Shin-Kickers From History: Olaudah Equiano
Most accounts of the slave trade were written by slave traders, or by people dedicated to abolishing the slave trade. Few accounts were written by the slaves themselves. One important exception is The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, published in 1789.
Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in what is now Nigeria. When he was ten or eleven, he was kidnapped and sold as a slave in Barbados. He did not remain in Barbados long. He was sold first to a planter in Virginia and three months later to a British naval officer. He spent most of his time as a slave working on British slave ships and naval vessels. One of his owners, Henry Pascal, the captain of a British trading ship, gave Equiano the name Gustavas Vassa, which he used for most of his life.
In 1762, Equiano was sold to Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia. King allowed Equiano to trade small amounts of merchandise on his own behalf. He earned enough money to buy his freedom in 1766.
Once free, Equiano settled in England, where he worked as a merchant and became active in the abolition movement there. At the urging of his abolitionist friends, he wrote a memoir describing his capture and his experiences as a slave. The book was clearly designed as part of the movement: it began with a petition to Parliament and ended with an antislavery letter addressed to Queen Charlotte.* Although he included horrifying tales of the middle passage and West African slavery, he focused on his personal story–countering the popular image of the African slave as a heathen savage with that of a middle-class Englishman who improved his fortunes with hard work and just happened to be black.
The time of its publication in 1789 was good. William Wilberforce had brought his first bill for the abolition of the slave trade before Parliament. Abolitionist committees were flooding the country with copies of the shocking diagram of the slave ship The Brookes. With abolition in the air, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African, Written by Himself became an international best seller. ** Equiano did his part to make that happen. He traveled across the British Isles for five years promoting his book and his cause.***
Equiano died in 1797. It was 1807 before Parliament declared the slave trade illegal in Britain.
* No point in addressing it to the king. George III was known to be pro-slavery, or at least anti-abolition. The man always backed the wrong historical horse.
**It’s still in print today.
***Speaking as an author who has tried to actively promote a book for a period of months, this exhausts me just to think about.
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Grass Roots Organizing And the Abolition of the Slave Trade
The first popular political movement to use the techniques of what we call grass roots organizing was the movement to abolish the slave trade in the eighteenth century.
The Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, were the first group to take a public stand against slavery and the slave trade, even though Quakers were prominent slave traders in the seventeenth century and American Quakers had owned slaves since the founding of Pennsylvania in 1681. By the 1770s, the Quaker church took the position that all slaves should be freed. In fact, some congregations excommunicated Quakers who continued to own slaves.
The Quakers found natural allies for their campaign to abolish slavery in a group of wealthy businessmen, derisively known by their contemporaries as the Saints, and later called the Clapham Sect. The members of the Clapham Sect were evangelical Christians, whose beliefs emphasized personal salvation and a commitment to principles of individual and social responsibility, which they called “practical humanity” .
The Quakers and their allies were opposed by powerful economic interests. The owners of West Indian sugar plantations–some of the wealthiest men in Britain–were only the most obvious opponents. The slave trade was a key part of Britain’s extensive maritime trade industry in the eighteenth century: one-third to one-half of the ships that sailed out of Liverpool were related to the slave trade in one form or another. It provided work for ship owners and builders, sail and rope makers, customs officials, dock laborers and seaman, chandlers, and nautical-instrument makers. The growth of shipping and the slave trade contributed to Britain’s overall prosperity. The shipping trade also contributed to the growth of new business institutions, such as banks and marine and fire insurance. Many businessmen reinvested profits from the slave trade, and other imperial ventures, not only in more slave voyages but in agricultural improvements, canals, textile factories, and other forms of manufacturing. The slave trade reached beyond British ports. In the rural areas surrounding each slave port, manufacturers, merchants and farmers benefited by providing trade goods and supplies for outgoing slave ships.
Faced with a pro-slavery lobby of interests from all levels of society, anti-slave trade activists had to find ways to educate people about the evils of the slave trade and to put pressure on those with the power to change the law. They developed political tactics that we take for granted today.
They organized local action groups, building on the existing network of Quaker meeting houses. They collected and published information condemning the slave trade, including a bestselling first-hand account by former slave Olaudah Equiano.** They organized boycotts against products created using slave labor, particularly sugar, which had made the leap from a luxury to a necessity.** They bribed the doorkeepers of both houses of Parliament to give their pamphlets to every member.*** They visited elite schools to talk to future members of Parliament (including the sons of wealthy West Indian plantation owners) about the evils of slavery. Activists went door to door to canvas support for the cause. (One woman visited 3000 homes during a sugar boycott to explain the issue to individuals.) They even created the nineteenth century equivalent of a t-shirt: the image of an African man in chains with the slogan “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” appeared on personal seals, cufflinks and other jewelry, snuffboxes, tea sets, and even a cameo produced by luxury potter Josiah Wedgewood.
The first bill to abolish before the slave trade came before Parliament in 1789. The bill was postponed for further review. It finally came to a vote two years later,*** after parliamentary hearings on the slave trade produced 1700 pages of eyewitness accounts and other testimony before the House of Commons. The timing was bad. News arrived that a violent slave revolt had broken out on the British island of Dominica in the Caribbean. The pro-slavery advocates blamed the revolt on the abolitionists and argued that ending the slave trade would damage the British economy, which was already suffering from the war with France, Many members of Parliament opposed a bill they feared would encourage more slave revolts. The motion was defeated.
In response to the bill’s failure, abolitionist force sought to broaden their base of popular support with a flood of books, pamphlets and public speeches denouncing the sale of human beings. They focused on winning over Anglican ministers, who then preached to their congregations about the evils of the slave trade. When Wilberforce proposed a new bill for abolishing the slave trade in 1792, it was supported by petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of British subjects. The debate lasted all night. To the disappointment of Wilberforce and his supporters, the House of Commons passed a compromise measure that called for the gradual abolition of slavery. The bill was subsequently killed in the House of Lords.
It would be another fifteen years before Parliament passed a law abolishing the slave trade in British territories and making it illegal to carry slaves in British ships. During that time, the Quakers and the Clapham Sect worked on, winning over one member of Parliament at a time. That’s the way you change the world.
*The pro-slavery lobby produced witnesses who testified that life on a plantation as a slave was better for than life as a freeman in Africa. Can you say “alternative facts”?
**In 1700, the average Englishman ate four pounds of American-grown sugar a year. By 1900, that amount had increased to 100 pounds.
***Not recommended as a political tactic today.
****Yes, you read that correctly. Two years later. Holding up a bill in committee is not a new tactic.
From the Archives: Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Immigration Law of 1924
If you’ve been hanging out here in the Margins for a while, you probably have a pretty good idea about where I stand on political issues in general even though I try not to shove my opinions in your face because this is a history blog, not a political blog. One thing I feel strongly about is immigration. This post first appeared in December, 2015.
America has always been a nation of immigrants, fueled by a constant stream of those with the energy and imagination to leave the familiar in search of something more. And it has always had people who wanted to keep out the immigrants who came a generation or two after they themselves arrived.
Between 1880 and 1923, America saw the greatest voluntary migration in human history. Twenty-one million people moved to the United States in search of a better life. By 1911, the United States Immigration Commission reported that three-fifths of American wage-earners were born somewhere else.
Not everyone was happy about the new arrivals. Many groups argued that Congress should shut down the flood of immigration, just as some people now argue for tighter control of immigration. Labor unions feared that the flood of immigrants would take American jobs and depress wages. (Sound familiar?) Many longtime Americans felt that newcomers from eastern and southern Europe were inherently inferior to earlier immigrants from northwestern Europe. Others disliked the fact that many of the new arrivals were Catholic or Jewish. (Members of the Ku Klux Klan were the most violent proponents of this position, but they weren’t alone.)
Responding to these pressures, Congress passed a new immigration law in 1924. In addition to limiting the total number of immigrants allowed into the country each year, the new law established immigration quotas for each country based on the proportion of each nationality in the United States in the 1890 census, effectively reducing immigration from central and southern Europe. Asian immigrants were excluded altogether, with these exception of those from Japan and the Philippines.* The quotas remained in place, largely unchanged, until 1965.
You’d think we’d learn.
*Japan kept tight control over the number of emigrants allowed to leave. The Philippines were a US possession.