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

by David Olusoga

Olaudah

Useful summary of sons of Africa - black campaigners

The Sons of Africa whose words – both spoken and written – were broadcast across their society were able to present themselves to the British public as living proof of black humanity, in an age when that self-evident fact was still called into question by some. Alongside Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano and their colleagues other black Britons took part in the struggles against the trade and slavery. Phillis Wheatley, James Gronniosaw, Ignatius Sancho and later Mary Prince through their letters, poems, memoirs, speeches, journalism and very living presence in Britain acted as a counter to the propaganda of the growing pro-slavery lobby that emerged. The talents and life stories of black people who had personal experiences of slavery enabled the abolitionist movement to fine-tune its message, but it was also able to administer its various campaigns and expand its reach across society because it was willing to free the enormous amount of wasted intellect and energy that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was bottled up within the women of Britain. Denied the vote or any meaningful role in politics – which was regarded as being an entirely male preserve – women were, to some extent and in some quarters, permitted to become active participants in individual causes. Significantly, it had long been deemed socially acceptable for women to raise petitions, which were then delivered to Parliament – an assembly which, of course, was then entirely male. Propriety set limits o...

The abolitionists were as much educators as activists and abolition meetings were as much tutorials as they were rallies.

Abolitionists educators as much as campaigners. Shared the true reality of slavery to those who were ignorant.

The abolitionist message was often at its most persuasive when it came from the mouths of men who had personally been involved in the slave trade. The voices of former slaves like Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano had a uniquely powerful impact but almost as potent were those of repentant former slave-traders.

Another

Account of slave ship doctor who converted to abolitionist cause

The progress of the abolitionist movement was repeatedly delayed and enormously complicated by the turmoil of the age. The French Revolution drastically transformed the political and philosophical landscape over which the campaign traversed.

The

In reaction to chaos in France British parliament and wealthy determined to keep stability and abolitionists seen as threat.

Even more dishearteningly events in France and within the French empire enabled the defenders of slavery to portray abolitionism as a threat to stability.

As well as owning slaves, plantations and slave ships, Hibbert was the chairman of the cabal of West India merchants who financed and built the West India Docks in east London, a vast system of docks that were opened in 1800 and into which the slave-produced sugar of the West Indies was landed. Although parts of it still exist today, the name ‘West India Docks’ has almost disappeared from the map of London, surviving only as the name of a street and a railway station. The area is today known as Canary Wharf. In the same way that the link between Canary Wharf and slavery has been buried, George Hibbert too has been forgotten. Yet it can be argued that the story of abolition cannot be properly told without him, as Hibbert is the villain of the piece. He can be thought of as the ‘anti-Wilberforce’, the passionate, committed and defiant figure who fought a restless battle for what he believed which, in Hibbert’s case, was to ensure that Africans remained items of chattel that could be bought and sold, beaten and whipped.

In our traditional telling of the history of slavery, which is so heavily focused on the abolitionists and their struggles, the men against whom the abolitionists struggled have, bizarrely, been written out of the story. With our national gaze fixed firmly on the saintly figure of William Wilberforce, George Hibbert remains a forgotten figure. Yet his association with Wilberforce runs deep, and without him this history is incomplete. Both Wilberforce and Hibbert lived in homes overlooking Clapham Common and both men worshipped at Holy Trinity, an elegant Georgian church that stands under the shade of some broad trees in one corner of the Common. Wilberforce and his supporters – the pious men of what was called the Clapham Sect and sometimes the Clapham Saints – shared the pews of their little church with their greatest and most effective enemy. There are no records of services being disrupted of passions spilling over. While the names of the Clapham Saints are engraved into a stone plaque fixed into the walls of Holy Trinity, George Hibbert is notably absent. Whereas the home that Wilberforce shared with his cousin Henry Thornton is proudly and rightly stamped with a blue heritage plaque, the elegant town house that once belonged to George Hibbert is unmarked and anonymous.

Although

Negative Effect of slave rebellions on abolition movement in gb

The icon of the abolition movement was the famous image of the enslaved man kneeling with his hands in chains, asking plaintively ‘Am I Not A Man And A Brother?’ Designed by the Quaker abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood it was one of the most compelling and brilliant pieces of political marketing ever devised. By depicting the enslaved man as a fellow human being, but helpless, it emphasized the idea that abolition was an act of Christian charity and humanitarian compassion. Abolition was portrayed as something that was to be given to the enslaved by the British people rather than seized by them. Yet when the enslaved rose up against their brutalization and commoditization, whether on a plantation or a slave ship of the Middle Passage, and demanded freedom through physical force there were many in Britain who found this alternative picture of the African profoundly disturbing.

The act also imposed a legal requirement that every slave ship sailed with a doctor on board and that a log be kept detailing illnesses and mortality rates among the captives. Historians disagree as to the effectiveness of the Dolben Act but it was at least a form of governmental oversight imposed upon a trade that had been an unregulated free-for-all ever since the Royal African Company had lost its monopoly in the early eighteenth century. Some abolitionists feared the Dolben Act might confer the legitimacy of legal oversight upon the slave trade, and thereby weaken the case for outright abolition, but the Sons of Africa disagreed. They regarded it as a first step forward. Writing to Dolben they thanked him for his ‘benevolent law . . . by which the miseries of our unhappy brethren, on the coast of Africa, may be alleviated’.

The wars with France, poor harvests, widespread distress among the poor and a rebellion in Ireland made it increasingly difficult for Clarkson, Wilberforce and their allies to keep the abuses of the slave-traders at the forefront of MPs’ minds – despite the constant barrage of new abolitionist pamphlets and the constant drumbeat of mass public meetings and fiery speeches. Yet the bill of 1796 failed by only four votes after one group of pro-abolition MPs went to the opera and missed the vote. There were rumours that the performance of the comic opera The Two Hunchbacks that had drawn the lawmakers away from the chamber had been arranged by the supporters of the slave trade.

By 1804 Wilberforce had come to fear that the momentum that had been built up behind the movement in the 1790s had been lost. Nevertheless he introduced yet another abolition bill to Parliament which this time passed through the House of Commons only to be rejected by the House of Lords. In 1805 yet another bill was defeated in the Commons by a narrow margin but that year the political mood began to shift. Decisive victory over the French at Trafalgar strengthened Britain’s military and economic position in the world. Parliament had changed too. Many of the pro-slavery members who had thwarted attempts to prohibit the trade had retired or passed away and the election of 1806 changed the complexion of Parliament. A new, younger generation of parliamentarians took up their places on the benches of the House of Commons and Wilberforce, with the encouragement of the Prime Minister, Lord Grenville, seized the opportunity. After so many parliamentary failures and after years of opposition from the Lords, Wilberforce’s final abolition bill was presented before a Parliament far more sympathetic to his ambitions than any that had been called previously. The bill passed through both houses, receiving the Royal Assent from George III on 25 March 1807, and came into force on 1 January 1808. The British slave trade, begun in the 1660s under King Charles II, had, by this act, been ‘utterly abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful’.21 It has been estimated that between 1789 and ...

On the islands of the West Indies hundreds of thousands of black people remained subject to the manifold horrors of plantation slavery and in Britain there was no great rallying call for a new abolitionist campaign.

Abolitionism went into hibernation. During their long campaign against the slave trade the abolitionists had repeatedly reassured the slave owners and the pro-slavery West India lobby that once the trade was ended they did not propose to seek the abolition of slavery. Immediate emancipation of the slaves, they argued, would be a disaster for both the slaves and the slave owners. Publicly and privately William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and almost all of the more vocal of the abolitionists were committed to the principle of ‘gradualism’. This view was predicated upon the belief that the slaves were unready and ill-equipped for freedom and any sudden transition might lead to violence and chaos.

Freedom would be delivered incrementally, in carefully spaced stages with white men judging and assessing the capacities of black people to manage their own affairs and adhere to European norms. The faith in gradualism said much about the racial ideas that prevailed among the abolitionists and most people in nineteenth-century Britain. It said nothing about the capacities and inner nature of African people.

Wilberforce remained confident abolition represented the ‘deathblow’ of plantation slavery and that the literal irreplaceability of the slaves would have transformative effects. Thomas Clarkson likewise believed that the abolition of the trade was the seed from which black freedom would flower.

This

Role of data in reviving of abolition movement

But in the 1820s the faithful were increasingly more radical than their leaders. Clarkson reported that everywhere he went the demand for immediate abolition was growing and faith in gradualism fading. The most eloquent and compelling of the advocates of ‘immediatism’ were women and the most dynamic of them was Elizabeth Heyrick, a Quaker schoolteacher from Leicester. In 1824 she wrote a pamphlet entitled Immediate, not Gradual Abolition. Heyrick was almost as critical of the abolitionist establishment as she was of the West India planters, rounding upon the abolitionist establishment for its lack of moral fervour.

At

Account of pivotal Jamaican rebellion

The abolitionists acknowledged that the slave owners would be compensated for their loss of property, something the planters had been lobbying to achieve for decades. The government recognized that it would have to foot the bill: twenty million pounds was raised and set aside to compensate the forty-six thousand slave owners. That sum represented 40 per cent of all government spending for the year 1833 and is the equivalent of around seventeen billion pounds today, making it then the largest pay-out in British history.

In the early morning of the Emancipation Day one of the most unusual funerals in British history took place. In the grounds of a nearby school a grave had been dug. A coffin was then brought forward into which were placed the instruments of slavery; a pair of shackles, a chain, a whip and an iron collar. A crowd assembled and in the dawn light the coffin was lowered into the earth, Jamaican soil into which the bodies of around a million slaves had been interred over the previous three centuries. The congregation sang their hymns and gave their cheers and the flag of freedom, with the Union flag set into its corner. A headstone placed above the grave read, ‘Colonial Slavery died 31 July 1838, Age 276 years’.29

When William Knibb and his congregation of newly emancipated slaves symbolically buried the chains of slavery at Falmouth in 1838 they did so in the hope that three centuries of British slavery would not be forgotten. There is some irony therefore in the fact that what largely obscures our national memory of slavery is the history of abolition, and a very specific reading of it. The first historian of the abolition movement was Thomas Clarkson who, in 1807, rushed out an account of the triumphant campaign to end the slave trade. That book was completed and in print by 1808. Clarkson understood the importance of seizing the historical narrative and wanted to use the movement’s history to further its continuing ambitions. But after 1833 he himself became a victim of a new history that was centred around the figure of William Wilberforce. This narrative was masterminded by William Wilberforce’s two sons, who, in their five-volume biography of their father, demoted Thomas Clarkson. In their account Clarkson was not the movement’s inspirational moral leader but merely a hired functionary. The two younger Wilberforces also committed one of the most outrageous acts of historical vandalism when they convinced Clarkson to send them much of his correspondence with their father. These letters were not returned and have never been found. They are presumed destroyed. But Clarkson was just one among a long list of historical casualties. The contributions of the black abolitionists, Olau...

Superb and powerful explanation of flawed history of abolition right up to present.

Exhilarated by their historical triumphs and reinvigorated, more latterly, by the successful campaign against the hated apprenticeship system, the speakers of 1840 declared their firm belief in the notion that abolition placed Britain in a position of global moral leadership, a view that was reinforced on several occasions by the foreign delegates, who vied with one another to praise Britain.

During the nineteen months from his arrival in 1845 to his departure in April 1847, Frederick Douglass, by his own estimation, lectured on slavery on three hundred occasions, meaning that he spoke publicly against slavery on more days than he was silent. In some ways he completed his development in Britain. Freed from the daily fear of re-enslavement, and able to live a more expansive existence in an unsegregated society, he had the emotional space to evolve intellectually. In January 1846, in a speech in Belfast, he described how he had been ‘persecuted, hunted, outraged in America, I have come to England, and behold the change! A chattel becomes a man. I breathe. I am free.’29

No matter how difficult it is for us to understand, the fact remains that many millions of Victorians who, like their most famous author, passionately opposed slavery saw no contradiction between that opposition and an unshakable belief in black inferiority.

Within a few years of publication, the book had become what the scholar Sarah Meer describes as ‘the frame for the majority of British discussions of slavery.’53 Uncle Tom did more to damage the reputation of America abroad and shine a light on Southern slavery than any other feature of the transatlantic abolitionist campaign. Its runaway success in Britain and popularity in the free states of the North also helped reaffirm the links between the anti-slavery movements on both sides of the Atlantic.

By far the most important of the black American musical troupes to tour Britain in our period were the legendary Fisk Jubilee Singers, who arrived in 1873. They came from Nashville, Tennessee, and were directly responsible for introducing British audiences to the world of Negro spirituals. Their impact upon British music tastes is too significant to be dealt with here, but more than any other troupe they changed British tastes, introducing into the national song book standards like ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I See’ and ‘Deep River’; songs that became part of the lives of millions of Victorian churchgoers. The Fisk Jubilee Singers performed for Queen Victoria and symbolically they gave a concert at London’s Exeter Hall, the historic headquarters of the British abolitionist movement.

The cultural penetration of minstrel music, and later of genuine African American spiritual music, from which the minstrels had borrowed, was remarkable. Minstrel tunes were ubiquitous. Karl Marx, then resident in London, was said to have sung minstrel songs and taught them to his children. In addition to the flow of minstrel music into Victorian family life, terms and slang that were used in minstrel songs and in blackface stage acts infiltrated everyday speech, and not just that of the poor. Among the words that surface in the letters of even the highly respectable are ‘Mammy’ and the N-word. Charles Darwin, writing to his wife Emma in a letter of May 1848, signed off, ‘Your old nigger—C.D’.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Charles Darwin had actually seen slavery in operation and witnessed the trade in slaves while in South America during his travels on board HMS Beagle in the 1830s. These experiences had reinforced the strong anti-slavery sentiment with which he had been brought up, and throughout his life Darwin was a committed anti-slavery man. The use of the N-word in jest, whether imbibed from the culture of anti-slavery or the popular culture of minstrelsy or perhaps from both, was, it seems, an accepted joke within a family whose abolitionist credentials were unquestioned.72

What he was sensing was a generational shift in both people and ideas. The generation that had called the World Anti-Slavery Convention twenty years earlier, many of whom had been veterans of the abolition campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s, were ageing and fading away. In the same years, the optimism of those earlier decades was being overwhelmed by newly emergent racial ideas. The capacities of black people, intellectual, spiritual and political, were increasingly being called into question by new supposedly scientific ideas about race and the capacities of the various branches of humanity. These new ideas fused and mingled with the older racisms. In this new atmosphere not only did increasing numbers of Britons believe that the nation had no business intervening in the issue of slavery in America, some suggested that even abolition in the West Indies, the great act of moral absolution on which so much of Britain’s self-image and patriotic triumphalism rested, might have been a mistake.

Britain’s anti-slavery patrols were intended to stop British slave-trading, but their mission expanded rapidly. Through a series of bilateral treaties negotiated over the next half-century, the patrols targeted the slave ships of other trading powers. At times their mission was extended into the Caribbean and during the 1850s they loitered off Brazil, intercepting slave ships at sea and burning others that were caught at anchor. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Britain’s crusade against the slave trade turned to the East, and British warships surged into the Indian Ocean, where they pursued the dhows of the Muslim slavers, who continued their ancient trade in human flesh long after the Atlantic trade was reduced to a trickle. They were not stopped until the twentieth century and even then not comprehensively. It is one of the great questions of British history: why was it that the nation that had refined and perfected the slave trade, and become the dominant player in that global industry, turned her back on its profits, and committed herself to its suppression?

This deployment of Britain’s military might and her diplomatic influence to suppress slave-trading activities by other sovereign nations, which although abhorrent were legal, antagonized her friends and foes alike. It stretched international law to breaking point and on various occasions it materially damaged her relations with Spain, France, Portugal, Brazil and the United States.

Yet for all its failings this enormous global undertaking cost Britain both blood and treasure. It was an early example of what we today would call a ‘humanitarian intervention’ but it remains a largely forgotten chapter in the long and troubled history of Britain’s relationship with Africa and her peoples.

Such

Information on the extent to which some british slavers continued to operate illegally

Even in 1807, there were more enslaved people in Africa than in the Americas, although the institution of slavery existed in Africa in many varying forms of differing degrees of severity and not all of them were permanent. In parts of the continent new slave-trading states were on the rise and in many societies slavery – in its domestic, agricultural and even military forms – was so normalized as to be ubiquitous and largely unquestioned. Various African leaders puzzled, after 1807, as to why the British, formerly their most enthusiastic trading partners, had become so squeamish about the trade in human flesh, a commerce that they themselves had so recently dominated.

From the boom in slave-trading in the 1820s until its slow decline in the 1850s and 1860s deadly games of cat and mouse were played off the coast of Africa, as both sides sought to refine their tactics and find new ways to achieve their ends. Slave ships learnt to loiter in the blockaded rivers and lagoons around the Bights of Benin and Biafra until the ships of the West Africa Squadron were forced to return to Freetown for supplies; only then would they make for the open sea. Slave captains would wait for moonless nights, then race to the river mouths and silently slip past the British patrols in the inky darkness.

Frederick Forbes, a highly successful commander with the West Africa Squadron, concluded that ‘So long as there is a demand there will be slavers.’

need for slaves to be on board for prosecution

fame of british anti slave ships

A British writer who visited the city the following year claimed that, ‘So efficient were her services, that many a negro who had been liberated by her is said to have wept on beholding the conflagration’. He claimed that there were ‘feasts and rejoicings amongst the slave-merchants’ of West Africa as they celebrated the ‘destruction of their scourge.’

Contemporary artists tended to depict the squadron’s ships in action rather than at anchor. They are shown, heroically pursuing or confronting the slave ships. William John Huggins’ painting The Capture of the Slaver ‘Formidable’ by HMS Buzzard, 17 December 1834 is one of the more dramatic.18

absent from popular accounts and paintings of the squadron is the role that Africans played in the crews of the slavery suppression vessels. A number of ships, including the Black Joke, had sailors from the Kru people of Liberia, the state which neighbours Sierra Leone. The Kru, who traditionally worked as fishermen, possessed detailed knowledge of the West African coastline, and as pilots and regular seamen, they assisted the British commanders, who often struggled to compete with the more experienced slave-traders.

interpretations of west africa squadron

criticism of gb policy

The greatest criticism of Britain’s crusade against the Atlantic slave trade has to be that the vast majority of slave ships were not intercepted. When measured in raw statistical terms, the anti-slavery squadron was a failure. It has been estimated that around one in five of the approximately 7,750 slave ships that were engaged in the Atlantic trade between 1808 and 1867 were condemned by the courts; 85 per cent of those interceptions were the work of the Royal Navy.39 In all, around a hundred and sixty thousand African captives were liberated. For those thousands of men, women and children, people whose shackles were broken off and who were guided out of the gloom of the slave decks and landed on King Jimmy’s Wharf in Freetown, their personal liberation was miraculous. But they represented only around 6 per cent of the approximately 2.7 million Africans who were captured and put on slave ships bound for the Americas in the three decades after 1836.40 In its first decades of operation not only did the squadron fail to have a significant impact on the scale of the Atlantic trade, it watched impotently as the trade increased markedly. By the 1820s it reached levels of intensity beyond even those of the 1780s, when the British trade was at its apex.

The historian of slavery Seymour Drescher has described British abolition as an act of ‘econocide’, a policy that ran counter to British economic interests. However, the decision to abandon the trade somewhere near the apex of its profitability made the task of suppression almost impossible in the 1820s and 1830s, as ruthless new players joined the trade.

If the West Africa Squadron was a humanitarian intervention then Freetown in those decades became what today we would call a reception centre for the refugees of the Atlantic slave trade.