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William Wilberforce
Speech to Parliament
on the horrors of the slave trade
(1789)
Born in 1759, died in 1833; elected to Parliament in 1780; began to agitate
against slavery in 1787; secured its abolition in 1807.
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In opening, concerning the nature of the slave trade, I need only observe
that it is found by experience to be just such as every man who uses his
reason would infallibly conclude it to be. For my own part, so clearly am I
convinced of the mischiefs inseparable from it, that I should hardly want
any further evidence than my own mind would furnish, by the most simple
deductions. Facts, however, are now laid before the House. A report has been
made by his majesty’s privy council, which, I trust, every gentleman has
read, and which ascertains the slave trade to be just as we know. What
should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a
slave trade with Africa? With a country vast in its extent, not utterly
barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a
slave trade would help their civilization? Is it not plain that she must
suffer from it; that civilization must be checked; that her barbarous
manners must be made more barbarous; and that the happiness of her millions
of inhabitants must be prejudiced with her intercourse with Britain? Does
not every one see that a slave trade carried on around her coasts must carry
violence and desolation to her very center? That in a continent just
emerging from barbarism, if a trade in men is established, if her men are
all converted into goods, and become commodities that can be bartered, it
follows they must be subject to ravage just as goods are; and this, too, at
a period of civilization, when there is no protecting legislature to defend
this, their only sort of property, in the same manner as the rights of
property are maintained by the legislature of every civilized country.
We see then, in the nature of things, how easily the practises of Africa are
to be accounted for. Her kings are never compelled to war, that we can hear
of, by public principles, by national glory, still less by the love of their
people. In Europe it is the extension of commerce, the maintenance of
national honor, or some great public object, that is ever the motive to war
with every monarch; but, in Africa, it is the personal avarice and
sensuality of their kings. These two vices of avarice and sensuality, the
most powerful and predominant in natures thus corrupt, we tempt, we
stimulate in all these African princes, and we depend upon these vices for
the very maintenance of the slave trade. Does the king of Barbessin want
brandy? He has only to send his troops, in the night-time, to burn and
desolate a village; the captives will serve as commodities, that may be
bartered with the British trader.
The slave trade, in its very nature, is the source of such kind of
tragedies; nor has there been a single person, almost, before the privy
council, who does not add something by his testimony to the mass of evidence
upon this point. Some, indeed, of these gentlemen, and particularly the
delegates from Liverpool, have endeavored to reason down this plain
principle; some have palliated it; but there is not one, I believe, who does
not more or less admit it. Some, nay most, I believe, have admitted the
slave trade to be the chief cause of wars in Africa.
Having now disposed of the first part of this subject, I must speak of the
transit of the slaves to the West Indies. This, I confess, in my own
opinion, is the most wretched part of the whole subject. So much misery
condensed in so little room is more than the human imagination had ever
before conceived. I will not accuse the Liverpool merchants. I will allow
them, nay, I will believe them, to be men of humanity; and I will therefore
believe, if it were not for the multitude of these wretched objects, if it
were not for the enormous magnitude and extent of the evil which distracts
their attention from individual cases, and makes them think generally, and
therefore less feelingly on the subject, they never would have persisted in
the trade. I verily believe, therefore, if the wretchedness of any one of
the many hundred negroes stowed in each ship could be brought before their
view, and remain within the sight of the African merchant, that there is no
one among them whose heart would bear it.
Let any one imagine to himself six or seven hundred of these wretches
chained two and two, surrounded with every object that is nauseous and
disgusting, diseased, and struggling under every kind of wretchedness! How
can we bear to think of such a scene as this? One would think it had been
determined to heap on them all the varieties of bodily pain, for the purpose
of blunting the feelings of the mind; and yet, in this very point (to show
the power of human prejudice), the situation of the slaves has been
described by Mr. Norris, one of the Liverpool delegates, in a manner which I
am sure will convince the House how interest can draw a film over the eyes,
so thick that total blindness could do no more; and how it is our duty
therefore to trust not to the reasonings of interested men, nor to their way
of coloring a transaction.
“Their apartments,” says Mr. Norris, “are fitted up as much for their
advantage as circumstances will admit. The right ankle of one, indeed, is
connected with the left ankle of another by a small iron fetter, and if they
are turbulent, by another on their wrists. They have several meals a
day—some of their own country provisions, with the best sauces of African
cookery; and by the way of variety, another meal of pulse, etc., according
to European taste. After breakfast they have water to wash themselves, while
their apartments are perfumed with frankincense and lime juice. Before
dinner they are amused after the manner of their country. The song and the
dance are promoted,” and, as if the whole were really a scene of pleasure
and dissipation, it is added that games of chance are furnished. “The men
play and sing, while the women and girls make fanciful ornaments with beads,
with which they are plentifully supplied.” Such is the sort of strain in
which the Liverpool delegates, and particularly Mr. Norris, gave evidence
before the privy council. What will the House think when, by the concurring
testimony of other witnesses, the true history is laid open? The slaves, who
are sometimes described as rejoicing at their captivity, are so wrung with
misery at leaving their country, that it is the constant practise to set
sail in the night, lest they should be sensible of their departure. The
pulse which Mr. Norris talks of are horse beans; and the scantiness of both
water and provision was suggested by the very legislature of Jamaica, in the
report of their committee, to be a subject that called for the interference
of Parliament.
Mr. Norris talks of frankincense and lime juice: when the surgeons tell you
the slaves are stored so close that there is not room to tread among them;
and when you have it in evidence from Sir George Young, that even in a ship
which wanted two hundred of her complement, the stench was intolerable. The
song and the dance are promoted, says Mr. Norris. It had been more fair,
perhaps, if he had explained that word “promoted.” The truth is, that for
the sake of exercise, these miserable wretches, loaded with chains,
oppressed with disease and wretchedness, are forced to dance by the terror
of the lash, and sometimes by the actual use of it. “I,” says one of the
other evidences, “was employed to dance the men, while another person danced
the women.” Such, then, is the meaning of the word “promoted”; and it may be
observed, too, with respect to food, that an instrument is sometimes carried
out in order to force them to eat, which is the same sort of proof how much
they enjoy themselves in that instance also.
As to their singing, what shall we say when we are told that their songs are
songs of lamentation upon their departure which, while they sing, are always
in tears, insomuch that one captain (more humane as I should conceive him,
therefore, than the rest) threatened one of the women with a flogging,
because the mournfulness of her son was too painful for his feelings. In
order, however, not to trust too much to any sort of description, I will
call the attention of the House to one species of evidence, which is
absolutely infallible. Death, at least, is a sure ground of evidence, and
the proportion of deaths will not only confirm, but, if possible, will even
aggravate our suspicion of their misery in the transit. It will be found,
upon an average of all ships of which evidence has been given at the privy
council, that exclusive of those who perish before they sail, not less than
twelve and one-half per cent. perish in the passage. Besides these, the
Jamaica report tells you that not less than four and one-half per cent. die
on shore before the day of sale, which is only a week or two from the time
of landing. One-third more die in the seasoning, and this in a country
exactly like their own, where they are healthy and happy, as some of the
evidences would pretend. The diseases, however, which they contract on
shipboard, the astringent washes which are to hide their wounds, and the
mischievous tricks used to make them up for sale, are, as the Jamaica report
says—a most precious and valuable report, which I shall often have to advert
to—one principal cause of this mortality. Upon the whole, however, here is a
mortality of about fifty per cent., and this among negroes who are not
bought unless quite healthy at first, and unless (as the phrase is with
cattle) they are sound in wind and limb.
When we consider the vastness of the continent of Africa; when we reflect
how all other countries have for some centuries past been advancing in
happiness and civilization; when we think how in this same period all
improvement in Africa has been defeated by her intercourse with Britain;
when we reflect that it is we ourselves that have degraded them to that
wretched brutishness and barbarity which we now plead as the justification
of our guilt; how the slave trade has enslaved their minds, blackened their
character, and sunk them so low in the scale of animal beings that some
think the apes are of a higher class, and fancy the orang-outang has given
them the go-by. What a mortification must we feel at having so long
neglected to think of our guilt, or attempt any reparation! It seems,
indeed, as if we had determined to forbear from all interference until the
measure of our folly and wickedness was so full and complete; until the
impolicy which eventually belongs to vice was become so plain and glaring
that not an individual in the country should refuse to join in the
abolition; it seems as if we had waited until the persons most interested
should be tired out with the folly and nefariousness of the trade, and
should unite in petitioning against it.
Let us then make such amends as we can for the mischiefs we have done to the
unhappy continent; let us recollect what Europe itself was no longer ago
than three or four centuries. What if I should be able to show this House
that in a civilized part of Europe, in the time of our Henry VII., there
were people who actually sold their own children? What if I should tell them
that England itself was that country? What if I should point out to them
that the very place where this inhuman traffic was carried on was the city
of Bristol? Ireland at that time used to drive a considerable trade in
slaves with these neighboring barbarians; but a great plague having infested
the country, the Irish were struck with a panic, suspected (I am sure very
properly) that the plague was a punishment sent from heaven for the sin of
the slave trade, and therefore abolished it. All I ask, therefore, of the
people of Bristol is, that they would become as civilized now as Irishmen
were four hundred years ago. Let us put an end at once to this inhuman
traffic—let us stop this effusion of human blood.
The true way to virtue is by withdrawing from temptation; let us then
withdraw from these wretched Africans those temptations to fraud, violence,
cruelty, and injustice, which the slave trade furnishes. Wherever the sun
shines, let us go round the world with him, diffusing our benevolence; but
let us not traffic, only that we may set kings against their subjects,
subjects against their kings, sowing discord in every village, fear and
terror in every family, setting millions of our fellow creatures a-hunting
each other for slaves, creating fairs and markets for human flesh through
one whole continent of the world, and, under the name of policy, concealing
from ourselves all the baseness and iniquity of such a traffic.
It will appear from everything which I have said, that it is not regulation,
it is not mere palliatives, that can cure this enormous evil. Total
abolition is the only possible cure for it. The Jamaica report, indeed,
admits much of the evil, but recommends it to us so to regulate the trade
that no persons should be kidnapped or made slaves contrary to the custom of
Africa. But may they not be made slaves unjustly, and yet by no means
contrary to the custom of Africa? I have shown they may, for all the customs
of Africa are rendered savage and unjust through the influence of this
trade; besides, how can we discriminate between the slaves justly and
unjustly made? or, if we could, does any man believe that the British
captains can, by any regulation in this country, be prevailed upon to refuse
all such slaves as have not been fairly, honestly, and uprightly enslaved?
But granting even that they should do this, yet how would the rejected
slaves be recompensed? They are brought, as we are told, from three or four
thousand miles off, and exchanged like cattle from one hand to another,
until they reach the coast. We see then that it is the existence of the
slave trade that is the spring of all this infernal traffic, and that the
remedy can not be applied without abolition.
And, sir, when we think of eternity, and of the future consequences of all
human conduct, what is there in this life that should make any man
contradict the dictates of his conscience, the principles of justice, the
laws of religion, and of God? Sir, the nature and all the circumstances of
this trade are now laid open to us; we can no longer plead ignorance, we can
not evade it; it is now an object placed before us, we can not pass it; we
may spurn it, we may kick it out of our way, but we can not turn aside so as
to avoid seeing it; for it is brought now so directly before our eyes that
this House must decide, and must justify to all the world, and to their own
consciences, the rectitude of the grounds and principles of their decision.
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