Abolitionism unshackled

Bury the Chains

Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves

Adam Hochschild

Houghton Mifflin: 468 pp., $26.95

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Though the Heavens May Fall

The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery

Steven M. Wise

Da Capo Press: 282 pp., $25

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While there are thousands of books on slavery, with new studies tumbling from the presses each year, the abolitionists who helped to strike down the slave systems in the Americas attract much less attention. When noticed at all, they tend to be caricatured as dour Puritan fundamentalists. In Steven Spielberg’s 1997 movie, “Amistad,” the briefly glimpsed abolitionists were distinctly unsympathetic, black-clad scolds, waving prayer books. Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film “Queimada!” (“Burn!”) portrays the abolitionist -- Marlon Brando doing an over-the-top portrait of an English gent -- as a tool of British imperialism.

At least these films paid attention to the slaves’ own anti-slavery efforts, in sharp contrast with mainstream Anglo-American histories that portray emancipation as a gift generously bestowed by pious and noble whites on the poor blacks, with little or no attention to slave resistance and slave witness. The Trinidadian historian and statesman Eric Williams once observed that British historians wrote as if their country had undertaken a vast slave traffic only to have the satisfaction of abolishing it.

The fact that the anti-slavery movement succeeded, and that it was frequently appropriated by the Anglo-American ruling circles, also helps to explain the weak interest of subsequent generations in the movement. Going down to defeat, like Dixie, allows for more romance and pathos.

Adam Hochschild, the author of “Bury the Chains,” a readable and lively history of British abolitionism, is well aware of the misuses of anti-slavery themes by London and Washington. In a previous work, “King Leopold’s Ghost,” he showed how the Belgian monarch established a genocidal regime in the Congo with U.S. and British diplomatic support, all in the name of suppressing the slave trade.

However, in that work he also gave a vivid portrait of the international movement that eventually exposed Leopold’s cynicism, greed and cruelty. “Bury the Chains” gives a harrowing account of the slave trade and the slave condition, but it mainly supplies lively narrative of the popular and parliamentary campaign to suppress the Atlantic slave trade, and then slavery itself. (The trade ban was eventually agreed to by the British Parliament in 1807, and slavery was outlawed in 1833 but did not completely disappear until 1838.)

Hochschild tells much of the story by weaving an account of the lives of a varied cast of protagonists. They include a slave sailor who wins his freedom and becomes an abolitionist author and agitator (Olaudah Equiano); a slave trading captain who becomes a leading evangelical preacher and, years later, denounces the trade’s cruelties (John Thornton); a Cambridge graduate who gives up his vocation as a clergyman to become a full-time abolitionist organizer and researcher (Thomas Clarkson); a leader of the great slave rebellion that erupted in the rich French colony of St. Domingue (what is now Hispaniola) in 1791 (Toussaint L’Ouverture); and a close friend of the British prime minister who pursues the anti-slavery cause side by side with other attempts to restore what he sees as morality to British life (William Wilberforce).

Until very recently, accounts of anti-slavery efforts paid scant attention to black abolitionism and portrayed the Haitian revolution -- the setting up of a new state in 1804 by the rebels of St. Domingue -- as a confused, bloody and marginal event that contributed nothing to the stately advance of the anti-slavery cause. Hochschild instead explains how the defeat of Britain’s attempt to occupy St. Domingue in the 1790s, losing more than 80,000 soldiers and sailors in the Caribbean theater, allowed some influential abolitionists to persuade the British Parliament that a wiser long-term policy would be to end the slave traffic, with its attendant mayhem, and to make abolitionism the banner of a new Pax Britannica.

Steven M. Wise’s book, “Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery,” has a much narrower focus -- the 1772 case of slave James Somerset -- and does not quite justify its subtitle. Nevertheless, written by a legal historian, it illuminates the most important of the English “freedom suits.” Cases like this occurred in many Atlantic ports, where courageous captives found those willing to support them in a legal bid for freedom. The success of a few of these suits helped to open up the social space that was later to be dramatically expanded by abolitionists at times of high political crisis.

Hochschild is good at distinguishing between the idealism of most abolitionists and the tactical appeals of the movement’s parliamentary champions. Like others, he pays tribute to the crucial role of the Quakers in initiating and sustaining organized abolitionism. He rightly stresses the initiative of Clarkson, who traveled thousands of miles in search of evidence and witnesses. Clarkson was able to debunk the slave trading lobby’s claim that it was a “nursery of seamen” by showing that the mortality rate among English sailors on the long slave trading voyages was even higher than that of the African captives themselves, appalling as the latter was.

Hochschild’s grasp of the overall British and Atlantic context is sometimes cliched or questionable. There are passages about Hanoverian London, teeming with improbable numbers of prostitutes and unbuttoned upper-class cynics, that seem positively Brandoesque. No doubt this furnishes a good foil to Wilberforce’s anguished concern for public and private morality (though Wilberforce’s own opium habit is not mentioned).

At one point Hochschild writes: “[A]ll the Evangelicals were middle or upper class and they were especially alarmed at sinful behavior among the poor.” One of the reasons why abolitionist movements might interest us today is that they show that Evangelical politics could be progressive. While there were a few upper-class Evangelicals, many of the movement’s followers actually were lower middle class or respectable working poor. At this point the Methodists had an Evangelical appeal, and they reached out to the workers in the new industrial districts and to the army of domestic servants in the houses of the upper, and upper-middle, classes. Wives of workingmen saw the chapel as a way of combating “sin,” in the shape of drunken, lewd and violent behavior, or the gambling away of meager wages.

Getting the balance right is not easy here. There was certainly a current of working-class radicalism that had no time for the Evangelicals and, as E.P. Thompson wrote in “The Making of the English Working Class,” even less time for Wilberforce. But the antagonism between Evangelicals and radicals partly stemmed from the fact that they were in competition with one another. Abolition turned out to be one of the few issues on which both could agree.

Though Clarkson started out as a candidate for Holy Orders, he became a supporter of the French Revolution. Indeed, Hochschild thinks he overdid his enthusiasm, comparing him to a Soviet fellow traveler. But Hochschild himself is rather dismissive and grudging about the major Jacobin contribution to anti-slavery in the 1790s. While the pressure of the slave rebels was certainly salutary, it is not fair to say that the French Revolutionary authorities had no option but to decree universal emancipation. The emancipation decreed locally by the Jacobin commissioner in August 1793, and generalized by the National Convention in February 1794, was followed by significant military help, which gave vital breathing space to the new black power. With Napoleon as first consul, it is true, France took a quite different tack and unsuccessfully sought to re-impose slavery. But these disgraceful proceedings do not wipe out the pivotal French Revolutionary contribution from 1793 to 1799.

While there is room for debate on such questions, they should not detract from warm appreciation of Hochschild’s considerable achievement. He presents a fresh and vigorous narrative of an important movement. He has read widely and attentively in primary and secondary sources, and his travels enable him to convey a sense of many of the locales in which the action unfolds. “Bury the Chains” is by far the most readable and rounded account we have of British anti-slavery, a campaign that, as the author rightly claims, helped to change the world and can be seen as a prototype of the modern social justice movement. *