The World полностью

In 1778, France was trading 13,000 Africans annually to the Caribbean; Britain was far ahead, trading 80,000. In both countries, a growing section of the elite was appalled by slavery, though the slave-owning lobby known as the Interest remained extremely powerful. In France the movement would be backed by the first prince of the blood, in London by the prime minister himself.

On 12 May 1787, at Holwood House, Pitt’s suburban home in Bromley, the twenty-seven-year-old prime minister sat under a tree chatting with two MPs, his cousin William Grenville and William Wilberforce, a rumpled Yorkshire merchant’s son. Wilberforce had been Pitt’s friend at Cambridge and together they had gone on a Grand Tour of Europe. It says something about the tininess of the oligarchy of merchants and landowners who ruled the industrializing nation that both Pitt and Grenville were the sons of prime ministers, and both would head governments themselves. ‘I remember a conversation with Mr Pitt,’ recalled Wilberforce, ‘under the root of an old tree.’

‘Wilberforce,’ said Pitt, ‘why don’t you give notice of a motion on the subject of the Slave Trade?’

Wilberforce had been recruited to the abolition campaign by a Cambridge contemporary, the Reverend Thomas Clarkson, who visited him weekly.

The campaign had been gathering momentum since 1765 when a slave named Jonathan Strong, brought to London from Barbados, was beaten by his master, a lawyer, David Lisle, and left to die, but was spotted and rescued by a remarkable doctor, Granville Sharp, a civil servant and member of a talented family of accomplished professionals and amateur musicians. Sharp threatened to charge the slave master with assault if he tried to repossess Strong. Sharp won Strong’s freedom, though the Barbadian died at twenty-five, probably of his injuries. Sharp began to campaign against ‘the injustice and dangerous tendency of tolerating slavery’. But the lord chief justice, William Murray, earl of Mansfield, tried to avoid any change that would challenge the ownership of property until in 1772 he finally ruled that the Interest could no longer enforce slavery in Britain.^*

Then in 1781 an atrocious case intensified anti-slavery feeling. A Liverpudlian slave ship, the Zong, owned by William Gregson, a mayor of Liverpool and slaving mogul, sailed from Cape Coast Castle, the RAC headquarters (Ghana), with 442 slaves crammed into its hold, double the number for which it was designed. Sixty-two Africans died at sea. When water and supplies ran out with disease rife, the captain, aware that slaves who died onshore could not be claimed on insurance, murdered 142 men and women by throwing them into the sea. Another ten killed themselves. The murders allowed Gregson to declare that the slaves had ‘perished just as a cargo of goods had perished’, claiming £30 per drowned slave from the insurance. It is likely that such murders and insurance payments were common, but this time the story was spotted by a freed slave, Olaudah Equiano, an abolitionist campaigner, whose autobiography Interesting Narrative charted his kidnapping from Benin and enslavement in America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia, traded by three owners, until he emerged free in 1780s London.

Starting in 1783, Equiano and Sharp publicized the outrage. The first trial found in favour of the slave traders, but when the insurers challenged this, Mansfield gave an ambiguous judgment, acknowledging property rights while ruling on a technicality that the insurers were not liable.

Ten days after Pitt’s conversation with Wilberforce, on 22 May 1787, he joined Clarkson, along with Sharp and Equiano, at the first meeting of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, funded by the designer Josiah Wedgwood, along with other radical entrepreneurs, often Dissenters.^* Wilberforce would lead the campaign in Parliament, tabling his first bill in 1791. His strategy was to abolish the trade first, avoiding the issue of how to confiscate human property.^* The abolitionists were vigorously opposed by the Interest, led by George Hibbert MP, Jamaican slave trader and builder of the West India Docks in London, but also a botanist, antiquarian and founder of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, who called the slave trade ‘indispensable’, explaining that ‘The colonies would not exist without the African trade. The Manchester & Sheffield Manufactories would instantly go to ruin & their people set a starving.’