Am I Not a Man and a Brother?
The Problematic Symbolism of the Abolitionist Movement and its legacy today
[In the wake of the forced removal of the statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol, and its depositing at the bottom of Bristol Docks, where I hope it stays, I am publishing below an essay I wrote as part of my MA. I hope it adds to the debate about statues, symbols, and the legacies of colonialism.]
The lasting image of the campaign launched by 12 men above James Philips’ print shop in George Yard, London, on 22 May 1787, to abolish the transatlantic slave trade, is Josiah Wedgwood’s depiction of a shackled slave. The African man, viewed in profile, raises his head and hands upwards, as if in prayer, and cries ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’
This image appeared as a ceramic medallion, distributed widely as part of what Adam Hochschild has called ‘one of the most ambitious and brilliantly organised citizens’ movements of all time.’ [i] But the imagery is problematic. The slave is begging for manumission. He remains servile, chained, and on his knees. He looks upwards towards salvation. Like the overwhelming majority of the estimated 10 million souls who survived the Atlantic crossings, he is anonymous.
To what extent does this image reinforce negative stereotypes about African slaves? What does it tell us about the moral and religious motivations of the Abolitionists, and the many thousands who wore the emblem? How does the image shape our understanding of how and why the transatlantic slave trade was abolished?
The medallion was modelled in 1787 by William Hacker at Wedgwood and Sons, at the newly-built Etruria works in Stoke-on-Trent. It was approved by the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and adopted as their symbol and official seal. This campaign to abolish the slave trade has its roots in the Evangelical Revival in England in the early Eighteenth Century. The religious revival generated a moral responsibility for the poor and dispossessed.
Earnest Marshall Howse suggests this Great Awakening ‘created a moral sentiment that permanently changed England’s attitude to distant and defenceless people, and to her own brutal and degraded masses at home. Within a lifetime, like a group of mountain springs, there appeared in England a series of religious and humanitarian movements which altered the whole course of English history, influenced most of Europe, and affected the life of three other continents.’ [ii]
Nine of the 12 founding members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 were Quakers. The other three, including Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, were Evangelicals. William Wilberforce MP, who had converted to Evangelicalism in 1785, became the tireless champion of emancipation in Parliament. Josiah Wedgwood, brought to the campaign by Clarkson, was a Unitarian. Other leading voices, for example Hannah More and Helen Maria Williams, were also Dissenters.
Thomas Clarkson writing the year after the 1807 Act, claimed: ‘Among the evils, corrected or subdued, either by the general influence of Christianity on the minds of men, or by particular associations of Christians, the African slave-trade appears to me to have occupied the foremost place.’ [iii]
By its nature, the impulse of these Christians to free the slaves was salvationist. It rested on their belief that their religion gave them a special insight, and duty, to perform good works on behalf of those less fortunate, and that included the slaves. That’s why the man on the medallion is depicted as a supplicant at prayer: because it fitted in with the Abolitionists’ own ideas of the respective roles and power relationships between themselves and the slaves. They were souls to be saved, both from slavery, like the Biblical Jews escaping the Egyptians, and also from the heathen idolatry which would bring them eternal damnation.
The Abolitionists struck out against a fierce prevailing wind. Slavery and other forms of indentured servitude were the norm, not the exception, in every part of the globe. The transatlantic slave trade was merely the latest, albeit an especially cruel, violent and lucrative, expression of much older forms of social organisation. Its proponents could point to other systems of slavery throughout history, including the Roman and Greek civilisations so admired by the Georgians and Victorians.
Slavery was the hegemonic common sense, enmeshed in the economic fabric of the nation. Linda Colley says that British ships were exporting 45,000 slaves annually throughout the 1790s. Investors could be confident of a 10% return.[iv] It was a vital part of England’s standing as an independent, trading, maritime nation. It brought huge wealth, and a solid and well-funded lobby in its favour, including in Parliament.
As the true horrors of the slave trade, including systematic floggings, rape, amputations, castration, and the boiling or burning of slaves alive, became better known, the Abolitionist campaign spread through Dissenting and Radical circles, and beyond. The Wedgewood medallion was worn to denote support for an increasingly fashionable cause, amongst women as well as men.
Mary Guyett shows how, by ‘feminising’ the medallion by making it into a broach, bracelet or hairpin, women could defy patriarchal disapproval and express publicly a radical opinion.[v] Thomas Clarkson recalled that the medallion created a sensation: ‘Some had them inlaid in gold in the lids of their snuff boxes. Of the ladies, some wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for their hair. At length the taste for wearing them became general, and thus a fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom.’[vi]
For Evangelicals like Clarkson, the campaign was an all-consuming moral duty. For Radicals such as Helen Maria Williams and her salonistes, it exemplified a broader belief in liberty and equality, expressed through the American and French Revolutions. For the much wider group of wearers of the medallion it might be a desire to ‘fit in’ with a fashionable cause, and to display empathy, not necessarily with the enslaved Africans, but with the altruism of the Abolitionists. It was an example of what modern commentators call ‘virtue signalling’ (the desire to be seen to be supporting a fashionable cause). [vii]
Linda Colley links the wearing of the medallion with a deeper desire to express national virtue and superiority over the French and Americans: ‘trumpeting their concern for slave welfare became a standard way for more orthodox Britons to rebut American pretensions to superior freedoms right up to the 1860s and beyond…Anti-slavery became an emblem of national virtue, linked to a desire to reaffirm Britons’ libertarian heritage. [viii] Whatever the motivations of medallion-wearers, it added to the growing culture of Abolition, and made a contribution as great as any of the other methods — pamphlets, petitions, lecture tours, evidence to Parliament, boycotts, depictions of the cargo-holds of slave ships — the Abolitionists used in their repertoire.
But let us return to the image itself. Why did the Abolitionists not select a positive image of an African man or woman? There were plenty of positive role models of black Africans available. A century earlier Aphra Behn (1640–1689), in Oroonoko (1688) tells the story of a Royal Prince, tricked into slavery in Ghana, and transported to Surinam, where he organises a revolt.[ix] Gainsborough painted the portrait of Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) in November 1768. Sancho, born onboard a slave ship, was a man of letters, and the first Black Briton to vote in an election. The Sons of Africa comprised freed slaves in England, and its leading figures, educated writers and debaters such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, were well known to the Abolitionists.
Instead, the Abolitionists chose to depict the man bending his knees and raising his clasped hands as a Christian at prayer, and, in his rhetorical plea, speaking English. Both the religion and the language are imposed. The man would have had as a first language one of the Yaruba, Igbo, and Hausa languages prevalent in West Africa at that time, or at least some second or third generation knowledge of his own language. In such a private cry of despair, surely a slave would have used his or her own language?
If this man is a first-hand survivor of the transatlantic crossing, his own religion would have been Islam or animism, not the imposed Christianity of the European. The image is not designed to represent the reality of the enslaved Africans, nor even to present a positive image of the African man as defiant, noble or self-activated. Instead, the image is designed to illicit the sympathy and support of a domestic audience by appealing to their own charitable and benevolent impulses, within the framework of, at best patronising, and at worst racist, assumptions about black people.
The medallion bolsters a traditional narrative about the abolition of the slave trade: that a small, dedicated group of Christians, motivated by their faith, and by use of innovative visual propaganda and emotive arguments, gathered enough popular opinion to force Parliament to pass a Bill abolishing the transatlantic slave trade. In doing so, Britain became a paragon of virtue, and the protagonists (especially Wilberforce) became ‘saints’, worthy of commemoration in Westminster Abbey.
Contemporary commentators call this the ‘white saviour’ trope, which reoccurs in popular culture as enlightened whites ‘saving’ oppressed blacks. Examples abound, from films such as Hidden Figures, Amistad and Django Unchained, to Band Aid and Comic Relief, to the ‘selfies’ taken by American and European volunteers in developing countries’ aid programmes, which place themselves at the centre of groups of Africans. This was certainly the narrative running through the bicentenary celebrations organised by the British Government in 2007. JR Kerr-Ritchie, observed in the Journal of African American History that the visitor ‘was left in little doubt as to who was responsible for ending the British slave trade’ — the Abolitionists.[x]
Yet there is a rich and textured debate about the causes of Abolition. Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1943) suggests that the forces coalescing to end slavery were mostly economic: ‘the growth of the internal market in England, the ploughing in of the profits from industry to generate still further capital and achieve still greater expansion, played a large part. But this industrial development, stimulated by mercantilism, later outgrew mercantilism and destroyed it.’ [xi] This argument, known as the Williams Thesis, has been challenged by economic historians who argue that the American and French Revolutions was good for business, and profits from slavery remained healthy into the first decades of the Nineteenth Century. [xii]
The larger problem with the ‘white saviour’ narrative is the unwitting yet insidious denial of agency amongst the captured Africans and their descendants. For the fashionable wearers of the slave medallion, the supplicant slave was deserving of pity and charity, not necessarily viewed as equal. To assume that the millions of enslaved Africans were unable to offer resistance, and were reliant on the benevolence of the British Parliament, is to reinforce the pro-slavery narrative: that slaves were inherently, genetically docile and supplicant. To ascribe negative characteristics to entire racial groups is the very essence of racism.
In his account of the successful rebellion by slaves on the French colony of St Domingue (modern-day Haiti), CLR James states: ‘The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings, with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.’ [xiii]
The growth of post-colonial studies has enabled us to begin to unearth a forgotten, or suppressed, history of rebellion and resistance, which began onshore in West Africa, and onboard the slave ships themselves. CLR James writes: ‘Contrary to the lies that have been spread so perniciously about Negro docility, the revolts at the ports of embarkation and on board were incessant.’ [xiv] Professor David Richardson, Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, suggests that 392 insurrections took place onboard ships in the hundred years before 1807. Once on the plantations, resistance took the form of sabotage of machinery, deliberate slow working, pretending to be ill, and of course escape from capture. There is evidence of suicide and infanticide as acts of rebellion. Resistance might be passive and individual, or collective and violent. There were notable armed insurrections in Barbados (1675), Antigua (1735–36), Jamaica (1760), Grenada (1795–96), and St Lucia (1796–97).
In Jamaica, enslaved Ashanti rebelled against their captors, and formed their own free population, known as Maroons. One of their leaders Queen Nanny was a military strategist who used guerrilla tactics and camouflage against the British, and is commemorated on the Jamaican $500 bill. Britain sent more troops to suppress these rebellions in the West Indies than she did to put down the revolting American colonies. Between 1793 and 1801, 45,000 British troops were killed in the fighting. [xv]
Gelien Matthews, in a study of slave revolts[xvi] in the West Indies after the 1807 Act, argues that the revolts on the plantations catalysed the anti-slavery movement and hastened the passing of the 1833 Act. The history of revolt and insurrection proves that the slaves were not servile, supplicant, nor waiting patiently for Wilberforce et al to unlock their chains. Through their resistance, slaves were part-authors, and a significant part, of their own emancipation.
Britain takes pride in being the first nation to abolish slavery. But self-congratulation can be misplaced. The morning after the 1807 Act was passed, black men and women across the Caribbean woke up no less enslaved. An illegal trade in slaves persisted long after the 1807 Act. Between 1808 and 1860, the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans, suggesting a persistent and significant slave trade, decades after Abolition. When the Act abolishing slavery was finally passed in 1833 ‘throughout the Empire’ the Act did not cover those territories controlled by the East India Company, where millions remained enslaved. Nor was it immediate: a period of adjustment was built in.
It is almost beyond comprehension that when the 1833 Act was passed, slave owners were awarded huge amounts of ‘compensation’ for the loss of their ‘property’. The Government allocated £20m to around 3,000 slave-owners, representing 40% of the UK’s annual budget or around £16.5bn in modern money. Parliament’s munificence established many dynastic British families in wealth and status for centuries to come, and fuelled the next stages of the industrial revolution. You can’t have capitalism without capital. The liberated slaves received nothing. Even at the very point of their deliverance, the British Parliament considered the slaves neither men, nor brothers, but chattels. Parliament’s answer to the plaintive cry of the man on the medallion was an emphatic ‘no’.
British cities, especially Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol and London, the older institutions, and most British families, if they can be traced back to the reign of George III, materially benefitted from the slave trade. If there is to be culpability for its horrors, it should be evenly shared. Like Michelle Obama in the White House, we are all surrounded by edifices built by slaves.
Praise for Abolition should also be justly apportioned. The Abolitionists, described in a pro-slavery letter in Gentleman’s Magazine in April 1789 as ‘pious divines, tender-hearted poetesses, and short-sighted politicians’ [xvii] deserve to be lauded for their stand against seemingly immoveable social and economic interests. They deserve their statues. But where are the statues of the leaders of the slave revolts, whose names, outside of the Caribbean, are largely unknown? Where the plaques commemorating, for example, Samuel Sharp, who led the rebellion in Jamaica in 1831? Or Queen Nanny who led her troops against the ranks of Red Coats?
Symbols matter. A metal medallion struck in 1807 celebrates the Act with an image of Wilberforce on one side and Britannia on her throne on the reverse, declaring (in words taken from Exodus) ‘I have heard their cry’. An image published in 1833 shows Britannia lifting her hand in manumission, with a copy of the Act abolishing slavery in her hand. At her feet are a cringing man, woman and child, surrounded by broken chains and a copy of the Holy Bible.
These images, alongside others, dramatise the myth of a benevolent nation freeing the subject races from bondage, without questioning why they were enslaved in the first place, or apportioning culpability or censure. In this period, the idea that the ‘white’ race had a duty of care towards the ‘subject’ races (the ‘white man’s burden’ in Kipling’s later phrase) was inculcated into the popular imagination, and echoed down the decades of Victoria’s reign as the moral justification for the bloody spread of the British Empire. The Wedgwood medallion, notwithstanding the noble intentions of its designers, denies the slaves a role in their own story, thus rubbing salt into the wounds of a dark and shameful episode of Britain’s history.
Paul Richards is a writer-for-hire.
This essay was submitted in 2017 as part of the MA Victorian Studies programme at Birkbeck, University of London.
[i] Adam Hochschild Bury the Chains The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (London Macmillan 2005) P.3.
[ii] Earnest Marshall Howse, Saints in Politics the Clapham Sect and the growth of freedom (London George Allen and Unwin 1953) P.7
[iii] Thomas Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, (Frank Cass, 1968 (first published 1808)), p. 3
[iv] Linda Colley Britons Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (Yale University Press 1992) P.358
[v] Mary Guyett The Wedgewood Slave Medallion Values in Eighteenth-century Design Journal of Design History Volume 13 №2
[vi] T. Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, (Frank Cass, 1968 (first published 1808)), P.1
[vii] For a fuller discussion of ‘virtue signalling’ see https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/i-invented-virtue-signalling-now-its-taking-over-the-world/
[viii] Linda Colley Britons Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (Yale University Press 1992) P.353
[ix] Aphra Behn Oroonoko or the Royal Slave (Dover Thrift Editions, 2017 (first published London William Canning 1688)) P.10.
[x] JR Kerr-Ritchie Reflections on the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade Journal of African American History Volume 93 №4
[xi] Eric Williams Slavery and Capitalism (London 1943)
[xii] See, for example, Gad Heuman ‘The British West Indies’ in Andrew Porter, ed, The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford University Press 1999) P.470
[xiii] CLR James ‘The Black Jacobins’ (London Penguin 1938) P.9
[xiv] CLR James ‘The Black Jacobins’ (London Penguin 1938) P.9
[xv] Adam Hochschild Bury the Chains The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (London Macmillan 2005) P.281
[xvi] Galien Matthews Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolition Movement (Louisiana State University Press 2006)
[xvii] The Gentleman’s Magazine Vol 59 Jan-June (London April 1789) from the British Library collection
