WILLIAM
WILBERFORCE
The Life of
the Great Anti-Slave Trade
Campaigner
WILLIAM HAGUE
For Ffion
CONTENTS
6 The Trade in Flesh and Blood
18 ‘An Increase of Enjoyments’
The Abolition of the Slave Trade
An observer of the House of Commons that Monday afternoon, 23 February 1807, might have thought it a day like any other: the Members walking in and out in the middle of predictable speeches, others sitting facing each other on the tiered green benches, all giving off the hubbub of gossip which was a sure sign that they were waiting for something important and were not enthused by the proceedings before it.
There was, after all, no shortage of subjects for the Members to discuss as they watched and waited. The government of Lord Grenville was at such an impasse in its relations with King George III that its fall from power could be imminent, and the war with France, which over fourteen years had cost tens of thousands of lives and added £350 million to the national debt, seemed deadlocked. If national crisis and European conflict were not enough for them there was plenty of drama closer to home: that morning, at the hanging at Newgate of three convicted murderers, Messrs Holloway and Haggerty and Elizabeth Godfrey, the attendant crowd of twenty thousand had become so tightly packed that thirty spectators had died in the crush. No wonder the MPs that afternoon seemed to pay little attention to the tedious routine of their chamber: a complaint against the Sandwich Road Bill, a committee seeking to take evidence in Ireland, a short debate on the Poor Laws Bill, an alteration of the general election result in Chippenham, all typical of the daily fare of the House of Commons at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Only after all these matters had been considered did the Speaker call for the business that was keenly awaited on the floor of the House and in the public gallery, and ask the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Howick, to move the second reading of the Slave Trade Abolition Bill.
The slave trade had been debated in the same chamber and by many of the same people for nearly two decades. Year after year the evils of the trade, ‘founded in robbery, kidnapping and murder, and affording an incentive to the worst passions and crimes’,1 as Lord Howick was soon to refer to it, had been brought before the attention of MPs. Year after year the Bills proposed had been rebuffed, delayed, abandoned amidst the lengthy taking of interminable evidence or brusquely thrown out in the House of Lords. Once again that Monday afternoon the arguments were deployed. The abolition of the trade would lead to the better treatment of slaves already in the West Indies; the great ports of Liverpool and Bristol were not remotely dependent on it; and most of all, the House of Commons could no longer accept the principle ‘that British subjects are allowed to tear by violence from their home their fellow creatures, to take them from their family, and from their friends, to convert them from free men into slaves, and to subject them for the remainder of their lives to the arbitrary will and wanton caprice of others’.2 Once again, as afternoon wore on into evening and the candles were lit around the chamber for a sitting long into the night, the House had to endure the arguments to the contrary. There was General Gascoyne, the Member for Liverpool and ‘conservative to the backbone’, drawing attention to the capital invested in forty