Storming the Gates of Paradise (30 page)

Some activists are born into their disposition and vocation, but many of the most passionate lead ordinary lives until some injustice or atrocity strikes them like lightning and they are reborn dedicated. Clarkson was such an activist, and, like Saint Paul on the way to Damascus, he even had a transformative moment: riding to London, he got off his horse and sat down “disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.”

With luck and dedication, he became that person. His movements and contacts among slave-ship doctors as well as theologians, in Liverpool as well as London, amount to a network whose complexity is comparable to some of Lombardi’s diagrams. Like most high-profile activists, he had a committee behind him—nine Quakers, Granville Sharp, and another Anglican—with whom he founded what was almost unprecedented then though common now, a nongovernmental organization, an NGO. (He also circulated the famous diagram of slaves packed into the hull of a ship that his Quaker colleagues published as a poster—a diagram still widely known and one of the great visual icons of inhumanity of all time.)

At various moments during the antislavery campaigns, there were widespread petitions to Parliament, at a time when petitioning was one of the few rights available to ordinary citizens; sugar boycotts, since sugar was the principal West Indies slave product; gatherings of local antislavery groups and sympathetic
Parliamentarians—all the accoutrements, as Hochschild points out, of later human rights movements. Chief among the sympathetic Parliamentarians was the wealthy, pious William Wilberforce, who did not support labor organizing and other extensions of rights and powers to the underclasses but devoutly opposed slavery. (In the interim, he argued, the whipping of slaves should not be abolished, but rather should be done only at night: some compromise is strategic, whereas some—like the Democrats looking for a nicer version of the war—is moral compromise.) Timid and conventional, Wilberforce made an odd pairing with the radical, far-ranging Clarkson, but they remained friends for life.

Compromise ran all through this movement, or rather through some of its members, while others were ardent revolutionists, eager to see all the rights of man—and, when women took over leadership in the 1820s, of women—granted. In this movement and any other, the utility of compromise is an arguable point (or one can argue instead for a kind of symbiosis of unbending activists and back-room-dealing ones, whereby the revolutionists extend the argument and make the reformers look reasonable—which is how the Sierra Club often looks at groups like Earth First!—and, in due time, even revolutionists come to look reasonable, as abolitionists did once they had won).

For example, the movement long campaigned against the slave trade rather than against the existence of slavery itself in the British Empire, on the grounds that it was a more winnable battle—and it was. (British sugar plantations were so energetically murderous that they required constant replenishment of the slave population from Africa, which is why it looked as though British slavery, unlike slavery in the United States, could be undone simply by closing down the maritime trade in human beings—that is, the supply of fresh slaves.) The struggle against the slave trade was won in 1807, but the abolition of slavery took more than another quarter century and even then limped forward with a six-year interim period in which the slaves’ labor was somehow to further compensate their masters, who had already been compensated in cash for loss of ownership of their fellow human beings. The most radical antislavery activist, Elizabeth Heyrick, had long before suggested that it was the slaves who were due compensation for their lives and labor. Still, the antislavery movement kept its eyes on the
prize, clear that it was more important to free the slaves by any means necessary than to punish slavery’s perpetrators.

Clarkson and his colleagues built a network consciously and conscientiously, recognizing that in doing so they were laying the foundations for the undoing of slavery. It stretched from the vast numbers of ordinary citizens who signed petitions and followed boycotts to the sympathetic witnesses who brought information back from Africa for what were, in essence, the first official human rights hearings in history, to the slaves themselves who turned up in London to testify or rose up in the Caribbean. (One of the things that distinguished the British abolition movement from the American was the fierce, effective slave revolts that terrified slaveholders and played a role on the road to abolition.) More fortuitous, or fortunate, or mysterious is the string of coincidences that brought the
Zong
to trial, the trial to Equiano’s attention, Equiano into friendship with Sharp, Sharp to write to Peckard, Peckard to set the Latin prize topic as slavery, and Clarkson to be as inspired in his Latin as passionate in his conscience. It’s one of those for-want-of-a-nail conundrums: how would it have come about had any element been absent?

Clarkson shows up on the periphery of other histories and other networks. In the 1790s, he moved to England’s Lake District and became close friends with a poet who had also written a gold-medal-winning composition on slavery at Cambridge, this time an ode in Greek in 1792: the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Clarkson’s wife became Dorothy Wordsworth’s close friend and key correspondent, and with this leap from the advancement of human rights to the advancement of British poetry, Hochschild bumps into a dizzyingly broad network of radical ideas stretching from the French Revolution to the vast slave revolution against the French in Haiti.

At that moment, some sense of what it means to be human was shifting, and the antislavery movement was part of that shift, as was the Romantic movement,
with its cultivation of introspective awareness and its enthusiasm for liberation and revolution. Clarkson turns up briefly in Richard Holmes’s Coleridge biography as someone who supported Coleridge in the depths of his opium addiction, while Wilberforce was close friends with Wordsworth’s kindest uncle. Wordsworth himself wrote a sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian slave uprising, and William Blake and J. M. W. Turner both addressed slavery in their visual art (the moral if not the aesthetic ancestors of Lombardi). Others, such as the Wedgwood family, link the antislavery and poetry movements while branching into the sciences, the invention of photography, and beyond.

Hochschild’s account of all this is certainly testimony not only to the smallness of Britain’s intelligentsia then but also to the largeness of ideas about human freedom that were moving through and then beyond these networks, the ideas and passions that constitute the atmosphere of an age. Of all the networks he deals with, this one made up of ideas and ethical stirrings is the most important and the most nebulous. The changed spirit and beliefs that link these people are explicable up to a point and then ultimately mysterious. Why is it that suddenly slavery, which had existed in one form or another throughout history, became urgently intolerable not only to the slaves but to privileged people an ocean away from most of the suffering in Africa and the Americas? What made the
Zong’s
first mate testify against his captain about the murder of those slaves? What made a Cambridge student abandon his career in the church and give his life over to a cause? What made tens or hundreds of thousands of anonymous Britons give up sugar and take up letter-writing and committee meetings? The networks can be traced, but the stirrings remain mysterious.

Without popular opinion at least periodically rising to meet them, Clarkson and the Quakers would have been just eccentrics and historical footnotes, the rebellious slaves a sad side story, rather than begetters of a new era.
Bury the Chains
quotes Wilberforce as writing in his diary, “How popular Abolition is, just now! God can turn the hearts of men.” But it’s clear that it was other men and women, uprisings and revolts, books and pamphlets that did the turning, that the change was mysterious, magnetic, or catalytic, but far from divine.

In both Britain and the United States, women who became involved in the antislavery movement began to question the enslavement of their gender, and so goes another long trajectory of links and steps in the expansive history of human rights these past two centuries. I have been reading another book lately, my friend Susan Schwartzenberg’s
Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of Disability
. The book traces a group of Seattle-area mothers from the birth of their mentally disabled children to the discovery that their children were denied access to public education to those mothers’ engenderment of an educational rights movement. That movement, with interim victories in Washington State, culminated in the 1975 IDEA—Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—some decades after these women decided to change the world to make room in it for children like theirs, and not quite two centuries after those nine Quakers and Clarkson met to launch a human rights movement. The two stories are akin, with initial private moments of realization, the building of public associations and communities, and eventually the overhauling of society.
Bury the Chains
is a kind of template for how the world gets changed, sometimes, for the better. Hochschild’s book, like his
King Leopold’s Ghost
before it, often reads like an exciting novel, as one character chases another, or an idea, or a ballot issue across the years. But it pauses periodically to take in the larger landscape of change; its original subtitle was
The First International Human Rights Movement
.

The book begins with a kind of trumpet cry:

To understand how momentous was this beginning, we must picture 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 go where they want. . . . They die young. They are not chained or bound most of the time, but they are in bondage, part of a global economy based on forced labor. Such a world would, of course, be unthinkable today. But that 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 of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity of striped prison uniforms, but of various systems of slavery or serfdom.

Midway through his story, Hochschild halts the narrative to cast about for a reason why the British should have been so much readier than, say, the French to oppose literal slavery. Here, he lands upon the essential enslavement of sailors in both the British Navy and its merchant marine, with their press gangs, beatings, kidnappings, horrific conditions, and high mortality, which kept the empire whole and the slave trade going. But why should empathy have been extended from sailors to slaves? The answer would make this into another, more speculative book.

The book that Hochschild gives us is valuable instead for its magnificent portrait of how activism works—by coincidences, friendships, patience, and stubbornness, by carefully built networks and belief systems that change slowly or suddenly like climate or the weather. There is the protracted timeline of change: a preliminary state in which almost no one cares about slaves; another moment when it seems that everyone in England does; moments during the Napoleonic wars when everyone, except a few diehards, is apparently too frightened—more by their own government than by threats from abroad—to say anything about slavery at all; and then decades more to go until a final victory. There are interim victories. There are moments of despair. Most of all, there are people giving over their lives to a battle that turns out to take more than a lifetime for most of them. And then there are the arguments over how the history will be written—Wilberforce’s sons tried to write Clarkson out of it, and succeeded until 1989, when biographer Ellen Gibson Wilson revived his stature as the pivotal figure in the antislavery movement.

You can think of the nuclear freeze movement, which in 1982 had a million proponents gathered on its behalf in New York’s Central Park, though few of those stuck with it long enough to realize the “peace dividend” that the collapse of the Soviet empire was supposed to spawn, or to push further the opportunities for disarmament that arose. The current bout of nuclear proliferation can be blamed
in part on Bush, but it can also be traced to those who expected a three-year struggle rather than a sixty-year one; any eventual victories will be owed in large part to the dedicated minority of activists who have not been realistic, have not gone home, have not succeeded yet—but might. Or think of the movement against apartheid, which, like the antislavery movement two centuries before, combined the nonviolent and the violent, governmental and citizen action, domestic and foreign action, boycotts and educational campaigns to dismantle, piece by piece, slowly, with setbacks, a racist regime (but which, with the moderation that made victory possible, though far less of a victory, never dismantled the extreme financial injustices some call economic apartheid). That story, however, is still unfinished. So, for the record, is the global history of slavery. And what was once the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1839 to continue the good work after the signal victory of the year before, is still active as Anti-Slavery International, based in Thomas Clarkson House in London.

The news of Susan Sontag’s death arrived as a single sentence spoken in the opening moments of a radio news program Tuesday morning, and then the program returned to what had been the main story since the day after Christmas: the tsunami and the death toll, then in the tens of thousands, that would continue to rise. It was strange to weigh these two incidents of mortality against each other. Though for some people it would be considered insensitive or even irreverent to do so, one of the things to be appreciated about Sontag, I think, is that she considered everything a proper occasion for more thinking, more analyzing, more writing.