The Quality of Mercy (40 page)

No, she did not believe he would let the mine go; he had found something to devote himself to. He wanted to improve things, bring more efficiency, reduce the harshness of the labor. Was not this a desire to improve the lot of his fellow men? Even if he himself did not altogether regard it in this light, or at least refer to it in this way, was not this perhaps what underlay his ambitions, the desire to be a benefactor? Profit, efficiency, material improvement—was not this the way forward? She had always believed in measures that would bring more independence, more well-being to those who were deprived, whose lives were all toil, who were ignorant and kept in ignorance and helpless because of it, always at the mercy of those richer and more powerful.

She could help him in this; it was something she had always dreamed of, practical measures, practical solutions, looking to see what could be done. The boys went to work in the mine at seven years of age! It was appalling—they were children still, they were not grown, their bones were not properly formed. For children to be racked with toil and have no remedy, it cried out for betterment. She could speak of it to Erasmus if they were married, she could prevail upon him to see things with more tenderness. For love of her—and she could not doubt the love—he would be prepared to change. For her sake, for what he would see as
the sake of her happiness. Guided by her, he would come to see what was due, what was just—not the justice of the courts, but the justice of human dealings, where the quality of mercy entered more closely and decisively. She could press for the setting-up of a school; it was an ambition close to her heart to teach people to read and write—the children, anyone else who wanted to attend and learn. A kind of Sunday school. The working people would benefit; they would be able to understand what was happening in the world, discuss things, form opinions. But what leisure would they have for reading, what energy left over from their work? She had been assuming a way of life not far different from her own. The answer, of course, was to reduce the hours of labor, but she could not imagine Erasmus agreeing to this. However, he had other ideas for making things better. The men worked by candlelight at present, but he had spoken of a kind of lamp that might be devised, which they could attach to their caps in some way; no, not caps, they would wear a sort of metal helmet, a modified version of what soldiers sometimes wore. It would be safer, he had said, but the main thing was that better light would save time and so increase production. He sometimes put things in what seemed to her the wrong order …

These things might take time, but all manner of more immediate reforms could be introduced. She and Erasmus together would make this colliery village a happier place. Other collieries would imitate them, follow suit.

He would listen to her. She had been struck from the first by the way he listened to her, hung on her words. She had been flattered by this attention, the way he confided his plans and designs to her, made her a partner in them.

It was now, thinking this, that a shadow of fear came to her. What he had always sought was her accord, her complete approval and endorsement. Not once had he consulted her on the grounds of opinion, not truly. She remembered his face as it had been when she had taken the pitman’s part and defended his choice—and his right—to keep the land and cultivate it for his father’s
sake, as a memorial to his father. He had not seemed to see the similarity with his own case. He had assumed an air of amusement, which she had not much liked, but he had been surprised and displeased—it had shown in his expression—because she had not seen things exactly as he did. Unendurable to be trapped forever in his expectations of her, his need for her blessing. Like an imprisonment … Her only role the invariable one of support and assent. But he could be supported in a deeper, more meaningful way; he would come to recognize the value of her independent judgment, which would be exercised for his good. Even disagreeing, always for his sake. He would know she had his interests at heart, his true interests.

The fear, however, persisted. In the toils of guilt and debt and obligation that had long lost all reason, possessed by the need for successes that might silence the voices but never did, he had made a cage for himself, and now he wanted to draw her into it. But to draw her in, he would have to open the cage door and take the risk of freedom.

She looked round the room, the objects in it so familiar, accompanying her through all the stages of her life so far. It was time for a new stage, it was time for her to marry. With this recognition, a kind of partial yielding, Erasmus’s face and figure invaded her mind, as if they had been waiting only for that, endowed with an extraordinary vividness and immediacy. She was enveloped in thoughts of him; there was no closing them off. The sense of him—what she knew and what she surmised—was too potent, there was no door that could be closed on it. She knew herself to be strong, not easily daunted or browbeaten; she would not consent to be imprisoned in his judgments; she would give battle if need be. In the fear that she felt there was love and a sense of rising to challenge, a sense that such a moment, such a desire, would never come to her again. She drew the sheet of paper toward her and wrote the first words of the letter:
My Dearest Erasmus
 …

The case of Jeremy Evans had aroused very considerable public interest, and this increased during the period of the adjournment; letters and articles on the topics of Evans in particular and the institution of slavery in general filled the columns of the newspapers. There was a letter from a white man born in the West Indies who maintained that whites could keep control of the slaves in the sugar plantations only if black people were prevented from coming to Britain. Once arriving here, they would see the weaknesses of the whites and learn to despise them, and as a consequence the use of terror that had kept them in subjection on the plantations would be of no avail when they returned, in the face of this newfound contempt for their masters. One letter expressed the fear that white criminals, in order to get rid of their enemies, would organize blacks into gangs of assassins, something that could be done with total impunity, as the confession of a slave could not be offered in court, and he could not give evidence against his master. A man who signed himself Humanist argued that black people living in Britain were unhappy because alien, and therefore constituted a pernicious and dangerous element of society. If unwilling to leave of their own accord, they should be shipped back at public expense and the costs recovered
by selling them. If they remained in the country, they should have no claim to any rights under English law.

When the case was resumed, counsel for Evans continued to argue the irrelevance of colonial laws in regard to persons living in Britain, whatever their condition or the color of their skin. When Jeremy Evans set foot in England, from that very moment he had become possessed for the first time since being sold into slavery of rights that were common to all mankind. In England, where liberty was so highly valued, was regarded in fact as a precious birthright, how could it be permitted that he, or any man, should be seized and bound and carried away out of the realm?

Ashton had conferred with Harvey and Compton as to whether Evans should be called on to speak for himself, but it was thought that he might be too assertive, or even combative, to gain the sympathy of the court. Once brought to England, he had not accepted his lot; he had run away, sought his own freedom. He had resisted to the best of his strength the attempts to take him by force—it had needed three hireling slave-takers to subdue him. He was not meek in his bearing, he stood up straight and met the eyes of those who questioned him. All of this, it was feared, might go against him. He was useful as a presence in court, a victim of injustice, unoffending, ill used and helpless. But in the end they decided against calling on him to speak on his own behalf. Harvey even went so far as to advise him to keep his eyes lowered and his head hanging down a little while he was in the courtroom.

The counsel for Bolton and Lyons, finding no convincing argument for the subordination of British law to the laws of slave-owning communities in America and the West Indies, sought to claim that this lack favored their case. Since there was no law in England prohibiting slavery, it should be clear to any view not obscured by bigotry or prejudice that the practice was legal. Moreover, if once the slaves learned that in England they were free, they would come flocking in vast numbers and overrun the whole country, to the grave detriment of the economy and the ruin of the sugar trade, as there would be no one left to work
in the plantations. This frightening prospect caused some stir in the court, which Compton endeavored to allay by requiring his learned friends of the defense to enlighten him as to the means by which the slaves, captive and destitute as they were, would be able to undertake such a journey—a question to which no coherent answer was forthcoming.

The Lord Chief Justice made few interventions in this debate. He was still very much hoping, even at this late stage, that Messrs. Bolton and Lyons, seeing that things were going against them—and it was clear that they were—would relinquish their claims of ownership in Evans and withdraw from the case, or that something else might occur that would deliver him from the looming duty of a verdict. Further delays would do nothing to help matters. During the adjournment he had sent people to one of the witnesses of the assault, a widow of some means named Mary Dunning, in an attempt to persuade her to purchase Evans and free him, but she had indignantly refused on the grounds that it abetted the practice of slavery, of which she was a convinced opponent.

As the time passed and the proceedings drew to a close, it became clear that a verdict would have to be delivered, that he would have to commit himself to a judgment. He worried that his words, if not extremely well chosen, would set at liberty what had been computed at fifteen thousand blacks at present in condition of slavery in Britain, at a cost to the owners of more than £700,000, his clerks had estimated. A flood of actions would follow, disputes over settlements and wages, claims of coercion against the masters. It was a nightmare. A number of these same owners were members of his club, with whom he took coffee or played faro.

Westminster Hall was packed with spectators when the day appointed for the judgment arrived. The public galleries were crowded with black people, awaiting words which they knew would affect them closely. Reporters from most of the major newspapers waited in the body of the court to take down the words of
judgment verbatim. Slave owners too were there in good number. To this audience, silent with expectation and tense with conflict, the Chief Justice uttered his ruling in the case of Jeremy Evans.

He had thought long and carefully in preparing the terms of his decision. The only way he could see out of the dilemma was to confine his remarks strictly to the particular situation of the plaintiff, avoiding all reference to the wider issue of slavery as an institution and restricting his judgment to the specific issue of whether it was legal to take a slave by force out of the country.

The only laws to be enforced, he told the court, were those of the country where the cause of the action occurred. No justification for the seizure of Jeremy Evans could be established by a negative, by the absence of a law forbidding it, as the defendants had attempted to do. Only positive law could be brought to bear in such a case, and there existed no law that could confer the power claimed by the defendants. It was a power never in use in England that a master should be allowed to take a slave by force to be sold abroad, whether the slave had deserted his service or for any other reason.

He sat up taller in his high-backed chair and raised his voice for the final words of the judgment: “The cause set forth by the defendants cannot be said to be allowed or approved by the laws of this kingdom. Therefore the man must be discharged.”

There was an outburst of applause at these words from the crowded galleries, and this had to be hushed by the court attendants, and silence restored while the judges descended from the bench. Ashton had been disappointed by the narrowness of the Chief Justice’s wording, though in some part of his mind he had been prepared for it. All the same, the victory was there: Evans walked free; no longer would anyone be allowed to return black people by force to the plantations. It would continue to be done, he knew that, but no one could ever again claim that it was lawful. As he rose to shake hands with Evans and his lawyers, both of whom were beaming with delight, and with the various friends and well-wishers who had attended the trial from the first day,
he allowed himself to be swept along in the tide of congratulations, moved by the rejoicing he saw on many faces, though by no means all.

That evening he dined out with friends, fellow abolitionists. Toasts were drunk to liberty, to the final end of this iniquitous traffic in human beings, an end just round the corner now—they would see it in their lifetime. There were even toasts to the Lord Chief Justice for this historic ruling, which, someone declared in the euphoria of the occasion, had abolished slavery in England. There was a speech of thanks to Ashton for his selfless efforts on behalf of Evans and his long campaign in the antislavery cause.

He arrived home late and made his way to bed, lightheaded with the praises and the bumpers of wine. He slept deeply in the first part of the night, but woke at dawn with something of a headache and a strong feeling of thirst. When he had drunk a glass of water, he realized with remorse that he had lain down to sleep without saying his prayers, without any word of thanks to the Divine Author for the outcome of the trial. He knelt at his bedside and prayed aloud, asking forgiveness for his neglect, the failure to show gratitude, thanking God for guiding the judge’s mind to a right decision. True, it had been narrowly worded; true, it had been restricted in scope, doing no more than deny the master’s right to compel a slave aboard ship and transport him back to the plantations. But a step had been taken, a decisive step in the struggle he had given his life to.