5. Eighteenth-century voices
What was it like to be a black settler in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century? A vivid account was published at Bath about the year 1770.
The author’s real name was Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, but after coming to England he took the name James Albert. His birthplace was Borno, west of Lake Chad, in the north of present-day Nigeria. His mother was the eldest daughter of the king of Zaara. He was the youngest of her six children, and he tells us that ‘my grandfather almost doated on me’.1 Taken from his homeland by a Gold Coast ivory merchant when he was about 15, Gronniosaw was sold to a Dutch captain for two yards of check cloth. An American bought him in Barbados for 
50, then sold him for £50 in New York to ‘a very gracious, good Minister’2 who taught him to pray and sent him to school, where he learnt to read. His master died of a fever: ‘I held his hand in mine when he departed: he told me he had given me my freedom. I was at liberty to go where I would . . . My master left me by his will, ten pounds and my freedom.’3 But Gronniosaw chose to stay with his mistress and then, after her death, with her sons. When they died he was left destitute and friendless, and was persuaded to join a privateering expedition as cook. Cheated of his share of the prize-money, Gronniosaw worked as servant to a wine-merchant, then enlisted in the British army’s 28th Foot (afterwards The North Gloucestershire Regiment), served in Martinique and Cuba (probably in 1762), received his discharge, and came to England.
He had expected to find nothing but ‘goodness, gentleness and meekness in this Christian land’,4 but he was soon disabused. First, the cursing of the citizens of Portsmouth astonished him. Then, when he took lodgings at a public house and left 19 guineas with his landlady for safe keeping, she denied that he had ever given it to her. ‘I could scarcely believe it possible that the place where so many eminent Christians had lived and preached could abound with so much wickedness and deceit . . . I cried like a child.’ Eventually the landlady coughed up four guineas, ‘which she said she gave me out of charity’.5
Moving to London, Gronniosaw met and married a weaver called Betty, a poor English widow with a child: ‘I firmly believed that we should be very happy together, and so it proved.’6 Before they had been married a year, fear of the consequences of industrial unrest led the couple to move to Colchester, where Gronniosaw worked for a time as a labourer on the roads. But, during a severe winter, both husband and wife were unemployed, ‘and we were reduced to the greatest distress imaginable’. Gronniosaw tried to get a job helping a gentleman’s gardener, but managed to obtain only a gift of four big carrots. These were welcome enough, but the family had to eat them raw since they had nothing to make a fire with. And they had to eke them out: ‘We allowed ourselves but one every day, least they should not last till we could get some other supply.’7 A Colchester lawyer, ‘a sincere good Christian’, gave Gronniosaw a guinea: ‘I went immediately and bought some bread and cheese, and coal, and carried it home. My dear wife was rejoiced to see me return with something to eat . . . The first nobility in the land never made a better meal.’8 The lawyer then employed him for more than a year to help pull down a house and rebuild it.
Gronniosaw was offered regular work in Norwich, but his new employer failed to pay his wages regularly. Betty hired a loom and wove in her leisure time, and all was going well when their three children were stricken with smallpox. Threatened with eviction, the family were saved by a Quaker who paid their arrears of rent. When their daughter died of a fever various ministers of religion refused to bury her, since she had not been baptized and was not a member of their own congregation.
At length I resolved to dig a grave in the garden behind the house, and bury her there; when the parson of the parish sent for to tell me he would bury the child, but did not choose to read the burial service over her. I told him I did not care whether he would or no, as the child could not hear it.9
After pawning their clothes and feeling ‘ready to sink under our troubles’,10 the family moved to Kidderminster, first selling all they had to pay their debts. Gronniosaw’s Narrative of the Most remarkable Particulars in the life of . . . an African prince (c. 1770), ‘committed to paper by the elegant pen of a young LADY of the town of LEOMINSTER’, ends when he ‘appears to be turn’d of sixty’.11
Such is our situation at present. – My wife, by hard labour at the loom, does every thing that can be expected from her, towards the maintenance of our family; and GOD is pleased to incline the hearts of his people at times to yield us their charitable assistance, being myself through age and infirmities able to contribute but little to their support.12
So ends ‘the only extant account of the trials and tribulations of a Poor Black and his family’.13 Of Gronniosaw’s later life, nothing is known.
The first book by a black woman ever published appeared in London in 1773 and was reprinted many times. It was called Poems on various subjects, religious and moral, and it contained 39 poems by a 19-year-old slave living in Boston, Massachusetts. The first black poet of any significance to write in English,1 Phillis Wheatley had just spent a month in England, partly as a kind of cultural ambassador or involuntary propagandist for the refinement of Boston. In this role, however, she turned out to be something of a boomerang for her pro-slavery sponsors. Though her situation neither equipped nor permitted her to become an abolitionist, she nevertheless became ‘a supreme witness to the anti-slavery movement in Britain’.2
Wheatley was not of course her own name but that of her Boston mistress, a tailor’s wife who in 1761 bought her ‘for a trifle’ in the local slave-market.3 Dressed only in a scrap of dirty carpet, the 7-year-old girl – her age was estimated from the shedding of her front teeth – seemed to be suffering from the change of climate but impressed her purchaser by her ‘humble and modest demeanor’ and ‘interesting features’.4 Before long she was impressing her still more by trying to make letters on the wall with chalk and charcoal.5 Phillis was segregated from the other household servants and taught to read and write. Within 16 months she was reading the Bible fluently. She learnt Latin and ‘was proud of the fact that Terence was at least of African birth’.6 This child prodigy, whose attainments must have marked her as ‘one of the most highly educated young women in Boston’7 and no doubt gave much satisfaction to the cultivated tailor’s wife, was often visited by clergymen ‘and other individuals of high standing in society’. But, in spite of the attention paid her, she retained her ‘modest, unassuming demeanor’.8
She seems to have begun writing poetry at about the age of 13. One of her earliest, and shortest, surviving poems, showing the influence both of missionary propaganda and of Alexander Pope – whose neo-classicism permeates all her later work – was called ‘On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA’.9
When Phillis came to England in 1773, in the company of her mistress’s son, she was lionized. The Countess of Huntingdon, to whom she had dedicated her first published poem three years before, introduced her to the Earl of Dartmouth and other prominent members of London society. Her visitors included Benjamin Franklin, then agent in Europe of the north American colonies.10 The lord mayor of London presented her with a valuable edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
When her book was published, soon after her return to Boston, the London Magazine’s reviewer found that ‘these poems display no astonishing power of genius; but when we consider them as the production of a young untutored African . . . we cannot suppress our admiration of talents so vigorous and lively’.11 The Monthly Review came closer to making a political point. Its reviewer was
much concerned to find that this ingenious young woman is yet a slave. The people of Boston boast themselves chiefly on their principles of liberty. One such act as the purchase of her freedom would, in our opinion, have done them more honour than hanging a thousand trees with ribbons and emblems.12
There were also favourable notices in the Critical Review, Gentleman’s Magazine, London Chronicle (reprinted in the Universal Magazine), Scots Magazine, Town and Country Magazine, and Westminster Magazine.13
Phillis Wheatley is ‘easily among the most renowned – and therefore the most variously interpreted – Afro-American poets’,14 and both advocates and adversaries have found in her writing only what they wanted to find. Her work has been overpraised because of her youth, sex, race, and servitude. And it has been undervalued because of this excessive praise. She was not a great poet. All the same, ‘some of her poems reveal an exceptional being producing exceptional poetry’.15 And she displayed ‘much more Black consciousness, much more concern for her fellow Blacks, than many readers will admit’.16 She was well aware of the part black people played in American and European society, and in the popular mind. Though she adopts the conventional missionary stance of calling Africa ‘The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom’,17 she often identifies herself as an African and entitles one poem: ‘To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works’.18 Naturally enough, her concern for her fellow-blacks is expressed most strongly in her letters, which, unlike her poems, were not intended for the white reading public.19
After her mistress’s death in 1774, Phillis Wheatley seems to have made a precarious living hawking her book from door to door and reading selections from her poems to potential lady customers. In 1778 she married John Peters, a free black man whom she had known for five years or more. Though she bore him at least one child, and mothered two others whose origins are not precisely known, it was not a happy marriage. Peters was in and out of jail for debt. Two of Phillis’s children died and the third was very sick. America’s first black woman poet died in 1784, in a poor boardinghouse, ‘surrounded by all the emblems of a squalid poverty’.20 She was hardly more than 30. Her third child survived her by just a few hours.
The first African prose writer whose work was published in England – his Letters appeared in 1782, two years after his death, and proved an immediate best-seller – was born in 1729 on a slave-ship in mid-Atlantic. At Cartagena, on the coast of Colombia, the baby was christened Ignatius. His mother died soon afterwards, and his father killed himself rather than exist as a slave. When the boy was about two his owner brought him to England and gave him to three maiden sisters who lived in Greenwich. These ladies called him Sancho because they fancied that he looked like Don Quixote’s squire. Unlike Phillis Wheatley’s mistress, they ‘judged ignorance the best and only security for obedience’ and believed that ‘to enlarge the mind of their slave would go near to emancipate his person’. All the same, ‘by unwearied application’, Ignatius Sancho taught himself to read and write.1
The Duke of Montagu, who lived at nearby Blackheath, admired the young man’s ‘native frankness of manner as yet unbroken by servitude’,2 gave him presents of books, and advised the three sisters to attend to his education. But they were inflexible. What brought matters to a head was a love affair, which would have appeared ‘infinitely criminal in the eyes of three Maiden Ladies’.3 So Sancho, now 20 years old, ran away and sought refuge with the Montagus. The duke had recently died; the duchess wanted to send the runaway back to Greenwich but he threatened to shoot himself rather than return, so she engaged him as a butler. Now he could freely indulge his passion for reading and cultivate a broad range of talents. He wrote poetry, two stage plays, and a ‘Theory of Music’, dedicated to the Princess Royal, which was never published and is apparently lost. He emerged also as a minor composer: three small collections of songs, minuets, and other pieces for violin, mandolin, flute, and harpsichord were published anonymously. ‘Composed by an African’, they are dedicated to members of the Montagu family, which makes their attribution to Sancho reasonably certain. Some of Sancho’s music, which Paul Edwards has called ‘slight, but elegant, and thoroughly fashionable’, was broadcast by the BBC in 1958.4 Sancho adored the theatre and would spend his last shilling to see Garrick, greatest actor of the age, at Drury Lane. But he was not a clear enough speaker to play Othello and Oroonoko, though it seems he would have liked to. His other passions were for women and gambling; he was cured of the latter weakness when he lost his clothes playing cribbage.
Sancho was soon taken up by London’s fashionable literary and artistic circles. Gainsborough painted his portrait in 1768. He became a friend of Garrick. Other friends included the historical painter John Hamilton Mortimer, the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, and the writers Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne. Sancho’s friendship with Sterne began in 1766, when he wrote to tell the author how much he admired his Sermons and Tristram Shandy5 – and to ask for Sterne’s help on behalf of the enslaved Africans:
How very much, good Sir, am I (amongst millions) indebted to you for the character of your amiable Uncle Toby! – I declare I would walk ten miles in the dog-days, to shake hands with the honest Corporal. – Your sermons have touch’d me to the heart . . . Of all my favourite authors not one has drawn a tear in favour of my miserable black brethren – excepting yourself, and the humane author of Sir Geo. Ellison.* – I think you will forgive me; I am sure you will applaud me for beseeching you to give one half hour’s attention to slavery, as it is at this day practised in our West Indies. – That subject handled in your striking manner would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many – but if only of one – gracious God! what a feast to a benevolent heart! and sure I am, you are an epicurean in acts of charity. – You who are universally read, and as universally admired – you could not fail. – Dear Sir, think in me you behold the uplifted hands of thousands of my brother Moors. Grief (you pathetically observe) is eloquent: figure to yourself their attitudes; hear their supplicating addresses! – alas! you cannot refuse.7
In reply, Sterne pointed out that, by coincidence, he had been writing ‘a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl’ when Sancho’s letter arrived, and added that Sancho’s brethren were his also and that he often, looking westward, thought of ‘the burthens which our brothers and sisters are there carrying’.8 Ten months later, Sterne was thanking Sancho for getting the Montagu family to subscribe to the ninth and final volume of Tristram Shandy and asking him to press his employers to pay their subscriptions since he needed the money.9 A few weeks later he wrote to Sancho: ‘I hope you will not forget your custom of giving me a call at my lodgings next winter.’10
Troubled with gout and ‘a constitutional corpulence’,11 Sancho left the service of the Montagu family in 1773. By now he was married to Anne, a black woman from the Caribbean who was to bear him six children. Helped by a small legacy and annuity left him by the Duchess of Montagu, Sancho opened a grocery shop in Charles Street, Westminster. Here he was visited by Charles James Fox (for whom he voted in 1780),12 the Duchess of Queensberry, and Nollekens. The latter took him, as a present, a cast of his bust of Sterne; the visit is described by John Thomas Smith, keeper of prints and drawings in the British Museum:
As we pushed the wicket door, a little tinkling bell, the usual appendage to such shops, announced its opening: we drank tea with Sancho and his black lady, who was seated, when we entered, in the corner of the shop, chopping sugar, surrounded by her little ‘Sanchonets’. Sancho, knowing Mr. Nollekens to be a loyal man, said to him, ‘I am sure you will be pleased to hear that Lord George Gordon is taken, and that a party of the guards is now escorting him in an old ramshackled coach to the Tower.’ Nollekens said not a word, and poor Sancho either did not know, or not recollect, that he was addressing a Papist.13
Sancho had, in fact, been an eyewitness of the 1780 Gordon riots, of which he totally disapproved – though some black people took part, one of whom, Charlotte Gardener, was afterwards hanged on Tower Hill for helping to tear down a publican’s house.14 Sancho called the rioters ‘the maddest people – that the maddest times were ever plagued with’, referred ironically to ‘the worse than Negro barbarity of the populace’, and gave in one of his letters a vivid running commentary on the scene:
There is at this present moment at least a hundred thousand poor, miserable, ragged rabble, from twelve to sixty years of age, with blue cockades in their hats – besides half as many women and children – all parading the streets – the bridge – the park – ready for any and every mischief. – Gracious God! what’s the matter now? I was obliged to leave off – the shouts of the mob – the horrid clashing of swords – and the clutter of a multitude in swiftest motion – drew me to the door – when every one in the street was employed in shutting up shop. – It is now just five o’clock – . . . This instant about two thousand liberty boys are swearing and swaggering by with large sticks – . . . Thank heaven, it rains; may it increase, so as to send these deluded wretches safe to their homes, their families, and wives! . . .
Postscript,
The Sardinian ambassador offered 500 guineas to the rabble, to save a painting of our Saviour from the flames, and 1000 guineas not to destroy an exceeding fine organ: the gentry told him, they would burn him if they could get at him, and destroyed the picture and organ directly. – I am not sorry I was born in Afric.15
Six months after writing this account, Sancho died in his shop. His Letters, published two years later with the express intention of proving ‘that an untutored African may possess abilities equal to an European’,16 attracted over 1,200 subscribers, more than any publication since the Spectator of Steele and Addison 70 years before.17 The first edition sold so quickly that the Monthly Review could not get hold of a review copy and had to wait for the second edition in the following year. (‘Let it no longer be said,’ concluded the reviewer, ‘by half-informed philosophers, and superficial investigators of human nature, that Nēgers, as they are vulgarly called, are inferior to any white nation in mental abilities.’)18 Sancho’s widow, who carried on the grocery business after his death, is said to have received over £500 from the book’s sales.19 Sancho’s son William, after working for a time in the library of the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, turned bookseller, in his father’s old shop, and published the fifth edition of the Letters in 1803.20
Though Sancho’s literary style owes an obvious debt to Sterne, he never forgets that he is an African. He signs two letters to the press ‘Africanus’, sends ‘Blackamoor greetings’, refers to ‘my brother Negroes’ and ‘my poor black brethren’.21 Now and again he laughs at himself as ‘a poor Blacky grocer’, ‘only a poor, thick-lipped son of Afric’, ‘a fat old fellow’, and ‘a man of a convexity of belly exceeding Falstaff – and a black face into the bargain’.22 He describes himself as ‘a coal-black, jolly African, who wishes health and peace to every religion and country throughout the ample range of God’s creation!’23 Nor is his good humour ruffled when he and his family are subjected to rudeness or racist insults. After a visit to the Vauxhall pleasure-gardens he records: ‘We went by water – had a coach home – were gazed at – followed &c. &c. – but not much abused.’24 Of a later excursion he writes in salty vein:
I shall take no notice of the tricking fraudulent behaviour of the driver of the stage – as how he wanted to palm a bad shilling upon us – and as how they stopped us in the town, and most generously insulted us – and as how they took up – a fat old man – his wife fat too – and child – and after keeping us half an hour in sweet converse of the – of the blasting kind – how that the fat woman waxed wrath with her plump master, for his being serene – and how that he caught choler at her friction, tongue-wise – how he ventured his head out of the coach-door, and swore liberally – whilst his — in direct line with poor S—n’s nose – entertained him with sound and sweetest of exhalations. – I shall say nothing of being two hours almost on our journey – neither do I remark that S—n turned sick before we left G—, nor that the child p—upon his legs: – in short it was near nine before we got into Charles Street.
Sir, the pleasures of the day made us more than amends – for the nonsense that followed.25
How far can Sancho, butler turned shopkeeper, with artistic tastes and literary talents and friends, be said to have been ‘assimilated’ into eighteenth-century English society? Brought to England at the age of two, he grew up as a black Englishman. His cultural models, in literature and music alike, were English, not African. But a black Englishman, even one with the broad talents, white friends, and endless patience and good humour of a Sancho, was not an easy thing to be in the eighteenth century. Sancho himself knew all too well that he was not, and could never be, truly at home in England. ‘I am only a lodger – and hardly that’, he wrote.26 He was aware that few Englishmen possessed ‘charity enough to admit dark faces into the fellowship of Christians’.27 In his Letters at least, the pervading racial prejudice of the country he has grown up in rarely makes him bitter. But he does note wryly that ‘to the English, from Othello to Sancho the big – we are either foolish – or mulish – all – all without a single exception’.28
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano – his middle name, by which he is usually known, means ‘twin’1 – was born about the year 1757, near the Fante village of Agimaque or Ajumako, on the coast of what is today Ghana. When he was about 13 he was kidnapped by ‘several great ruffians’2 and, amid the rattling of chains, the crack of whips, and the groans and cries of his fellow-captives, was put on board a ship that carried him to Grenada. After nine or ten months in the slave-gang there, and a further year or so at different places in the West Indies, he was brought to England by his owner at the end of 1772 and set free.3 Advised to get himself baptized in order not to be sold into slavery again, he took the name John Steuart. Somewhat later he entered the service of Richard Cosway, principal painter to the Prince of Wales, and before long had emerged as one of the leaders and spokesmen of London’s black community.
In 1786 Cugoano played a key part in the rescue of Henry Demane, a black man who had been kidnapped and was being shipped out to the West Indies. Cugoano and another community leader, William Green, reported the kidnapping to the white abolitionist Granville Sharp, who got a writ of habeas corpus and rescued Demane at the very last minute, just as the ship was weighing anchor.4
In the following year Cugoano published a powerful contribution to the campaign for abolition of the slave trade, his Thoughts and sentiments on the evil and wicked traffic of the slavery and commerce of the human species. This book, ‘one of the earliest expressions of African thought to reach a European audience’,5 seems to have been written with the help of Cugoano’s fellow-African and fellow-author Olaudah Equiano.6 Systematically and trenchantly, Cugoano and his collaborator demolished the arguments in defence of slavery: that Africans thought it no crime to sell their own wives and children; that slavery had divine sanction; that Africans were, by nature and complexion, peculiarly suited to slavery; that black slaves in the Caribbean were better off than the European poor. On the contrary, the slaves were bought and sold and dealt with as their capricious owners thought fit, ‘even in torturing and tearing them to pieces, and wearing them out with hard labour, hunger and oppression’.7 But Cugoano went further than mere denunciation of slavery, the slave trade, and their defenders. He declared – and he was the first writer in English to do so – that enslaved blacks had not only the moral right but the moral duty to resist:
If any man should buy another man . . . and compel him to his service and slavery without any agreement of that man to serve him, the enslaver is a robber, and a defrauder of that man every day. Wherefore it is as much the duty of a man who is robbed in that manner to get out of the hands of his enslaver, as it is for any honest community of men to get out of the hands of rogues and villains.8
No less boldly, Cugoano held ‘every man in Great-Britain responsible, in some degree’ for the slavery and oppression of Africans – ‘unless he speedily riseth up with abhorrence of it in his own judgment, and, to avert evil, declare himself against it’.9 Men of eminence and power – nobles and senators, clergymen, and every man in office and authority – must incur a double load of guilt: ‘not only that burden of guilt in the oppression of the African strangers, but also in that of an impending danger and ruin to their own country’.10 It was evident that the British legislature encouraged the trade and shared in the infamous profits:
Is it not strange to think, that they who ought to be considered as the most learned and civilized people in the world, that they should carry on a traffic of the most barbarous cruelty and injustice, and that many . . . are become so dissolute as to think slavery, robbery and murder no crime?
Since the British had acquired ‘a greater share in that iniquitous commerce than all the rest together’, they ought to set an example by immediately abolishing the slave trade and emancipating the slaves:
I would propose that a total abolition of slavery should be made and proclaimed; and that an universal emancipation of slaves should begin from the date thereof . . . And . . . I would propose, that a fleet of some ships of war should be immediately sent to the coast of Africa, and particularly where the slave trade is carried on, with faithful men to direct that none should be brought from the coast of Africa without their own consent and the approbation of their friends, and to intercept all merchant ships that were bringing them away.11
Within just over 20 years this proposal to send a fleet to suppress the slave trade was being adopted;12 but almost another half-century of bondage lay ahead for the slaves.
Cugoano buttressed his moral, humanitarian argument with a practical, economic one. Black labour in the sugar islands would be more productive when voluntary than when compulsory; the only people who would lose anything by emancipation would be the slave-owners. And if Africans were dealt with in a friendly manner, a fruitful trade could develop which ‘would soon bring more revenue in a righteous way to the British nation, than ten times its share in all the profits that slavery can produce’.13
Two years before the French revolution, four years before the uprising of black slaves in Haiti, and almost 200 years before decolonization, Cugoano ventured an audacious prophecy, couched in solemn and mystical terms but no less impressive for that:
History affords us many examples of severe retaliations, revolutions and dreadful overthrows; and of many crying under the heavy yoke of subjection and oppression, seeking for deliverance . . . Yet, O Africa! yet, poor slave! The day of thy watchmen cometh, and thy visitation draweth nigh . . . In that day thy walls of deliverance are to be built, in that day shall the decree of slavery be far removed.
What revolution the end of that predominant evil of slavery and oppression may produce, whether the wise and considerate [i.e. prudent] will surrender and give it up, and make restitution for the injuries that they have already done, as far as they can; or whether the force of their wickedness, and the iniquity of their power, will lead them on until some universal calamity burst forth against the abandoned carriers of it on, and against the criminal nations in confederacy with them, is not for me to determine? But this must appear evident, that for any man to carry on a traffic in the merchandize of slaves, and to keep them in slavery; or for any nation to oppress, extirpate and destroy others; that these are crimes of the greatest magnitude, and a most daring violation of the laws and commandments of the Most High, and which, at last, will be evidenced in the destruction and overthrow of all the transgressors. And nothing else can be expected for such violations of taking away the natural rights and liberties of men, but that those who are the doers of it will meet with some awful visitation and righteous judgment of God, and in such a manner as it cannot be thought that his just vengeance for their iniquity will be the less tremendous because his judgments are long delayed.14
Cugoano sent copies of Thoughts and sentiments to King George III, the Prince of Wales, and the prominent politician Edmund Burke. There is no evidence that any of the three read it or that it had any influence on them if they did. The royal family stood solidly against abolition of the slave trade. The Duke of Clarence, who later came to the throne as William IV, would bitterly attack the abolitionists in a speech to the Lords in 1793, calling them ‘either fanatics or hypocrites, and in one of those classes he ranked Mr Wilberforce’. He was forced to apologize to Wilberforce,15 who 11 years later found it ‘truly humiliating to see, in the House of Lords, four of the Royal Family come down to vote against the poor, helpless, friendless Slaves’.16 George III once asked mockingly at a levee: ‘How go on your black clients, Mr. Wilberforce?’17 As for Burke, his attitude to abolition was dictated, as F.O. Shyllon has pointed out, by political expediency alone.18 After mature consideration he abandoned the attempt to regulate and, ultimately, suppress the slave trade – ‘from the conviction that the strength of the West Indian body would defeat the utmost effort of his powerful party, and cover them with ruinous unpopularity’.19
In a postscript to a shorter version of Thoughts and sentiments, published in 1791,20 Cugoano announced his intention of opening a school, mainly for ‘all such of his Complexion as are desirous of being acquainted with the Knowledge of the Christian Religion and the Laws of Civilization’.21 We do not know whether he succeeded in opening this school – nor what became of him after 1791, except for a glimpse we catch in a tribute by the Polish patriot Scipione Piattoli, who seems to have been in London between 1800 and 1803. According to a not always reliable source, Piattoli knew Cugoano well, reported that he was married to an Englishwoman, and praised ‘his piety, his mild character and modesty, his integrity and talents’.22
Ottobah Cugoano was the first published African critic of the transatlantic slave trade and the first African to demand publicly the total abolition of the trade and the freeing of the slaves – a position which scarcely any white abolitionist had taken by 1787. His ‘insight into the nature of European–North American hegemony and its dialectical consequences’23 brilliantly foreshadows what has been called ‘the delayed boomerang from the time of slavery’.24 For, through history’s sly irony, the classical triangle of the slave trade was also the geographical pattern whereby the ideas pioneered by Cugoano and his friend Olaudah Equiano became, in the shape of Pan-Africanism, a force for enlightenment and liberation.25 To Equiano’s contribution we now turn.
The first political leader of Britain’s black community was an Igbo, born in eastern Nigeria – probably near Onitsha – about the year 1745. His first name, Olaudah, means ‘fortunate’ or, possibly, ‘having a loud voice and well spoken’. His surname, Equiano, means ‘when they speak others listen’ or, alternatively, ‘if they wish, I shall stay’.1 Olaudah Equiano was the youngest son of a large family, seven of whom survived infancy. His father was one of the province’s elders, who met to decide disputes and punish crimes. Olaudah was his mother’s favourite. When he was about 11 he and his only sister were kidnapped by slave-traders. After a journey to the coast lasting six or seven months, during which he was separated from his sister and temporarily reunited with her, he was transported to the West Indies. On the voyage he was brutally flogged for refusing food; saw a white seaman flogged to death and the corpse tossed overboard like so much meat; and experienced the other horrors of the middle passage.
After a fortnight or so in Barbados Equiano was shipped to Virginia and put to work weeding grass and gathering stones, an occupation varied by a few hours spent fanning the plantation-owner, whose black cook prepared his food with an iron muzzle locked over her mouth to prevent her eating any of it. A British naval lieutenant called Michael Pascal soon bought the lad for £30 or £40, renamed him Gustavus Vassa (or Vasa), and cuffed him till he answered to his new name. On the ship that brought him to England with his new master, Equiano made his first white friend: an American, four or five years older than himself, called Richard Baker.
Soon after I went on board he shewed me a great deal of partiality and attention, and in return I grew extremely fond of him. We at length became inseparable . . . Although this dear youth had many slaves of his own, yet he and I have gone through many sufferings together on shipboard; and we have many nights lain in each other’s bosoms when we were in great distress. Thus such a friendship was cemented between us as we cherished till his death . . . I lost at once a kind interpreter, an agreeable companion, and a faithful friend; who, at the age of fifteen, discovered a mind superior to prejudice; and who was not ashamed to notice, to associate with, and to be the friend and instructor of one who was ignorant, a stranger, of a different complexion, and a slave!2
Equiano was about 12 when he arrived in England, early in the year 1757. Amazed to see snow for the first time, he was hardly less amazed to see the white people eating with unwashed hands; and ‘I likewise could not help remarking the particular slenderness of their women, which I did not at first like; and I thought they were not so modest and shamefaced as the African women’.3 In London, he stayed with two sisters called Guerin, relatives of his master: ‘Very amiable ladies, who took much notice and great care of me’.4 They taught him to read, sent him to school, and had him baptized. He served Pascal during Wolfe’s Canadian campaign and with Boscawen in the Mediterranean, acting as gunpowder-carrier under heavy fire during one fierce battle against the French fleet. Then, without warning, he was sold to Captain James Doran, commander of the Charming Sally.
In a little time I was sent for into the cabin. When I came there Captain Doran asked me if I knew him; I answered that I did not. ‘Then’, said he, ‘you are now my slave.’ I told him my master could not sell me to him, nor to any one else. ‘Why’, said he, ‘did not your master buy you?’ I confessed he did. ‘But I have served him’, said I, ‘many years, and he has taken all my wages and prize-money, for I only got one sixpence during the war; besides this I have been baptized; and by the laws of the land no man has a right to sell me:’ . . . They both then said that those people who told me so were not my friends; but I replied – it was very extraordinary that other people did not know the law as well as they. Upon this Captain Doran said I talked too much English; and if I did not behave myself well, and be quiet, he had a method on board to make me. I was too well convinced of his power over me to doubt what he said; and my former sufferings in the slave-ship presenting themselves to my mind, the recollection of them made me shudder. However, before I retired I told them that as I could not get any right among men here I hoped I should hereafter in Heaven; and I immediately left the cabin, filled with resentment and sorrow.5
Equiano’s new master took him to Montserrat and sold him to that island’s leading merchant, a Quaker called Robert King, whose property he remained from 1763 to 1766. During those years, by dint of petty trading and hard saving, he managed to accumulate the price of his freedom: £40. For a time he went on working for his master as a free man. In 1767 he returned to England, where he was apprenticed to a hairdresser. Then he travelled widely: to Turkey, Italy, Portugal, Jamaica, and the Arctic, where the ship he was on and a companion ship, trying to find a passage to India, were trapped in the ice for 11 days. Returning to Britain once more, he started his anti-slavery activities when he tried to prevent the transportation of a black sea-cook, John Annis, who had been freed by his master on the island of St Kitts. The master now wanted Annis back and had caused him to be kidnapped. Equiano got advice from the abolitionist Granville Sharp, who had been active on behalf of kidnapped runaway slaves since 1765. But the lawyer whom Equiano engaged on Annis’s behalf proved useless, ‘and when the poor man arrived at St. Kitts, he was, according to custom, staked to the ground with four pins through a cord, two on his wrists, and two on his ancles, was cut and flogged most unmercifully, and afterwards loaded cruelly with irons about his neck’.6 Returning to the Caribbean, Equiano was himself badly treated. A sloop-owner named Hughes tried to enslave him and strung him up with ropes for several hours, but he managed to escape in a canoe.
In 1777 Equiano came back to Britain and worked as a servant again. One of his employers, who had spent a long time on the African coast, suggested that he go there as a christian missionary; but the bishop of London, ‘from certain scruples of delicacy’, refused to ordain him.7 After nearly losing his life in a Shropshire coal-mine and serving as a steward on one voyage to New York and two to Philadelphia, Equiano was in November 1786 appointed commissary of provisions and stores for the black poor going to Sierra Leone.
The Sierra Leone ‘resettlement’ scheme had been put up by an eccentric botanist called Henry Smeathman, and soon had enthusiastic government backing. It was designed to get rid of several hundred of the destitute black people in London by shipping them out to West Africa. The story will be told in a later chapter; our concern here is with the part Equiano played. At first he was reluctant to go with the settlers, largely ‘on the account of the slave dealers, as I would certainly oppose their traffic in the human species by every means in my power’.8 But he let himself be overpersuaded, and within days he had permission to take a ton of gunpowder on board one of the three ships. Clearly he meant business. But he soon found out that the government agent, Joseph Irwin, was guilty of ‘flagrant abuse’:
Government had ordered to be provided all necessaries . . . for 750 persons; however, not being able to muster more than 426, I was ordered to send the superfluous slops [i.e. clothes and bedding], &c. to the king’s stores at Portsmouth; but, when I demanded them for that purpose from the agent, it appeared they had never been brought [sic], though paid for by the government. But that was not all, government were not the only objects of peculation [i.e. embezzlement]; these poor people suffered infinitely more; their accommodations were most wretched; many of them wanted beds, and many more cloathing and other necessaries . . .
I could not silently suffer government to be thus cheated, and my countrymen plundered and oppressed, and even left destitute of the necessaries for almost their existence. I therefore informed the Commissioners of the Navy of the agent’s proceeding; but my dismission was soon after procured, by means of a gentleman in the city, whom the agent, conscious of his peculation, had deceived by letter.9
A naval officer to whom Equiano appealed for support agreed that Irwin had done nothing to indicate that he had the would-be settlers’ welfare ‘the least at heart’. On the other hand this officer, apparently irritated by a black person’s daring to take a stand on principles, called Equiano ‘turbulent, & discontented’, accused him of ‘taking every means to actuate the minds of the Blacks to discord’, and criticized his ‘spirit of sedition’.10 The Navy Board stood up for Equiano all the same:
In all the transactions the Commissary has had with this Board he has acted with great propriety and been very regular in his information but having from the beginning expressed his Suspicions of Mr. Irwins intention in supplying Tea Sugar and other Necessaries allowed for the use of the Women and Children on their Passage and having complained from time to time of his conduct in this particular we are not surprized at the disagreement that has taken place between them.11
But Equiano’s adversary was white, so his dismissal was inevitable. His worst crime seems to have been ‘his anxiety to see that justice was done to his own people’.12 He defended himself, unavailingly, in a statement in the Public Advertiser.13 And, as he and Cugoano had feared, the Sierra Leone scheme turned out an unqualified disaster.
Equiano’s active participation in the growing movement for abolition of the slave trade was, by contrast, much more successful, though he did not live to see the triumph of his cause. He emerged, in his forties, as a capable and energetic publicist: a fluent writer and speaker, a campaigner prepared to travel wherever he was invited to present the abolitionist case. His friends and associates in the movement included, not only middle-class abolitionists like Granville Sharp, who chaired the largely Quaker Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade that was launched in May 1787, but also a young Scottish shoemaker called Thomas Hardy, who was chief founder and first secretary of the London Corresponding Society, strongest of Britain’s radical working-class organizations in the 1790s.
From 1787 on, abolitionism was a major – indeed, a central – tenet of the emergent radical movement, and Hardy was one of the first to state clearly that black freedom and white were two sides of one coin. He wrote to a Sheffield clergyman in 1792:
Hearing from Gustavus Vassa that you are a zealous friend for the Abolition of that accursed traffick denominated the Slave Trade I inferred from that that you was a friend to freedom on the broad basis of the Rights of Man for I am pretty perswaded that no Man who is an advocate from principle for liberty for a Black Man but will strenuously promote and support the rights of a White Man & vice versa.14
Equiano not only helped Hardy by passing on names and addresses of useful contacts – abolitionists in the provinces whom he had met on his speaking tours – but joined the London Corresponding Society. Writing to Hardy from Edinburgh in May 1792, he sent his ‘best Respect to my fellow members of your society’, adding: ‘I hope they do yet increase.’ (For the full text of this letter, see appendix A, pp. 403-4.) While staying in Hardy’s Covent Garden house two months earlier Equiano had been, by Hardy’s account, ‘now writing memoirs of his life’ – which evidently meant working on the sixth edition of his autobiography and trumpet-blast against slavery: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.15 (Writing to Hardy from Chesham in April 1792, his wife Lydia reported that her acquaintances there were ‘very fond of vassa book’, adding: ‘Give my respects to him and I wish him a good jorney to Scotland.’)16
First published in 1789, Equiano’s book was both ‘a uniquely detailed account of an African’s movement out of slavery’17 and the most important single literary contribution to the campaign for abolition. For the first time the case for abolition, presented by a black writer in a popular form, reached a wide reading public. It was, for instance, the last secular book read by Wesley before his death.18 And it was highly effective in rousing public opinion. ‘We entertain no doubt of the general authenticity of this very intelligent African’s interesting story’, wrote the Monthly Review, adding: ‘The narrative wears an honest face: and we have conceived a good opinion of the man . . . His publication . . . seems calculated to increase the odium that hath been excited against the West-India planters.’19 The General Magazine agreed. Condemning ‘a traffic disgraceful to humanity, and which has fixed a stain on the legislature of Britain, which nothing but its abolition can remove’, the reviewer declared:
The narrative appears to be written with much truth and simplicity . . . The reader, unless perchance he is either a West-India planter or Liverpool merchant, will find his humanity often severely wounded by the shameless barbarity practised towards the author’s hapless countrymen in our colonies . . . That so unjust, so iniquitous, a commerce may be abolished, is our ardent wish.20
In its author’s lifetime the Interesting Narrative went through eight British editions; six more followed in the 22 years after his death. But even before this well-aimed blow at the plantocracy, Equiano had won widespread recognition as principal spokesman of Britain’s black community. It was Equiano who in 1783 had called Granville Sharp’s attention to the mass murder of 132 black slaves thrown alive into the sea from the decks of the Liverpool slaver Zong.21 (For the Zong case, see pp. 127-9 below.) From then on the two men kept in close touch and undoubtedly co-ordinated their plans.
But Equiano was not merely, as we should call it today, a liaison officer between the black community and the white abolitionists. He was one of the acknowledged political leaders of his fellow-blacks. He was not by any means the only leader, in that period, whose name has come down to us. Ottobah Cugoano was, as we have seen, a close colleague and co-thinker. Others were Yahne Aelane (English name Joseph Sanders), Boughwa Gegansmel or Broughwar Jugensmel (both forms were printed; English name Jasper Goree); Cojoh Ammere (English name George Williams), Thomas Cooper, William Green, George Robert Mandeville, and Bernard Elliot Griffiths – all co-signatories with Equiano and Cugoano of a letter from nine ‘Sons of Africa’, published in the Diary newspaper in 1789, declaring that ‘thanks to God the nation at large is awakened to a sense of our sufferings, except the Oran Otang philosophers’ (i.e. the racist pro-slavery pamphleteers).22 Other ‘Sons of Africa’ who signed public statements at various times in 1787-8 were Daniel Christopher, John Christopher, James Forster, John Scot, Jorge Dent, Thomas Oxford, James Bailey, James Frazer, Thomas Carlisle, William Stevens, Joseph Almaze, John Adams, George Wallace, and Thomas Jones.23 It was no doubt these leaders, or some of them, who went with Equiano to Westminster to listen to debates and the examination of witnesses when Sir William Dolben’s Bill to regulate the slave trade was passing through Parliament – against every procedural obstacle the West India lobby could devise. Equiano was constantly consulted by Dolben and was received by both the Speaker of the House of Commons and the prime minister. There could have been no clearer indication that a wind of change was beginning to blow.
The name of ‘Gustavus Vassa the African’ was now a familiar one to readers of the Public Advertiser, one of London’s most widely circulated newspapers, items in which were often copied by the provincial press. For the Public Advertiser Equiano wrote a review of two pro-slavery pamphlets by the racist James Tobin of Nevis. It was a capable piece of polemical journalism: pointed, reasonable, and securely anchored in personal experience. ‘Can any man less ferocious than a tiger or a wolf attempt to justify the cruelties inflicted on the negroes in the West Indies?’ Equiano demanded. Tobin had tried to make his English readers frightened of ‘the rapid increase of a dark and contaminated breed’ in England. Equiano met him head on. Some of the wealthiest planters, he pointed out, had fathered children on their black slaves, and were responsible for infanticide, abortion, ‘and a thousand other horrid enormities’. But why should people who loved each other not marry? ‘Why not establish intermarriages at home, and in our Colonies? and encourage open, free, and generous love, upon Nature’s own wide and extensive plan, subservient only to moral rectitude, without distinction of the colour of a skin?’24
For the same newspaper, and equally trenchantly, Equiano reviewed Gordon Turnbull’s Apology for Negro Slavery (1786), a pamphlet which bore the hopeful sub-title : The West-India Planters Vindicated from the Charge of Inhumanity. Equiano cast his review in the form of an open letter to Turnbull:
To kidnap our fellow creatures, however they may differ in complexion, to degrade them into beasts of burthen, to deny them every right but those, and scarcely those we allow to a horse, to keep them in perpetual servitude, is a crime as unjustifiable as cruel; but to avow and to defend this infamous traffic required the ability and the modesty of you and Mr. Tobin . . . Can any man be a Christian who asserts that one part of the human race were ordained to be in perpetual bondage to another?25
In a letter to Lord Hawkesbury, president of the Council for Trade and Plantations, later reprinted in the Public Advertiser, we see Equiano shrewdly appealing to capitalist self-interest. He urged, as Cugoano had done, the benefits of trading with Africa in normal commodities instead of human beings:
A commercial intercourse with Africa opens an inexhaustible source of wealth to the manufacturing interests of Great-Britain.
The abolition of Slavery, so diabolical, will give a most rapid extension to manufactures . . .
The manufacturers of this country must and will, in the nature and reason of things, have a full and constant employ by supplying the African markets . . .
It lays open an endless field of commerce to the British manufacturer and merchant adventurer.26
But Equiano was not satisfied with writing letters to the press and book reviews. After his Interesting Narrative was published he travelled the country addressing anti-slavery meetings. His speaking tours promoted sales of his book and won new adherents to the abolitionist cause. In 1789 he visited Birmingham ‘and increased the indignation of the friends of the slave by the circulation of his narrative’. To the Birmingham people who had given him hospitality and a hearing, and many of whom had bought copies of his book, he wrote this charming letter of thanks:
I beg you to suffer me thus publicly to express my grateful acknowledgments for their Favours and for the Fellow-feeling they have discovered for my very poor and much oppressed countrymen; these Acts of Kindness and Hospitality have filled me with a longing desire to see these worthy Friends on my own Estate in Africa, where the richest Produce of it should be devoted to their Entertainment; they should there partake of the luxuriant Pine-apples and the well-flavoured virgin Palm Wine, and to heighten the Bliss, I would burn a certain kind of Tree, that would afford us a Light as clear and brilliant as the Virtues of my Guests.27
In the following year Equiano spoke in Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, and Cambridge. In 1791 he spent eight and a half months touring Ireland, where he sold 1,900 copies of the Interesting Narrative, was everywhere ‘exceedingly well treated, by persons of all ranks’, and ‘found the people extremely hospitable, particularly in Belfast’.28
The only brief lull in this activity came when Equiano married, on 7 April 1792, Susan Cullen, daughter of James and Ann Cullen of Ely. The marriage was solemnized at Soham church in Cambridgeshire, five miles south-east of Ely. A brief report in the Gentleman’s Magazine described the bridegroom as ‘well known in England as the champion and advocate for procuring a suppression of the slave-trade’.29 There were two daughters of the marriage, Anna Maria and Johanna. The former died, at the age of four, on 21 July 1797, and there is a memorial inscription to her at Chesterton parish church in north Cambridgeshire.30
After a ten-day honeymoon, Equiano pressed on with his speaking engagements, visiting Scotland, Durham, Stockton, and Hull. The year 1793 found him in Bath and Devizes. One practical result of these meetings was to swell the subscription lists of successive editions of the Interesting Narrative. The sixth edition (1793) lists 487 subscribers in England (259 of them in Hull alone), 68 in Ireland, and 158 in Scotland. Interestingly, these subscribers included ‘William, the son of Ignatius Sancho’.31 But a still more important effect was to mobilize public antagonism to the slave trade. Equiano wrote to a Nottingham clergyman in 1792:
I Trust that my going about has been of much use to the Cause of the Abolition of the accu[r]sed Slave Trade – a Gentleman of the Committee . . . has said that I am more use to the Cause than half the People in the Country – I wish to God, I could be so.32
As the Belfast abolitionist Thomas Digges put it, Equiano was ‘a principal instrument in bringing about the motion for a repeal of the Slave-act’.33
Given the strength and determination of the West India lobby, it was inevitable that Equiano should at some stage be the victim of an attack on his integrity. The attack, when it came, was ludicrous and easily refuted. A poisonous paragraph in the Oracle newspaper, in 1792, alleged that he was not an African at all, but a native of Santa Cruz, a Danish-held island in the Lesser Antilles. Two days later this slander was reprinted in the Star.34 Equiano was away from London, on a speaking tour. His friends demanded an apology, but none seems to have been printed – though the Star’s editor was forced to admit, in a private letter, that the story must have been invented by the enemies of abolition, ‘for the purpose of weakening the force of the evidence brought against that trade; for, I believe, if they could, they would stifle the evidence altogether’.35 Equiano nailed the lie in the next edition of his Interesting Narrative. ‘It is only needful for me’, he pointed out, ‘to appeal to those numerous and respectable persons of character who knew me when I first arrived in England, and could speak no language but that of Africa.’36
Olaudah Equiano died in London on 31 March 1797, aged about 52. His friend Granville Sharp went to see him on his death-bed; Equiano had lost his voice and could only whisper.
Fourteen years later, when Sharp’s niece asked her uncle what sort of a man Equiano had been, he replied: ‘A sober, honest man.’37 So far as it goes, this is an accurate epitaph; but it needs to be supplemented. Equiano was, for his time, exceptionally widely travelled. Experience had made him wise. He had a shrewd grasp of the political realities of his day. He had a fluent pen, a persuasive tongue, and absolute integrity. Abolition of the slave trade was the next link in the chain by which his community could haul themselves out of degradation to dignity. Equiano concentrated single-mindedly on securing this next link. He put his gifts and energy wholly at the service of his community in their struggle against slavery. He made an outstanding contribution to that struggle. He has never lost his voice.38
* i.e. Mrs Sarah Scott, author of The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), whose hero’s sentiments on the improvement of the conditions of his slaves were said by one reviewer to be ‘noble, generous, humane’, and deserving ‘to be engraven in the heart of every West Indian planter’.6