Chapter 10 Ghostly and vernacular presences in the black Atlantic
Alan Rice
What kind of case is a case of a ghost? It is a case of haunting, a story about what happens when we admit the ghost – that
special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present – into
the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world. It is a case of the difference it makes
to start with the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish, or, more commonly, with what we never even notice.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 24–25
In seeking to write a comprehensive account of the literature of the black Atlantic and abolition, the critic is hamstrung
by silence and absence as large majorities of Africans
in the diaspora were non-literate and often uncounted and unaccounted for. These absent figures are of course paralleled
throughout our period by the majority of white women and the transatlantic working class
who had little access to the tools of literacy. Here, though, I want to concentrate on African-Atlantic figures whose cultural
marginality was arguably the most extreme of these three groups. Critics such as the late Paul Edwards, Houston Baker Jr.,
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Vincent Carretta, Moira Ferguson, Sara Salih, Brycchan Carey, Peter Kitson, Srivinas Aravamudan, Peter
Fryer, Norma Myers, Gretchen Gerzina, David Dabydeen, and Helen Thomas have constructed coherent studies that have brought
to life or provided contexts to the lives of such important literary figures as Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius
Sancho, Jupiter Hammon, John Marrant, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ottobah Cugoano, Venture Smith, Robert Wedderburn, and Mary Prince.
1 I shall return to some of these writers later in this chapter.
But, to start from the midst of the literary academy where so much important work has been done, however tempting, would not
speak to the realities of our period where writing by blacks was a marginal occupation
and did not reflect the experience of most black Atlantic people. Black hands were mostly not writing hands, they were for
labor. I want to begin with a black female hand that is a remnant from the eighteenth century because it reveals the way black
presences shadow Anglo-American culture. This mummified black hand, dried with the bones neatly cut, was kept in a prized
position above the fireplace in a white British family as late as the 1940s, a plaything for the lonely daughter of the house.
The hand had almost certainly belonged to Frances Elizabeth Johnson (Fanny) born in St. Kitts in the West Indies in 1751 and
brought to Lancaster by her owner John Satterthwaite in 1778. He had just married Mary Rawlins and this marriage had combined
two significant Lancaster families who made their money in the slave and West Indian trades as many other families did in
the period when the city was the fourth largest slave port in Britain.
2 Fanny’s mummified hand, buried in 1997 during a special ceremony at the Priory church where she was baptized, can stand as
a material spectre to remember other black lives that made little or no mark on the written record and whose presence we need
to save from the obliquity of sentimentalist appropriations.
The late eighteenth century offers many examples of how even stories recovered from such obliquity may be manipulated for
the emotional and ideological needs, not of the victims, but of their erstwhile oppressors. One of the best illustrations
comes from another example, little known, at least in literary culture. Marcus Wood’s seemingly comprehensive
The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology 1764–1865 (2003) does not include the Lancaster poem about the death of the slave boy Sambo around 1736 at Sunderland Point where the
river Lune meets Morecambe Bay a few miles from the center of the town.
3 The poem was written by the Reverend James Watson sixty years later and the final three stanzas were inscribed on a brass
plate attached to a stone slab at the site itself by the author in 1796. These stanzas are exemplary in their appropriation
of Sambo’s dead body for the sentimental needs of Watson, his fellow Lancastrians, and Britons beyond. Sambo had been buried
in such a lonely grave far from others because he was not baptized and had to be laid in unconsecrated ground. Like most Africans
arriving in Britain as “servants” (usually slaves), he appeared to suffer a profound sense of culture shock, being landed
amongst strangers with whom he could not communicate. There has been much speculation about the cause of his death ranging
from the pragmatic (pneumonia) to the sentimental (profound homesickness). The latter provided the grist for anti-slavery
panegyrics such as this elegy. James Watson’s interest in the slave grave is not without irony, however, as his brother William
Watson
was a leading light in the Lancaster slave trade. William Watson was “one of the most committed investors in Lancaster slavers
[whose] tenacity was no doubt instrumental in keeping the slave trade alive at Lancaster.”
4 The tone of the memorial is sentimental in the extreme, praising Sambo as a “faithful Negro” who had died because of his
“service” to his master. The poem consists of seventeen verses including the epitaph of the final three verses which appears
on the grave:
Full sixty years the angry winter wave
Has thundering dash’d this bleak and barren shore,
Since Sambo’s head, laid in this lonely grave,
Lies still, and ne’er will hear their turmoil more.
Full many a sand-bird chirps upon the sod,
And many a moon-flight Elfin round him trips;
Full many a Summer’s sunbeam warms the clod,
And many a teeming cloud upon him drips.
But still he sleeps, till the awak’ning sounds
Of the Archangel’s Trump new life impart;
Then the great Judge his approbation founds,
Not on man’s colour, but his worth of heart.
This clarion call for the humanity of the slave reflects late eighteenth-century construction of an anti-slavery
sentiment that elided Africans as actors in their own struggle on the other side of the Atlantic at the exact time of the
Santo Domingo uprising (1791–1803), which exemplified a revolution
ary African diasporan tradition. African agency is downplayed by such a discourse and a displaced character like Sambo is
saved from obliquity by the workings of English sentiment long after it does him any practical good. This feeling that Sambo’s
actual biography is misinterpreted by the poem is exacerbated by the Christian sentimentality of the final lines which allow
him life after death despite his heathenism.
6Sentimentality infected the discourse of both the defenders of slavery and the abolitionist in the late eighteenth century.
Even in death black bodies became surrogates for the competing ideological agendas that were becoming increasingly voluble
with the development of visual and literary propaganda that supported or opposed the movement to end slavery after the formation
in 1787 of the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (later the Society for Effecting the Abolition of
the Slave Trade) by Thomas Clarkson and others. There has been much excellent work recently on the problematics of the iconography
of freedom developed
during this period of fervent agitation. The passivity engendered by the description of Sambo’s death and afterlife falls
squarely into such limiting discourse. Watson shows the reach of the abolitionist message in this period, far from metropolitan
London in a town which had very few recorded anti-slavery
meetings, but also its limitations. The passivity of the slave is accentuated by such widely spread iconography as the 1787
Description of the Slave Ship “Brooks” and Josiah Wedgewood’s 1789
Abolition Seal. Both are brilliant propaganda tools. The former shows the serried ranks of slaves beneath decks exposing the cruelty of
the trade but simultaneously anonymizing its victims. The latter, also a very effective political weapon, was worn by radical
women to show their anti-slavery credentials, but was, in a sense, even more troubling, showing a slave who has had his chains
physically removed and is depicted kneeling with his head raised in supplication with the words “
AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER” written round the edge of the rounded design. As Marcus Wood observes:
he is still imprisoned within the posture and gestures which the Abolitionists invented and which white society considered
the most acceptable official icon of the Atlantic slave. The black slave has been given a strange form of freedom, and is
now forever frozen within a gratitude which imprisons him.
7
Thus even radical propaganda tools of this period are, in this reading at least, debilitating to the full human rights of
those Africans they seek to emancipate, as their bodies are used to show the humanitarianism of their emancipators rather than African agency.
Fragmentary and largely sentimentalized written evidence of the transatlantic experience of slaves has led scholars such as
Hershini Bhana Young to find the ghostly presence of Africans in psychoanalytically inflected traces in material rather than
textual locations:
The dead, the beloved who haunt the…landscape as spectral traces of unresolved social history, of time out of joint, are not
mere objects of melancholia as Freud posits (where one excludes that which one cannot forget) nor are they easily locatable
whole subjects. Instead they are spectres, crucibles for political mediation and historical memory that enable us to rethink
the relationship between an authorized and a vernacular witnessing of racial injury itself.
8
Elsewhere, Brycchan Carey’s dynamic reading shows that white abolitionist sentimentalist discourse was an effective propaganda
tool that helped to bring slavery to an end.
9 In a global context, Stephen Shapiro reminds us of some essential similarities between traders in Philadelphia, Liverpool,
and Bonny on the African coast, encouraging us to move beyond over-simplified binary oppositions that deny agency to all Africans
because of the slave status endured by so many.
10 Understanding that in this period
not all Africans
were utterly debilitated by an all-encompassing slave system, nor under total European domination, allows us to bring light
to bear on a group of black Atlantic personalities, who, although forged in the context of an exploitative slave system, were
not wholly constrained or constructed by it. Ira Berlin has probably best explicated the self-making of this extraordinary
group of Africans. He speaks of African-Americans, but due to the Africans’ circum-Atlantic movement, his explanation of self-making
also applies to Afro-Britons:
Black life in mainland North America originated not in Africa or America but in the netherworld between the continents. Along
the periphery of the Atlantic – first in Africa, then in Europe and then finally in the Americas – [Anglophone African] society
was a product of the momentous meeting of Africans and Europeans and of their equally fateful encounter with the peoples of
the Americas. Although the countenance of these new people of the Atlantic – Atlantic creoles – might bear the features of
Africa, Europe, or the Americas in whole or in part, their beginnings, strictly speaking, were in none of these places. Instead,
by their experiences and sometimes by their persons, they had become part of the three worlds that came together along the
Atlantic littoral. Familiar with the commerce of the Atlantic, fluent in its new languages, and intimate with its trade and
cultures, they were cosmopolitan in the fullest sense.
11
Berlin’s description of Africans forging lives beyond national boundaries and negotiating complex subject positions in relation
to multiple linguistic, cultural, and geographical identities is relevant to the lives of a number of exemplary African figures
in the black Atlantic. The biography of the African Kweku or Philip Quaque illustrates the paradoxes created by cultural contacts,
trading relationships between continents, and the ambivalences of the slave trade that helped to created the “Atlantic creole.”
His black presence is not ghostly like Frances Johnson’s or Sambo’s, but fleshed out by his status as family member of elite,
slave-trading Africans, and as a scholar, clergyman, and finally colonial servant with a sketchy, but accessible written record.
In 1753, as part of the treaty arrangements that established the conditions for Cape Coast Castle to be built on Fante lands,
Quaque was one of four boys handed over to the British as “pledges” of their good faith. Quaque, along with the other boys,
was taken to England and educated in the care of the Reverend John Moore. In 1765 he returned to Cape Coast with his white
wife and servant; now he had a new status, the Reverend Philip Quaque, the first African ordained in the Church of England,
the salaried English chaplain to the castle inhabitants. Neither his white wife nor his servant, who became his second wife,
survived for long after their “seasoning” on the west coast of Africa; but he was to
flourish as chaplain to the castle, as local schoolmaster, and as missionary to the surrounding areas for the next five decades,
until his death in 1816. During his time at the fort, “he was treated in all respects as an officer and a gentleman, and he
performed the rites of baptism, marriage and burial without anyone demurring.”
12 For most of his time there, the castle was a key holding point for enslaved Africans being traded by British slave traders.
Quaque’s correspondence to his employers at the Society for Propagating the Gospel shines a revelatory light on the guilt
of the British employees at the castle. Although he never publicly spoke out against the practice, he wrote of how officers
of the African Service eschewed holy communion:
[they decline to] embrace the Rapture of the Lord’s supper and the only plea they offer is that while they are here acting
against Light and Conscience they dare not come to that holy Table, so that while I remain in these remote Soil, that branch
of Duty will never be exercised in publick, unless it be to myself & Spouse.
13
Quaque’s African-Atlantic status allows him insights into the toll the slave system took on the oppressors as well as the
oppressed. As Quaque approached death in 1816, he reverted to his ancestral Fante religion which caused dismay amongst his fellow missionaries because of his status as the first black English priest. Hence his conversion
was denied and he was given a Christian burial.
Quaque had lived a full and, in part at least, independent life, and returned to his homeland a free man. His position as
chaplain in a slave fort exemplified the complexities of black Atlantic lives which should never be reduced to victimology
or hero-worship. Saidiya Hartman’s description of him as a “failed witness”
14 to an objectionable trade only partly captures the ambivalence of a life where survival meant compromises with which, as
his dying wishes show, he never fully came to terms.
A more conventional plantation-bound African-Atlantic life, at least in its early manifestations, was that told in
The History of Mary Prince (1831), which countered Prince’s perceived role as passive victim in the economies of the circum-Atlantic world. Prince described
a transatlantic sojourn which reversed a Middle Passage enslavement and led to emancipation. Her narrative is the first African-British
slave-woman’s autobiographical account. It takes issue not only with the plantocracy but also with sentimental abolitionist
discourses on black women’s positionality. As Moira Ferguson observes, Mary Prince “inaugurates a black female counter-offensive
to pro- and anti-slavery
Anglo-Africanism and refuses a totalizing conception of black women as flogged, half-naked victims of slavery’s entourage.”
15As a black woman, Prince was at the bottom of the social pile. But a transatlantic sojourn led to her emancipation. Born into
slavery on Bermuda around 1788, Prince’s early life was relatively happy until, following the death of her mistress, Mrs.
Williams, she was sold to finance the wedding of her new master. Prince then endured privations under various masters which
enabled her to reveal the institution of slavery in all its manifold ugliness which included habitual floggings, frequent
sadistic sexual abuse, and commonplace murder.
She determined to gain her freedom by raising money to manumit herself. Prince’s rhetorical independence unraveled the certainties
of the slave system:
I was earnest in the request to my owners; but their hearts were hard – too hard to consent. Mrs. Wood was very angry – she
grew quite outrageous – she called me a black devil, and asked me who had put freedom into my head. “To be free is very sweet,”
I said: but she took good care to keep me a slave. I saw her change colour and leave the room. (pp. 75–76)
Mrs. Wood’s “change” of “colour” after her outburst is a physical manifestation of a diminution of the whiteness that has
connoted her power. The strong black woman standing up for her rights begins to undermine the relationship between enslaved
and slaver. This undermining, of course, could not readily be realized in the Caribbean where the slave polity was strong
but became possible when Prince came to Britain where she was able to make her escape. Once escaped, her publication of the
vices of slaveholders like the Woods “reversed the power relationship” as she was enabled to “expose their barbarity” as a
consequence of her transatlantic crossing.
16 Standing up to the forces of oppression and speaking a different reality undermined the power of whiteness, showing it a
chimeric construction rather than a fact of nature. Such an “active moment of challenge against a dominant power”
17 introduced dialogue into a relation where hitherto hierarchical monologue had seemed the primary mode of discourse.
Prince’s narrative subtly repositioned her both in relation to the plantocracy that had abused her and, as important, in relation
to the abolitionists who had provided safe refuge. Moira Ferguson notes how, from the proliferation of texts about her that
accompany and follow the publication of her
History, “she establishes an autonomous domain of her own [that]…signifies visible public victory for a self-motivated subject. She
attains authorship while simultaneously conforming and subversively erupting (consciously and unconsciously) out of that conformity.”
18 Mary
Prince’s black female voice is here seen as originating a tradition of texts that reinterpret the transatlantic through a
black female lens hitherto silenced within majority discourse.
19Compelling scholarship by Moira Ferguson, Sara Salih, and Helen Thomas has established Prince as the first of the female transatlantic
slave narrators, as an earlier generation of scholars such as Paul Edwards, Houston Baker Jr., and Henry Louis Gates Jr. recuperated
the writing of Olaudah Equiano as godfather of the slave narrative genre and an essential part of the canon of Romantic English
and early American literature. Equiano epitomizes Ira Berlin’s “Atlantic creole.” Vincent Carretta’s edition of the 1789 The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings and his meticulously researched biography Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005) establish this, but also show his self-fashioning through his writing of his autobiography and successful promotion
of it. Even when still a slave in 1759, Equiano described himself as in awe of the English:
I soon grew a stranger to terror of every kind, and was, in that respect at least almost an Englishman…I could now speak English
tolerably well…I now not only felt myself easy with these new countrymen, but relished their society and manners. I no longer
looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the desire to resemble them; to imbibe their spirit,
and imitate their manners.
20
In 1767, when he had bought his freedom through canny business skills, he hoped to return to “England, where my heart had
always been” (p. 147). This does not seem a strategic Anglophilia; Equiano’s hoped-for assimilation to bourgeois English respectability
should not, however, blind us to other more critical voices that make black Atlantic writing a dynamic and less assimilationist
canon.
The crucial figure ignored in many accounts of transatlantic black writers is the free black, radical preacher and protean
anarchist, Robert Wedderburn (c. 1762–1835). His life history and dynamic interventions into British political life were accompanied
by writings and speeches that provide literary scholars with exemplary material to broaden the account of black Atlantic life
beyond the now familiar litany of slave narrators. Wedderburn’s life is a revolutionary counterweight to Equiano’s more measured radicalism. There are major differences between the ultra-radicalism of Wedderburn
and Equiano’s more gradualist approach, but also between a life lived out on the margins of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
society and one at the heart of bourgeois literate culture. The black Atlantic comprehends both these literary lives.
Wedderburn, like Equiano, learned his egalitarianism at sea. Both men served in the British navy in time of war, Equiano in the Seven Years War (1756–63), Wedderburn in later wars with the French. As Vincent Carretta asserts, naval practice
was ahead of eighteenth-century law when it came to race: there were opportunities for black men, even slaves like Equiano, to be treated as full human beings, and even to rise through
the ranks. Equiano’s
life in the little world of the navy was one in which the content of his character mattered more than the colour of his complexion…Not
once in his detailed account of his naval experience did he see himself as a victim of what we recognize today as racial prejudice.
He offers us, in the little wooden world of British Royal Navy ships and of the merchant marine, a vision of an almost utopian,
microcosmic alternative to the slavery-infested greater world, and saw his naval experience as a model for the relationships
between Europeans and Africans. The demands of the seafaring life permitted him to transcend the barriers imposed by what
we call race. (p. 72)
The Atlantic was emancipating even for a slave. As steward, Equiano had a position of authority that put him in a position
of superiority over ordinary seamen who were white. As Kathy Chater controversially asserts in her recent meticulous study
of the black presence in Britain,
Untold Stories, “in eighteenth century England class (or, as it would have been called then, rank) seemed to be the determining factor in
how Black people were perceived, not colour or race.”
21 This is a bold statement, and is open to challenge in terms of evidence of white on black racism in a variety of texts; however,
when tested in terms of Equiano and Wedderburn’s naval careers, it does have some validity.
The hierarchies of late eighteenth-century naval life meant that class and status did often transcend race. For instance,
in the winter of 1758–59, Equiano blandly participated with his master Pascal in that most iniquitous of assaults on the rights
of freeborn Englishmen, the press gang, “as we wanted some hands to complete our complement” (p. 76). Press gangs worked against
the freedom of working-class people whatever their color; Equiano sees them as just another part of naval life. Wedderburn’s
experience of the navy was quite different. As a free black man without the protection of a master, his status as an ordinary
seaman put him at the mercy of the draconian naval law of the lash. Such complexities mean that we should beware making blanket
claims about blacks in the Atlantic that assume parity between slaves and free blacks. Sometimes class, rank, and status could
be just as, if not more, important in determining conditions for black sailors and their attitudes to navy discipline. Many
blacks,
including Wedderburn, chafed at naval rules that were oppressive in their effects on working-class
sailors, despite their being relatively egalitarian in racial terms. The revolts at Spithead and the Nore in the late 1790s
in which both black and white sailors participated attest to alignments along class rather than racial lines. As Peter Linebaugh
and Marcus Rediker assert, race
and class often intersected with surprising consequences in the Circum-Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century:
the red Atlantic should always be discussed alongside the black Atlantic as a consequence.
22Partly because of their different experiences in the navy, Equiano and Wedderburn developed radically different political
standpoints, gradualist and ultra-radical respectively. This is best exemplified by their attitude to the monarchy. Struck
by the need to garner maximum support for the abolition of the slave trade, Equiano petitioned Queen Charlotte, George III’s
wife, in March 1788 as Parliament discussed a bill for the ending of the trade, “on behalf of my African brethren, which was
received most graciously by her Majesty.” By now a free man for over two decades, Equiano displays an essentially hierarchical
and conservative worldview:
I presume, therefore gracious Queen, to implore your interposition with your royal consort, in favour of the wretched Africans;
that by your Majesty’s benevolent influence, a period may now be put to their misery; and that they may be raised from the
condition of brutes, to which they are at present degraded, to the rights and situation of men, and be admitted to partake
of the blessings of your Majesty’s happy government. (pp. 231–32)
Equiano deploys the stereotype of the “wretched Africans” to seek political concessions from a powerful monarchy. His accommodationist
stance to monarchical rulers contrasts with the polemical, regicidal reaction of Wedderburn towards the Prince Regent in the
wake of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, where at least 18 working-class activists for voting reform were trampled
and sabred to death by government forces and over 700 injured. Government spies reported him exclaiming at a public meeting
in London:
That the Prince had lost the confidence and affection of his people but that he the Prince being supported by the Army and
surrounded by his vile ministers nothing short of people taking arms in their own defence could bring about a Reform and prevent
the bloody scene taking place at the next Smithfield meeting as had taken place at Manchester; for his part old as he was
he was learning his Exercise as a soldier and he would be one if he fell in the cause, for he would rather die like Cashman
if he could but have the satisfaction of plunging a dagger in the heart of a Tyrant.
23
He rallies his fellow radicals’ protests against government murder by invoking the Irish sailor, fisherman, and Napoleonic-war
veteran who had been arrested and executed at a London riot at Spa Fields in 1816. Regicide is justified by class warfare
to avenge the dead in Manchester and London. There is little to distinguish this voice from the “English” radicalism of the
period, so fully has Wedderburn imbibed its norms.
The only full record of this speech that we have comes from government spies: black Atlantic expressivity must be sought beyond
traditional literary texts in the interstices of the majority culture, even at their very heart in court and government records.
Without these copious records on Wedderburn we would have only a partial record of his contribution to a radical black alterity.
The fervent atmosphere in Britain polarized opinion, and Wedderburn’s speech illustrates the way government repression had
radicalized him. His clear-headed and polemical analysis was allied to a riotous, satirical, and comedic performance in his
Cast-Iron Parsons, or Hints to the Public and the Legislature on Political Economy, written from his prison cell in Dorchester and published in 1820. This wonderfully scurrilous pamphlet was a response to
his imprisonment for blasphemy in 1819. At the very end of the pamphlet, his hyperbolic scheme is expanded from the clergy
to the monarchy:
P.S. In those foreign countries where the Kings are mere drones, sunk in debauchery and licentiousness, troubling themselves
with nothing but their own pleasures, and so completely absorbed in luxury and effeminacy that they leave the management of
state affairs to the knaves and parasites by whom they are surrounded, signing every paper at random which the minister lays
before them, – in such cases as these I think a
CAST-IRON KING would answer every purpose and be a great saving.
24
Adopting a canonical voice of eighteenth-century British literature, Wedderburn’s Swiftian satire speaks of “foreign countries,”
at once inhabiting and estranging himself from the land whose monarchy is a rubber-stamp to a corrupt and undemocratic government.
Wedderburn’s description of cast-iron oppressors of the common man reflects an industrializing process at that moment changing
the terms of engagement between the classes.
Wedderburn’s attack on monarchy and the government are merely the postscript to a pamphlet where he concentrates most of his
ire on the clergy. His attitude illustrates another crucial distinction from Equiano. Equiano, a convert to Christianity and
a Wesleyan, found his British identity, at least in part, through his conversion experiences in 1774 when, “seeking to be
a Christian in fact as well as name,” he adopted the familiar transatlantic discourse of the spiritual conversion narrative.
A period of soul-searching
led to his finding “joy in the Holy Ghost! I felt an astonishing change, the burden of sin, the gaping jaws of hell and the
fears of death that weighed me down before, now lost their horror” (pp. 190–91). Wedderburn had also been a Wesleyan convert
in 1786, but his later trajectory was to a more radical nonconformism in a London radical underworld linked to the philosophy
of the Jacobin Thomas Spence. He became “a dissenting minister who cast himself as Spencean prophet or enthusiast who has
undergone an ecstatic conversion to the movement’s ideals and goals,” which included millenarianism and redistributive politics.
25 In a blasphemy against the Christian religion
noted at a meeting attended by government spies, Wedderburn refused to honor a messiah whose message to oppressed people
is to surrender. He described how government ministers
tell us to be quiet like that bloody spooney Jesus Christ who like a Bloody Fool tells us when we get a slap on one side of the face turn gently round and ask them to smack the other – But I like jolly
old Peter give me a rusty old sword… (p. 122)
Wedderburn’s depiction of the limits of Christian non-violence in a world of class and race oppression is key to his rejection of a quietistic faith that, in his view, supports a rotten system. This reaches its apotheosis
in his satirical polemic describing “Cast-Iron Parsons.” Like Swift’s Modest Proposal, Wedderburn’s satire works through an extreme rationality that calculates the economic and social costs of the replacement
of the clergy with automata as the only solution to the corruption, venality, and hypocrisy of the church:
Finding that the routine of duty required of the Clergy of the legitimate Church, was so completely mechanical, and that nothing
was so much in vogue as the dispensing with human labour by the means of machinery, it struck me that it might one day be
possible to substitute a CAST-IRON PARSON. I had seen the automaton chess-player, the automaton portrait painter, the mechanical figure of a beautiful lady who played
delightfully on the piano-dulce. (p. 145)
Sermons can now be given by his Cast-Iron Parsons in parishes across the land. The clerk of the parish now has an enhanced
role in “superintendence of the said automaton…always recollecting that his voice is to be wound up to a higher key when the
sermon is placed before him” (p. 148).
And of course once they have their voices, these men of the cloth could indulge in their age-old task of supporting local
landlords and national governments. Wedderburn gave the task of providing sermons to the local magistrates so that “he will
become a more certain and uniform engine of the government than a live parson” (p. 149). There would subsequently be no fear
of rebel clergy to undermine corrupt government; the
“Cast-Iron Parsons” would be almost exact replicas of the craven clergy they replaced:
There have been instances of stubborn, headstrong, and independent men getting into the church, and what has happened once
may happen again; therefore as the times are getting worse, and arbitrary measures more necessary to keep the “swinish multitude” in order, care must be taken against such an occurrence, by adopting my Cast-Iron Parson, who will at the end of every discourse
say, “Fear God, honour the King, pay your taxes, be humble and quiet that you may enter the kingdom of Heaven.” (pp. 149–50)
Wedderburn had Edmund Burke (who coined the phrase “swinish multitude” in his conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790]) in view here. Burke, who had supported the colonists’ cause in the American Revolution, was a particular target of transatlantic radicals after his apparent apostasy. From jail, Wedderburn exulted
in a radical vision that refused to bow down to custom. In one of the few studies to effectively contrast Equiano and Wedderburn
and give the latter his rightful place as a writer worthy of notice by literary critics, Helen Thomas outlines the importance
of this subaltern voice to a full understanding of the black Atlantic:
Whereas the Romantics had displayed varying degrees of affinity with abolitionist and political radicalism, yet had stayed
on the whole within the confines of the law, Wedderburn took such radicalism to a site of “illegitimate” anarchy. In his hands,
the bicultural tactics presented in the earlier narratives by slaves such as Wheatley and Equiano, reached a volatile climax
in terms of his radical negation of church/state authority and his demands for ownership and cultural insurrection.
26
Wedderburn’s anarchist vision and comic sensibility demonstrate that black voices in the transatlantic literature of this
period were not confined to abolitionist discourse. They also drew on the ribald vision exemplified by Swift and graphic satirists
like William Hogarth and George and Isaac Cruikshank. A full understanding of African-Atlantic writers and history in this
period will require wider reference than the slave narrative which has been sanctioned by the makers of the black canon. A
comprehensive reckoning of black Atlantic and abolitionist cultures in the eighteenth century must also pay as much attention
to still ghostly, female, and vernacular presences, and to complex figures who worked within the slave system, as to Wilberforce
or the canon’s favored sons. Hershini Bhana Young reminds us of the “centrality of diasporic Africans to the building of modernity.”
27 The task of the critic is to find the spectres, to allow forgotten and troubling voices speaking room, and to make their
histories as central in the academy as those whom they shadow.
NOTES
1 Paul Edwards (ed.), Equiano’s Travels (London: Heinemann, 1967);
Houston Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial” Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988);
Sara Salih (ed.), Mary Prince: The History of Mary Prince (London: Penguin, 2000);
Srivinas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999);
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984);
Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past (London: Frank Cass, 1996);
Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: Life Before Emancipation (London: John Murray, 1995);
David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Mandelstrup, Denmark: Dangaroo, 1985); and
Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
2 Eliza Dear, In Celebration of the Human Spirit: A Look at the Slave Trade (Settle, Yorkshire: Lambert’s Print and Design, 2007), pp. 10–13.
3 Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
4 Melinda Elder, The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of 18th Century Lancaster (Keele, Staffordshire: Ryburn Press, 1992), p. 144.
5 Quoted in
J. T., “Samboo’s Grave,” Lonsdale Magazine and Kendal Repository 3:29 (May 31, 1822), 188–92.
6 Some aspects of this study of Sambo appear in my new book, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010).
7 Wood,
Blind Memory, p. 13.
8 Hershini Bhana Young, Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), p. 33.
9 Brycchan Carey, British Abolition and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807 (London: Macmillan, 2005).
10 Stephen Shapiro, “The Technology of Publicity in the Atlantic Semi-Peripheries: Benjamin Franklin, Modernity, and the Nigerian Slave Trade,” in Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology, ed. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (London: Routledge, 2006).
11 Berlin quoted in
Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. xiii–xiv.
12 William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 121.
14 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), p. 129.
15 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831), ed. Moira Ferguson (London: Pandora Press, 1986), p. 298. Subsequent page references are given in the text.
16 Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 292.
17 Homi Bhabha quoted in
Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 23.
18 Ferguson,
Subject to Others, p. 298.
19 Some aspects of this study of Mary Prince were developed in a different context in my Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London: Continuum Press, 2003).
20 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1789), ed. Vincent Carretta (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 77–78. Subsequent page references are given in the text.
21 Kathy Chater, Untold Stories: Black People in England and Wales During the Period of the English Slave Trade, c. 1660–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 7.
22 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000).
23 Robert Wedderburn, Cast-Iron Parsons, or Hints to the Public and the Legislature on Political Economy, ed. Ian McCalman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 119.
24 Ibid., p. 151. Subsequent page references are given in the text.
25 Ian McCalman (ed.), The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 12–13.
26 Thomas,
Romanticism and Slave Narratives, p. 270.
27 Young,
Haunting Capital, p. 47.