You no think, Massa, when you eat our sugar, you drink our blood?

Abolitionist pamphlet of 18261

As Dido Belle sipped her sweetened coffee in the company of Thomas Hutchinson, one wonders whether she spared a thought for the slaves who laboured to harvest and refine the sugar at such a huge cost to themselves. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were many in England who were beginning to reassess the role of sugar in domestic life.

In 1787 the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed, chaired by Granville Sharp. It was a coalition of various strands of anti-slavery factions, propelled by Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce as well as Sharp, but its roots were in the Quaker and Christian evangelical Churches, and many of these abolitionists were women. They felt compassion and sympathy for African women who were torn from their families and sexually exploited by planters and slavers. They were the homemakers who purchased and served sugar to their families. As one newspaper article said, ‘In the domestic department, they are the chief controllers [who] provide the articles for family consumption.’2 Women may have been prohibited from voting in Parliament, but they could boycott the British sugar bowl.

One powerful abolitionist metaphor was of sugar tainted with blood. The Quaker William Fox wrote that ‘for every pound of West Indian sugar we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh’. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge joined in the furore: ‘A part of that Food among most of you is sweetened with the Blood of the Murdered … will the father of all men bless the food of Cannibals – the food which is polluted with the blood of his own innocent children?’3 Coleridge implored the women of England to consider their role: ‘The fine lady’s nerves are not shattered by the shrieks! She sips a beverage sweetened with human blood even while she is weeping over the sorrows of Werther or Clementina.’4

William Allen urged women, sipping their tea at home, to consider their responsibilities as consumers. And it wasn’t just the upper classes: a white working-class abolitionist called Lydia Hardy wrote to Olaudah Equiano to tell him that in her village of Chesham more people drank tea without sugar than with it.5 So it was that women took the lead in the campaign to refuse to buy sugar or rum, another product of the plantations.

Lady Margaret Middleton hosted dinner parties at which she spoke and spread awareness of the horrors of the slave trade. The novelist, playwright and evangelical writer Hannah More joined forces with her, and wrote anti-slavery pamphlets and poems. The official seal of the abolitionists was Wedgwood’s medallion bearing the figure of a manacled, kneeling slave and the slogan ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Women abolitionists wore the medallion on chains around their necks, as bracelets or as hair ornaments.6 This was a visual symbol far more powerful than any pamphlet or newspaper article. Could Dido ever have slipped one around her neck?

Abstention from sugar was an equally powerful, if less ostentatious, force. It was a denial of luxury, a self-sacrificing act of generosity which drew attention to the virtue of anti-consumption and anti-commodification.7 By the late 1790s the number of British abstainers from sugar seems to have risen towards half a million – and over half of them were women.8

The abstention campaign, said to be supported by Queen Charlotte, provided satirists with ample ammunition. James Gillray’s ‘Anti-Saccharrites – or John Bull and his Family leaving off the use of Sugar’ (March 1792) depicts the royal princesses unhappily sipping unsweetened tea, urged on by their mother: ‘You can’t think how nice it is without sugar,’ and ‘then consider how much work you’ll save the poor Blackamoor by the leaving off the use of it’. Cruikshank followed with a print showing the Queen snipping off a tiny bit from the loaf with her sugar nippers and weighing it on scales, saying, ‘Now my dears, only an ickle bit. Do but tink of de Negro girl dat Captain Kimber treated so cruelly.’9

It was Lady Middleton who persuaded the evangelical Christian MP William Wilberforce to take up the cause and lead Parliament towards the Abolition Act. The Middletons’ home, Barham Court in Teston, Kent, was the heart of the movement, and it was there that Wilberforce was introduced to such leading supporters as James Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson. Wilberforce adored the house, and his time spent there in the autumn of 1786 was pivotal to his conversion to the cause of abolition. By the early months of 1787 he had become convinced to take up the cause, writing in his journal: ‘God Almighty has sent before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.’10 Barham Court was used for planning the abolition campaign, with numerous meetings and strategy sessions attended by Wilberforce, Clarkson and others.

Margaret Middleton’s impact was huge. In 1784 it was she who had persuaded James Ramsay to publish his account of the horrors of the slave trade, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. This was the first time that the British public had read an anti-slavery work by a mainstream Anglican writer who had personally witnessed the suffering of the slaves on the West Indian plantations. Christian Ignatius Latrobe, a leading figure in the evangelical Moravian Church who spent many years at Barham Court, wrote to his daughter that the abolition of the slave trade was the work of one woman, Margaret Middleton.11 But the presence in another grand but more peaceful house – Kenwood – of another woman – Dido Elizabeth Belle – was also a hidden element in the story of abolition.

Lord Mansfield would not live to see the end of the slave trade. By the time that the abolitionist forces were gathering at Barham, he was growing frail. In 1785 he wrote to the Duke of Rutland: ‘I go down hill with a gentle decay, and I thank God, without gout or stone.’12 On 1 November that year, the London Chronicle reported that the Lord Chief Justice ‘has been obliged to give up the pleasure of riding on horseback owing to a weakness in his wrists’ – it was rather remarkable that he had stayed on a horse so long, given that he was eighty.

His popularity was waning. There were rumblings in the press that he was losing his judgement, and that retirement was overdue. Caricatures began to portray him as an old dodderer. One particular engraving even cast aspersions on his beloved dairy farm at Kenwood, which was presumably run by Dido alone now that Lady Mansfield had passed away. Entitled ‘The Noble Higglers’ and published in the Rambler’s Magazine on 1 February 1786, it shows four figures in a landscape, on a road leading from a country house. A judge, evidently Mansfield, carries a pair of milk pails on a yoke, while his companions bear pigs and poulty. It was published as an illustration to a letter about two peers, one of them Mansfield, who were in the habit of selling their dairy produce at Highgate. Surely, the letter suggests, they should be liable to the shop tax.13

Finally, in 1788, Mansfield retired from his role as Lord Chief Justice. He remained at Kenwood, looked after by Dido and his other nieces, the Ladies Anne and Margery Murray, for the last few years of his life. When Fanny Burney visited Kenwood in June 1792 she was unable to see Lord Mansfield, as he was too infirm. She was told by the housekeeper that he had not been downstairs for four years, ‘yet she asserts he is by no means superannuated, and frequently sees his very intimate friends’. Burney says that the Miss Murrrays ‘were upstairs with Lord Mansfield, whom they never left’. Fanny Burney asked after the Miss Murrays and left her respects. They had often invited her to Kenwood, and she expressed her sorrow that she hadn’t taken up the offer before then. There is, however, no mention of Dido.

On Sunday, 10 March 1793, Mansfield did not feel like taking breakfast. He was heavy and sleepy, his pulse low. Vapours and cordials were given to him. He perked up a little on the Monday, but all he asked for was sleep. He survived for another week, lying serenely in bed, but his silver tongue was silenced. He never spoke again.14 He was buried in Westminster Abbey with great dignity. The obituaries described him as the greatest judge of the age, if not any age.

The story of Dido Belle and Lord Mansfield is about individuals who changed history. There are many heroes and heroines in this story – both ordinary and extraordinary. There is Mrs Banks, who spent so much of her own fortune on securing the release of Thomas Lewis; Elizabeth Cade, who refused Lord Mansfield’s request to buy James Somerset and so avoid the issue of English slavery; Lady Margaret Middleton, who set up the abolitionists’ headquarters in her own home. The many thousands of women who stopped buying sugar. Mary Prince, who published her memoir. The men, too. The lawyers on the Somerset case who refused payment; Lord Mansfield, who made the ruling; and Granville Sharp, who was propelled into the cause of his life by seeing the bloodied face of Jonathan Strong.

The woman we know so little about, Dido Belle, played her own part. Would Mansfield have described chattel slavery as ‘odious’, and have made his significant ruling in the Somerset case, if he wasn’t so personally involved in the ‘Negro cause’ as a result of his adoption of Dido? His language in the case of the Zong massacre, his description of the comparison of slaves to horses as ‘shocking’, his constant concern for questions of ‘humanity’, are entirely consistent with his personal affection and respect for her. His pride in bringing the two Princes of Calabar to London and his determination in freeing them makes evident his abolitionist sympathies. His confirmation of Dido Belle’s freedom in his will reveals his absolute determination that there should be no possibility of the realisation of the awful possibility of her being somehow sold into slavery.

Mansfield’s insistence on the limitations of his famous ruling seems to point more to his fastidious nature than anything else. He was scrupulous about following the letter of the law, and utterly focused on clarity and certainty within the law. Nevertheless, he knew what was at stake in the Somerset case. He seems to have felt genuine concern that his ruling would be perceived as favourable to the black cause because of his relationship with Dido: in the words of Thomas Hutchinson, ‘He knows he has been reproached for showing his fondness for her.’ Yet he let Somerset go free, and in Thomas Lewis’s case threatened to bring into custody any man who ‘dared to touch the boy’.

For much of English polite society before the Somerset case, slavery was not to be spoken about. It was out there, far away in the plantation fields and on the slave ships. It didn’t have to be faced, especially if the consequence would mean the sacrifice of sugar. The Somerset case, and its widespread publicity and legal ramifications, brought slavery into the spotlight. Just as the planters feared, after Mansfield’s ruling there was no going back.

On 25 March 1807 the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade received the royal assent and entered the statute books. William Wilberforce’s face streamed with tears of joy. One month later, William Gregson’s son James hanged himself at home in the Liverpool mansion built on the proceeds of slave labour.

Granville Sharp continued his battle for black freedom. His fame had spread, as is indicated by a letter he received from an African in Philadelphia who wrote, ‘You were our Advocate when we had but few friends on the other side of the water.’15 A committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was set up by Sharp in the years following the Somerset ruling, and he began work on his plan to return English slaves to Africa, dreaming of their resettlement in Sierra Leone. Granville Sharp died in 1813 and, like Mansfield, has a memorial in Westminster Abbey.