Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [35]
That parliament was eventually jolted out of its complacency is testimony to the power of campaigns and campaigners to change the world, a reflection of an innate commitment to decency. The role of religion in this enormous transformation cannot be exaggerated. Thomas Clarkson had been intended for a career in the Church when, thinking about the slave trade, he decided that ‘it was time some person should see these calamities to their end’. As the eighteenth century ended and the nineteenth began, his marathon journeys across the land took the anti-slaving message to uncountable thousands, and everywhere he went – even in cities where he expected to be rebuffed – he found support. Ordinary citizens might appear powerless to change the law, but they had realized that they could change their own behaviour. ‘There was no town through which I passed in which there was not some individual who had left off the use of sugar,’ he recorded. William Wilberforce’s tireless efforts in parliament to have the trade made illegal were grounded in his evangelical beliefs, but the individuals trying to justify slavery were powerful and well heeled and it cannot have been easy. Even the royal family defended the slave trade, with the Duke of Clarence (who, in 1830, became King William IV) calling the abolitionists ‘either fanatics or heretics’. Yet nothing drives action like a sense of mission, and the campaign against what the poet Robert Southey called ‘the blood-sweetened beverage’ took root across the land. In Birmingham pamphlets argued that those who used the products of slavery were ‘as guilty of flagellation and murder as those actually employed in that abominable trade’. In Leicester, Elizabeth Heyrick, the widow of a young cavalry officer, organized a consumer boycott which within a year had persuaded a quarter of the town to lay off sugar. It was, as Victor Hugo might have put it later, an idea whose time had come, greater than the tread of mighty armies.
Oddly, anti-French hostility helped the abolitionists’ moral argument. Their supporters in parliament claimed it stood in heroic contrast to the way things were done across the Channel. The 1807 decision to ban the transport of slaves in British ships provided proof of the ethical superiority of the country’s population. ‘The people of England are not going to consent that there should be carried out in their name, a system of blood, rapine, robbery and murder,’ thundered Sir Samuel Romilly. On the other hand, he could not resist pointing out that the historic enemy was now being led by a Corsican tyrant. The French had also enslaved hundreds of thousands to work their Caribbean sugar plantations, and Romilly invited MPs to look into Napoleon’s conscience as he lay in bed, to ‘contemplate the anguish with which his solitude must be tortured by the recollection of the blood he has spilt, and the oppressions he has committed’ in the course of his ruthless climb to supreme power in France. He went on to imagine the feelings which accompanied his friend Wilberforce to bed after the vote to ban the slave trade: ‘how much more enviable his lot, in the consciousness of having preserved so many millions of his fellow-creatures, than that of the man, with whom I have compared him, on a Throne to which he has waded through slaughter and oppression’.
There was no material advantage to be gained by abolishing slavery, no territory to be conquered by the act, no gain either tactical or strategic. It was a decision taken for purely altruistic reasons, as noble as participation in the slave trade was contemptible. The Royal Navy was now ordered to begin anti-slavery patrols off the coast and up the rivers of tropical west Africa, a thankless task with few prospects of promotion and every chance of catching a nasty disease. In the first fifty years of these patrols, British citizens freed 150,000 men, women and children considered by others to be citizens of nowhere. And, apart from being