Anti-Slavery and Australia

No Slavery in a Free Land?

Jane Lydon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429817335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. This book explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical changes demanded by industrialization and rapid social change in Britain. Abolition posed problems to which colonial expansion provided the answer, intimately linking the end of slavery to systematic colonization and Indigenous dispossession. By defining slavery in the Caribbean as the opposite of freedom, a lasting impact of abolition was to relegate other forms of oppression to lesser status, or to deny them. Through the shared concerns of abolitionists, slave-owners, and colonizers, a plastic ideology of 'free labour' was embedded within post-emancipation imperialist geopolitics, justifying the proliferation of new forms of unfree labour and defining new racial categories. The celebration of abolition has overshadowed post-emancipation continuities and transformations of slavery that continue to shape the modern world.

1 No slavery in a free land?

On the 13 May 1787, the eleven ships now known as the ‘First Fleet’ sailed from Portsmouth with their cargo of convicts, effectively initiating the British colonization of Australia. In the same month, the organized British anti-slavery movement began, with the establishment by Granville Sharp, Quakers and other evangelical Christians of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST). This correspondence was no coincidence, but rather points towards the profound imbrication of the seemingly distinct histories of the anti-slavery movement and Australian colonization. In the months before the First Fleet departed, the first governor of New South Wales, Captain Arthur Phillip, presented his views regarding the colony’s management. He advocated a future colonial society in which convicts, paradoxically, would be excluded from civil society forever, but at the same time retain their freedom as British subjects, writing that

As I would not wish convicts to lay the foundations of an empire, I think they should ever remain separated from the garrison, and other settlers that may come from Europe, and not be allowed to mix with them, even after the 7 or 14 years for which they are transported may be expired. The laws of this country will, of course, be introduced in [New] South Wales, and there is one that I would wish to take place from the moment his Majesty’s forces take possession of the country: That there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves.¹

Phillip’s assertion may at first sight appear odd, given that at the time he wrote Britain was the world’s leading slave-trading nation and was not to abolish the trade for another twenty years (1807). The practice of slavery itself was not to be outlawed across the British empire until 1833, forty-five years after the colonization of New South Wales. The British had first entered the Atlantic slave trade during the sixteenth century, and subsequently transformed it, enlisting state naval and military resources to protect the trade from rivals and the threat of revolt. During the 1640s, the British began to develop the sugar industry in Barbados, requiring vast amounts of labour. Its most intense phase constituted the ‘triangular trade’, which involved European ships taking goods to Africa to buy slaves, then transporting enslaved Africans from Central and West Africa to the plantation societies of the Americas (the Caribbean, the American South and Iberian America), before returning to Europe with slave-grown products such as sugar, tobacco and cotton. By the time the British ended their own slave trade in 1807, they had shipped 3.25 million Africans across the Atlantic.²

So what did Phillip mean by the ‘laws of this country’, and what did he know of slavery? Phillip himself, like many British sailors, had observed slavery at first hand on a tour of duty to the Caribbean between 1760 and 1762 as a junior naval officer, when he had visited Spanish and British slave plantations in Jamaica, the Leeward Islands and Cuba. He had also served in the Portuguese navy between 1774 and 1778, fighting in Brazil against Spain in the Third Colónia War. At this time, Brazil was a depository for degredados or convicts, and Colónia itself had become a place of secondary punishment; Brazilian society was permeated by slavery at all levels and in every province, providing labour for its sugar plantations, gold fields, and households and ranches.³ Phillip probably shared the general view that the condition of slavery did not exist under English law, promulgated following the landmark Somersett Case, and often considered to mark the unofficial beginning of the abolition movement. In 1771, James Somersett, a slave who had escaped in England from his American owner, approached campaigner Granville Sharp seeking to prevent his forcible return to slavery. Granville and his allies sought a writ of habeas corpus (legal justification of detention) from Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, to obtain Somersett’s freedom. Mansfield ruled that ‘the state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being now introduced by justice upon mere reasoning … it must take its rise from positive law’. He thus created a new legal framework for slavery in determining that chattel slavery had no basis in common law in England and Wales.⁴ The emergence of these new ideas also prompted counter arguments, intensifying the politics of what we now term ‘race’. Slave-owner Edward Long’s 1774 History of Jamaica represented the biological extreme, making the polygenist argument that ‘negro’ and ‘white’ constituted distinct species.⁵

Phillip may also have known about the horrifying case of the Zong, which contributed to the growing public profile of the anti-slavery movement. In 1781, Captain Collingwood of the slave ship Zong, sailing from west Africa, had thrown 133 sick slaves overboard, and when the ship reached Jamaica, its owners claimed their insurance value. The insurers refused to pay, and a trial resulted in a finding for the slave-owners. Freed man Olaudah Equiano went to Sharp, and with the insurers they brought a motion for a new trial, heard by Mansfield in July 1783. In his opening remarks, Mansfield reminded the court that ‘the case of slaves was the same as if Horses had been thrown overboard’; after a two-day hearing, however, he recommended a new trial, which the slavers never dared to bring. Despite the case’s limited legal and public impact at the time – it was not circulated widely in newspapers, for example – it quickly became a symbol of the terror of the Middle Passage, and subsequently an icon of public memory.⁶ In the same year, a group of Quakers or the Religious Society of Friends, forerunners of the formal British anti-slavery movement, founded an abolitionist organization and introduced a bill to Parliament to abolish the trade. Also in 1783, Beilby Porteous, Bishop of Chester (and soon to be Bishop of London), delivered a famous sermon at the church of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, in which he challenged the Church of England to address the plight of 350 slaves on its Codrington Plantations in Barbados.⁷

During the tumultuous decade of change sandwiched between the American Revolution (1775–1783) and the French (1789–1799) and Haitian (1791–1804) revolutions, debates about slavery, penal discipline and transportation intersected in important ways, as administrators grappled with governing a growing empire. The emerging anti-slavery movement enhanced popular views of Britain’s unique commitment to liberty at a time when conflict with America had called it into question, so making abolitionism ‘an emblem of national virtue’.⁸ As William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) asserted, freedom was ‘the singular frame and polity of that land, which is governed by this system of laws. A land, perhaps the only one in the universe, in which political or civil liberty is the very end and scope of the constitution’, and where ‘this political or civil liberty … falls little short of perfection, and can only be lost or destroyed by the folly or demerits of its owner’.⁹ The slave trade debates combined the language of reform and the rhetoric of nation to define liberty against colonial tyranny and inhumanity and associate freedom with Englishness.¹⁰ A key insight of Christopher Brown’s landmark study Moral Capital was that the movement that emerged in 1783 was contingent upon its political usefulness within the dynamic of transatlantic politics, after the loss of the American colonies and the crisis of empire that it engendered. Brown argues that the coalescence of Anglican evangelical and Quaker concerns in the Revolutionary era marked a turning point in both British and American responses to slavery, by defining complicity in slavery as proof of collective vice, and opposition as virtue. This transformation of the political and cultural significance of anti-slavery allowed proponents to accrue moral prestige, as a resource that could be powerfully mobilized to serve intellectual, cultural and emotional purposes, and strategically benefit other projects.¹¹

By defining slavery as ‘un-British’, the Somersett decision and anti-slavery ideology more broadly vindicated English law and tradition. As David Brion Davis argued, a ‘denunciation of colonial slavery therefore implied no taste for a freer or more equal society. On the contrary, much of the early British anti-slavery writing reveals an almost obsessive concern with idealizing hierarchical order’.¹² From at least the 1770s, radicals and pro-slavery advocates pointed out the seeming blindness of abolitionists to workers’ treatment in Britain. Long argued in his History that ‘slaves are better off than the lowest classes in Britain’, comparing the happy situation of West Indian slaves with the wretched state of white British labourers and indentured apprentices.¹³ Similarly, Jamaican planter and slave-trader Gilbert Francklyn suggested that restraints upon the ‘personal liberty’ of some people were necessary for the peace of society as a whole and warned of revolution. Taking his attack to the metropolis, he argued that abolitionists should look to their own society first, asking ‘whether any society, or community, can, with justice, make laws in restraint of personal liberty, which do not press equally on all its members?’, cautioning against ‘too nice and critical an enquiry into the exact portion of each man’s particular liberty’.¹⁴ The coevalness of transportation an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘an equal portion of liberty’
• 1 No slavery in a free land?
• 2 ‘Poor creatures’: anti-slavery and transportation, 1789–1807
• 3 In spite of all the saints: the amelioration of British slavery and the making of the settler colonies, 1807–1833
• 4 Abolition, systematic colonization and the end of transportation, 1830–1840
• 5 Is not the new Hollander a man and a brother? Abolition and genocide
• 6 After emancipation, 1834–1900: ‘we but enliven labour with the lash’
• 7 Modern slavery and Australia
• Select bibliography
• Index