8. Up from slavery

The black poor

‘Starvin about the Streets’

Suddenly, in 1784, London’s black population was swollen by a stream of mostly penniless refugees from north America. The promise of freedom had lured them to the British side in the American War of Independence (1775-83). The promise was kept. But hundreds of these black ‘loyalists’, many of them ex-servicemen, exchanged the life of a slave for that of a starving beggar on the London streets.

In 1775, about 15 months before the Declaration of Independence, Virginia’s royal governor Lord Dunmore sent a thrill of horror through the rebel colonists by promising to ‘arm my own Negroes & receive all others that come to me who I shall declare free’. When he proclaimed martial law a few months later he repeated this promise to all black men able and willing to bear arms. Runaway slaves flocked to him, and before the year was out he had 300 soldiers in his Royal Ethiopian Regiment. Across the front of their uniforms was stitched the incendiary slogan: ‘Liberty to Slaves’. This regiment was ravaged by smallpox, but in 1779 the British commander-in-chief, General Sir Henry Clinton the elder, repeated the offer of freedom for slaves who rallied to the royal standard. There was a competition between the two sides, to recruit black people. Neither side treated black recruits well. The British offered freedom only to adult male slaves. They billeted them in segregated camps, put those who fell sick in segregated hospital tents, and gave ex-slaves court-martialled for petty theft anything from 500 to 1,000 lashes. All the same, tens of thousands of black men opted for the British side.

They were used as shock troops: Samuel Burke, one of the 1,500 black soldiers fighting with the British forces in July 1780, was credited with killing ten rebels at Hanging Rock. They were used as cavalry: a black mounted unit was formed in Virginia in 1782. They were used as guides: a black man called Quamino Dolly led British troops through the swamps to attack Savannah. They were used as spies and couriers and to smuggle messages through the American lines. They were used as labourers: several units of Black Pioneers, with black NCOs, dug trenches, repaired the lines, drained ditches, dragged boats overland, and built dams. Black labourers cleared rubbish off the streets, shovelled cow dung out of the cattle pens, dumped earth on white men’s shit in the ‘necessary houses’. Before he surrendered Yorktown, the British commander Cornwallis was complaining of a shortage of black labourers, since in his view the heat was ‘too great to admit of the soldiers doing it’. Black men were used in many other capacities: as pilots of coastal and river vessels, seamen, canoeists, miners, woodcutters, carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors, foragers, impressers of horses, nurses, servants to officers, servants to common soldiers, waiters, orderlies, drummers, fifers, and recruiters of yet more black men. And when the war ended and the British withdrew, at least 14,000 black men went with them, evacuated from the ports of Savannah, Charleston, and New York. Thousands more escaped overland to Canada. Of those who quit, hundreds came to London.1

About some of these we have a few personal details, for the claims that 47 of them made to the British government for compensation for wartime losses are preserved in the Public Record Office, as are the claims of 5,000 white ‘loyalists’. The 47 were not typical of the black refugees as a whole; unlike most of their fellows most of the claimants were freemen, not ex-slaves, and some had owned a little property in America. Twelve had served in the British navy and five had been wounded in battle. Benjamin Whitecuff, formerly a small farmer on Long Island, had been a British spy and was credited with having saved the lives of 2,000 troops. The Americans had captured and hanged him, but three minutes after the noose went round his neck he was rescued by British cavalry. Now he was living on a pension of £4 a year, a small dowry from his English wife Sarah, and what he could earn as a saddler and maker of chair bottoms. David King was a shoemaker, earning 2s. a day. John Robinson had been a cook on a British warship and was now keeping a cookshop. George Peters was working at a gentleman’s house for 18d. a day. Samuel Burke, born in Charleston, had served as a brigadier-general’s batman and been wounded twice, the second time so badly that he was discharged. Prince Williams, born free in Georgia, had been tricked into slavery and had fled to the British forces. Newton Prince had been a pastry-cook in Boston, where rebels tarred and feathered him after he gave evidence against them in the Boston Massacre trial; when the British left Boston he went with them. Shadrack Furman, a Virginia slave who had given food and information to British troops and had been captured, flogged, and left blind and crippled by the Americans, was making a living playing the fiddle in the London streets. In 1788 he was awarded a pension of £18 a year.2

This was the most generous settlement awarded to any of these claimants. For the most part the claims of black ‘loyalists’ were viewed with sour suspicion by the Commissioners for American Claims, who met in a grand house overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Few white ‘loyalists’ were denied help. The allowances granted to even the least favoured among them were almost without exception higher than the £18 a year awarded to blind Shadrack Furman. White claimants compensated with lump-sum payments rarely came away with less than £25. Twenty black claimants got lump sums ranging from £5 to £20; the majority got nothing at all. Some ex-servicemen were not even granted the back pay owed them for years of service to the Crown. Many black applicants were told that their claims hardly deserved ‘a serious Investigation or a serious Answer’, since they had ‘gained their Liberty’ in the war ‘instead of being Sufferers’. They came ‘with a very ill grace to ask for the bounty of Government’. One Connecticut man was told that ‘he ought to think himself very fortunate in being in a Country where he can never again be reduced to a state of Slavery’. John Provey, born in North Carolina, slave to a lawyer before the war, had served in the Black Pioneers and described himself as ‘an entire Stranger in this Country illeterate and unacquainted with the Laws thereof’. He was told how lucky he was to have reached ‘a much better Country where he may with Industry get his Bread & where he can never more be a Slave’. Peter Anderson, a Virginia woodcutter who had been press-ganged by one of Dunmore’s officers and had escaped and rejoined the British forces after capture by the Americans, told the commissioners that he was completely destitute:

I endeavour’d to get Work but cannot get Any I am Thirty Nine Years of Age & am ready & Willing to serve His Britanack Majesty While I am Able But I am realy starvin about the Streets, Having Nobody to give me A Morsal of bread & dare not go home to my Own Country again.

At first the commissioners found Anderson’s story ‘incredible’, but when Lord Dunmore vouched for it they changed their tune and forked out £10. Many were denied relief because they could not provide written evidence, or the testimony of knowledgeable witnesses, to back their claims. Those who obtained pensions or grants did so because they had the support of prominent white refugees.3

Peter Anderson’s case was typical of the black poor as a whole. By mid-1786 there were at the very least 1,144 of them living in London, and most were penniless.⁴ Besides ex-servicemen and other black ‘loyalists’, new arrivals included some Lascars, or East Indian seamen, and it was the plight of the latter that first came to public notice, in March 1785. In a letter to the Public Advertiser, ‘an old man just arrived from the country’ declared himself ‘shocked at the number of miserable objects, Lascars, that I see shivering and starving in the streets’. He suggested a charitable subscription to buy clothes and food for ‘a race of human beings, who, though different in colour, religion, and country from ourselves, are still our fellow-creatures, and who have been dragged from their warmer and more hospitable climates by our avarice and ambition’.⁵ This was probably a tilt at the East India Company, or at certain shipowners, or at both. In that year five Lascars, one named Soubaney, sued a shipowner for wages due to them. Their case was pleaded by the recorder of London, who refused to accept a fee. The court ordered that each of the plaintiffs should be paid the £20 10s. that was owing to him.⁶ Early in 1786 a ‘Committee of Gentlemen’ – i.e. bankers, merchants, and MPs – was set up to organize relief for distressed Lascars, and soon extended its activities to help other black people in need. By 11 February the committee knew of about 320 people in need, 35 of whom were from the East Indies. About 100 had served as seamen in the recent war and had come to Britain on warships. Most of the others had been brought from north America or the West Indies ‘by various Accidents’, and many were seeking work as seamen.⁷

Soon the committee was styling itself ‘Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor’ and raising money by public appeal. From 24 January it distributed broth, a piece of meat, and a twopenny loaf to 140 people a day, and from 5 February the number thus fed increased to 210 a day. Bread was sent daily to those too sick to leave their homes. For the most serious cases, the committee opened a hospital (‘Sickhouse’) in Warren Street, and between 40 and 50 were admitted, given medicine – and reported, in July, to be ‘in a miserable state’.⁸ Clothing was distributed to about 250 people in rags. ‘Some have been fitted out, and sent to sea,’ said a newspaper report, ‘and a place is provided with straw and blankets for such as apply for Lodging.’9

By April the committee had given help to 460 people¹⁰ and money was running short. But public opinion was coming to realize that the black ‘loyalists’ had a watertight moral claim for charity. As a writer in the Public Advertiser put it, they

have served Britain, have fought under her colours, and after having quitted the service of their American masters, depending on the promise of protection held out to them by British Governors and Commanders, are now left to perish by famine and cold, in the sight of that people for whom they have hazarded their lives, and even (many of them) spilt their blood . . . Shall these poor humble assertors of [Britain’s] rights be left to the agonies of want and despair, because they are unfriended and unknown?¹¹

From mid-April, regular relief in cash was provided for the black poor. The normal rate was 6d. a day. The money was handed out at two public houses at opposite ends of London: the White Raven in Mile End and the Yorkshire Stingo in Lisson Green. On 20 April 75 turned up to receive their dole. Three weeks later there were 327 claimants. There was a temporary fall when it was put about that, in future, payment would depend on the recipient’s agreeing to be ‘resettled’ overseas. But in June the handout was given to 364 people, in August to 622, in early September to 736. By the end of September the daily 6d. was reaching nearly 1,000 people. Total cost of the relief has been estimated at close on £20,000, of which only £890 came from public subscriptions.¹² The government contributed the rest.

Resettlement – or deportation?

Why did the government contribute the lion’s share? Basically, because it was eager to solve the problem of the black poor by dumping them overseas and saw the daily 6d. as bait. They were ‘indigent, unemployed, despised and forlon’, wrote a commentator nine years later, and ‘it was necessary they should be sent somewhere, and be no longer suffered to invest [sic] the streets of London’.¹³ It is only fair to add that, initially, a number of the black poor themselves favoured resettlement, though their own idea seems to have been to go to Nova Scotia, where many other black ‘loyalists’ had settled and there seemed a reasonable prospect of finding work. What emerged, however, was a scheme to resettle them in Sierra Leone.

This idea was first put forward by the eccentric amateur botanist and elocution teacher Henry Smeathman. Mainly designed to further Smeathman’s financial interests, the scheme had the support of two London merchants who saw it as an opportunity to invest in large-scale cotton-growing.14 Another supporter was Granville Sharp, who jumped at the chance to do some experimental social engineering by furnishing the expedition with an ingenious, elaborate, and naïve code of regulations, curiously foreshadowing utopian socialist blueprints for an ideal society.¹⁵ The black poor themselves were the last to be consulted; their wishes and needs were at the bottom of everyone else’s list of priorities.

By May 1786, hard pressed by creditors, Smeathman had managed to persuade both the Treasury and the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor that his proposal was the only way of removing the ‘Burthen’ of the black poor ‘for ever’.¹⁶ The Treasury agreed to pay him £14 for every black emigrant who went to Sierra Leone, and the committee had a handbill printed telling the black poor that ‘no place’ was ‘so fit and proper’ for them as ‘the Grain Coast of Africa; where the necessaries of life may be supplied by the force of industry and moderate labour, and life rendered very comfortable’.¹⁷ The black poor themselves were much harder to persuade, largely because the Sierra Leone coast was a notorious slaving area. But in June 1786 Smeathman had control of the relief money, and that no doubt enhanced his powers of persuasion. Still, winning the recipients’ confidence was uphill work. Chairman of the committee at that time was Jonas Hanway, philanthropist and pioneer of the umbrella, one of whose more dubious qualifications for the post was his dislike of ‘unnatural connections between black persons and white; the disagreeable consequences of which make their appearance but too frequently in our streets’.¹⁸ One day Hanway found a crowd of black people at the Yorkshire Stingo reluctant to go to Africa ‘unless they had some Instrument insuring their Liberty’. So he tried oratory. He ‘formed them into a Ring and harangued them, appealing to God and the Common Sense of Mankind for the pure and benevolent Intentions of Government’.¹⁹ Despite Hanway’s silver tongue, the black poor insisted on a formal agreement between themselves and Smeathman. They would promise to embark when required and Smeathman would guarantee their freedom on arrival, as promised in his pamphlet, Plan of a settlement to be made near Sierra Leona (1786).20 To this the committee agreed. But the contract as drawn up was a palpable trick. Neither the committee nor the British government was bound by it to protect the proposed colony. On the other hand, those who signed it were legally committed to emigrate as promised, since it was drafted as a legal indenture enforceable in the courts. And the committee now started to require that black people sign this agreement as a condition for receiving the daily handout.²¹

Hanway chose eight ‘Head Men’ or ‘Corporals’ to act as recruiters of intending settlers. Each undertook to produce a list of a dozen or two people ‘for whose Steadiness and good Behaviour they might be respectively answerable’. Of this first group of ‘Corporals’ – others were appointed later – four were north Americans. James Johnson, aged 31, and Aaron Brookes, aged 25, both born in New Jersey, gave their occupation as ‘husbandry’. Johnson had come to Britain as a ship’s steward, Brookes as captain’s cook on a naval vessel. John William Ramsay (24), born in New York, was a servant who had come over as a ship’s steward. John Williams (25), born in Charleston, was a seaman and had come on a naval vessel. Barbados-born William Green (40) was a servant and had come in that capacity. There were two Africans: John Cambridge (40), net-maker and servant, and Charles Stoddard (28), cooper, had both come as servants. The eighth ‘Corporal’ was a Lascar called John Lemon. Born in Bengal, this 29-year-old hairdresser and cook had come to Britain on a naval vessel. Six of the eight could read, and two of these could write as well.²² The ‘Corporals’, who eventually numbered 15, were given an extra 2s. a day.²³

Though these hand-picked men were prepared to trust the scheme, many of their comrades remained sceptical. About 30 refused to accept their sixpences, ‘alleging that they wished for time to consider’. And only 130 of the 437 black poor by then drawing the allowance were prepared to give an immediate promise that they would go to Sierra Leone.²⁴ There were ways of putting pressure on them, however. At the committee’s meeting on 7 June it was reported that ‘some of the Blacks had been taken up by Beadles and chastised as Vagrants’.²⁵ As the months went by, this screw was to be turned tighter and tighter.

It is hard to blame the black poor for their doubts and suspicions. After Smeathman’s unexpected death from a ‘putrid fever’ early in July the committee suddenly tried to switch the place of resettlement from Sierra Leone to the Bahamas, where slavery still reigned. Naturally enough this caused the black poor ‘considerable uneasiness’. They protested vigorously and said they were ‘totally disinclined to go’,26 and the committee, failing to get Treasury support for the switch, now came up with a scheme to carry them to New Brunswick in Canada. Hanway hinted to them that they would be given land, but the Treasury records reveal that the major attraction of New Brunswick was the belief that ex-slaves would make handy servants and labourers for the white ‘loyalists’ who had recently settled there.²⁷ In fact the black poor showed ‘great reluctance’ to go to Canada, and in mid-August the Treasury agreed to the revival of the Sierra Leone scheme, with Smeathman’s associate Joseph Irwin now in charge. The Treasury displayed some impatience, urging that the necessary arrangements be made ‘with as little Delay as possible’.²⁸

On 9 October the committee resolved to give no further money to any black person who had not signed on for resettlement, and it repeated this decision a fortnight later, complaining of the ‘want of discipline’.²⁹ Meanwhile, a black woman and five black men had been arrested and thrown in jail for vagrancy.³⁰ The committee tried a different kind of pressure by inserting an advertisement in the newspapers telling masters of runaway slaves, and people to whom the black poor owed money, that intending settlers might be viewed at the White Raven at a certain time.³¹

By now the black poor were very worried and suspicious indeed. They made a number of demands to Smeathman’s successor, Irwin. Each intending settler must have a ‘certificate’, as a kind of passport to protect them against the slave-traders of the West African coast. The committee agreed. Printed on parchment, and put up in a twopenny tin box, the document bore the royal arms and certified that the bearer was a ‘Freeman of the Colony of Sierra Leona or The Land of Freedom’.³² The settlers demanded arms to defend themselves and hunt game. The navy refused to let them have cannon, but they were given 400 guns and a supply of powder, balls, and flints. The settlers also wanted constables’ staves, two movable forges, tents, stationery, and extra provisions: ‘a little Tea and Sugar for their Women and Children’.³³

For the voyage, the Navy Commissioners provided first two ships, the Atlantic and the Belisarius, then a third, the Vernon. But 400 of those who had signed on had last-minute doubts and, on the advice of Lord George Gordon (the famous agitator, opponent of the transportation of convicts, and idol of the London ‘Mob’), they failed to embark.³⁴ So the screws were tightened still further. On 6 December the committee’s chairman, Samuel Hoare, urged the Treasury to issue a proclamation threatening black people ‘found begging or lurking about the Streets’ with action under the Vagrancy Act.35 A week later – a fortnight before Christmas – the committee asked the public ‘to suspend giving alms’ to the black poor, ‘in order to induce them to comply with the engagement they entered into’.³⁶ Early in the new year it was reported that London’s lord mayor had ordered city marshals and constables

to take up all the blacks they find begging about the streets, and to bring them before him; or some other magistrate, that they may be sent home, or to the new colony which is going to be established in Africa; near twenty are already taken up, and lodged in the two Comptors [i.e. city prisons].

    The conduct of the Lord-Mayor in ordering the blacks who are found begging about the streets to be taken up, is highly commendable, and it is to be hoped will be imitated by the Magistrates of Westminster, Middlesex, Surry, and the other counties. It is however humbly submitted to their judgment, whether instead of mere confinement in a gaol, it would not be preferable to put them to hard labour in Bridewell. The blacks, especially those of the East-Indies, are naturally indolent; nothing but the utmost necessity will make them work; and the very thought of being subjected to that would soon reconcile them to the plan proposed by Government.³⁷

Thus wrote the Public Advertiser.

Why were the black poor so reluctant to go on board the ships? Some of them had seen the first Australia-bound convict ships being loaded in the Thames alongside the Atlantic and the Belisarius, and were afraid of being shipped to the new penal colony at Botany Bay; this fear was not lessened by garbled and sensational newspaper reports.³⁸ But above all, in the words of Ottobah Cugoano, one of the two black leaders who at length came out publicly against the scheme, the ‘wiser sort’ refused to get involved ‘unless they could hear of some better plan . . . for their safety and security’. After all, he asked, ‘can it be readily conceived that government would establish a free colony for them nearly on the spot, while it supports its forts and garrisons, to ensnare, merchandize, and to carry others into captivity and slavery’.³⁹ Here was political opposition to the government’s plan for disposing of the black poor. Such opposition struck some people as outrageous, especially when it took the form of a meeting of black people at which they dared to make political demands. When paragraphs appeared in the newspapers, calling on Britain to follow France’s example by expelling all black people and banning their entry to this country,40 a protest meeting of black people was held in Whitechapel. This greatly angered the Morning Post, which called for such meetings to be broken up by the police:

The oppositionists have converted numbers of the black poor into zealous patriots. They assembled, it seems, in Whitechapel, where they held, what the Indians term a talk; the purport of which was, that they had ‘heard of an intention of introducing the arbitrary French laws, with respect to black people, as part of the new French Treaty; and they looked upon the arts now practised to inveigle them out of a land of liberty, with the utmost jealousy’. In this instance, as in many others, the lenity of our Government operates to the detriment of the nation. Are we to be told what articles in a treaty should be adopted or rejected, by a crew of reptiles, manifestly only a single link in the great chain of existence above the monkey ? Should a sooty tribe of Negroes be permitted to arraign, with impunity, the measures of Government? A few constables to disperse their meetings, and a law, prohibiting blacks from entering our country, would be the proper mode of treating those creatures, whose intercourse with the inferior orders of our women, is not less a shocking violation of female delicacy, than disgraceful to the state.⁴¹

Those who did go on board the ships were living, as the months dragged on, in wretched conditions. Many lacked beds; many more lacked clothing and other necessities. We saw earlier that Olaudah Equiano, having reluctantly accepted the post of commissary of provisions and stores, found that Irwin had been pocketing the money given him to buy supplies. Equiano declared that both Irwin and the Revd Patrick Fraser – ordained by the archbishop of Canterbury to serve as missionary to the settlement – had treated the black people concerned, in essence, ‘the same as they do in the West Indies’.⁴² When the passengers tried to make themselves comfortable they were accused of wasting wood, candles, and water. Before the voyage even began, 50 had died of cold and disease. Others left the ships to avoid ‘the prospect of their wretched fate’, as Cugoano put it.⁴³ For one reason or another, nearly one in three of the passengers listed as being on board in November 1786 was absent from the ships when they finally left the Thames on 23 February 1787.44 One of those who died on the Belisarius during the long wait was John Provey, late of the Black Pioneers, whose appeal for help had been rejected, as we have seen, by the Commissioners for American Claims. He and his white wife Ann and their daughter Louisa had each signed the Sierra Leone agreement, and each had been receiving 6d. a day. But by February father and daughter were both dead, leaving Ann Provey to go to Africa alone.⁴⁵

Heavy gales drove the three ships and their naval escort into harbour. At Plymouth the sight of black people from these ships ‘strolling about’ disturbed the local magistrates, who expressed a fear that ‘many of these People will be left behind to the great nuisance of the Country’. So the Navy Commissioners told the commander of the naval escort vessel ‘to prevent the Blacks from getting ashore’, and he did so.⁴⁶ It was during this further delay that Equiano was sacked for turbulence and discontent, leaving Irwin in sole charge of the arrangements. While at Plymouth, the Atlantic and Belisarius were largely resupplied, which tends to confirm Equiano’s allegations against Irwin.⁴⁷

The convoy finally left England on 9 April 1787. On board were 350 black settlers, 41 of them women, and 59 white wives (some now widows, of men who had died on board). After a voyage lasting a month, during which about 35 more passengers died, they landed in Sierra Leone. The later history of these settlers is one of disaster piled on disaster. They died like flies. Some were sold to French slave-traders. Incensed by their failure to build him a church and a house, the missionary deserted them. The seeds they had brought from England would not grow in the tropical climate. Caught in the three-way crossfire of a conflict involving an American slave-ship, a British man-of-war, and a local ruler, the settlers were given three days to leave their little town and it was then burnt to the ground. After four years, only 60 were left of the 374 who arrived.

Why did the scheme fail? One recent writer claims that it was ‘mainly because the settlers arrived in the wrong season of the year’.⁴⁸ Another advances a different explanation:

The committee and the British government fostered the Sierra Leone settlement not because they were concerned about the welfare of the blacks, but rather because they wanted to rid the nation of what they regarded as a pestilent influence. Throughout its planning for the colony, the committee worried more about speed than about anything else. Crucial questions of supply and organization were left to agents who turned out to be incompetent, if not corrupt, and the wishes of the blacks were ascertained only when it was absolutely necessary.49

Or, as Cugoano wrote at the time, there was no ‘prudent and right plan’. On the contrary, ‘they were to be hurried away at all events, come of them after what would’.⁵⁰

There is a strange pendant to the story of the Sierra Leone resettlement scheme. One of the black ‘loyalist’ refugees that went to Nova Scotia was an ex-slave from North Carolina called Thomas Peters, who had served as a sergeant in the Black Pioneers. Like many others, he was promised land but never got it. After six years of waiting for his land, he decided in 1790, at the age of 52, to go to Britain and complain to the government of the injustice he and many of his fellow-settlers were suffering. This was a brave decision, for an ex-slave travelling alone was at the mercy of any ship’s captain who chose to put in at an American port and sell him. Peters reached London in 1791. Granville Sharp and Henry Thornton, chairman of the newly formed Sierra Leone Company, took up his complaint. His old commanding officer gave him an introduction to his old commander-in-chief, General Clinton, who befriended and supported him and spoke to Wilberforce on his behalf. The home secretary, Henry Dundas, ordered the governor of Nova Scotia to investigate and redress the grievances. The directors of the Sierra Leone Company offered the black ‘loyalists’ in Nova Scotia a new home in Sierra Leone. And Peters returned in triumph to Nova Scotia with the news.

In January 1792 over 1,100 black colonists sailed from Nova Scotia and two months later they arrived in Sierra Leone, where they founded a second settlement, happily more successful, on their predecessors’ original site. They called it Freetown, and it is still, after almost 200 years, the capital of Sierra Leone.

Peters was disappointed to find that leadership of the settlement was given, not to him, but to seven ‘self-important, and for the most part inefficient and quarrelsome’ officials sent out from England to run the colony. Heartbroken, he died less than four months after landing in Africa.⁵¹ ‘Without his courage and faith in coming to England’, writes Christopher Fyfe, ‘no Nova Scotian would have come to Sierra Leone; without the Nova Scotians the Colony would have failed.’⁵²

Resistance and self-emancipation

The British government had succeeded in getting rid of 309 black men and 41 black women. They were got rid of to such effect that, within five years of setting sail for Sierra Leone, most of them were dead. But the rest of the black community stayed in Britain. There were at least 10,000 of them. Most were servants. What precisely was their legal and social status?

It was a period of transition. Black slaves in Britain were in the process of freeing themselves, largely by their own efforts but partly with the help of free blacks and sympathetic whites. So much has been shown by Professor Douglas A. Lorimer in an essay which destroys the myth that black slaves in Britain were freed by the courts and the ‘rule of law’.

We have already seen that, contrary to general belief, slavery in England was not abolished by Lord Mansfield’s decision in the Somerset case of 1772 but persisted after that year. Eighteen years after Mansfield, a black woman was hunted down in the Bristol streets and dragged to the ship that was to take her to the West Indies; and two years later another black woman was sold for £80 in Bristol and shipped to Jamaica. As late as 1822, Thomas Armstrong of Dalston, near Carlisle, bequeathed a slave in his will.1 Formally, slavery was not ended in this country until the 1833 Act of Parliament freed the slaves throughout the British Empire. But in practical terms the institution of slavery, in Britain itself, largely withered away between the 1740s and the 1790s. And it did so as a result of the slaves’ own resistance – which was, to be sure, greatly encouraged from 1772 onwards both by the Mansfield decision and by popular misinterpretation of that decision. The slaves resisted, as so many of their predecessors in the seventeenth century had resisted, by running away. As individuals, over a period of half a century or so, they escaped from bondage. They shook it off, and asserted their dignity as human beings. Individual acts of resistance, multiplied many times over, became self-emancipation: a gradual, cumulative, and irreversible achievement which constituted the first victory of the abolitionist movement in Britain.

Lorimer’s argument entails three emphases not made by previous writers on the subject:

First, he introduces the concept of ‘slave-servants’. Practically all black slaves in England worked as servants. These servants occupied a position intermediate between chattel slavery and the domestic service of whites. They were bound to their masters’ households, much like serfs.

Second, Lorimer stresses the importance of the wage question for the personal autonomy of individual servants both black and white. He shows how the demand for wages posed by black slaves brought into this country helped them attain some degree of independence and enabled them to join in the activities of well-established black communities in larger centres such as London, Bristol, and Liverpool. And this in turn strengthened their will to resist.

In demanding wages, Lorimer adds, slaves were claiming more than mere spending money. Wages certified a free status. No less important, they conferred the right of residence within a parish – a necessary condition under the Poor Law for the payment of parish relief.

Third, while not denying that there existed a social and ideological climate conducive to successful black resistance to slavery, Lorimer shows that the initiative for ending slavery was the slaves’ own action in resisting their owners’ authority and quitting their households. Credit for this major victory for English liberty belongs therefore, not to the law and the courts – as is claimed by what Lorimer calls ‘the mythology giving substance to the ideology of the rule of law’ – but to the black slaves themselves. That British air became too pure for slavery was due to brave acts of resistance by individual members of Britain’s black community. This initial victory of the abolitionist movement stimulated the assault on the more entrenched slave trade and on plantation slavery in the colonies.2

This is a necessarily brief summary of a long-drawn-out process. All available evidence fully supports Lorimer’s analysis. In 1764 the Gentleman’s Magazine complains that black people arriving in England ‘cease to consider themselves as slaves, nor will they put up with an inequality of treatment’.³ In 1768 Fielding the ‘Blind Beak’ grumbles: ‘They no sooner arrive here, than they put themselves on a Footing with other Servants, become intoxicated with Liberty, grow refractory, and either by Persuasion of others, or from their own Inclinations, begin to expect Wages according to their own Opinion of their Merits.’⁴ Forty years later the whole process is already half a generation in the past, so that Clarkson can write, in 1808, that ‘we no longer see our public papers polluted by hateful advertisements of the sale of the human species . . . We are no longer distressed by the perusal of impious rewards for bringing back the poor and the helpless into slavery’.⁵

We know, of course, from those very advertisements that black slaves in Britain had been running away right from the beginning. The charge most frequently levelled against black servants was that hey were always ready to desert their masters.⁶ West Indians who brought over trusted, long-serving slaves were amazed to find them gone at the first opportunity.7 Many a faithful retainer, treated for years almost as one of the family, melted swiftly into the ‘Mob’. What effect did the Mansfield judgement of 1772 have on this process? Clearly it intensified it. Though there was still some illicit kidnapping and shipment to the plantations in the early 1790s – and even, as we shall see, some illicit sales of black children as house-boys in Westmorland early in the nineteenth century – Mansfield had outlawed and so reduced the most serious threat that runaways had to fear: deportation. Thus the social implications of the Somerset case were far wider than its limited legal effect. The ruling did not give runaways absolute protection, but it gave them some. And it could be used to some extent as a lever by those who chose not to run away but to demand, instead, a better deal as employees receiving wages. A former governor of Massachusetts told Mansfield in 1779 that slave-owners who had brought slaves to Britain in recent years ‘had, as far as I know, relinquished their property in them, and rather agreed to give them wages, or suffered them to go free’.⁸ When, six years later, Granville Sharp’s clergyman brother wrote asking for advice on how to protect a runaway black boy from his master’s claims, Sharp advised against buying the boy’s freedom, since this would implicitly recognize the master’s property rights. The servant’s desertion from his master’s service was in itself, he added, an act of emancipation; the boy should be protected from possible kidnapping.⁹ Sharp’s role was to prevent slave-owners from using the law to crush the slaves’ resistance.

Sharp and other abolitionists themselves used the courts as a weapon against slave-owners seeking to reclaim their property. In practice, since at least the early 1740s, London magistrates had tended to ignore the rulings of higher courts by refusing to recognize black slaves as property at all and setting black petitioners free.¹⁰ After the Somerset case the higher courts, though not invariably liberal, tended to do the same. Mansfield himself ordered the release of two runaway slaves from Virginia who stowed away on a British ship, and he awarded £500 damages to Amissa, a free African seaman sold into slavery by the captain of a Liverpool slaver.¹¹ By the 1790s the abolitionists’ rescue operations were mostly concerned with slaves in transit – locked up in English ports, on or off the ships that had brought them here – and black seamen. Some of the latter had escaped from slavery in the West Indies by stowing away on British ships and then offering to work their passage. Greedier captains would chain them up in the hope of taking them back to the West Indies and reselling them. Abolitionists rescued some of these prisoners by obtaining writs of habeas corpus for their release.12

A similar process of resistance and self-emancipation took place in Scotland, as is shown by the case of David Spens. This was the name adopted by the black slave of a West Indian merchant who went to live in the Fife port of Methil. In 1769 this slave was publicly baptized by a local minister, the Revd Dr Harry Spens. His master decided to ship him back to the West Indies and sell him. So David Spens ran away and was given shelter by a farmer in the parish of Wemyss. Local miners and salters – themselves virtually serfs – as well as farmworkers gave generously to aid his defence, and five lawyers took up his case and refused any fees. The merchant died before the case was heard, and David Spens returned to work for the Wemyss farmer and became a popular local figure.¹³ The cause of black freedom in Scotland was greatly helped in 1778 by the Court of Session decision in the case of Joseph Knight, which, as we saw in chapter 6, was much more clear-cut than the Mansfield decision in England.

The success of slave resistance led many English people to suppose that their institutions and customs were ‘peculiarly antagonistic to slavery’ and enabled abolitionists ‘to draw a stark contrast between English traditions of liberty and colonial slave practice’.¹⁴ And indeed, a ‘libertarian heritage’ was ‘the dominant political ideology in the eighteenth century, to which all groups subscribed’.¹⁵ Hence ‘the intense popular hatred of the press-gang, the standing army, excise taxes, and other manifestations of intrusive state power’.¹⁶ However paradoxical it may seem to us 200 years later, lower-class culture in eighteenth-century England was ‘rebellious in defence of custom’. In E.P.Thompson’s words, the ‘free-born Englishman’ of the lower classes ‘took to himself some part of the constitutional rhetoric of his rulers, and defended stubbornly his rights at law and his rights to protest turbulently against military, press-gang or police, alongside his rights to white bread and cheap ale’. The poor displayed ‘a generally riotous and unpoliced disposition which astonished foreign visitors’.¹⁷ These riot-prone plebeians, asserting their presence and rights by ‘a theater of threat and sedition’,¹⁸ were the immediate precursors of the industrial working class. Their belief in, and obstinate defence of, what they saw as their age-old tradition of liberty furnished a social and ideological back-drop favourable to black resistance and self-emancipation. The black slaves in Britain who freed themselves by their own efforts were giving practical expression to the ‘libertarian heritage’ of the country they found themselves in. And, by winning the antislavery movement’s first victory, they were making a substantial, though largely forgotten, contribution to that heritage.19

Abolitionists and radicals

Abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 was an expression of humanity’s slowly awakening conscience. It was the result of a dedicated crusade by the ‘Saints’, a group of middle- and upper-class christian humanitarians, led by that Great Emancipator William Wilberforce. ‘The unwearied, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery’, wrote the leading nineteenth-century historian of European morals, ‘may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations.’1

This comfortable and comforting myth was challenged, early in the present century, by an obscure German economist; since he wrote in German, for an audience of scholars, no notice was taken of his suggestion that the British slave trade may have been abolished for economic and political reasons.² The next challenge to the myth came in 1938, from the pen of the great Trinidadian historian, theorist, and activist C.L.R.James, who wrote in his biography of the black statesman Toussaint-Louverture:

Those who see in abolition the gradually awakening conscience of mankind should spend a few minutes asking themselves why it is man’s conscience, which had slept peacefully for so many centuries, should awake just at the time that men began to see the unprofitableness of slavery as a method of production in the West Indian colonies.³

To James, abolition was part of a world-wide historical process: a stage in the successive victories of the industrial capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. But James, too, might have been writing in German for all the notice that was taken by historians. They reacted vigorously, however, when another Trinidadian, the late Eric Williams, launched an attack on the myth in 1944, not in an aside, but as the central thesis of his book Capitalism and Slavery. In the short term, according to Williams, the Briitish slave trade was abolished in order to curtail overproduction of sugar. Without denying the importance of the humanitarians – ‘one of the greatest propaganda movements of all time . . . the spearhead of the onslaught which destroyed the West Indian system and freed the Negro’ – Williams, like James, saw abolition in the long term as part of a vast historical process: ‘The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works.’4 Williams’s thesis has attracted a large volume of criticism,⁵ though even his fiercest critics find it ‘difficult . . . to get around the simple fact that no country thought of abolishing the slave trade until its economic value had considerably declined’.⁶ As restated in From Columbus to Castro (1970), Williams’s explanation for the abolition of the Caribbean slave system covers five interlocking sets of factors: economic; political; humanitarian; international and intercolonial; and social.⁷ Here is a far more subtle and sophisticated theory than Williams’s critics generally credit him with. The controversy, which continues, is beyond the scope of this book; but it ought to be said that the myth which James and Williams were arguing against is still widely believed.

The abolitionist movement was far from being exclusively, or even predominantly, upper- and middle-class. To be sure, it was set in motion by white humanitarians who had the leisure, means, and education to occupy themselves with such matters. Many of the pioneers, on both sides of the Atlantic, were Quakers. It was the Pennsylvania Quaker Anthony Benezet who, by his writings, converted Thomas Clarkson to abolitionism and influenced Granville Sharp and John Wesley, too; Sharp’s Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery appeared in 1769, Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery in 1774. It was Quakers who presented the first substantial anti-slavery petition to Parliament, in 1783. In the same year they formed a special committee on the slave trade, and in the following year they distributed 12,000 free copies of an antislavery pamphlet. It was the Quakers’ official printer who published, in 1784, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies by James Ramsay, an Anglican clergyman who had spent 19 years on St Kitts and whose devastating public opposition to slavery, backed by first-hand knowledge, drew down on his head a vitriolic onslaught from the West India lobby, led by the Nevis planter James Tobin. When the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in 1787, there were nine Quakers on its committee of twelve.

By that year Parliament could no longer ignore the slave trade. Too much was known. Ramsay, meeting William Wilberforce in 1783, had given him an array of facts that prepared him to respond favourably to Pitt’s suggestion that Wilberforce should raise the matter in Parliament. Pitt had it in mind to destroy the rise to prosperity of the French colony of St Domingue, or Haiti. The French bought most of their black slaves from British slave-merchants; abolition of the trade would be a crippling blow to them. Wilberforce, with his strict views on religion and morals, was an ideal instrument for Pitt’s scheme. Working behind the scenes at first, he initiated a series of Privy Council and select committee inquiries which brought an avalanche of disturbing facts to public attention in the years 1789-91. Sir William Dolben’s Bill regulating overcrowding on slave-ships was passed in 1788, but the West India lobby resisted abolition tooth and nail. In April 1791 Wilberforce’s first motion to bring in an abolition Bill was defeated in the Commons by 163 votes to 88.

Meanwhile, however, a new and unexpected element had entered the abolitionist movement. In 1788 over 100 petitions had flooded into Parliament, from all over Britain, demanding abolition of the trade.8 These were not the result of agitation by middle-class humanitarians. They reflected rather the emergence of working-class radicalism. Mass support for abolition was first expressed in Manchester, where it was initiated by two members of the Society for Constitutional Information, founded in 1780 to promote Thomas Paine’s doctrine of human rights. The Society was the originator of the wave of radical agitation that was to sweep the country in the 1790s. Its two Manchester leaders, Thomas Cooper and Thomas Walker, surprised and delighted Clarkson, when he visited Manchester in 1787, by telling him of ‘the spirit which was then beginning to show itself, among the people of Manchester and of other places, on the subject of the Slave-trade, and which would unquestionably manifest itself further, by breaking out into petitions to parliament for its abolition’.⁹ In the event, 10;639 Manchester people signed the petition, which was reprinted in several provincial newspapers as a model for others to copy. Soon they were doing so. A meeting in Nottingham praised Manchester’s citizens ‘for the Zeal, Activity, and manly Firmness, which they have manifested in this noble cause’.¹⁰ This was the first large-scale use of petitions as a political weapon. Petitioning soon became ‘the standard abolitionist approach to Parliament, and it was to remain a dominant feature of radical working class politics until the 1840s’.¹¹ In 1792 over 500 petitions were sent to Parliament in support of Wilberforce’s abolition Bill.12 When Lydia Hardy, wife of the radical leader Thomas Hardy, wrote to her husband from Chesham in April 1792, her first question was what was happening in Parliament concerning the slave trade – ‘for the people are here as much against that as enny ware and there is more people I think hear that drinks tea without suger then there is drinks with’.¹³

The shift in public opinion is shown, above all, by the support for abolitionism even in places that owed a large share of their prosperity to the slave trade. The 1792 petition from Manchester, whose population was somewhat under 75,000, carried over 20,000 signatures.¹⁴ Even Bristol had a petition. It was the spread of radical ideas among working people that had brought about this change.

From the start, opposition to slavery was central to radical beliefs and at the heart of radical agitation. The ‘Father of Reform’, the respected Major John Cartwright, whose support for American independence had put paid to a brilliant naval career, worked closely with Clarkson, Sharp, and other prominent abolitionists. In 1788 he wrote to his wife: ‘Should the West Indian slaves, who but the other day had not the slightest prospect of such an event, find themselves emancipated, who can say that there is no hope of our constitutional rights and liberties being restored?’¹⁵ We have seen that Olaudah Equiano, chief spokesman of Britain’s black community, stayed in the house of Thomas Hardy, chief founder of the radical London Corresponding Society; that he joined the society; and that he put Hardy in touch with the provincial abolitionists whom he had met on his speaking tours. When Hardy declared that liberty for blacks and liberty for whites were indivisible, he was expressing more than a theoretical understanding. The unity in struggle of black and white working people found practical expression on the streets of British provincial centres in the 1790s.

This was a feature of the new radical movement that disturbed both the pro-slavery section of the ruling class and its anti-slavery section. Terrified by the French revolution, horrified by the revolution of black slaves on the island of Haiti, the ruling class found the connection between domestic radicalism and abolitionism a fearful portent. Bristol’s MP Lord Sheffield actively opposed Wilberforce’s 1791 abolition motion and, in the following year, ‘reprobated’ the abolitionist petitions because they were ‘obtained through the medium of associations; to which he had always professed himself an enemy’.¹⁶ Others expressed alarm because many of those signing were working people: poor and ignorant people, ‘enthusiastically inclined’.17 Nothing quite like it had been known before, and it made the upper classes shudder. The very foundations of their privileged existence seemed threatened. One noble earl summed it up like this in 1793:

The idea of abolishing the slave trade is connected with the levelling system and the rights of man . . . What does the abolition of the slave trade mean more or less in effect, than liberty and equality? What more or less than the rights of man? And what is liberty and equality, and what the rights of man, but the foolish fundamental principles of this new philosophy. If proofs are wanting, look at the colony of St Domingo [i.e. Haiti] and see what the rights of man have done there.¹⁸

Radicals and abolitionists alike were branded as agents of the French revolution, to the distress of Wilberforce and his supporters. Wilberforce’s brother-in-law grumbled that respectable people in Hull and Norfolk connected abolition of the slave trade with ‘democratical principles’ and therefore would not hear it mentioned; Wilberforce’s friends complained of Clarkson’s enthusiasm for the French revolution, and Wilberforce asked Lord Muncaster to caution Clarkson against such talk: ‘It will be ruin to our cause.’¹⁹ Wilberforce and Clarkson were dubbed ‘the JACOBINS of ENGLAND’.²⁰

Whereas the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade concentrated its efforts on the aim set forth in its title, the radical abolitionists – echoing Ottobah Cugoano, consciously or not – went further. When Sheffield radicals organized their biggest-ever mass meeting in April 1794, attended by thousands of artisan cutlers, a unanimous resolution called for the emancipation of black slaves as well as the ending of the slave trade. The resolution was a fascinating blend of abolitionist humanitarianism, radicalism, and working-class solidarity: precisely the three traditions that were to resist the rising tide of racism throughout the nineteenth century. Slave-merchants and planters were branded as ‘unfeeling barbarians’. ‘Wishing to be rid of the weight of oppression under which we groan,’ declared the Yorkshiremen, ‘we are induced to compassionate those who groan also.’ As ‘no Compromise can be made between Freedom and Tyranny’, there should be ‘a total Emancipation of the Negro Slaves’. Slavery in the West Indies

is insulting to Human Nature in an age of Reason and Philosophy . . . it tends to open wide the flood gates of Patronage, Corruption, and Dependance; inflames and stimulates the sordid passion of Avarice . . . its Abolition will redeem the national honor, too long sullied by the trade of blood . . . will promote the cause of Liberty . . . will avenge peacefully ages of wrongs done to our Negro Brethren.21

When John Thelwall of the London Corresponding Society, perhaps the most brilliant of the English radicals of the day and certainly the one most feared by the government, addressed huge meetings in London and the provinces in 1794 and 1795, he directly linked the struggle against slavery with the struggle against a corrupt ruling class at home. ‘The seed, the root of the oppression is here; and here the cure must begin’, he declared. ‘ . . . If we would dispense justice to our distant colonies, we must begin by rooting out from the centre the corruption by which that cruelty and injustice is countenanced and defended.’²² And Thelwall’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then only 22, was bold enough to lecture against the slave trade in Bristol itself, after a day spent reading, or re-reading, the books of Clarkson and Wadström. His lecture, delivered at the Assembly coffee-house on the Quay, showed a grasp of the anomalies in the triangular trade as they were experienced by ‘the poor and labouring part of Society’ in Britain: ‘We export a vast quantity of necessary Tools, Raiment, and defensive Weapons – with great store of provisions – so that . . . the poor with unceasing toil first raise and then are deprived of the comforts which they absolutely want in order to procure Luxuries which they must never hope to enjoy.’²³ To the radicals, writes James Walvin,

the corrupt political patronage exercised by West Indian wealth provided one of the most telling criticisms of the slave colonies. The corollary was that an end to plantocratic power, based on slavery, would minimize their political leverage in London. Equally, reform of Parliament would undermine the political base that the West Indians needed to defend their economic system.²⁴

Government repression, effectively prohibiting public meetings in 1795 and outlawing radical and trade union activities four years later, crippled both radicalism and extra-parliamentary abolitionism. For almost 20 years, working-class political activity was barely smouldering. When such activity did flare up again on a large scale, in 1814, the unpredictable spark was the question of slavery. At the Congress of Vienna that followed Napoleon’s defeat, a proposal was made to renew the rights of French slave-merchants. This roused English working people to fury. Within four weeks some 806 petitions, bearing the signatures of 1,500,000 protesters, were sent to Parliament. As Walvin makes clear, a higher proportion of the population signed these petitions than was to sign even the massive Chartist petition in 1848. In the small West Riding town of Guise-ley, for instance, between Leeds and Ilkley, 2,000 signed out of a population of 7,000.25 Never, wrote Samuel Whitbread, had the country expressed so general a feeling as they had about the slave trade – ‘if they had, Parliament would long since have been reformed’.²⁶

From then on the grassroots movement for emancipation grew steadily stronger. Between 1826 and 1832 more than 3,500 petitions were submitted to the House of Lords alone. These petitions were ‘steeped in the political vernacular of what had once been artisan radicalism’; but now the abolitionists ‘assumed that West Indian slaves possessed those rights which, in the 1790s, the popular radicals had claimed for themselves’²⁷ – and which some Englishmen had been jailed, others transported, others again hanged, for demanding.

Two of the radicals who suffered for their beliefs and activities were black men. William Davidson was hanged and beheaded; Robert Wedderburn, son of a slave, was jailed for two years. Both were born in Jamaica. Both were included – in each case there is a note saying ‘Black Man’ – in a secret list of 33 ‘leadeing Reformers’ compiled for the home secretary from police reports in October 1819.²⁸ Both were revolutionary socialists: members of the farthest left of all the radical organizations of the time. These were the followers of Thomas Spence, a poor Newcastle schoolmaster who had been secretary of the London Corresponding Society, had edited radical papers, was several times imprisoned for his radicalism, and was in certain respects ahead of his time. He was a kind of agrarian communist, who held that the poor had had their land stolen from them and were therefore dependent on the rich; his remedy was communal ownership of the land, which would restore the independence of the poor. Spence demanded the right of easy divorce for poor people (the rich already had it). And he addressed some of his writings to working women, an unusual thing to do in those days. At one time his followers called themselves the ‘Free and Easy Club’, apparently because they met in taverns to talk politics over a pint of beer. In 1812 the club adopted the more formal title of Society of Spencean Philanthropists (i.e. ‘friends of humanity’ – the older, wider sense of the word).

Not only were the spenceans the farthest left of the radicals; their group was also the most solidly working-class in composition. Most of its members were ‘mechanics and manufacturers’ – factory workers and shoemakers, with a sprinkling of discharged soldiers and sailors. Though small in numbers, theirs was the only radical organization to maintain an unbroken continuity throughout the Napoleonic wars. In 1815 it was the only socialist organization in the country, and for a long time it was the most serious, determined, and influential revolutionary trend in London.29 Spenceans were prominent in the Spa Fields riots of December 1816. Some of them had contacts outside the capital – certainly in Manchester, Stockport, and Bolton, and probably elsewhere.³⁰ Formally they were organized, rather grandly, into sections and divisions, a structure that seems to have been copied from the old London Corresponding Society – whose last secretary, the brace-maker Thomas Evans, led the spenceans after Spence’s death in 1814. But in practice there were splits and quarrels, and various spencean groups were operating independently of each other in the disturbed years 1817-20. One of those groups, as we shall see, was led for a time by Robert Wedderburn. William Davidson was in another group, whose activities against the most repressive regime that Britain has ever known were to end in disaster.

The black radicals

William Davidson

One of the two black men who played a prominent part in the British radical movement during the regency, William Davidson, was hanged with four of his white comrades, Arthur Thistlewood, John Brunt, James Ings, and Richard Tidd, early on the morning of 1 May 1820. It was one of the grimmest scenes ever witnessed by the people of London. The crowd was the largest that had ever turned out for an execution and, in case of a rescue attempt, was split up into small groups separated by contingents of Life Guards. Black-friars Bridge was guarded by 100 artillerymen and six guns. The five men were hanged on a specially large platform, erected in front of the debtors’ door of Newgate jail, where the Old Bailey stands today. Near the drop were five plain coffins, liberally strewn with sawdust to soak up the blood, and a block. Davidson, alone of the five, accepted the holy sacrament and prayed fervently before they hanged him. He called to the crowds: ‘God bless you all! Goodbye.’ Half an hour later a black-masked ‘resurrection man’, whose fee was 20 guineas, cut the heads from the bodies with a knife, then held up each head in turn and named each victim thrice as a traitor. The crowds had only murmured before; now they went wild with fury. Some were sick; others fainted. The rest hissed, groaned, shrieked, and shouted: ‘Murder!’ It was the last public decapitation in England.1

A cabinet-maker by trade, with a reputation as an excellent worker, William Davidson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1786. His father was the island’s attorney-general, his mother a black woman. Acknowledged and provided for, it seems, by his father, whose second son he was, the boy was educated in Jamaica until he was about 14. Then, against his mother’s wishes, he was sent to Edinburgh to complete his education. He may have had some connection with the radical movement in Scotland. He was apprenticed to a Liverpool lawyer, but after three years ran away to sea and was twice impressed into the navy. Discharged, he studied mathematics in Aberdeen for a while but was soon apprenticed to a Lichfield cabinet-maker.

It was in that Staffordshire town that he met and fell deeply in love with a Miss Salt, whom at first he visited without her parents’ consent. Her mother was partly won over but her father strongly disapproved, fired a bullet through the young man’s hat, and had him arrested on a false charge. When Davidson was released it was the father’s turn to be locked up, for shooting at him. He promised Davidson his daughter’s hand if he would refuse to prosecute, then asked him to wait until the girl came of age. Sent far away, Miss Salt married another suitor nine months later – and took with her a dowry of £7,000. When he heard this news Davidson tried to poison himself, but was saved by a friend who administered a strong antidote in the nick of time.

Davidson bought himself a house in Birmingham and set up in business there as a cabinet-maker, probably with £1,200 sent from Jamaica by his mother. But his business failed and he made for London, where he become journeyman to a Haymarket cabinetmaker and taught in a Wesleyan Sunday school. He was accused of making passes – that is all it seems to have amounted to – at a lady teacher, or a young lady in his class. Accounts differ. But they agree that, before long, he set up in business for himself once more, at Walworth, and married Mrs Sarah Lane, a poor widow with four sons. They took a cottage at 12 Elliott’s Row, near Lord’s Old Cricket Ground in St Marylebone, paying an annual rent of £22. A son called John was born in 1816 and another, Duncan, in 1819. Though government spies later described him as ‘a desperate character’ and ‘a terror to the neighbourhood’, Davidson was in fact a popular figure, who invited neighbours to his birthday party and entertained them with wine and radical songs.2 He was 5ft 10in. tall, with dark eyes and dark curly hair, strong and ‘able looking’ and often dressed in a light brown overcoat.³ His wife and children and step-children loved him very much, and they loved him no less when he was arrested and convicted. While in jail he petitioned the Privy Council to ask that his 3-year-old son be allowed to ‘Stop with me Occasionally from one Visit to another of his Mother’.⁴ (For a letter from William Davidson to his wife, written while he was in prison awaiting trial, see appendix B, p. 405.)

An avid reader of Thomas Paine,⁵ Davidson joined the Marylebone Union Reading Society, formed in 1819 in response to the Peterloo massacre, in which 11 unarmed demonstrators had been killed and 500 injured. Members paid 2d. a week and met on Monday evenings to read radical newspapers and discuss political matters. Soon Davidson was holding meetings in his own house, and one informer counted 18 people arriving. Another, who alleged that his dog had been shot by Davidson, told of seeing him and others ‘exercising like Soldiers’ on Sunday mornings.⁶ All over the country, radicals were doing the same. Those who practised drilling acted as stewards at open-air meetings, and at one such meeting, in Smithfield in November 1819, Davidson helped guard the banner from capture by police. It was a black flag with skull and crossbones and the legend: ‘Let us die like Men and not be sold like Slaves.’⁷

At some stage a fellow-radical called John Harrison, later to be transported for life for his politics, introduced Davidson to a certain George Edwards, by trade a modeller of statuettes. Edwards, whose brother was a policeman, pretended to be a radical but was in fact a police spy and agent provocateur. The movement accepted him with an innocence that seems utterly reckless, for the government’s use of informers was by then notorious and it was Edwards who was always urging his fellow-members to desperate acts of violence – meanwhile writing copious reports to his masters on the preparations for a rising. These reports, in crabbed handwriting on long thin strips of paper, show how cunningly he baited his trap. Davidson had great physical strength and courage – just the qualities that Arthur Thistlewood was looking for. Thistlewood was one of London’s most influential radical leaders and organizers, who had earned fame and a year’s imprisonment by challenging the home secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, to a duel. Thistlewood, like many others, was burning with indignation over the Peterloo massacre. He thirsted for revenge on the Cabinet of tyrants whom he held responsible for this crime – notably the hated Viscount Castlereagh, of whom Shelley wrote that autumn:

    I met Murder on the way –

    He had a mask like Castlereagh.8

And Thistlewood, again like many others, was certain that a mass uprising was imminent. The country was seething with unrest. All that was needed, many supposed, was a dramatic signal. By the end of 1819 Thistlewood had gathered round him a group of about 30 poor and determined men who believed that assassination was the only way to dislodge a government of murderous tyrants. Most of them were shoemakers, who still called each other ‘Citizen’ in the old Jacobin manner. Edwards the police spy was one of Thistle-wood’s best recruiters. It was he who introduced ‘Black Davidson’ to the group. Before long Davidson had become secretary of the newly formed shoemakers’ trade union,⁹ and was chairing meetings of the ‘Committee of Thirteen’ and ‘Executive of Five’.

It was Edwards the police spy who, at these meetings, urged plan after plan for executing the guilty members of the government. One of his schemes was to blow up the House of Commons. But Thistlewood and the others rejected each fresh plan in turn because they did not want the innocent to suffer with the guilty. At length, an announcement planted by the government in the New Times gave them, as they supposed, the chance they were waiting for. The Cabinet, it said, would be dining all together at the Grosvenor Square house of Lord Harrowby, Lord President of the Council (for whom Davidson had worked for a time and in whose opinion he was ‘a damned seditious fellow’).¹⁰ It was decided to kill the ministers as they sat at dinner. This would serve as the signal for an insurrection. Barracks would be set on fire, artillery seized, strategic locations in London occupied, and a prepared proclamation issued to rally the country around a provisional government installed in the Mansion House. Even now, Thistlewood and his supporters were merely agreeing to a plan suggested to them, in every detail, by Edwards.

One account says that it was Edwards who gave Davidson some money to get his blunderbuss out of pawn – though, according to another version, Davidson obtained the necessary 30s. from the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity ‘under pretence of redeeming his Working tools’. Davidson had in fact been found begging in the street the previous January; he told the society that he had pawned his tools and other property for nearly £50, and had been out of work and had ‘not earned one penny for the last 18 weeks’.11

At all events, Davidson was appointed by Thistlewood’s group to raise money and buy weapons. There was nothing exceptional in this. All over the country, working men were arming; if there were more attacks on radical demonstrations, all the casualties would not be on one side. So Davidson bought 450 muskets and 2,700 rounds of ammunition – and was canny enough to keep none of them in his house, so that when it was searched in the December nothing was found. He was given gunpowder by the Marylebone Union Reading Society, apparently as a gesture of support from some of the many radicals who were not told details of the assassination plan but knew that a rising was on the cards. There is a story that he took seven or eight old files to be sharpened for pike-heads – this sort of activity, too, was widespread all over the country – and that he replied, when asked if they were for turning tools: ‘They are for turning men’s guts out.’¹² Because he was physically strong and a capable swordsman, it was Davidson who was posted as sentry in the Cato Street loft, just off the Edgware Road, where the group kept their store of home-made grenades, muskets, pistols, cartridges, swords, and pikes.

As they were about to set out for Grosvenor Square, police stormed the loft. Amid shouts of ‘Kill the buggers!’ Thistlewood stabbed a Bow Street constable to death and escaped, only to be arrested next day at a hide-out known to Edwards. Davidson fired a shot at one intruder and aimed a cutlass blow at the commander of the raiding party, Lieutenant Frederick Fitzclarence of the Coldstream Guards, bastard son of the future King William IV. But he was overpowered and led away, ‘damning every Person that would not die in liberty’s cause’ and singing ‘Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled’ until his captors silenced him.¹³

There was no rising in London. Almost simultaneous insurrections were attempted, but fizzled out, in Barnsley, Huddersfield, and Sheffield,¹⁴ and about 60,000 weavers went on spy-fomented strike in Glasgow and Paisley. The Scottish insurgents were defeated in the ‘Battle of Bonnymuir’ and three men were put to death. Then the movement collapsed.

When Thistlewood, Davidson, and their three companions stood trial for high treason, before the lord chief justice and a series of carefully selected juries,15 Edwards was not called as a witness. He had been packed off to Guernsey under a false name to protect his hide.¹⁶ Instead, the prosecution relied very largely on the testimony of Robert Adams, a shoemaker who had turned king’s evidence. Davidson and Tidd were tried together. Davidson pleaded not guilty and suggested that his colour might go against him, whereupon one of the judges assured him: ‘God forbid that the complexion of the accused should enter, for a single moment, into the consideration of the Jury.’ Davidson told the court that his house had been practically torn down in the search for incriminating evidence; but none had been found.¹⁷ In his final plea, he complained of a biased trial and an unfair summing up. Then, referring to Magna Charta, he defended the English tradition of resistance to tyranny. It was, he declared, an ancient custom

with arms to stand and claim their rights as Englishmen; and if every Englishman felt as I do, they would always do that . . . And our history goes on further to say, that when another of their Majesties the Kings of England tried to infringe upon those rights, the people armed, and told him that if he did not give them the privileges of Englishmen, they would compel him by the point of the sword . . . Would you not rather govern a country of spirited men, than cowards? . . . I can die but once in this world, and the only regret left is, that I have a large family of small children, and when I think of that, it unmans me.¹⁸

The five accused were all sentenced to be hanged, to have their heads severed from their bodies, and to have their bodies divided into four quarters; but this last part of the sentence was remitted by the king.

Though their dream of tyrannicide had failed miserably, the five revolutionaries died bravely. Brought from his cell, Davidson ‘ascended the scaffold with a firm step, calm deportment, and undismayed countenance. He bowed to the crowd, but his conduct altogether was equally free from the appearance of terror, and the affectation of indifference.’¹⁹ He said his prayers and clasped the hand of the attendant clergyman. Then the drop fell. The five widows begged the king, in a letter signed by them all, to be allowed to take away ‘the mutilated remains of their deceased husbands’ for decent burial.20 But the bodies were buried in quicklime in an underground prison passage.²¹

The radical freethinker Richard Carlile, then in Dorchester jail as a result of his fight for a free press, had suspected Davidson of being an agent provocateur. Davidson had offered to spring Carlile from jail; Carlile was more cautious and less trusting than most of his contemporaries and hotly denounced Davidson in his journal The Republican soon after the Cato Street group was arrested. It was characteristic of Carlile that, when Davidson was hanged, he not only sent Mrs Davidson £2 and asked others to help her too, but also wrote a public letter of apology:

Little did I think that villain Edwards was the spy, agent, and instigator of the government, and Mr. Davidson his victim. I now regret my error, and hope that you will pardon it as an error of the head, without any bad motive . . . Be assured that the heroic manner in which your husband and his companions met their fate, will in a few years, perhaps in a few months, stamp their names as patriots, and men who had nothing but their country’s weal at heart. I flatter myself as your children grow up, they will find that the fate of their father will rather procure them respect and admiration than its reverse.²²

Robert Wedderburn

Freedom of the press was not handed to the British people on a plate by enlightened rulers. It was fought for and won by the working-class radicals of the early nineteenth century, a number of whom served prison sentences for publishing opinions, on religious and other matters, which challenged the ideas of the ruling class. In 1817 alone there were 26 prosecutions for seditious and blasphemous libel. But the radicals persisted. One of those imprisoned for freedom of speech was a black radical tailor named Robert Wedderburn, who led a spencean group in London.

Wedderburn was some 25 years older than Davidson, having been born in Jamaica in 1762 or 1763. We know rather less about his life than about Davidson’s. But we do know that his mother, Rosanna, was a slave on the estate of Lady Douglas, a distant relative of the Duke of Queensberry, and that his father, James Wedderburn, who came from Inveresk, near Edinburgh, owned large sugar plantations on the island. James Wedderburn had Rosanna bought for him in another planter’s name and sold her back to Lady Douglas when she was five months pregnant, stipulating that the child she bore should be free from birth.23 That child was Robert Wedderburn. He was cared for by his grandmother, ‘Talkee Amy’, a Kingston merchant who made a little extra on the side by handling smuggled goods. When Robert was about 11 he had the searing experience of seeing his grandmother flogged by a white man who fancied she had bewitched his uncle’s ship, causing it to be captured by the Spaniards: ‘He tied up the poor old woman of seventy years, and flogged her to that degree, that she would have died, but for the interference of a neighbour’.²⁴ Robert also saw his mother flogged, while pregnant, by a certain Dr Boswell, whose friend Captain Parr was notorious for having chained a woman slave to a stake until she starved to death.²⁵ Forty years later, Robert’s blood still boiled when he recalled these scenes, and he wrote in a journal he edited and published:

My heart glows with revenge, and cannot forgive. Repent ye christians, for flogging my aged grandmother before my face, when she was accused of witchcraft by a silly European. O Boswell, ought not your colour and countrymen to be visited with wrath, for flogging my mother before my face, at the time when she was far advanced in pregnancy. What was her crime? did not you give her leave to visit her aged mother; (she did not acquaint her mistress at her departure,) this was her fault. But it originates in your crime of holding her as a slave.²⁶

In 1778, when he was 17, Robert Wedderburn came to Britain. He went to sea, serving first on a warship (where he learnt gunnery) then on a privateer.²⁷ Later in life he was a jobbing tailor; perhaps his apprenticeship or his time at sea was what he meant by seven years spent ‘amongst a set of abandoned reprobates’. One Sunday he heard a Wesleyan preacher at Seven Dials and became intensely interested in ideas, including those of various fringe groups of unorthodox christians: Arminians, Calvinists, and Unitarians. At some stage he was licensed as a Unitarian preacher, which entitled him to put ‘Reverend’ before his name.²⁸ About the year 1790 he wrote and published a pamphlet called Truth, Self-supported; or, A refutation of certain doctrinal errors, generally adopted In the Christian Church, in which he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.

When Wedderburn was 51 or 52 he met Thomas Spence. Spence had only nine months left to live, but in that time he clearly had much influence on the Jamaican, who joined the Society of Spencean Philanthropists and became, as he put it nearly 20 years later, ‘an attentive and active member’. In March 1817 an Act of Parliament was passed with the aim of suppressing the spenceans, and Wedderburn first came into prominence when their leader Thomas Evans and his 20-year-old son were jailed later that year for ‘high treason’. They had dared to advocate in print the expropriation of the landowners, ‘than which’, as E.P.Thompson remarks, ‘a Parliament of landowners could imagine no greater crime’.29 Wedderburn’s first periodical, The ‘Forlorn Hope’, or A Call to the Supine, To rouse from Indolence and assert Public Rights, launched in 1817 ‘to establish something in the shape of a free Press’, carried in its first issue Mrs Evans’s appeal for help for her imprisoned husband and son.³⁰

The movement, as has been made clear, was plagued by spies and informers. But it is from their reports that we can piece together some picture of Wedderburn’s political activities – though naturally such material has to be interpreted with caution. One spy comes up with the news that Wedderburn has been chosen to lead Evans’s group after Evans is jailed. Then there is apparently a merger with a spencean group led by the apothecary ‘Dr’ James Watson, charged but acquitted for his part in the previous year’s Spa Fields riots.³¹ Another spy takes us into the Mulberry Tree tavern in Long Alley, Moorfields, one of the spenceans’ four regular meeting places in London. It is ‘Polemic Society’ night. The room, which holds 100 people with ease, is ‘crowded to Suffocation’ with as many as 150, all very poor. The meeting starts at eight in the evening and goes on for five hours. Pamphlets representing various shades of radical opinion are on sale, and ‘Wedderburn, a noted Spencean is very active’, distributing ‘Seditious Pamphlets’. Readings are given from well-known radical writers: William Cobbett, W.T.Sherwin, and Jonathan Wooler. The landlord is sympathetic, looks hard at everyone entering the club-room, and if a stranger comes in signals to the speaker; then ‘the subject of Spies is started and violent declarations made as to the Manner they would treat a Spy if discovered’.³² The spy’s state of mind at this moment is not hard to imagine.

When Evans came out of jail the two leaders quarrelled, accusing each other of stealing group property. Evans tried to have Wedderburn charged with felony; Wedderburn alleged that Evans, whom he called ‘my apostate son’ and ‘a Double-Faced Politician’, had broken into his house and taken away a stool.³³ This dispute seems to have stimulated Wedderburn to open his own meeting-house, in the shape of a Unitarian chapel in Hopkins Street, Soho, where he and the spencean shoemaker-poet Allen Davenport were reported to be making ‘very violent, seditious, and bitterly anti-Christian Spencean speeches’. By the autumn of 1819 up to 200 people were paying 6d. a head to attend debates on Monday and Wednesday evenings, besides ‘Lectures every Sabbath day on Theology, Morality, Natural Philosophy, and Politics, by a Self-Taught West Indian’.34 The Sunday audiences were disapprovingly referred to by a spy as ‘mostly young Men: who kept their Hats on and applauded any thing that he ridiculed in the Scriptures most violent’.³⁵ Wedderburn, who described himself as ‘The Offspring of an African’, was ‘highly gratified’ by the outcome of a debate on whether a slave had the right to kill a master. This question ‘was decided in Favor of the Slave without a dissenting Voice, by a numerous and enlightened Assembly, who exultingly expressed their Desire of hearing of another sable Nation freeing itself by the Dagger from the base Tyranny of their Christian Masters’; indeed, ‘Several Gentlemen declared their readiness to assist them’.³⁶ This led the authorities to prosecute Wedderburn for sedition and blasphemy.³⁷ He was locked up briefly in Newgate jail until £200 bail was raised for him by means of the following handbill:

To the Philanthropists Of every Denomination, Are the following Lines addressed, stating the Case of Robert Wedderburn, a Prisoner in Newgate, – for what he knows not! but £200 Bail is required of him, which he is not able to procure. His Political and Theological Sentiments being well known to the World, through his Exertions at Hopkins Street, and other Public Meetings, supersedes the necessity of his giving particulars of those Sentiments; but the Public may rest assured that he is fully persuaded that no Persecutions from the Tyrant, the Bigot, or the Hypocrite will be able to move him from the cause of Truth and Justice.

    Should the candid [i.e. impartial] and independent Public think him worthy of their Assistance, Subscriptions will be thankfully received.³⁸

A few days later the political climate was transformed by Peterloo, when Manchester factory-owners, merchants, and shopkeepers on horseback – the Yeomanry – brought the class war to the working people of Lancashire with the blades of their sabres. Week after week these events and their implications were discussed at the Hopkins Street chapel. ‘Is the slaughter at Manchester Legal or Not?’ was the subject on 13 and 15 September, with Wedderburn as main speaker and about 60 in the audience. It was ‘unanimously agreed it was an act of Murder, committed by the Magistrates and Yeomen’. A fortnight later, with a fraternal delegate from Manchester present, they debated whether Peterloo was the start of the revolution, and an informer reported Wedderburn as saying:

I am not such a fool to suppose nor to advise that the poor and half starved part of the Population should meet the regular Army of the Borough mongers in the field because they would have no chance, one party being armed & the other not, but arms are now preparing as fast as the means of paying for them will admit.

The revolution, he added, would give land to the soldiers. On 4 October he called the ministers and prince regent ‘bloody Tyrants’ and told his hearers: ‘Arm & be ready, the day is near at hand.’ Two days later: ‘We must all learn to use the Gun the Dagger, the Cutlass and the Pistols – We shall then be able to defy all the Yeomanry of England.’ Later that month he said the revolution had begun in blood at Manchester and must now end in blood; old as he was – 57 – he was learning his exercise as a soldier and hoped to live to see the revolution victorious. ‘It is the Duty of every one to arm . . . But if we cant all get Arms, theirs them Iron railings in front of these Big fellows Houses . . . they will make excellent Pikes used by a strong Arm.’ Wedderburn never lost this faith in the imminent overthrow of ‘these Bloody Murdering thieves who would rob us of the Shirt from of our Backs’. ‘The Poor would be Victorious, should a Civil War Commence’, declared one of his handbills.39

Yet even in the turbulent aftermath of Peterloo, Wedderburn and his group did not neglect the issue of colonial slavery. A meeting at the chapel in November heard two black West Indian speakers, specially invited by Wedderburn to expose a Wesleyan scheme for sending missionaries to the West Indies. He and his fellow-spenceans saw missionaries as ‘vipers’ and ‘church robbers’ whose role was to try to make the slaves submit instead of rebelling, at the same time taking money from them. ‘Which is the greater crime’, he demanded, ‘to preach passive obedience to the Poor Black Slaves . . . or to extort from them at the rate of £18,000 per an[nu]m under the pretence of supporting the Gospel’.⁴⁰

Wedderburn was also busy writing pamphlets, with such titles as A shove for a heavy-breach’d Christian, Crutches for the lame in faith, High-heel’d shoes for dwarfs in holiness, and Cast-iron parsons; or Hints to the public and the legislature, on political economy: clearly proving that the clergy can be entirely dispensed with. Two of his pamphlets, an open letter to the Chief Rabbi and A critical, historical and admonitory letter to the . . . Archbishop of Canterbury, are described by J.M.Robertson, the historian of freethought, as showing ‘a happy vein of orderly irony and not a little learning’.41 But again, not all his writings were on theoretical and religious questions; some were addressed to fellow-Jamaicans still oppressed by slavery, and Wedderburn found ways of getting copies out to Jamaica, where they caused consternation in the planters’ assembly.⁴²

This was the first revolutionary propaganda sent to the West Indies from Britain, and the content is fascinating. Wedderburn suggests an annual one-hour strike by all the slaves on the island. He advises strongly against petitions for emancipation, ‘for it is degrading to human nature to petition your oppressors’. And, whatever happens, they must gain and keep control of the land: ‘Take warning by the sufferings of the European poor, and never give up your lands.’ Wedderburn was fired by the vision of a simultaneous revolution of the white poor of Europe and the black slaves of the West Indies. He warns the planters: ‘Prepare for flight, . . . for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you. Get ready your blood hounds, the allies which you employed against the Maroons.’ And he warns the slaves: ‘You will have need of all your strength to defend yourself against those men, who are now scheming in Europe against the blacks of St. Domingo.’ His own position he makes defiantly plain:

Oh, ye Africans and relatives now in bondage to the Christians because you are innocent and poor; receive this the only tribute the offspring of an African can give, for which, I may ere long be lodged in a prison . . . ; for it is a crime now in England to speak against oppression . . . I am a West-Indian, a lover of liberty, and would dishonour human nature if I did not shew myself a friend to the liberty of others.⁴³

We catch a glimpse of Wedderburn as political leader and tactician when we find him supporting a break with the popular radical orator Henry Hunt. For three years Hunt had been an ally of the spenceans; but it was an alliance based on mutual convenience rather than harmony of principles, and it could not long survive Peterloo. Wedderburn came out against Hunt on the ground that ‘his principles of Reform would not suit their purpose, which must be nothing short of a Revolution – and that they had now force enough to carry on their plans independent of the Huntites’ – and independently, he added, of the middle-class supporters of the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett.44 Though some historians make much of Wedderburn’s alleged violence and extremism, he was in fact far more cautious and sensible than Thistlewood. He opposed as premature the idea of an insurrection in London in November 1819, and that may have been why his group split. They could not, he argued, count on more than 2,000 people in London, and not all of these were armed; better, therefore, to wait until Parliament roused popular fury by suspending habeas corpus.⁴⁵ Wedderburn had contacts among London’s Irish community, who assured him that they would join the uprising when it began.⁴⁶

When Wedderburn stood trial the sedition charge was apparently dropped. He was accused of ‘blasphemous libel’ – a convenient way of muzzling dissenters in an age when political and religious dissent were closely connected, and the charge most likely to obtain a conviction.⁴⁷ A parish constable named William Plush testified that he had heard Wedderburn call Moses ‘a d——d old liar for saying that he had seen God, when according to Jesus Christ no man had ever seen God’. Moreover, Wedderburn had said that ‘as religion is part of the law of the land . . . your fat-gutted parsons, priests, or bishops, would see Jesus Christ d——d, or God Almighty either, rather than give up their twenty or thirty thousand a year, and become poor curates at twenty pounds per annum’.⁴⁸ In court Wedderburn defended himself so ably that the lord chief justice had to acknowledge that his defence was ‘exceedingly well drawn up’.⁴⁹ Wedderburn said to the jury:

Where, after all, is my crime? – it consists merely in having spoken in the same plain and homely language which Christ and his disciples uniformly used . . . There seems to be a conspiracy against the poor, to keep them in ignorance and superstition; the rich may have as many copies as they like of . . . sceptical writers . . .; but if I find two most decided contradictions in the bible, I must not in the language of the same book assert that one or the other is a lie . . .

    As to my explanation of the doctrines of Christ, I must still maintain it to be particularly faithful. He was like myself, one of the lower order, and a genuine radical reformer. Being poor himself, he knew how to feel for the poor, and despised the rich for the hardness of their hearts. His principles were purely republican; he told his followers they were all brethren and equals, and inculcated a thorough contempt for all the titles, pomps, and dignities of this world . . .

    As NATURE has blest me with a calm and tranquil mind, I shall be far happier in the dungeon to which you may consign me, than my persecutors, on their beds of down.50

Found guilty, Wedderburn was sent to join Carlile in Dorchester jail for two years. A contemporary comment pointed out that he had been

thrust into a solitary dungeon for TWO YEARS, to live upon grey pease, and barley broth, merely because he differed in opinion from the State religion, and had too much honesty, and too little education to wrap his sentiments up in that cautious, decent, and guarded manner which the Solicitor-General said he could tolerate.⁵¹

Though submerged in the 1820s, the spencean tradition did not die out. In the early 1830s old spenceans were members of the National Union of the Working Classes, and Others; Spence’s ideas had much influence on Robert Owen’s socialist theories and on the owenite movement; and veteran spenceans were to play an ‘important and continuous’ role in London Chartism.⁵² Of Wedderburn’s contribution after he came out of jail, however, disappointingly little is known. In 1824 he published an autobiographical sketch, The Horrors of Slavery, in which he declared that he would have gone back to Jamaica had he not been afraid of the planters – ‘for such is their hatred of any one having black blood in his veins, and who dares to think and act as a free man, that they would most certainly have trumped up some charge against me, and hung me. With them I should have had no mercy.’⁵³ He got precious little mercy from the English courts. In 1831, when he was 68, he was serving a sentence of hard labour for his part in an affray outside a brothel.⁵⁴ He wrote from the Giltspur Street prison to the reformer Francis Place in reply to an inquiry about Thomas Spence. (For the text of this letter, see appendix C, p. 406.) What became of him when he was released is not known.

The everyday struggle, 1787-1833

It is hardly surprising that, of the black people living in Britain in this period whose names are known, so many were fighters of one sort or another: political activists or prize-fighters. (For the black prize-fighters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see appendix I, pp. 445-54.) Everyday life was a grim struggle for all poor people in those days. The great majority of the black people who lived in Britain were very poor indeed and had to fight, in one way or another, to survive. Daily experience knocked into black people the art of self-defence, with brains for choice, with fists or other weapons as a last resort. To be a radical or a boxer was merely to apply, at a public level, a lesson transmitted by oral tradition and reinforced on the street every day of one’s life.

Whoever did not learn this lesson was liable to become a victim. One such victim, chained to his master’s table like a dog, was rescued by the long arm of the African Institution from a house in Long Acre, in the heart of London, in 1814. According to the master, the lad he had chained up and ‘otherwise ill treated’ was his apprentice, whom he had brought from the West Indies two months before and who had cheated him of money and stolen his wine. No, he could not produce the boy’s indentures. No, he had not paid him any wages. He had been going to send him back to the West Indies by the next fleet and had chained him up to stop him running away.¹ Other victims were the black children sold as house-boys in Westmorland early in the nineteenth century. The Liverpool merchant John Bolton would pick out young boys from his slave cargoes and transfer them to Greenodd. A local man would smuggle them up the Leven valley to Windermere, where they were taken to Storrs Hall, which Bolton owned, and sold to the surrounding gentry.² Other victims again were the black youths who toiled in the marble quarries at Rigg End, near Dent in the West Riding, in the same period. Rigg End, right up in the fells, was owned by a Liverpool slave-merchant called Sill, who had black servants in his fine new house, not far from the quarries.³

Victims of another kind were the Africans, and descendants of Africans, exhibited as freaks for public amusement. Mrs Amelia Lewsam (or Newsham), ‘the White Negro Woman’, brought from Jamaica in 1754 at the age of about five, was offered for sale as ‘the greatest Phænomenon ever known’. The price demanded was 400 guineas, but probably much less was paid. At all events, the little girl was being exhibited a year later at Charing Cross, where people paid a shilling a head to gawp at her. She was described as having ‘all the features of an Æthiopian, with a flaxen woolly Head, a Skin and Complexion fair as the Alabaster’. In 1788 she was exhibited again, at Bartholomew Fair.⁴ Sixteen-year-old Primrose, ‘The Celebrated PIEBALD BOY’, born in Jamaica of African parents, was on display in London’s Haymarket in the following year.5 George Alexander Gratton, ‘the beautiful spotted negro boy’, was born to an African couple on the island of St Vincent in 1808 and brought to Bristol at the age of 15 months, and was soon being exhibited at 41 Strand (from 11 a.m. to dusk), Bartholomew Fair, and elsewhere. At the theatre of the travelling showman John Richardson ‘he stood on the bills between the Monk and Murderer, or the Skeleton Spectre, and Love and Liberty, or Harlequin in his Glory’. Though he became Richardson’s favourite among his freaks, the child had not long to live. His tombstone, in the churchyard at Marlow, Buckinghamshire, says he died on 3 February 1815, aged 4 years and 9 months.⁶

Most painful of all is the story of Saartjie Baartman, probably a San (‘Bushwoman’). Daughter of a cattle-drover, she was brought to Britain in 1810 by a Boer farmer called Hendrik Cezar, who saw commercial possibilities in her large buttocks. Told that she could make her fortune by letting herself be put on public display, and promised repatriation after two years – a promise which was not kept – she was exhibited at 225 Piccadilly as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. Spectators were charged 2s. a head. The exhibition was, by present-day standards, wholly degrading; and even in regency London there were some who protested. The Times said that Saartjie was ‘produced like a wild beast, and ordered to move backwards and forwards, and come out and go into her cage, more like a bear in a chain than a human being’. A letter in the Morning Post complained that she was exhibited ‘like a prize ox or a rattle-snake’; one in the Morning Chronicle reported that, when she seemed tired, her master ‘holds up a stick to her; like the wild beast keepers, to intimidate her into obedience’. Another visitor ‘found her surrounded by many persons, some females! One pinched her, another walked round her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; and one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, “nattral”’. Not surprisingly, Saartjie was often heard to sigh deeply and seemed anxious and uneasy. Some of those who objected took Cezar to court, but the case was dismissed after Saartjie had been interviewed for three hours, through interpreters (using Dutch) and in the presence of representatives from both sides. The interview established – to the court’s satisfaction, at any rate – that she was under no restraint, was happy in England, and was under contract to receive a share of the profits. But it is highly likely that the contract was drawn up in haste and antedated.

Saartjie featured in coarse street ballads and even coarser political cartoons. She was baptized in Manchester on 1 December 1811, under the name Sarah Bartmann, and was reported to have married a black man by whom she had two children. In 1814 she was again exhibited, for 11 hours a day – this time in Paris, where she died on 29 December 1815. Her corpse was treated with still less dignity than her living body. Before dissecting it, the naturalist Cuvier made plaster casts of it and wax moulds of her genitals and anus. A replica of these moulds was presented to the Royal Academy of Medicine (‘J’ai l’honneur de présenter à l’Académie’, wrote Cuvier, ‘les organes génitaux de cette femme’), and Saartjie’s skeleton and brain, too, were preserved for posterity and may still be seen, with a plaster cast of her body, in the arrestingly named Musée de l’Homme, in Paris.7

There were a good many beggars among London’s black population in the early nineteenth century, much as there had been in the mid-1780s. ‘In Angel-Gardens and Blue Gate Fields, about twelve beggars, four of them blacks’, reported a parliamentary committee in 1815.⁸ The Society for the Suppression of Mendicity concerned itself with approximately 400 black beggars in the years 1820 to 1826 inclusive – roughly one in 40 of the beggars who came to its notice in those years.⁹ This average of 60 or so black beggars passing through the society’s hands each year dropped sharply to four in 1827,¹⁰ in line with a general, though far more gradual, decline in the the size of the black population as a whole, for ‘the death rate in London was high and there was little fresh immigration’.¹¹

Undoubtedly a great many black beggars managed to slip through the society’s net. Its treatment of some of those it did catch gave those it did not excellent reasons for keeping out of its clutches if they could. In 1819 it was responsible for sending a Jamaican to the house of correction for seven days. In 1820 it had another Jamaican, aged 58, imprisoned for six months and ‘well flogged’; he had a previous history of begging. And in the same year a young Barbadian, formerly a ship’s cook, who had been sleeping rough for several nights, had not eaten for several days, and was taken to the society’s office ‘in a miserable state’, was shunted into a workhouse – probably a worse place to be than a house of correction.¹² Of course this is not the whole story. In 1822 a black man born in New York, who had served in the British navy for many years, was fainting with hunger and nearly naked when he reached the office, and the society did manage to squeeze out of a reluctant Admiralty the £47 due to him as prize money.¹³ But to keep out of the hands of this charity, if one possibly could, was simple common sense. A parliamentary committee recommended in 1816 that black beggars should be deported to the West Indies, which could be done ‘at no great expense’.14 Threats of that kind, which spelt slavery, sharpened their wits and toughened them. Cornered, they would put up a desperate struggle, like the beggar who pulled a knife on his persecutors in 1815¹⁵ or the young Haitian whose friends came to his aid when he was grabbed by four of the Mendicity Society’s busybodies in Mayfair in 1821:

J.F. aged 22, a native of St. Domingo, was apprehended in Park-lane, by four of the Society’s officers, after a most desperate resistance, during which, the constables were compelled to use their staves, in consequence of five other blacks attempting a rescue . . . The prisoner . . . was handcuffed to the iron railing until a coach was procured. He however, escaped, but was stopped by a Soldier . . . He was . . . brought up at Clerkenwell Sessions, sentenced to be imprisoned for three months, and to be twice flogged during that period.¹⁶

Most of the beggars ‘apprehended’ in this way seem to have been transients in the profession. The survival against heavy odds of those who turned professional earned them both the grudging respect of the better-off (in the form of persistent folklore about the immense wealth they were supposed to accumulate)¹⁷ and the ungrudging tribute of London’s down-and-outs, who elected the black one-legged violinist Billy Waters ‘King of the Beggars’ and turned out in force for his funeral in 1823.

Married, with two children, ‘Black Billy’ had lost a leg in ‘his Majesty’s service’, and was famous for his feathered hat and ‘peculiar antics’: ‘Every child in London knew him.’ He and his successor as ‘King of the Beggars’, a crippled dwarf called Andrew Whiston, together with ‘Black Sal’ and a dustman known variously as ‘Nasty Bob’ and ‘Dusty Bob’, became the four favourite characters in the best stage version of Pierce Egan’s Life in London.¹⁸ These four are immortalized in the vigorous Cruikshank illustrations to Egan’s book, as is another successful black beggar, the one-eyed ‘Massa Piebald’, whose real name was Charles M‘Gee.

Born in Jamaica in 1744, of a father who lived to be 108, M‘Gee was a familiar figure on his regular pitch at the bottom of Ludgate Hill, with his white hair tied up behind in a tail. He was said to have bequeathed ‘many hundred pounds’ to a lady who ‘not only gave him a penny or a halfpenny more frequently than any one else, but enhanced the value of the gift by condescending to accompany it with a gracious smile’.¹⁹

Toby, another well-known black beggar, who lived in Church Lane, St Giles, ‘was destitute of toes, had his head bound with a white handkerchief, and bent himself almost double to walk upon two hand-crutches, with which he nearly occupied the width of the pavement’.20

One of the best-known black mendicants in London was the merchant seaman turned street singer Joseph Johnson, famous for the model of a sailing ship which he built and carried round on his cap. ‘By a bow of thanks, or a supplicatory inclination to a drawing-room window’, he could give this model ‘the appearance of sea-motion’. A ‘Regular Chaunter’, Johnson often hitched a lift in a farmer’s wagon to such market towns as Romford, St Albans, and Staines, where he would entertain the local people with nautical ditties: The British Seaman’s Praise and The Wooden Walls of Old England.²¹

Were these successful professional beggars victims or fighters? They were fighters who consciously adopted the role of victim and knew how to make it pay. Generally they had something to offer: music, a colourful costume, a gimmick of some sort, if only a witty turn of phrase. ‘Black men’, said a writer on mendicants in 1817, ‘are extremely cunning and often witty.’²² In every sense, the professional beggars lived on their wits. That was their weapon in the fight to survive.

Their success in this fight contrasts with the hard lot of most of the Lascars in London in the same period – though a few of these Indian seamen, shanghaied, then dumped in a cold and inhospitable foreign land, did manage to join the ranks of the professional beggars. One was reported in 1817 to be making an average of 15s. a week – almost certainly an exaggeration – hawking halfpenny ballads round the streets.²³

Over 1,000 of his countrymen lived in a barracks in Ratcliff Highway, where the East India Company, legally obliged from 1814 to feed, clothe, and shelter them, paid a contractor Is. 6d. a day for their board and lodging.²⁴ It was estimated that at least 130 Lascars had died in Britain in each of the years from 1790 to 1810, and that this death rate doubled in 1813. During the severe winter of 1813-14, by the company’s own admission, Lascars at the barracks were dying at the rate of almost two per week and five died in one single bitterly cold day.²⁵ When company officials heard that some of these men had been complaining of their treatment, they ‘resolved to send the grumblers off by the first ship’.²⁶ There was plenty to grumble about. A parliamentary committee, visiting the barracks without notice, found that they were often overcrowded; that there was neither bedding nor furniture nor fireplace nor proper accommodation for the sick; that the men slept on a plank floor, making do with one blanket apiece.27 The company publicly admitted that the superintendent and his assistants used to strike the men in their care.²⁸ Missionaries and magistrates joined in a racist chorus of hate:

They are the senseless worshippers of dumb idols, or the deluded followers of the licentious doctrines of a false prophet . . . They are enemies to God by wicked words . . . They are practically and abominably wicked . . . They have none, or scarcely any, who will associate with them, but prostitutes, and no house that will receive them, except the public house, and the apartments of the abandoned . . . It is not to be denied that they are extremely depraved.²⁹

That was the ‘orthodox’ christian view of Indian seamen in 1814. Three years later a London magistrate told a parliamentary committee that ‘little good can be done by taking away the licences of [public] houses in Shadwell, for this reason, that the population consists entirely of foreign sailors, Lascars, Chinese, Greeks and other dirty filthy people of that description’.³⁰

Not every single black person in Britain had to struggle. At the opposite end of the social spectrum from the black beggars and the despised Lascars, a small number of well-to-do black residents and visitors found themselves tolerated by white society, though often in a patronizing, ‘tokenist’ kind of way. The key to social acceptance was money. In 1805 a black man able to afford fashionable clothes could walk along Oxford Street arm in arm with a well-dressed white woman, unmolested and largely unremarked – except by a surprised and primly disapproving white American visitor.³¹ Wealth, however modest, in the hands of a black person lent an exoticism that mere blackness by itself could no longer command. It was now possible, though exceptional, for a black servant to save enough money from his wages to make a will. Take, for example, James Martin. His life was typical of a slave-servant’s: kidnapped in Africa, taken to the West Indies, sold to a planter, bought by a British officer who brought him to England. When Martin died at Clifton, near Bristol, in 1813 the event would have attracted no more attention than the deaths of so many of his fellows. But he had some modest savings, and he left half of them to the Church Missionary Society, the other half to the African Institution, and this combined triumph of thrift and christianity was greatly to the taste of the times.32

The question the liberally minded asked themselves was: ‘Is he a gentleman?’ or ‘Is she a lady?’ In 1802 ‘men of colour in the rank of gentlemen’ were commented on, as a sign of social change, by the blue-stocking Mrs Hester Piozzi. She also noticed ‘a black Lady, cover’d with finery, in the Pit at the Opera, and tawny children playing in the Squares, – the gardens of the Squares, I mean, – with their Nurses’.³³ Clearly falling within the category of black ‘gentlemen’ were Prince Sanders or Saunders, a New Englander who served as Haiti’s agent in London in 1816 and was taken up briefly by the middle-class abolitionists;³⁴ and Paul Cuffe, a black American sea captain born in Africa. Visiting Liverpool in 1811, four years after abolition of the British slave trade, Cuffe was himself tolerant enough to dine with two former slave-ship captains, who, as he recorded in his journal, treated him ‘politely’.³⁵ The son of a St Lucia judge ‘by a dark coloured woman’, who had received from his father ‘a good plain education at Liverpool’, was described in 1831 as ‘a young gentleman’.³⁶

But tolerance often turned out to be a genteel cloak for racism, in that bland and irresponsible way that later became so familiar to black people looking for a job or for somewhere to live. ‘Unfortunately he is a Mulatto, a native of the West Indies, which circumstance, added to a family of nine children, has kept him down in the world – where so dark a complexion is not objected to, he would make a very valuable Schoolmaster’: thus a referee’s confidential report on an applicant for a teaching post in Bisley, Gloucestershire, in 1815.³⁷ When members and friends of the African and Asian Society dined at a tavern in 1816, with Wilberforce in the chair, the token Africans and Asians invited to the gathering were separated from the other guests by a screen set across one end of the room.³⁸

Black people were tolerated, after a fashion, if they had money, knew their place, and kept it. For black to marry white was, in the eyes of many, not just stepping out of place; it was contrary to nature. In 1804, when he was already moving towards political radicalism, William Cobbett demanded:

Who, that has any sense or decency, can help being shocked at the familiar intercourse, which has gradually been gaining ground, and which has, at last, got a complete footing between the Negroes and the women of England? No black swain need, in this loving country, hang himself in despair. No inquiry is made whether he be a Pagan or a Christian; if he be not a downright cripple, he will, if he be so disposed, always find a woman, not merely to yield to his filthy embraces, that, among the notoriously polluted and abandoned part of the sex, would be less shocking, but to accompany him to the altar, to become his wife, to breed English mulattoes, to stamp the mark of Cain upon her family and her country! Amongst white women, this disregard of decency, this defiance of the dictates of nature, this foul, this beastly propensity, is, I say it with sorrow and with shame, peculiar to the English.39

Though he often wrote erratically as well as with gross prejudice, Cobbett here provides an accurate answer to the question that is often asked: what became of the black people, numbering 10,000 or so, who were living in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century? Males among them heavily outnumbered females: and, like Olaudah Equiano and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and others before them, many of these black men married white women. At the 1816 dinner just referred to, chaired by Wilberforce, ‘a black man led in a white woman, with a party-coloured child, the fruit of their mutual loves’.⁴⁰ The grandchildren of such unions – the children of the ‘English mulattoes’ that Cobbett wrote of so scornfully, the children of those ‘tawny children’ observed by Mrs Piozzi – no longer thought of themselves as constituting a distinct black community. They were part of the British poor. The records of their lives are obscure and scattered, and they have for the most part been forgotten by their descendants. But there must be many thousands of British families who, if they traced their roots back to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, would find among their ancestors an African or person of African descent.

Let one example of this intermarriage serve for all the rest. We cannot call it typical, for each is in some way or other unique. This one is from Caernarvonshire, and the record spans close on 150 years.

John Ystumllyn, otherwise known as ‘Jack Black’, was kidnapped on the African coast around the year 1745, when he was about eight years old. According to oral tradition first published in 1888 and ‘accepted as authentic’ 70 years earlier, he ‘spoke no proper language’ but eventually acquired two: presumably Welsh and English. He was baptized at either Criccieth or Ynyscynhaiarn church; learned to write; and was taught gardening. He is described as ‘a meticulous and skilful worker’, ‘adept at mastering almost everything he saw others doing’, such as making model boats, wooden spoons, and baskets. He loved flowers and grew them with success. He was ‘an active, healthy looking youth and even though his skin was black, the local maidens used to dote on him and would compete for his favours’. The one who won his heart was a maidservant named Margaret, and they were married at Dolgellau church in 1768, with the son of Criccieth’s vicar as best man. John was appointed steward at a local big house and took the name Jones. He died in July 1791 and was buried at Ynyscynhaiarn. He and his wife had raised a large family. Ann, their elder daughter, married a Liverpool musican and seller of musical instruments. One of their sons, Richard, became huntsman to Lord Newborough; described as a ‘quiet, unassuming man’, who used to wear top hat, velvet jacket, and high white collar, he died in 1862 at the age of 92 and was buried at Llandwrong, near Caernarvon, where his descendants were said to be still living in the 1880s.41

Does this widespread intermarriage, coupled with the dwindling of black immigration to a trickle, mean that Britain’s black community disappeared in the last 60 years of the nineteenth century? Research in Liverpool clearly establishes that there never was a time, throughout the century, when that city did not have black citizens – and that those black citizens were always united by common problems and common interests.⁴² There were black people in Cardiff, as we shall see, from the 1870s or earlier. How far a continuity of tradition and struggle was maintained elsewhere is a question that cannot be answered without detailed local inquiry. But if the black community as such shrank in size and importance for 100 years, black people were here to stay. In the next chapter we look at the lives and achievements of some of them.