Britain and the slave trade

There is a huge literature on this subject. A good starting point might be this website. The UCL database on the British slave-owners is a ground-breaking work of digitized history.

The trade

Here are a couple of typically bland items from the 20 November 1762 issue of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal.

‘Arrived at Virginia, the Hector Chilcott, last from Angola, with 512 slaves.’
‘Tuesday died in Queen-square Mr King, Commander of a Ship in the African Trade.’

The British slave trade had flourished since the 1713 when the  Treaty of Utrecht awarded Britain the contract (asiento) to import slaves to the Spanish Indies. Between 1721 and 1730 the British carried over 100,000 slaves to the Americas, the majority going to Jamaica and Barbados. 

Bristol  soon overtook London as the main base for dealing in slaves, but it was itself overtaken by Liverpool, the Mersey basin being deeper than the Avon and Frome, the rivers on which Bristol was built. The first recorded slave ship was the Liverpool Merchant of 1700 which carried 220 slaves to Barbados. By 1740 it was sending thirty-three ships a year to Africa. Thereafter the total grew. While Bristol merchants tended to remain faithful to safe old anchorages in the Gold Coast and Angola, the Liverpool merchants struck out anew to seek Africans in Sierra Leone, Gabon and the Cameroons. Unlike the Bristol traders, the Liverpool slavers were the founders of dynasties: the Leylands, the Cunliffes, the Bolds and the Kennions. Penny Lane is thought to have been named after the slave trader James Penny. The facade of the Liverpool Exchange carried the heads of Africans with elephants in a frieze and one street was commonly known as ‘Negro Row’.

Jamaica overtook Barbados as the prize colony. The richest planter, Peter Beckford, owned at his death (1735) nine sugar plantation and was part-owner of seven more. His son William, MP for the City, was the most powerful businessman in the City and was twice Lord Mayor.

The plantations

In the first decade of the eighteenth century slaves began to be imported in substantial numbers onto the North American mainland in order to counter an acute labour shortage. Over 3,500 slaves were carried to South Carolina between May 1721 and September 1726. Their task was to clear the cypress swamps and plant and harvest rice. Advertisements for ‘prime slaves’ and ‘strong, stout, hearty negroes’ were soon seen everywhere. From 1723 ships from Newport (RI) carried rum to Africa in exchange for slaves.

However, the sugar-producing Caribbean islands (St Kitts, Barbados, Jamaica) were always of greater commercial value to Britain than mainland North America. But the white population of the West Indies was only 32,000 as opposed to 234,000 in North America, making the prospect of slave revolts an ever-present fear.

Imports to Africa

The cargo most generally carried was cloth, which the Africans liked to wear untailored, wrapping the cloths around them. Metal goods were also valued. Cowrie shells from the Maldives served as a unit of currency in west Africa. From the middle of the seventeenth century weapons were sold, as West Africans developed a taste for muskets. Alcohol was an increasingly valued commodity. West Africans had their own palm wine but came to enjoy European spirits, with rum replacing brandy by the end of the 17th century.

The slave traders

Over the period 1761-1807 the slave trade yielded an average of just under 10 per cent on invested capital.

Some families became extremely wealthy. The Lascelles family purchased plantations in the West Indies in the late seventeenth century. They purchased their Yorkshire estate in 1738, and between 1759 and 1771 Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood built Harwood House.

Harewood House, Yorkshire
built on the profits from the slave trade

The recently restored Danson House in Bexleyheath was built by John Styleman out of his West Indian fortune.

Danson House Bexleyheath

Many of the Bristol slavers had houses in Queen Square, the first Georgian square in the city. Successful slave owners and merchants would often buy substantial country properties or invest in art. John Pinney, who owned a slave plantation in Nevis, built a house in Great George Street from the profits. It is now the Georgian House Museum and contains an exhibition showing the lives of the slaves on the plantations.

The Georgian house, Bristol
built about 1790.
My photograph.

The most revered Bristol citizen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the merchant and philanthropist, Edward Colston, who sponsored numerous charitable projects, funded from slavery, many of which survive to this day and bear his name. This is now a hot topic in Bristol.

Edward Colston
philanthropist and slave trader
Public domain.

Because the trade was risky and profits were not always high, most slave voyages were financed not by individual merchants but by partnerships, with six or more merchants participating.

All Christian denominations were involved in the slave trade. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had inherited the Codrington estate in Barbados. The slaves had the word 'Society' branded on them. Many Christians justified this involvement on the grounds that they were giving them a better life than they would have had in Africa. 

A typical slave ship would not have been a specialist vessel but a standard wooden cargo vessel. A high proportion of the British slave ships were naval prizes, the rest were built in British shipyards. The ships had had to be armed because of the danger of pirates - though this decreased as the seas became safer in the eighteenth century. All ships were insured, often internationally.

Ordinary seamen were usually young men of low achievement and aspirations, who faced a life of poor pay, vile conditions and danger. The former slave-trader turned Evangelical clergyman, John Newton declared: ‘There is no trade in which seamen are treated with so little humanity.’ At least a fifth of the crew usually died.

Slave mortality in the crossing fell from perhaps 15 to 20 per cent at the beginning of the century to round 10 per cent or less after 1783. But this varied greatly from voyage to voyage.

Bristol Journal, Sat 15 Jan, 1763: ‘The Oldbury, Watkins, is blown up on the Coast of Africa, with near 500 slaves on board.’

The Somerset Judgement

Most black slaves in England had been brought back by sea captains and their status was legally uncertain. Some had been legally emancipated. Dr Johnson's servant, Francis Barber, had been freed by his previous owner, Colonel Bathurst; similarly a black valet in the service of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But slaves were often put up for public sale in Bristol and Liverpool.

Portrait, possibly of Francis Barber
Tate Collection
Public domain.

Granville Sharp, then a junior clerk in the Ordinance Office (grandson of an Archbishop of York) took up the case of James Somerset, who had been brought to England by his master, Charles Stewart of Boston, in 1769. He escaped in 1771, was recaptured, then put on board the Ann and Mary, whose captain was John Knowles, bound for Jamaica, where he was to be sold.

Granville Sharp, the grand old man
of abolition
by George Dance
Public domain

The case came before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield on the Court of King's Bench. Mansfield decided that there was no legal definition as to whether there could or could not be slaves in England. After procrastination, he decided the case on the ground that slavery was so odious that nothing could be suffered to support it except positive law. Somerset therefore was freed. There was general rejoicing among the many blacks present at the hearing. However in 1779 Mansfield stated that his judgment went no further than to determine that the master had no right to compel the slave to go into a foreign country. Little changed in the Caribbean and Africa. Yet the judgment affected public opinion. 1779 saw the last known sale of a slave in England (in Liverpool).

For the story of Mansfield's mixed-race niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle, see here.

Opposition grows

In 1774 John Wesley, who had seen slaves sold in Georgia, published his Thoughts on Slavery:

‘I would to God it [the slave trade] may never be found more: that we may never more steal and sell our brethren like beasts; never murder by thousands. … Never was anything such a reproach to England, since it was a nation, as the having a hand in this infernal traffic.’

In 1783 William Cowper’s poem Charity denounced the slave merchant who ‘grows rich on cargo of despair’.

In June 1783 a Quaker anti-slave-trade petition was presented to the Commons. It argued, in a fusion of Christian and Enlightenment thought, that the trade was inconsistent not only with Christianity, but also with humanity, justice and the natural rights of mankind generally.

The case of the Zong

This was a Liverpool slave ship. Its master was Luke Collingwood, its owners William Gregson and George Case, Liverpool merchants. In September 1781 it sailed with 442 slaves from São Tomé off the west coast of Africa. In between Jamaica and San Domingue (Haiti) the ship lost its way, water became short, and many slaves died or became ill. Collingwood called together his officers and said that if the slaves on board were to die naturally the loss would be that of the owners of the ship; but if on some pretext affecting the safety of the crew they were to be thrown alive into the sea it would be the loss of the underwriters. Therefore 133 slaves, most of whom were sick and not likely to live, were thrown into the sea.

J. M. W. Turner, The Slave Ship
inspired by the Zong massacre
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Public domain.

When the ship returned home the insurers disputed the captain’s claim. The owners therefore brought a suit against the insurers, demanding to be paid £30 for each slave, and they were backed in King’s Bench; the underwriters then petitioned the Court of the Exchequer. In allowing the case to go to another court, Lord Mansfield remarked that the jury had to decide whether the slaves were thrown overboard from necessity

‘for they had no doubt (though it shocks one very much) that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard)'.

However, public opinion was turning. From 1783 the Liverpool Quaker timber firm of Rathbone and Son refused to supply timber for the African trade. Even in Liverpool, therefore, opposition to the trade was building up. 

The beginnings of abolition

In 1787 the Quaker-dominated Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed. Its chairman was Granville Sharp. In the same year the young Cambridge graduate, Thomas Clarkson, was sent on a potentially dangerous fact-finding mission around Liverpool and Bristol to discover the details of how the slave trade operated. In October the MP for Yorkshire, William Wilberforce was persuaded by the prime minister, William Pitt, to take up the cause of abolition. 1788 saw a flurry of abolitionist literature, and on 12 May 1789 Wilberforce delivered the first of his abolitionist speeches in the Commons. 

William Wilberforce,
by John Rising
Wilberforce House, Hull
Public domain.

Conclusion: the abolitionist movement

From its beginnings in 1787 a mass movement grew that finally achieved success when the slave trade was abolished in 1807. At one level it was a human-rights campaign, but it was also deeply religious, inspired by humanitarian sentiment, and also by a providentialist belief that divine judgement would fall upon a nation that acted in a wicked and ungodly fashion.