Human Traffic Stopped
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels In the Fight to Free an Empire’s
Slaves
by Adam Hochschild
Houghton Mifflin, 2005
(467 pages, $16.00, paperback)
reviewed by L. P. Fairfield
On March 25, 1807, King George III of England formally ratified a Parliamentary Act abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire. That infamous trade had carried more than three million Africans to misery and death in the Americas since the 1580s. A prominent English lord asserted in 1807 that the Abolition Bill was “the most humane and merciful Act which was ever passed by any legislature in the world.”
To be sure, the Abolition Act in 1807 merely ended the slave trade in British vessels, not the institution of slavery altogether in the nascent empire. More than half a million slaves were still suffering on British sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Their final emancipation would not come until 1833. But the prohibition of the slave trade was a crucial first step in that direction.
As the two-hundredth anniversary of the Abolition Act approaches, University of California journalism professor Adam Hochschild has told us the story of British abolitionism winsomely and comprehensively. He focuses on the period from 1787 to 1833, when opposition to slavery became a permanent conviction among Englishmen.
A Winsome Story
Hochschild gives the Evangelical Anglican William Wilberforce his due, as the Parliamentary leader of the movement. But he gives equal treatment to lesser-known “prophets and rebels” as well. Anglicans Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson appear as dynamic workhorses who began gathering information and compiling anti-slavery petitions in the 1780s.
The faithful and largely anonymous London Quakers stood behind Sharp and Clarkson, praying and organizing and paying the bills. The brilliant maritime lawyer James Stephen joined the movement in 1805, and wrote the Abolition Act that finally passed. Hochschild weaves all their stories into a narrative that is gripping and convincing.
Some of Hochschild’s players appear in unfamiliar roles. The book’s first five chapters focus on the Reverend John Newton, not as the beloved author of Amazing Grace but as the young captain of slaving ships who was completely oblivious to the moral depravity of his occupation. His conversion to Christianity in his twenties made no difference. Only in 1788, at the end of his life, did Newton confess “that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.”
More influential than Newton on English public opinion was the Nigerian freedman Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography in 1789 quickly became a bestseller. Equiano wrote vividly, conveying at first hand the nauseating stench of the densely packed slaves aboard ship in the mid-Atlantic, the searing wounds slashed by overseers’ whips on the Caribbean sugar plantations, and the death by scalding of the slaves who boiled the sugarcane in 24-hour shifts. Equiano gave slavery a human face in England, putting a moral edge on Josiah Wedgwood’s famous cameo (a slave in chains with the words “Am I not a man and a brother?”).
Hochschild’s story crisscrosses the Atlantic repeatedly, showing how the Caribbean slave revolts of the 1790s gradually persuaded Englishmen that slavery was not only immoral but far too expensive. While the war with France preoccupied the country at home, and Wilberforce’s abolition bills languished in Parliament, Haiti exploded in a frenzy of violence.
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