As Palmerston projected his new world vision, at home he backed reform and abolition, which were now becoming inevitable.
RATHER DIE THAN LIVE AS A SLAVE: DADDY SHARPE AND ABOLITION
In December 1831, 60,000 Jamaican slaves rebelled, led by a captivating Baptist millenarian preacher, Samuel ‘Daddy’ Sharpe, ‘the most intelligent, remarkable slave, his fine sinewy frame handsomely moulded’, recalled a missionary, with ‘an eye whose brilliancy was most dazzling’. Only fourteen whites were killed but, aided as usual by the Maroons, whom planters paid by the numbers of black ears delivered, the Christmas Rebellion was crushed. Six hundred slaves died in battle or were murdered by planters, 340 sentenced to death, some just for stealing a pig or a cow. ‘I’d rather die upon yonder gallows,’ declared Sharpe, ‘than live as a slave.’
As Grey appointed a committee of inquiry filled with slave owners, rioters demanded electoral reform and attacked Wellington’s mansion. On 7 June 1832, Grey and Palmerston passed the Reform Act, a partial measure that raised the electorate by 250,000 voters to around 650,000 – almost the same number as the Caribbean slaves whose liberation became the issue in the general election at the end of that year. Young William Gladstone denounced abolition, arguing that slavery was ‘not necessarily an evil’, and claimed that the conditions of slaves were no worse than those of child labourers in England, while liberation would ‘exchange the evils now affecting the negro for others which are weightier’. The king, who had visited slave plantations as a sailor, also insisted that the ‘state of the negroes’ was ‘humble happiness’.
Yet, horrified by the slave rebellions, the reformed Parliament finally had a majority for abolition. Grey’s colonial secretary, Edward Stanley, Lancashire grandee, future earl of Derby, later thrice prime minister, promised abolition ‘without palliative or compromise’. But if it was to pass, it required
The Slavery Abolition Act had its third reading in the House of Commons in August 1833, just after William Wilberforce died, and came into force a year later. But it was so flawed that some abolitionists contemplated voting against.
The compromise egregiously enriched slave owners for owning humans, yet without the compensation it would not have passed. Slaves became indentured ‘apprentices’ for six years before full liberation. The slave owners, who varied from titled grandees to persons of colour, a quarter of them women, were, for example, paid £20 a slave in Jamaica, £15 in Guiana, a total of £15 million.* Sir John Gladstone received the biggest payment, £106,769 for his 2,508 slaves, and his son William, the future prime minister, acknowledged abolition: ‘God prosper it.’*
Yet not everyone was delighted by abolition. In Africa many rulers obstinately resisted the end of this profitable trade and, strangely, abolition coincided with an intensification of conflict and of slavery itself across the continent.
THE FEMALE FIGHTERS OF DAHOMEY, THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH, THE CALIPH OF SOKOTO AND COMMANDANT PRETORIUS
Four years after abolition but out of British reach, the caliph of Sokoto, Muhammad Bello, died, leaving a new empire that was now the second largest slave state in world history with around 2.5 million slaves – compared to 3.5 million in the largest, the USA. Bello’s father, Usman dan Fodio, a tall, charismatic Hausa born in Gobir (Nigeria), a Muslim city, had in 1774 at the age of twenty launched a jihad, inspired by mystical trances and visions, going on to conquer the largest empire in sub-Saharan Africa and in 1803 declaring himself the caliph. On his death in 1817, his son Bello continued the holy war, expanding from northern Nigeria to Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Niger.
Wars between African polities continued as they fought and expanded, no different from Eurasian states; wars captured slaves, who were less easy to export, creating a surplus. ‘After abolition,’ writes John Reader, ‘the use of slaves in Africa became more common than ever before and enslavement actually increased.’
Further south, King Ghezo of Dahomey, assisted by the notorious ‘viceroy of Ouidah’ and his female army, resisted abolition. One visitor to Ghezo’s palace in the capital Abomey passed ‘three human heads … the blood still oozing’ on each side of the doorway. ‘The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people,’ Ghezo told British envoys. ‘It’s the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.’
