Thomas clarkson timeline thomas clarkson and the abolition of the slave trade

After Liverpool, Clarkson rode to Manchester. They invited Clarkson to speak at the Collegiate Church. Clarkson delivered a powerful and moving speech. He argued that Christianity preaches that ‘we should not do that to others, which we would be unwilling to have done unto ourselves’ yet the African slave ‘drinks at the cup of sorrow and drinks it at our hands’. Clarkson highlighted how thousands of Africans each year were being torn from their homeland, family and friends only to be forced into the degradation of being the ‘possession of a man to whom he never gave offence’. Clarkson gave specific examples from his own research into the cruel way in which slaves were treated. How inconsistent, he declared, to pray for God’s mercy on ourselves ‘who have no mercy upon others’. Clarkson ended by calling on the congregation to join the cause of abolition so that ‘the stain of the blood of Africa is not upon us’. When Manchester’s petition was sent to parliament it had been signed by nearly 11,000 people, more than a fifth of the town’s population.

By the time Clarkson returned to London he had been away for more that five months. He had inspired many people around the country to support the abolition cause. He had also collected the names of more than 20,000 seamen in the slave trade and he knew what had become of each one.

William Hackwood designed this famous medallion for the campaign. It was produced in jasperware by one of Britain’s leading industrialists, Josiah Wedgwood, who was a keen supporter of the campaign to end slavery. The medallion portrayed a kneeling African in chains framed with the words ‘Am I not a man and a brother? This motto became the rallying cry for the campaign. The image was distributed in thousands. Clarkson alone gave out 500 on his travels. The abolitionists also found that fashion promoted justice. The image was inlaid in gold on snuff-boxes and set into bracelets and hairpins. Perhaps parallels can be drawn with the wrist bands of 2005!

Meanwhile, Wilberforce was able to raise the issue of slavery with parliament; the order was given that the first slave-trade inquiry should be established. Some members of parliament responded enthusiastically. 2 MPs (William Morton Pitt and James Martin) joined the Committee. The abolitionists launched a propaganda campaign to try and raise support for the cause around the country. Clarkson’s work was reissued and Falconbridge’s account of his four sailing voyages was published. In addition, the Reverend John Newton wrote Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade, which was filled with powerful images of slaves packed as close as ‘books upon a shelf’, at the mercy of the drunken crews.

During May the issue of slavery and in particular conditions on the slave ship was a topic of hot debate. On 9 May, William Pitt described the slave trade as the most important subject ever raised in the House of Commons. William Dolben, MP for Oxford University, who had inspected a slave ship in the Thames, described the ‘crying evil’ of the Middle Passage, the horrors of slaves chained hand and foot, stricken with illness. He wanted to introduce a law that would improve conditions on the slave ships. During the inquiry that followed the House of Commons heard evidence from both sides for the next two weeks.

A witness for the slave trade described how ‘delightful’ the slave ships were, Robert Norris stated

‘[The slaves] had sufficient room, sufficient air, and sufficient provisions. When upon deck, they made merry and amused themselves with dancing… In short, the voyage from Africa to the West Indies was one of the happiest periods of a Negro’s life.’

The evidence provided by Clarkson and a detailed report Pitt had established to look into conditions on Liverpool slave ships told a very different story. Each slave had a five and a half foot by sixteen inch space to lie in, spent up to 16 hours of every 24 chained to his neighbour and after a small meal of yams and beans was forced to jump in his irons for exercise.

A law (The Dolben Act) was subsequently passed which fixed the number of slaves in proportion to the ship’s size. The abolitionists were hopeful that this was the first step towards banning the slave trade and that they would have achieved this aim by the end of 1789.

In the second half of 1788, Clarkson set about collecting more witnesses and evidence that he hoped would win the argument in parliament for abolition. He set out on another tour, covering 1600 miles in two months. At Plymouth he uncovered a key piece of evidence, the plan and section of a loaded slave ship. Clarkson reworked in London, applying the idea to the Brookes (a slave ship from Liverpool).

The plan shows how the enslaved Africans would have been positioned inside the hull of the ship. In 1788, Parliament tried to restrict the number of captured Africans that a ship could carry across the Atlantic. This famous diagram shows the slave ship Brookes carrying 454 Africans, which was its regulated number. This image was used to expose the appallingly cramped conditions below deck. In fact, the Brookes had carried as many as 609 Africans on earlier voyages. Despite the government’s intervention in the trade, the new restrictions were not actively enforced.

This shocking diagram was published in April 1789 and widely distributed. It was a powerful visual representation of the cramped conditions on the slave ships that still existed despite the new law. Wadstrom’s research (published in 1794) also made this point. He calculated that on a slave ship a man was given a space of 6 feet by 1 foot 4 inches; a woman 5 feet by 1 foot 4 inches and girls 4 feet 6 inches by 1 foot.