Slavery: Not a Black and White Issue

There has been a major effort recently to downplay the role of the abolitionists in the process of abolishing the slave trade and to big up the role played by blacks in ending the trade. How crazy can you get?

The slave trade wasn't resisted out of existence.

The slave trade wasn't rebelled out of existence

The slave trade was abolished out of existence.

There's a bloody big clue in the verb. Black people did not end slavery because they were not voters or parliamentarians. Of course black people were involved in the slave trade and many of them didn't like it but they didn't end it.

Slaves have been resisting capture and revolting against their masters for millennia and slavery continued. Remember Spartacus?

Black Africans took precautions against capture, they moved to more easily defensible locations, they went about armed. So did the people on the coasts of France, England and Ireland at about the same time. Capture and enslavement by Barbary pirates was a real danger for people in isolated coastal communities. Such resistance did not stop slavery. The barbary pirates were not suppressed until the navies of the United States then Britain and finally France (with full scale invasion and colonization) put them out of business with military might. Mere resistance to capture could not stop slavery or force people to abolish the trade, African women carrying clubs as they worked in the fields or the odd slave ship set alight is a red herring. So are a few hundred escaped slaves living free in the mountains, sometimes attacking plantations, sometimes capturing and returning runaway slaves for bounty.

The Atlantic slavers originally took to capturing slaves themselves, directly. Later this was abandoned as pointlessly risky. It made more sense to let Africans capture the slaves as they knew the risks involved. Life was cheaper on the African coast, why ship tough guys from Europe to do the strong-arm stuff when there were strong arms available cheaper in situ? This is all standard practice for capitalists, isolate yourself from risk, spread the risk. It made far more sense to own a third of ten ships than to own any ship outright. One ship might sink, ten ships wouldn't sink. It made more sense to buy slaves in the open market than get directly engaged in the capture of slaves especially as you could pay for the services of Africans with goods you could buy cheaply in England or America rather than paying white men danger money in hard cash that bites into your profits. In the triangle trade everything gained value by moving from one port to another. Shipping white men out to Africa to die of tropical diseases while risking their lives in slave raids at premium wages didn't make any sense, black muscle was cheaper, even after allowing an African slave trader to make a profit. With a triangle trade there were plenty of ways to make profits and plenty of ways to reduce your risk of loses.

It is all too easy to see the blacks taken as slaves as simply victims and wholly innocent. Of course they didn't ask to be enslaved and they didn't do anything to deserve such treatment but that doesn't buy their descendants any supreme moral advantage as if they were constitutionally incapable of brutality. They were the victims of brutality that was all around. Consider what would have happened if that black ancestor had not been captured. Where would the modern Caribbean or American black man have been living in this alternative world? He wouldn't. That ancestor would have stayed in Africa, perhaps to have a different set of descendants, some of whom would now be living a lifestyle that would make anybody redefine the term dirt poor. Or perhaps that ancestor would have died. Some slaves were not captured at all, they were sold by poor parents unable to feed their children. No slave exporting would have meant a lower price paid for slaves. Of course some would still have been slaves but would live and die as slaves in Africa, owned by Africans, unnoticed, their suffering lost to history as all the tens of millions of slaves who have lived and died in countries without literate caring people around to document their suffering for posterity. The key difference wasn't the barbarity of the Atlantic trade but the fact that it was noticed and people cared enough to stop it. And none of the people with the power to stop it were black.

Black people who enjoy victim status like to imagine an alternative history in which they would be living as a tribal chief surrounded by beautiful bare-breasted wives doing all the work on their huge farm if it wasn't for evil whitey. That doesn't compute. Africans didn't refuse to trade in slaves. They had been doing so for centuries. Why should white capitalists refrain from doing what the blacks were already doing? Why should white men be held to a higher standard of morality by the descendents of black men whose communities also sold and kept slaves? Africans didn't ship slaves across the Atlantic, this is true, but they had neither the means nor the need to.

The Atlantic slave trade differed from other cultures' history of slavery only by virtue of the semi-industrial scale, the efficiencies of the developing international capitalist market, the degree of historical documentation of suffering and the fact that it was ended by act of parliament.

Slaves in all eras have been whipped, flayed, flogged, branded, mutilated or crucified. Slaves in all eras have been traded and sold in the same way cattle and horses are sold. Slaves in all eras have been regarded as stupid ignorant unteachable savages by their owners, the Romans considered British slaves to be too stupid to command a good price at market.

There was and is some variation in the level of harshness of treatment of slaves. Traditional African slavery had more in common with the experience of the white European apprentice obliged to work for seven years without pay in return for his keep and picking up the skills of a trade than it did the experiences of a galley slave for the Barbary pirates or a slave on Barbados turning forced sweat into sugar and rum. It is all a matter of degree, if your master can beat you, name you, sell you and you have no right not to work or to object to sexual advances then you are a slave.

The slaves treated the most harshly tended to be strong men held together in large groups, the reasons should be obvious if you put yourself in the overseer's shoes for a few moments. Slaves have nothing to lose and little to live for, to keep them in line you have to use fear. The stronger they are and the more the numbers favour them over their masters the harsher and surer painful punishment has to be. Harsh treatment for newly acquired slaves is essential, for exactly the same reason why armies make life hell for their new recruits in the first few weeks: break the spirit, give them something to fear, try to make obedience instinctive. An effective overseer isn't a psychopath but he doesn't worry too much if the stupider of his charges think he is. Those dynamics work in Rome, Egypt, Barbados, Georgia, in a V-2 factory or the on the bridge on the River Kwai. It was inevitable that plantation slavery was towards the harsher end of the scale of cruelty.

The Bible is riddled with references to slavery. Did the people Moses supposedly led from captivity out of Egypt regard slavery as evil? Of course not. Foreigners, gentiles, were fair game to be enslaved to work in the fields or put to use in other ways by Jews. What wasn't on was Jews being held as slaves, because Jews count as people.

Let's be clear about this, slavery is not a black and white issue. There are many bloodstained black hands in the history of slavery too. Africans had been trading and owning slaves for millennia. These were black men owning black men and women. There were also freed slaves in America who went on to own slaves in their own right. Joseph Cinque, ringleader of the mutiny on the slave ship La Amistad after being exonerated by the US Supreme Court returned to Africa and became a slave trader.

There was no brotherhood among Africans (even rhetorically) until long after their contact with the world of Europe and America. Europe was one of the few parts of the world largely free of slavery and that was because of the attitude of the Catholic Church forbidding the taking or holding of Christian slaves. Christianity helped Europeans to see each other as brothers under the skin. Jews didn't enslave Jews, that was normal for most classical ancient people, foreigners were not people, foreigners could be slaves. Foreigners didn't count as people and you could not sin against a foreigner, killing a foreigner did not break any commandments, neither did raping a foreign woman, how could it even be rape if she wasn't one of us? Foreigners were chattels, a resource to be plundered. Just think about the moral values in Jack and the Beanstalk, the giant wasn't English so it was perfectly reasonable for Jack to steal anything he wanted from him, and serve him right for not being English. How could we possibly sympathize with such a sociopath? He makes Cecil Rhodes look like Gandhi. And yet this is a story we tell our children as if Jack was a hero. Well, he was good to his mum, just like Ronnie and Reggie.

Chattel slavery had not existed in England since an act of Parliament of 1102. Before this time slavery was fairly common in England with slaves being captured, traded and exported. We should face up to reality, slavery was common almost everywhere in less civilized times. Vikings took huge numbers of slaves wherever they went and exported them to sell elsewhere for a higher price. Battles on English soil often led to defeated armies being sold into slavery, being shipped across the sea to Normandy or Ireland. It was a growing distaste for the practice that led to the original abolition, which was accelerated because of the ubiquity of Christianity. If everybody around you worships the same god and is a member of the same church it becomes impossible to see defeated and captured people merely as brutes.

Englishmen abroad had bought and sold slaves in the early colonial days and a few had taken their servants back to England with them, but the law did not allow them to be kept as slaves. The case of James Somersett, baptised black servant abducted by his master to be shipped out to Jamaica brought the legal position into sharp focus. The judge declared that English law did not recognize the condition of slavery, Somersett was entitled to the full protection of English law, including protection from abduction and wrongful imprisonment.

The first people to think that slavery was wrong in all circumstances for all people (other than slaves, and they don't count as they're obviously biased) were non-conformist Protestants in England, Quakers in America and revolutionary radical liberals in France. Revolutionary sentiments of Liberté, égalité, fraternité clearly jarred with the idea of keeping slaves. A model of a loving caring Jesus didn't sit well with slavery either. Once you have made the change in your thinking to identify the slave as your own kind, a brother under the skin, a fellow man, a Christian brother or a fellow citizen you can't go on treating them like sub-humans. Many white slave owners knew this well, they knew blacks were men like them because they saw the obvious evidence that the offspring of black and white were not sterile like mules but were fine, strong and as intelligent as their own legitimate children. Only by keeping the blacks ignorant and illiterate could they continue to be seen as lower or lesser beings. A deliberate policy of denigrating the intelligence and humanity of black people was required by the apologists of slavery to make such horrendous treatment appear reasonable. It was essential to deny them full education, if your slave could outsmart you and quote the Bible better than you could how could you maintain the illusion of inherent superiority? Echoes of this policy are still clearly to be found on the internet today perpetrated mostly by whites of well below average intelligence whose only claim to any status at all is the fact that they share a country and a skin colour with some unrelated people (who don't share their racist worldview) who have managed to achieve something significant with their lives.

Human ingenuity being what it is it was inevitable than some blacks would manage to get themselves educated and would be able to demonstrate to the world their equal capacity to learn and to suffer.

A small handful of articulate black men could not stop the institution of slavery. But they were a vital part of the abolitionist movement. It was essential that the white electorate came to know of such men and to hear them speak. Without them the abolitionists would have had a harder task. Yes tales of floggings can shock and seeing manacles and leg irons does make a point but ultimately a person has to believe that it is a person who is suffering. They have to empathize. The best possible advocate is a black man who looks and sounds like a gentleman who is introduced by a white man who clearly is. It is not essential that every single white elector meets an articulate black man but a certain proportion of the opinion-formers must do so.

The abolitionist movement could not expect to win overnight, it didn't, it took many decades from the first stirrings of resolutions within the Quaker movement in England back in 1727. The Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1783 marked a significant advance, Quakers were not allowed seats in Parliament at this time so they needed Anglican supporters too who could take the struggle into the heart of government and actually effect a change in the law rather than bleat about the issue like a bunch of punks.

New ideas often take a generation to become widely accepted. Two hundred years ago, in 1807, the British Parliament took the first big step by outlawing the Atlantic slave trade. That step too wasn't a single step, William Wilberforce had introduced his first bill to ban the slave trade back in 1791 and re-introduced similar bills almost every year until it finally passed. It was thought by stopping the trade slaves would be treated better (crudely that they would be allowed to survive long enough to breed for a change). But it didn't work out entirely as hoped, the prospect of being caught slaving led a few British sea captains to throw slaves overboard when the spied Royal Navy vessels, they saved themselves £100 in fines for every slave they could remove from the ship. The next step was to treat all slavers as pirates, a crime punishable by death. While the trade and the Atlantic crossing was particularly barbaric slavery in and of itself was fundamentally objectionable and that is what needed to be abolished.

It took many more years and several new laws before slaves throughout the British Empire were freed. In America it took the first modern large scale war to turn the tide. Even after the slaves were freed, and in the British case the colonial slave owners were compensated (£20 million of compensation was paid out to plantation owners and other owners of slaves) there was more work to be done.

Black Africans in the nations which exported slaves have been slower to mop up the traces of slavery than any of the lands which imported slaves. Slavery is still not yet fully defeated. It still exists in parts of West Africa today, places where cousins of black people in America, the Caribbean and the world-wide black diaspora are still today living as slaves.

Should I feel any shame for my part in the slave trade? I assume my great great great great grandparents bought a few pounds of sugar and sold food to people who made things, some of which were sold to Africans who earned money to buy the stuff by selling slaves. That's it. I don't come from any families who benefited directly from the trade. I have no family oral history which goes back to the slave era and no hints of any of my ancestors ever setting foot on any ship before the First World War. I don't have a family seat paid for by the profits of shipping, cotton or sugar. Why should I apologize for something done by people my ancestors shared a country with? It wasn't me. It wasn't my ancestors either. There is no blood on my hands and no guilt in my blood.

Slavery is a shameful history but two hundred years ago slavery began to be removed from our human experience, the experience and behavioural repertoire of our species. It was the British Parliament that really started that process, on 23rd February 1807. That is something to celebrate, people stopped taking slavery as an unavoidable but grubby fact of life and started to do something about stopping it. In that same month the US Congress also voted on abolishing slavery, but the vote did not pass. But the abolitionists did not give up. The first step was ending the trade in slaves, which was thought would lead to slaves being looked after better if replacements could no longer be bought. Of course for the majority of abolitionists stopping the trade was merely step one. Then came abolishing slavery itself in Britain, then in slave holding colonies, then using the empire to eradicate slavery and extreme forms of bonded labour anywhere in the empire. Then using the power of trade to export abolitionism to the world. The fight to eliminate all traces of slavery still goes on.

Let my people go

The Catholic Church forbade the trading of Christian slaves but granted Portugal a monopoly on the trade in African heathen slaves.

Haitian black slaves fought for the freedom of black slaves in Haiti.

Gandhi stood up for the rights of Indians in South Africa and later in India.

Martin Luther King Jr stood up for the rights of his own race in America.

How is fighting for your own people (as you define the concept) to be compared to fighting for people who are not like you? Do Black Muslims in Chicago protest about Hindus in India being kept as indentured labourers? Do they fight for the rights of Hispanic women? Do they denounce black Africans keeping black Africans as slaves? What kind of honour is there in fighting for a gang that has grown up to include a whole race, but not a single person more?

What did Gandhi do for the black people of South Africa? He demanded in effect that Indians be treated better than the blacks.

How many times has the Israeli Defense Force been used directly to help gentiles?

How much money did black Christian churches raise to help the plight of white Muslims in Bosnia?

Surely it is people who fight for the rights and the freedom of people different from themselves who deserve the greatest respect and the highest accolades rather than the people who fight for the rights of groups of which they too are a member.

Any black brother pointing a finger at me for the crime of being white and therefore being responsible for all his ills is dead wrong.

Let Those People Go

There was no unity among black Africans of any kind until some were chained together and sold to white men. Like most people across the world there was no automatic assumption among Africans that a person of the same race is your brother. If they looked a bit different, dressed differently and spoke a different language or dialect they were foreigners, potentially hostile. Members of different tribes distrust and hate each other and want each other dead a lot of the time. For details of how tribal people tend to view people of other tribes just read the Bible.

It is a total myth to imagine any kind of black unity or pan-Africanism existing in the days of the slave trade. For the most part Africans lived in tribal communities with a few reaching the status of nation and fewer still the status of empire. There was no attempt among African tribes and kingdoms to unite against the slave trade. The only measures used to fight slavery were resistance to slave raids on a village-by-village basis. Attacks on slave raiders did put off European slave traders from capturing slaves directly and of putting their ships in danger of attack. It made much more sense to stick to harbours where they were welcomed and allow African and Arab traders to bring the slaves to them in the ports. Guns and other weapons were part of the Guinea goods that the triangle traders shipped out from Europe to trade in Africa for slaves, along with beads, copper kettles, mirrors, tobacco and gin.

The God of Moses is quoted as saying Let My People Go. This is the normal response of tribal leaders. Having your people taken away in chains is a big affront to your tribal or national (or godly) pride. No doubt individual African chieftains made similar commitments and oaths to see their people freed. But this was always limited to the tribe. Moses didn't (even taking the myth at face value) lead the slaves out of Egypt he led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt. The gentile slaves could rot. Moses and his God didn't care about them or give them a backward glance. Read the story yourself and see if you can detect any hint of concern about gentile slaves or the idea that slavery in and of itself was wrong.

The first people who ever stood up and were prepared to be counted as opposing slavery of all kinds, of all people, were the abolitionists. This was nothing to do with tribal pride or protecting their own people. It was not selfish or self-aggrandizing. It was a universal human concern that transcended tribe, nation and race. It was a civilized value.

Nobody is going to make me be ashamed of being English because some unrelated long-dead Englishmen bought and kept slaves. Most nations and tribes have bought and kept slaves at times when they had had the power to do so. But slavery is now largely confined to history and it was defeated because people, white Englishmen and women to the fore, stood up and protested, drew together a movement and saw to it that the law was changed. The slave revolt in Haiti was a one-off, it had no repercussions, no other dominoes fell. In contrast the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade was the start of a process that transformed the world, ending slave trading, slave owning and serfdom in many places, ushering in the modern era.

Why was it white people who enslaved black people and carried them away across the sea? Simple, only white people had ships and plantations across the sea. It wasn't that black Africans were morally incapable of doing such nasty things, they were merely incapable of doing them in practice. That's exactly the same reason why England bullied Ireland and Scotland rather than the other way around. I find it incredibly annoying when I get accused of the crimes of the people who ruled over my ancestors as if the people doing the accusing had ancestors who lived as bloody vegan hippies, blue-painted skirt-wearing moral paragons, superheroes and instinctive lawyers or Disney heroines. My ancestors were peaceful farmers, not redcoats, pirates, coal mine owners or slavers.

West Africa was merely a few hundred years behind the pace of civilization of Europe. West Africans were behaving very much the same as the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings had been acting in the ninth and tenth centuries, tolerating slave trading between peoples and kingdoms who were very similar, to the point that outsiders might not have been able to distinguish between them. Tolerating slavery (while resisting being enslaved) is the normal state of mankind. It takes exceptional people to decide that slavery should not be tolerated. Thank goodness there were some exceptional people to cause us to recognize that slavery is always wrong.

It is not only wrong but absurd to demand an apology from me and my generation for the activities of those people long since dead. I have never condoned slavery. None of my ancestors I can remember condoned slavery. This is not the same as the case of Nazi Germany, there is nobody alive today who remembers a grandfather who was a slaver. Nobody is suggesting that slavery was anything to be proud of. My ancestors were not guilty of anything other than living in a country that hadn't yet abolished slavery.

Anti-Slavery: The Fight Goes On

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