called Scramble for Africa of the late nineteenth century that we struggle to recall that when Englishmen first arrived in Africa they came not in pith helmets and khaki uniforms but in doublets and hose. The English traders who infiltrated the Portuguese trading zones in coastal West Africa in the sixteenth century did not come as colonizers but, like all other Europeans, as traders.

No

Goodpassage on how Africa was advanced and developed compared to.stereotype

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Passage on Benin as impressive kingdom

Hawkins had attacked and plundered a number of Portuguese vessels, seizing the enslaved Africans on board. With his ships loaded up ‘with that prey he sailed over the Ocean sea unto the island of Hispaniola’ (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Hawkins called at several Spanish colonies and sold his commodities, including the African captives. According to Hakluyt ‘he received, by way of exchange, hides, ginger, sugars, and some pearls’. When he arrived back in England in September 1563 he had, through this one expedition, made himself a fortune and proved that English ships could break into the Spanish trade in African slaves, even though English participation in the trade was prohibited under Spanish law. He had also shown that buying and selling human beings could be as profitable as the trade in gold.

However, as labour became more scarce in England after the Civil War, the system of indentured servitude could no longer provide the tobacco planters of Virginia, the Carolinas and Maryland or the sugar planters of Barbados with the manpower required to cultivate their estates.

The intensity of sugar production, combined with the decline in the numbers of indentured servants immigrating into the island, provided the planters of Barbados with the economic rationale for the transition towards African slavery.

In 1637 there were only two hundred Africans on Barbados out of an island population of six thousand. By 1660 the majority of Barbadians were black Africans, and consequently much of the Slave Code was focused on measures to prevent uprisings and revolutions among the enslaved.

the Slave Code divided Barbados society along the lines of race. All white men of all classes were accorded rights that were systematically denied to black people. The planters, who had long held the white poor in deep disdain, especially Irish indentured servants and the convict labourers, understood that white racial unity was an insurance policy that might protect them in the event of a slave rebellion. They were therefore willing to deliberately blur the distinctions of classes in order to bring racial differences into sharper relief. The Atlantic slave trade had taken Africans from numerous and widely differing cultures and ethnic groups and defined them en masse as ‘negroes’. Now the pioneers of English plantation slavery, driven by their desperate desire for security, ushered all Europeans, irrespective of their ethnic or social backgrounds, into the new category of ‘white’; a term that had to be explained to newly arriving Europeans who were unfamiliar with the workings of the new slave society. The model quickly spread to other islands.

The Royal African Company was responsible for transporting and enslaving more Africans than any other company in British history. More than any other institution it established Britain as a key player in the transatlantic slave trade, setting her on an upward trajectory that, by the eighteenth century, would enable her to become the dominant slave-trading power in Europe. Its most significant years of operation were between 1672 and the early 1720s, during which it dispatched over five hundred expeditions to Africa. Within a decade of the Royal African Company’s formation, the English share of the Atlantic trade had increased from 33 per cent to 74 per cent, mainly at the expense of the Dutch and the French.30 Over the whole of its existence the Royal African Company dispatched into slavery around a hundred and fifty thousand African men, women and children.

For England to thrive, for her balance of trade to be healthy and for her power to be extended into the Atlantic world, the slave trade had to be deregulated and privatized, they reasoned. Without such a move, the sugar and tobacco plantations of the Americas had no viable future, and England would no longer be able to supply the nation with those highly desirable commodities. Few people disagreed with the economic case, and fewer still concerned themselves with the plight of the enslaved Africans whose commoditized bodies were placed at the centre of a debate about the nature of English freedom.

The

End of royal monopoly leads to flooding of slave market

Among the mixed-race students sent to Britain for their educations were the children, usually the sons, of British planters in the West Indies who had children with enslaved women. The most fortunate of these received the educations befitting Georgian gentlemen. One of the most remarkable cases was that of Nathaniel Wells, the favourite son of a prominent St Kitts plantation owner. Educated in Britain, in 1794 he inherited a fortune worth around £200,000 on his father’s death, which included three sugar estates and the slaves who worked them. Among the slaves was his own mother, an enslaved woman who had remained the legal property of his father. Wells freed his mother and a handful of other relatives but continued as a slave owner, despite his own racial heritage. As a mixed-race man he understood that his presence in the Caribbean would be unwelcome and so never returned to St Kitts. He used his great fortune to buy a country home, the grand Piercefield House, near Chepstow, and there he played the part of a country gentleman, becoming High Sheriff of Monmouthshire.

It is plausible that in their biographies some black Britons, Equiano, James Gronniosaw, Mary Prince, omitted accounts of racial abuse in Britain because they were trifling compared to the experiences they had known as slaves in the New World, or because they wanted to express their affection for Britain and conceal their disappointments. Equiano’s biography saved its ire for the slave trade and slavery, not British racism, but perhaps he was prioritizing and choosing his battles. Eighteenth-century Britain was a ferociously xenophobic society in which it was extremely unwise to appear disloyal or unpatriotic, and black British writers tended to stress their loyalty to Britain. Phillis Wheatley praised the King and Sancho commended Britain’s war against the North American colonists.64

A series of late-seventeenth-century cases seemed to suggest that religion might hold the key to the conundrum. In 1694 a judge concluded that a ‘Negro boy’ could be regarded as merchandise because black people were ‘heathens, and therefore a man may have property in them’.7 But rather than offer a definitive answer to the problem this judgement merely raised new questions. If black people could be enslaved because they were ‘heathens’ that suggested they would have to be freed if they were baptized. The belief that conversion to the Christian faith bestowed freedom upon a slave was widely held among black people and slave owners in the colonies, right up to the formal end of British slavery in the 1830s. Runaway slaves in the West Indies were known to seek out clergymen and demand to be baptized. There were reports of baptismal ceremonies being interrupted by irate slave owners, bursting in and dragging enslaved people away from the font, to the horror of the officiating ministers. In the West Indies, the planters dominated the local legislatures and were able to pass their own laws clearly stipulating that baptism did not confer freedom, but in Britain the slave owners were never able to quash the belief. Jonathan Strong had himself been baptized after his escape from David Lisle in 1765, and among the letters he wrote from his cell at the Poultry Compter were notes to his two godfathers, both white.8 There was also a shocking case in London. In 1760 a nine-year-old blac...

When the royal monopoly was pushed aside and English and Scottish slave-traders enormously expanded the scale of the trade, legal decisions over the status of black Africans made by judges in England were no longer mere points of law, but judgements that could potentially have an impact upon the national economy. As the planter in the Chamberlain v. Harvey case asked, ‘Who would squeeze the sugar from the cane once all slaves had been sprinkled with holy water?’12

In 1729 a group of ‘many merchants and British Planters’ petitioned the Attorney-General, Sir Philip Yorke, and the Solicitor-General, Charles Talbot – both of them future Lord Chancellors – for an opinion. The two lawmakers were received at a dinner in Lincoln’s Inn after which they delivered to the gathered planters their learned opinion on the legality of slavery in Britain. The Yorke–Talbot opinion gave the planters everything they wanted. It stated that ‘a slave coming from the West-Indies to Great-Britain or Ireland, with or without his master, doth not become free, and that his master’s property or right in him’ remained unchanged. They also opined that for a slave in Britain, ‘baptism doth not bestow freedom on him, or make any alteration in his temporal condition in these kingdoms.’ Just as importantly Yorke and Talbot stated, ‘We are also of opinion, that his master may legally compel him to return again to the plantations.’15 This after-dinner opinion appeared to put slavery on a far stronger legal footing. But within two decades two other cases – those of Galway v. Cadee in 1750 and Shanley v. Harvey in 1762 – appeared to confirm Holt’s earlier judgements, that a slave became free upon setting foot on English soil. This was the maze of case law, precedent, contradiction and vested interest into which Granville Sharp suddenly found himself thrust in 1765.

With the collapse of Kerr’s action Granville Sharp was no longer a defendant and Jonathan Strong was no longer at risk of being re-enslaved by Kerr or David Lisle. At this point Sharp could have ended his legal studies and returned to his flute and his monotonous job at the Ordnance Office. But he did not. In 1769, he published his book, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England.

From 1765 to 1772 Sharp searched for the case, that might be brought to trial and that would force the judges to make a final determination on the legality of slavery in Britain. He was worldly enough to understand that taking on the institution of slavery in the colonies was, in the 1760s and 1770s, a futile task. In those decades the British slave trade and the plantation system were hurtling towards the zenith of profitability. Islands like Jamaica were among the most productive territories in the world and the planters and merchants of the West Indies a powerful political force. For now Sharp contented himself with seeking to prevent what he termed the ‘toleration’ of slavery in Britain, though his views on the slave trade were clear.

At a time when the black population of London probably numbered fewer than ten thousand it is truly remarkable that the man who was to make a legal determination on the issue of slavery in England had a mixed-race niece, to whom he was evidently devoted, yet this was the case and Dido must, at times, have been in Mansfield’s mind over the weeks during which he agonized over his judgement.

From

Press interest in the case made it high profile

Granville Sharp’s campaign harnessed an interest in the issue of slavery that already existed and that was building within sections of the public. Here was an institution that raised difficult questions about the limits of the freedoms that Englishmen increasingly valued. Slavery was built on violence; it ripped families apart, separated husbands from wives and children from their mothers. All of this played on late Georgian notions of sentiment and tragedy. Much of this sentimentalism was paternalistic, and fixed the black African very much as a passive victim, but the emotions it elicited were real and powerful. The slow rise of a new Christian philanthropy, the same spirit that had provided both Jonathan Strong and James Somerset with white godparents from the churches in which they had been baptized, inspired a moral and religious fervour in people who, in later years, would be called abolitionists. To them the potential of the Somerset case was clear and unambiguous.

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.’48

To those who heard it, and to those who were to read about it later, the judgement appeared to grant freedom not just to James Somerset but to all black people in Britain. This is not what Mansfield said, but it is what most people took his judgement to mean.

Ultimately

Examples of how black britons responded to the judgment

After the Mansfield judgement there was not a large-scale dash for freedom among enslaved black Britons. The economic considerations that convinced black people to stay with their masters, whether as slaves or as servants, were unchanged by rulings from the King’s Bench. Life among the black poor on the streets of London and elsewhere remained as precarious and harsh as ever and black slaves lacking family networks or marketable skills were barred by poverty from seizing the freedoms that the law appeared to have conceded.

There were two revolutions in the American colonies during the 1770s and 1780s.6 In the first, the white colonists rose up against British rule and fought to realize their independence. Without any embarrassment the rebels and patriots of that revolution used the term ‘freedom’ to allude to their political aspirations, and the word ‘slavery’ to describe their exposure to British taxation. Even before the American patriots had issued a Declaration of Independence that professed ‘all men equal’, their hypocrisy had been noted and ridiculed. In 1775 Samuel Johnson, writing from the London town house he shared with Francis Barber, asked, ‘how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’7

In November 1782, when the provisional peace treaty was being negotiated, Laurens was called to Paris to assist Benjamin Franklin, who was leading the United States’ negotiating team. Arriving after negotiations had begun Laurens was too late to influence the primary articles of the treaty. All that remained to be settled, he later noted, were ‘a few points respecting the Fishery and the Loyalists’.18 But Laurens was to have an influence on the peace agreement as he was able to push through a late amendment, which was accepted by the chief British negotiator, who happened to be Laurens’ business partner Richard Oswald. This amendment to Article VII of the agreement, agreed by two close friends and partners in the Atlantic slave trade, concerned the fate of the black loyalists. Inserted literally into the margins, this late amendment prohibited the evacuating British forces from ‘carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American Inhabitants’.19 The terms of the preliminary peace treaty were published in March 1783. The thirty-five thousand white loyalists trapped in New York examined the feeble assurances the British negotiators had managed to wrench from the Americans and with good reason feared for their property and their welfare. The three thousand black loyalists trapped in the city alongside them feared chains and whips. They had survived their flight from slavery, evaded the slave patrols of the Southern states, fought for their liberty in epic battles and ...

The deeper problem, however, was that most of the black loyalists had been slaves before the revolution. They had not lost items of property but had been items of property. They had gained their liberty through the service they had provided to the nation; that they were now destitute and hungry was regarded as an unfortunate reality, but one that it was felt fell beyond the scope of the commission. With nowhere else to turn for assistance and little chance of finding work, these former soldiers and self-emancipated slaves, who had crossed an ocean to reach the mother country, now swelled the ranks of London’s black poor.

By the 1780s the defenders of slavery had begun a campaign of racist propagandizing that lasted until the 1830s. By the time the committee was formed, Edward Long’s influential History of Jamaica, with its hysterical warnings about the dangers of racial mixing, had been in print for twelve years. The view that the presence of black men in Britain would lead to a form of racial pollution was gaining currency. As the idea took hold, fuelled by pro-slavery pamphlets and satirical cartoons that lampooned black people, it was not just the sight of black men reduced to vagrancy that disturbed many wealthy Londoners, but the sight of black men with white wives and mixed-race children that stuck in their throats. Unlike the slaves dressed in livery who opened the doors of fashionable West London homes, or the little black pageboys in feathered Ottoman turbans making tea for their mistresses, the black poor were regarded as a threat rather than a novelty.

Eventually all African options were discounted and the convicts of Georgian Britain were loaded aboard the First Fleet and dispatched to Botany Bay, making the colonization of Australia a bizarre and unintended consequence of the loss of America, and the unsuitability of Africa.

There was much in Sharp’s Temporary Regulations that was commendable; this, after all, was a blueprint for self-rule and equality drafted at a time when millions of Africans in the New World occupied a chattel status akin to that of livestock. However, that settlement had been established, on the advice of the late Henry Smeathman, just twenty miles from the slave fortress at Bunce Island. The colonists were able to stand on their allotted plots within the Province of Freedom and watch slave ships slip up and down the Sierra Leone River, carrying trade goods to the chiefs and traders inland, and returning with hundreds of fellow Africans, chained and terrified, on their lower decks. The British slave ships that cruised along the shore travelled, as the settlers themselves had done, under the protection of the warships of the Royal Navy. Not only had they set themselves up within one of the centres of the Atlantic slave trade, they had done so in one of the boom decades of that trade.

Sharp maintained that the land would yield crops with ‘very little labour’. Even in the wake of so much bad news and evidence to the contrary he remained dedicated to the fanciful (and in the circumstances self-indulgent) belief that if the settlers would only commit to following his regulations ‘they would become the freest and the happiest people on earth’.56 The puritanical, fanatical aspects of Sharp’s nature that had made him such an effective and belligerent campaigner against slavery in England in the 1760s and 1770s now blinded him to the deadly calamity that was being played out three thousand miles away in a doomed settlement named in his honour.

The defection that clearly most shocked and hurt Sharp was of Henry Demane, the former slave whom he had saved from being transported to the West Indies in the summer of 1765. The news that a man he had released from chains was now fixing collars and shackles onto the necks and legs of others brought out all of his fiery religiosity.

A few of the Nova Scotians who signed up to settle on the banks of the Sierra Leone River did so despite the fact that it was from that river that they had been sold into slavery. One of them, John Gordon, who had been held captive in Bunce Island, after several years settled in Freetown accidentally encountered the man who had kidnapped and sold him. Having become a Methodist preacher in North America, Gordon forgave the slave-trader as he had come to regard his own enslavement as a necessary part of a divine plan that had led to both his conversion and his return to his motherland.

Freetown today is largely a product of subsequent waves of settlement, of which we shall hear more later, and there is perhaps nowhere in Africa upon which the energy and optimism of the British abolitionist impulse has been so deeply inscribed into the local geography and demography. To reach Susan’s Bay the visitor passes along the broad thoroughfare upon which the Maroon church stands, passing smaller side streets whose names read like a who’s-who of nineteenth-century British politics. Each is named in honour of a prime minister, abolitionist or politician – Percival Street, Walpole Street, Bathurst Street, Wellington Street and Liverpool Street, after the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool. One of the last streets before Susan’s Bay is Wilberforce Street. Freetown was never a dumping ground for unwanted black people. Although the establishment of the Province of Freedom went disastrously wrong and although the treatment of the Nova Scotian settlers was never free from racial bias these schemes of settlement were relatively well funded and for the most part well meaning – in the mind of Granville Sharp they were intended to be almost utopian. The descendants of those early settlers, who form portions of the Krio population, are a people whose identities have been profoundly shaped by British slavery and by popular British opposition to slavery, a political and moral impulse that became one of the defining issues of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Living ...

The forces that led Britain to become a slave-trading and slave-owning nation in the seventeenth century have been discussed earlier, and are relatively straightforward. The nation was drawn into the trade for the same reason that English traders like John Lok and Thomas Wyndham broke Portugal’s monopoly of the African gold trade in the sixteenth century and English planters on Barbados moved into sugar cultivation a century later. Simply put, the English (later the British) saw the profits being made by their Portuguese, Spanish and then Dutch competitors and wanted a slice of the action. By contrast the forces that led to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and then of slavery itself in 1833, are far more complicated, opaque and contested. What we do know is that the view that the trade in slaves was a national sin emerged in the 1770s and then spread rapidly, growing to become an intellectual and ethical current that ran through society and carried the abolition movement forward. Once it emerged, British abolitionism forced the issue of slavery and the contested humanity of black people into the centre of British politics, where it remained long after the slave trade and slavery had been abolished. Abolitionism, and the developing sense that slavery belonged to the past rather than the future, was one of the forces that shaped and influenced Britain’s relationship with Africa and people of African descent on three continents until at least the end of the nineteent...

Great passage on lack of opposition to slavery until late 18C

These

Pro slavery arguments

Various

Why 1807?

Sharp also sought unsuccessfully to bring criminal charges against the crew of the Zong, although the main culprit, Captain Collingwood, was by this time dead. In this he was unsuccessful and no one ever faced trial for the massacre. Yet the fact that the case had garnered so much publicity and shocked so many millions was significant in itself. The murder of the sick or the disruptive on board slave ships was a routine practice. Never before had the details of so terrible a case been brought to the attention of so many. A light had been shone upon some of the darkest secrets of the slave trade.

For the next two decades Wilberforce, a fellow Cambridge graduate, worked alongside Clarkson – the former in Parliament and the latter at the hustings and in the lecture hall.8 Their partnership epitomizes the movement’s twin-track approach of popular agitation and parliamentary strategizing.

Slavery, its opponents argued, was not just immoral but also very much inferior to free labour, free enterprise and free trade. The enemies of American slavery were making the same arguments right up until the US Civil War in the 1860s.

The early abolitionists focused upon the slave trade, rather than slavery.

Many

Explanation of decision to focus on trade not slavery

To

Excellent description of abolitionist strategy

In his Address to the People of Great Britain of 1791, the abolitionist William Fox wrote, ‘If we purchase the commodity we participate in the crime. The slave-dealer, the slave-holder, and the slave-driver, are virtually the agents of the consumer, and may be considered as employed and hired by him to procure the commodity . . . In every pound of sugar used . . . we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh’.10 Two hundred thousand copies of William Fox’s Address were printed, and they circulated around Britain and America.

Abolitionist meetings and lectures stoked the fires of indignant opposition that burned in the breasts of the converted and convinced those who attended out of interest or curiosity to dedicate themselves to the great moral crusade.

Cugoano’s shocking book was distributed among the great and the good; even George III was reportedly given a copy. Cugoano is another of the many notable black Britons who left us their words and experiences only to later disappear from the historical record. It’s believed he married an English woman and laid plans to open a school but nothing certain is known. If he has descendants they carry his blood line unknowingly.

In his forties when his narrative was published, and by then a forceful speaker and passionate campaigner, Equiano used his fame and his extraordinary life story to establish himself as a critical figure on the abolitionist circuit.