The tyrant’s plea, excuse his dev’lish deed.
‘That our Colonies want people, is a very weak argument for so inhuman a violation of justice.—Shall a civilized, a Christian nation encourage Slavery, because the barbarous, savage, lawless African hath done it? Monstrous thought! To what end do we profess a religion whose dictates we so flagrantly violate? Wherefore have we that pattern of goodness and humanity, if we refuse to follow it? How long shall we continue a practice, which policy rejects, justice condemns, and piety dissuades? Shall the Americans persist in a conduct, which cannot be justified; or persevere in oppression from which their hearts must recoil? If the barbarous Africans shall continue to enslave each other, let the dæmon slavery remain among them, that their crime may include its own punishment. Let not Christians, by administering to their wickedness, confess their religion to be a useless refinement, their profession vain, and themselves as inhuman as the savages they detest.’
James Foster, in his Discourses on Natural Religion and Social Virtue, also shews his just indignation at this wicked practice, which he declares to be a criminal and outrageous violation of the natural right of mankind. At page 156, 2d vol. he says, ‘Should we have read concerning the Greeks or Romans of old, that they traded, with view to make slaves of their own species, whom they certainly knew that this would involve in schemes of blood and murder, of destroying or enslaving each other, that they even fomented wars, and engaged whole nations and tribes in open hostilities, for their own private advantage; that they had no detestation of the violence and cruelty, but only feared the ill success of their inhuman enterprises; that they carried men like themselves, their brethren, and the offspring of the same common parent, to be sold like beasts of prey, or beasts of burden, and put them to the same reproachful trial of their soundness, strength and capacity for greater bodily service; that quite forgetting and renouncing the original dignity of human nature, communicated to all, they treated them with more severity and ruder discipline, than even the ox or the ass, who are void of understanding.—Should we not, if this had been the case, have naturally been led to despise all their pretended refinements of morality; and to have concluded, that as they were not nations destitute of politeness, they must have been entire Strangers to Virtue and Benevolence?
‘But, notwithstanding this, we ourselves (who profess to be Christians, and boast of the peculiar advantage we enjoy, by means of an express revelation of our duty from Heaven) are in effect, these very untaught and rude Heathen countries. With all our superior light, we instil into those, whom we call savage and barbarous, the most despicable opinion of human nature. We, to the utmost of our power, weaken and dissolve the universal tie, that binds and unites mankind. We practise what we should exclaim against, as the utmost excess of cruelty and tyranny, if nations of the world, differing in colour and form of government from ourselves, were so possessed of empire, as to be able to reduce us to a state of unmerited and brutish servitude. Of consequence, we sacrifice our reason, our humanity, our Christianity, to an unnatural sordid gain. We teach other nations to despise and trample under foot, all the obligations of social virtue. We take the most effectual method to prevent the propagation of the Gospel, by representing it as a scheme of power and barbarous oppression, and an enemy to the natural privileges and rights of men.
‘Perhaps all that I have now offered, may be of very little weight to restrain this enormity, this aggravated iniquity. However, I shall still have the satisfaction, of having entered my private protest against a practice which, in my opinion, bids that God, who is the God and Father of the Gentiles unconverted to Christianity, most daring and bold defiance, and spurns at all the principles both of natural and revealed Religion.’
How the British nation first came to be concerned in a practice, by which the rights and liberties of mankind are so violently infringed, and which is so opposite to the apprehensions Englishmen have always had of what natural justice requires, is indeed surprising. It was about the year 1563, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, that the English first engaged in the Guinea Trade; when it appears, from an account in Hill’s Naval History, page 293, That when Captain Hawkins returned from his first voyage to Africa, that generous spirited Princess, attentive to the interest of her subjects, sent for the Commander, to whom she expressed her concern lest any of the African Negroes should be carried off without their free consent, declaring it would be detestable, and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers. Captain Hawkins promised to comply with the Queen’s injunction: nevertheless, we find in the account, given in the same History, of Hawkins’s second voyage, the author using these remarkable words, Here began the horrid practice of forcing the Africans into slavery.
Labat, a Roman Missionary, in his account of the Isles of America, at page 114, of the 4th vol. mentions, that Lewis the 13th, Father to the present French King’s Grandfather, was extremely uneasy at a Law by which all the Negroes of his Colonies were to be made slaves; but it being strongly urged to him, as the readiest means for their Conversion to Christianity, he acquiesced therewith.
And although we have not many accounts of the impressions which this piratical invasion of the rights of mankind gave to serious minded people, when first engaged in; yet it did not escape the notice of some, who might be esteemed in a peculiar manner as watchmen in their day to the different societies of Christians whereunto they belonged. Richard Baxter, an eminent preacher amongst the Nonconformists, in the last century, well known and particularly esteemed by most of the serious Presbyterians and Independents, in his Christian Directory, mostly wrote about an hundred Years ago, fully shews his detestation of this practice in the following words: ‘Do you not mark how God hath followed you with plagues? And may not conscience tell you, that it is for your inhumanity to the souls and bodies of men?—To go as pirates and catch up poor Negroes, or people of another land, that never forfeited Life or Liberty, and to make them Slaves and sell them, is one of the worst kind of Thievery in the world; and such persons are to be taken for the common Enemies of mankind; and they that buy them, and use them as beasts, for their meer commodity, and betray, or destroy, or neglect their souls, are fitter to be called devils than Christians. It is an heinous sin to buy them, unless it be in charity to deliver them.——Undoubtedly they are presently bound to deliver them; because by right the man is his own; therefore no man else can have a just title to him.’
We also find George Fox, a man of exemplary piety, who was the principal instrument in gathering the religious society of people called Quakers, expressing his concern and fellow-feeling for the bondage of the Negroes: In a discourse taken from his mouth, in Barbadoes, in the Year 1671, says, ‘Consider with yourselves, if you were in the same condition as the Blacks are,—who came strangers to you, and were sold to you as slaves. I say, if this should be the condition of you or yours, you would think it hard measure: Yea, and very great bondage and cruelty. And, therefore, consider seriously of this, and do you for and to them, as you would willingly have them, or any other to do unto you, were you in the like slavish condition; and bring them to know the Lord Christ.’ And in his journal, page 431, speaking of the Advice he gave his friends at Barbadoes, he says, ‘I desired also, that they would cause their Overseers to deal mildly and gently with their Negroes, and not to use cruelty towards them, as the manner of some had been; and that after certain years of servitude they should make them free.’
In a book printed in Leverpool, called The Leverpool Memorandum-book, which contains, among other things, an account of the Trade of that port, there is an exact list of the vessels employed in the Guinea Trade, and of the number of Slaves imported in each vessel, by which it appears, that in the year 1753, the number imported to America, by vessels belonging to that port, amounted to upwards of Thirty Thousand; and from the number of Vessels employed by the African Company in London and Bristol, we may, with some degree of certainty conclude, there is, at least, One Hundred Thousand Negroes purchased and brought on board our ships yearly from the coast of Africa, on their account. This is confirmed in Anderson’s History of Trade and Commerce, printed in 1764, where it is said, at page 68 of the Appendix, ‘That England supplies her American Colonies with Negro-slaves, amounting in number to above One Hundred Thousand every year.’ When the vessels are full freighted with slaves, they set out for our plantations in America, and may be two or three months on the voyage, during which time, from the filth and stench that is among them, distempers frequently break out, which carry off a great many, a fifth, a fourth, yea, sometimes a third of them; so that taking all the slaves together that are brought on board our ships yearly, one may reasonably suppose, that at least ten thousand of them die on the voyage. And in a printed account of the State of the Negroes in our plantations, it is supposed that a fourth part, more or less, die at the different Islands, in what is called the seasoning. Hence it may be presumed, that, at a moderate computation of the slaves, who are purchased by our African merchants in a year, near thirty thousand die upon the voyage and in the seasoning. Add to this, the prodigious number who are killed in the incursions and intestine wars, by which the Negroes procure the number of slaves wanted to load the vessels. How dreadful then is this Slave-Trade, whereby so many thousands of our fellow-creatures, free by nature, endued with the same rational faculties, and called to be heirs of the same salvation with us, lose their lives, and are truly, and properly speaking, murdered every year! For it is not necessary, in order to convict a man of murder, to make it appear, that he had an intention to commit murder. Whoever does, by unjust force or violence, deprive another of his Liberty; and, while he has him in his power, reduces him, by cruel treatment, to such a condition as evidently endangers his life, and the event occasions his death, is actually guilty of murder. It is no less shocking to read the accounts given by Sir Hans Sloane, and others, of the inhuman and unmerciful treatment those Blacks meet with, who survive the seasoning in the Islands, often for transgressions, to which the punishment they receive bears no proportion. ‘And the horrid executions, which are frequently made there upon discovery of the plots laid by the Blacks, for the recovery of their liberty; of some they break the bones, whilst alive, on a wheel; others they burn or rather roast to death; others they starve to death, with a loaf hanging before their mouths.’ Thus they are brought to expire, with frightful agonies, in the most horrid tortures. For negligence only they are unmercifully whipped, till their backs are raw, and then pepper and salt is scattered on the wounds to heighten the pain, and prevent mortification. Is it not a cause of much sorrow and lamentation, that so many poor creatures should be thus racked with excruciating tortures, for crimes which often their tormentors have occasioned? Must not even the common feelings of human nature have suffered some grievous change in those men, to be capable of such horrid cruelty towards their fellow-men? If they deserve death, ought not their judges, in the death decreed them, always to remember that these their hapless fellow-creatures are men, and themselves professing Christians? The Mosaic law teaches us our duty in these cases, in the merciful provision it made in the punishment of transgressors, Deuter. xxv. 2. And it shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten before his face, according to his fault, by a certain number; Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed. And the reason rendered is out of respect to human nature, viz. Lest if he should exceed, and beat him above these, with many stripes, then thy Brother should seem vile unto thee. Britons boast themselves to be a generous, humane people, who have a true sense of the importance of Liberty; but is this a true character, whilst that barbarous, savage Slave-Trade, with all its attendant horrors, receives countenance and protection from the Legislature, whereby so many Thousand lives are yearly sacrificed? Do we indeed believe the truths declared in the Gospel? Are we persuaded that the threatenings, as well as the promises therein contained, will have their accomplishment? If indeed we do, must we not tremble to think what a load of guilt lies upon our Nation generally, and individually so far as we in any degree abet or countenance this aggravated iniquity?