The British Anti-Slavery Movement

Sir Reginald Coupland

• Éditeur: Papamoa Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787207516
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: World History

This book was first published in 1933 and incorporates material used for a course of lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute at Boston in March 1933.Sir Reginald Coupland, author of Wilberforce, describes how Britain led anti-slavery movement, starting from the late eighteenth century, marked by the emergency of mass anti-slavery movements organized on the basis of a national network.A fascinating read."A SLAVE, said Aristotle, is "a living tool, " and Slavery may be defined as the ownership and use of human property. The master inherits, buys, sells or bequeaths his slave as he does his pick or his spade. His treatment of him or her may be controlled, like the usage of other possessions, by the custom or law of the society to which he belongs; but in general the slave's life and labour are as much at the master's disposal as those of his horse or his ass. As with a beast of burden, the slave's health and happiness depend on chance—on the character of his master and on the nature of his work. He may be well cared for; he may even sometimes seem better off than if he had never been enslaved; or he may be cruelly treated, underfed, overworked, done to death. But Slavery stands condemned more on moral than on material grounds. It displays in their extreme form the evils which attend the subjection of the weak to the strong. The slave's soul is almost as much in bondage as his body. His choice of conduct is narrowly prescribed. He cannot lead his own life. He can do little to make or mar his fate: it lies in another man's hands. Though Slavery was regarded by the founders of Western civilization as a natural and permanent element in human society, it was recognized that enslavement inflicted a moral injury."—Chapter I

CHAPTER I—THE AFRICAN SLAVE-SYSTEM

A SLAVE, said Aristotle, is “a living tool,” and Slavery may be defined as the ownership and use of human property. The master inherits, buys, sells or bequeaths his slave as he does his pick or his spade. His treatment of him or her may be controlled, like the usage of other possessions, by the custom or law of the society to which he belongs; but in general the slave’s life and labour are as much at the master’s disposal as those of his horse or his ass. As with a beast of burden, the slave’s health and happiness depend on chance—on the character of his master and on the nature of his work. He may be well cared for; he may even sometimes seem better off than if he had never been enslaved; or he may be cruelly treated, underfed, overworked, done to death. But Slavery stands condemned more on moral than on material grounds. It displays in their extreme form the evils which attend the subjection of the weak to the strong. The slave’s soul is almost as much in bondage as his body. His choice of conduct is narrowly prescribed. He cannot lead his own life. He can do little to make or mar his fate: it lies in another man’s hands. Though Slavery was regarded by the founders of Western civilization as a natural and permanent element in human society, it was recognized that enslavement inflicted a moral injury. “Zeus takes away the half of a man’s virtue,” sang Homer, “when the day of slavery comes upon him.” It was not so widely understood that Slavery might be injurious to the masters’ morals also.

From the beginning of history Slavery has been practised among men. It was a universal element in the social and economic structure of all ancient civilization—in that of China, India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. And, though its character varied at different times and places, it had certain more or less common features. The slaves were usually obtained in two ways, which might be termed “internal” and “external.” Within a society, a man might be enslaved as a punishment for crime or might sell himself or his children into slavery to pay a debt. From outside the society, slaves were acquired by the capture of enemies in war. This happened sometimes on a great scale. Whole tribes or communities might be carried off from their homeland, like the people of Judaea to Babylon. At an early date, also—it is impossible to say how early—a trade in slaves developed. Traders kidnapped and purchased slaves from primitive or defenceless peoples and sold them in the markets of the civilized world. The use of the slaves acquired in these ways was broadly of two kinds. Domestic Slavery, which may be taken to cover the employment of slaves in gardens or small farms or shops as well as in the house or the harem, was the universal type, and it was or might be relatively mild. The domestic slave could achieve a personal relationship with his master. He could develop an individuality of his own. He might even become in some sort a member of the family. None of this was possible in the other and less general kind of Slavery—the employment of slaves in gangs for large-scale industry or agriculture. It was this mass-use of human labour that required the sternest discipline and involved the greatest cruelty; and no sentimental apologies for slavery can mitigate the tragedy of the nameless thousands who built the pyramids of Egypt and the palaces of Nineveh and Babylon or worked the silver-mines of Attica or tilled the Roman latifundia.

With the advance of civilization Slavery slowly declined. In Europe the cessation of Roman conquest diminished the supply of slaves, and the spread of Christianity, though it countenanced their ownership, tended to improve their treatment and raise their status. Gang-slavery for public works or on big agricultural estates disappeared. Domestic Slavery was gradually transformed into the looser bondage of serfdom or villeinage, and so proceeded, more slowly in backward Eastern Europe than in the progressive Western countries, towards complete emancipation. In Asia, likewise, the range and volume of enslavement were contracted. Wars and conquests continued: there was no “Roman peace”; but from the eighth century onwards the chief conquering races, Turk or Arab, were Moslems whose main incentive was to force the peoples they conquered to embrace their creed; and the Koran, while, like the Bible, it accepted the institution of Slavery, declared that no Moslem might be enslaved. Thus, throughout the great belt of Moslem Asia which stretched across the “Middle East”—the Turkish Empire, Arabia, Persia, Northern India—Slavery would presumably have died a natural death, more quickly perhaps than in Europe, if it had not been possible for those countries to obtain a steady supply of slaves from unconquered lands and by other means than conquest. Such a supply, as it happened, was available in one vast area of the Old World, beyond the reach of Moslem armies but not of Moslem slave-traders. Asia’s need was met by Africa.

The records of human history had so far been concerned with the white and brown and yellow races only. The black race—the Negroes and kindred negroid stock—had lived an isolated life in their mid-African homeland between the Sahara and the Zambesi, unknowing and almost unknown to the rest of mankind. A huge natural barrier of desert and swamp secluded them from the stream of civilization, European or Asiatic, flowing through the Mediterranean and the Near East. Their tropical environment had made it easy for them to live, but difficult to do much more. Their country contained no great navigable rivers or alluvial plains such as facilitated the growth of an indigenous civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Northern India or China. Leagues of forest or jungle, chains of mountains, parching drought and swamping rains confined their movements and restricted intercourse. Here and there a vigorous tribe attained a substantial measure of military and even political organization; but there was nothing remotely comparable with the social or cultural achievements of Europe and Asia; and the great mass of the Africans—for these black people of the Tropics and not the mixed Berber and Semitic races of the northern coastland are the true Africans—stayed sunk in primitive barbarism, the most backward of all the major races of men. To more fortunate and forward folk in other continents they seemed at first contact to be little above the animals; and centuries were to pass before they were allowed the opportunity of proving their capacity to take their place in the march of human progress. But in one thing, it seemed from the outset, they excelled—in physical strength. They could work, or be made to work with a whip, both hard and long. If slaves were needed, therefore, they provided the ideal material. As the Greeks would have put it, they were ȹvσει δоύλoι, “slaves by nature”; and even to Christians of a later day they seemed almost to have been created for the purpose. What else could be the meaning of the curse of Ham?

It was easy enough, moreover, for the agents of the outer world to get slaves from among them, once they had found the way to their homes. Enslavement was no new thing in Central Africa. It had never, indeed, been practised there on such a scale as in Egypt or Asia. Gang-slavery belongs to a far higher civilization than the Africans had attained, and there is nothing to suggest their use of it except the great ruins of mysterious Zimbabwe and its fellow-sites in Rhodesia. But domestic Slavery seems to have been a normal feature of African life. A conquering tribe would enslave the women and children of the conquered tribe and sometimes, if it spared their lives, the men. It was not difficult, therefore, for the alien trader to tempt a chief with strange and desirable goods from afar—in later days the most irresistible commodities were firearms and alcohol—to sell some of the slaves in his village or, better still, to attack a neighbouring village and sell such of its inhabitants as could be caught. And the trader himself, if he had a well-armed following and was operating among unwarlike tribes, might effect a raid on his own account.

In course of time African slaves were exported from the whole of the midland zone, from the foothills of Abyssinia to the coast of the Gulf of Guinea and Angola; but the main source of supply was always in the very heart of the continent—the equatorial area between the Upper Nile, the Upper Congo and the Great Lakes, where, broadly speaking, the teeming population was least civilized, least organized, and most defenceless. From this inexhaustible reservoir the stream of Negro slaves began to flow northwards as soon as contact was established by way of the Nile between the southern Sudan and Egypt or by the caravan-routes across the Sahara between the Niger and Congo country and the Greek, Phoenician and Roman cities on the Mediterranean coast. A third line of export ran eastwards to the shore of the Indian Ocean where, long before the rise of Islam, Arab colonists from Oman had begun to found a string of trading-towns all down the coast from Somaliland to the Zambesi.

When the great wave of Arab conquest, impelled by Islam, ran right along the north coast of Africa to the Atlantic, those three threads of the Slave Trade were all in Arab hands, and from the ninth century it was mainly Arab traders who supplied the demand of the Moslem world for slaves. Nor was it only in the markets of the Arab or, later on, the Turkish Empire—at Fez, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Mecca, Bagdad—that they sold their human wares. From the East African ports, especially Kilwa, a steady stream of slaves was carried across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and thence inland to Persia or along the coast to India. As late as the fifteenth century there were thousands of African slaves in the Moslem kingdom of Bengal. And in the great days of Arab history (c. A.D. 900-1300) when Arab ships were masters of the Eastern seas and Arab trading-posts were dotting all their coasts, the unhappy Africans were borne still farther from their homes. In A.D. 976 a sensation was caused at the court of the Emperor of China by the arrival of an Arab envoy with a “Negro slave” in his suite.

Thus, year after year and century after century, the depopulation of Africa by Asia went on. The average annual number of slaves exported may not have been great—not more, perhaps, than a few thousands; but since the process continued without a break till the end of the nineteenth century, the total volume of this Asiatic branch of the Slave Trade must have been enormous. And that was not all that Africa had to suffer. Another vast multitude of Africans were stolen away from their homeland when Europe joined Asia in the game.

Of the European peoples it was the Portuguese who began it, for the simple reason that they were the first to make close contact with mid-Africa. The existence of a rich fertile country to the south of the bare Atlantic seaboard of Morocco had been made known to Europe from the works of Arab geographers, and at the outset of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, following up and going beyond the earlier Genoese ventures, pushed on, bit by bit, down the African coast till in 1445 they reached the Senegal. This southward track was to lead them farther than they had dreamed—round the Cape of Good Hope to India and to the naval and commercial mastery of the East. But those first voyages down the African coast were organized by Dom Henrique, popularly known as “Henry the Navigator,” son of King Joao I and nephew through his Lancastrian mother of Henry IV of England, with the limited idea of founding a Portuguese dominion on the Gulf of Guinea, pushing east to link up with the Christians of Abyssinia, and so taking the “Moors” of North Africa in the rear: and, ironically enough, it was to finance this “last crusade” against the Moslems that Christian Europe first took part in the African Slave Trade. Dom Henrique instructed his adventurers to try to tap the traffic at its source in Guinea and to bring by sea to Portugal those valuable Negroes whom the Arabs had long brought across the desert to Tunis and Morocco: and in 1441 two of his captains secured twelve men, women and children from the neighbourhood of the Rio d’Ouro and presented them to their delighted master. The business thus begun grew swiftly. Licences to pursue it were freely given by Dom Henrique. In 1444 six caravels set out from Lagos on a “joint-stock” enterprise, and came back laden with 235 slaves. By 1448, when the Senegal and the Gambia had been reached and passed, a total of nearly 1,000 slaves had been imported: and as the explorers sailed farther and farther south, to the Congo and Angola and finally round the Cape to Mozambique, the imports rose with the expansion of the sources of supply.

So Slavery, which had long died out in Western Europe, was re-established on its soil. Most of the slaves were sold to Portuguese landowners who used them to cultivate the areas laid waste in the recent Moorish wars. The results, social as well as economic, were bad; and it seems improbable that the experiment would in any case have been long sustained. As it was, the import of slaves dwindled and ceased as soon as it was discovered that gold and ivory were more profitable articles of export from West Africa; and, though it is said that several thousand Negroes were being sold every year in the slave-market at Lisbon as late as 1539, by that time the untold wealth of India and the Far East had been opened up, and thenceforward Portuguese traders were unlikely to waste ships in fetching slaves. But the European Slave Trade was not destined to be a relatively mild and transient infliction upon Africa. The age of exploration had opened the West as well as the South and East—the West Indies and America as well as West Africa and the Indian Ocean. Colonization had followed on exploration. And just when Europeans in the Old World had realized that they had no real need for Negroes, Europeans in the New World discovered that they could not do without them.

In the half-century after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas in 1492 the Spaniards conquered and partly occupied a huge area stretching from Mexico through Peru to Uruguay and including all the larger West Indian islands, while in 1581 the Portuguese began the colonization of Brazil. At once the newcomers set themselves to exploit the great natural wealth of their acquisitions, to work the gold and silver mines on the mainland and to lay out plantations of tobacco, indigo and sugar in the rich soil of the islands and Brazil. But they were soon confronted by the difficulty of procuring the requisite supply of labour. A great deal of it was needed, and the cost of white men’s wages and the heat of the tropical sun made it virtually impossible for the Europeans to provide it themselves. Of the native Indians many had been massacred during the conquest, many had fled to the mountains and forests, and even where sufficient numbers were available it was soon apparent that they did not possess the stamina required for continuous and exacting toil. This labour-difficulty would in fact have indefinitely retarded the economic development of most of the New World if the Portuguese had not recently shown how it could be overcome. Christians in the West could do what Moslems in the East had done. America was saved by Africa.

The first batch of slaves from Guinea arrived in Haiti in 1510, and in Cuba in 1521. By another stroke of irony their import into the mainland Spanish colonies was stimulated by the humanitarian zeal of the Spanish missionaries. In 1514, the benevolent Las Casas, first Bishop of Mexico, began to denounce the cruelties inflicted on the Indians and to plead—how unwisely he realized too late—that Indian slaves should be replaced by African. So Africans were shipped across the Atlantic in fast-increasing numbers: by 1576 there were some 40,000 of them in Spanish America. Meantime the Portuguese had adopted the same expedient and begun to shift the people of their colony in Angola across the narrows of the South Atlantic to their colony in Brazil. Already in 1585 there were 10,000 Negroes in the single province of Pernambuco. Since, moreover, the Portuguese alone controlled the area of export in West Africa, the supply of slaves to the Spanish colonies was mainly in their hands, and after 1580 it was wholly entrusted to them by the Spanish Government under an agreement known as the Asiento. It was a paying business. Indeed, the economic life of Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was largely grounded on the profits of the Slave Trade.

Neither tropical colonization nor the control of the slave-supply, by which alone, it seemed, such colonies could be effectively exploited, remained for long the exclusive privilege of the Iberian peoples. From the end of the sixteenth century onwards the other sea-going nations of Europe—the Dutch, the French, the English—began to encroach on Spanish and Portuguese preserves. At the outset of the eighteenth century the Dutch, for example, possessed the East Indies, Ceylon, the Cape, and Surinam (Guiana); the French Île de France (Mauritius), Louisiana, the western part of Haiti, Guadeloupe and other West Indian islands; and the English the Bahamas, Jamaica and other islands, and Honduras. And, like the Spanish and Portuguese before them, Dutch, French and English began from the beginning of their occupation to stock these colonies with slaves. Nor did they leave the supply of them to the Portuguese. They intruded into the Gulf of Guinea, established fortified posts on its coast, and took their own share in the Slave Trade. Even Denmark secured a foothold there to supply the Spanish colonies by way of St. Thomas and St. Croix. So the outward flow of Africans was immensely increased. A minor part of it went eastwards; for a short time to the East Indies, continuously to Île de France and its satellites. Another small part halted midway at the Cape; most of the 1,700 slaves in the Colony in 1708 came from West or East Africa or Madagascar. But far the most of it streamed over the Atlantic and went on streaming year after year, right through the eighteenth century. Some rough figures may suggest its volume. About 1800 there were Negroes in Spanish America. Between 1759 and 1803 from S. Paolo de Loanda and Benguela, the ports of Angola, 642,000 slaves were shipped to Brazil. About 1775 the slaves in the French West Indies numbered over 500,000. These high numbers were mainly due to the extensive and continually extending cultivation of sugar. Jamaica, the greatest British “sugar-island,” contained 140,000 Negroes in 1764 and 300,000 in 1800. Nor had Slavery been confined to the zone of the Caribbean: it had spread to North America. In 1620, when the colony of Virginia was fourteen years old, the first slaves, a batch of twenty, were landed at Jamestown from a Dutch ship. By 1760 those twenty had grown to 200,000, about half the total population. In the thirteen English colonies which were presently to constitute the United States, the blacks in 1760 were 30 per cent of the whites. North of Maryland, where they numbered 8 per cent, they were only employed as domestic or farm slaves: in the South they were mainly used in gangs for cultivating sugar and tobacco and, later, cotton. Thus in the southern part of North America as well as in the West Indies and South America it was the worse kind of Slavery which Europe had revived—gang-slavery—a kind which demanded vast numbers of slaves, which precluded their natural increase, and which therefore required for its maintenance an increasing inflow of fresh stock. The total volume of this inflow was so huge as to startle the imagination. When the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was at its height in the second half of the eighteenth century, it is certain that in one or two single years the number of slaves transported exceeded 100,000. An authoritative calculation made more than a century ago fixed the total of slaves imported into the English colonies in America and the West Indies between 1680 and 1786 at 2,130,000. Guesses at the total for all the European colonies have gone as high as 40,000,000. But, if half or less than half that figure be accepted, and if it be remembered that the European Slave Trade was to continue in full volume till past the middle of the nineteenth century, that an incalculable multitude must be added for the Arab Slave Trade, that it was the young and virile Africans who were taken and the old and feeble who were left, and finally that (as will presently be explained) in the process of obtaining one seasoned African slave the life of at least one other African was lost, then there is nothing surprising in the fact that the population of modern Africa is relatively small.

In this business of depopulating Africa the English took a large share. One of the first Englishmen known to have had a hand in it was the Elizabethan seaman, Sir John Hawkins, who, violating the Portuguese monopoly, made several voyages to West Africa between 1562 and 1567 and sold the slaves he obtained in the Spanish colonies. But the earlier chartered-companies formed for the African trade dealt mainly in gold, and it was not till 1663 that a regular English Slave Trade began with the grant of the monopoly thereof to “The Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa.” Once started, it rapidly increased. In 1697, when the monopoly was abolished, about 5,000 slaves a year were being carried in English ships, and, when at the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 England obtained the coveted Asiento, she soon took the lead of all the other sea-powers. By 1770 about half the total Trade was carried by 192 British slave-ships with cargo-space for nearly 50,000 slaves; and, though the British figure droppe...

Table des matières

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
• CHAPTER I-THE AFRICAN SLAVE-SYSTEM
• CHAPTER II-THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE BRITISH ISLES
• CHAPTER III-THE EMANCIPATORS
• CHAPTER IV-THE ABOLITION OF THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE
• CHAPTER V-THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE BRITISH COLONIES
• CHAPTER VI-THE FIGHT WITH THE FOREIGN SLAVE TRADE
• CHAPTER VII-THE SUPPRESSION OF THE EAST AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE
• CHAPTER VIII-THE LAST PHASE
• NOTE ON BOOKS
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER