The slave trade and slavery were debated in Britain for at least fifty years between the 1780s and the 1830s. Sometimes, as in the early 1790s or 1830s, there was an intense level of discussion and action; at other times, it was only the committed abolitionists, often the women, who kept the cause alive. Throughout this period, large numbers of Britons, in the West Indies, the Cape and ‘at home’ continued to enjoy the fruits of slavery, either directly or indirectly. But what happened after emancipation? How were the slave trade and slavery remembered in Britain? Was there a dominant collective memory? Were the memories contested? What was remembered and what was forgotten? In what ways did race and empire figure in these memories? How was the past of the slave trade and slavery constructed in relation to the present of Victorian society?

Much has been written on the attempts to reconstruct memories of the black Atlantic, the complexities of working with slave narratives and their mediated voices, the work of re-remembering done by contemporary artists.Footnote ¹ Abolitionist histories too have been critically addressed.Footnote ² Much less has been said about the memories and histories of the slave owners and those who benefited from slavery. Three different nineteenth-century accounts provide a way of beginning to explore their contemporary imaginings of the slave trade, slavery and abolition. The context for this work is a research project at University College London which is concerned with understanding the legacies of slave ownership.Footnote ³ When slavery was abolished in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape in 1833, the planters and the West India interest in Britain were able to drive a hard bargain. British taxpayers paid £20 million in compensation to the owners (roughly 40 per cent of annual state expenditure at that time) and freed men and women were forced to serve four or six years of ‘apprenticeship’ – years in which they would ‘learn to be free’. Our aim is to trace the ways in which those who received compensation after the abolition of slavery contributed in myriad ways to the formation of modern British society. We are utilising the compensation records, and the work which Nick Draper has already done on them, as a starting point for following the money and the people in Britain who got compensation.Footnote ⁴ Of the c. 29,000 claims, about 10 per cent came from absentee owners or West India merchants – but they received nearly half the money. Of the £20 million approximately £8.2 million stayed in Britain. Some of these slave owners, as for example John Gladstone, William's father, were very rich men. John Gladstone received over £100,000 in compensation for his estates in Demerara and Jamaica and to give some point of comparison for this sum, a well-paid artisan might hope to earn between 25s and 30s a week. Indeed, William Gladstone's first major speech in the House of Commons was against emancipation and he personally went to the compensation office to collect one of the cheques due on the family's West Indian estates. Others received much smaller sums. It is very striking that over 40 per cent of the claimants for compensation were women, hardly our picture of West Indian slavers. Most of them were receiving relatively small payments as would be expected, perhaps on account of an annuity or pension which depended on one or two enslaved women working as domestic servants in Kingston or Bridgetown. Very few received large sums. There are incidents of slave ownership across Britain, not just in the major centres of the slavery business in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, but also amongst rural clergy, and in spa towns such as Bath and Leamington, as well as being disproportionately present in Scotland.

Our project is attempting to assess the economic effects of this extraordinary injection of capital into the British economy in the 1830s. What part did it play, for example, in the railway boom of the late 1830s and 1840s, or in the turn to India and China? And what was the influence of these men and women in political, social, cultural, and imperial domains? We are also asking, and this is the subject of this paper, what memories surfaced, what histories were constructed and how were these articulated in chronicles, memoirs, poetry or fiction by those who received compensation? How did they contribute to understandings of Britain's role in the slavery business?

One of the most striking aspects of this process of compensation was that, despite the widespread popular support for abolition and the difficulties that those who were opposed to emancipation had in making their case by the 1830s, few opposed the granting of compensation. The principle of private property was so firmly embedded that despite the fact that the campaign for abolition was founded on the moral principle that owning property in people was wrong, indeed sinful in the eyes of God, only the most radical of the emancipationists opposed owners receiving what was deemed to be proper monetary compensation for the enslaved men and women they had owned. ‘Thank God’, said Wilberforce in his dying days, ‘that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of Slavery.’Footnote ⁵ Justice should be done to the colonists if they suffered injury, for after all, Britain had formerly encouraged the trade. Once compensation was agreed, there was what Nick Draper describes as a ‘feeding frenzy’ from slave owners.Footnote ⁶ In only one instance have we traced a slave owner who, according to one contemporary report, had not only manumitted his apprentices before emancipation, but also directed that a considerable amount of the compensation money he received should be used for their benefit.Footnote ⁷ What is more, we are finding many instances of links between pro-slavers and abolitionists, which suggests that despite slavery being seen as a ‘stain’ on the nation, it was not such a stain that it prevented people cooperating on other fronts – acting together in philanthropic organisations, sharing political commitments, living cheek by jowl, worshipping at the same churches, even inter-marrying. In the 1790s, William Wilberforce felt obliged to insist that his daughter break off an engagement with a member of the Pinney family, well-known Bristol slavers. In 1834, however, the young Charles Trevelyan, an up-and-coming civil servant in India, married Tom Macaulay's sister Hannah. Hannah was the daughter of an extremely well-known abolitionist, Zachary Macaulay. Trevelyan's widowed mother and several of his uncles had put in claims for compensation on their estates in Grenada at this very time, yet this does not surface in the correspondence over the marriage.Footnote ⁸ Being absentee owners, it was clear, figured very differently from being actively involved in the management of plantations. Property was property, even in people.

Pro-slavers and abolitionists have been constructed as fundamentally divided and they certainly acted in this way in some contexts. The campaign of vilification, for example, that the pro-slavery magazine John Bull conducted against Zachary Macaulay, was extensive and long lasting and Gladstone Junior's speech against emancipation was summoned up by his enemies long after. Yet as Emilia da Costa argued in relation to her study on the Demerara rebellion of 1823, planters and abolitionists had much in common.Footnote ⁹ The violent rhetoric utilised on both sides buried deep similarities; the majority belonged to the same ideological universe, sharing a commitment to property rights and profit, alongside a fear of subalterns, whether black or white, and a conviction that with education levels of civilisation could eventually be achieved by ‘others’ less advanced than ourselves. As was seen in relation to the heated exchanges between the supporters and critics of the actions of Governor Eyre after the events at Morant Bay in Jamaica in 1865, ‘Their internecine conflicts were in part associated with what Freud calls “the narcissism of minor differences”. It was their closeness in some respects which made it particularly urgent that they demarcate their differences.’Footnote ¹⁰ There were the exceptions both on the right and the left – those who actively supported the institution of slavery on grounds of racial inferiority, and those radicals who critiqued the institution of private property and believed not only in racial equality but in the value of the cultures of strangers.

In 1808, one year after the abolition of the British slave trade, Thomas Clarkson published his celebrated The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament in which he documented the growth of a white transatlantic abolitionist movement, inspired by Christian and humanitarian sentiment, and its final triumph, in which he played a key part, the ‘establishment of a Magna Charta for Africa in Britain’.Footnote ¹¹ ‘No evil more monstrous’ had ever existed upon earth than the slave trade. The ‘great event’ of abolition should be recounted, the ‘perusal of the history’ should afford lessons for posterity. It had become a ‘principle in our legislation that commerce itself shall have its moral boundaries . . . the stain of the blood of Africa’ no longer poisoned the moral springs of the nation.Footnote ¹² This was an account which established a framework for thinking about the slave trade and abolition: the triumph was that a movement had unified peoples across different religious and intellectual traditions and by concerted action brought about the ending of the trade.Footnote ¹³ The example could inspire for the future. Similarly, the ending of slavery was seen as a demonstration of the liberal and generous spirit of the British, prepared to contribute £20 million of taxpayers’ money to ensure freedom for enslaved Africans. In the Life of their father, William Wilberforce, published five years after his death and the passage of Emancipation, Robert and Samuel Wilberforce narrated abolition as their father's triumph, sidelining Clarkson with whom they were locked in an acrimonious competition which continued for years.Footnote ¹⁴ William Wilberforce was represented as a heroic figure, remarkable for ‘the moral sublimity of his Christian character’, his sincerity and perseverance, the embodiment of a certain kind of British philanthropy and identity.Footnote ¹⁵ But more than this, the struggle that was represented was the struggle to win hearts and minds in Britain, not the struggles or the experience of the enslaved, which remained unrepresented. While the Anti- Slavery Reporter over years had detailed the horrors of slavery, once it was abolished those could be forgotten. The five-volume account by the Wilberforce brothers of their father's life had little to say about either the trade or the plantations. A ‘white mythology’ had been inaugurated, one which worked hard to ‘deny the possibility of gaining knowledge of the disaster of the Atlantic Slave Trade’.Footnote ¹⁶ There was a selective forgetting, only parts of the past were to be remembered. The triumph of abolition would screen the horrors and violence of the plantation and the Middle Passage.

Prior to 2007, in so far as there was a collective memory in the United Kingdom on issues of the slave trade and slavery, it was this vision of Britain's pride in having led the world, or so it was thought, in abolition and emancipation. Eric Williams's seminal text, Capitalism and Slavery published in 1944, fundamentally challenged this view, arguing that the industrial revolution was heavily dependent on the slave economy, that after the American Revolution there was a significant decline in this economy and that it was financial and commercial imperatives, the advantages of free labour over enslaved labour in a growing capitalist global market, that lay behind the move for abolition.Footnote ¹⁷ But his thesis remained extremely controversial, sidelined from mainstream accounts.Footnote ¹⁸ In the decades since, anti-colonial struggles and the emergence of independent nations, in the Caribbean particularly, have led to new national histories with an emphasis on black agency and resistance. The rebellions of 1823 in Demerara and 1831 in Jamaica are now represented as central to the winning of abolition. These different accounts informed much of the activity in 2007, the bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade, when there was an extraordinary level of engagement with British, Caribbean and West African histories. A cornucopia of exhibitions, books, documentaries, theatrical productions and educational initiatives that year explored these issues, sometimes with an emphasis on the black experience – an element which had been so patently ignored in many previous accounts. Orthodox understandings of Britain's role in the slave trade and slavery were contested and the notion that it was the glorious achievement of white Christian men was, at the very least, significantly challenged.

Putting compensation back into the picture adds, I suggest, another element to our thinking. Pride over abolition displaced guilt over slavery. ‘The legacy of slavery’, as Barnor Hesse argues, became ‘the historical record of abolitionism, not the contemporary agenda of racism’.Footnote ¹⁹ Racial violence and the horrors associated with it were banished in the warm glow of national pride. But it was not simply that slavery was abolished, though this is what was mainly remembered. Compensation of £20 million was paid and this marked a historic compromise, in line with the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832. The Reform Act enfranchised middle-class men, made the ownership of a certain level of property the key to inclusion in the political nation. Compensation confirmed the slave owners’ view that their ownership of the enslaved had been legitimate, sanctioned by the law and the state as they had always claimed: they deserved recompense, money for requisitioned property.Footnote ²⁰ They were not a stain, there was no need for guilt, they were part of the nation.

What then of the memories and the histories? Were they troubled? Three examples, each of a well-known figure, offer some insights into the construction of memories. Two of these authors, Lord Holland, a leading Whig peer, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a leading woman poet, benefited from compensation. The third, Thomas Babington Macaulay, son of a leading abolitionist and the great historian of England in the mid-nineteenth century, did not himself benefit from compensation, but his beloved sister Hannah did through her marriage. Together, they give some flavour of the complicated legacies of the slave trade and slavery, as they were created after emancipation, across two generations.

Lord Holland

Henry Richard Vassall Fox, Lord Holland, was a leading Whig peer, his uncle Charles James Fox, the great orator, renowned for his defence of civil and religious liberties and his opposition to the slave trade. Fox's grand memorial in Westminster Abbey celebrates his contribution to the abolition of the trade – he lies in the arms of Liberty while at his feet Peace weeps and ‘an African negro’, in the words of the sculptor, prays.Footnote ²¹ The Whigs, a close-knit group of aristocratic families were committed to the view that they were responsible for securing the liberties of ‘the people’ against over-mighty monarchs: their particular focus civil and religious liberties. Lord Holland, born in 1773, was orphaned as boy, and brought up by his two uncles. He revered his uncle Charles and saw it as his political responsibility to sustain his values.

In common with many young aristocrats Lord Holland enjoyed a continental tour. In Naples in 1794, he met Elizabeth Vassall, married to Sir Godfrey Webster, a man much older than herself. Holland and Elizabeth fell in love and she refused to return to England with her husband. She was a Jamaican heiress, only child of Richard Vassall. The Vassall family had been in Jamaica since 1672 but it was Elizabeth's grandfather who had made a fortune in the second half of the eighteenth century, the time when Jamaica was truly the jewel in the English crown. Her grandfather left his plantations in trust for her, provided her future husband took on the name of Vassall. Webster divorced Elizabeth and got her fortune including the Jamaica estates – said to be worth £7,000 a year.Footnote ²² The Hollands found slave ownership so out of keeping with their values that they apparently did not mind her losing her property.Footnote ²³ As a divorced woman Lady Holland had no rights to her children either; so desperate was she to keep one of her daughters that she faked her illness, death and burial – but this was discovered and the child returned to her father.

In 1800, Webster committed suicide, burdened with heavy gambling debts. The Jamaica property reverted to Elizabeth and Lord Holland, who now took on the name of Vassall. Despite now being a West Indian proprietor Lord Holland supported abolition of the slave trade in 1806, speaking in favour of it in the House of Lords, and seeing this legislation as his beloved uncle's greatest legacy. Wilberforce regarded him at this time as a ‘most zealous partisan’.Footnote ²⁴ But abolition went alongside substantial measures of tax relief for sugar producers which had been demanded by the West India interest and Lord Holland benefited from these. The two estates in Jamaica were in Westmoreland and were named, extraordinarily inappropriately for plantations of the enslaved, Sweet River and Friendship. One was cattle rearing, the other sugar producing; both were managed by an attorney. Lord Holland had become an absentee proprietor. Up to 1817, he took little interest in the property. But then in the context of his friend Monk Lewis's inspection of the Vassall estates on his celebrated visit to Jamaica, and increasing public discussion of the iniquities of slavery, he began to take more interest. He attempted to encourage a paternalist regime, but like others discovered how difficult this was from afar. Faced with increasing hostility between the abolitionists and the planters he took the view, a classic Whig view in the wake of the American Revolution, that questions relating to colonial property must be subject to the colonial assemblies, for representative government should be protected and there should be no taxation without representation. Jamaica had its own House of Assembly, totally dominated by the planter interest. Holland wanted to avoid a clash between the House of Assembly and the imperial parliament. In 1823, he did not support the abolitionist attempt to challenge slavery, rather aligning with Canning and hoping the colonial assemblies would adopt the policies of amelioration.

As the struggle between the pro-slavers and the abolitionists became more intense, Holland tried to influence both the West India lobby in London and the colonial assemblies towards moderation. Once the Whigs were back in power in 1830, and he was in the cabinet, he maintained these strategies as we know from the careful diary he kept. He regarded the Reform Act of 1832 as necessary to avoid revolution, defend aristocratic power and property. At the very same time, he opposed the ‘extravagant and impracticable plans’ of those in favour of immediate emancipation who had no plan of ‘providing for the subsistence or the subordination of the emancipated’.Footnote ²⁵ Subordination, in his view, was the proper basis of social and political order, whether ‘at home’ or in the colonies. Wilberforce, trying to stiffen his sinews, reminded him of the need to uphold his uncle's principles. The new House of Commons after 1832, with its reduced West India interest and increased commitment to abolition, meant that immediate emancipation became inevitable. His role then became to negotiate with Stanley, the colonial secretary, about the terms. He pressed for financial inducements for West Indians to get their agreement, hoping that improving the terms of compensation, from £15 million to £20 million, would secure acceptance by the colonial legislatures as well as the representatives of Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow and London. His major identification was with the Whigs, he spoke of ‘our’ government, and ‘our’ plan, rather than with the West India interest, but he was also fully aware of his identity as a colonial proprietor. Indeed, Wilberforce addressed him in his ‘other character as a West India proprietor’.Footnote ²⁶ In securing better terms for the slave owners, he was, of course, securing better terms for himself and his wife. He was convinced that the West Indians were unjustly unpopular, that there were undoubtedly cases of cruelty, but that the public was unfairly predisposed against the slave owners. He hoped to mediate between the hothead abolitionists, as he saw them, and the unreasonable plantocracy, and crucially to protect the interests of property. His major fear was of anarchy in the West Indies, just as he had feared in Britain in the stormy days before the Reform Act, particularly after 1831 when rebellion erupted on the Vassall estates in Jamaica. Faced with the terrible reprisals meted out to the rebels while the planters attacked some of the missionaries and their chapels he argued for more military power to uphold ‘the various orders of society without which property cannot subsist’.Footnote ²⁷

Three claims were made in the names of Lord and Lady Holland, one of which was contested. The compensation money was divided and the Hollands got over £2,200.Footnote ²⁸ Lord Holland continued to try and ensure that the plantations were conducted on paternalistic lines and to influence the Jamaica assembly. He believed that black property owners should get the vote and that it was vital to ensure the future of representative government. It was property that secured order and stability. He died in 1840, before the notion that the ‘great experiment’ of emancipation had failed had become widely accepted.

How then did Lord Holland construct the slave trade, slavery and abolition in his Memoirs of the Whig Party which dealt with the period up to 1821? The answer is a remarkable silence. But silencing, as the Haitian historian Michel-Rolphe Trouillot argues, is a practice. Questions of silence always raise questions of memory.Footnote ²⁹ Who and what has been forgotten? Which peoples and events downplayed? There is ‘no memory without forgetfulness, no forgetfulness without memory’ and memory is a site of conflict, ‘in which many contrary forces converge and in which the interactions between memory and forgetting are contingent as much as they are systematic’.Footnote ³⁰ Page after page of Holland's memoirs dealt with issues of foreign politics, while the colonies were ignored. Yet we know from his diary and correspondence that West Indian matters at times occupied much space in his mind. In his history, however, the abolition of the slave trade merited half a paragraph. There was no need to record anything about it, he noted; since it had been extensively dealt with, it could be taken for granted. He merely remarked that it ‘put an end to one of the greatest evils to which the human race has ever been exposed, or at least to our share in the guilt of it’.Footnote ³¹ And when it came to considering the failure of efforts to get abolition of the continental slave trade into the peace treaty of 1814, an issue to which Wilberforce and his allies devoted much time and energy, he simply blamed the Tories.Footnote ³² In this well-chronicled history, the memories of plantation slavery and the struggles over it had been entirely marginalised. Memories, as Bill Schwarz argues, bring the past into the preset. But they are not histories.Footnote ³³ Holland chose not to remember slavery as he narrated the doings of the Whig party. It was disturbing, not to be brought into public view. Amnesia was a less troubling condition.

After his death, Thomas Babington Macaulay, one of his young protégés, was asked by Lady Holland to write an appreciation of him in which he was described as ‘the planter, who made manful war on the slave trade’, his ambivalence about emancipation and his efforts on behalf of the planters simply erased.Footnote ³⁴ In the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, only recently completed, a 7 page biography of Lord Holland describes him as ‘a keen supporter of the abolition of slavery in 1833, despite its adverse effects on his West Indian income’ – a very misleading account of a much more complicated picture.Footnote ³⁵

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If Lord Holland chose effectively to forget his role as an absentee planter, my second figure, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, had a more troubled relationship to her money.

In the summer of 1846, thirteen years after emancipation, she had just secretly married Robert Browning and was about to escape from her dominating and patriarchal father's household. She wrote to Robert about the public announcement that was to be made. ‘You might put in the newspaper’, she reflected, ‘of Wimpole Street and Jamaica, . . . or and Cinnamon Hill, Jamaica.’Footnote ³⁶ This reference to Jamaica and Cinnamon Hill, the family estate, indicated her powerful, albeit deeply ambivalent, identification with the island where her father had been born, the family's properties were held, members of the family had been buried over generations and from which the family income derived. Browning had his own reasons for complicated feelings about the West Indies. His ancestors ‘were in the midst of Jamaican history at its inception’, the inception, that is, of British colonialism. His father had himself been so troubled by his family's plantations in St Kitts that, according to his mother's account, he gave up all prospects there.Footnote ³⁷

The first of the Barrett lineage had served on the fleet commanded by Penn and Venables that took Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655.Footnote ³⁸ By the eighteenth century the family were established as very significant landholders on the north coast of the island. Elizabeth's great-grandfather, Edward Barrett, built up the family fortunes, named his plantations Oxford and Cambridge and established sugar works near his Great House at Cinnamon Hill. Barrett land was the basis for the development of Falmouth, the major slaving port on the north coast in the eighteenth century. After his death in 1798, his property was left to two grandsons since his three sons had pre-deceased him. Both were the sons of his daughter, Elizabeth Barrett, who had married Samuel Moulton. One was Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton, the other her favourite uncle Samuel Barrett Moulton. Both took the paternal Barrett name along with the inheritance so that her father became Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett. The will, however, was contested by cousins and a long-running legal case drained much of the family resources. In the long term, the cousins Richard Barrett and Samuel Goodin Barrett were to establish more successful branches of the family and they both received compensation for the enslaved on their estates. Samuel Goodin was living in Leamington at the time. Elizabeth's own name, prior to her marriage with Browning, was Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett.

Elizabeth had contact with Jamaica from her earliest childhood. Her mother, Mary Graham-Clarke came from a rich merchant family in Newcastle.Footnote ³⁹ They too had property in Jamaica and were old family friends of the Barretts. Elizabeth's grandparents separated after their marriage and her father, Edward, was taken back by his mother to her family home at Cinnamon Hill. He lived there until he was seven and then was sent to England for his education. His mother, who followed him, could not avoid the traces of slavery after she left Jamaica, and often they were found far too close to home. She was disgusted that her son was in contact with the illegitimate children of her oldest brother George who had at least six children, all of whom he freed, with an enslaved woman, Elissa Peters. Her second brother Henry also had two mixed-race children. George's six children had been sent to England to be educated and their guardian was Mary Graham-Clarke's father. George, all too aware of the discrimination that his mixed-race children would face in Jamaica, hoped that they would ‘settle and reside’ in a country where ‘the distinctions respecting colour (which the policy of the West Indies renders necessary) are not maintained’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In addition to these half-cousins who were an ever-present reminder to the family in England of the pernicious effects of the plantation system Elizabeth's grandmother, who had spent much of her life in Jamaica, was very close to her son's children. Her companion, known as Treppy, was the child of a beleaguered planter and an enslaved woman, and regarded emancipation as a sorrow for the ‘poor creatures’.Footnote ⁴¹

Elizabeth's father Edward, meanwhile, took an active interest in his Jamaica property and probably went there on business at least once. The estates were very profitable at this highpoint of Jamaica's dominance of the global sugar market and brought in an estimated income of £4,000 in 1807. Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett was a paternalistic proprietor. Like Lord Holland, he was a Whig, a supporter of the 1832 Reform Bill and a Wesleyan Methodist. He was influenced by the anti-slavery movement and anxious that the enslaved men and women on his estates should not suffer unduly. In 1823, when debates over emancipation were galvanising people and press in both Britain and Jamaica, he instructed his attorney, who managed his estates, to abolish the whip. Nevertheless, being at a distance from his estates raised problems and it was decided that his brother Samuel, who had also inherited properties from his grandfather but had been living in Yorkshire and was a member of parliament, should move to Jamaica and manage the business himself. This was initially for two years but he settled permanently at Cinnamon Hill and soon some of his nephews, Elizabeth's brothers, were coming to work with him in the hope that they would make their fortunes.

By the early 1830s, the time of abolition, Elizabeth was a young woman in her late twenties and well aware of the implications of abolition for the family fortunes. Yet she was also a supporter of anti-slavery. In 1832, the estate at Hope End on which they had grown up had to be sold, a casualty of the family's legal battles, declining sugar prices, the effects of the 1831 rebellion and the expectation of abolition. Elizabeth wrote to a friend in May 1833, ‘The West Indies are irreparably ruined if the bill passes.’Footnote ⁴² Once the bill had passed in September, she wrote ‘Of course you know that the late bill has ruined the West Indians. That is settled. The consternation here is very great. Nevertheless, I am glad, and always shall be, that the negroes are – virtually – free.’Footnote ⁴³ Any notion of ruin for the West Indians, however, was unduly pessimistic. Edward Moulton-Barrett received £7,800 for 397 enslaved men and women on the Oxford and Cambridge estates.Footnote ⁴⁴

Concerned about the management of the property in the wake of emancipation, Edward Moulton-Barrett sent his oldest son, known in the family as ‘Bro’, to Jamaica to work with his Uncle Sam. Elizabeth was anxious about this ‘necessary evil’. In September 1834, he was ‘still an exile’ and wrote cheerfully enough but he ‘cannot be happy there’, she was convinced, ‘among the white savages’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Her picture of Jamaica was of a benighted island dominated by the hated system of slavery and capable of hopelessly polluting its white inhabitants. On his return, after ‘two years in nearly a solitude – abstractedly from the negroes’ he was ‘very very glad to get back to the light of white faces again’ and declared he would rather be a stone breaker on English roads than live in Jamaican palaces.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet there were the family fortunes to consider. In 1836, his younger brother Sam replaced him and lived most of the time with his uncle at Cinnamon Hill while managing the Oxford and Cambridge estates. He, however, succumbed to the vices of the plantocracy, to the great dismay of his family. In 1838, Uncle Sam died, leaving his niece Elizabeth shares in the ‘David Lyon’, a West India ship named after one of the original proprietors of the West India Dock Company, established in 1799 to build new dock facilities specifically for the Caribbean trade. He also left her some money and this legacy from her favourite uncle made Elizabeth richer than her sisters and able to be independent from her father. She had already inherited £4,000 from her grandmother's properties in 1830.

Sam returned to England for a while, sailing back to Jamaica in 1839 with his younger brother Charles, known as ‘Stormie’, who was eventually to settle permanently on the island. In 1840, however, to the deep distress of his family, Sam died of fever and was buried at Cinnamon Hill alongside his uncle. Stormie was left to look after the properties. In 1857, at the death of his father he inherited the Jamaica properties according to the terms of his grandfather's will and gave his sisters £5,000 each in compensation. Elizabeth wrote to Henrietta the following year when Stormie was on his way back to the island: ‘It is with pain I hear of the departure to Jamaica . . . and in that horrid creeping David Lyon too.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Jamaica was contaminated, a dreadful place, and yet so necessary for her family.

Elizabeth expressed her ambivalence about the familial connection with slavery most vividly in the poem that she began in Pisa in 1846 at the request of an American anti-slavery organisation. This was ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point’ written over a decade after abolition when it was already clear, in the eyes of many, that emancipation was far from an unmitigated success. It may have been easier for her to write about slavery in an American context – a process involving distantiation.Footnote ⁴⁸ The poem told the tragic tale of an enslaved woman, who fell in love with an enslaved man on the plantation. He was killed and she was then raped by her white master. But the white child that she bore ‘was far too white . . . too white for me’ so she suffocated him, to save him from the fate of a black mother who could not love him, seeing in him the face of her rapist. Child and mother could only be reconciled in death.

The mother was flogged to death, and she died willingly, a Christ-like figure, yet knowing that as a child murderer there would be no place in heaven for her.

Elizabeth was proud of its anti-slavery content and thought it ‘ferocious’, possibly too ferocious for the Americans to publish.Footnote ⁵⁰ ‘I could not help making it bitter’ she told her friend Mary Mitford Russell.Footnote ⁵¹ Perhaps the scale of the bitterness, as Cora Kaplan has suggested, was possible in part because she was writing about slavery in the US, not the British Caribbean.Footnote ⁵² Furthermore, as Marjorie Stone has convincingly demonstrated, biographical explanations are not enough to account for the militant abolitionist sentiment in the poem. Rather, her inter-textual account of the context for its publication in the Liberty Bell, edited by Maria Weston Chapman and closely linked to radical abolitionists and feminists with Garrisonian sympathies, makes sense of Barrett Browning's portrayal of an enslaved black woman, both sexually and racially oppressed. A figure who is martyred for her race and articulates the curse that white slave-holders bring upon themselves.Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, Kaplan argues that the poem cannot be explicated only through a family history. Rather, it needs to be seen in relation to the debates about race circulating in Britain as well as the US in the 1840s, and in its revision of earlier feminist antislavery writing, its re-working of familiar tropes and rhetorical challenge to the negative associations of blackness.Footnote ⁵⁴

Yet, like so much of the anti-slavery discourse of white male and female abolitionists, it was an ambivalent work, speaking for the enslaved woman, the adopted ‘I’ of the poem, a woman who had no name and who could not speak for herself. Elizabeth had had her own historic struggle, to free herself from the authority of her father, which could only be effected through her elopement. He punished her by never speaking to her again. She had been aware from her adolescence of her own ‘self-love and excessive passion’. In a manuscript autobiography, written when she was fourteen, she remarked on her ‘determined and if thwarted violent disposition’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Her struggle to be an independent creative woman, which meant rejecting her father, has been justly celebrated as one of the success stories of nineteenth-century white feminists. Yet in her poem, the rage of the African woman could only be expressed through the despairing act of killing her child and willingly sacrificing herself. Barrett Browning was claiming freedom for the unfree, yet the only freedom that could be imagined was death. She hated slavery, yet she had lived much of her life on the proceeds of the plantations. Pursued with guilt, she knew her dependence on that tainted money. Her favourite uncle had died an untimely death, her beloved brother was buried at twenty-eight. Jamaica was indeed a dangerous place and ‘cursed we are from generation to generation!’ she reflected. She wished profoundly that she had ‘some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave’.Footnote ⁵⁶

In a letter to her friend Anna Jameson some years later, Elizabeth urged her to read Uncle Tom's Cabin. ‘Is it possible’, she asked, ‘that you think a woman has no business with questions like the question of slavery?’ Then, she continued,

Property was property, after all. And poetry was a medium through which disturbance could be spoken.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay aimed in his History of England, the first two volumes of which were published to huge acclaim in 1848 and established him as the great historian of England, to ‘civilise subjects’, to make Britons aware of their shared history and culture, to bind them to the nation.Footnote ⁵⁸ How did he deal with the slave trade and slavery?

Tom grew up in an abolitionist household. His father Zachary Macaulay was a key figure in the struggle for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, a tireless lobbyist, collector of evidence, editor and pamphleteer. It was hoped and assumed that Tom, the first born, would become an evangelical Christian like his parents and their friends and neighbours in the Clapham Sect, all of whom were engaged in a wide range of efforts to moralise both the domestic and the imperial world. Tom was educated at a small private school followed by Cambridge. By the early 1820s, a young man in his twenties, he was living at home again in London, hoping initially to make his fortune at the bar. He joined the committee of the new Anti-Slavery Society of which his father was a prime mover and made a powerful impression with his first major public speech at their general meeting in 1824. This was held in the wake of the Demerara rebellion and the death of the missionary John Smith and was an impressive gathering. Tom, naming himself ‘a friend of humanity’, spoke in support of the Committee's resolutions on the evils of slavery, the failure of amelioration and the need as Christians and as men to work for eventual emancipation. It was the abandonment of proper legal process in Demerara that was a scandal and that endangered social order. Those of us, he said, who had ‘always had the happiness of living under the protection of the laws of England’ had not had to suffer such wrongs. England had much to glory in: ‘her ancient laws . . . her magnificent literature . . . her long list of maritime and military triumphs . . . the vast extent and security of her empire’. But her ‘peculiar distinction’ was ‘not that she has conquered so splendidly – but that she has ruled only to bless, and conquered only to spare’. ‘Her mightiest empire’, he continued,

The speech was ‘rapturously received’ and Wilberforce was greatly moved by the spectacle of a new young leader who would carry the baton forward. Tom, however, did not appear on an antislavery platform again. This was Zachary's cause and never his own.

Growing up in an abolitionist household had not made Tom into an enthusiastic abolitionist, indeed far from it. As John Stuart Mill ruefully observed in later years, the sons of abolitionists rarely shared the passions of their fathers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Macaulay Junior liked to poke fun at his father's pieties. No doubt the unremitting diet of the horrors of slavery and Zachary's obsessional preoccupation with ‘the cause’ to the detriment of the family economy was hard to live with. Tom did not share his father's evangelical beliefs though he preferred not to be explicit about this. He did share his understanding of a universal human family and the centrality of culture, education and civilisation to stages of development. Colonising parents must guide their colonised children, raise up their dependants in the hope that one day they would walk alone. In theory, like Zachary, he believed that assimilation should be possible: ‘they’ would develop the same desires as ‘us’ and learn to labour accordingly. But while for Zachary the route was Christianity, for Tom a secular notion of civilisation was his key concept. By the nineteenth century, civilisation was increasingly seen as the achievement of certain races and nations. The young Macaulay believed that England and the English had achieved it, though it was never entirely secure. Race and nation were used virtually interchangeably for much of the nineteenth century and ‘race’ was never just about biology, it was always ‘a bricolage of cultural, religious and historical values’.Footnote ⁶¹ Macaulay Junior did not believe in theory that races were separate and distinct: universalist notions still held sway in his mind. Yet in practice, ‘they’, whether the ‘listless’ negroes he imagined to people the West Indies or those he came to identify as ‘effeminate Bengalis’, were strangers of different kinds, and the language of civilisaational difference could slip into a harsher register of hierarchies. As an avid reader of Scott, Macaulay was deeply familiar with his account of the integration of Saxons and Normans, two hostile races, through a common language: race was invoked only to be sidestepped by an argument for cultural assimilation.Footnote ⁶² This was a way of thinking that was to become common sense to Macaulay.

After leaving Glasgow as a young man, Zachary Macaulay had, like so many of his fellow Scots, sought his fortune in the empire. He spent six years as a book keeper on a Jamaican plantation, and then become governor of the new colony of Sierra Leone in the 1790s. Stories of his father's conflicts with the feisty African-American loyalists who had settled in Sierra Leone left significant negative traces on his son. ‘Lord Macaulay had in his youth heard too much about negro preachers, and negro administrators’, his nephew recollected, ‘to permit him to entertain any very enthusiastic anticipations with regard to the future of the African race.’Footnote ⁶³ His friendship for humanity was strictly limited.

By 1833, and his spectacular oratorical successes in the debates over reform when he argued that England's ‘peculiar distinction’ was its capacity to learn from history and ‘reform in time’, Macaulay was elected as one of the MP's for Leeds and was appointed to a junior position in the Whig ministry, as secretary of the Board of Control, the government body with responsibility for India. The year 1833 was an extraordinary one in colonial politics, just after the great Reform Act, when distinctions were being made between what worked at home and what was necessary for the empire. Emancipation was being discussed alongside the new Charter Act for India and a Coercion Bill for Ireland. As a member of the government, the difficult negotiations over abolition, with a determined plantocracy on one side and a powerful movement for abolition on the other, were painful for him, caught between his father's principles and his own position in the ministry. Zachary strongly disapproved of some of the clauses in the government's original bill, including the possibility that the enslaved might have to contribute to the costs of compensation to the slave owners. Tom felt that he should support the government especially since the family finances were in a parlous state, and resignation, with the consequent loss of his salary, was an alarming prospect. His own feelings about ‘the black man’ were apparent in a letter to his sister Margaret, telling her about the constant requests he now received for patronage, including from his father for antislavery employees, ‘a clerkship for Mr. Stokes, a place in the excise for Mr. Barnes . . . and he was going on to demand, I suppose, a partnership for the black man, when I stopped him by saying I had nothing to give’.Footnote ⁶⁴ ‘I am plagued out of my life’, he told his sister Hannah, ‘between the Moguls and the Methodists, Rammohun Roy and the Antislavery Agency Society’, and he penned a quick poem for her including the lines

Deep-seated feelings about racial difference could be shared as secrets with his beloved sisters.Footnote ⁶⁶ ‘Niggers’, a derogatory term his father, ‘the Governor’, would never have used, were in his mind those negroes without culture, unknown and nameless, locked in drudgery, to be rescued from ‘the foul blot of slavery’ and delivered into a society ruled by law.Footnote ⁶⁷ Brahmins and Moguls figured differently. Men such as Rammohun Roy, the leading figure of the Bengal renaissance now visiting London, were cultured in some respects, could give evidence to parliamentary committees and be received in London drawing–rooms, but they were still living in darkness and in need of colonial rule. The West Indies and India were different kinds of colonial spaces, in need of different forms of rule.

The ministry had little enthusiasm for abolition. Macaulay's sense of duty to his father made him decide that he must stand out against the government's proposals on apprenticeship which would have tied freed slaves to twelve years of labour. He was prepared to resign but was led to hope that the cabinet, sympathising with his position, would allow him a free vote. He spoke in support of the principle of abolition and the granting of compensation, which was strongly opposed by the more radical abolitionists, but against the term of apprenticeship, fearing that the effect of the twelve years proposed would be that ‘the whole negro population would become inactive, would sink into weak and dawdling inefficiency, and would be much less fit for liberty at the end of the period than at the commencement’.Footnote ⁶⁸ That evocation of ‘weak and dawdling inefficiency’ evoked a particular view of ‘the African’. In the event, Buxton, the abolitionist leader in the House of Commons won the vote, the government cut the term from twelve to six years, and Macaulay's resignation was not accepted.Footnote ⁶⁹ ‘I cannot go counter to my father’, his nephew reports him as saying, ‘he has devoted his whole life to the question, and I cannot grieve him by giving way when he wishes me to stand firm’.Footnote ⁷⁰ To sister Hannah he wrote in a different vein: ‘I am glad that you approve of my conduct about the Niggers. I expect, and indeed wish, to be abused by the fools of the Agency Society (the more radical end of the abolitionists). My father is quite satisfied.’Footnote ⁷¹

Macaulay introduced the new Charter Act for India on its second reading in the House of Commons. He was particularly proud, he told the House, of the ‘noble and benevolent clause’: specifying that ‘no native of our Indian Empire shall, by reason of his colour, his descent, or his religion, be incapable of holding office’.Footnote ⁷² But this would have to be effected by slow degrees. Just as he believed in theory that enslaved Africans, once freed, might be able to ‘become men’, so Indians too might be educated into civilisation. He famously looked forward to a day when Indians might be self-governing, for ‘to trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages’.Footnote ⁷³ ‘To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition’, ‘a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft’, ‘to have so ruled them as to make them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own’.Footnote ⁷⁴

The following year Macaulay sailed for India where he stayed for four years, acting as the law member in the governor-general's council. His experience there further convinced him of the gap between ‘barbaric peoples’ and ‘civilised subjects’ and of the impossibility of closing that gap quickly. In theory, all positions in the Indian Civil Service should be open to native Indians, in practice, they were not ready. They must toil in the ‘waiting room of history’, hoping for that day, always delayed, when they would be would be able to represent themselves, rather than being governed by others. While in India, his sister Hannah, who had accompanied him, married Charles Trevelyan, scion of a west country landed family and East India Company official. No mention appears to have been made of the Trevelyan family's West Indian properties, nor of the compensation Charles's widowed mother was successfully seeking along with her Trevelyan relatives.Footnote ⁷⁵ The taint of slave ownership was cleansed by abolition.

A decade later, when Macaulay was busy writing his history of England, West Indian sugar producers were still trying to maintain their privileged position, complaining bitterly that emancipation had ruined them and the government owed them recompense. But the protection of West Indian sugar became a divisive issue, even for abolitionists, in the context of a strong movement for free trade.Footnote ⁷⁶ Macaulay was a free trader and spoke in the House of Commons in favour of a reduction in sugar duties. This speech provided him with an occasion to reassert his antislavery credentials with an attack on the particularly horrible practices of the southern states of the US, where slaves were being bred for sale. This was the slave trade in its worst form, to his mind, and it was ‘a trade as regular as the trade in pigs between Dublin and Liverpool, or as the trade in coals between the Tyne and the Thames’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Slavery in the US was peculiarly horrible, for it was rooted in ‘the antipathy of colour’. Here was Macaulay, the opponent of distinctions based on colour, a position which he had consistently maintained formally, while undermining informally on the basis of culture and history. The job of liberal reformers was to remove restraints on individual freedom and to ensure access to the rule of law. Inequalities of gender, of race and of ethnicity were not their concern for they were universalists. Exclusion and equality were wedded together in the liberal imperial state.Footnote ⁷⁸ Macaulay had felt himself bound in the past, as ‘a British legislator’, whatever the cost to himself and his constituents, ‘to remove a foul stain from the British laws’.Footnote ⁷⁹ But once slavery was ended in the British empire, he no longer felt the same responsibility. The great struggle for negro freedom had been won in Britain, the nation had been cleansed. This was the legacy of his father's generation and it had freed his generation. With slavery gone, race was no longer a problem for the English in his mind. ‘I hate slavery from the bottom of my soul’, Macaulay recorded in his journal, ‘and yet I am made sick by the cant and the silly mock reasons of the Abolitionists . . . the nigger driver and the negrophile – are two odious things to me.’Footnote ⁸⁰

Like Dickens, who, he judged, ‘hated slavery as heartily as I do’, Macaulay hated slavery as an institution, because it was the antithesis of the freedom he valued so highly.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet, again like Dickens, he felt only contempt for Africans and their defenders. Macaulay's liberal ambivalence, so characteristic of liberalism, rested on a contradiction. A formal and legalistic universalism was underpinned by an acceptance of inequality, whether of race, ethnicity, class or gender, as the necessary foundation for any stable society. Slavery was a denial of human freedom, but freed slaves were not ‘like us’. Skin colour was irrelevant to appointments in the Indian Civil Service, yet Indians were never ready for those senior appointments.

Macaulay's History of England focused on the late seventeenth century. Yet it had nothing to say about the development of the slave trade and slavery, the Royal African Company and the royal patronage of Charles II and James II, the expansion of London and its docks, the slave ships in Bristol, the merchants who made their fortunes in that trade and became key players in the new global financial markets. Nor about the sugar which gradually became part of the consumer revolution, bringing sweetness to those teas, coffees and chocolates which were arriving from the empire. Nor about the ways in which race was imagined in England – in written and visual culture, in the plays of Shakespeare or Aphra Behn, or the paintings of the enslaved serving the wealthy. Nor about the ways in which colonists in the West Indies constructed new legal codes that enshrined their freedom and rights to property and representative government, while at the same time denying others their rights to their own bodies and labour. The silence is striking: his father's lifetime work had been to expose the horrors of slavery. Yet the history of England as Macaulay imagined it could be told outside of empire; the nation was self-determining, the logic of its development one of constitutionalism, a story of peaceful incorporation and assimilation, no irreconcilable class conflict, no question of gender trouble, no racial tremors. Abolition had cleansed the nation of any racial taint, Britain's hands were clean. There was no need to return to these troubling subjects. The empire was a reforming empire – one that refused slavery, saw peoples of colour as British subjects with rights to the rule of law, and believed, as Macaulay did, that one day, in the future, it might be possible for those imperial subjects to become ‘brown Englishman’, enjoying the same liberties and freedoms as the English.

But putting slavery aside meant deliberately avoiding and forgetting: disavowal. Macaulay was well aware of the extent to which slavery had sustained the economy and society. He was a member of the government that negotiated compensation to the slave owners: he knew what the payment of £20 million meant.

In her wonderful long essay, Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison dissects the ways in which the canon of white American literature disavowed, knew but did not know, the African-American presence whilst constructing the white American man in relation to his silenced black other. Yet, she argued, read with a certain eye, the ‘tremors’ were there, the slippages that spoke, the ghosts that haunted, the spectres that disrupted.Footnote ⁸² Lord Holland forgot, Barrett Browning remembered, Macaulay disavowed. The challenge is to grasp how the slave trade, slavery and race are present in the absences and silences, the particular forms of remembering and forgetting, of nineteenth-century histories. What contribution did this make to ‘island stories’? And how might this be re-imagined in the present?