And did we attend to these scenes in Africa in like manner as if they were transacted in our presence, and sympathize with the Negroes in all their afflictions and miseries as we do with our children or friends, we should be more careful to do nothing in any degree helping forward a trade productive of so many and so great calamities.15
Following Woolman, British abolitionists considered it standard practice to challenge the idea of self-interest and to combat the belief that ordinary Britons were simply detached parties in a slave system beyond their control. In 1791, the radical abolitionist William Fox wrote specifically about bridging distance based on racial and geographic boundaries: “Can our pride suggest,” he asked, “that the rights of men are limited to any nation, or to any colour? Or, were any one to treat a fellow creature in this country as we do the unhappy Africans in the West-Indies; struck with horror, we should be zealous to deliver the oppressed, and punish the oppressor. Are then the offices of humanity and functions of justice to be circumscribed by geographical boundaries?”16 Others bridged that distance in more rhetorically simple ways. The slave trader turned evangelist John Newton actually became a “a Captive and a Slave myself” among the “Natives of Africa.”17 Similarly, Thomas Clarkson, in an effort to bring the subject of slavery closer to the British mind, wrote part of his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species in the first person, but from the perspective of the African witnessing a scene of horror equal to that of the Zong. “To place this in the clearest, and most conspicuous point of view,” Clarkson writes, “I shall suppose myself on a particular part of the continent of Africa, and relate a scene…. At first, I will turn my eyes to the cloud of dust that is before me. It seems to advance rapidly, and, accompanied with dismal shrieks and yellings, to make the very air, that is above it, tremble as it rolls along. What can possibly be the cause?”18
Clarkson was by far the most active abolitionist of the Romantic period and the most inclined to make slavery a personal issue. He traveled over thirty-five thousand miles between 1788 and 1795 alone, establishing local antislavery organizations all over the country and collecting facts and artifacts about the British slave trade that would help convince anyone, from paupers to Members of Parliament, of the inhumanity of slavery.19 Not only did Clarkson submit facts and figures, numbers and dimensions, and stories of ill treatment, he brought in actual iron instruments used on slave ships: handcuffs, leg shackles, thumb-screws, speculums for force-feeding slaves who would rather die.
One of the most shocking artifacts of Clarkson’s travels is a drawing that shows how Liverpool and Bristol slavers regularly crammed hundreds of African bodies into the bowels of their slave ships (Figure 1). The drawing, in fact, has remained a sort of icon of the visual horror of the slave trade ever since. The peculiar way in which the bodies are imagined in the genre of an architectural drawing and cross section says something about the hideous underside of British seafaring. What is most surprising about the drawing, however, is the amount of detail the bodies have. Little leg irons and arm bands cup the limbs of the African males, while the females lie with their breasts exposed. The distance with which these middle passage slave bodies were normally kept from the British people must have made them startling to viewers at this time. This British ship—the Brookes—was originally filled with slaves in Africa and emptied of them in the West Indies, far from Britain’s clean shores, and it is the close proximity of this conventionally foreign and distant picture that gives it the intensity of a central image of the antislavery movement.20
By driving the Liverpool slaver onto the steps of London’s parliamentary buildings, Clarkson and the abolitionists brought slavery home, bridged the distance between London and West Africa, between Liverpool and Barbados. Psychologically, they were saying, as Tommy would say some years later in his Berbice complaint, that it was no longer possible for people in Britain to look with myopic indifference on the human suffering and violence of slavery. “As then the inhumanity of this trade must be universally admitted and lamented,” the notice on the slave ship poster reads, “people would do well to consider, that it does not often fall to the lot of individuals, to have an opportunity of performing so important a moral and religious duty, as that of endeavouring to put an end to the practice, which may, without exaggeration, be stiled one of the greatest evils at this day existing upon the earth.”21
II
There is very little argument by historians or literary scholars over the claim made by Clarkson and his coworkers in 1788 that slavery was the greatest evil existing upon the earth at that time. But slavery, they were all aware, was an inherited problem. Servitude, bondage, and forms of dependence and forced labor have been aspects of many cultures and time periods. Ancient civilizations in Asia, Africa, Europe, and pre-Colombian America record slavery in its various forms. It has been endorsed by the world’s major religious institutions—Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity.22 And long before the transatlantic trade, slavery was practiced in the Mediterranean. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, slave auctions were held all along the coast of North Africa as well as in some of the most fashionable European cities, such as Venice, Seville, Lisbon, and Antwerp.23 From the fourteenth right through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, India received slaves from Africa, with the trade running from Madagascar and the Red Sea by way of Arab traders. Slaves were also integral to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.24 Even in Africa itself, slavery was widespread until the nineteenth century.25
Figure 1. Detail, Thomas Clarkson, 1789. Courtesy of Wilberforce House, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries, UK/Bridgeman Art Library, London.
But transatlantic slavery was a very different creature. One of the most startling aspects of the early years of the slave trade is how rapidly it expanded from a minor commerce to a full-blown economic enterprise. If one wanted to attach an actual date to the beginnings of the trade it would be 1518, when Charles V of Spain granted the first licenses to Europeans to take African people from their homes and bring them to the Spanish American colonies to be used as slave labor.26 Within just ten years, by the 1520s, the slave trade was a developed operation managed by the Portuguese, who controlled the basis for slave supply on the west coast of Africa. One hundred years later, during the 1640s, the trade ballooned again when sugar plantations spread from Brazil to the Caribbean. Sugar cultivation could only be profitable if outfitted by cheap labor in the form of slaves. And so during the middle 1640s, the Portuguese who had controlled the transatlantic trade for a hundred years, and the Spanish who continued to be involved, were joined by the Dutch, French, Danish, and British. The gruesome baton of massive slave exports passed from the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and eventually to the British, who dominated the trade after 1660.
Britain’s very first dealings in the slave trade were amply recorded by Richard Hakluyt in 1582. Hakluyt chronicled the voyage of “Master John Haukins,” who “having made divers voyages to the Iles of the Canaries,” realized what other European nations had already made disturbingly possible: “that Negros were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that store of Negros might easily bee had upon the coast of Guinea.” According to Hakluyt, Hawkins immediately “resolved with himselfe to make triall thereof, and communicated that devise with his worshipfull friends of London.”27 Britain’s role in the trade continued to expand, as it seized various portions of the Caribbean and exported slaves to its North American colonies, dealing principally in sugar.
In the 1780s, the transatlantic trade reached its peak, with the British leading the way and, ironically enough,