Just about every town and city in the country organised petitions on scrolls. It was the most discussed subject in London's popular debating societies. Initially they had spectacular successes. With the help of the Quakers (the only religious group to campaign wholeheartedly against the trade) Clarkson founded the all-white anti-slavery committee in 1787 at 18 Old Jewry, in the heart of the City of London. For the rest of his life he rode and walked the length of Britain (and quite a lot of France, too) addressing meetings, writing pamphlets, collecting signatures on petitions, and compiling a wealth of evidence on the horrors of the slave trade. His chosen subject was the slave trade and his tract became famous. Clarkson sprang into prominence when he entered, and won, England's top Latin essay competition. He was a giant of a man, more than 6ft tall, with striking red hair. There was Olaudah Equiano, an eloquent, freed Igbo slave, who gatecrashed London society and wrote bestselling books about his own experiences.īut above all there was the abolitionist's most tireless worker, Thomas Clarkson. There was James Steven, a philanderer whose law studies had been financed by an uncle who bought sick slaves, cheaply, and oiled and fattened them up for resale. Sharp went to court and had the slave freed. There was Granville Sharp, a royal musician who rescued a slave, Jonathan Strong, who had been brought to London by his master and so badly beaten up that he nearly died. Newton turned to God, wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace" and, late in life, joined the anti-slavery cause. But still there were uprisings and Newton regularly had to lash them and "put them slightly in the thumbscrews" to keep them quiet. Newton mounted guns on deck and trained muskets on the captives' quarters to intimidate them. Slave revolts on board ship were frequent and every captain had to be on the lookout. He was a ruthless businessman and a dispassionate observer of the Africans he bought and sold: "I was brought a woman to buy, but being long breasted and ill made, I refused her." Among them was John Newton, who worked on slave ships between West Africa and the Caribbean, where profits on a slave could be as much as 147%. Here are the observations of the planters' eating and drinking habits from the diary of Lady Nugent, wife of the governor of Jamaica: "Such eating and drinking I have never seen before - a dish of tea, another of coffee, a bumper of claret, then Madeira hot and cold meat, stews and fries and cold fish pickled, peppers, ginger, sweetmeats, acid fruits and sweet jellies." And that was just for breakfast.īury the Chains tells of the struggle to end slavery through the eyes of the few who plotted its downfall. In contrast, the life of the plantation owners who exploited the slaves was sweet and extravagant. A machete was kept nearby to cut off an entire arm in order to save them. Slaves would often fall asleep and let their hands slip into the crushing mills. By contrast, the 400,000 shipped to the Americas (where sugar cane was not the only crop) had grown to four million.Ĭutting sugar was back-breaking and dangerous. At its close, there were fewer than 670,000. During the period of the slave trade, more than two million were shipped to the Caribbean. The life of the slaves who cut and harvested the sugar was hellish and short: they died being captured, they died crossing the Atlantic, they died from beatings and they died from sheer hard work on the sugar plantations. At the height of the slave trade, for instance, British imports from the tiny, sugar-producing West Indian island of Grenada, were eight times those from Canada. Our British ancestors, unaware of its dangers to health, consumed huge quantities of the stuff and the economy would have ground to a halt without it. The problem facing the abolitionists can be summed up in one word: sugar. "It was the first time in history," writes Hochschild, "that a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years over someone else's rights." Yet with organisation, enthusiasm and imaginative campaigning, the abolitionists eventually forced parliament to hear the cries of the suffering slaves and bend to the will of the British people. Only one MP, William Wilberforce, was active in the abolitionists' cause. Ship owners, slave traders, sugar exporters, chocolate makers and plantation owners were earning fortunes. Eighty thousand slaves were trafficked every year from Africa to the New World. Two hundred years ago, three-quarters of the world's population were in bondage of one kind or another.
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