The Long Argument About Slavery

Call it legal, and you are pointing back to Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex, the colonial slave codes, and the statutes written into every Atlantic empire. Call it taxed, and add this one detail: the state collected its share at the dock.

Insurance meant exactly that: human beings were underwritten as cargo, on marine policies, against the ordinary perils of the sea. The Zong's trouble began with a navigational error that made the voyage run long, and the master said the ship's water was running out.

In court the argument turned on whether the loss counted as a necessary jettison of cargo, the way throwing goods overboard to save a ship would be covered. The Solicitor General added that the suggestion of humanity had nothing to do with the case at all.

The missionary society had a name: the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Its estates funded not only missionary work but a college, and the branding existed for a plain administrative reason, so the enslaved people could be identified as belonging to the society that owned them.

Benjamin Lay was about four feet tall, hunchbacked, and had lived in Barbados and seen slavery firsthand. He was not diplomatic: he stood outside meeting houses in the snow with one bare foot, so that people going in comfortably would have to think about who was cold, and he refused anything made by enslaved labor. At the 1738 yearly meeting at Burlington in New Jersey, he stood up in a military coat with a sword hidden under it and said God would take vengeance on those who held his creatures in slavery, then pulled out the hollowed book, with a bladder of bright red pokeberry juice inside it, and ran the sword through, spattering red over the slaveholding Friends in the front seats before they carried him out. In 2017 and 2018, Quaker meetings in Pennsylvania and in England formally reversed his expulsion, two hundred and eighty years late.

John Woolman spent his life walking from household to household, sitting with slaveholding Quakers one at a time and asking them quietly to reconsider. He would not ride the stagecoaches, because of what was done to the horses and to the boys who drove them, and he refused sugar and dye because they came from slave labor, wearing undyed clothes and looking strange without caring. As a young scrivener, a man who wrote out legal documents, he refused to write bills of sale for human beings and told his employer why: he was the man who would not sign. He did not write laws. He changed minds one kitchen table at a time, and the Quakers became the backbone of abolition in two countries.

Six days before he died, on 24 February 1791, Wesley wrote to a young member of Parliament named Wilberforce, urging him to keep going. It was an old man's last letter, spent on that.

Behind the dates lies an organized campaign that invented most of the methods every campaign has used since. Thomas Clarkson spent seven years riding around the ports, by his own reckoning some thirty-five thousand miles, interviewing sailors, finding ship's surgeons willing to talk, and collecting objects: shackles, thumbscrews, branding irons, the device used to force a man's mouth open. He carried them in a box and put them on the table.

The Brookes diagram worked because it was not a drawing of cruelty; it was a diagram of the lawful loading plan, showing the human beings as small figures laid out in rows to scale, with the legal maximum in place, printed in the thousands and pinned up in homes and pubs. It is probably the most effective piece of campaign design ever made. The 1792 petitioning session was, at five hundred and nineteen petitions, the largest such campaign there had ever been.

The sugar boycott had a gendered engine: women ran it, largely, because women bought the groceries, even though they could not vote, sit in Parliament, or speak at the public meetings, and grocers advertised sugar from India as not made by slaves.

Equiano had been enslaved as a child, carried across the Atlantic, sold several times, and eventually bought his own freedom before his book appeared. It sold enormously, nine editions in Britain in his lifetime, and he toured for years promoting it and speaking, putting audiences who had argued about Africans in the abstract into a room with one and letting him out-argue them. He was also the man who had brought the Zong case to Granville Sharp.

The four Quakers who wrote it lived in a settlement outside Philadelphia. Their one verse was not left to speak for itself: they asked the Friends around them to imagine being taken by force, carried to a strange country, and sold, and then say whether it was right, applying the Golden Rule without an exception clause. It was, in fact, their whole document. And they added something sharper that nobody quotes: Europeans were horrified when Muslim pirates on the Barbary coast took Christians and enslaved them, and this, they wrote, was the same act with the colours reversed.

The chain that buried it had three separate levels: the monthly meeting, the quarterly meeting, and finally the yearly meeting, each in turn calling it too weighty to judge. The interest at work was concrete. Prominent Quakers in Philadelphia held enslaved workers, and Quaker merchants in Newport, Rhode Island, were among the largest slave traders in North America. The document itself was then lost for a hundred and fifty years, and only turned up again in 1844.

Saint-Domingue was producing more sugar and coffee than anywhere else in the world, and the timing of the rising was no mystery: the colonists there had cheered the French Revolution's declaration and then refused to apply it to free men of color, let alone to the enslaved, who made up about nine tenths of the population. A free man of color named Vincent Ogé demanded that it be applied, raised a small revolt, and in early 1791 was executed by being broken on the wheel.

The rising began in the north, and the man remembered as its first leader, Boukman, was killed within months. Toussaint Louverture, whom the world remembers as commander, had been freed before the revolution and taught himself soldiering and diplomacy.

Toussaint was shipped to France after his capture and died in a cold fortress in the Jura mountains on 7 April 1803. His generals finished the fight without him, and the name Dessalines gave the new nation, Haiti, was the name used by the people who had lived there before Columbus arrived.

The United States held out until 1862, when the southern congressmen who had blocked recognition had walked out to form the Confederacy. France itself had refused recognition until 1825, leaving Haiti unable to trade or borrow, and granted it then only by an ordinance from the king.

The sum demanded was roughly ten times Haiti's annual government revenue. Borrowing from French banks to make the first payments meant Haiti was now paying interest to France in order to pay compensation to France. The principal was later reduced, but the payments dragged on for decades, and Haiti spent the whole of the nineteenth century and half of the twentieth paying for the crime of having been freed.

Of those who died, around two hundred fell in the fighting itself, and more than three hundred afterward by sentence of the courts. A missionary who visited Sharpe in his cell wrote down his last words about the gallows. And in Sharpe's own case, the planters were more or less right about the cause.

The planters organized formally: they founded something called the Colonial Church Union, which burned down more than a dozen Baptist and Methodist chapels and had both Knibb and a second missionary, Thomas Burchell, jailed. At the Baptist Missionary Society's public meeting in the summer of 1832, Knibb stood up and said he would not be silent whatever it cost his mission, and that the enslaved must be freed.

What moved a British public that had already signed half a million petitions against slavery was not fear of another rebellion. Parliament was moved because the planters had attacked white English clergymen in front of witnesses.

It was the largest payout in British history to that point: roughly forty-six thousand separate claims, made not only by plantation magnates but by peers, bishops, widows, clergymen and ordinary respectable families who had never seen a plantation and simply held the people as an investment. The records are public now, and searchable by name.

Because that loan ran for most of the twentieth century, British taxpayers, including the descendants of enslaved people living in Britain, were still paying, through their own taxes, toward the compensation of the men who had owned their ancestors.

The test was explicit: the papers stated plainly that the nominee was a slaveholder, precisely to force the national board to answer the question directly. The break came at Augusta, Georgia, in May 1845, a year after the Methodists had already split over whether a bishop could own people.

The Genesis story itself is stranger than the slogan built on it. Noah gets drunk, something happens, and he curses a descendant to be a servant of servants: the text names that descendant twice, and both times it is Canaan, not Ham. That racial reading was added later, by people who needed it. Read plainly, it is a story about the origins of a people the Israelites fought in Canaan, and turning it into cover for the Atlantic trade required reading in things that are not on the page.

Read past the phrase in Leviticus and the same chapter also requires that a poor Israelite be treated as a hired worker and be released in the jubilee year. It never once commands anyone to buy a slave, and it says nothing whatever about race.

The command to obey masters was not confined to one letter: the same words appear in Colossians 3:22, Titus 2:9 and 1 Peter 2:18, and chapels were often required to use them. In Ephesians, the instruction to masters goes further than the line about favoritism already quoted: they are also told to do the same things to their slaves that they expect from them. A master who genuinely obeyed that could not have held a human being as property at all. You cannot treat a man as your equal before God and sell his wife.

The verse in 1 Timothy sits inside a list of the lawless and the ungodly, alongside murderers and liars, and the old English translation renders the word there as "menstealers": kidnappers, people who take a human being and sell him.

Paul does not stop at asking that the runaway be received as a brother: he calls him more than a slave, offers to pay out of his own pocket anything the man owes, and tells Philemon he is confident he will do even more than asked. That reads less like tolerance of slavery than a man being manoeuvred, in front of his entire church, into freeing someone, by a writer too polite to give the order and too pointed to be misunderstood.

The command in Deuteronomy does not stop at refusing to hand him over: the escaped man is to live among his protectors, in the place he chooses, in whichever town he likes, and not be oppressed. And the Fugitive Slave Act went further than criminalizing shelter alone: it required every citizen to help capture the people it named.

Current scholarship puts her return trips at about thirteen. The Combahee raid itself used three steamboats and Union troops, moving through waters her scouts had mapped for mines, and she was the first woman in that war to plan and lead an armed expedition.

The government's near-nothing payment was not the end of it: she spent the next thirty years petitioning for a pension, and was finally granted one as a soldier's widow, not for her own service. She never claimed to be clever about any of it. She said she was told where to go.

That test is one of the most reliable you have. It has worked in every century so far, including yours: you do not get grapes off thorns, and a good tree does not produce bad fruit.

Douglass wrote this at the end of his own account of his life, as an appendix, because he was afraid readers would think he was attacking religion itself. He added that to be the friend of one was necessarily to be the enemy of the other.

Three more words help here. Underwrite: to insure something, since an underwriter agrees to pay if it is lost. Indemnity: money paid as compensation for a loss. Proof text: a single verse quoted to settle an argument, often with the surrounding verses left out.

That capital-crime verse describes the Atlantic trade exactly. The same chapter of Exodus also regulates, a few verses earlier, the holding of a Hebrew slave, and states plainly that a master who beats his slave to death is punished for it.

Anyone who tells you the Bible is a straightforwardly anti-slavery book has not read it, and you should not trust the rest of what they say either. Every one of the protections that law puts around slavery, the ban on kidnapping, the ban on returning an escaped slave, the release dates, was violated deliberately and as a matter of system by the Atlantic trade. So even on the terms of the book the slaveholders were holding, the thing they were doing was illegal.

One more question to think about: whose interest does the preaching you hear on Sunday happen to serve?