y Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’ Slaves Bice cin aLCeST eeeCe pe BAURDO Ui eee SCA To Ea Eto Cane) PCAC Oe an agINTRODUCTION: TWELVE MEN IN A PRINTING SHOP a famous event or resident is commemorated by a blue and white glazed plaque, none marks this spot. All you can see today, after you leave the Bank station of the London Underground, walk several blocks, and then take a few steps into a courtyard, are a few low, nondescript office buildings, an ancient pub, and, on the site itself, 2 George Yard, a glass and steel high-rise, Nothing remains of the bookstore and printing shop that once stood here, or recalls the spring day more than two hundred years ago when a dozen people—a somber-looking crew, most of them not removing their high-crowned black hats—filed through its door and sat down for a meeting. Cities build monuments to kings, prime ministers, and generals, not to citi- zens with no official position who once gathered in a printing shop. Yet what these citizens began rippled across the world and we feel its aftereffects still. It is no wonder that they won the admiration of the first and greatest student of what we now call civil society, The result of the series of events begun that afternoon in London, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, was “absolutely without precedent... . If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary.” To understand how momentous was this beginning, we must pic- ture a world in which the vast majority of people are prisoners. Most of them have known no other way of life. They are not free to live or S TRANGELY, ina city where it seems that on almost every blockBoe eee 3 * 2a), INTRODUCTION ie “ho ge oa $ go-where they want. They plant, cultivate, and harvest most of 1), eacth’s major crops.-They earni no money from their labor. Their wo), often lasts twelve or fourteen hours a day. Many are sibject to cry) © Such a world would, of course, be unthinkable today. ..: ,whippings o other punishments if they do not work hard enough They die young. They are not.chained or bound most of the time, by, ‘ they are in bondage, part of a global economy based on forced labo, But this was the world—our world — just: two centuries ago, and to most people then, it was unthinkable that it could ever be otherwise At the end of the eighteenth century, well over three: quarters ° al people alive were in bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity .. of striped prison unifornis, but of various systems of slavery or serf _. whipped, or sent to the » dom. The age was a high point in the trade in which close to eighty thousand chained and shackled Africans were loaded onto slave s ips and transported to the New World.each year. In parts of the Americas, slaves far outnumbered free persons. The same was true in parts of Af. rica, and it was from these millions of indigenous slaves that African chiefs and slave dealers drew most of the men and women they sold to Europeans and Arabs sailing their ships along the continent’s coasts, African slaves were spread throughout the Islamic world, and the O toman Empire enslaved other peoples as well. In India and other parts » of Asia, tens of millions of farmworkers were in outright slavery, and others were peasants in debt bondage that tied them and their labor to a particular landlord as harshly as any slave was bound to.a plantation owner in South Carolina or Georgia. Native Americans turned pris- oners of war into slaves and sold them, both to neighboring tribes and to the Europeans now pushing their way across the continent. In Rus- sia the majority of the population were serfs, often’ bought, sold, army at the will of their owners, The era was one when, as the historian Seymour Drescher puts it, “freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.” This world of bondage seemed all the more normal then, because anyone looking back in time would have seen little but other slave systems, The an- cient Greeks had slaves; the Romans had an estimated two to three million of them in Italy‘alone; the Incas and Aztecs had slaves; the sa- cred texts of most major reli t= igions took slavery for granted. Slavery had existed before money or writ . ‘ written law.TWELVE MEN IN A PRINTING SHOP / 3 One measure of how much slavery petvaded the world of the eigh- teenth century is the traffic on the Atlantic Ocean. We usually think of the Atlantic of this period as being filled with shiploads of hopeful white immigrants. But they were only a minority of those carried to the New World. So rapidly were slaves worked to death, above all on the brutal sugar plantations of the Caribbean, that between 1660 and 1807, ships brought well over three times as many Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans. And, of course, it was not just to British territories that slaves were sent. From Senegal to Virginia, Sierra Leone to Charleston, the Niger delta to Cuba, Angola to Brazil, and on dozens upon dozens of crisscrossing paths taken by thousands of vessels, the Atlantic was a conveyor belt to early death in the fields of an immense swath of plantations that stretched from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro and beyond. : Looking back today, what is even more astonishing than the perva- siveness of slavery in the late 1700s is how swiftly it died. By the end of the following century, slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost everywhere. The antislavery movement had achieved its goal in little more than one lifetime. This is the story of the first, pioneering wave of that campaign. Every American schoolchild learns how slaves fled Southern planta- tions, following the North Star on the Underground Railroad. But England is where the story really begins, and for decades it was where American abolitionists looked for inspiration and finally for proof that the colossally difficult task of uprooting slavery could be accom- plished: If we were to fix one point when the crusade began, it would. be the late afternoon of May 22, 1787, when twelve determined men ‘sat down in the printing shop at 2 George Yard, amid flatbed presses, ' wooden trays of type, and large sheets of freshly printed book pages, - to begin one of the most ambitious and brilliantly organized citizens’ movements of all time. . A long chain of events, large and small, led to that meeting, ". Perhaps the most crucial moment came when Thomas Clarkson, a twenty-five-year-old Englishman on his way to London, paused, dismounted from his horse, and sat down at the roadside, lost in thought. Many months later, he would be the principal organizer of the gathering at George Yard, Red-haired, dressed in black, he was the ~PEE ae 4/ INTRODUCTION youngest of those who entered the shop that day, perhaps duckin,,, | head slightly as he came through the doorway, for he was a ful inches taller than the average Englishman of his time. In the yey come, his sixteen-hour-a-day campaigning against slavery would 1, him by horseback on a thirty-five-thousand-mile odyssey, from wi), front pubs to an audience with an emperor, from the decks of ;, ships to parliamentary hearing rooms. More than once people w., threaten to kill him, and ona Liverpool pier in the midst of a stor, group of slave ship officers would nearly succeed. Almost forgor. today, he remains one of che towering figures in the history of hur, rights. Although we will not meet him until Part IL of this book, |), its central character. There are many others as well, most of whom were not ar | meeting that day. John Newton was a slave ship captain who wo, later write the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Olaudah Equiano was a ; sourceful slave who earned his freedom, spoke out for others in bor: age, and reached tens of thousands of readers with his life sty Granville Sharp, a musician, pamphleteer, and all-round ecceniy, rescued a succession of blacks in England from being returned to s| ery in the Americas. A London dandy named James Stephen fled \. the West Indies to escape an intricately tangled love life, and then wa transformed when some slaves he saw in a Barbados courtroom wer sentenced to a punishment he found almost unimaginable. A col league of his became the only abolitionist leader who ever crossed «/) Adlantic ona slave ship, taking notes in Greek letters to disguise them from the eyes of prying crewmen, Later in time, another key figure was a Quaker widow whose passionate stand against all compromise helped reignite a movement in the doldrums. And one was the leader of history's largest slave revolt, which defeated the armies of Europes two most powerful empires. The British abolitionists were shocked by what they came to learn about slavery and the slave trade. They were deeply convinced that they lived in a remarkable time that would see both evils swept from the face of the earth, Like anyone who wages such a fight, they discov- ered that injustice does not vanish so easily. But their passion and op- timism are still contagious and still relevant to our times, when, in s°TWELVE MEN IN A PRINTING SHOP / 5 many parts of the world, equal rights for all men and women seem far distant. The movement they forged is a landmark for an additional reason. There is always something mysterious about human empathy, and when we feel it and when we dont. Its sudden upwelling at this par- ticular moment caught everyone by surprise. Slaves and other subju- gated people have rebelled throughout history, but the campaign in England was something never seen before: it was the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’ rights. And most startling of all, the rights of people of another color, on another continent. No one was more taken aback by this than Stephen Fuller, the London agent for Ja- maica’s planters, an absentee plantation owner himself and a central. figure in the proslavery lobby. As tens of thousands of protesters signed petitions to Parliament, Fuller was amazed that these were “stating no grievance or injury of any kind or sort, affecting the Peti- tioners themselves.” His bafflement is understandable. He was seeing something new in history. At times, Britons even seemed to be organizing against their own self-interest. From Sheffield, famous for making scissors, scythes, knives, and razors, 769 metalworkers petitioned Parliament in 1789 against the slave trade. “Cutlery wares . . . being sent in considerable quantities to the Coast of Africa . . . as the price of Slaves—your peti- tioners may be supposed to be prejudiced in their interests if the said trade in Slaves should be abolished. But your petitioners having al- ways understood that the natives of Africa have the greatest aver- sion to foreign Slavery . . . consider the case of the nations of Africa as their own.” For fifty years, activists in England worked to end slavery in the British Empire. None of them gained a penny by doing so, and their eventual success meant a huge loss to the imperial economy. Scholars estimate that abolishing the slave trade and then slavery cost the Brit- ish people 1.8 percent of their annual national income over more than half a century, many times the percentage most wealthy countries today give in foreign aid. The abolitionists succeeded because they mastered one challenges'@ J INTRORUCTION -,°s, e who cares about social-and’ economic jUstig drawing connections between the near and che distant. We have lon, lived in a world where everyday objects embody labor in anoth,, < corner of the earth. Often we do, not know where the things ,, use come from, or the working conditions of those who made then, "Were the shoes or shirt you're wearing, made by children in an Indon, ”. sian sweatshop? Or by prison labor in China? What pesticides w.., breathed in, by the Latin American laborers who. picked the fruit ,, your table? And do you even know in what country te innards ar your computer were assembled? The eighteenth century had its oy, booming version of globalization, and at its core was the Atlany;, trade in slaves and in the goods they produced, But in England jts¢) there were no caravans:of chained captives, no whip-wielding oye, seers on horseback stalking the rows of sugar cane, The abolitionis;, first job was to make Britons understand, what lay. behind the sug, they ate, the tobacco they smoked, the coffee they drank. One thing more makes these men. and women from the age of wigs, swords, and stagecoaches seem surprisingly contemporary. Thi, small group of people not only helped to end. one of the worst o/ human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every-important tool used by citizens’ movements in * .. democratic countries today. Think of what you're likely to find in your mailbox—or electronic mailbox—over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national ¢nvironmental, group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper. A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A‘poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore. A plea that-you write your ” fepresentative in Congress or Parliament, to vote for that Guatemalan See coffee boycott bill. A “report card” on how your legislators have voted on ‘these and similar issues. A newsletter from the group organizing ~..support for'the grape pickers or the coffee workers. *. Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stit . people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy: Two and a half centuries. ago, few people assumed this. When we + that still faces anyonTWELVE MEN IN A PRINTING SHOP / 7, wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or per- fected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in. 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and in- sisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire's economy would collapse. The parliamentarian Edmund Burke, for example, opposed slavery but thought that the prospect of ending even just the Atlantic slave trade was “chimerical.” Within a few short years, however; the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a'central committee in London. More than 300,000 Brit- ons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever re- ceived on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. For reasons we will see, a ban did not take effect for some years to come, and British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe's most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back. “Never doubt,” said Margaret Mead, “that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” This book is about one such group. Their story is not a simple one, but a ragged and untidy epic that did not * unfold in the orderly way they hoped for. It would sprawl across decades and continents, encompassing not just the long Atlantic traf- fic in slaves and the British slave colonies of the Caribbean, but also threads that stretched to unexpected places as far off as New York, Nova Scotia, and an improbable Utopian colony on the coast of Af tica, It would be filled with dashed hopes and wrohg turnings. It would become interwoven with great historical currents which, on that afternoon in the George Yard printing shop in 1787, no one fore- saw: above all the dreams of equality unleashed by the French Revolu-8 / INTRODUCTION tion, and a series of ever-larger sla i i i ger slave revolts that shook the Brit; Pee made clear that if the slaves were not Giudticipated mig t free themselves, The stage on which British slavery : 7 at last died was a vast one. We must begin by visiting — : : celeste d of bon ich, to a citize! i us looked as if it would endure for all ae naib ctgeteeathce "To the British abolitionists, the challenge of ending slavery in a world that considered it fully normal was as daunting as it seems today when we consider challenging the entrenched wrongs of our own age: the vast gap between rich and poor nations, the relentless spread of nuclear weapons, the multiple assaults on the earth, air, and water that must support future generations, the habit of war. None of these problems will be solved overnight, or perhaps even in the fifty years it took to end British slavery. But they will not be solved ar all unless people see them as both outrageous and solvable, just as slavery» was felt to . kind of faith. They ‘ +366 / ERILOGUE ‘i be by the twelve men who gathered in James é inting shop in George Yard on May 22, 1787. a ide twelve were deeply religious, and the twenty-sey., Allo! re black clerical garb. But they also shared , believed that because human beings had a ca ed ing of others, exposing the truth would mo clearly of opinion,” Granville Sharp Wrote “that the nature of the slave-trade Needs ilipg, "Yea. old Clarkson wo! tig to care about the sufferi people to action. “We are to a friend later that yeat, only to be known to be detested.” Clarkson, writing of this ‘enon mous evil,” said chat he “was sure chat it was only necessary for the in. habitants of this favoured island to know it, to feel a just indignation against it.” It was this faith that led him to buy handcuffs, shackles, and thumbscrews to display to the people he met on his travels, Ang that led him to mount his horse again and again to scour the country for witnesses who could tell Parliament what life was like on the slave ships and the plantations. The riveting parade of firsthand testimony he and his colleagues put together in the Abstract of the Evidence and countless other documents is one of the first great flowerings of a very modern belief: that the way to stir men and women to action is not by biblical argument, bur through the vivid, unforgettable description of acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings. The aboli- tionists placed their hope not in sacred texts, but in human empathy. We live with that hope still.a * e/ Aye. phone: “DIS gfellow Londoners would’ve guessed that Gran i Shang skilled musician and accomplished attorney— was about to @hange the world. Nor did anyone suspect that a group of religious outsiders would hold unseen powers, or that a small AA-like group would change the laws of the greatest em- pire of the time. As Adam Hochschild describes in his book Bury the Chains, it all started in 1765. Granville Sharp's life wasn’t exactly ordinary— he played the clarinet, flute, oboe, kettle drums, and harp in a twelve-member family orchestra that often performed on a float- ing barge. Sharp wasn’t really looking for a cause, but a causeTHE STARFISH AND THe 9 Pip, ER of Jonathan Strong, 2 sixteen-yean 1 to death by his master, But Strom, al help from Sharp’ brother, a 0 found bim 1? the form i e who was nearly beater m . vive and received medic su was a doctor. Strong eventually h making a : » oro idered his mastets Pp wo ye later, nOW healthy and able ¢ dit : to reclaim the young ™O** Sharp was indignant at the IMjusticg. How could Jonathan Strong; who ball SSE 2 SEER tina to such a will to make it, be considered mere property? He had seed wetting © help Strong and agreed to represent him in court, The case went down to the wire: Strong was about to he shipped to the Americas to be sold when Sharp succeeded in winning his freedom. The process changed Sharp forever, Soon more slaves were seeking his counsel, and he often found him. self in court fighting for their rights, He became determined to abolish slavery. Sharp’ views put him in a tiny minority. Most people saw nothing wrong with slavery, a practice that was older than the Roman empire. Not only did people support slavery, but big in- dustry was behind it as well. At the time, the sugar business was one of the biggest in the world; revenues from sugar production dwarfed those of most other industries. Sugar was huge, and it depended on slavery for its survival. When Sharp wrote pam- pales about the mistreatment of slaves aboard transport ships, Big Sugar declared that the journey was the happiest time in a0 African person’: life. When abolitionists organized sugar boy- cotts, the industry warned ‘es ae people that not eating sugar was bad sealed and, with the help of Sharp ang iS better life for himself. But he Was stil) perty. When the master found Stns 6 sw attempted live,EGS On FIVE L on gt! oo" tecth. To say that Sharp had an uphill battle ahead of is a understatement. when Sharp started his campaign, he didn’t have access to the owerfull elite. His cause went against public sentiment, and he « going against big business interests. But he started a crusade nonetheless. He continued defending slaves’ rights in court, wrote and gistributed abolitionist literature, and talked about slavery to ’ eryone he met. ‘After eighteen years, Sharp had made some progress on his campaigns, but things really started to take off when he turned to the Quakers. Now, in eighteenth-century London, the Quak- ers were viewed in the same way that the Hare Krishna are viewed today. They were a marginalized religion, often mocked for their peculiarities (like refusing to take their hats off when they greeted others and calling people “thou” instead of “you”). Unlike the Hare Krishna, however, the Quakers had always been nonhierarchical, shunning priests and other higher-ups. Quaker meetings began in silence, and whichever congregant was moved to do so spoke for as long as he or she wanted. They believed that all people have an “inner light” and should be treated as equals, and they were therefore staunch opponents of slavery. Al- though Sharp wasn’t a Quaker himself, he joined a small Quaker group. It was organized as a circle, the first of five important foundations of a decentralized organization. A decentralized organization stands on five legs. As with the starfish, it can lose a leg or two and still survive. But when you have all the legs working together, a decentralized organization can really take off.t LEG 4: The Preexisting Network The Quakers bad litle political power or influence and wer, * marginalized group: But their. marginalization ultimately gay vy aphe Quakers a different kind of pov ahi sh mene a, mi forced to form thelr own “culture, business rela. wf Siders, they were tionships, and community Here was a robust network of people «who lived together, conducted business with one another, and ei shared a common belief system. Put together a close-knit com- munity with shared value and add a belief that everyone’s equal, and what do you get? entealijation. The Quakers*werent _ just decentralized themselves: they served asthe decentufilized plat- form upon which the antislavery movermeniiayds built, This piggy- backing effect enabled the abolitionist movement to take off. The Quakers had over twenty thousand members in England -Alone. They were already well versed in working together ino cles and shared a common ideology. For eighteen yea"s, Sharp went around England trying to win over the public and the courts. But without an army, the effort was quixotic. It w* m » ———___ 6non ON FIVE LEGS sgicult t build a brand-new decentralizeg organiz: cally with the vast majority of people sp ation, espe. the Quakers gave the movement a platform, Almost every decentralized organization that hasamai was Jaunched from a preexisting platform. Bill W. ee . i of AA, drew upon the Oxford Group, an independent pee movement started by a renegade Lutheran minister. The dee ttng slavery. But t big Group had established circles and even a six-step program for re- covery: Bill W. changed the six steps into twelve, borrowed the methodology, and launched his first AA circle. . in entrance into a preexisting network isn’t as simple as jud@showing up with a good idea. It might have been easier for Sharp if the Quakers had-been centralized. He could have met with the leaders and convinced them to mobilize their fol- lowers and engageythem j aptislavery campaigns. But central- ized organizagionpit pe od platforms. For one thing, if orders come’ from abgyer: thet ership might follow, but they won't ° be inspired to, gpiv@it their all. Second, leaders in top-down orga- ‘nizations, at to control what’s happening, thereby limiting sreativieg hind, and most important, centralized organizations - arent, vet Bp to launch decentralized movements. Without cir- cles, thay jgn’t the infrastructure for people to get involved and . jrlake ownéship of ea . : Decentralized Naty however, provide circles and an ém- Powered membership afid typically have a higher tolerance for arge, Sharp had to rely 07 , innovation. But without a person in ch: Personal connections with the members. Though not 2 = ideas himself, Sharp didn’t judge the Quakers, nor did he are i On them. Instead, he slowly gained their ust ae a to Wpically, it takes the special skills of a catalyst likey A ork. But the Internet, a5 we've seen, change . SS 's day, decentralized organizations worg 7 Very thing, In Shar m was difficult, but today the Interne, ay ang rance into the! he back of which a wide Variety g 8 ay St. ent an open platform a ched. The Internet is a breegi organizations can be Jaun: “fch - ing un and launching pad for new starfish organiza tons. Skype, Mee and craigslist are among the many decentralized or acai that have been launched atop the Internet. i" The implications of the Internet for decentralization ate py found. For centuries, people would start decentralizeg ay 0. tions, but because a platform like the Quakers was rativy organizations remained both scarce and largely social, posed to profit-driven. The Internet not only makes jt easier people to communicate but provides a fertile ground fo of new decentralized organizations. bess of the ling and the platform it provides that we'réSeeing'a Tevolution, Even with the help of the Quakér Pitform, Sharp Could no have completely abolished slavery without the 4fth leg. Th ‘he was a passionate ‘Gralyst, Sharp needed another Person t arfish 12a. these So T a hos ough © ex. * ecute on the vision. Someone like Thomas Clarkson, . . ¢ ; % 5 Me e@ * ‘ LEG 5: The Champion ae ’ $ Oy In 1785 Thomas Clarkson entered an abolitionist essay contest, * His main motivation was to win the prize, but in researching the br, he was more and more bothered by what he learned: how abhorrent the conditions were aboard transport ships and how masters dehumanized and mistreated their so-called property. ¥ * ‘NG ON FIVE LEGS ganol on began to sympathize with the aboliti a pe won the contest, he developed the ze ig fight slavery. Clarkson met Sharp, and the two b:, was the visionary, Clarkson was the imple © hit it off if hat we call the “champion,” Menter, Clark. Onist Ideole, ss BY AL. elf nd drive to ac sharP son was W’ Z . ‘A champion is relentless in Promoting new j ie charismatic, but champions take it to the how atlas yt charisma, like that of the Nant’ans, has 4 Vel. A cata. nt ere and natiralk; --.... Subtlety ¢, :.on brought to the arp) formed a twelt:- ’e non-Quakers. Th e made by constE LEGS did. He was the only member of the cj json : . cist - jssue full-time. He spent sixteen_ of iraveled up and down the British | ao Clarkson dedicated his life to the eats ce from twenty thousand seamen, "debates, published newsletters, and ic — a who Worked 'Ys on the Cause sles. For the next sixty Movement. He callketey - He Participated in pub- made buttons, He met im because he Wasn't a esiden ch O jnion-makers, who respected h oe He even lobbied Parliament. ‘qyhenever he entered a new town, Clarkson helped form an abolitionist circle. The network was gaining strength. As peo- ple Jearned about Clarkson's message, slavery became a hot topic. Slowly, he started winning over the hearts and minds of the public. / a In 1833, years before its abolition in America, slavery was outlawed in England. Although Sharp was the catalyst of the movement—or rather, because he was a catalyst—he has remained absent from. ttiost history texts. Clarkson was soon forgotten awh 2g" Credit for the abolition of slavery was attributed to William Wilberforce, ‘a politician who was the movement’s ally and spokesman in Parliament. When Wilberforce died, his sons glo- tified him while bashing Clarkson. The leaders of the decen- tralized movement never bothered securing recognition for themselves, and failing to understand the power of a starfish or- ganization, people credited the success of the movement to 2 Politician,