Rational Dissenters were among the leading advocates for religious and political reform in late eighteenth-century Britain and, while not numerically large, they exerted a significant cultural and political influence.Footnote 1 Their contribution to the campaign to abolish the slave trade, however, has been neglected. It would be easy to slot Rational Dissenters into a Marxist account of abolitionism as rooted in emerging capitalist ‘bourgeois radicalism’.Footnote 2 This article demonstrates, however, that their role was more complex and sheds light on the relationship between religion, economics, and abolitionism. Rational Dissenters helped abolitionism to spread rapidly in 1787–92, helped sustain it in parliament during the reactionary years that followed, and contributed to its parliamentary success in 1806–7.
Scholars traditionally depicted abolitionism as a conservative movement led by Quaker and evangelical ‘Saints’.Footnote 3 In his important study of The Atlantic slave trade and British abolition, Roger Anstey argued that while Enlightenment thought fostered critiques of slavery, the evangelical sense of sinfulness and desire for redemption was the key impulse that converted anti-slavery sentiment into abolitionist action.Footnote 4 David Brion Davis depicted anti-slavery as arising from both Enlightenment and evangelical intellectual developments and, in turn, serving the class interests of capitalists by promoting the superiority of wage labour.Footnote 5 With respect to Scotland, Duncan Rice argued that, while many Enlightenment thinkers criticized slavery, it was evangelicalism that generated abolitionist action.Footnote 6 More recently, Nicholas Hudson has unconvincingly argued that British anti-slavery was largely the product of a mainstream conservative Anglican ideology of patriotism and piety.Footnote 7
Since the 1980s, studies of abolitionism have focused on its social ecology in an effort to understand why anti-slavery sentiment spawned a campaign to abolish the slave trade in Britain in the late eighteenth century, and not at some other time or place. In doing so, they have emphasized the secularizing aspects of abolitionism. James Walvin has pointed to links between abolitionism and extra-parliamentary reformist agitation, observing that many active abolitionists enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution.Footnote 8 Focusing on the emerging industrial city of Manchester, Seymour Drescher sees abolitionism as growing out of a culture of ‘improving’ clubs and associations that proliferated as people sought to forge new lives in new urban landscapes – in the process, developing an increasing attachment to individual rights. Many assumed that industrializing Manchester would be supportive of the slave trade and were surprised when it produced a large petition that ‘pushed Britain across the psychological threshold into the abolitionist era’.Footnote 9 Challenging this focus on industrial towns, J. R. Oldfield has stressed the importance of the London Abolition Committee and the ways in which abolitionism was part of the general ‘commercialization of politics’.Footnote 10
Moving beyond studies that focus on either intellectual or social history, Christopher Brown's award-winning Moral capital has stressed the highly contingent nature of what was ‘a peculiar institution rather than the inevitable outcome of moral and cultural progress'.Footnote 11 Brown emphasized the American Revolution's importance in provoking debate about slavery, liberty, empire, and identity, and the way in which abolitionism was spawned by the convergence of groups and individuals who saw it as a means to advance various interests in the late 1780s. Quakers sought to revitalize their denomination, evangelicals saw abolitionism as the spearhead of a wider reformation of manners, and Thomas Clarkson wanted to become a heroic individual. Since Moral capital stops at May 1787, it has the general effect of re-emphasizing the role of the Quakers and evangelicals, which is significant, given that Brown's book is likely to prove the most influential study of abolitionism for years to come.
There was never a monolithic anti-slavery movement. As Drescher has observed, there were many varieties of anti-slavery: ‘anti-slave trade, anti-black, humanitarian, egalitarian, religious and secular variants, sometimes operating separately and sometimes in tandem or tension’.Footnote 12 Diverse coalitions of individuals, ideas, and interests came together at different times in support of varying programmes. Abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 was of world historical significance and we need to understand the aims and actions of the full range of abolitionists.
While their significance emerges implicitly in studies of abolitionism, there has been little focus on the role of Rational Dissenters. While stressing the importance of religion, Anstey largely ignored the contribution of Unitarian Dissenters to abolitionism.Footnote 13 Douglas C. Stange has written on mid-nineteenth century British anti-slavery Unitarians, emphasizing the role of so-called ‘evangelical Unitarians’, which is a questionable category of little relevance prior to the 1830s.Footnote 14 Grayson Ditchfield's essay on the Unitarian Manchester College has shown how it was ‘possible for a religiously inspired commitment to Anti-Slavery to emanate from other than evangelical sources’.Footnote 15 David Turley's The culture of English antislavery, 1780–1860 provides the most detailed discussion of Rational Dissenting anti-slavery, focusing on their prominence in regional towns as part of a broad multi-denominational ‘middle class reform complex’.Footnote 16 Despite such scholarship, however, Rational Dissenting abolitionism remains under-researched. As a result, important recent studies of Rational Dissent hardly mention their anti-slavery activism, whilst some historians of slavery still talk of ‘the abolitionist leadership and … its evangelical constituency’.Footnote 17
During the nineteenth century, evangelicals magnified the role of William Wilberforce and, at times, even claimed that the leading abolitionists were successful because they believed in the Holy Trinity.Footnote 18 Influenced by the five-volume Life of William Wilberforce, written by his evangelical sons, historians and commentators have often perpetuated the marginalization of non-evangelicals, even listing heterodox abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson and William Smith as part of the evangelical ‘Saints’.Footnote 19 In reality, some of the most vocal Anglican abolitionists were ‘rational Christians’, such as the politicians Samuel Whitbread and Samuel Romilly (who came from Dissenting backgrounds). In important ways, Peter Peckard and William Paley, heterodox Anglican clergymen at Cambridge, helped stimulate anti-slavery sentiment in the 1780s.Footnote 20 Most significantly, while the leading abolitionist continues to be described by some historians as an ‘Anglican evangelical’, Thomas Clarkson's friends thought he ‘inclined to Unitarian opinions’.Footnote 21 Clarkson's writings reflect the mind of a rational Christian, he had life-long Unitarian friends such as William Smith and Henry Crabb Robinson, and he was married by an Anglican priest, Robert Edward Garnham, who had openly subscribed to the militant Unitarian Society.Footnote 22 The evangelical tendency to gloss over, marginalize, or ignore heterodox abolitionists has influenced scholarship and partly explains why historians have a limited understanding of the abolitionism of Rational Dissenters.
Neglect of Rational Dissenting abolitionism also owes something to the nature of the sources. Overall, abolitionist pamphlets tended to issue from the pens of some key activists, such as Clarkson and James Ramsay, and even someone like Wilberforce published little on abolition outside of his parliamentary speeches. In addition to this consideration, with conservative Christians actively supporting abolition, Rational Dissenters on the whole continued to prioritize their campaigns for religious and political reform. Drawing together evidence from pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, subscription lists, and scattered comments in letters and memoirs, we can nevertheless see that Rational Dissenters contributed to abolitionism in a variety of ways, sometimes anonymously. Focusing on leading clergy, politicians, and lay Rational Dissenters, this article shows that they played an important role in the campaign to end the slave trade.
I
Set alongside established accounts of Quaker and evangelical abolitionism, an appreciation of the role of Rational Dissent underlines the importance of religion. While we can still talk about ‘The Enlightenment’ at a general level, scholarship since the 1980s has demonstrated the great variety of confessional, national, and regional ‘Enlightenments’. Colin Kidd, for example, has discerned a distinctive ‘Ayrshire Enlightenment’, and we can even see traces of ‘practical enlightenment’ in the West Indies.Footnote 23 England arguably generated a dominant ‘Conservative Enlightenment’ centred on Anglicanism, which used enlightened values such as empirical philosophy, polite manners, science, and economic progress to defend the established order against both religious ‘enthusiasm’ and radical philosophies. This conservative Anglican Enlightenment was challenged in the late eighteenth century by the rise of a Dissenting Enlightenment that championed natural rights, religious liberty, rational reform, and drew inspiration from the American and French Revolutions.Footnote 24 While prominent in the historiography of political radicalism, the ‘terminological swamp’ of eighteenth-century religion has seen many scholars neglect, or miss, the broader cultural role of Rational Dissent and Unitarianism.Footnote 25
Rational Dissent was composed of two broad types. The majority were members of the congregations of ‘Old Dissent’ (Presbyterians, Independents and some Baptists) who, under the influence of Enlightenment rationalism, rejected such orthodox doctrines as the Trinity and original sin. While many remained arians, by the end of the century Rational Dissenters tended to become Unitarian. In the course of the late eighteenth century, this Old Dissent core was joined by a trickle of Anglicans whose Unitarianism and anxieties of conscience compelled them to leave the established Church. The leading figure was the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey who left the Church of England and established the Essex Street Unitarian Chapel in London in 1774. By the nineteenth century, the loose and theologically diverse category of Rational Dissent had yielded to a more defined Unitarian denomination. As the Toleration Act of 1689 had extended only to orthodox Protestants, Unitarianism was technically illegal until the act was amended in 1813. Unitarians continued to be regarded by many as socially unacceptable; the mid-nineteenth-century Unitarian abolitionist, George Armstrong, thought his sect were treated like ‘theological negroes’.Footnote 26 This vulnerable status encouraged Rational Dissenters to sympathize with others they regarded as victims of legal discrimination and to engage in reformist activities.Footnote 27
It is wrong to assume that evangelicalism was the only ‘vital’ form of religion in the eighteenth century. Rational Dissent is often viewed through the prisms of nineteenth-century romanticism and evangelicalism, depicted by some historians as a case of religious decline linked with secularization and by others, such as E. P. Thompson, as the cold and polite religion of calculating capitalists.Footnote 28 In general, there is a tendency to ‘judge the rationalists out of the mouths of their critics’.Footnote 29 Posterity should not be condescending, however, toward the ‘rational piety’ of eighteenth-century Unitarians, which fostered a combination of individualism, sociability, and reformist activism as a form of religious devotion. In the words of Knud Haakonssen, ‘for the Rational Dissenters who rejected original sin, self-betterment and piety were no longer a compensatory mission but a fulfilment of God's promise for the future’.Footnote 30 While charitable Anglicans fostered passive obedience, Rational Dissenting philanthropy was linked to efforts to extend political rights and sought to foster individualism and independence among the poor.Footnote 31
Rational Dissent declined numerically in the late eighteenth century, while evangelical Dissent spread rapidly among artisans and the lower middling sort. Some of the approximately 200 Presbyterian chapels remaining in England at the end of the eighteenth century were, nevertheless, wealthy, influential, and concentrated in urban centres. Congregations tended to be dominated by merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and professionals, while Lindsey's Essex Street chapel in London was also patronized by the dukes of Grafton, Norfolk, and Richmond. In contrast to numerous, but marginal, Methodist shopkeepers, leading Rational Dissenters exerted considerable intellectual and political influence in favour of reform at both the local and national levels.Footnote 32
II
The core values of Rational Dissent were opposed to ‘slavery’. It is well established that Enlightenment thinkers often displayed an ambivalent attitude toward race and slavery.Footnote 33 While some Enlightenment texts used the discourses of natural rights and free trade to condemn slavery, others categorized Africans as an inferior race and speculated about separate origins. Rational Dissenters tended to condemn slavery owing to their Protestant commitment to spiritual equality and individual autonomy, combined with Enlightenment notions of liberty and natural rights. Slavery was seen as fundamentally wrong because it placed individuals under despotic and arbitrary power. Thanking Granville Sharp for a copy of his Essay on slavery in 1776, the Unitarian political activist, John Jebb, declared that he had ‘for many years maintained that no considerations of trade, or any other consideration whatever can be offered in excuse for so horrible a practice’. He congratulated Sharp for marshalling biblical evidence against slavery, and concluded that ‘this practice is as offensive to the Supreme Being, as it is contrary to reason and Humanity. Indeed, a stronger and more wanton violation of Man's Rights cannot possibly be conceived.’Footnote 34 In a widely read pamphlet that called for the election of a national convention to ‘new-model the constitution’ in 1780, Jebb deemed the slave trade abhorrent to the ‘dictates of humanity’ and ‘ought not to be tolerated in a Christian country’.Footnote 35
Rational Dissenters also appear to have been anxious about empire and its impact on the moral fibre of British society. They were in the front rank of domestic opposition to coercion of the North American colonies and could prove highly critical of the impact of British imperialism.Footnote 36 In Observations on the importance of the American Revolution, and the means of making it a benefit to the world, the Rev. Richard Price, a Rational Dissenting ‘Friend of America’, wrote that ‘the negro trade cannot be censured in language too severe. It … is shocking to humanity, cruel, wicked and diabolical’, and he called on the American states to be consistent with their principles and abolish chattel slavery with ‘as much speed … as their particular circumstances and situation will allow’.Footnote 37
The Rational Dissenting approach is perhaps best illustrated by Joseph Priestley's 1788 sermon against the slave trade, preached at the request of a congregation in Birmingham that included manufacturers such as Josiah Wedgwood. Priestley declared that as men, Christians, and Englishmen, they should denounce the slave trade and employed a mix of biblical, natural rights, and utilitarian arguments. He conceded that slavery was allowed in the Old Testament and not condemned in the New Testament, but that many barbaric ancient practices were now illegal and the spirit of ‘both natural and revealed religion’ encouraged humane treatment of others and respect for their rights. To have preached ‘liberty to all slaves … in the age of the apostles, would have been deemed rebellion against the government then established’. Priestley stressed that, because humans have the capacity to remember and to anticipate the future, slavery caused great mental ‘terror’ that partly explained the high mortality rates in the ‘seasoning’ period of initial adjustment to life on a West India plantation of slaves arriving from Africa. Priestley rejected ideas of racial inferiority, observing that ‘the Ancient Egyptians so famed for their wisdom’ were probably negroes. To those who argued that negroes were ‘improved’ by being removed from a state of savagery in Africa, Priestley replied that, even if this were true, ‘what right has any man to judge for another, and even to better his condition by force?’ In addition, any ‘political slavery’ experienced under African despots was preferable to chattel slavery in the West Indies where slaves had no rights at all. Slavery retarded progress and debased both masters and slaves. The despotic power of masters tempted them to licentiousness and discouraged industriousness, whilst slaves were degraded, deprived of education, and, unlike labourers in Britain, denied any hope of individual improvement. Priestley dismissed commercial concerns about abolition, arguing that free trade would foster ‘civilization’ and transform Africa into a major market for British manufactured goods. Sugar was an unnecessary luxury good that could be cultivated by free labour in both Africa and the Americas – its price should be determined by the cost of labour, and those who could not afford it should live without it, ‘as they do with respect to other things’. Priestley observed that the Spaniards and French had good regulations, allowing some slaves to ‘work out their own freedom’, while none treated their slaves ‘with so much cruelty as the English’. With a growing awareness that West Indian slavery was ‘perhaps the greatest and most crying evil under the sun’, the ‘national guilt’ would increase if the slave trade was not immediately abolished.Footnote 38
Rational Dissenters were happy to praise the Quakers for instigating the campaign against the slave trade and establishing the London Abolition Committee in 1787, along with the heterodox Anglican, Thomas Clarkson. In doing so, the Quakers could be seen as providing further evidence of the virtuous nature of nonconformists. This image might be helpful at a time when Dissenters were under sustained attack by Anglican polemicists for lobbying parliament to repeal the discriminatory Test and Corporation Acts. Aside from this practical point, there was considerable friendship and daily business contact between Quakers and Rational Dissenters. The Quaker physician, John Fothergill, for example, was friendly with many Unitarian Dissenters such as Thomas Percival, who praised Quakers for their characteristic ‘diligence, cleanliness, sobriety and composure of mind’.Footnote 39 When Thomas Clarkson came to write a history of the Quakers in the 1800s, he singled out Joshua Toulmin, a Unitarian minister, as the only non-Quaker who had hitherto provided a judicious account of the sect.Footnote 40 James Adair, a Unitarian politician, sponsored a bill to grant some legal relief for the Quakers in 1796, and there were also Quakers such as William Rathbone, a Liverpool merchant, who embraced Unitarian theology and criticized the slave trade.
The extra-parliamentary character of the British campaign against the slave trade was a feature that distinguished it from abolitionism in other European countries, where anti-slavery activity was primarily a concern of some among the political and intellectual elites.Footnote 41 It is unsurprising that Rational Dissenters played a significant role in popularizing abolition, given that they were at the forefront in developing extra-parliamentary political associations during the American war. A number of Rational Dissenting political reformers were early subscribers to the Abolition Society. While Richard Price, the ‘Apostle of Liberty’, turned down an early invite to join the London Abolition Committee due to ill-health and other commitments, the Rev. Andrew Kippis and Josiah Wedgwood joined by early 1788.Footnote 42 Wedgwood made a substantial contribution to the campaign through his marketing and manufacturing skills, creating the famous ‘Am I not a man and brother?’ medallion of a kneeling slave.Footnote 43 Capel Lofft and Major John Cartwright, Unitarians and founding members of the radical Society for Constitutional Information, also became correspondents of the Abolition Committee.Footnote 44
Rational Dissenters contributed significantly to the regional spread of abolitionism. Rejecting the traditional London- and Wilberforce-centric depiction of abolitionism, Drescher has argued that it was the well-established associational culture of Britain's regional towns that accounts for the rapid rise of abolitionism. According to Drescher, the London Committee largely responded to provincial initiatives, particularly that of Manchester, where Thomas Clarkson was delighted to find an abolitionist society already formed and active when he visited the city in the autumn of 1787.Footnote 45 This arguably underplays the role of the London Committee in developing strategy, liaising with MPs, and linking provincial societies – not least through Clarkson's tireless travelling.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, the impressive scale of regional activity sprang from a rich cultural seedbed of congregations, clubs, and societies that developed throughout eighteenth-century Britain. Led by the physician Thomas Percival, who maintained an extensive correspondence, Rational Dissenters who attended the Rev. Thomas Barnes's Cross Street Chapel helped to make Manchester a nest of abolitionism.Footnote 47 Percival founded the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and served as lay president of the Unitarian Manchester College. Both institutions provided supporters of the Anti-Slave Trade Committee that was founded in Manchester in the autumn of 1787.Footnote 48 The Unitarians Thomas Cooper and Thomas Walker, both members of the Society for Constitutional Information, enthusiastically joined the campaign against slavery as part of a wider radical agenda. Early in the campaign, Cooper published a pamphlet that pioneered the use of statistics to criticize the destructive demographic impact of the slave trade on Africa.Footnote 49
While Abolition committees throughout Britain had male membership, women were among the subscribers to the Abolition Society. Claire Midgley has calculated that the subscription list of the Abolition Society in 1788 contained 206 women, which was approximately 10 per cent of the total. This proportion was similar to other such groups and reflects the fact that married women lacked independent legal and financial status. In addition to the identifiable 10 per cent, women may have been among the eighty anonymous subscribers whilst, to some extent, male subscribers may have been acting at the urging of wives.Footnote 50 The Abolition Society list includes many wives and daughters from prominent Manchester Rational Dissenting families. In addition to the Coopers, the Bayley, Rigby, Grimshaw, Hardman, and Mather families all attended the Cross Street Chapel. Unitarians fostered female education and companionate marriages, and Midgley suggests that the Unitarian stress on individual autonomy probably explains why these women ‘were encouraged, and felt motivated, to subscribe to the Manchester society in their own right rather than letting their husbands or fathers act as their representatives’.Footnote 51 The popular Rational Dissenting poet Anna Letitia Barbauld wrote a supportive Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791).
Other than Manchester, towns where Rational Dissenting reformers were prominent also generated strong support for abolition.Footnote 52 This can be illustrated by the travels of Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, as he travelled Britain promoting his ex-slave Interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). The book was printed privately by subscription in several editions and distributed by a number of booksellers, including Joseph Johnson, the leading Unitarian printer. Johnson was simultaneously fostering the career of a young Mary Wollstonecraft and asked her to review Equiano's book in his new periodical, The Analytical Review.Footnote 53 At Birmingham in 1790, Equiano publicly thanked sixty-three subscribers, including Priestley and some members of his congregation, for their ‘great marks of kindness’.Footnote 54 Visiting Manchester, Sheffield, and Nottingham, he was given written endorsements by, among others, the Rational Dissenters Thomas Cooper, William Shore, and George Walker, which Equiano published at the front of the third edition of the Interesting narrative.Footnote 55 In one of his few surviving private letters, Equiano thanked the Rev. George Walker at Nottingham, a friend of Priestley and Cartwright, for his warm hospitality and invited him to his wedding in Cambridgeshire.Footnote 56 With the tide running against reform, Equiano spent four months in East Anglia in 1794, mostly at the ‘Jacobin city’ of Norwich which was a bastion of Rational Dissent.Footnote 57 In a sermon at Norwich commemorating the ‘Glorious Revolution’, William Enfield declared the emancipation of slaves was ‘a universal obligation of natural justice’.Footnote 58
Even England's two leading west-coast slaving ports witnessed Rational Dissenting opposition to the slave trade. Equiano eventually visited Bristol with some trepidation in 1793, writing a letter to Josiah Wedgwood beforehand, requesting his assistance should he get into trouble.Footnote 59 While 40 per cent of Bristol's wealth came directly from the West India trade, its population also contained twice the national average of Dissenters, and Clarkson was able to gather much information about the trade when visiting the port.Footnote 60 Though the wealthy Lewins Mead Presbyterian congregation included many West India merchants, John Prior Estlin, its junior minister, became a Unitarian and he, along with the chapel's senior minister, Thomas Wright, helped to establish a Bristol Abolition Committee in January 1788. Robert Hall, junior minister at the Broadmead Baptist Chapel, had Unitarian inclinations and published two eloquent letters against the slave trade under the name ‘Britannicus’. With a leading West India merchant, John Harris, a senior deacon at his chapel, Hall did not put his name to the letters in which he declared: ‘we are extending the empire of barbarity and ignorance’ and ‘the genius of Britain, the guardian angel of Europe, stands by smeared with blood and smiles malignant over these scenes of horror!’Footnote 61
Equiano wisely steered clear of Liverpool, which had become Britain's pre-eminent slave trading port. While nonconformists were prominent in Bristol's local government, ‘Liverpool had a solidly Anglican, virtually self-perpetuating, and pro-slave trade corporation.’Footnote 62 Liverpool Rational Dissenters nevertheless provided important covert support for abolition. Gilbert Wakefield, who became a Unitarian at Cambridge, controversially preached against the slave trade during his brief time as an Anglican clergyman at Liverpool in 1779.Footnote 63 In 1788, John Yates preached a Rational Dissenting anti-slavery sermon at Liverpool that championed ‘the equality of mankind’ in the eyes of God and ‘gave great offence to many influential members of his congregation’.Footnote 64 The literary circle that formed around William Roscoe, a Unitarian merchant, fostered an understandably small-scale Liverpudlian abolitionist movement.Footnote 65 Living with the threat of violence, Roscoe published anonymous poems condemning slavery, donating the money raised by The wrongs of Africa (1787) to the Abolition Committee in London, which they found ‘very consolatory and encouraging’, since it originated from a place where they had expected only opposition.Footnote 66 As the petitioning campaign progressed, Roscoe attacked the slave trade in pamphlets, rebutting the scriptural arguments of the pro-slavery writer, Raymond Harris, a Spanish former Jesuit priest who was granted £100 for his services by the Liverpool Corporation.Footnote 67 Roscoe's pamphlet impressed the London Abolition Committee as the best reply to Harris and they proceeded to distribute copies throughout the kingdom.Footnote 68 When news of the slave revolt in the French colony of St Domingue reached Britain in April 1791, some argued that slaves were aware of the ongoing campaign for abolition and claimed that it thereby increased the possibility that similar revolts would erupt in the British West Indies.Footnote 69 Roscoe responded with an anonymous pamphlet declaring it was not right or realistic of the French to expect that the Declaration of the rights of man and citizen (1789), the truths of which were ‘as general as day-light’, should only ‘give a candle-like light in the residence of the Planter, whilst the poor and destitute Negro was to sit in darkness in his hut’. Roscoe argued that the uprising stemmed from the ‘ragings of despair’ and that only abolition and amelioration could prevent such an uprising in the British West Indies.Footnote 70
Revolution in the West Indies checked the progress of abolitionism in Britain and Wilberforce's motion was defeated in April 1791. Wilberforce warned Clarkson to stop talking favourably of the French Revolution and expressed concern that a boycott of West India sugar that started in mid-1791 would provoke opposition. The boycott was nevertheless supported by over 300,000 families, including leading Rational Dissenting families such as the Wedgwoods and Smiths, and helped build the popular petitioning momentum that underpinned the successful House of Commons vote to abolish the slave trade in 1792.Footnote 71 Though over 500 petitions supported abolition, the bill became bogged down in the House of Lords and abolition was not enacted in the 1790s as a reactionary climate developed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Unitarian phase, delivered a lecture against the slave trade in Bristol with an eye to countering the ‘falling off of zeal in the friends of Abolition’.Footnote 72 While Clarkson retired to live in the Lake District and the popular movement waned, politicians nevertheless continued to bring abolitionist measures before parliament.
III
Reflecting a widespread view, Roy Porter has written: ‘if it was the evangelical lobby which in the event secured in Parliament the abolition of the trade, the groundswell of criticism owed much to enlightened liberalism’.Footnote 73 This underestimates the parliamentary contribution of Unitarians and their heterodox Anglican friends. The short-lived ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ brought Foxite Whig abolitionists into power in 1806, and after abolishing the foreign slave trade they moved to abolish the British slave trade in 1807. Pressure from ‘the people’, combined with careful attention to tactics, lobbying, and voting lists was required to ensure abolition passed into law and was not at risk of being repealed in future.Footnote 74
Dissenters provided significant electoral support for the Whigs, and for two decades the few Unitarian politicians spoke frequently in support of abolition. In 1787, Dissenters began a campaign for Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts that, as Ditchfield has demonstrated, had a very real chance of success before reaction against the republican turn of the French Revolution swamped any hope of reform.Footnote 75 Analysis of voting lists reveals that on the whole politicians who supported religious liberty also voted for abolition bills.Footnote 76 Henry Beaufoy, parliamentary leader of the repealers, became secretary of the African Association and spoke frequently in parliament on commercial subjects. Son of a Quaker vinegar merchant, Beaufoy became a nominal Anglican for marital reasons and sought to succeed in public life. Tutored by the Unitarian Andrew Kippis, Beaufoy donated £100 and served on the committee that established a new Rational Dissenting academy at Hackney. The evangelical Wilberforce complained of Beaufoy's ‘absurd and affected religious tenets’.Footnote 77 In a speech published by the Edinburgh Abolition Society, Beaufoy spoke strongly in favour of Dolben's bill to regulate and reduce the number of slaves-per-ton that could be carried on slaving ships.Footnote 78 In the absence of Wilberforce (who was ill), the resulting Slave Trade Regulating Act of 1788 eventually passed in heavily modified form after much debate in both houses, and after the prime minister, Pitt, had threatened to resign. According to Dale Porter, this proved to be the ‘most successful of all the “abolition” measures and the only one to become law before 1806’.Footnote 79
Rational Dissenters ‘monopolised the parliamentary representation of Dissent’.Footnote 80 Joshua Grigby, James Martin, and James Adair were Unitarians who spoke strongly in favour of abolition at various times over the twenty years of parliamentary agitation. Roscoe spent a considerable amount of money in getting elected for Liverpool, and was soon removed by a hostile electorate after he voted for abolition of the slave trade. In his History, Clarkson noted that William Smith, the Unitarian MP, was the first individual to send a letter of support to the London Abolition Committee.Footnote 81 Despite his heretical religion, Smith was one of the few people Wilberforce addressed by his Christian name and the two men worked closely on parliamentary investigations into the slave trade.Footnote 82 Early in his long and active parliamentary career as a champion of Dissent and political reform, Smith declared that ‘of all public objects’ abolition of the slave trade ‘lies nearest to my heart’.Footnote 83 With evangelicals hostile to Unitarianism and political reform, Smith acted as an important bridge between Wilberforce and the Foxite Whigs.Footnote 84 He spent many hours, together with Wilberforce, working on parliamentary inquiries into the slave trade. In 1798, he introduced a ‘Slave Carrying Bill’ designed to extend the Dolben Act by sharply restricting the number of slaves that could be carried on each ship. It passed the Commons and, had it not been blocked in the Lords, one anti-abolitionist feared it would have caused ‘a virtual abolition of the trade’.Footnote 85 Smith unfortunately found himself temporarily out of parliament in 1807, so prior to the vote he published a Letter to William Wilberforce as his contribution to the final debate, targeting the ‘old and stale’ delaying arguments of pro-slave trade politicians.Footnote 86 Smith worked hard at lobbying MPs during the final debates and unsuccessfully implored the Whig leadership not to remove the declaration that the slave trade was ‘contrary to the principles of justice, humanity and sound policy’ from the preamble of the abolition bill – which had been something Wilberforce was willing to give up.Footnote 87
Over the course of twenty years, William Smith appeared next to Wilberforce in his parliamentary work for abolition in Clarkson's eyes, but despite his central role, Smith remains little mentioned in histories of abolition.Footnote 88 This neglect probably stems from the way in which his role was marginalized and disparaged in the Life of Wilberforce – among their handful of references, Wilberforce's evangelical sons noted that some nicknamed Smith ‘king-killer’ in the 1790s.Footnote 89
IV
Having outlined their significant popular and parliamentary contributions to the campaign against the slave trade, we need to map the contours and limits of Rational Dissenting abolitionism. Turley's Culture of English antislavery has depicted Rational Dissenting abolitionism as part of a broad ‘middle-class reform complex’, but he neglects the uneven pattern of abolitionism among Rational Dissenters. Given their commitment to ‘liberty’, we might ask why Rational Dissenters did not instigate the campaign against the slave trade and why some were inactive on the subject. An examination of the ambivalences that stemmed from conflicting interests, their sense of priorities, and the place of chattel slavery in their theological world-view reveals the complex nature of Rational Dissenting anti-slavery.
We should resist the temptation to view Rational Dissenters as simply anti-slavery capitalists. Until the mid-twentieth century, many saw abolition of the British slave trade as one of ‘the three or four perfectly virtuous acts’ in recorded history.Footnote 90 This self-congratulatory view was eloquently challenged by the West Indian historian, Eric Williams, in his Capitalism and slavery. Williams argued that abolition was caused by changing economic interests: the upheavals of the American War of Independence began a period of decline in the profitability of British West Indian slavery, while industrial revolution spawned a growing class of manufacturers who increasingly championed capitalist principles in parliament. Most historians now reject the ‘decline thesis’ in the face of evidence that, despite some fluctuations, slavery and the slave trade remained economically significant and dynamic. Indeed, it is apparent that various forms of ‘unfree labour’ (including chattel slavery, indenture, and convict labour), were far from being antiquated systems in decline, but rather continued to be central to global economic development in the nineteenth century.Footnote 91 A widespread belief continues, nevertheless, that abolition of the British slave trade must have some connection to economic change, given that it occurred when the industrial revolution was developing. Rational Dissent was clearly rooted in the commercial classes and is often associated with industrialization. John Seed has shown, however, that congregations tended to be composed of bankers, merchants, and professionals, whilst the expanding younger generation of industrialists tended to avoid Unitarian chapels in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 92
In contrast to the active abolitionism of many Rational Dissenters, leading London clergymen appear relatively muted on the subject. Why is there no substantial abolitionist sermon or publication by otherwise prolific metropolitan Rational Dissenting clergymen such as Theophilus Lindsey, Andrew Kippis, Richard Price, Joseph Towers, Abraham Rees, and John Disney? In private correspondence, Lindsey lamented royal opposition to ‘abolition of the trade in human flesh’.Footnote 93 Although Kippis joined the Abolition Committee, he was not very active, being a member of many clubs and societies. In a sermon before the London Revolution Society on the one-hundredth anniversary of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, Kippis simply observed that, while Britons should be ashamed of some aspects of their conduct, on the whole ‘moderation, charity and humanity have increased; and designs for promoting both the present and future welfare of the lower orders of people, and for abolishing the infamous traffic in slaves are embraced and prosecuted with ardour’.Footnote 94 Considering the occasion and the timing, it is notable that Kippis did not say more on the subject, and that abolition of the slave trade went unmentioned in Price's famous sermon at the following year's celebration of the Revolution.Footnote 95
This subdued abolitionism on the part of London Rational Dissenting clergy is probably explicable by the fact that they ministered in one of Britain's main slaving ports and the financial hub of the West India trade.Footnote 96 The sermons of Kippis and Price were delivered in the Old Jewry, and while the Abolition Society rented a room there as its headquarters, it also remained the financial heart of London. Abraham Rees, minister at the Dissenting Chapel in the Old Jewry, is not listed as a subscriber to the Abolition Society.Footnote 97 While the Revolution Society membership list includes abolitionist politicians such as William Smith and Lord Stanhope, also present were the London MPs, Watkin Lewes and John Sawbridge, who supported Nathaniel Newnham, who warned that abolition would render the city ‘one scene of bankruptcy and ruin’.Footnote 98 William Smith praised Londoners for eventually presenting a petition in favour of abolition in 1792, ‘notwithstanding every effort which could be used to prevent it’.Footnote 99
Dissenting ministers were hired by their congregations and abolition was an issue that could cause tension in London chapels.Footnote 100 There were several prominent London Rational Dissenting families involved in the West India trade, such as the Boddingtons and Vaughans. Samuel Vaughan, and his sons Benjamin and William, were leading members of the West India Committee, and also part of Price's Gravel Pit congregation at Hackney.Footnote 101 After several years in Jamaica, Samuel Vaughan settled in London as a wealthy merchant and became active in radical politics during the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ agitation.Footnote 102 In April 1792, his son Benjamin Vaughan's first speech after entering the House of Commons was made in opposition to immediate abolition of the slave trade.Footnote 103 While Joseph Priestley was free to preach against the slave trade to his congregation in Birmingham, which included the wealthy abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood, he appears to have been anxious to avoid offending the Vaughans in London. Four weeks before he preached and published his sermon against the slave trade in early 1788, Priestley dedicated his Lectures on history (1788) to Benjamin Vaughan, who heard them as a young man at Warrington Dissenting Academy: ‘My obligations to your father, to yourself and to the whole of your large and respectable family, will always be a subject of pleasing recollection to me’.Footnote 104
Aside from congregants having direct investments in the trade, there were many points of everyday contact between Londoners and the West India trade. John Lee, the rough-speaking barrister and Foxite Whig who served briefly as solicitor-general, was a significant patron of Lindsey's Essex Street Chapel, providing financial support, legal counsel, and political weight to its fledgling heretic congregation. In 1783, Lee also represented the owners of the slave ship Zong in their legal battle to claim insurance for 131 slaves thrown overboard out of supposed necessity. In this case, which became notorious and helped stimulate the emergence of abolitionism, it was Lee who argued: ‘What is all this vast declaration of human beings being thrown overboard? … This is a case of chattels or goods … This property – the human creatures if you will – have been thrown overboard: whether or not for the preservation of the rest, that is the real question.’Footnote 105 Samuel Heywood, another Rational Dissenter, was among the lawyers for the Zong insurers and argued that it was a case of murder and violation of natural rights. Both lawyers were speaking as hired counsel and so their courtroom statements cannot serve as evidence of private views, but this case nevertheless illustrates the degree to which London Rational Dissenters had ordinary everyday involvement with the West India trade.
The Monthly Review was Britain's leading periodical and, dominated by Rational Dissenters, provides further evidence of tensions over abolition. It greeted James Ramsay's influential Essay on the treatment and conversion of African slaves (1784) with an enthusiastic review, but a year later declared a pro-slavery response convincing. After being criticized at length by Ramsay for siding with the West India interest, the Monthly Review declared that it would stand aside from the debate and refrain from pronouncing on disputed ‘facts’.Footnote 106 In 1788, it praised Priestley's sermon against the slave trade for its spirit of ‘manly freedom’, declaring its ‘arguments irrefragable’.Footnote 107 Cautiously positive in its treatment of Equiano's Interesting narrative, the Monthly Review was careful to note that his book detailed ‘many instances’ of the ‘cruelties that some are said to have exercised on their slaves’.Footnote 108 With the Monthly Review continuing to strive for even-handed treatment of the slavery issue, its editor received a letter from William Enfield, a minister in Norwich and regular reviewer, asking that the periodical adopt a clear stand in favour of abolition.Footnote 109 This claim was easier for a Rational Dissenting preacher in the ‘Jacobin city’ to make than for the publisher of a national periodical to do in an increasingly competitive market.Footnote 110
Philosophically opposed to all forms of ‘slavery’, the extent to which Rational Dissenters engaged in abolitionism also depended on how well it accorded with other priorities. Metropolitan clergy like Lindsey were focused on a national project to advance what they believed was the true form of Christianity in the face of vitriolic attacks by orthodox clergy who branded them as dangerous heretics. Seeking all the support they could muster to advance the cause of religious liberty, they needed to foster good relations within their congregations. In the same year that the abolition campaign was launched, the Dissenters started to lobby parliament to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts and their support for abolition was thus, to some extent, motivated by a desire to improve relations with Anglicans. Hence Theophilus Lindsey wrote to a friend in early 1788 about Priestley's Sermon on the slave trade:
When I was last in [Joseph] Johnson's shop, all the copies of his sermon on the Slave Trade which Priestley had sent up were sold, so that I hope it is well received as it greatly deserves … I think that his engaging in such a way against such a traffic will soften prejudices even with such very orthodox men as the worthy Granville Sharp, who hitherto has not allowed us salvation, unless we change our sentiments before we die, as he often expressed himself to Dr. Jebb.Footnote 111
Priestley himself was hopeful that multi-denominational co-operation in Birmingham on the campaign for abolition would help ‘to lessen much of that bigotry, by which this town has been distinguished’.Footnote 112
For Rational Dissent as a whole, abolition was not a front-rank issue. Priestley used the preface to the published version of his Sermon on the slave trade to promote his necessarian philosophy, religious liberty, and rational reform. The English Review thought that, ‘from the many arguments and observations advanced by Dr Priestley in this discourse, it is rather a politico-religious than a purely religious sermon’.Footnote 113 This forceful denunciation of slavery occupies only twenty-five pages of Priestley's twenty-five-volume collected works. The extensive correspondence of the provincial English Rational Dissenter Samuel Kenrick and his old Scottish university friend the Rev. James Wodrow contains over 200 lengthy letters written between the 1750s and the first decade of the nineteenth century. While they supported abolition, the slave trade was only mentioned in passing compared to lengthy and detailed discussions of religion, politics, literature, health, and social news.Footnote 114 Rational Dissenting abolitionism in regional towns, such as Manchester and Norwich, was part of a vibrant, broad-based radicalism; in this context, the slave trade was just one more rotten plank that needed to be removed from supporting the established order. Liverpool had the feel of a ‘frontier town’ until the 1780s, with an elite ‘characterized by the philistinism of self-made men’, and the abolitionism of Roscoe and his circle was part of a broader plan to civilize the city and make it a ‘Florence of the North’.Footnote 115
Rational Dissenters were not unusual in treating abolitionism in light of their main interests and concerns. Ending the slave trade was the top priority for only a few key activists such as Clarkson and Equiano. It is now well established that the Quakers were keen to revitalize their denomination and evangelicals saw abolition as a way to promote a religious revival – Wilberforce once declared that the spread of Christian missions in India was more important than abolition of the slave trade.Footnote 116 Some scholars have claimed a strong link between political radicalism and early abolitionism, noting that radical clubs often expressed support for ending the slave trade.Footnote 117 Like the Jacobin clubs in revolutionary France, however, anti-slavery was of less concern than political reform for British radicals, and some of the leading metropolitan activists, such as John Horne Tooke, appear quiet on the issue of the slave trade.Footnote 118 This undoubtedly owes something to the historically strong link between City politics and the West India trade. William Beckford, for example, was at once among the most wealthy of West India merchants and a leading London radical in the 1760s. Rational Dissenters appear to have been more active in promoting abolition than more secular minded political radicals.
Rational Dissenting abolitionism was also influenced by theology, since Rational Dissenters believed themselves instruments by which a general providential plan was being advanced. Progress through the spread of liberty and reason was ordained by God to prepare the way for the millennium. Any setbacks were only temporary and, indeed, were viewed as tools by which God spurred individuals to more virtuous efforts. Anstey emphasized the importance of the new concept of progressive improvement in Christian doctrine and humanity espoused at mid-century by the Anglican divine, Edmund Law. According to Anstey, this supplied ‘a conception of progress as the manifestation of a great providential design’, which was ‘an important intellectual development and one which gave a fresh dimension to the idea of Providence’.Footnote 119 An influential figure at Cambridge, Law was a socinian and some of his protégés, such as John Jebb and John Disney, resigned from the established church to become leading Unitarian Rational Dissenters. In the eyes of Rational Dissent, orthodox Christians professed a religion corrupted by Greek philosophy and defended by priestcraft. Their first priority was to establish religious liberty that would, in turn, accelerate the spread of a simple Christianity that, cleansed of man-made theological crust, would convince honest and rational minds. As true Christianity spread, so would its qualities of piety, candour, sympathy, and benevolence. Although scholars tend to dismiss the ‘anarchist’ philosophy of William Godwin as ‘a fantasy of reason’, Mark Philp has, however, convincingly demonstrated that Godwin's philosophy was not simply the work of an extreme rationalist imagination. Godwin began as a Dissenting minister and eventually became an atheist, but for a considerable time worked among the densely woven network of Rational Dissenters, who provided a living example of a community of self-regulating rational individuals.Footnote 120 In an age of revolutions, Rational Dissenters believed that their enlightened Christianity was the way of the future. During the early years of the French Revolution, Joseph Priestley, at once the most optimistic and influential of Rational Dissenters, believed that ‘the second advent of Christ’ could not be more than twenty years away.Footnote 121
In this view, establishing religious and political liberty at the metropole of empire would help to usher in an era in which all forms of ‘slavery’ would end. While generally attacking the institution of slavery, Rational Dissenters proved willing to tolerate its continuance in a meliorated form for as long as necessary. Since slavery had ‘debased’ slaves almost to the level of ‘brutes’, Rational Dissenters argued that immediate emancipation was not in slaves' interests, since it would result in anarchy, bloodshed, and destruction.Footnote 122 By forcing planters to improve conditions, abolition of the slave trade was seen as a first step toward meliorating colonial slavery, and various reforms and regulations were proposed by which slaves could be ‘improved’ and individuals enabled to work towards their freedom. For example, Priestley suggested that ‘in time their condition would be the same with that of the villeins in the Feudal times of this country, and by degrees approach that of freemen.Footnote 123 With a concern for property rights and social order, Rational Dissenters trusted that Providence would end all forms of slavery through the gradual spread of ‘rational liberty’.
The role of Rational Dissent is further evidence that abolitionism was rooted in religious and humanitarian concerns rather than economic interests. While some were cautious gradualists or even quiet on the issue of abolition for reasons of congregational obligation or economic interest, it is clear that Rational Dissenting values were fundamentally critical of slavery. Unitarian politicians like William Smith, James Martin, and James Adair repeatedly declared that the slave trade violated human rights, offended Providence and must end, irrespective of economic considerations. In one of his numerous speeches, Smith ‘derided the argument of expediency, and declared, that no system of commercial policy should be allowed to exist for a moment, which was repugnant to moral duty’.Footnote 124
V
Rational Dissenting communities appear to have provided fora in which tensions between morality and commercial practice could be explored and solutions proposed. Whilst not the driving force behind abolitionism, economic arguments were important in achieving the act of abolition. ‘Economics did matter’, David Richardson has recently concluded, but ‘not because abolitionists were facing pro-slavery interests in retreat but because they were able ideologically to reconcile defence of West Indian prosperity and of Britain's national interest with the more enlightened moral content of an emergent political economy and their own humanitarian beliefs’.Footnote 125 During the long period of war with France, abolitionists needed to counter the economic and security arguments of the West India lobby. While they attacked the slave trade with the sword of justice, they needed a shield of ‘sound policy’ arguments to win the fight.
On the whole, Rational Dissenters were champions of commerce as a civilizing force, but some worried about its potential to corrupt manners. Reflecting their Puritan heritage, Rational Dissenters at times criticized the spread of ‘luxury’ and the importation of ‘foreign frippery’.Footnote 126 Roscoe first attacked the slave trade in a poem on Liverpool that worried about economic growth corrupting and coarsening manners.Footnote 127 Such concerns were part of a long debate in eighteenth-century Britain about the relationship between commerce and morality.Footnote 128 With economists like David Hume and Adam Smith arguing that commerce was an inherently civilizing force, abolitionists portrayed the slave trade as an ‘unnatural’ and ‘barbaric traffic’.Footnote 129 Several Rational Dissenters helped to establish the African Association, and generally joined Clarkson in arguing that the ‘barbaric traffic’ of the slave trade could be replaced by a more natural, moral, and prosperous free trade with Africa.Footnote 130 Such free trade might even provide cheaper substitutes for slave-grown produce.
Abolitionists made little use of Adam Smith's argument that free labour was superior to slave labour, especially in the face of rising plantation production during the 1790s.Footnote 131 While asserting the moral superiority of free labour, Rational Dissenters conceded that it might prove more expensive, in which case consumers should pay the real cost of the labour or live without plantation produce. Reflecting Lunar Society confidence, Priestley declared that slavery should eventually end and it be left ‘to the ingenuity and industry of our countrymen to find a substitute for it’.Footnote 132 When the Rational Dissenting-dominated Abolition Committee in Manchester commissioned James Anderson of Monkshill, a Scottish agricultural economist, to write an attack on the slave trade, he produced a tract that condemned slavery, championed free labour, and provided a programme of melioration. Although the Society would have preferred Anderson to focus on the slave trade, it nevertheless published his pamphlet.Footnote 133 Rational Dissenters did not accord free labour arguments more than a subordinate role in their attacks on the slave trade. This is best illustrated by the parliamentary speeches of William Smith, who often quoted from publications at length in the House of Commons. He cited Adam Smith in opposition to Pitt's income tax, but never appears to have invoked the Wealth of nations in his numerous abolition speeches.Footnote 134
While abolitionist Rational Dissenters made some use of capitalist arguments, so too did the slave trading Vaughan family. An active member of the West India Committee, William Vaughan campaigned for the construction of a ‘wet docks’ in London. While some wanted to build docks for the exclusive use of West India merchants, Vaughan argued in pamphlets and before parliamentary inquirers that London should become a ‘free port’. They were living, he argued, in an age of both political and commercial revolution. By establishing itself as a free port, London could ensure that it remained the capital of Europe's leading trading nation. William Vaughan clearly saw no contradiction between championing free trade principles and continuing to manage the family's West India trade and plantation interests – receiving compensation for his Jamaican slaves following emancipation in 1833.Footnote 135 His older brother, Benjamin, was an active and well-connected advocate of political reform who fled Britain in 1794 to avoid the treason trials Pitt's government instigated in order to suppress radicalism. Inspired by The wealth of nations and the free trade principles of the French physiocrats, he helped negotiate liberal trade relations as part of the peace treaty with the United States, as well as translating the marquis de Condorcet's Life of Turgot (1787).Footnote 136 Benjamin Vaughan's anonymous New and old principles of trade compared (1788) led the Critical Review to observe that the author had ‘adopted the opinions of Dr. Smith concerning the unlimited freedom of trade’.Footnote 137 Published in the same year that parliament debated Dolben's bill for regulation of the slave trade, Vaughan argued that trade should be free of regulation by ‘legislatures notoriously subject to passion and delusion’ and warned against ‘rash changes in the regulations of commerce’.Footnote 138
If capitalist arguments could be used to defend the slave trade, the growing political weakness of the West India interest appears to have owed something to the prominence among Britain's commercial classes of Rational Dissent, with its fusion of Christian spiritual equality and the language of ‘liberty’. If clergy presiding over congregations with investments in the West India trade felt that they could not openly preach against slavery, they could nevertheless foster anti-slavery sentiment more subtly. As seen above, Andrew Kippis made only a passing reference to abolition in his sermon for the London Revolution Society in the Old Jewry in 1788. A few pages prior to this reference, he boasted about Britain's flourishing agriculture, manufacturing and global commerce, adopting ‘the language of the sublime Prophet, “Our merchants are princes, and our traffickers the honourable of the earth”’ (Isaiah 23:8). A member of the Abolition Committee, Kippis encouraged his audience to live up to this ideal, noting briefly that efforts were underway to end the ‘infamous traffic in slaves’.Footnote 139 Thomas Belsham, who eventually became a minister at the Essex Street Unitarian Chapel, wrote mainly on religious subjects, but his brother published a scathing denunciation of slavery.Footnote 140 In addition to knowing that their clergy at least privately inclined toward abolition, Rational Dissenters with investment in the West India trade were confronted with open denunciation of slavery in pamphlets by opinion leaders like Priestley, and in printed parliamentary speeches by the likes of William Smith.
While many throughout Britain signed abolitionist petitions with little cost to themselves, it could prove a tense subject within Rational Dissenting congregations. In addition to pamphlets, pulpits, petitions, and parliamentary debate, sociability played an important role in the spread of abolitionism. In Liverpool, for example, the highly respected physician James Currie, who worked quietly over many years providing Wilberforce with information about the slave trade, observed that ‘the general discussion of the slavery of the negroes has produced much unhappiness in Liverpool. Men are awakening to their situation, and the struggle between interest and humanity has made great havoc in the happiness of many families.’ Awkward conversational situations occurred where Currie felt compelled to counter arguments designed ‘to justify this gross violation of the principles of justice’, noting that ‘it is dreadful to hold an argument where, if your opponent is convinced, he must be made miserable’.Footnote 141 In mid-1789, Benjamin Vaughan informed Thomas Jefferson that ‘the slave trade causes great anxiety here on both sides. I do not think and do not hope the trade will last many years for civilized nations, but am against a sudden abolition of our share in it under present circumstances.’Footnote 142
With the weight of Rational Dissenting values in favour of abolition, those with a vested interest in the slave trade were under increasing pressure. Prior to spending several years managing the family estate in Jamaica, Robert Hibbert became a Unitarian at Cambridge and a close friend of the abolitionist William Frend. Hibbert presented himself as a benign absentee planter – Frend's daughter remembered him as a kindly unmarried man who always spoiled the children of friends with ‘figs, barley-sugar, and sugar-candy’.Footnote 143 Hibbert eventually sent a Unitarian missionary to his Jamaican estate in 1817 (an experiment that failed and led to a nasty controversy), whilst a high status in the eyes of posterity was secured by establishment of the Unitarian Hibbert Trust to fund lectures and a journal.Footnote 144 If the Vaughans found slave-owning and trading compatible with championing free trade, Benjamin recognized a tension with his commitment to natural rights. Priestley thought no one in Britain better informed on developments in France than Benjamin Vaughan, who had joined his fellow Unitarian, William Smith, in attending the Festival of Federation at Paris in 1790.Footnote 145 The third to speak on Wilberforce's successful House of Commons motion to abolish the slave trade in 1792, Vaughan focused on defending the reputation of the West India planters. During a year in Jamaica, he ‘found the Negroes by no means in a condition to receive civilisation’, but that their physical condition was, in many ways, preferable to that of poor labourers in Britain. Vaughan noted a number of ways in which colonists might improve regulations to restrain a few bad masters, some potential advances in tropical medicine, and urged the promotion of Christianity – suggesting that the clergy observing the debate from the gallery ‘might make themselves of the utmost use in the islands’. Abolitionist MPs criticized Vaughan's rosy picture of colonial slavery and emphasized that the subject of the debate was the slave trade, not plantation slavery. To clarify his position, Vaughan declared that, though he was the eldest son of a plantation owner, he himself had never, and would never, own a slave: ‘I would sacrifice any thing to a prudent termination of both evils, for all persons must wish that neither had commenced.’Footnote 146
As a Rational Dissenting champion of the French Declaration of the rights of man and citizen, Vaughan clearly felt awkward in the face of criticism by experienced MPs – especially that of Samuel Whitbread, a radical Whig who was otherwise Vaughan's ally in the cause of religious and political liberty. Vaughan's Rational Dissenting unease with the slave trade contributed to tensions within the pro-slavery lobby. After writing numerous anonymous publications in favour of religious and political liberty, and before fleeing Britain permanently, Vaughan again spoke on the slave trade issue in late February 1794. Seeking to exploit divisions within the West India interest, Wilberforce introduced a bill to ban the foreign slave trade. Vaughan and Joseph Foster Barham, another member of the West India Committee, supported the motion.Footnote 147 Vaughan argued that it was folly to continue selling slaves to the French colonies and add ‘fuel to the fire’ by providing ‘fresh reinforcements of mutineers’. With the ‘minds of the negroes’ already in a ‘state of dangerous excitement’, the only way to preserve order in the British colonies was for planters to abandon their reliance on race-based divisions and forge an alliance with free mulattos and free blacks.Footnote 148
In addition to helping to weaken support for the West India interest among the mercantile classes, Rational Dissent helped to make abolition of the slave trade appear commercially sensible. Ryden has recently emphasized the role of economic arguments in making abolition acceptable to those in the House of Lords who were not prepared to support abolition on the grounds of ‘justice and humanity’ alone.Footnote 149 James Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson argued strongly that the West Indian economic system encouraged a ‘boom-and-bust’ culture of exploitation of slaves, exhaustion of land, and overproduction. Ending the slave trade would foster humanity and efficiency in the colonies, with planters induced to treat slaves with care, encourage natural population growth, and develop sustainable farming practices. Such arguments were espoused by Rational Dissenters in pamphlet and parliament. Early in the campaign, Wedgwood told a friend that abolition could only have a good effect:
We are already possessed of a stock of negroes sufficient for every purpose of the cultivation and trade of our plantations; and consequently that our West India commerce could not be materially injured by prohibiting further importation; which prohibition appears to be the only probable means of withholding the heavy hand of cruelty and oppression from those who now groan under it.Footnote 150
Unitarian politicians repeatedly urged that abolition was the only way to improve the lot of slaves in the West Indies and that abolition could lead to a demographic increase that would compensate for the trade's ending. Roscoe's election as MP for Liverpool in 1806 ‘electrified the country’ and he provided a prominent Unitarian voice in the final debate on slave trade abolition.Footnote 151 In his short speech, Roscoe simply added to well-established arguments of ‘justice and humanity’, one of ‘sound policy’: population will always increase if people are in a comfortable condition. Abolition of the slave trade would ‘instantaneously ameliorate the sad condition of the Negroes’ because planters would no longer deem it better to ‘buy than to breed a Slave’, and would thus lay ‘the primary foundation of their true wealth and prosperity’. As for British merchants, rather than beg for compensation they should focus on new ‘extensive and honourable’ opportunities emerging globally for ‘the active genius of this commercial nation’.Footnote 152 Richard ‘Conversation’ Sharp was listed as a ‘Staunch Friend’ of abolition in 1807 and, sitting beside the MP for Liverpool, told Roscoe his quiet speech ‘was worth twenty’.Footnote 153 A Unitarian and inactive member of the Abolition Society, Sharp became a partner in Samuel Boddington's West India firm. He was one among many men of commerce who had convinced themselves that the moral imperative to abolish the slave trade was also ‘sound policy’.
VI
British abolitionism was sparked by a conjunction of factors. Expanding imperialism saw attention increasingly drawn to the Atlantic world and beyond, and aspects of empire were criticized in light of Enlightened and evangelical values. Slaves engaged in various forms of covert and overt resistance, which provoked acts of repression that made the violence inherent in the slaving system more visible. Urbanization and early industrialization fostered a vibrant civil society, in which ‘improving’ clubs and societies mushroomed and created pressure for humanitarian reform within Britain and beyond. While necessary, however, these were not sufficient causes of abolitionism. Other empires such as France were involved in Atlantic slavery and experienced the Enlightenment expansion of print and public sphere, yet only spawned ‘courtly’ abolitionists. In other empires, slaves resisted and revolted without causing the rise of a popular metropolitan anti-slavery movement.Footnote 154 We have also learned to be cautious about asserting exceptionalism, with some scholars arguing that until the 1820s Britain was essentially an ancien régime society similar to those on the Continent.Footnote 155 At most, we can view eighteenth-century Britain as displaying a peculiarly advanced ‘commercialization of politics’ that facilitated widespread debate over the slave trade.Footnote 156
The British abolitionist take-off in the 1780s emerged from a combination of concerns about religion, rights, and national identity in the wake of the American Revolution.Footnote 157 It is true that prosperity and confidence returned quickly, partly owing to British naval victories near the end of the war and the growing crisis of the French state.Footnote 158 Nevertheless, the decade following the American Revolution arguably witnessed the most extensive debate about the nature of empire prior to the twentieth century. Abolitionism was attractive to many as a means by which ‘British liberties’ could be revitalized in what remained a significant Atlantic empire that was also expanding in the Eastern hemisphere.
Traditional accounts that depicted abolitionism as rooted in religion were too narrow in focusing on Quakers and evangelicals. While historians of eighteenth-century Britain have become increasingly sensitive to the importance and diversity of religion in the so-called ‘Age of Reason’, scholars of slavery have at times almost equated religion with the evangelical revival. The heterodox were not less religious than the orthodox. They practised a ‘rational piety’ and tended to see themselves as ‘humble instruments’ by which Providence worked to promote enlightenment and reform.Footnote 159 Widening our perspective, and recognizing the role of rational Christians within and without the Anglican church, leads us to re-emphasize the importance of religion in British abolitionism.
The slaving interest in Britain suffered a political decline rather than economic decline, and Dissenting denominations, as a whole, were central to the success of abolitionism. Some scholars suggest that once the campaign was established in the late 1780s, it became easy for most Britons who were not directly interested in the trade to sign petitions and feel virtuous.Footnote 160 This underestimates the degree of indirect links to the slave trade and the difficulties many faced in reconciling religious values with economic interests. The British slave trade boomed in the 1790s and prosperous Rational Dissenting congregations included many families who were directly or indirectly connected to the West India trade. Enlightened Christian values undercut their ability and desire to defend the slave trade, and encouraged a search for potentially positive economic aspects of abolition. In the final debate on the abolition bill, George Hibbert, a leading spokesman for the West India interest, expressed frustration at the decline of support among the broader commercial class for an important element of Britain's imperial economy.Footnote 161 His brother, Robert, had become a Unitarian at university and, whilst he owned a plantation in Jamaica, he does not appear to have publicly defended the slave trade, and struggled to do so in private discussions with his friend William Frend, a leading Cambridge Unitarian and abolitionist.
In addition to studying what happened in history, it is important to reflect on what did not happen. The prominence of Rational Dissent among Britain's middle class helps to explain why some men of commerce decided not to support the slave trade. In France, by comparison, in addition to lacking popular support, the small abolitionist elite faced a powerful mercantile interest that was united in defence of the slave trade. By 1790, both France and Britain had thriving slave trades and vibrant public spheres awash with discussion of liberty and rights. Historically persecuted Huguenots dominated the French slave trade but lacked the social, political, and intellectual confidence of their British Dissenting counterparts. There was no abolitionist activity in the French ports equivalent to that in Liverpool, Bristol, and London.Footnote 162 If Rational Dissent had not been prominent among Britain's commercial class, with its particular combination of Enlightenment and Christian values, the West India interest might have had broader and more unified support.
In pulpit, print, and parliament, Rational Dissenters were among Britain's most vocal champions of liberty and natural rights. They played a leading role in fostering the widespread culture of reformist associations that enabled abolitionism to spread like wildfire in the late 1780s. Rational Dissenters were among the leading critics of the slave trade: Wedgwood supplied the famous kneeling slave medallion, Roscoe in Liverpool and Percival in Manchester were leading activists, and William Smith proved a tireless voice in parliament. It has been argued that popular anti-slavery delayed the spread of scientific racism in Britain during the early nineteenth century.Footnote 163 Both the success of abolitionism and the limited interest in secular scientific racism is in part explained by the presence of heterodox Christianity among the progressive elements of Britain's cultural elite.
