The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783-1807

Judith Jennings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317791867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This study presents new information about the four Quaker businessmen who helped found the London Abolition Committee in 1787 and remained active in the late anti-slave trade movement throughout their lifetimes. Drawing on previously unused primary sources, the study traces the close personal, business, social and religious ties binding the men together and shaping their abolition activities and arguments. By closely examining the lives of Joseph Woods, James Philips, George Harrison and Samuel Hoare, the study presents a new view of the factors shaping the arguments and strategies of abolitionism in Britain.

1
Four Merchants and Philosophers in 1783

Joseph Woods was born on 19 September 1738 in Bartholomew Lane by the Exchange in the City of London. He was the first son of Edward Woods and his second wife, Sarah Neale. Edward Woods kept a pastry shop on the corner of Bartholomew Lane and was a freeman member of the company of vintners. Edward also owned two houses at Winchmore Hill, a London suburb. Joseph Woods later recalled spending 'a considerable part' of his 'early days' at his parents' home in Winchmore Hill.¹

Joseph Woods and his parents were Quakers, like their parents before them.² Quakerism began, as religious historian William Braithwaite shows, in 1647 when George Fox felt called 'to declare the truth' that the inner light of salvation is present in every woman and man. Fox named those who shared his view 'Friends', and by 1652 meetings of Friends were being held in Yorkshire. In the next few years, meetings of Friends, called Quakers by detractors, were established in Lancashire, Cumberland, Devon, Cornwall, Hertfordshire, London, Bristol, Norwich, and as far away as Barbados, France and Holland

When the Church of England was restored along with the Monarchy in 1660, Friends were persecuted for their refusal to pay tithes and for their 'testimonies' against paid priesthood and prescribed forms of worship. In 1675, Friends established the Meeting for Sufferings in London to record and redress their persecutions. The next year, Robert Barclay defended the Friends' beliefs and practices in an Apology for the True Christian Divinity Professed and Preached by Those Who Are in Derision Called Quakers.

The worst of the Quaker persecutions came to an end with the Toleration Act of 1689 as, according to Braithwaite, did the heroic age of Quakerism. When George Fox died in 1691, Quakers had no official creed but they did have an organizational structure that covered Great Britain, included pockets of western Europe, and stretched across the Atlantic to the North American colonies.³

Historians estimate that the number of Friends peaked at about 60,000 in 1680 and then dropped to between 20,000 and 32,000 by the end of the eighteenth century.⁴ By the mid-1700s, British Friends were coming together regularly at the Yearly Meeting in London to set policies. The Meeting for Sufferings was becoming an experienced political association, calling on Members of Parliament and petitioning Parliament and the Monarch on behalf of Friends.⁵

Like British Quakerism, the British economy and society were changing and evolving in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In The Birth of a Consumer Society Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb show how rising real income, rising population, rising production, better transportation, and increasing economic centralization in London were rapidly transforming Britain into a consumer society. Focusing on the demand side of the developing market economy, they argue that while a desire to consume was not new to the late eighteenth century, the potential of an ever-increasing segment of society was being raised to new levels.⁶

More recently, in Consumption and the World of Goods, John Brewer, Roy Porter and a cadre of international scholars have begun measuring the scope and plumbing the depths of consumer societies world-wide. Roy Porter concludes that whether or not there was a 'consumer revolution' in late eighteenth-century Britain, as Neil McKendrick had argued earlier, 'no one doubts that aggregate consumption of services and material goods —necessities decencies and luxuries — was rising among an impressive social cross-section'.⁷

Edward Woods, Joseph's father, like many Friends in the late eighteenth century, was engaging in trade and doing quite well. 'The most conspicuous characteristic' of many late eighteenth-century Friends, according to D.B. Davis, was 'quite simply, their incredible economic success'. Economist David Landes shows how such Quaker practices as selling high quality goods at fixed, marked prices helped Friends move ahead in the developing consumer economy. John Brewer says credit and debt were two of the biggest problems facing late-eighteenth-century tradesmen, but Quaker entrepreneurs were able to command significant amounts of capital and credit through intermarriages and by combining business and religious ties.⁸

Financially prosperous second-generation Friends like Edward and Sarah Woods were faced with the problem of reconciling money and morals. Edward Woods was a ministering Friend, and he advised the London Quaker organization on financial matters. He served on a committee which was responsible for paying common expenses and for the administrative oversight of Quaker property.⁹ Poor Friends in good standing had traditionally received informal financial assistance from Quaker meetings but, in the eighteenth century, the central organization began defining membership rights more tightlv.¹⁰

Birth and education were becoming important criteria for membership in what was coming to be considered the Society of Friends, Joseph Woods, like the sons of other rising Quaker families, was sent away to school.¹¹ When Joseph Woods was growing up, William Massey's school for boys at Wandsworth was 'much patronized by the Society of Friends' and combined the study of religion and the classics with good business practices.

Massey recommended beginning 'lower Scholars with reading in the Bible and Spelling' and then moving on to arithmetic. Advanced students learned merchant's accounts, bookkeeping, geography, history, the Latin Testament, and Aesop's Fables. Massey believed in 'evening tasks' and advocated seating students according to scholarly achievement as 'This raises an Emulation in them to gain Places'.¹² Joseph Woods later wrote, 'Boys go first to school to learn to spell and read, and afterwards rise in progression ... in order to discipline them into learning proper and useful for their intended station.^'13

In 1753 when Joseph was 15, the last of his father's sons by a previous marriage died. Joseph thus became the eldest child and the only surviving son. At Michaelmas in 1755 when Joseph was 17, Edward advanced him £2,000 to establish a woollen drapery business. A few years later, Joseph was described as a woollen draper in Blackfriars.¹⁴

Edward Woods died in June 1756. By Edward's will, the advance to Joseph became 'so much of his fortune'. Joseph also inherited the copyroll rights (after the death of his mother Sarah) on a farm costing £1,400 at Revel End near Redbourne in Hertfordshire. The two houses at Winchmore Hill went to Sarah Woods during her lifetime and afterwards to Rachael, the only other child of Edward and Sarah.¹⁵

In 1769, Joseph Woods, now 31, married Margaret Hoare, age 21. Margaret's marriage portion was £2,500.¹⁶ Like Joseph's family, Margaret's family were second-generation Quakers engaged in trade. One of her grandmothers was a Quaker minister in Ireland, and Quaker leader William Penn attended the wedding of another.¹⁷

Margaret's father Samuel Hoare was bom in Ireland and 'engaged young in the Irish provision trade'. He moved to London and married Grizell Gurnell in 1744. He thus became a partner in his wife's family firm which was known first as Gurnell and Hoare, and later Gurnell, Hoare, Harman and Company located at Frederick Place in the Old Jewry.¹⁸

Between 1745 and 1761, Samuel and Grizell Hoare had 10 children, seven of whom survived. Margaret was bom second but was the eldest surviving child of the seven. Margaret and two siblings were born at Dyer's Court in the City of London but, by 1750, the family had moved to Paradise Row in Stoke Newington. A granddaughter later remembered Samuel Hoare setting off to work in the City in 'a green coach with red wheels'. The same granddaughter described Margaret as 'the great favourite' of her mother Grizell.¹⁹

In 1771, two years after her marriage, Margaret Hoare Woods began keeping a journal as a means of 'more frequent reflection and selfexamination'. As the journal indicates, her main concerns over the next ten years, in addition to her spiritual development, were raising children and establishing patterns of family life. By 1772, her husband's woollen drapery shop was located in White Hart Court, just off Lombard Street, in the heart of the City. There, she gave birth to their first child, a boy named Samuel, on 30 August 1772.²⁰

In August 1773 Margaret was pregnant again, but she was stricken with measles and lost the child. After that, Margaret moved to Paradise Row, Stoke Newington, where her mother and father had their home. Joseph kept a sleeping room at his shop in the City and travelled to Stoke Newington at weekends.

A third child born to Margaret and Joseph Woods in October 1774 lived only a few days. After that, between 1776 and 1781, the couple had two healthy sons and one daughter. During that time, they took a family holiday to Margate and began spending three weeks to a month every summer with Joseph's mother at Winchmore Hill.²¹

In 1774, Joseph Woods began what was to become a life-long friendship and correspondence with fellow Quaker William Matthews. Matthews, the son of an Oxfordshire shoemaker, taught at a highly regarded Quaker school in Burford. After 1768. he became a teacher at Coggeshall in Essex.

In 1777 Matthews gave up teaching and moved to Bath, where he opened first a brewery and then a coal yard. In 1777, evincing the Quaker trait of combining religious, social, and economic ties, the more wellestablished Woods loaned Matthews £100 for two and a half years at £12 interest. In 1781 Woods advanced Matthews another £50 to help further his new career in Bath.²²

In the course of commenting on various issues of their day, Joseph Woods made it clear, to Matthews at least, that he believed women's abilities were limited by nature. 'Their province, I humbly conceive', he wrote to Matthews in September 1774, 'lies in Matters of Imagination and Taste.' Woods was a man who measured his words carefully even in private. 'Nature has assigned certain boundaries between the minds of the Sexes. I mean has established a distinction, I do not say a superiority....^'23

Margaret Woods, meanwhile, was struggling with the idea of submissi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Four Merchants and Philosophers in 1783
• 2 The First Abolition Association, 1783-87
• 3 The London Abolition Committee, 1787-91
• 4 Investigations, Examinations, Publications, 1788-91
• 5 The Abolitionist Breakthrough, 1791-92
• 6 The Abolitionist Breakdown, 1792-98
• 7 Success, 1803-7
• 8 Three Merchant Philosophers in Retirement, 1807-27
• 9 Significance
• Appendix: Family Histories of Joseph Woods, Samuel Hoare, James Phillips, and George Harrison
• Bibliography
• Index