Up from slavery
Bury the Chains addresses the innumerable setbacks and eventual success of Britain's abolitionist movement
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
By Adam Hochschild
Houghton Mifflin, 468 pp., illustrated, $26.95
In 1788, British planters owned a great share of the slaves in the Western Hemisphere, while British captains and investors dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Fifty years later, Britain had outlawed slavery and the slave trade, and began to take active steps to throttle them worldwide. The sea change in policy was preceded by a sea change in public opinion. In ''Bury the Chains," Adam Hochschild tells the story of ''one of the most ambitious and brilliantly organized citizens' movements of all time."
The engine of 18th-century slavery was Europe's demand for sugar, most of which was grown in the West Indies. Tiny islands were worth more than continental masses: In 1773, Jamaica's exports to Britain were worth five times the exports of the 13 Colonies. Sugar was grown and processed by African slaves, and in order to maximize profits, it was necessary, as one Antiguan planter explained, ''to wear [slaves] out before they became useless . . . and then, to buy new ones, to fill up their places." The slaves were acquired from African dealers by a network of British-run trading posts. The Bance Island trading post, in the Sierra Leone River, even had a two-hole golf course.
The Englishmen who joined forces to fight this traffic were a diverse lot. Granville Sharp belonged to an eccentric family of musicians. William Wilberforce was a small, unworldly, wealthy member of Parliament. John Newton had captained a slave ship before becoming a hymn-writing Anglican clergyman (''Amazing Grace" is his most famous work); late in his life, he dramatically repented his youthful career. Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vasa, had been a slave. Born, he said, in what is now Nigeria, then shipped to Barbados, he sailed with the Royal Navy and earned enough to buy his freedom. Most energetic of them all was Thomas Clarkson, a divinity student at Cambridge who in 1785 entered a Latin essay contest on the topic of slavery. The theme absorbed him: ''a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end." He decided to become that person, crisscrossing Britain, hunting down testimony, and accumulating facts about the slave trade's evils.
The opponents of the slave trade pioneered what Hochschild calls techniques of ''modern civil society." They formed a committee with branches nationwide, though the structure was flat enough to give local chapters -- which were often the most activist -- considerable leeway. They sent out reports on their progress and requests for donations. Equiano wrote a memoir -- ''The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African" --and embarked on a long political book tour. Josiah Wedgwood, the potter, designed a logo: a chained slave, surrounded by the motto ''Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"
An even more powerful visual aid was a top-down diagram of the Brookes, a slave ship, packed with 482 slaves. ''You have seen this diagram," Hochschild tells us, referring to its ubiquity in textbooks and documentaries. ''Precise, understated, and eloquent in its starkness, it remains one of the most widely reproduced political graphics of all time." The abolitionists boycotted sugar, signed petitions, and, with the help of Wilberforce and other political allies, conducted damning hearings in Parliament. After the hearings, they boiled the facts down into a pocket-size ''Abstract of the Evidence" that reads, Hochschild says, ''like a report by a modern human rights organization."
The movement faced innumerable setbacks. Planters and slave traders hired their own lobbyists, and wrote their own books. The French Revolution, and the wars that ensued, distracted the nation's attention. A plan to resettle freed slaves on the Sierra Leone coast, ironically only a few miles from Bance Island, got off to a bad start (one skeptical observer called it ''a premature, hair-brained and ill digested scheme"). But the long years of lobbying finally succeeded.
West Indian slaves themselves, encouraged by reports of what was afoot in Britain, repeatedly rose in revolt, which only made the abolitionist case stronger. The slave trade was abolished in 1807; slavery in the British Empire ended in 1838. Clarkson died in 1846, at the age of 86. Two of his last visitors were the American abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.
Hochschild has a knack for vivid portraits, and an eye for arresting detail. ''Bury the Chains" suffers, however, from a major flaw, which I can only call Hochschild's dislike of Christianity. He seldom misses an opportunity to mock and belittle it, and since many of the figures in his story are devout Christians, even clergymen, he is kept busy. He jeers at Newton for not testifying against slavery until decades after his own conversion. The pious Wilberforce opposed slavery all his adult life, but Hochschild jeers at him too.
Many of the organizers and foot soldiers in the abolition movement were Quakers, whom Hochschild likes because they were ''pacifist and democratically minded," though he hardly pauses to reflect what influence their faith had on their peaceable, democratic minds. Whited sepulchres -- the bishops who supported slavery, the church bodies that owned plantations -- are fair game. But Hochschild's secularist animus can make him sound like a color-blind man who has taken up art criticism. Jesse Jackson would not make this mistake.
But if you discount Hochschild's reverse bigotry, ''Bury the Chains" makes a lively introduction to an important subject.
Richard Brookhiser is the author, most recently, of ''Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution." 