97
JOHN COFFEY
Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave
Trade: From Whitefield to
Wilberforce
Evangelical Christians were prominent in the campaign to bring about the
end of the British slave trade in 1807. However, John Coffey here shows
how, in the mid-eighteenth century, evangelical Christians on both sides
of the Atlantic acquiesced in the slave trade and slavery. By the 1770s to
1780s their ideas underwent a dramatic change and it was evangelicals,
mainly Quakers and a few Anglicans, who established the Committee to
Effect the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. Coffey shows how, over
the next 20 years, with various set-backs, they took a dominant role in
the first mass extra-parliamentary campaign in British history that
successfully restricted the British slave trade and then brought in the Act
to abolish it.
… the campaigns in England which secured first the abolition of the slave
trade and then of slavery itself in the British Empire were led by Evangelical
Christians and Quakers, not by the liberal intelligentsia.
(Roy Porter)1
The abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 is forever associated with the name of
William Wilberforce, a man routinely identified (even in the secular press) as an
Evangelical Christian. This article locates Wilberforce within the larger story of
Evangelicalism, slavery and the slave trade from the 1730s to 1807. The first section
describes the ways in which leading Evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic
acquiesced in the exploitation of black Africans. The second section shows how
attitudes changed very dramatically in the 1770s and 1780s, and endeavours to explain
why this was so. The third section analyses the Evangelical contribution to the
spectacular early years of the mass abolitionist movement after the founding of the
Abolition Society in 1787. Finally, we turn to the lean years after 1794, and the role of
Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect in the abolition of the slave trade in 1806-07.
‘A time of ignorance’ (1730s-1760s)
Edwards, Whitefield & The Countess of Huntingdon
On 15 September 1791, the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom
held its annual meeting in the university town of New Haven. Its speaker was the
Rev. Dr. Jonathan Edwards Jr., pastor of the local Congregational church, and son
1 Porter 1990: 68.
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of the famous revivalist and theologian. His sermon was on The Injustice and
Impolicy of the Slave Trade, and of the Slavery of the Africans. The preacher realised
that some in his audience might struggle to embrace abolitionism, ‘because it seems
to bear hardly on the characters of our pious fathers, who held slaves’. ‘Thirty years
ago’, he noted, ‘scarcely a man in this country thought either the slave-trade or
the slavery of Negroes to be wrong’. The previous generation had been like
Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon, who ‘were ignorant that polygamy or
concubinage was wrong’. ‘As to domestic slavery’, he continued, ‘our fathers lived
in a time of ignorance which God winked at; but now he commandeth all men
everywhere to repent of this wickedness’.2
Edwards must have been thinking of his own dear father, Jonathan Edwards
Sr. The great preacher had baptised black children, rejoiced in the conversion of
blacks in times of revival, and admitted them to full membership of his
congregation. He had envisaged a day when ‘many of the Negroes and Indians
will be divines’. But for all that, he still seated slaves in a segregated area of the
church. As a young minister, he travelled to the slave port of Newport, Rhode
Island, to purchase a fourteen-year-old African girl as a household slave. Her name
was Venus, and she cost him eighty pounds. During his lifetime, Edwards Sr bought
and sold several other slaves, including a ‘Negro boy named Titus’, who was valued
at thirty pounds in the inventory of his estate. Indeed, when a local congregation
criticised their minister for slave-owning, Edwards wrote in his defence, mounting
biblical arguments to justify slavery. He believed that slavery, like just wars, was a
necessary evil, and he never referred to slaveholding as a sin. Paradoxically, he
did criticise the slave trade – the source of some of his own slaves – as a cruel
traffic that impeded the evangelisation of Africa.3
A similar ambivalence can be found in the attitudes of Edwards’ friend, George
Whitefield, the most celebrated Evangelical preacher of the age. In a letter to the
inhabitants of the southern colonies in 1739, Whitefield spoke out against the harsh
treatment of slaves:
As I lately passed through your provinces in my way hither, I was sensibly
touched with a fellow-feeling of the miseries of the poor Negroes. Whether it
be lawful for Christians to buy slaves, and thereby encourage the nations from
whom they are bought, to be at perpetual war with each other, I shall not take
upon me to determine; sure I am, it is sinful, when bought, to use them as
bad nay worse, than as though they were brutes.
Whitefield declared that ‘my blood has frequently almost run cold within me’, when
witnessing the sufferings of the black slaves, whose ‘cruel task-masters’ ploughed
their backs with ‘unrelenting scourges’. He warned callous slaveowners of divine
vengeance: ‘Go to now ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall
come upon you’.4
This prophetic denunciation of oppression was eagerly seized upon by early
abolitionists like the Quaker Anthony Benezet, but Benezet believed that ‘after
residing in Georgia, & being habituated to the sights & use of Slaves, his judgement
became so much influenced as to paliate, &, in some measure, defend the use of
2 Edwards 1791.
3 Chamberlain 2007: 340-41; Marsden 2003:
255-58; Stout and Minkema 2005.
4 Cited by Benezet 1766: 10-12.
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
99
Slaves’. Benezet challenged Whitefield on this ‘repeatedly, with brotherly freedom’,
but to no avail.5 Whitefield sanctioned the use of slave labour at his orphanage in
Georgia, and defended slavery in a letter written in 1751:
As for the lawfulness of keeping Slaves I have no doubt, since I hear of some
that were bought with Abraham’s money & some that were born in his house
– And I cannot help thinking that some of those servants mentioned by the
Apostles in their Epistles, were or had been slaves. It is plain that the
Gibeonites were doomed to perpetual Slavery, & though liberty is a sweet thing
to such as are born free, yet to those who never knew the sweets of it, slavery,
perhaps, may not be so irksome. However this be, it is plain to a demonstration,
that hot countries cannot be cultivated without Negroes.6
The complacency of the 1751 letter stands in stark contrast to the moral outrage
of a decade earlier. And when Whitefield died, he left behind over fifty slaves
working the land of the Georgia orphanage.
Whitefield was chaplain to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. In 1774, she
received a letter from Anthony Benezet urging her to join him in a campaign for
‘putting an end to this mighty Destroyer, “The Slave Trade”’. Benezet was optimistic
that she could gain the support of Lord Dartmouth, the leading Evangelical in
Parliament.7 In reply, Selina apparently stressed the priority of spiritual liberation
for slaves, and suggested that the issue of the slave trade should be left in God’s
hands. Benezet feared that this was a recipe for inaction. He agreed that ‘God alone’
could liberate ‘his afflicted and oppressed creatures’, but argued that God had often
stirred up his people ‘to labour both by word & deed, for the deliverance of their
fellow-men, from outward as well as spiritual oppression & distress’. The trade was
bound to continue if ‘promulgators of the Gospel’ were as mealy-mouthed as
Whitefield had been, ‘instead of bearing their Christian Testimony, against this
outragious violation of the rights of Mankind’.8
Although there were exceptions, most Evangelicals did not share Benezet’s
outrage against the slave trade. In fact, as Christopher Leslie Brown has recently
commented, they displayed ‘manifest indifference’ to the enslavement of Africans.
The Countess of Huntingdon acted as a patron to leading black Christian authors
like Phillis Wheatley and John Marrant, but she more than doubled the number of
slaves at the Georgia orphanage after Whitefield’s death. The Anglican, Martin
Madan, used profits from his Caribbean plantations to build a chapel for London
Evangelicals at the Lock Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes. The Baptist, Anne Dutton,
advised slaves to accept their condition and concentrate on the salvation of their
souls. The early Evangelicals aimed to save souls, not to change laws. There were
few Evangelicals in Parliament, and Lord Dartmouth, the Evangelical secretary of
state, was a cautious man with little crusading fervour. Challenged to take up the
slave trade issue in the 1770s, he privately expressed his dislike of the trade, whilst
5 See his letter of the Countess of Huntingdon
in March 1775, in Bruns 1977: 380-81.
6 Bruns 1977: 381.
7 Unpublished letter from Anthony Benezet to
the Countess of Huntingdon: Cheshunt
Collection, Westminster College
Cambridge, A3/1 no. 33.
8 Benezet to the Countess of Huntingdon in
March 1775, in Bruns 1977: 379-84.
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acting publicly to uphold it. As Brown explains, ‘he cordoned off his political work
from (to him) the no less important work of promoting the Evangelical revival’.9
The slave trade was simply not on the Evangelical agenda.
John Newton
The most dramatic evidence for this is found in the life of John Newton, who worked as
a slave trader between 1748 and 1754. As a slave ship captain, Newton resorted to
draconian measures to control his human cargo. On 11 December 1752, he discovered
a plot among the slaves below deck, and recorded his action in a logbook: ‘Put the boys
in irons and slightly in the thumbscrew to urge them to a full confession …’. Yet, at this
very time, Newton was becoming deeply serious about religion. Acutely sensitive to divine
providence, he immersed himself in the Bible and formal prayer. He cracked down hard
on cursing and sexual immorality among his crew, whipping one sailor for having sex
with a female slave in full view of the other Africans. At the Caribbean island of St Kitts
in 1753, he enjoyed a month of conversations with another slave trader, Alexander Clunie,
who explained the concept of grace and drew him towards an Evangelical understanding
of the Christian faith. At no time in the 1750s (or indeed in the 1760s or 1770s) did Newton
express remorse for trading in slaves. He retired from the business not because of moral
qualms, but because of a minor stroke he suffered as he was preparing to embark on
another slaving voyage in 1754. When he published his autobiographical Authentic
Narrative (1764), he lamented the sins of his youth, blasphemy, drunkenness and
immorality. But this classic Evangelical text did not seriously question the ethics of the
slave trade; indeed, Newton wrote that ‘I never knew sweeter or more frequent hours of
divine communion, than in my last two voyages to Guinea’. In his mind (and in the eyes
of nearly all his contemporaries), slave trading was just a job.10
The case of Newton confirms that one could experience a full-blown Evangelical
conversion without feeling any real compunction about the slave trade. But how
could devout and conscientious Christians be so oblivious to the moral evil of this
traffic in human beings? Many years later, Newton tried to explain why he (as a
Christian) had participated in what he now called ‘a commerce, so iniquitous, so
cruel, so oppressive, so destructive’:
Disagreeable I had long found it; but I think I should have quitted it sooner,
had I considered it, as I now do, to be unlawful and wrong. But I never had a scruple
upon this head, at the time; nor was such a thought once suggested to me, by any
friend. What I did, I did ignorantly; considering it as the line of life which Divine
Providence had allotted to me, and having no concern, in point of conscience, but
to treat the Slaves, while under my care, with as much humanity, as a regard to
my own safety would admit…The Slave Trade was always unjustifiable; but
inattention and interest prevented, for a time, the evil from being perceived.11
This testimony is worth unpacking. Firstly, Christians supported the slave trade
because they did not believe it to be ‘unlawful or wrong’; after all, it was sanctioned
and promoted by the British state, and slavery was apparently legitimised by both
9 Brown 2006: 337-41, 380, 176-77.
10 See Walvin 2007b: 1-102, quotations on p
51; Newton 1765(3rd edn), quotation at p
141. For a sympathetic popular account see
Turner 2005.
11 Newton 1788: 3-4, 7. For a provocative
reading of the journal and Newton’s other
writings on slavery see Wood 2002, ch 1
(‘Slavery, testimony, propaganda: John
Newton, William Cowper, and compulsive
testimony’).
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
101
the Old and the New Testament. Secondly, contemporary society regarded the slave
trade as morally unexceptionable, and slave traders encountered little or no criticism
from friends. In Evangelical circles, being an actor or a card player was unacceptable,
but being a slave trader was apparently legitimate. Thirdly, an earnest Christian slaver
or planter could satisfy his conscience by resolving to treat his cargo with some
‘humanity’. Fourthly, Christians were simply inattentive. To most, the horrors of the
slave trade were out of sight, out of mind. Newton did not have this excuse, but he
too was guilty of ‘inattention’ – preoccupied by the getting the job done, by nourishing
his soul, and by writing home to his beloved Mary, he simply failed to think seriously
about whether his vocation was morally justifiable. Finally, slave trading was a
profitable business, and ‘interest’ prevented many from questioning the source of
their wealth. Newton himself made a good living from his activities, and in his
extraordinary journal from these years, slave trading is reduced to an exercise in
bookkeeping, with the anonymous slaves known only by their numbers.12
Evangelical failure and black Evangelicalism
The first generation of Evangelicals, then, signally failed to question the morality
of the African slave trade. There was no Evangelical equivalent to the prophetic
Quaker voices of Benjamin Lay, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet. The early
Evangelicals preached about turning from ‘the world’, but when it came to the slave
trade, they were social conformists.
Yet, remarkably, it was this very period that was to witness the birth of a vibrant
black Evangelicalism. Evangelical religion with its fiery preaching and warm
fellowship had a powerful appeal to black slaves. When Olaudah Equiano heard
Whitefield preach in Georgia in 1765, he was ‘very much struck and impressed’ at
the passion of the evangelist’s exhortations, noting that Whitefield was ‘sweating
as much as ever I did while in slavery on Montserrat beach’. When he first attended
a Methodist ‘love feast’, Equiano was overwhelmed by the heartfelt testimonies
and the sense of community.13 On Whitefield’s death in 1770, the African-American
poet, Phillis Wheatley, wrote ‘An Elegiac Poem’ in praise of the great revivalist.14
All across the British Atlantic world, African slaves were converting to Christianity
in large numbers through the new Evangelical movements.15 In the Danish sugar
colonies in the Caribbean, the Moravians saw hundreds of slaves come to faith,
and organised them into the earliest African Protestant congregations in the
Americas. In some ways, the Moravians were remarkably egalitarian and interracial,
as is illustrated by the career of Rebecca Protten, a convert who eventually gained
her freedom from slavery, became an itinerant evangelist, and married a white
Moravian missionary. Yet they were careful not to condemn the institution of
slavery itself.16 In Virginia, the leading Presbyterian revivalist, Samuel Davies, went
out of his way to convert slaves, but he also eschewed any attack on slavery. As
David Brion Davis has put it, ‘the main thrust of eighteenth-century revivalism
ended with the missionary, not the abolitionist’.17
12 Newton 1952.
13 Equiano 2003: 132, 183-84, 277. After
describing Whitefield, Equiano adds dryly: ‘I
thought it strange I had never seen divines
exert themselves in this manner before, and
14
15
16
17
was no longer as a loss to account for the
thin congregations they preached to’.
Basker 2002: 174-76.
See Frey and Wood 1998, ch 4.
See Sensbach 2005.
Davis 1966: 388.
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The Birth of Evangelical Abolitionism (1770s-1780s)
And yet, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, Evangelicals were to play
a central role in the great campaign against the slave trade. The 1770s and 1780s
saw a sudden surge of abolitionist activism, prompted by a variety of factors
including the growing influence of Quaker and Enlightenment critiques of slavery,
and the upheaval of the American Revolution.18
The Quakers and the Enlightenment
The key group promoting abolition in this period was the Quakers, led by the
indefatigable Benezet. Evangelicals were somewhat doubtful about the doctrinal
orthodoxy of the Quakers, but they admired the Quaker commitment to serious,
counter-cultural Christianity. Indeed, the leading historian of early British
abolitionism has argued that ‘The British antislavery movement emerged from a
religious reaction against what its Evangelical and Quaker founders derided as
nominal Christianity’.19
Benezet clearly recognised Evangelicals as potential allies in his crusade against
slavery, for they shared the Quaker dissatisfaction with lukewarm piety and lax
morality. Although he failed to sway Whitefield or the Countess of Huntingdon,
he had more success with others. In Pennsylvania, he struck up a friendship with
the young Presbyterian physician, Benjamin Rush, who managed to cling on to his
Evangelicalism while immersing himself in the Philadelphia Enlightenment. Rush
reminds us that Evangelicals were awakening to the issue of slavery partly because
of their growing engagement with moderate Enlightenment thought with its ideals
of liberty, benevolence, progress and humanity. Various eighteenth-century
intellectuals (including Montesquieu and the Scottish historian and divine William
Robertson) had condemned the slave trade, and Rush drew on their arguments in
An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements on the Slavery of the Negroes
(1773). But he also used Scripture to bolster his case, and finished his tract with a
stirring appeal to the clergy to take up the cause.20
American Evangelicals
Rush’s pamphlet reflected a wider ferment among significant numbers of American
Evangelicals. Their conversion to antislavery was the result of growing exposure
to several intellectual influences: Quaker writings, Enlightenment moral philosophy,
and the radical Whig ideas of the Patriots. In New England and the Middle Colonies,
Evangelical preachers were often fervent promoters of American protests against
British ‘tyranny’. But, as they preached, some became painfully aware of the glaring
gap between the noble rhetoric of American liberty, and the terrible reality of
American slavery. On the eve of the revolutionary war, the heirs of Jonathan
Edwards began to denounce slavery. Among them were the Congregational divines,
Jonathan Edwards Jr, Nathaniel Niles, Levi Hart, and Samuel Hopkins. Hopkins
was the boldest, for he was based in Newport, Rhode Island, New England’s major
slave port. He witnessed the inhumanity of the traffic at close quarters, but his
frequent attacks on the slave trade and on slavery put him on a collision course
with members of his congregation. In the South, where the economy was heavily
18 See Brown 2006.
19 Brown 2006: 28.
20 See Rush 1948, 1951.
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
103
dependent on slave plantations, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian itinerants won
a significant following among blacks, forming interracial fellowships that posed a
direct challenge to the predominant culture of the slaveholding Anglican gentry.
Leaders like the Baptist David Barrow, the Methodist James O’Kelly, and the
Presbyterian David Rice, spoke out against slavery.21 In 1784, under the influence
of Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke, the Methodist Conference condemned ‘the
Practice of holding our Fellow-Creatures in Slavery’ and resolved ‘to extirpate this
Abomination from among us’.22
Once convinced, Evangelicals proved zealous abolitionists. They developed
what can only be described as a liberation theology directed against black slavery
– the mission of God, they insisted, was to loose the bands of wickedness, to let
the oppressed go free, to break every yoke, to preach deliverance to the captives,
to set at liberty them that are bruised (Isa. 58:6; Luke 4:18). Like the Quakers, they
launched a counter-cultural assault on worldliness, and declaimed in the
uncompromising language of the Hebrew prophets. Slavery was not merely wrong,
it was an abomination, an accursed thing, a crying sin, a national crime. Individuals
and nations who traded in slaves were stained by blood guilt, and exposed to the
threat of divine vengeance. The only way to avert God’s wrath and atone for this
sin was to repent, to renounce slavery without equivocation and with immediate
effect.23 This highly charged theological vocabulary made the Enlightenment
critique of slavery look rather colourless, though Evangelical reformers tended to
sugar their Biblical imperatives with Enlightenment values.24 The Enlightenment
provided them with a language that appealed to their more secular contemporaries,
but it was their moral and religious absolutism which would drive much of American
abolitionism from the 1770s to the 1860s.
Yet as we have already suggested, there was no necessary connection between
Evangelical theology and abolitionism. It remained perfectly possible in America
to embrace Evangelicalism whilst owning slaves or defending slavery. The wave
of antislavery sentiment in revolutionary America eventually swept away slavery
in the northern and middle colonies, and led to the abolition of the American slave
trade in 1808. But in the South, plantation slavery was firmly entrenched. By 1800,
southern Evangelicals – Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians – were starting to
make their peace with slavery. The Baptist evangelist John Leland, who had once
condemned slavery as ‘the violent deprivation of the rights of nature’, later
described it as a ‘humane, just and benevolent’ institution. In the North too, many
Evangelical leaders became less strident.25
British abolitionism
In Britain, abolitionism took longer to get off the ground, though once it did it would
face less opposition. West Indian planters were to prove a much weaker lobby than
the slaveholding Southern states. In the 1770s, however, British abolitionism was
21 See Bruns 1977; Essig 1982; Isaac 1982, ch
8; Stout and Minkema 2005.
22 Bruns 1977: 502-504.
23 For numerous examples of this language
used by both Quakers and Evangelicals, see
Bruns 1977. The importance of this
evangelical rhetoric of sin and repentance
for instilling a sense of urgency is stressed in
Davis 1962.
24 For a suggestive analysis focussed on the
early nineteenth century see Forbes 1999.
25 See Essig 1982; Mathews 1965; Gourley
2005.
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ANVIL Volume 24 No 2 2007
almost a one-man crusade. That man was Granville Sharp, the founding father of
British abolitionism. Raised in a High Church family, his doctrinal orthodoxy and
intense biblicism gave him an affinity with the rising Evangelical movement.26 He
was drawn to the cause after a chance encounter in 1765 with a black slave,
Jonathan Strong, who had been savagely beaten by his master. Sharp brought a
number of legal cases against slaveowners in subsequent years, culminating in the
famous Somerset case (1772), when Lord Mansfield ruled that black slaves could
not be returned to the colonies against their will. He formed strong connections
with black Britons, and was greatly admired by Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah
Cugoano. 27 He also developed close links with American abolitionists,
corresponding with both Benezet and Rush.28
During the 1770s, Sharp published a number of attacks on slavery and the slave
trade, culminating in The Law of Retribution (1776), a major work of 350 pages that
marshalled biblical evidence to warn of ‘God’s Temporal Vengeance against Tyrants,
Slave-holders, and Oppressors’. It was published in the same year as the American
Declaration of Independence, but whilst Sharp sympathised with the American
Patriots, and embraced Enlightenment notions of benevolence and rights, his book
displayed an unfashionable preoccupation with divine wrath. Believing that national
crimes bring national punishments, Sharp insisted that slavery must be rejected if
God’s judgement was to be averted. He reminds us that the militant abolitionism
of late eighteenth-century Evangelicals (and Quakers) arose from their distinctive
combination of moderate Enlightenment values and Counter-Enlightenment
convictions. Whilst their opposition to the slave trade had roots in contemporary
moral philosophy, the urgency of their activism arose from a belief that the trade
was an abomination in the eyes of a just God – only swift and unconditional
repentance would restore Britain and America to divine favour.29
Sharp’s was a relatively lonely voice, but he was able to garner support from
John Wesley, who (following Whitefield’s death in 1770), was England’s most
renowned Evangelical preacher. By 1772 at the latest, Wesley was corresponding
with Benezet and Sharp, and praising the ‘honest Quaker’ for exposing ‘that
execrable sum of villainies, commonly called the Slave-trade’. According to one
historian, ‘the correspondence between Benezet, Sharp and Wesley was almost
certainly the most significant grouping in the early campaign against slavery’. 30 In
1774, he published his own Thoughts upon Slavery, a tract that went through four
editions in two years, becoming one of the most widely read books on the subject
in the 1770s. Other Methodists like John Fletcher and Thomas Vivian condemned
slavery in the same decade.
Birth of the national movement
It was not, however, until the 1780s that abolitionism became a national movement.
In 1783, Britons were shocked by the story of the slave ship Zong, whose captain
had ordered over 130 sick slaves thrown overboard for whose loss the ship owners
26 He is included in Lewis 1995 (Vol II: 1000).
Brown 2006, ch. 3 emphasises his High
Church background and his distance from
the Clapham Sect, but other historians stress
his Evangelical convictions: Anstey 1975:
158; Ditchfield ; Wallace 1998.
27
28
29
30
Equiano 2003: 328-30.
Woods 1967.
See Brown 2006: 174-76; Coffey 2007.
Carey 2003: 276.
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
105
claimed compensation from the insurers. The case was publicised by Equiano and
Sharp. At Cambridge University, the Vice-Chancellor Peter Peckard preached a
university sermon against the slave trade in 1784, and set a Latin essay competition
on the lawfulness of enslaving others by force in the following year. The winning
entry came from a student named Thomas Clarkson who was preparing for a
clerical career. But what began as a scholastic exercise soon became a consuming
passion, and Clarkson quickly emerged as a central figure in the abolitionist
movement.31 Quakers were once again at the heart of the action. In 1783, the
London Yearly Meeting petitioned Parliament on the issue and set up its own
Committee on the Slave Trade. In 1787, Quakers would reach beyond their own
ranks to establish a non-sectarian Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave
Trade, including Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson on the organizing
committee.
The Quaker initiative coincided with important developments among
Evangelical Anglicans. As the Evangelical movement burgeoned within the Church
and the nation, it grew in confidence and ambition. It is surely no coincidence that,
as Seymour Drescher observes, ‘the take-off of British abolitionism coincided
almost exactly with the revival of the British missionar y movement’. 32
Evangelicalism was now attracting elite lay converts who began to expand its vision.
In part, this may have been a generational shift: the generation of Walpole, for
whom politics had been a dirty business, was giving way to the generation of Pitt
the Younger, which was more likely to see politics as a moral vocation.33 But it
was also a result of a political crisis – the revolt of the American colonies – and
of a profound cultural shift during ‘the age of sensibility’.
Cowper, Teston and evangelical women
The new attitudes were reflected in the work of England’s most popular poet,
William Cowper, who also happened to be a close friend and collaborator of John
Newton. Cowper introduced stinging attacks on slavery and the slave trade into
his long meditative poems, ‘Charity’ (1782) and the ‘The Task’ (1785). In ‘Charity’,
he held out little hope for ‘merchants rich in cargoes of despair/Who drive a
loathsome traffic … And buy the muscles and the bones of man’.34 Among other
things, Cowper’s poems were subtle pieces of Evangelical propaganda, and they
would certainly have been read by cultured Evangelicals like Margaret Middleton.
Middleton was an accomplished painter and musician, who lived at Barham Court
in Teston, Kent, with her husband, Sir Charles (a leading naval official) and the
philanthropic Elizabeth Bouverie. Barham Court was to be the unlikely epicentre of
the new Evangelicalism, and these well-connected Evangelical women did much to
31 Clarkson’s religious identity is a matter of
some debate, for whilst he collaborated with
Evangelicals and Quakers, and was
sympathetic to both, he was not strictly
aligned with either. He is included in Lewis
1995 (‘While he worked closely with
evangelicals, it is difficult to identify him
with certainty as an evangelical although his
deathbed confession clearly fits the
evangelical stereotype: “All my works and
righteousness are as filthy rags. I trust only
in the Atonement, the sacrifice, the blood
shed on the cross for washing away my sins
and entrance into Heaven”’, Vol I: 288-29).
32 Drescher 1980: 47.
33 I owe this point to Mark Smith.
34 Basker 2002: 294-302. Cowper’s early
antislavery poetry is oddly overlooked in
Brown’s detailed analysis of the origins of
Evangelical abolitionism in Brown 2006, ch. 6.
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ANVIL Volume 24 No 2 2007
promote the idea of abolition among influential Anglicans. In 1791, Hannah More
told Margaret that ‘you have the first title to every prize on the whole slave subject’,
while another visitor to Barham Court later insisted that the ‘abolition of the slave
trade…was the work of a woman’ [his italics]. Middleton encouraged the campaigning
of the vicar of Teston, James Ramsay, who had witnessed the cruelties of slavery at
first hand in the Caribbean, and who published a series of informed critiques of the
slave trade between 1784 and his death in 1789. These were the first works to attract
the ire of the West Indian lobby in Britain, and to give the issue a national profile.
The two women also hosted a series of seminal meetings between 1786 and 1789,
which led to a strategy to put the campaign for abolition on the agenda of their fellow
Christians and of Parliament itself. It was here in 1786, that both Clarkson and
Wilberforce pledged themselves to work for abolition. Also present at these gatherings
were Hannah More and Beilby Porteus (the High Church bishop of Chester and then
London), both of whom would make important contributions to the campaign. In
1789, Wilberforce and his allies were ‘locked up’ at Barham Court planning their
parliamentary campaign. Hannah More, who loved her visits to the house, declared
that Teston would prove ‘the Runnymeade of the negroes’.35
As Christopher Brown has recently emphasised, the elite Evangelical Anglicans
at Barham Court were not simply interested in the physical welfare of black
Africans. They had other agendas too. Initially, their concern was with the promotion
of Christianity among the slaves. They believed that if the slave trade was
abolished, planters could no longer tolerate high mortality rates among their
existing slaves – they would be forced to treat them more humanely, and might
also allow missionaries to work among them. But the Evangelicals soon developed
wider concerns, partly in response to the nation’s crushing defeat in the American
War of Independence (1775-83). This had been Britain’s Vietnam, and with the
prestige and morale of the empire so badly battered, there was a desperate need
to recover national dignity and moral purpose. Starting from the premise that the
slave trade was a stain on the national character, an ‘iniquity’ that had provoked
divine wrath, they believed that abolition could rehabilitate the international
reputation of Britain, and re-establish the nation’s fractured relationship with God.
Abolition could serve as a wedge issue, one that would lend credibility to their
other campaigns for moral and spiritual uplift, and inject ethical and religious
seriousness into public life. As Brown observes, this marked a significant departure
from the strategy of earlier Evangelicals, who had concentrated their energies in
evangelism, and held out little hope for political activism. Yet the Teston set were
just as committed to the spread of ‘vital religion’ as their predecessors – they just
happened to believe that a Christian crusade against the slave trade would enhance
the profile and credibility of the Gospel.36
Evangelicals and the Abolitionist Crusade (1787-1794)
Wilberforce, Evangelical Anglicanism and Quakers
The emergence of Anglican abolitionism in the mid-1780s was vital to the success
of the Abolition Society. Abolitionism could no longer be dismissed as the cranky
concern of a marginalised sect; it was now a mainstream cultural and political
35 The definitive study of the Teston set is
Brown 2006, ch. 6.
36 See Brown 2006, passim and Coffey 2007.
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
107
phenomenon. Wilberforce was clearly the key player. A personal friend of the Prime
Minister William Pitt, he was well connected and well liked by the nation’s leading
politicians. He was also highly intelligent and very eloquent. His first major speech
against the slave trade in May 1789 was a three-and-a-half hour tour de force which
left veteran parliamentarians reaching for superlatives to describe the performance.
Edmund Burke, the finest orator in the House, declared that it was ‘equal to anything
he had heard of in modern oratory’.37 But besides his natural gifts, Wilberforce was
also fired by religious passion. Had he been converted to Evangelicalism in his
teens, he may not have cultivated friendship with Pitt or embarked on a political
career; but had he not experienced evangelical conversion in his twenties, he would
have lacked a burning sense of mission. As he wrote in his diary on 28 October
1787: ‘God Almighty has placed before me two great objects: the suppression of
the slave trade & the reformation of manners’.38
Recent scholarship has rightly emphasised that abolition was not a one-man
show (though who has seriously argued that it was?). Wilberforce relied on other
elite Evangelical Anglicans, and his own contribution was matched by Clarkson’s
Stakanonvite labours. Clarkson travelled 35,000 miles between 1787 and 1794 in
order to raise support for the campaign. He set up local branches, orchestrated
petitions, gathered evidence about the trade, organised eyewitness testimony to
Parliament, and still managed to find time to publish a series of influential books.39
But these Anglican abolitionists could hardly have achieved what they did without
the Quakers, who published most of the key abolitionist propaganda, and used their
networks to promote the cause across England.40
Moreover, the Evangelical Anglicans and Quakers at the heart of the campaign
were quickly inundated with support from all quarters of society. Politicians like
William Pitt, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox raised their voices against the
trade in Parliament; the master potter, Josiah Wedgwood, joined the Abolition
Committee and designed their famous seal (‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’);
literary figures like Coleridge and Southey wrote eloquent diatribes against the
trade; theatre managers put on performances of plays like Oroonoko to evoke
sympathy for slaves; black Londoners lobbied on behalf of their enslaved brethren;
urban radicals in Manchester and other towns promoted petitions; women
spearheaded the boycott of sugar produced on slave plantations. In 1789, over one
hundred petitions were sent to Parliament; in 1792, over five hundred. By that stage,
at least 300,000 Britons had stopped consuming sugar and rum. The nation was
swept by a tide of moral fervour. Abolition had become the first great popular
human rights campaign of the modern era.41
A popular movement
There was nothing like this anywhere else in Europe. France had its own abolitionist
organisation, but one with little popular support. Only in Britain (and in the northern
37 The speech is anthologised in MacArthur
1995 and discussed in Bragg 2006.
38 There are many biographies of Wilberforce,
but see especially Wilberforce and
Wilberforce 1838; Pollock 1977; Hague 2007.
For perceptive observations on the secrets of
his success see Wolffe 2004: 28-32.
39 His role is vividly described in Hochschild
2005, chs 6 & 8.
40 The Quakers’ role is examined in Jennings
1997.
41 See Oldfield 1995.
108
ANVIL Volume 24 No 2 2007
United States) did abolitionists manage to inspire a groundswell of public agitation.
There are various reasons for this, but Britain’s distinctive religious culture was
surely one of the most important.42 As James Walvin observes, ‘it was, from the
first, a form of grass roots Christian outrage: churches, chapels, and ministers rallied
their flocks to direct their voice to Parliament’.43 Quakers played a crucial role, but
the campaign received unstinting support from other denominations. Many
Christians who threw their weight behind abolition were not Evangelical. Unitarians
like the scientist Joseph Priestley and the Manchester radical Thomas Cooper were
active abolitionists. Latitudinarian and High Church Anglicans often supported the
campaign too – in 1807, the bishops in the House of Lords (none of whom was
firmly aligned with the Evangelical party) would vote ‘virtually en bloc’ for
abolition.44 Cambridge University’s leading abolitionist, Peter Peckard, was decidedly
Latitudinarian in his churchmanship, though as Master of Magdalene College he
fostered a significant number of Evangelical fellows and students.45 In the Church
of Scotland, many clergy in the Moderate Party promoted petitions to Parliament
and letters to the press.
The Christian case
Moreover, when one compares the sermons and tracts of Evangelicals with those
of other Christian abolitionists, the arguments and texts they employ are strikingly
similar. Both emphasised the unity of humanity – Africans and Europeans were
‘of one blood’, brethren fashioned in the image of their Father God. Both invoked
the principle of liberty – ‘deliverance for the captives’ was on the agenda of Jesus,
as well as being mandated by modern notions of natural rights. Both insisted on
the necessity of benevolence, a cardinal virtue of British moral philosophy in the
eighteenth century, but also a biblical requirement – ‘love your neighbour’ and the
Golden Rule were favourite abolitionist texts. Finally, Evangelical and other
Christians warned that persistence in the slave trade would provoke ‘national
punishment’ from above. Christian abolitionists – whether they identified with
Evangelicalism or not – displayed a high regard for the authority of Scripture and
a discriminating attitude towards Enlightenment thought. They repudiated the
radical Enlightenment’s denial of monogenesis and providential intervention in
histor y, while fusing the fashionable language of the moderate Christian
Enlightenment with the ancient teachings of the Bible.46
Yet Evangelicals held these common biblical convictions with a peculiar
intensity, and they assumed a correspondingly high profile within the campaign. It
is striking that parliamentary critics of abolitionists labelled them ‘enthusiasts’,
‘fanatics’, and ‘methodists’. Historians have long acknowledged the central role of
Evangelicals, focussing on the elite Anglicans around Wilberforce, but abolitionism
attracted the support of many other Evangelicals across Britain.
Scotland
Scotland has often been silently omitted from the history of abolition, but Scottish
Enlightenment thinkers like William Robertson and James Beattie were a source
of inspiration to Wilberforce and his allies, and Scottish Evangelicals were also
42 See Drescher 1980, 1986, 1994a.
43 Walvin 2007a.
44 Anstey 1975: 393.
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
109
deeply committed to the cause from the late 1780s. The Popular Party in the Kirk
eagerly promoted petitions and backed the General Assembly’s deliverance in 1792
that the slave trade was ‘incompatible with the great principles of religion and
morality’. Clarkson’s counterpart in Scotland, William Dickson, noted that the
leading minister of the Popular Party, John Erskine, was ‘zealous, well informed
and inquisitive’ about the subject. Evangelicals from the various Seceder
denominations also spoke up against the slave trade. Moreover, London Scots like
James Ramsay, Zachary Macaulay and James Stephen would play a central role
in the abolitionist activities of the Evangelical networks at Teston or Clapham.47
Evangelical Dissent
The influence of Evangelical Dissenters would reach its peak many years later in
the early 1830s, when their agitation helped to precipitate the overthrow of slavery
itself in the British empire. But Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians were heavily
involved in the earlier assault on the slave trade. The General Baptists were the
first religious group (other than the Quakers) to announce their support – in June
1787, their annual meeting sent a deputation to the Abolition Committee led by
the renowned evangelist Dan Taylor.48 Particular (or Calvinistic) Baptists were just
as enthusiastic. In Bristol, second only to Liverpool as a slave trading port, the
preachers Caleb Evans and Robert Hall wrote to the press and raised funds for
the Abolition Committee.49 Other leading Baptist ministers, like James Dore in
Southwark, Robert Robinson in Cambridge, and Abraham Booth in London,
published influential sermons against the trade.50
Methodists too were keen participants in the abolitionist movement. John
Wesley wrote to pledge his support in August 1787, and in the following year he
provoked a disturbance by preaching an abolitionist sermon in Bristol. He died in
March 1791, at the height of the agitation, with the cause still prominent in his
thoughts. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was one of the last books he read, and
his final letter was addressed to Wilberforce: ‘Go on, in the name of God and in
the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the
sun) shall vanish away before it’.51 A year later, Samuel Bradburn, known as ‘the
Demosthenes of Methodism’ for his oratorical powers, published a powerful address
on the evil of the slave trade. He claimed that ‘he had never conversed on the
subject with but one Methodist in the nation, who did not avowedly oppose the
slave trade’. In Manchester, hundreds of Methodists had signed the city’s great
abolitionist petition ‘in the Chapel at the Communion Table, on the Lord’s Day’.
Bradburn exhorted his readers to petition Parliament, pray for abolition, and boycott
West Indian sugar.52
African writers: Cugoano and Equiano
Vincent Carretta has noted that ‘Almost all the Afro-British writers whose religious
beliefs we know were Methodist members of the Church of England, embracing
45 Walsh and Hyam 1998.
46 Coffey 2006, available online at
www.jubilee-centre.org/cambridge_papers/
index.php.
47 See Whyte 2006.
48 Clarkson 1808, vol I: 442-43.
49
50
51
52
See Hayden 2001 and Whelan 2000.
Dore 1788; Robinson 1788; Booth 1792.
Carey 2003: 277-78.
Bradburn 1792: 13-24.
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ANVIL Volume 24 No 2 2007
the predestinarian Calvinism preached by George Whitefield and the clergymen
associated with his aristocratic patron, the Countess of Huntingdon’.53 The irony
here, of course, is that Whitefield and Huntingdon had signally failed to speak out
against the slave trade, despite being prompted by Benezet. But by the 1780s, some
of their African followers were becoming politicised, and finding that Scripture
spoke of physical as well as spiritual liberation. In 1787, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano
published a powerful abolitionist work, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery.
Cugoano was a close friend of Olaudah Equiano, and both men enjoyed a public
profile as eloquent correspondents to the press, signing themselves in joint letters
as ‘Sons of Africa’. Equiano even addressed a personal petition to Queen
Charlotte.54 But it was his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789) which was
to prove most influential. The book went through nine editions in English over the
next five years, and attracted an array of elite subscribers, from the Prince of Wales
to Josiah Wedgwood. A bootleg American edition was published in New York in
1791, and there were translations into Dutch (1790), German (1792) and Russian
(1794). Equiano’s book not only assisted the campaign for abolition, it also made
him a prosperous man.55
Among the subscribers to the first edition were some of the leading lights of
Anglican abolitionism: Elizabeth Bouverie, Thomas Clarkson and his brother John,
Sir Richard Hill, Sir Charles and Lady Middleton, Hannah More, Beilby Porteus,
Granville Sharp, Henry Thornton and John Wesley.56 Most of these figures were
closely identified with Evangelicalism, and it is easy to see why Equiano’s narrative
appealed to them. Besides being an eloquent first-hand testimony to the evils of
the slave trade, it was also a compelling evangelical conversion narrative. The title
page depicted Equiano holding a Bible open at Acts 4:12: ‘Neither is there salvation
in any other: for there is no other name under heaven given among men, whereby
we must be saved’. His autobiography traced the hand of Providence in his life,
protecting him from death during his many voyages, and drawing him towards
Christ. His was a story of redemption – it told of how he had saved money to
purchase his freedom from physical slavery, and how Christ had redeemed him
from spiritual bondage. Chapter 10, which described his encounter with Calvinistic
Methodists and his subsequent conversion, culminated with a long poem (or hymn)
recounting the tale of his spiritual transformation.
Of all the texts published by abolitionists before 1807, Equiano’s is now by far
the most famous. He himself has become an icon for black Britons, Africans and
African-Americans, and The Interesting Narrative is widely taught in schools and
universities across the world. Its hero appears as the representative African in the
film Amazing Grace, and his portrait (together with that of Wilberforce) adorns the
front cover of the government’s bicentenary booklet. Yet his contribution to the
cause was often not acknowledged by white abolitionists. In Amazing Grace the
movie, Clarkson (played by Rufus Sewell) visits Equiano’s grave in 1807 to celebrate
abolition in the presence of his deceased friend; in Clarkson’s History of the Abolition
(1808), Equiano was conspicuous by his absence. Only in recent decades have
53 Caretta’s ‘Introduction’ in Equiano 2003:
xviii.
54 Equiano’s correspondence is published in
Equiano 2003: 327-71.
55 See Carretta 2005.
56 Equiano 2003: 317-22.
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
111
historians begun to do justice to the contribution of abolitionists who were not
educated, white, middle-class men.
Women abolitionists
We have, for example, learned more about women’s place within the movement.
As we noted above, Elizabeth Bouverie and Margaret Middleton were unsung
heroes, whose behind-the-scenes lobbying helped to launch the abolition campaign
among Anglican Evangelicals. But their friend Hannah More played a more public
role. More was already an acclaimed writer by the 1780s, when she identified openly
with Evangelicalism. She had known the Middletons since 1776, and later became
a close friend of Newton and Wilberforce. Her poem, Slavery (1788), was written
to coincide with the centenary of the Glorious Revolution, and designed to raise
support for Wilberforce’s first abolition bill. It exposed the gulf between Britain’s
self-image as a land of freedom, and the nation’s systematic enslavement of
Africans. More canvassed MPs by letter and in person, and raised the subject of
the slave trade at fashionable dinner parties.57
Evangelical Anglicans: Gisborne, Cowper and Newton
Other Evangelical Anglicans assisted the cause in significant ways. Thomas
Gisborne, a clergyman and close friend of Wilberforce, hosted strategy meetings
at Yoxall Lodge in Staffordshire, and published his own abolitionist tract in 1792.58
William Cowper composed several new poems against the slave trade, including
‘The Negro’s Complaint’, a sonnet to Wilberforce, and the biting satire, ‘Pity for
the Poor Africans’:
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum;
For how could we do without Sugar and Rum?
Especially Sugar so needful we see;
What, give up our Desserts, our Coffee, and Tea?59
Cowper’s mentor, John Newton, also backed the campaign by finally speaking
out against the slave trade. His personal journey personified the moral pilgrimage
of the nation and of the Christian community – blinded to the sinfulness of the
trade in the 1750s, he saw the light three decades later. To his credit, he tried to
make amends. His most important contribution was to persuade the newly
converted Wilberforce to remain in Parliament, and use his position to fight for
good causes. But he also published his Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade
(1788). Although this pamphlet bore a biblical text on its title page, Newton
realised that his value to the campaign lay in his past as a slave trader, rather
than in his present role as a preacher. Even here, he held back from telling the
full truth about his old life, observing that some captains used thumbscrews on
their slaves, but omitting to say that he had done so himself. Nevertheless, the
tract was a powerful indictment of slave trafficking, and Newton was able to give
the substance of his evidence to a special parliamentary committee established
to investigate the trade.60
57 See More 1788; Stott 2003: 87-95; Skedd in
ODNB.
58 Gisborne 1792.
59 Basker 2002: 297.
60 See Walvin 2007b: 83-102.
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Political failure
The committee produced a major report that provided the abolitionists with potent
ammunition for their case.61 Wilberforce brought his Abolition Bill to the Commons
in April 1791, but was defeated by 163 votes to 88. When he tried again in 1792,
at the height of popular agitation, he was outmanoeuvred by the Home Secretary,
Henry Dundas, who won parliamentary approval for a gradual abolition bill that
promised much but delivered nothing. By this stage, events abroad were derailing
the campaign. The French Revolution created fear of popular politics and suspicion
of abolitionists and their talk of liberty, equality and brotherhood. The slave
rebellion in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) in 1791
only reinforced the conservative backlash. By 1794, the public outcry against the
slave trade had died down. The Abolition Committee met less often, and practically
disbanded after 1795. It was all too much for Thomas Clarkson, who had worn
himself out with obsessive research and campaigning. He retired from public life
in 1794, his ‘nervous system … almost shattered to pieces’.62
Wilberforce, the Clapham Circle and Abolition (1794-1807)
‘The Clapham Sect’
Wilberforce was in a stronger position to ride out this storm. In 1792, his friend
Henry Thornton had invited him to move to Clapham, where he had recently
purchased a small estate, Battersea Rise. Wilberforce agreed, and before long the
two men attracted a galaxy of highly-placed friends to join them. They thought of
themselves as the Clapham ‘circle’, but contemporaries called them ‘the Saints’,
and they would later be dubbed ‘the Clapham Sect’. Most of the group worshipped
at Holy Trinity Clapham, where John Venn was the Rector from 1792.63
Among those gathered at Clapham, a number made particularly valuable
contributions to the campaign for abolition. Henry Thornton was a banker, a
distinguished political economist and MP for Southwark, and one of Wilberforce’s
most valued confidants. William Smith, the only non-Evangelical in the group (and
a Unitarian to boot), was another MP who worked closely with Wilberforce
throughout these years, providing a useful link to Whigs and radicals.64 James
Stephen moved to Clapham in 1797, after a dissolute early life, a spell in the
Caribbean, and an evangelical conversion. A brilliant legal mind, he would help to
mastermind abolition.65 Zachary Macaulay, who had also seen slavery at first hand
in the Caribbean, was chosen by Wilberforce and Thornton to take over from John
Clarkson as governor of Sierra Leone in the 1790s; he returned to England and
moved to Clapham in 1799, becoming editor of the Christian Observer, the house
journal of these Evangelicals. His encyclopaedic knowledge of slavery and the slave
trade was legendary among his friends, for when information was needed,
61 Some of Newton’s evidence is cited in
Abstract of the Evidence, contained in the
Report of the Lords of the Committee of
Council, relative to the Slave-Trade,
London, 1790; Extracts from the
Evidence delivered before a Committee of
the House of Commons … on the part of
the Petitioners for the Abolition of the
Slave Trade, London, 1791.
62
63
64
65
Clarkson 1808, vol. II: 469.
The fullest study remains Howse 1953.
See Davis 1971.
The turmoil and scandal of his early life are
described in graphic detail in Stephen 1954.
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
113
Wilberforce quipped, ‘Let’s look it out in Macaulay’. Together these men formed a
formidable team. As John Wolffe has written, their campaign against the slave trade
‘exploited their respective talents: Wilberforce’s parliamentary eloquence, Stephen’s
legal acumen, Thornton’s business skill, and Macaulay’s capacity for gathering and
ordering evidence’.66
Rejection and revival
Yet they had to be patient and tenacious. Wilberforce brought abolition bills to
Parliament year after year between 1794 and 1799, only to see them rejected. The
House of Lords seemed resolutely opposed, as were George III, his son the Duke
of Clarence, and Admiral Lord Nelson, who condemned ‘the damnable doctrine
of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies’. Pitt, whose cabinet had always been split
on the issue, was now less supportive. The French and Haitian Revolutions had
made the House of Commons increasingly reactionary, and even Wilberforce (who
backed the current crackdown on political radicalism) had been labelled a ‘Jacobin’.
Between 1800 and 1803, he introduced no further abolition bills to Parliament,
waiting for a more opportune moment. He was himself rather weary and
disillusioned with both the public and the politicians. In February 1804, he wrote
to Hannah More: ‘Alas! the tales of horror, which once caused so many tears to
flow, are all forgotten! I am grown to think that sensibility is one of the most cruel
of all qualities’.67 The British were suffering from compassion fatigue.
But ‘the Saints’ remained watchful. They saw signs that events were beginning
to turn their way. Following the Union with Ireland in 1801, the new Irish MPs
constituted a bloc sympathetic to abolition. The French had abolished their slave
trade following the catastrophic slave rebellion in Haiti, but Napoleon reinstituted
it in 1802. British abolition could now be presented as a patriotic measure – a means
of shaming the French, and boosting Britain’s reputation. In May 1804, the Abolition
Committee met for the first time since 1797, with Wilberforce and Sharp meeting
with eight other Quakers and Evangelicals. James Stephen and Zachary Macaulay
were soon added to the committee, and Thomas Clarkson emerged from retirement
to take an active part. The committee was increasingly dominated by the Anglican
Evangelicals, who were better placed than the Quakers to drive abolition through
Parliament. Once again, appeals were made to the public. Clarkson set off on the
road again, and Macaulay published a pamphlet entitled The Horrors of Slavery
(1805).68
Yet this strategy had been tried before, without success. Clarkson worried that
Macaulay’s moralistic assault on slavery risked alienating supporters, and pointed
out that in 1787 the Society had deliberately decided to limit its focus to abolition
of the slave trade. This had never satisfied Granville Sharp, who like many other
abolitionists thought slavery itself intolerable. But it reflects the caution and
pragmatism of Wilberforce and Clarkson, who recognised the advantages of setting
achievable objectives. Both men also knew that it was not enough to denounce
the trade as immoral and irreligious. MPs were a hard-headed bunch, and the
abolitionists had sought to persuade them with hard evidence and facts. They had
set out to demonstrate the ‘impolicy’ of the trade, not simply its ‘injustice’ and
66 Wolffe in ODNB, online edition.
67 Wilberforce and Wilberforce 1840, vol. I: 299.
68 Jennings 1997: 99-104.
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‘impiety’. Atrocity stories about the treatment of black slaves had their place, but
so did mortality statistics recording the appalling death rates among slave ship
crews. Clarkson’s books and Wilberforce’s speeches relied less on religious appeals
than on secular arguments. David Brion Davis is right to assert that ‘religion was
the central concern of all the British abolitionist leaders’;69 yet they were well aware
that religious considerations weighed less heavily with others. Not content with
salving their own consciences by denouncing the trade, Wilberforce was determined
to do whatever was necessary to abolish it.
It was James Stephen who struck on the ingenious tactic of introducing abolition
by stealth. In 1805, he had published an anonymous work, entitled The War in
Disguise, which highlighted the fact that enemy colonies were being supplied by
ships flying neutral colours. Stephen argued that Britain should cut off this line of
supply in order to defend its national interest. The book barely mentioned the slave
trade, but Stephen knew that much of the British slave trade was carried out by
ships in neutral flags, and that much of it took slaves to foreign colonies or to
recently captured possessions. In 1806, he persuaded Wilberforce that a bill against
the foreign slave trade, introduced by the government not by the abolitionists, would
end much of the traffic. Following Pitt’s recent death, a new ministry had been
established headed by Lord Grenville and Charles James Fox. Firmly opposed to
the trade, they approved the plan, and Stephen duly drafted the legislation. In April,
the Foreign Slave Bill was debated in both Houses, though few MPs or Lords
bothered to turn up. Wilberforce adopted a low profile, aware that his ‘suspicious
face’ would give the game away. He warned Grenville to argue on the basis of
national interest alone, to avoid the ‘mistaken idea that it rests on general Abolition
principles or is grounded on justice and inhumanity, an imputation which I am aware
would prove fatal to it’. The proslavery Liverpool MP Colonel Tarleton warned that
the abolitionists were ‘now coming in by a side wind’, but most of the West Indians
believed that the bill would simply undermine their French and Dutch rivals. In
May, the Bill was passed into law. According to Roger Anstey, it would wipe out
between two-thirds and three-quarters of the British slave trade.70
Having achieved so much by working undercover, the abolitionists resurfaced
and moved in for the kill. They announced their intention of introducing a bill for
the abolition of the slave trade to the British West Indian colonies, and published
a new raft of pamphlets against the slave trade. Perhaps the most striking feature
of these works is their emphasis on averting divine judgement on Britain.
Evangelical abolitionists construed the national interest in theological as much as
in secular terms – abolition alone would wash away Britain’s blood guilt and restore
the nation’s relationship with God. Granville Sharp, who had argued like this since
the 1770s, returned to the theme in two tracts published in 1806 and 1807. He
interpreted hurricanes on Caribbean plantations as judgements from God ‘to blast
the enemies of law and righteousness’, and warned that the persistent toleration
of slavery ‘must finally draw down the Divine vengeance upon our state and
nation!’.71 In The Dangers of the Country, published in January 1807, James Stephen
highlighted the threat from Napoleonic France and outlined a plan of action. At
69 Davis 1984: 139.
70 See Anstey 1975: 365-78.
71 Cited in Davis 1962: 219.
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
115
one level, this was the work of a practical politician, packed with facts and figures,
and offering a seven-point plan for strengthening Britain’s military. But the book
culminated with a passionate, sixty-page call for national ‘reformation’. Stephen
argued that the crisis confronting Britain was a sign of God’s anger against the
nation for its part in the slave trade. Despite being shown the horrors of the trade
in 1792, Parliament had allowed it to continue for fourteen long years. God had
already punished the French for their part in the trade by sending them a bloody
revolution and a dictator, and the British too were in imminent danger of divine
vengeance. The slave trade was ‘a national inquity’, ‘a most heinous offence, not
only against man, but against God’. Scripture and History showed that in ‘the course
of Providence towards nations’, ‘perseverance in guilt’ precedes ‘the scourge’. By
persisting in this ‘system of gigantic guilt’, Britain was toying with disaster, and
offering a ‘grand provocation’ to the Almighty.72
Wilberforce concurred. His Letter on the Slave Trade (1807) marshalled a variety
of secular arguments (economic, political and humanitarian), but his case was
topped and tailed by an appeal to the fear of God. Indeed, he frankly declared that
‘of all the motives’ that impelled him, concern for the prospects of his country
was ‘the greatest force’. God governed the world, and ‘the sufferings of nations
are to be regarded as the punishment of national crimes; their decline and fall, as
the execution of His sentence’. Since Britain had persisted in ‘fraud, oppression
and cruelty’, despite being clearly convicted of the evil of the trade, ‘have we not
abundant cause for serious apprehension?’ To continue any longer in such crimes,
after ‘the fullest knowledge and the loudest warnings, must infallibly bring down
upon us the heaviest judgements of the Almighty’. ‘We have been eminently
blessed’, Wilberforce concluded in his final sentence, ‘we have been long spared;
let us not presume too far on the forbearance of the Almighty’.73
Abolition became a key issue at the general election in the winter of 1806-07,
and public opinion was mobilised once again to good effect.74 A significant number
of MPs pledged themselves to support abolition. The Prime Minister Grenville made
meticulous preparations among peers, who had previously been the main roadblock
to abolition. He introduced the bill to the Lords with a stirring moralistic speech,
and the House agreed to its second reading. But Wilberforce was still cautious.
Although the slave trade had already been eroded by numerous minor pieces of
legislation, Wilberforce had suffered numerous defeats, and the opinion of many
MPs was unknown. In the event, the crucial debate in the Commons on 23 February
1807 was to be a triumph. The bill was introduced into the House, not by
Wilberforce, but by Lord Howick, who denounced the slave trade as ‘contrary to
the fundamental principles of Christianity, irreconcileable with that summary of
Christian duty, “to do unto others, as you would they should do unto you”. Many
other speakers invoked Christian ideals, and Wilberforce was praised repeatedly
for making ‘this signal act of mercy and justice the leading feature of his public
life’. He himself spoke at the close of the debate, delighted that MPs had been so
determined ‘to assert the rights of the weak against the strong; to vindicate the
cause of the oppressed’.75 The Solicitor-General, Samuel Romilly, contrasted
72 Stephen 1807: 164-227.
73 Wilberforce 1807: 4-5, 348-50.
74 Drescher 1994b.
75 Parliamentary Debates, ed. W. Cobbett and T.
Hansard, 41 vols, 1803-20, vol VIII, cols
945-995, quotations at cols 947, 967, 994.
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Napoleon, who was responsible for massive bloodshed, with Wilberforce, who could
enjoy the sleep of the just ‘having preserved so many millions of his fellow
creatures’. The House rose in spontaneous applause, and then burst into three
hurrahs. It was an unprecedented scene. Wilberforce ‘sat bent in his chair, his head
in his hands, and the tears streaming down his face’.76 When the House divided,
the slave trade lobby was routed. 283 voted for abolition, a mere 16 against. The
bill received the royal assent on 25 March 1807 and passed into law.
Conclusion
The 1807 Act was a stunning achievement for the abolitionists, but it was far from
being the end of the story. Illegal slave trading continued after 1807, and African
slaves were still being grievously exploited on Britain’s Caribbean plantations. It
was not until 1833-34 that Parliament legislated to emancipate Britain’s 800,000
slaves, and even then they had to serve an apprenticeship until 1838. Evangelicals
had a major part to play in emancipation too. In Jamaica, missionaries highlighted
the injustices of slavery, and the Baptist preacher Sam Sharpe led a slave revolt
that threw the viability of the institution into question. Wilberforce’s anointed
successor, Thomas Fowell Buxton, led the cause in Parliament, and Evangelical
Dissenters orchestrated massive antislavery petitions.77 By the 1880s, slavery had
been extinguished in the southern United States and across most of the earth. ‘From
any historical perspective’, writes the pre-eminent historian of slavery, David Brion
Davis, ‘this was a stupendous transformation’.78 Various factors had combined to
make this possible, but it could not have happened without the abolitionists.
Evangelicalism was one of the driving forces behind British and American
abolitionism, and the Christian crusade against the oppression of black Africans would
have important religious consequences. The Teston set had hoped that a righteous
assault on the slave trade would infuse godly values into public life. There is good
reason to think they were right. According to the eminent historian of slavery and
abolition, David Brion Davis, the abolitionist campaign helped to rehabilitate
Christianity’s reputation as a force for human progress after the critique of the secular
Enlightenment. When Thomas Clarkson wrote his two-volume History of the
movement in 1808, he credited the overthrow of the slave trade to the influence of
Christian faith.79 The rise of godly abolitionism reflected the growing ambition and
dynamism of evangelical religion, and probably enhanced its credibility. The success
of Wilberforce and his allies was a powerful testimony to the transformative power
of the Gospel, and heralded the emergence of Evangelicalism as a major cultural
force.80 In the United States, however, slavery was to prove a deeply divisive issue
among Christians, one that separated black from white, North from South. The
resurgence of militant abolitionism in the 1830s would help to put Northern and
Southern Christians on a collision course, leading to the great denominational schisms
of the 1840s, and finally contributing to the American Civil War.81
This whole complex story is one worth pondering. For the century and a half
between the 1730s and the 1860s, the history of Anglo-American Evangelicalism
76 Pollock 1977: 211; Howse 1953: 63.
77 See Wolffe 2006: 193-97.
78 Davis 1984: 108.
79 See Davis 1984, Part II: ‘Redeeming
Christianity’s Reputation’.
80 See Bradley 1976.
81 See Wolffe 2006: 197-201; Carwardine 1993.
John Coffey Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce
117
was intertwined with the history of black slavery. White Evangelicals were often
indifferent to the sufferings of African slaves, and even produced trenchant
defences of enslavement, especially in the antebellum American South. At the very
same time, black peoples across the Atlantic world turned to Evangelical religion
for succour and salvation. And Evangelicals (both black and white) were at the
very heart of the campaigns for abolition and emancipation. It is a story that should
disturb and challenge, chasten and inspire.
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