A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

The story of the accusation, the trial, and the death created an immense sensation in England. Brougham, Buxton, Sir James Mackintosh, the historian and scholar, and many others aroused the public indignation by their rightful denunciations of the trial and the verdict. The Government condemned and reversed the proceedings at the trial, and when Brougham brought on a motion in the House of Commons, publicly branding with just severity the whole conduct of the Demerara authorities, his motion was only defeated by a small majority. Meanwhile, the agitation against the whole system of colonial slavery was receiving new impulse and new strength from the teaching of new events in the colonies, and in May, 1830, a great meeting was held in London to demand, not the mitigation, but the total abolition of slavery in every land over which the flag of England floated. This meeting was presided over by the great abolitionist, William Wilberforce, who had been out of public life for some time owing to severe ill-health, and who believed that he could not more fitly celebrate his return to the active work of philanthropy than by taking the chair at such a demonstration. Mr. Buxton proposed a resolution calling on the country to agitate for the total abolition of slavery in the colonies, and to be content with nothing else, and the resolution was carried by enthusiastic acclamation. Brougham at once became the champion of the great London meeting by a motion which he brought forward in the House of Commons. One of the greatest speeches of his lifetime {195} was made in justifying his appeal to the House for the total abolition of a system which admitted of nothing like partial, or what is called moderate, reform, and must either be swept out of existence altogether or remain a curse to those who enforce it as well as to those against whom it is enforced. Brougham's motion was defeated, of course. We say of course because it was only a motion made by an independent member, as the phrase goes, and was not proposed by the leader of a strong Government, determined to stake its existence on the carrying of its proposition. Every great reform, it may almost literally be said, is heralded in Parliament by the motions of independent members, who are sure to be defeated, but whose determined efforts have success enough to make the leader of the Government, or the leader of the Opposition, feel that the time is near at hand when the cause must be taken up by one or other of the great parties in the State.

Buxton raised the whole question in the following session; and then Lord Althorp, speaking for the Government, went so far as to offer a sort of compromise by suggesting that the colonies which in the future should give evidence of their sincere resolve to make distinct improvement in the condition of their slaves should be rewarded and encouraged by a permission to send their sugar into English ports at a reduced rate of duty. The country, however, had long outgrown the condition of mind in which this feeble and ridiculous proposition could be regarded as worthy of serious consideration. The notion of sacrificing any part of the country's revenues for the purpose of bribing the planters to deal a little less severely with their slaves was not likely to find much favor among the men who had thus far conducted the great agitation against slavery. The object of reformers such as Clarkson, Wilberforce, Buxton, Brougham, and Mackintosh was not merely that the negroes should be flogged less often, or that the negro women should not be flogged at all, but that the whole abominable system which made men, women, and children the absolute property of their owners should be brought to an end forever.

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[Sidenote: 1833—A plan for the abolition of slavery]

At last it became evident to the Whig Ministry that something definite must be done, and that nothing would be considered definite by the country which did not aim at the total abolition of slavery. The hour had come, and the man who could best turn it to account in the House of Commons was already in his place. Lord Stanley, who had joined the Reform Ministry as Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, had since that time been moved to the higher position of Colonial Secretary, and to him was appropriately confided the task of introducing the measures which the Government had determined to take. The Lord Stanley of those days was in after years the Earl of Derby, whom some of us can still call to mind as one of the most brilliant orators in the House of Lords at a time when Brougham and Lyndhurst maintained the character of that assembly for parliamentary eloquence. Those among us who remember the eloquent Lord Derby, the Rupert of debate, remember him as a Tory Prime Minister or the Tory leader of Opposition in the House of Lords. But he began his great Parliamentary career as a Whig and as a Reformer, and he was one of the most zealous of Lord Grey's colleagues in pressing forward the great measure which was carried to success in 1832. Among those who can remember him there is only one opinion about the high order of his Parliamentary eloquence, and that opinion is that he was a worthy rival of Gladstone and of Bright. To him as Colonial Secretary was entrusted the task of bringing forward, in the House of Commons, the measures of the Government for dealing with the question of slavery in the British colonies. Stanley's speech was such a magnificent blending of reason and emotion, so close and so powerful in its arguments, so thrilling in its eloquence, that many of those who heard the speech naturally expected that it was destined to announce a bold and a comprehensive policy. A certain feeling of disappointment came up among the abolitionists when the measures were described which the Government had resolved to submit to the House of Commons. What Stanley had to propose was not a complete measure, but a {197} series of resolutions embodying the purposes of the Government's policy. It is enough to say that the Government proposed a plan which amounted to a scheme of abolition by stages. There was to be a certain period of apprenticeship, a term of fifteen years, during which the slaves, men and women, were to continue to work for their masters as before, under conditions gradually relaxing as the slave drew nearer to the time of emancipation, and then when that hour at length arrived the slave was to be free forever. This principle, however, was not to apply to children under six years old at the time of the passing of the measure, or to any children born after that time. The idea on which the whole scheme was founded was the notion, very common at that time and since, that the sudden emancipation of any set of human beings could only tend to bewilder them, and to prevent them from making a proper use of the freedom thus abruptly thrust upon them. "The fool in the fable," said Macaulay, when dealing with a somewhat similar question, "declared that no man ought to go into the water until he had learned to swim." Lord Grey's Ministry had apparently much the same idea about the perils of emancipation. Another part of the scheme proposed that fifteen millions should be advanced by the Government as a loan to the West Indian planters in order to help them over the diminution of income which might be expected to follow any interference with the conditions of slave labor.

The resolutions put forward by the Government were regarded as highly unsatisfactory by most of the leading abolitionists. Macaulay indeed argued with all his usual eloquence and skill in favor of the principle of gradual abolition, and it is hardly necessary to say that it was not in that speech he made use of the pithy sentence which we have already quoted. Buxton proposed an amendment to the resolution, an amendment in fact calling for immediate abolition, and the amendment was seconded by Daniel O'Connell. Buxton, however, was prevailed upon not to press his amendment on the ground that the Government were as eager for emancipation as any one could {198} be, and that Lord Grey and his colleagues were only anxious to bring forward such a measure as might at once secure the support of the majority and prevent further delay, while securing, at the same time, the ultimate and not distant settlement of the whole question. O'Connell stood firm, argued strongly against the proposed compromise, refused to accept it, and actually pressed Buxton's amendment to a division. Of course he was defeated by a large majority, but he carried a respectable minority along with him; and few now can doubt that the amendment which he pressed forward, even after its proposer had abandoned it, was right in its principle, and that the Government, if forced to it, could have carried a plan for immediate abolition with little more difficulty than was found in carrying the scheme of compromise. As the discussion went on the Government made some further concessions to the abolitionists, by reducing the time and modifying the terms of the apprenticeship system, and the abolitionists in general believed it their wisest policy to accept the modified arrangement and thus avoid any further delay. Another alteration of great importance was made by the Government in favor of the planters, and was finally accepted by the abolitionists and by the country in general. The friends of the planters made strong representations to the effect that the proffered loan would be of no use whatever to the owners of slaves whose property was so soon to pass from their hands into freedom, and that there was not the slightest chance of the planters being able to pay back to the English exchequer the amount that the Government was willing to advance. It was urged, too, with some show of reason, that the planters were not themselves responsible for the existence of slave labor, that generations of planters had grown up under the system and had made a profit by it during the days when civilization had not, anywhere, set its face against slavery, and that it was hard, therefore, to make them suffer in pocket for the recent development in the feelings of humanity. The offer of a loan was abandoned by the Government, and it was proposed instead that a gift of twenty millions sterling should {199} be tendered as compensation for the losses that the planters would be likely to undergo. This proposal, at first, met with some opposition, and by many indeed was looked upon as an extravagant freak of generosity; but some of the leading abolitionists were willing to make allowance for the condition of the planters, and most, or all, of them were prepared to make a large sacrifice for the sake of carrying some measure which promised, even by gradual advances, the final abolition of the slave system. We may condense into a very brief space the remainder of the story, and merely record the fact that the Government carried their amended measure of emancipation with its liberal grant to the West Indian planters through both Houses of Parliament, and that it obtained the royal assent.

[Sidenote: 1833—Slavery abolished in British colonies]

It may easily be imagined that poor King William must have had some mental struggles before he found himself quite in a mood to grant that assent. If the King ever had any clear and enduring opinion in his mind, it probably was the opinion, which he had often expressed already, against the abolition of slavery. He had, of course, a general objection to reform of any kind, but his objection to any reform which threatened the endurance of the slave system must have been an article of faith with him. It was the fate of King William the Fourth to live in a reign of reforms, not one of which would appear to have touched his heart or been in accordance with his personal judgment. The highest praise that history can give him is that he did not at least, as one of his predecessors had done, set his own judgment and his own inclination determinedly and irrevocably against the advice of the statesmen whom he had called in to carry on the work of administration. The King gave his assent to the amended Bill for the abolition of slavery, including the generous gift to the planters, and the measure became law on August 27, 1833. Some of the colonies had the sense and spirit to discard the apprenticeship system altogether, and to date the emancipation of their slaves from the day when the measure became an Act of Parliament. In no colony did the setting free of the negroes bring about any of the troubles and turmoils, the {200} lawless outbreaks of blacks against whites, the massacres of the innocents, which had been so long and so often pictured as the inevitable consequences of the legislation demanded by the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and the Broughams. It seems to us all now so much a matter of course for a civilized and enlightened State to decree the extinction of slavery within its limits, that we find it hard to appreciate at its true value the difficulty and the splendor of the achievement which was accomplished by the Grey Ministry. It has to be said, however, that the Ministry and the Parliament were, in this instance, only the instruments by which the great charge was wrought. The movement carried on out-of-doors, the movement set going by the leading abolitionists and supported by the people, deserves the chief honor of the victory. All the countries that make up the kingdom, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, sent their authorized speakers to sustain the cause of freedom for the slaves. The gift, which on the recommendation of Lord Grey's Ministry was placed at the disposal of the West Indian planters, was indeed a lavish gift; but the public in general made little complaint on the score of its lavishness, and did not calculate too jealously the value of the sacrifice which the State was invited to make for the purchase of negro emancipation. Thirty years and more had to pass before the great American republic was able to free itself from the curse of slavery, and even then the late deliverance was only accomplished at the cost of a war which threatened for the season a permanent division of the States.

[Sidenote: 1833—Labor legislation]

The same year which saw the passing of the measure for the abolition of slavery in the colonies saw also the passing of an Act which interfered seriously, for the first time, with something which might almost be called a system of domestic slavery. We are speaking now of the measure which dealt with the conditions of factory labor in these countries. Factory labor, as it was known in the early days of William the Fourth, was the growth of modern civilization. England had found that her main business in life was not the conquest and the subjection of foreign races, {201} or the building or the navigating of ships, or the cultivation of land, or the growth of corn, but the manufacture of goods for her own domestic use and for export all over the world. Great manufacturing cities and towns were growing up everywhere, and, while the workers on the land were becoming fewer and fewer, the workers in the city factories were multiplying every day, so that an entirely new laboring population was coming up to claim the attention of the State. Since the old days, when the whole social organization was conducted according to the dictates of some centralized authority, there had been growing up, as one of the inevitable reactions which civilization brings with it at its successive stages, a sort of vaguely expressed doctrine that the State has no right to interfere between capital and labor, between the employer and the employed. This theory naturally grew and grew with the growth of the capital invested in manufactures and the increase in the number of employers, and it was found in later years than those at which we have now arrived, that the course of agitation that Lord Ashley may be said to have begun was opposed mainly in its progress by the capitalists and the employers of labor, many of whom were thoroughly humane men, anxious to do the very best they could for the health and the comfort of those whom they employed, but who sincerely believed that the civil law had no right to interfere with them and those who worked for them, and that the civil law could do only harm and no good by its best-intentioned interference.