Abolition

March 25th 2007 sees the commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of British involvement in the slave trade.

The view that abolition was the result of the hard work of an elite group of British politicians held sway throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries.

Chains used on enslaved Africans

Certainly Wilberforce and his colleagues were important; their campaign in the 1790s focused on the immorality of the slave trade and the horrors of the ‘Middle Passage’ - the leg of the journey between West Africa and the Americas/the Caribbean.

But the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and  the abolition of plantation in 1834 was the outcome of a vast popular movement not by just the elite but the result of a diverse and popular campaign; the likes of which Britain had never known before and which has shaped political life ever since.

Sheffield slave trade connections

Sheffield’s connections to the actual slave trade were minimal when compared to other towns, particularly the west coast ports of Liverpool and Bristol. But they still existed. Local merchants did make money out of the slave trade.

Benjamin Spencer of Cannon Hall near Barnsley for example, ‘dabbled’ in the trade in the 1750s.

Connections with slavery can also be seen in paintings of elite families at country estates; family portraits would sometimes include a slave boy, a symbol of status and fashion.

And in terms of the lives of more ordinary people among the townsfolk, Sheffield was dependent on the metal trades. Sheffield Archives holds an advertisement from 1816 for plantation equipment made in the town, the hoes given the names of ‘Demerara’, ‘Barbados’ etc.

Metalworkers petition

Interestingly, one of the first groups in Sheffield to register their opposition to slavery were men working in the metal trades. In 1789, 769 Sheffield metalworkers petitioned Parliament against the slave trade; a brave statement, as abolition may well have affected their already slim livelihoods.

Again in 1793, a petition against slavery with 8000 names was sent from Sheffield to Parliament. Many of the men who signed these petitions would likely have had connections with radical politics in Sheffield.

Cannon Hall, Cawthorne, Barnsley

One member of the SSCI (Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information) and the London Corresponding Society (which, like the SSCI, campaigned for an end to the French Wars, lower taxation, cheaper bread and the enfranchisement of the working man) was the Sheffield filesmith and street entertainer Joseph Mather whose songs compared poverty among the workers in Sheffield with the lot of slaves in the Caribbean.

The following verse is from Mather's ‘The File Hewer’s Lamentation’:

I'm debtor to a many,
But cannot pay one penny;
Sure I've worse luck than any;
My traps are marked for sale.
My creditors may sue me,
The bailiffs may pursue me,
And lock me up in jail.
As negroes in Virginia,
In Maryland or Guinea,
Like them I must continue—
To be both bought and sold.
While negro ships are filling
I ne'er can save one shilling,
And must, which is more killing,
A pauper die when old.

Equiano visits Sheffield

Some of the signatories of the petitions were very likely to have attended the meeting in Sheffield in August 1790 addressed by Olaudah Equiano, a freed slave who now lived in London and was travelling the country publicising the horrors of the trade.

Equiano had been captured into slavery in the part of Africa which is now modern-day Nigeria when he was about 11 years old. He set out his memories of an idyllic African childhood in his 'Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano' (1789) in which he also described his experience of the brutality of slavery, his conversion to Christianity and his various adventures - some of them rather hair-raising - in the service of a naval captain.

Equiano bought his freedom in 1766 and settled in London with his English wife, becoming a spokesperson for the black community.

Black activism in abolition

The involvement of Equiano and other ex-slaves in abolition draws our attention to the importance of black people in the abolition movement. Slaves’ resistance included a full range of activities from full uprisings, desertion, attacks on planters and their houses; to working slow, maintaining aspects of African culture and singing protest songs; to writing and speaking as part of the political campaign.

But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, black activism was marginalised in accounts of the abolitionist movement. One explanation for this was that the assumption that black people were the passive victims of slavery was part of the racism of the day.

There was also a concern that to publicise the extent of slave resistance, which included regular uprisings throughout the British Caribbean, did not sit easily with the respectability of a bourgeois Christian campaign in England.

Nevertheless the group of people who have left us most of the evidence about their involvement in abolition are not radical working men or black anti-slavery activists, but ordinary middle-class members of the provincial Anti-Slavery Societies.

Sheffield Anti-Slavery Societies

Following the establishment in 1787 of the Anti-Slavery Society, similar groups were set up nationwide. In Sheffield the campaigns of this decade were largely led by men and included public meetings, canvassing for signatories for the petitions, and the boycott of slave-grown produce.

In the 1820s, the abolition campaign was revived. This time the focus was on plantation slavery, as it became clear that the 1807 Act had not improved the lives of the majority of people already living in slavery.

The new Anti-slavery Society was formed in 1823, and was again followed by provincial societies: the Sheffield Society for Abolition of Slavery (1824) and Sheffield Ladies’ Society (1825) led the campaign in the town.

Many of the same tactics were used, but by the 1820s and 1830s women were leading the way in producing petitions, writing tracts and pamphlets, coordinating the boycott campaign, writing poetry and urging the men to support immediate (rather than gradual) abolition.

Wincobank Hall

Again women in Sheffield, fronted by Mary Ann Rawson of Wincobank Hall, led the campaign against 'apprenticeship' whereby freed slaves were required to continue to work for their former masters for a period, a system based on the premise that people needed to be educated for life as free men and women. Apprenticeship was finally abolished in 1838.

For the members of the Anti-slavery societies, abolition was central to a Christian way of life. They believed that slavery was immoral and against the will of God: an oft-quoted extract from the Bible comes from Paul’s message that God had ‘made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth’ (Acts 17:26).

But their commitment to spiritual equality was undercut by an assumption of social inequality.

While anti-slavery activists were greatly concerned with reform (encouraging frugality, hard work, a clean house with a domesticated wife, children who attended Sunday School, regular worship at church or chapel etc.) and were undoubtedly well-meaning, these men and women had a tendency to impose their particular brand of middle-class Christianity.

Complex campaign

They found it pretty much impossible to understand other cultures, whether those of non-Christians overseas or the working class at home, in any terms other than their failure to conform to middle-class evangelical principles.

Even working-class Methodists and Christians in the Caribbean were often seen as not expressing their faith in the appropriate manner.

This is one of the dynamics that makes anti-slavery such a complex campaign; we celebrate the activists' hard work and commitment, but still need to be wary of assumptions and political practices which made it hard for black people to engage with the movement on their own terms.

Finally, we can see in the Sheffield campaign also the tensions over domestic politics in Britain.

Researcher examines historical documents

Hypocrisy

During the 1830s, some abolitionists were accused of hypocrisy; they supported an end to slavery overseas but continued to employ and exploit little children in textile mills on the West Riding of Yorkshire. 

It was these 'hypocrites' who the Sheffield abolitionist Samuel Roberts thundered against in 1837 when he wrote: “First cast out the beam out from thine own eye [Matthew 7:5]... The abolition of slavery should thus begin with the ‘HOME origin of the system!”

Roberts, who had previously led the campaign against the employment of little children as chimney sweeps, was one of the few men in Sheffield to support immediate abolition.

It is important to see the diversity of the anti-slavery campaign - to celebrate not only Wilberforce, important as he was, but the other main actors who brought the brutality of slavery to the public at large.

As well as Olaudah Equiano and his contemporaries these include other black writers of the 19th century; the radical men who extended their sympathy to slaves on the basis of their own oppression; and the provincial campaigners in Sheffield and across the rest of the UK who organised anti-slavery societies in their locality and were successful in bringing public opinion to bear on the British Parliament.

:: Alison Twells is principal lecturer in History and in particular has researched anti-slavery in nineteenth century Sheffield

Further information

• For further information about anti-slavery in Sheffield, see a recent booklet produced by Sheffield Archives, ‘Towards Liberty’, 2007.
  
• The History group at Sheffield Hallam University includes experts on aspects of anti-slavery: see for example, Barbara Bush’s Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1659-1838 (1990) and Clare Midgley’s Women Against Slavery: the British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (1992). 
  
• Alison Twells has also researched anti-slavery in nineteenth century Sheffield. Slavery and anti-slavery can also be studied on Sheffield Hallam’s two MA programmes: the distance-learning MA in Imperialism and Culture; and the new MA in Local and Global History, which starts this September.