Barbaric Culture and Black Critique

Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic

Stefan M. Wheelock

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813938257
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In an interdisciplinary study of black intellectual history at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Stefan M. Wheelock shows how black antislavery writers were able to counteract ideologies of white supremacy while fostering a sense of racial community and identity. The major figures he discusses—Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart—engaged the concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality as these ideas ripened within the context of racial terror and colonial hegemony. Wheelock highlights the ways in which religious and secular versions of collective political destiny both competed and cooperated to forge a vision for a more perfect and just society. By appealing to religious sensibilities and calling for emancipation, these writers addressed slavery and its cultural bearing on the Atlantic in varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory ways during a key period in the development of Western political identity and modernity.

CHAPTER ONE

Ottobah Cugoano, Liberty, and Modern Atlantic Barbarism

THE ISSUE THAT both arrested the attentions of black antislavery writers and subsequently transformed the black political and historical imagination was the increasing sway barbaric slavery held over Anglo cultural practices of reason and empire in the half century or so following America’s War of Independence. The African antislavery writer Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (baptized as John Stuart) would lay the groundwork for an especially robust form of political and historical interrogation in Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787). He looked out on his historical moment and imagined grim prospects for the supposed advanced cultures of the Anglo Atlantic. In Thoughts and Sentiments, Cugoano would historicize race, slavery, and political fate in a way that criticized the progress of freedom and civilization in the slaveholding Atlantic.

The historical regression of the Atlantic into slaveholding barbarism seemed, to Cugoano, to be caused by the predominance of bad theology in the historical evolution of modern political and cultural awareness—a regression that could only be described as the decline from “ethical religion” into an apostate form of Christianity.¹ It was this sensibility that would be repeated in the generation of black American intellectual production following in his wake. I argue that Cugoano’s religious historicism (in particular, his exegeses of biblical history) achieves two objectives: first, it exposes how the commercial practices of modernity began to regress into cultural savagery in the shadow of proslavery abuses of scriptures; and second, Cugoano’s expert reading of scriptures subsequently binds the historical fortunes of freedom and civilization to the prospects of imperial moral and spiritual regeneration under God’s higher law of love and human equality.

Not much is known about the circumstances surrounding the publication of Cugoano’s major work, let alone his life. We know that he published Thoughts and Sentiments the year prior to the formation of the London Society for the Effecting of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST),² the major organizing arm for the antislavery campaign in late eighteenth-century Britain. He may have even published the work with the sanction of the committee. What we know of Cugoano’s origins is that he was born among the Fante people in what is present-day Ghana, and was brought to the British West Indies as a slave for two years. After he arrived in England with his then master around the time of the historic Mansfield Decision of 1772, he gained his freedom and would go on to affiliate with the “Sons of Africa” to advocate for abolition in the five or so years leading up to the mass campaigns against the slave trade in the late 1780s.

Cugoano was especially unsettled by the seeming triumph of chattel slavery over the ideological, moral, and economic currencies of the Atlantic world. He knew that Great Britain controlled the “greater share” of an “iniquitous commerce.” Indeed, the most current estimates show that in the period from 1700 to the closing of the international slave trade in Great Britain and the United in 1807 and 1808, respectively, roughly 6 million slaves were brought to the Americas, which was nearly two-thirds of the total number of Africans who were ever sent. In the 1760s and 1770s, the volume of African slaves exported to the Americas reached historic heights, averaging around 66,000 Africans per annum and peaking in the 1780s between 75,000 and 80,000 Africans per annum. At least 3.1 million of Africans exported were moved by British slavers based in Liverpool, Bristol, and London.³

But for Cugoano, numbers tell only half the story. There were promising events such as the Mansfield decision, which narrowly specified that slaves could not be forced to return with their masters to slavery upon arrival in England. Public opinion interpolated this ruling to mean that the English air was too pure for slaves to breathe, which had the effect of permanently abolishing slavery on English soil. On the other hand, there were the disturbing events of the Zong Massacre of 1781, which Cugoano explicitly mentions. We may never know all the particulars of the event—or all the reasons why it occurred—given the contradictory statements from a number of witnesses who testified at trial in London’s courts in 1783. But we do know that at least 132 sick and healthy African slaves were murdered on board the slave ship Zong in late November of 1781, and that 122 of these died when they were thrown overboard by the ship’s crew, possibly under the direction of their captain, Luke Collingwood. The Zong was sailing from Africa’s western coast to Jamaica, and many of the crew and the African slaves were dying due to disease and overcrowding during the voyage when the ship overshot its destination just days from arrival, due to errors in navigation. Both the ship’s crew and passengers would later testify that the slaves were thrown overboard as a matter of “necessity,” given what they claimed were inadequate stores of water. Collingwood himself died soon after the Zong reached port.

The Zong Affair betrays the market-informed perversities of its historical moment, as historians have shown. This desperate, brutal act would be brought to trial not as a murder case but as a dispute over an insurance claim. It was standard practice in Cugoano’s day to insure both a ship and its slaves against possible damage and the loss of life, under the legal provision of “jettisoning” cargo, human or otherwise. The Zong’s owners (William Gregson and the Liverpool syndicate) sued the ship’s insurers in order to recover money for loss of their slave property, and the court ruled in their favor.⁴

This case—and the state of affairs generally—suggested, to Cugoano that the vestiges of a barbaric culture were, indeed, all around. The events of the Zong Massacre indicated the extent to which a pervasive and rapacious commercial logic was becoming the new religion of a modern Anglo imperial system. Cugoano’s main intent was to foster political education in both his black oppressed brethren and would-be-sympathetic whites. And he used prophetic language to achieve this aim. In religious rhetoric that would most certainly have resonated with the nineteenth-century black radical David Walker, Cugoano claimed that the prominence of the Atlantic slave trade was evidence that the “umbrageous horns of apostacy and delusion . . . [have] extended [themselves] over all the Christian nations in the West.”⁵ Indeed, this was the conventional language of the eighteenth-century jeremiad. But Cugoano was not simply involved in an exercise of political sermonizing. If he was emphasizing that the commercial successes of the Atlantic slave trade augured dark days ahead, Cugoano also wanted to point out the extent to which the Atlantic plantation complex was perverting the historical evolution of politics and religion in what was ostensibly an “advanced Christian era” in the Atlantic.

Cugoano’s searing remarks decry Western slaveholding arrogance. His prime target was the professed cultural superiority of Britons and their American counterparts. By the late eighteenth century, Britain imagined itself as a nation apart, with cultural sensibilities that surpassed even its European rivals. Cugoano understood that Anglo historical self-understanding—and more specifically, the British and North American vision for progress—was anchored in a highly self-aware sense of Anglo cultural superiority in freedom, religion, civility, and civilization. And like Walker in the nineteenth century, Cugoano would call attention to the savage underpinnings of advanced cultures that stood on the backs of commercial production from black slaves. As I show below, Cugoano’s remarks on the slaveholding savagery of Britons are a crest in what may be described as his sustained critique of Anglo barbarism.

These European (and, specifically, Anglo) cultures of apostasy and delusion, Cugoano believed, augured the historical decline of advanced societies into modern barbarism, with real consequences for the fate of Atlantic freedom. In a rhetorical flourish, he warned that commercial slavery threatened to “mark out the whole of the British constitution with ruin and destruction [to at last reduce] the most generous and tenacious people in the world for liberty [. . .] to slaves” (70). In this remark is a rather perceptive sense about the fate of Atlantic freedom on the whole. The commercial vibrancy of the Atlantic plantation regime knew no moral bounds—this illicit form of commercialism might one day overwhelm even the most venerable attempts to draw racial distinctions between those who were free and those who were supposedly destined to be forever in chains.

Admittedly, Cugoano was not the first to argue that Britain’s imperial expansion of chattel slavery augured apocalypse. The titular dean of Britain’s early antislavery campaign (and Cugoano’s intellectual predecessor), Granville Sharp, boldly contended, for instance, that the slave trade was a “national crime” that violated God’s “eternal decrees,” tested God’s grace, and invited his vengeance on Britain and its colonies. Nor was Cugoano the first to assert that commercial slavery signaled a decadent turn in imperial politics and morality. Sharp’s North American antislavery counterpart, Anthony Benezet, pointed out that if the practice of commercial slavery continued among Anglo Christians, imperial Britain, before long, would regress back into a “dark” age of “ignorance and barbarity.”⁶ Cugoano, nevertheless, took these conclusions further than most dared. Dire times called for desperate solutions, and Cugoano was among the precious few who called for the immediate abolition of slavery and the full emancipation of slaves during a period when suggestions like these were very rare.

The Bible had long figured as a significant index for crafting modern grammars of liberty and equality in the context of the Anglo Atlantic. If interpreted with care, the Scriptures may oppose historical justifications for slavery on strong grounds. And Cugoano, much like his antislavery peers, interpreted the character and course of British imperialism through the lens of sacred history. The discussion centers on Cugoano’s critique of what I identify as the proslavery “theology of black damnation.” By theology of black damnation, I mean a religious sensibility culled from proslavery biblical renderings that imagined blacks as consigned by God to perpetual slavery in the historical progress of a commercially vibrant Atlantic.

Britons staked the progress of Anglo civilization on its high potential for “civility,” meaning here “refinement” or “freedom from barbarism” (OED). If the language of civility had currency among both pro- and antislavery circles, proslavery advocates and the masters of slaves proved to be especially adept at manipulating the term from the earliest proslavery defenses in the British imperial world up through America’s antebellum period. I am especially interested in how Cugoano captures the corrosive effects of proslavery theology on imperial British understandings of civility. I examine how Cugoano traces an apostate rendering of the Bible through to its imperial consequences. Cugoano exposes how European imperial expansion (and its instrumentalizing of biblical authority beginning, in part, with the Spanish conquest of Peru) ushered in a partial collapse between modern Atlantic practices of barbarism and civilization and crested in Britain’s imperial slaveholding excesses. As I show in later chapters, this analysis prefigures an even more robust mode of black political investigation in the nineteenth century, most notably in Walker’s critique of the theology of racial inheritance and Maria Stewart’s political essays.

Black writers had already begun to expose the instrumental turn on Christianity during the slave trade. In the decade prior to the publication of Thoughts and Sentiments, the African British writer Ignatius Sancho complained that in the case of the slave trade “[t]he grand object of English navigators—indeed of all Christian navigators—is money—money—money.”⁷ Of course, Sancho follows the more conventional use of the term “Christian” as a substitute identity marker for European cultures of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, his remarks touch upon the runaway effects of slavery in a largely Protestant culture that professes superior religion.

Sancho’s rather blunt remarks only highlight the sense of the importance of slave-driven commercialism over a Christian culture. The 1778 letter Sancho writes to Jack Wingrave evinces what Keith Sandiford characterizes as the “double edged” rhetoric of accommodation and sarcasm to be found in many of his letters.⁸ Sancho does not blame British merchants for their actions. In what seems to be a conciliatory nod toward British mercantilism, Sancho contends that if British trade with Africa was pursued honestly and with a truly religious sensibility, commerce would be a blessing for Africa’s inhabitants. On the other hand, Sancho complains bitterly that British trade with Africa resulted largely in the misery of their inhabitants.

Sancho remarks that British imperial commercialism pursued a more savage path, turning the blessings of Providence into a curse, as the nation’s (and, more generally speaking, Europe’s) slave-trading presence in Africa caused strife and discord among its inhabitants and robbed the land of its peoples. Like Sancho, Cugoano plays on the double meaning of Christianity, highlighting the paradox that as an ethno-cultural grouping, white Christians (in particular Anglo Protestants) have hardly lived up to a religious tradition that distinguishes their culture from other peoples. Sancho commented on one portion of a particularly pernicious system of commerce and trade. Cugoano would expose the effects of this Atlantic system on a modern politics of civility. In a rather perceptive letter to Sharp written in 1787, Cugoano and his antislavery peers reasoned that if Africa was uncivilized, the relative state of African civilizations provide no basis to “devote to the most cruel slavery [blacks] and their posterity for ever” (189). Walker would offer a searing critique of America’s politico-religious with this one idea guiding his analyses.

The scholarly interest in Cugoano’s work is growing. But as a text, Thoughts and Sentiments and its abridged edition published in 1791 pose particular challenges for current critical interpretation. The work has a collaborative dimension to it, full of both acknowledged and unacknowledged debts to antislavery writers. In this sense, it is rhetorically cumulative rather than wholly original. Some literary historians have asserted that the work could possibly have been ghostwritten by an antislavery advocate, or written by Cugoano, significantly revised, and edited by an expert in biblical theology. Others have contended that Cugoano may have written the work in collaboration with his friend and fellow antislavery writer, Olaudah Equiano. Also, questions abound concerning the apparent discrepancy between the quality of his polemic in Thoughts and Sentiments and his letters. I follow Sandiford’s view that until further evidence is made available, these theories remain largely speculative.⁹ The more notable influences in the work are Granville Sharp’s extensive writings, Thomas Clarkson’s An Essay on The Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species Particularly the African (1785), Anthony Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea (1772), and John Wesley’s Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774). Cugoano’s intellectual debts have led some historians to view his work as something of a “pastiche” in antislavery remarks.¹⁰ Even so, critics such as Jeffrey Gunn and Vincent Carretta have insisted that Cugoano’s arguments follow a more general discursive trend among antislavery texts.¹¹

I treat Cugoano as the titular author of Thoughts and Sentiments. While I do not intend to retrace all the intellectual antecedents in Cugoano’s work, I do link his argument back to the work of both antislavery peers and predecessors where I believe it to be necessary. I focus on how Cugoano’s theologically oriented historicism pushes him toward a more radical perspective on the fate of Atlantic freedom. As we shall see, his discussion of the historical potential in Anglo barbarism went considerably further than the offhand remarks made by his intellectual predecessors. Cugoano’s anxious turn on historical investigation set the stage for a generation of black historical writers to retool early modern outlooks on the political development of liberty in the Anglophone Atlantic.

The historical regression of British policies from God’s divine imperatives resulted in the emergence of an especially brutal form of commercial logic. Cugoano maintains throughout Thoughts and Sentiments that in slavery one finds all things opposed to justice, law, equity, consistency, and reason. He refers to the commercial enslavement of African peoples as “robbery,” a popular idea in antislavery literature that imagines slaves as stolen property.¹² Cugoano refers to slavery as an “idol” of false worship to which an apostate culture of commercial greed adhered. He sought to expose his readers to the underside of colonialism in the Anglophone Atlantic. In a world where the idolatry of slavery reigns, slaves in the British West Indies are, as Cugoano imagines them to be, durable instruments of production that are “negotiated” and “merchandized” by slave masters. Cugoano writes that “[t]he slaves, like animals, are bought and sold, and dealt with as their capricious owners may think fit, even in torturing and tearing them to pieces, and wearing them out with hard labour, hunger and oppression” (20). At a cresting moment in the appearance of Anglo imperial modernity, slaves are “bought and sold” in a violent colonial ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index