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We're back.

Yeah, welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is this week not about bad things.

It's about good things.

Well kind of, it's still about bad things, but it's about how good things were done to fight a bad thing.

Anyway, we're talking about the end of the slave trade with our guest James Stout.

Author James Stout, author, doctor James Stout.

That's right.

Yeah, I am both of those things.

I have written and recently written a book, written two books.

Actually, the first one you should get your library.

You shouldn't pay for it, it's far too expensive.

But the second one, I would love it if you pre ordered.

It's called Against the State.

It's about anarchists and comrades at war in Spain, memr and Rojava.

And it contains many of the things I have learned well, being fortunate enough to share small parts of these two revolutions and study the other in an academic fashion.

I think that's a lot you can learn if if you're not particularly interested in conflict and war.

And I hope that people will pre order it from ak Press.

Yeah, pre order that from ak Press and you'll be a hero too, although you know, not quite as much of a hero as the people were talking about today because they ended the slave trade, and you know, that's pretty good.

So it's pretty good.

That's the thing to do in your life.

Pretty high bar.

So yeah, when we left off here, there's just been we had that case and then we had Gregson guilt, Like they revisited it to see like, should we you know, retry Gregs and b Gilbert and they decide yeah, probably, and then Gregson was like, actually, no, I know, I'm at a loss.

So I'm just kind of bouncing.

And so the Abolious Movement is left with We've had this big win, but it didn't really change anything.

But now we've got a group of people who are kind of like increasingly motivated and angry to fight against slavery.

And the head of the group is Granville Sharp right, And Granville's like, well, in the wake of this case, since we're not going to continue it, my priority is I need to document every single horrific detail about what happened on the Zorg and in general, everything I can get about how common some of these other awful things that happen are just in the slave trade as a whole.

And I need to publicize that so as many people can read it as possible in order to build support for an end to the whole institution.

So he has the notes from the court case transcribed, he can Ducks a further interview with Robert Stubbs and another crew member as part of his attempt to secure murder charges against them.

It's I don't think they have to sit down for this.

So it's weird that Stubbs and kelsall do stub stuff.

Missus a chance to fuck himself, a.

Chance to fuck himself over every wrong step he can take.

Oh, Stubbs, He's gonna take.

On June second, seventeen eighty three, Sharp sends one hundred and eighty something page document to the lords of the Admiralty demanding murdered chargers and quote an entire stop to the slave trade, which he argued would damn the entire country and unquestionably mark it with the avenging hand of God, who is promised to destroy the destroyers of the earth.

This doesn't work somehow, they don't take this seriously like you respect.

But yeah, I'm not surprised that they see like he send us like two hundred pages and he says that God's going to kill us if we don't shut down the money funnel.

Ah, let's just keep getting rich.

Right, it's one in a manifesto bucket.

Yeah yeah, classic Lords of the Admiralty behavior.

So his letter to them is ignored, but he doesn't stop pushing forward.

He sends the info he was gathering to the Prime Minister and to other public figures, warning them that God would might the whole empire if they keep doing this shit.

Most of these letters were ignored, but one of the letters he sent to prominent members of the Anglican community did provoke a response from a reverend named Peter Peckard, who had which is I we'll just move past that name.

But wait's silly, right, Peter Peckard.

It's silly.

It's a silly name.

But he's a good guy, so whatever, we'll give him a pass.

Now.

Peckard had been paying attention to gregs and V.

Gilbert, and he had concluded from the information in the case that the slave trade was a crime against humanity.

The two became friends and their correspondence influenced Peckard when a year or so later he was made vice chancellor of Cambridge University.

So this guy gets kind of radicalized by this case and by his friendship with Sharp.

He reads what Sharp collected and he gets increasingly horrified.

And then he gets a really prominent position at Cambridge, and one of his duties at this position is to organize the annual Latin essay contest, and so in seventeen eighty five he picks this topic or the contest.

Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?

Now?

Putting aside for a moment the question of how might you make a person a slave not against their will?

This topic was Yeah, I mean there are there was like Greek, some Greek people would sell themselves into slavery doing the Roman Empire and work is like basically household tutors to rich folks and stuff.

But still making someone a slave implies against their will, I would argue.

Anyway.

The topic provokes a high degree of involvement from divinity students at Cambridge, one of whom is a young man named Thomas Clarkson, and he's the next hero we're going to learn about in detail.

Born in March twenty eighth, seventeen sixty and the Isle of Eli, he was the oldest son of a reverend and a headmaster.

His mother, I assume, was a very nice person.

We have basically no details on his childhood or early life, but he comes from what you might call an upper middle class background and enjoyed a good education and as much stability as anyone got to have back in those days.

Right, So this is a he's a child of privilege, like for certain you know, not like crazy rich, but very comfortable.

Clarkson is an excellent student and he was admitted to Saint John's College at Cambridge in seventeen seventy nine.

He gets his BA in seventeen eighty three, and he continues at Cambridge with a plan of following in his father's career as a reverend.

Right, so he's continue his education to become like a religious studies expert or whatever, so he can be a reverend.

He's ordained in seventeen eighty three as a deacon, but his original plans for a life spent serving the church are derailed by a Greater Cause in seventeen eighty five as a result of that essay contest.

So when that contest is announced, he is still planning.

I'm going to be you know, I'm gonna spend my life in the church like my dad did, right, And then he starts working on this essay to try to win this contest.

And this is maybe the single best historic example of how one good teacher can change the world, because Clarkson's whole life and the lives of millions of people turn in part as a result of this essay.

Per the Zorg by Sidharth Kara, a towering figure with reddish hair and a compassionate gaze, Clarkson confessed he was wholly ignorant of the slave trade when he first began his research for the contest.

He read everything he could find on the subject, and was most impacted by a pioneering abolitionist tract authored by an American Quaker, Anthony Benezet.

Quakers were among the first communities to advocate against slavery, believing it was necessary for every lover of God and man to use their best endeavors that a stop may be put to this unnatural and barbarous traffic.

Following the Summerset case, Benize became a staunch ally of Granville Sharp.

The two abolitionists collaborated in seventeen seventy two on a petition to King George the Third against the toleration of slavery in the Colonies.

In seventeen seventy five, Benize founded the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first anti slavery organization in America.

One of its earliest presidents was Benjamin Franklin.

Right, So, Benize really influential guy and a partner with sharp and he writes this book that Clarkson reads prepping for this essay, called Some Historical Account of Guinea, its situation, produce, and the general disposition of its inhabitants, with an inquiry into the rise and progress of the slave trade.

Again, we didn't know how to write titles back then.

There hadn't been a good one.

Now the first good title is Moby Dick.

Right, yeah, I like he just calls it an interesting narrative, and then you know what you're gonna get.

But it's gonna be interesting.

It is interesting.

How fucking crazy?

Yeah, you're right.

Equiano knew how to had to title a fucking book, but none of these other guys do.

That said, the quality of the book is good, even if the title is kind of unwieldy, and Clarkson devours it.

He is horrified by each new fact he learns, and he finds himself obsessively driven to read and learn more.

He writes later, it was but one gloomy subject from morning to night.

In the daytime I was uneasy, and the night I had little rest.

I sometimes never closed my eyelids for grief, which is a relatable way to feel about reading too much about the realities of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation systems.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of a an ending nightmare.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think anyone who spends the period of time studying this is like, yeah, kind of is just consuming for a while.

It's really bad.

Oh yeah, it's one of the worst things that humans haven't done to each other.

Yeah, very upsetting stuff.

So that summer, Clarkson finishes and submits his essay for the essay contest.

He cites Granville Sharp in it and the court case against the Gregson Syndicate two years previously in his introduction, and he describes the massacre of enslaved prisoners aboard the Zorg as a deed unparalleled in the history of man, and one he was worried that future generations wouldn't believe that.

Like, if we don't document this well enough, they won't believe anyone did anything this bad.

It's so crazy evil right now, The essay itself is a banger.

It is anime by the kind of incolate rage that academics rarely allow themselves to express.

Clarkson gave voice to the kind of repellent nausea any decent person ought to feel upon investigating the slave trade.

He wrote, in a section directed to slave traders, you have no right to touch even the hair on their heads without their own consent.

It is not your money that can invest you with a right.

Human liberty can either be bought nor sold.

How wicked must be that servitude which cannot be carried on without the continual murder of so many innocent persons.

No custom established among men was ever more impious, since it is contrary to reason, justice, nature, the principles of law and government, the whole doctrine in short of natural religion and the revealed voice of God.

Pretty good stuff.

Yes, that's it.

Kind of a banger.

Yeah, Yeah, I like the Yeah, you have no right to touch even a hair on their heads.

If they don't say you can't.

How dare you think otherwise?

That's nuts?

He wins, Yeah, yeah, God hates you for what you're doing, and he wins first prize.

It's a good essay, and because he wins first prize, he gets to read his whole essay in Latin to the Senate House at Cambridge.

Again it's a Latin contest.

The abolitionist cause is at this point not yet a mass movement in England, but it's becoming one.

And Clarkson's success here is evidence that even in the halls of power, something had started to change.

When you're winning this essay contest at Cambridge, this is not like a fringe radical thing entirely anymore, right now, something had started to change within Clarkson too.

On paper, he's still following the path that he would need to take in order to become a reverend.

But as he rides a horse from Cambridge back to London right when he's kind of and I think he's heading to London to continue the process of becoming a reverend.

And in the middle of that journey he has an awakening.

And here's how he describes it.

I mean, came at times very seriously affected while upon the road.

I stopped my horse occasionally and dismounted and walked.

I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my essay could not be true.

The more, however, I reflected upon them, or rather upon the authorities on which they were founded, the more I gave them credit.

Coming inside of Wades Mill in Hertfordshire, I 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 those calamities to their end.

Which is such an interesting way for that to go.

Where he's like, I couldn't have been writing about real stuff, right, it's too fucked up.

It's too fucked up, and has he's just yeah, yeah, he's just like none that's happening.

I think there is a difference right between like these like colonial metropoles that were somewhat removed from the violence and the experienced saying positive Southern United States, where like the violence of shattle slavery was right there right like it was visible to everyone, and it's it's remarkable.

I guess that like the people who come to first I mean, not that they weren't anti slavery people in the United States, there were, including presumably all of the enslaved people, but like the fact that they the people who come to this realization that jos is fucked up and organize are the ones removed from it at.

First, Like it's yeah, and that's I think you would find similar sentiments of like this can't be real from a lot of people in the North during the worst of the period leading of the Civil War, right, Like you run into that a lot.

I think it's like it's this is just too fucked up.

It could can't be this bad, right, yeah.

Right, Like I think especially at a time when you know all you had to trust was a text, right, Like it's not that you can see a video, right, it can't be that bad.

No one would do that that humans wouldn't do that to each other.

And the one for people in this position, right is to like convince themselves, I'll just forget about it, right, And it says a lot about his moral character that he he goes through this day long period of like walking back through the sources in his head and being like no, these are really solid sources, and so if this is true, the only step I can take forward is to dedicate my entire life to destroying this slavery.

Yeah, Like there's no other option at this point, right, Yeah.

And it makes sense from looking back, but like for him, that's a remarkable choice to make.

Yeah, right, Yeah, it's a really significant leap that he goes on there.

So now that he's set on this new path, Clarkson starts meeting with Quaker anti slavery activists, including one who owned a printing shop and had already been publishing pamphlets and tracts.

The next year, his essay was published as one of these tracks, and it starts to circulate widely among educated Englishmen.

This helps Clarkson get into contact with other seasoned veterans of the fight, including Granville Sharp, who he meets in mid seventeen eighty six.

The two hit it off famously, and I kind of think Sharp picks this kid right away as the air pair to his own efforts to fight slavery, where he's like, this is going to be the guy who like keeps the fight going after I am gone, right, just kind of get that feeling and While public support for the cause is the highest it's ever been, there's still not a unified anti slavery movement, nor even an agreement as to how one should look Again, a lot of people just want to ban the Atlantic trade but leave slavery intact.

Otherwise, I think for most of these people it's just pragmatism, where they're like, well, we just were never going to get that done, but we can at least stop the worst part of the system.

I'm sure some people are like, well, slavery wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for this other part.

Right, those are definitely some.

People, you know, this type of guy.

Yeah, Yeah, there are other divisions.

Quakers, as I've repeatedly noted, have been central to the anti slavery cause from the beginning, but because of their niche religious views, there are also opponents of a bunch of other stuff, like being in the military, or paying taxes, or following the Anglican Church, and so a lot of people who might be open to the broader cause are like, well, I don't want anything to do with Quakers, right, They're nuts.

You know, That's how I got a Quaker listeners.

I'm not shit talking here.

That's how a lot of people feel at the time, right, who were otherwise and maybe down for the cause.

Yeah, yeah, the idea of being teetotal is not comprehensible.

Person were to kill people, well, what did they do a weekend?

Yeah?

Look, I'm fine with getting rid of slavery, but I draw the line at not drinking and shooting Frenchmen.

You know.

So it was clear to Sharp and to Clarkson that and their fellows that the cause needed a central organizing hub that lacked any of this baggage and could act as a big tent.

So they formed a committee and they all met together to hash things out.

Here's how Mike k described what happened next.

Clarkson and Sharp brought more than their individual skills to the community.

They were important figureheads who could forge alliances with people the Quakers could not reach.

They were instrumental in bringing the movement into the mainstream by forming partnerships with people like William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament who later became the movement's parliamentary spokesperson.

We're not going to talking about Wilberforce in these episodes, but he's also a big hero here.

The committee agreed to focus on the slave trade as a first step towards total emancipation, and called themselves the Society for Affecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

This society had a clear objective, access to a printing press and a distribution network, and a growing number of influential allies.

What they needed was evidence to prove that what they said about the slave trade was true.

Right, So this is going to send Clarkson on a personal quest.

He's going to be the member of the Society who goes out into the world to gather this information and bring it back right, so that they can prove to everyone that this is not just the Zorg wasn't a one off.

This is just how bad things always are in the slave trade.

And we'll return to Clarkson a bit later.

He's heading off right now to go find a bunch of dirt on the slave business.

Right.

And while the Society is getting itself up off the ground, other activists who are not a part of this group are heard at work providing firsthand documentation of the hideous evils of the slave trade.

And this brings us back to our friend Equiano, right, and another guy.

Because the next year, seventeen eighty seven.

The same year Robert Stubbs dies, a former slave named Ottoba Kuguano publishes his autobiography.

He'd been kidnapped at age thirteen and trafficked to England in seventeen seventy two.

Kuguano is a close friend of Olata Equiano, and his example likely helps to convince Equiano to write the autobiography that I quoted from earlier in the last episode.

It was published two years later, and both books become best sellers in their time and are reprinted in multiple languages.

They're very influential, right, and these books have a huge influence on the course of the abolitionist movement.

Previously, most ideological bystanders in England had passively accepted the claims made by pro slavery advocates that Africans were happy being forced labors and that life on plantations was an improvement from their situation back home.

Equiano and Guguano's books blast did those myths apart.

Right, You can no longer believe that when you're reading these guys being about like, here was my life before I got enslaved, you know, as Mike k wrote, it was difficult for those who read the book not to associate themselves with the African hero who was courageous, resourceful, literate, cultured, and Christian, all qualities, right, Like, you can no longer view these people as somewhere less than you when you've read the whole book.

One of them wrote about his incredible life, right yeah, it makes you start yeah, yeah, like.

This guy's done things that most most people in Britain, even wealthy people, wouldn't have dreamed of doing, right, Like, very hard to see him as a less human being.

No, and then once you start being like, wow, this this one guy was really incredible in a way, they said, none of these people are Is it possible that they're all just people?

And that what we're doing is one of the greatest crimes in human history.

I'm gonna have to think on that before I get back to my job dying of the Black Lung, which is what I assume most English people are doing at the time, or on boats, you.

Know, invY and black Line, Scurvian Blacklockstone, the economy.

So Equiano organizes a group of formally enslaved black men together called the Sons of Africa, and together they begin campaigning independently of white allies like Sharp, in order to spread public disgust at the institution of slavery.

And this is a really important fact, right, Equiano and his fellow freedmen have no political power, and they start from a position of basically zero cultural influence.

And they aren't just being like, oh, thank god, I met a nice white person who was able to take the fight for me.

They never do that.

Equianto, not like he and Guguano publish books that give them cultural influence because they're so popular, and then they start organizing other freedmen to become a political lobby in their own right and start writing letters and having meetings with members of the government and people of cultural influence in order to push out abolitionist sentiment.

They are very much active and strategic participants in the abolitionist cause.

Right, That's really important.

So Equiano orchestrates a nuanced and elaborate pr campaign, augmenting the work Grenville Sharp and the other folks on that side of things are putting together.

The Sons of Africa do these letter writing campaigns and they succeed in you know, it's an uneven progress, right, because the society right around this time, gets hearings before the Privy Council on the abuses of the slave trade, and none of the sons are called to testify.

So Equiano writes directly to the chair of the Council and then publishes the letter he wrote that guy in a prominent newspaper so that no one could ignore it, right to be like, and I sent this to this guy.

If he ignores it, he has it, you know.

By seventeen eighty eight, Equiano is considered one of the leading abolitionists in the country.

A newspaper at the time described him as well known in England as the champion and advocate for procuring a suppression of the slave trade.

He and Couguano spent years touring the country with their books, bringing hundreds of new activists into the cause every single year.

Right they're showing up in their meeting face to face with people and basically radicalizing folks one on one to get involved.

You know, that's like a big part of their conscious effort.

Here, cool guys you know who also radicalized people.

The products and services that support the show.

That's right, they radicalized me to advertise for them.

And we're back.

So By seventeen eighty nine, the lobbying of the society, and in particular Member of Parliament Sir William Wilberforce, had brought another William into the fold.

Sir William Dolben.

Williams are pretty load bearing for this part of the anti slavery campaign.

He proposed a bill Dolbin did, known as the Dolbin Act, that he described as the first bill to put fetters upon the barbarous and destructive monster that was the slave trade.

This is the definition of an incrementalist solution.

It is not banning anything, it is not saying these people aren't property.

But it requires slave ships to hold no more than two slaves per ton for the first hundred tons of weight of the vessel, and no more than one slave per ton after that.

This is directly inspired by the Zorc, which had held roughly four slaves per ton for most of its journey.

The Act also reforms some of the language around insurance policies to make sure someone like this Gregson Syndicate doesn't try another similar gambit again.

And while the bill is being pushed forward, Equiano leads a delegation of free black men to the House of Commons.

There they meet with the Prime Minister as well as Dolbin and several other members of Parliament, right, which is a really important moment.

These guys have gone from nobody who don't even get called to talk to the Privy Council too.

They're meeting with the Prime Minister and a bunch of nps about the passage of an act regulating the slave trade.

That's a big deal, you know, just in the history of English democracy, Right, Yeah, dudes meeting with the Prime Minister at that point in time doesn't seem like it had happened a lot, right, And their testimonies, the fact that these guys are all talking about what happened to them don't stand alone.

Right, So in the Dobin Act is not just like, it's not just kind of the testimonies of the form of these freedmen that is influencing how people think at the time.

One of the most influential first hand accounts of the slave trade that comes out in seventeen eighty eight, which helped spur support for the abolitionist cause, is written by a former slave ship captain, a guy we talked about in our first episode, John Newton.

Newton published his book Thoughts upon the African slave Trade in seventeen eighty eight, he'd been born and he's you know, I don't know if we call him a hero, but he's on the right side by the end of his life.

This is a complicated man, right that we're going to talk about here, but let's get it.

He's a fascinating guy too.

His story says a lot about why people became slave ship atens, like who got into that business?

Right yeah?

Was born in seventeen twenty five to a father who captained merchant vessels in the Mediterranean and a mother who was a Protestant nonconformist.

I don't understand this super well, but I think from what I can gather, it means she rejected the legitimacy of the Church of England but was still super religious, right yeah, yeah yeah.

Biographer John Dunn writes that the boy, as a child Newton quote feared his father and dreaded the times when the old sailor was home from the sea, and from what we can tell, when his dad's home, he spends most of his time drinking.

One of John's earliest memories is his father heading off to the bar and his mother, using the opportunity to have him memorize essays and tracts written by religious scholars she admired.

Missus Newton wanted her son to become a reverend, but she died two weeks before his seventh birthday.

I think it was tuberculosis, you know, probably a little bit of guestimating, just based on the symptoms.

But yeah, after this point, none of the adults in John's life really about his religious instruction or him.

He prays alone sometimes, but he drifts further and further from belief as his childhood gets steadily worse.

His father forces him to attend a boarding school for two years with an incredibly cruel headmaster who's very abusive, and by the time John leaves the school at age ten or eleven, he is no longer religious.

He's just not interested at all.

His dad is by this point gotten hitched to a new wife, but at age eleven, he takes his son to see for the first time.

Now, the upside of this is that because his dad is the captain, John gets to stay in the spacious captain's quarters.

The downside is that his dad is his dad, which means he's trapped in a fairly small room with an incredibly abusive father.

Right.

Newton later wrote, I was with him in a state of fear and bondage.

Is this is a very unpleasant childhood.

He and his dad go on six voyages together.

John has two near death experiences at sea during this time, at age twelve and then at age fifteen, and he becomes very anxious about dying unst saved.

So periodically he'll work himself up into a ladder about this, and he'll try to get back to being faithful.

He'll try to get into the rhythm of praying regularly and attending services, but he keeps falling out of it.

Nothing seems to take.

He would later write, I saw the necessity of religion as a means of escaping hell.

But I loved sin and was unwilling to forsake it just a funny way.

I just what a universal human sentiment.

M M God.

I don't want to go to hell, but sin is awesome.

I enjoy sinning.

What are you gonna do?

Yeah?

What perfect?

He wrote that as well.

Yeah, no shame of no, shame of that?

It okay.

The elder Newton gets his son an apprenticeship on a different ship, but teenage John is too rebellious.

Done describes him as switching between fits of aggressive rage and nonconformity, followed by days of obsessive meditation and prayer, begging God to forgive him for his sins.

He would fast for days at a time, which was also not conducive to his career.

In seventeen yeah, it's just not great working at a boat while starving.

Although a lot of sailors are starving a lot of the time anyway, so it's not that weird either, Saling.

It's good if you could the points when you don't have to be starving.

If you cannot be starving, it's probably better for your longevity if you don't.

Yeah, yeah, you really want to eat when there is food, Yeah, because you're on a boat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In seventeen forty two, his dad retires.

John is now seventeen, and his father tries to secure him another job.

This one is the overseer on a Jamaican plantation.

One of his friends owned, right, and he's like, look, it's a great job.

You'll make money.

It's safe.

You know, you can get rich and then come home with money.

Right.

John doesn't flake because he doesn't want to be a slave overseer.

He flakes because he falls in love with a fifteen year old, right, and he really wants to marry this teenage Yeah, that's.

Not the kind of saying I'd been hoping he was into.

To be honest.

To be fair, he's not a lot older than her, right, I think she's actually like thirteen or so.

But when they fall in love, so it is a little weird.

But he's not that like he's a teenager too.

I think when they start he starts, okay, flirting with her.

Yeah, but yeah, it's not good.

It's no great.

He feels like things are settling into place in his life.

He gets another job, he's working on a boat.

He feels like he's definitely going to marry this girl.

He gets over the worst of his religious anxieties and becomes basically an atheist, right, which he writes about some and it's kind of it's fairly interesting if you do read his book, him talking about how he kind of comes to that conclusion.

And then in seventeen forty four, while hanging out with some friends one night, Newton gets press ganged and forced to serve in the Royal navy.

Right, this is how a lot of boat stuff worked at the time, you know, both the Navy and also a lot of slave ships.

By the way, even a lot of the guys running slave ships in the early period of the slave trade are not there of their own free will.

They were picked up drunk one night and made to work on a boat.

Yeah enough, this is something the Navy's going to crack down on around a little later.

But yeah, not by the time.

When he's a teenager.

That said, his dad is a man of influence within the say, within the boat world, and he finds out his son's been kidnapped, and he's able to basically like, hey, I think he needs a job, so keep him on the boat, but you got to promote him to midshipman.

You know, you gotta, you can't.

You got to give him a better gig.

So Jack gets promoted and he actually likes his new job.

Things are going well until his boat, the har which announces their next mission is going to take five years.

And again he's pretty sure he's going to marry this this kid, right who is by this point he's a little older enough, she's fifteen now, and he goes to her parents, and they're like, never come here again, right.

When you get married to leave for haaf decade.

It's probably not best pitch.

It's not a good pitch.

So John goes kind of crazy and he tries to desert from the harwitch.

He gets caught, and he gets punished, And here's done describing what happens to him after he gets caught trying to go a wall.

All three hundred and fifty of the crew were assembled on deck to witness Newton's court martial and flogging.

The captain was determined to make an example of him and so discourage any other malcontents from thoughts of desertion.

He was stripped and lashed to a grating give him the first dozen The catannine tail swung repeatedly, lashing his bare back until his white skin was red with lacerated flesh.

His audience watched in sickened silence.

One young marine fainted.

Lash after lash pounded his torn back eight dozen strokes in all, Stripped of rank and degraded to his original position.

His former comrades now dared not even acknowledge that they had ever known him, and were forbidden by the captain to have any communication with him.

So this fucks him up, This leaves something, This does some damage to our right I can imagine?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, And that's a lot of lashes.

Yeah, rightly, that's like a potentially dying from loss of blood amount of lashes.

Yeah, And it's because he's trying to make an example of him, right.

So Newton's not happy after this.

He makes plans to murder the captain and then kill himself, but he never goes through with it.

Instead, he manages to use his clout to transfer to his dad's cloud to transfer to a different boat, the Pegasus, which is a slave ship working the you know, the doing the slave trade thing, right, So this is how he starts working on a slave boat, but he doesn't like it immediately.

It proves a worse fit than the Harwitch at first, because Newton is by this point an angry atheist and his main hobby when they're not working is making fun of everyone else's religion and then trying to commit convince them to commit sins.

Right, and this does not make him popular with the crew.

Yeah, people don't like it when you're stuck on a boat together and you keep calling him stupid for believing in whatever they believe in.

Yeah, so he gets left in West Africa.

It's a little unclear do they fully strand him or there is partly It seems to have been somewhat mutual.

Dunn's book suggests Newton makes a There's a passenger on board is a slave dealer named Amos Klow, and Newton's like, shit, being a slave dealer, I could just get rich, you know, and then I could go home and I can marry that teenager.

Right, you just do some slave dealing for a few years and then marry that teenage Carol.

I like, yeah, perfect plan.

So Amos is like, well, I I'm heading back home and hang out at home for a while.

I live on this island off the coast to Africa.

You want to come, like, chill with me.

I'll teach you the ropes, right, And I think Klow sort of cons Newton, right, because when they get dropped off at this island, the only people there are Chlo his mistress slash wife, who's apparently a princess in a local tribe.

I don't know if they're telling the truth about this.

I don't know Newton's telling the truth about this.

He's not a perfectly reliable narrator, but basically he's on an island with a slave dealer, his wife, and their household right, and his wife does not like Newton.

She immediately hates this guy as dun rights.

Klow immediately set him to work building a house, though he refused to pay Newton any wage at all for his hard work.

Klow's lady had no liking for Newton and viewed him with suspicion and hostility.

The combination of climate and hard manual labor soon took its toll.

In the nineteen year old succumbed to fever.

Newton was too ill to accompany Klow on his next trip and was left in his wife's care.

Far from looking after him, she virtually left him to die.

I had sometimes not a little difficulty to procure a draft of water when burning with fever.

My bed was a mat spread upon a board or chest, and a log of wood for my pillow.

She lived in plenty herself, but hardly allowed me sufficient to sustain life, except now and then, when in the highest good humor, she would send me victuals in her own plate after she had dined again.

I don't know if he's lying because he just didn't like this lady.

I don't know if this is true the way he describes it.

He's basically made into a forced laborer for a period of time by a black woman primarily, so again I don't know.

But also she's the wife of a slave dealer, and I could totally believe a slave deal would be like, yeah, man, i'll teach you the ropes, but first you got to build a house for free and then just leave.

Right.

That also doesn't seem possible.

So yeah, I don't know.

One's a good person here, right, Yeah, unclear to me what the truth is here, but this is his story, right, And if this is true, you might think the experience would have made him more sympathetic to people who were enslaved, but it does not, at least not immediately after he's rescued, because his dad sends a rescue when he finds out what's happened.

He had saved in seventeen forty eight and kind of on the journey back to England, his boat encounters a storm or something is another near death experience, and he converts back to Christianity.

Right, So he lands in Liverpool and As soon as he's back, he immediately gets a job on a different slave ship.

He becomes first mate due to nepotism.

His dad's influence is apparently pretty far reaching, and starts his career right in seventeen fifty.

After just two years, he's made captain and he leads three successful voyages before having a stroke in seventeen fifty four, which forces him to quit captaining slave ships, but he starts just taking the money he hasn't investing in slave ships now, right, and that's how he makes his money for a while, right, Okay, So his life goes on at this point.

He's guilty, not because of the slaving initially, but because of his years as a non believer, and this eventually pushes him to become a reverend and fulfill his mother's hopes for him that he would you get into the clergy and make a religion his life.

And over the course of years he starts to rethink a lot of the things that he'd accepted as a younger man.

I don't know when he becomes an abolitionist exactly.

I think it's the kind of thing that happened in stages, right, But by the late seventeen eighties, he had fully rejected his past life, describing it as an unhappy and disgraceful trade that stood against the feelings of humanity and was ashamed of the entire country.

Right, he writes pretty like clearly about like, it was a terrible thing I did.

It's a terrible thing that still exists.

I can't believe I did it.

It's completely contrary to my current beliefs.

Right, Like.

That's essentially his line from this point forward.

Right.

And Newton, by the time that he comes out against slavery, is a fairly prominent religious leader.

He's kind of controversial for reasons I don't fully understand very Anglican stuff.

But he's also fairly prominent and a lot of people respect him.

And one of the people who respects him is a young politician, William Wilberforce, who comes to meet with him in seventeen eighty five, right, not about slavery, just because he needs advice, and Newton becomes his mentor.

Right.

But this is a two way street, and as Wilberforce grows more involved in the fight against slavery, seems to have influenced Newton to write an account of his own experience as a captain in the slave trade, which hit at a perfect time to shock and horrify Britons.

Newton wrote unsparingly about how most slave ship captains governed through ferociousness, both against their crews and the chained humans kept below decks.

So much money was at stake, and insurrection was such a constant terror that cruelty was seen as pragmatic.

He described how sailors were whipped bloody and had their wounds rubbed with pickle spices.

He discussed how an obsession with maximizing profit led captains to cram their boats with every kind of merchandise they could find, further cramping the already pestilential confines of the slavehold, and leading many captains to bring insufficient amounts of food and water, working their crews and keeping their slaves at the brink of famine.

He described how women were loaded onto slave ships naked, trembling, terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue, and hunger as they were forced below decks.

These women were exposed to the wanton rudeness of white savages.

And he's, you know, he's talking about the sexual violence that occurs here right in a way that's palatable for this audience, But that's what he's talking.

Yeah.

Newton expressed revulsion that I was once an active instrument in a business which at which my heart now shudders.

So, while the Sons of Africa are lobbying and Newton's book is starting to like fly off the shelves, Clarkson is spending several years engaged in deep on the ground investigation, traveling to Liverpool and other key ports for the slave trade, where he would sneak aboard to document living conditions, conduct interviews with sailors and auctioneers, and generally gather as much documentation as he could about the ongoing crime against humanity.

And he's in a lot of danger doing this.

He has to have a bodyguard with him.

After a certain point he was like armed, right, because people want to kill him for what he's doing.

He's talking with the money.

Yeah, yeah, he's fucking with the bag.

That's what a remarkable transformation.

Yeah.

Yeah, from like a kid who wanted to be a reverend to he's now doing like dangerous investigative journalism, trying to like blow the lid on the most evil industry of the day.

Right, that's really a lot of what's going on here, you know.

Yeah, remarkable, Yeah.

Per that article in antislavery dot Org, Clarkson himself had carried out interviews with sailors in London, Bristol and Liverpool to document the conditions and treatment African slaves were forced to endure.

In Liverpool, Clarkson bought shackles, thumbscrews, and a device for force feeding slaves who went on hunger strike to provide physical evidence which confirmed the testimonies he collected.

Clarkson and a friend, Richard Phillips, also went through official records which allowed them to document exactly what happened to British sailors on slave ships.

On average, twenty percent of each ship's crew died from disease or ill treatment before the ship returned.

Of the five thousand sailors engaged in the British slave trade in seventeen eighty six, two thousand, three hundred and twenty came home, eleven hundred and thirty died, eighty were discharged in Africa and unaccounted for, and fourteen hundred seventy were discharged or deserted in the West Indies like.

Which is it's a pretty remarkable attrition rate, right, You're getting less than hoff them back.

Yeah, that's nuts.

Like, that's a crazy rate of death.

And again, I know, like the instinct is not when we're talking about slavery to feel bad for the poor slave ship crews.

But again, a lot of these guys are forced to work.

They're pres gagged, right, they don't have much of a choice here r either, and they're being worked to death in a nightmare right, Like this is a pretty bad situation all around here.

It's also important, Like this matters in part because of how they're talking, how the pro slavery side of things is talking about what the slave trey does for British sailors.

Right, Britain is a naval power.

The navy is what keeps Britain free and what keeps it influential.

And one of the arguments the pro slavery side will make is that like, well, these slave ships are a great training ground for British sailors.

Right, this is actually important to national defense because all of these guys are learning the ropes of how to work in very difficult conditions that can then come and fill our navy with skilled sailors and that makes all of us safer, right, And Clarkson's research proves that's a lie, because it's like, no, man, they're all fucking dying, like they're being forced to work.

They don't want to be sailors, and you're killing half of them.

This is not making the navy stronger.

You're fucking crazy, Like, yeah, no one's gonna want to be a fucking sailor.

Off to haffa friends die.

But again, this is a career for me.

Yeah, you know, I want to do again.

Get on another death boat, this one with guns, so that you add fighting to that, it's not gonna get better.

Yeah, boy, if you the only thing could have made that trip that killed all my friends better is if we'd fought the French at some point.

So Clarkson also be friends some of his sources.

One of them is a sailor named James Stanfield who'd worked on slave ships, and he convinces Stanfield to publish an account of his experiences in the slave trade, which also comes out in seventeen eighty eight.

So alongside Newton's account, you've got this kind of barrage of both the Sons of Africa's accounts of what it's like being enslaved and being a victim of this system.

And then on the other side the people actual working the ships who are also being no, no, no, this is as bad as they're saying.

And I used to run the boats like that.

All matters.

It matters that it comes out this way like that makes this a lot more convincing.

Clarkson inspires another writer, Alexander Falconbridge, to investigate and publish an account of the slave trade that was also released that year.

Educated Britons were thus deluged and detailed reputable accounts about the evils of the system.

William Wilberforce, the Member of Parliament that is like the major act like activist in Parliament, is inspired that year by Clarkson's essay to sponsor a bill in the House of Commons to ban the slave trade.

This led to the first parliamentary investigation into the Atlantic slave trade, which in turn inspired the slave syndicates and their agents in the West India Committee, an organization that still exists today but was founded to provoke trade with the Caribbean to strike back.

It's still around, but at this point it's just how slave owners like do their propaganda.

It's amazing.

What does it do now?

I think it's just about promoting trade with the Caribbean.

I guess okay, But if they didn't see any need to like shut that one down.

One yeah, imagine getting onboarded there and being like, so, yeah, how did this start?

Well started in seventeen thirty five?

Oh yeah, doing what well?

He needs to talk about that?

Yeah, I don't really think about it.

They don't have the old photos on the walls as you go in, you know, they pick up a bit later.

Yeah, wild, Well, you know what else picks up a little later, the products and services that support the show.

Hymns.

That's right, yep, hymns.

So we're talking about the the pro slavery lobby striking back via the West India Committee.

The committee brings witnesses before Parliament who make claims that, like one of their big claims is that slave ships are actually really nice.

Like, I don't know what you guys are talking about.

I would love to be in a slave ship, honestly.

They just won't let me on, right because I'm not a slave.

So they bring on They bring out a captain who says the space between the decks is sufficiently large to contain the number of people loaded on board, and the slaves in general do not show any great concern on their first coming on board.

They're comfortably lodged in rooms fitting for them.

When they come on deck, there are two minut attending with cloths to rub them perfectly dry, in another to give them a little cordial.

They are amused with instruments of music peculiar to their own country, and when tired of music and dancing, they go to games of chance.

It's basically a cruise.

You give them a little drink.

Yeah, they still getting out a cruise.

Yeah, what a fucking insane thing to say.

Yeah, and they have they also bring on like plantation owners who are like they love working on plantations.

They barely even work.

They're dancing all the time, dancing.

Yeah.

So the society and its allies fight back with skilled propaganda of their own, as well as factual legal arguments.

Josiah Wedgwood, an anti slavery activist, hires a woodworker to make a seal for the movement, which features an African man kneeling and raising his chained hands above the slogan am I not a man?

And a brother.

This becomes the logo of the movement, and it goes like really eighteenth century viral.

It is printed on flyers and books and sold and medallions will show you a picture of like it's like a medallion some of the merch that they had for this.

But like, you know, it's a very effective piece of visual advertising art.

I mean, it's yeah, I don't know exactly what you want to categorize it, but yeah, perhaps the most influential image in the whole campaign is a diagram of a slave ship sent to Clarkson by an abolitionist group in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

And one thing you're seeing here is the abolisious movement in the States is much less advanced, but they're starting to not just get things organized, but they're also connecting from an early point directly across the sea.

This is a from fairly early point an international cause, right among these abolitionists, right, And so these these folks in Plymouth send a diagram of like a slave ship's slave quarters in and it becomes one of the most important pieces of like propaganda that they the anti slavery cause uses.

Per the website antislavery dot org, they sent clarkson a plate or diagram of a slave ship the Brooks, which showed sections of the ship from different angles and graphically illustrated how inhumane the conditions were for the slaves.

Clark's and another abolitionists reworked the diagram to show the books loaded with four hundred and eighty two slaves.

The ship had carried over six hundred slaves in the past, but they did not want to be accused of exaggeration.

In seventeen eighty nine they printed seven thousand posters of the slave ship, and soon the shocking and iconic image was appearing everywhere.

And I mean you can see in the image there, particularly the bottom right corner, it's the the bottom of this vessel is almost black with the number of people drawn in just because like they're covering every available and there's no room in this thing whatsoever.

No, Like they're actually like sardines in account of sardines, right, they're.

Like, and this isn't the fullest yeah yeah yeah, front to head, Yeah.

I had fifty percent more people than this.

Yeah yeah at times, yeah.

Yeah, it's there.

Yeah, they're geometrically max like that.

They'll try and at the top there it's it's wild think of packing human beings.

And like that.

Yeah, so you can see why people are getting pissed and why this starts to have an effect.

By the start of seventeen eighty nine, nearly two hundred petitions had been sent to Parliament, with tens of thousands of cumulative signatures.

Popular momentum is clearly with the cause of abolition, but the society's progress was interrupted by a constitutional crisis over whether or not King George was crazy.

So we're not going to get into that.

But it does, it does, degree, it does.

Uh.

It puts a stafford of things for a little while, right, great city, and the answer is yeah, yeah, they're all kind of crazy.

Exp's all kind of crazy, centuries, all mad King George.

So things grind to a halt for a little while until in late seventeen ninety one, the Haitian Rebellion launches in Sanda Mang right, and two months later, former slaves are in charge of much of the island.

Thousands of white slavers are dead, more than a thousand plantations have been looted, and white people who are pro slavery are kind of freaking out about this.

Right, Parliament doggedly refuses to consider outlawing slavery.

But the success I was surprised to hear this.

The success of the rebellion, its primary influence on like in England, is to fuel abolitionist sentiment, because a lot of people instead of being like, oh my god, it's so scary look at like this uprising and what they did, they're like, wait, it's the only way we can keep these people slaved is by like holding guns at them at all times?

Is this evil?

Is this bad?

They don't see them happy over there?

Yeah, I don't think they're really all going on a cruise.

They burned a lot of plantations.

If they like plantations, I don't know why they do that, if they're fans of them.

She just seems like they weren't having a nice time.

Yeah.

That same year, seventeen ninety one, a series of popular pamphlets incite a boycott of sugar produced on slave plantations, and incredibly, some three hundred thousand people get on board.

This is like a big deal.

William Wilberforce cat Yeah, which is like, yeah, good thing to be boycotting.

Yep, yeah, go for it.

But it's very early for that kind of humor activism to be.

Yeah, you know, it's so so effective.

This is pretty foundational in a lot of ways.

And just like the history of Western activism.

William Wilberforce capitalized on the new found momentum in seventeen ninety two, introducing a new bill to abolish the slave trade.

This time, public support was so strong that parliamentarians actually feared opposing the bill.

They didn't want to pass it because again, money, but they were scared to piss people while off right, which is an important sea change.

It passes the House of Commons in a compromised form, right, and the version that passes has an amendment that says will gradually abolish slavery.

Right, We're not going to do it all at once, right.

Yeah, But it doesn't get through anyway because the lord, the House of Lords, has a say and they block the bill because they're the House of Lords.

Right.

It's it's them all the assholes in it.

Yeah, but that's not fair.

You're right, you're right, it has a higher portion of assholes in it.

Right.

In seventeen ninety three, war with France interrupts the anti slavery cause.

Again.

The whole you know, that Napoleon stuff is getting going, and it makes it hard to want to do things that might upset the economics of the entire empire, like when they're now fighting a series of wars, and now, you know, because the war is on, there's anti sedition laws that makes it difficult to organize during the war years.

So this is it again and another kind of like period of time in which things get delayed and off track in terms of the abolitionist cause.

But history keeps happening, and during the war years there's a series of slave rebellions in the Caribbean.

Right.

They're not as successful as the Haitian one, but they keep the human and financial cost of forcing slavery on Africans in the public consciousness.

People are constantly hearing, oh, a bunch more people died in this horrible slave uprising.

Right, they really don't seem happy, you know.

By eighteen oh six, it's time for things to move forward again.

And finally the Abolition of Slave of the Slave Trade Act is passed on March twenty fifth in eighteen oh seven, which brings an immediate band to the Atlantic slave trade.

The Royal Navy is now pressed into service searching for slave vessels.

Right, So this is the culmination of Sharp and Clarkson and Equiano and Newton and all of these people's efforts.

Is they ban the slave the Atlantics the slave trade right in teen oh seven within the empire, right, you cannot British ships are no longer supposed to be taking slaves and they're not supposed to be importing them to British colonies.

Right.

This is again not enough.

You know, this is not at all an end of slavery.

There's still slavery in the empire, but it's the beginning of the end for slavery within the empire, and it's the end of the beginning for the abolitionist fight.

Now.

There is one of the downsides is because this is a big victory, there's a loss of momentum within the cause, right because people are like, well, isn't that enough?

A sizeable chunk of people are Sharp is not, Clarkson isn't.

But a lot of people are like, I feel like we did okay, you know, move on to something else.

Yeah.

So there's a loss of momentum.

But abolitionists, the most dedicated ones do continue to mobilize and fight well, the British government uses its power to pressure other European states to pass laws prohibiting the slave trade.

And this is happening at the time.

Right.

It starts with just being a British thing, but they are a to get other European states to sign on to basically saying yeah, we're not going to participate in this anymore.

Right, And that is an important step too towards full abolition.

It's going to take until eighteen thirty three for slavery to be abolished in the British Empire.

And that is another story that we're not because is again about the slave trade being ended.

But that fact, the fact that they do abolish slavery in eighteen thirty three is directly tied to the abolition of the slave trade.

Right.

And even this act is imperfect.

You know, when slavery's abolished, slave owners are compensated financially for the slaves they don't have anymore, which is not great, but it's better than the situation that it existed previously, and it provides a shot in the arm to the abolitionist cause in the United States.

And in fact, everything we've talked about in these episodes helps to form and inspire the abolitionists who fought to end slavery in the US.

Granville Sharp, our Goat never lives to see full abolition, but he plays a major role in the eighteen oh seven abolition of the slave trade, and he lived to see that it comes at the end of forty two years of ceaseless work on his behalf.

By the end of his life, Sharp was one of the most admired men in the world.

John Adams wrote that he quote merited the esteem and respect of all men among whom liberty and humanity are not disregarded.

He dies in eighteen thirteen, aged seventy seven.

His protege, Thomas Clarkson, continued the fight and saw it through to the general abolition of slavery in the Empire.

After that was done, he devoted himself seamlessly to ending slavery in the Americas.

Clarkson's like, okay, we got that done.

Time to get over to the States.

Like that's the next fight, right, what a chain?

Yeah yeah, what a cool guy?

Are really forty dude?

Yeah yeah?

Oh glad he went for that horse ride.

The note we end on is so fucking cool.

I can't wait to read it to you here, but yeah.

So in eighteen forty, the first World Anti Slavery Convention is held in London.

To commemorate the event, a painting is commissioned by one of the best known British artists of the day, JMW.

Turn Inspired by Clarkson's writing and the horrible case of the Zorg, Turner made a painting called Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, which Sophie's going to show you.

It's a very affecting piece and it's yes, I mean it's not directly named after the Zorg, but it's people being throwed.

It's enslave people pink thrown overboard to die in the ocean.

Right, And this is kind of like the the head image of the conference, right to remind people again, they're hearkening back to the Zorg.

To remind people of the inhumanity of what they're fighting for.

Because it is such a difficult fight and a painful fight, you need to do that, right.

Clarkson gives the keynote speech at this conference and he urges his American allies to continue their fight against the planters in the South and persevere to the last.

In their quest to abolish slavery.

Six years later, at another abolition movement gathering near the very end of his life, Clarkson meets with Frederick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison.

Douglas viewed Clarkson as a hero, and he wrote later about the moment that he met Clarkson, and this is the most affecting things I have ever read.

This is Frederick Douglas talking about meeting Clarkson.

He took one of my hands with both of his, and in a tremulous voice, said, God bless you, Frederick Douglas.

I have given sixty years of my life to the emancipation of your people, and if I had sixty years more, they should all be given to the same cause.

Yeah uh wow.

And he dies a couple of weeks after this, at the age of eighty six.

Geez yeah wow, yeah wow.

I want to hear.

Yeah, cool guy, some cool guys in the story.

Yeah nice, you picked, you picked a good story.

Uh huh yeah, that last bit gets me.

Yeah yeah, yeah, so that's the wild to think like.

And then they did direct link.

Straight to hand to hand.

Yeah yeah, yeah.

For Frederick Douglas too.

You know that goes to women's suffraging the civil rights women in the United States, and like things happened in the last two hundred years.

Yeah, yeah, all because a lot some a number of people, you know, Equiano and Sharp and Clarkson and you know all of their allies.

Wilberforce got the ball rolling and spent years fighting for very little at a time.

It would have seemed like that constantly, that like, well we got fucking this was years of effort and what did we get, you.

Know, so much human suffering.

In the meantime.

It would have been so easy.

To give up nightmare continuing and just be like it's impotant.

Things are just fucked forever.

You can't fix any of this.

But they didn't.

Again, Clarkson was fighting sixty years.

Yeah, it's like an entire lifetime of struggle.

Yeah, inspiring, very inspiring.

Sorry, Truman's yelling at me because I'm carrying her sister, not.

Her, but yep, double dog carry.

So this is the last episode of the year.

I thought the audience deserved and Anderson.

That's right, you're getting one for me too.

I'm tired.

Yeah, it's been a long year friends.

Yep.

Hopefully the next one is better.

Yeah, yeah, be the Clarkson you want to see in the world or second Dog Second or someone hit the podcast A second Dog is hit the podcast.

James, you want to plug your book one more time?

I would love to plug my book.

Yeah.

If you want to read more about people who are struggling to make the world better, you can buy my book.

You can pre order it now ak press ak Press to org.

Slash Against the State will have a link for you.

Book is called Against the State looks at the revolutionary struggles in mem Java and in Spain.

If you know what roy Java is.

You can also listen to Roberts excellent podcast, The Women's War.

But I hope that just like this podcast, but book leaves you feeling a little hopeful, and certainly like the time that Robert and I have spent talking to young people fighting fore libration and Mema is one of the things that I go back to when I need a little hope these days.

So I hope the book can share some of that with all of you.

Yeah, I hope that too, And I hope you all have a good whatever you celebrate or don't celebrate, or just a good into December or a good Christmas or if I assume there's other holidays this time of the year, years, whatever.

Have fun.

Yeah, if you don't have to work.

That's nice, isn't it.

We'll be back, well, we'll be back with some new episodes in twenty twenty six.

Yes, we will.

So many new episodes, so many episodes.

Bye bye, bye bye.

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