Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (147 page)

One Pennsylvania Friend at the heart of these discussions, Anthony Benezet, devoted himself to publicizing the Pennsylvania decision, and he drew on the transatlantic character of international Protestantism. His message was heard in the mother country - in particular, by an Anglican gentleman, Granville Sharp, who entered prolonged and enthusiastic correspondence with him. Sharp came to hate slavery as much as he hated Roman Catholicism, an equal threat to British liberty in his eyes, and he revealed a genius for organized campaigns against both.
¹³
Grandson of a High Church Archbishop of York who had been patron to John Wesley's father, Sharp was a prolific biblical critic, turning his scriptural scholarship to constructing a case against slavery which would have a biblical base. Selectively he gathered from scripture a message in favour of equality and freedom, looking past the Bible's package of assumptions about the inequality of society. Yet Sharp's greatest triumph came not actually through any biblical argument but by his success in backing an English lawsuit in 1772, 'Somersett's Case'. In the judgement on this case, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield found in favour of an escaped slave, James Somersett, against his master, a customs officer of Boston, Massachusetts. Mansfield refused to accept that the institution of slavery existing in eighteenth-century England could be linked to the historic legal status of serfdom or villeinage recognized in English common law: logically, therefore, slavery had no legal existence in England.
¹⁴
Thus the useful rigidity and traditionalism of English law became the basis for a swelling campaign against slavery, just as it had brought the Jews back to England in 1656 after three and a half centuries (see pp. 773-4).

Mansfield's judgement in Somersett's Case proclaimed that only a decision of Parliament could legalize modern slavery in Britain. Now it became the ambition of one of Sharp's fellow Evangelicals, William Wilberforce, to do precisely the opposite, and legislate first the British slave trade and then slavery out of existence throughout the growing British Empire. Wilberforce's campaigning energies and charisma made him the dominant figure in his circle of Evangelical reformers, who gained the nickname 'the Clapham Sect' from a village south of London which was then a pleasant rural home to Wilberforce and other wealthy Evangelicals. His struggle was long and bitter, but in 1807 he achieved his first goal. When he and his friends realized that the abolition of the slave trade had not led to the weakening of slavery as they had hoped, they widened their horizons to persuade the British Parliament to cut off the institution at its root. It was only after Wilberforce's retirement from Parliament that, in 1833, the old man heard his friends had won that second victory, receiving the news just three days before he died. Like Charles Darwin later, the often-reviled reformer was now given national honour by burial in Westminster Abbey.
¹⁵

The long struggle to abolish slavery remained throughout a curious collaboration of fervent Evangelicals, who were mostly otherwise extremely politically conservative, with radical children of the Enlightenment, many of whom had no great love of Christianity, though some were enthusiastic Unitarians (as Socinians were now more courteously known).
¹⁶
Such radicals saw an end to slavery as part of the war on oppression of which the French Revolution also formed a part. So in 1791, before that Revolution became a liability rather than a potential ally for English radicals, the adventurous Whig MP Charles James Fox - whose colourful private life certainly did not make him a natural ally for morally censorious Evangelicals - spoke forcefully in Parliament in support of one of Wilberforce's earlier unsuccessful motions against 'this shameful trade in human flesh'. 'Personal freedom,' he insisted, 'must be the first object of every human being . . . a right, of which he who deprives a fellow-creature is absolutely criminal'.
¹⁷

There has been nearly a century of argument as to whether slavery's abolition was merely a Machiavellian outcome of the West's realization that slavery was becoming an economic liability. It is understandable that descendants of enslaved Africans should tire of hearing complacent British repetition of the famous judgement by the Victorian historian of European ethical change, W. E. H. Lecky, that the 'unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations'. Yet after all the debate, and the research it engendered, Lecky seems vindicated: abolition was an act of moral revulsion which defied the strict commercial interests of European and anglophone nations.
¹⁸
Less frequently has it been recognized as one of the more remarkable turnarounds in Christian history: a defiance of biblical certainties, spearheaded by British Evangelicals who made it a point of principle to uphold biblical certainties. Many of their fellow Evangelicals berated them for their inconsistency and few of their allies in mainland European Protestantism showed much sympathy for their project.

It is true that other moral dimensions nuance Lecky's judgement. The ethical imperative in the circle of Sharp and Wilberforce was part of a new self-confidence and imperial assertiveness on the part of Britain, taking shape even as its North American empire was ripped in two. A direct outcome of the abolitionist movement was one of the earliest British colonies to extend the Crown's territorial ambitions beyond coastal trading forts outside America and India: Sierra Leone in West Africa. Inaugurated in 1792 after a badly conceived false start in the same area five years before, this was a cooperation between the indefatigable Evangelical abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, his ex-naval officer brother John and a West African - an Egba prince who in enslavement had taken the name Thomas Peters and then regained his freedom by fighting for the British in the American War of Independence. The venture tried to learn lessons from a second previous failed colony of 1775 on the ominously (though coincidentally) named Mosquito Coast of Central America. That had been a partnership between an English businessman and another formerly enslaved African-American, Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography had become a transatlantic best-seller, especially among Evangelicals, and who became one of the advisers to the new Sierra Leone scheme. The Mosquito Coast venture involved using enslaved Africans to make it commercially viable, with only a vague prospect that financial success would bring them freedom: that strategy was very far from abolitionism and the slaves sought to escape, all drowning in the attempt.
¹⁹

There was now no question but that the Sierra Leone colonists who started arriving in 1792 should be Africans to whom freedom had been restored, either liberated on the West African coast or shipped back from the Americas complete with Protestant Christian values. Thomas Peters had his own ideas as to what those values might be, and he had the temerity to demand more political rights for his black fellow settlers than Englishmen would have enjoyed back home. Against him were ranged the English directors of the Sierra Leone Company, who as in the Mosquito Coast venture linked 'the true principles of Commerce' to 'the introduction of Christianity and Civilization', and who crushed uprisings by kindred spirits to Peters after his early death.
²⁰
Yet Peters's fellow colonists who shared his spirit of independence and self-reliance had the advantage that the tropical climate made even shorter work of British administrators than it did of returned African-Americans. The new venture soon developed a hierarchical pyramid of status groups: Christians from the New World at the top, then West Africans liberated locally (the two groups together became known as the Krio) and finally the indigenous population, who, like the inhabitants of Canaan three millennia before, had not been given any say in God's territorial gift to these new Children of Israel. It was an unhealthy imbalance in which the seeds of modern troubles were sown for Sierra Leone; the later American initiative in founding an entirely independent West African state of Liberia (from 1822) suffered from the same problem.

Sierra Leone did not make money for its proprietors, but it did survive, a rich source of African Christian leadership for all West Africa, from the many Protestant denominations it hosted. Its Krio language, a creative development of English, soon served as a lingua franca throughout the region.
²¹
The colony was also an interesting sign to imperial strategists that European African colonial possessions might usefully extend beyond scattered coastal outposts. From 1808 Sierra Leone was a Crown Colony, base for a remarkable practical extension of the Parliamentary Act abolishing the slave trade, a British naval squadron which intercepted slave ships and freed their captives. The British government was not unaware that this was a useful part of the war effort against the commerce of the Napoleonic Empire, but the work did not stop with Napoleon's defeat. The navy now combined a moral campaign with the steady extension of British influence. Evangelicals had produced this result, and their continuing agitation sustained British commitment - which, perhaps surprisingly, extended to the British government bringing pressure to bear on Pope Gregory XVI: an Apostolic Letter in 1839 echoed the recent British condemnation of the slave trade.
²²
Out of this moral crusade emerged the potent idea that the British Crown was a partner with its subjects in the worldwide enterprise of spreading Christian civilization - a theme as useful to imperial subjects as to imperial government.
²³

A PROTESTANT WORLD MISSION: OCEANIA AND AUSTRALASIA

Rather separate from the abolitionist campaign, although likewise led by anglophone Evangelicals, was a sudden upwelling of commitment to worldwide mission. The Moravians had provided the precedent, while doing nothing to challenge slavery (see pp. 746-7); now a similar missionary fervour seized all the mainstream British Protestant Churches. The coincidental rapidity of the first moves is remarkable. Even a catalogue of dates and institutions provokes astonishment - the energetic (not to say driven) Rev. Thomas Coke appointed by the Wesleyan Conference in 1790 as general supervisor of Methodist world missions, a Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, a (Congregational-based) London Missionary Society in 1795, an (Anglican Evangelical) Church Missionary Society in 1799, a British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804, an American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810.

This activity had a complementary relationship with that feature of British Protestantism unique in Europe, its large sector of Churches separate from the established Churches. Their century of vigorous growth in the United Kingdom now marched in step with the growth of British missionary activity. The creation of institutions was presaged by a decade of thought and planning, so that between 1783 and 1792 public interest was generated with manifestos for missions in Africa and British India and the Caribbean by leaders as prominent as John Wesley as well as the then lesser-known Anglican chaplain in Calcutta David Brown and the downright obscure and uneducated Baptist shoemaker William Carey.
²⁴
Equal excitement was aroused by the voyages of Captain James Cook in the Pacific Ocean, which Cook assiduously promoted by publishing the journals of his admittedly extraordinary feats of exploration and mapping. His dramatic death in the Hawaiian islands on his third voyage in 1779 only added to his celebrity.

But the 1790s added a new urgency. The events of the French Revolution suggested that a century of Evangelical expectations for the coming end might at last be fulfilled. Joanna Southcott's sensational public career (see pp. 828-9), which began in the year that the Baptist Missionary Society was founded, was just one symptom of the mood - she was a fierce and vocal opponent of the Revolution.
²⁵
In 1798-9 the French revolutionaries' imprisonment of the Pope and his death in exile were icing on the apocalyptic cake. As is usually the case with such fervour, the passing of 1800 with relatively little obvious divine intervention did not dampen enthusiasm. It was clear that Evangelicalism was making great strides among Protestant Christians; the new propensity for the expression of emotion in Romanticism did nothing to lower the devotional temperature. By 1830, it has been plausibly suggested, around 60 per cent of British Protestants were involved in some variety of Evangelical religious practice, while between 1800 and 1840 a hundred books were published in English discussing the signs of the times, eagerly debated in a new crop of periodicals with titles like
The Morning Watch
, organizations like the Prophecy Investigation Society and regular Evangelical conferences.
²⁶
Apocalyptic excitement was no longer common among the hierarchy of the established Church, so English bishops persisted in showing themselves almost as reluctant to get involved in missionary activity as they were resistant to invitations to open Joanna Southcott's box. It was not until 1841 that the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, an aged High Churchman of distinctly old-fashioned type, finally accepted an ex-officio relationship with the Church Missionary Society, thirteen years into his archiepiscopate.

By then it would have been foolish in the extreme for the Primate of All England to ignore the anglophone worldwide mission, which paralleled Britain's political and economic position in the world. With its navy's global reach and a network of commerce feeding its then unequalled capacity in industrial production and engineering, Britain was at the height of its power - long before its territorial empire had reached its greatest extent, which was in fact not until the 1920s, in an age when Britain's real power was on the wane. There was a complex relationship between mission and this imperial expansion. In recent years, it has been common among some of the historians who know the subject best to play down the links between missionary work and colonial expansion, particularly in the British imperial story.
²⁷
Certainly a majority of British missionaries were members of Dissenting Churches or Methodists, and they were unlikely to have an automatic sympathy with the aims of the British Establishment. Almost everywhere missionaries of whatever denomination preceded Crown colonial interventions by several decades, and Anglicans as much as others might resent official interference threatening the delicate web of local relationships which they had built up.
²⁸
Yet the fact remains that almost everywhere where British missions flourished, British official hegemony eventually followed.