A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade / Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of Yorkshire

by William Wilberforce

In these cases of systematic management, of daily and almost hourly recurrence, the interposition of a new tribunal of appeal for checking the master’s authority, and compelling him, by the dread of penalties, to be more liberal in his allowances of food and rest, and more abstemious as to labour and punishment; in short, to force him to amend the Slave’s treatment in future in all the undefinable particulars into which it ramifies, or even to compensate to the Slave his past ill usage, would in practice be soon found productive, not only of extreme discontent, insubordination, and commotions on private properties, but of the most fatal consequences to the safety of the whole colony. Sunk as the Slaves at present are, we are assured they do not feel into what a depth they have been depressed. We are told that they are not shocked, as we are for them, by the circumstances of a Negro sale, or by the other degrading particulars of their treatment; the spirit of the man is extinct, or rather dormant within them. But remember, the first return of life after a swoon is commonly a convulsion, dangerous at once to the party himself, and to all around him. Impart to the Slaves the consciousness of personal rights, and the means of asserting them; give the Slaves a power of appealing to the laws; and you awaken in them a sense of the dignity of their nature, you call into life a new set of most dangerous emotions; of emotions, let me repeat it, beyond measure dangerous, while you continue the humiliating and ignominious distinctions to which they now unconsciously submit. When you encourage your Slave to take account of his rights, and measure them with his enjoyments: when you thus teach him to reflect on the treatment he is receiving; to compare his own condition with that of Slaves under other masters; to deliberate about obtaining redress; and, at last, to resolve to seek it: when you thus accustom him to think, and feel, and decide, and act; to be conscious of a wrong; to resent an injury; to go and relate the story of his ill usage, thus daring to harbour the idea of bringing his master to punishment and shame: when you even enable him to achieve this victory; Do you think that he will long endure the wrongs he now tolerates? It is a remark, if I mistake not, of an ancient historian, who had the power above all others of placing before his reader the scene he represents, that in that celebrated instance in which a whole army, being hemmed in on all sides by the enemy, was compelled, according to the barbarous practice of ancient warfare, to submit to the shameful condition of going under a sort of gallows, that each man was rendered most sensible of his own dishonour, by seeing the shameful appearance of his comrades in that disgraceful exhibition. And can you think that, when affection combines with indignation, a Negro will bear to see the wife of his bosom, or a mother the children of her rearing, driven through their daily work like the vilest of the brute creation; and that too when each man can consult with his fellow, when all they see around them almost are blacks? Above all, but here I anticipate—when St. Domingo, and the lessons which it inculcates, occur to the mind.

Surely enough has been said to shew, that there is no alternative, no practical medium, between keeping the Slaves sunk in their present state of extreme degradation, an idea for which no one, I trust, will be found hardy enough to contend, and introducing the milder system of what may not improperly be termed Patriarchal vassalage (to which the abolition is an indispensable preliminary) as the state of training and discipline for a condition in which they may be safely admitted to a still more advanced enjoyment of personal and civil rights.

Mr. Burke’s plan respecting the Slave Trade.

And in this place, where we are considering the different modes which have been proposed for effecting the abolition of the Slave Trade, it may be proper to notice another plan of gradual abolition, which has been often mentioned, though it has never been yet produced. No one can doubt that attention is justly due to it, when they are told that it claims the late Mr. Burke as its author. In duty to that great man himself, as well as to the cause which I am defending, this matter should be explained. Some years before the abolition of the Slave Trade had been named in Parliament, Mr. Burke’s attention had been drawn to that object. His stores of knowledge were so astonishingly ample and various, that it is difficult to suppose any subject on which his great mind was not abundantly furnished. But certainly very little was known, even by men in general well-informed, concerning the nature and effects of the Slave Trade on the coast, but much more in the interior of Africa. Nor had we then obtained any of that great mass of information concerning the West Indian system of management, which was procured through the authority and influence of Government, and which could no otherwise have been obtained. Mr. Burke, however, drew up the heads of a plan for regulating the mode of carrying on the Slave Trade in Africa, and a system for securing the better treatment of the Slaves in the West Indies.

When, after the whole subject had been thoroughly investigated, a motion for the immediate abolition of the Slave Trade was made in the House of Commons; Mr. Burke honoured it with his support. He indeed stated, that he himself had formerly taken up ideas somewhat different, with a view towards the same end; but he added, expressing himself in that strong and figurative style which must, methinks, have fixed the matter of his speech firmly in the memory of all who heard him, that he at once consigned them to the flames, and willingly adopted our mode of abolition. I can with truth declare, that in private conversation, he afterwards expressed to me his concurrence in our plan. It is a little hard, therefore, that the authority of that great man should now be pleaded against us. Still harder, that this should be the only use made of it, that, instead of any attempt to give effect to his intentions, his plan of abolishing the Slave Trade should be rendered practically subservient to the continuation of that traffic. In short, that his name should be used in complete opposition to his example. As to the nature and effect of his proposed plan, I had the opportunity of perusing it only hastily, and I have endeavoured, hitherto in vain, once more to procure a sight of it. It is still however I believe in being, and will I trust appear in some authentic form.

The plan itself was probably no more than a rough draught, or rather his first thoughts on a subject, for forming a right judgment on which, a full and exact knowledge of facts must be particularly necessary. That on any subject, even the first thoughts of so great a man claim the highest deference, I willingly allow. But may I not be permitted to indulge a persuasion, that, from farther information than it was possible for any man then to possess, concerning the nature and effects of the Slave Trade in the interior of Africa, into which no traveller of credit had then penetrated for some centuries, Mr. Burke would have been convinced of the inefficacy of the regulations he proposed to establish for the coast. Of his West Indian regulations, I will only say, that while, unless completely neglected in practice, they would probably have excited an opposition even more efficient than abolition itself; while they would have been open from beginning to end to all objections, grounded on interference with the internal legislation of the colonies; they would, more than any other plan ever heard of, have been liable to the objections which I have lately urged against imparting personal rights and the privilege of complaining to a legal protector, so long as the Slaves remain in their present condition of extreme degradation.

Greater efficacy of abolition.

With this plan for abolishing, as by a strange perversion of terms it is styled, instead of confirming and perhaps perpetuating, the Slave Trade, by the gradual operation of colonial statutes, a plan which, though tried under the most favourable of all circumstances, has absolutely failed; which has been declared even by West Indian authority itself to have been proposed for the sake merely of getting rid of the interference of the British Parliament; which has been clearly proved to be utterly inefficient as to practical execution, and which, if it could be executed, would immediately become inconceivably dangerous—With this measure, founded on principles essentially and unalterably incompatible, either utterly inefficient or mischievously active, compare the effects of the measure which we propose, the abolition of the Slave Trade.

The bad effects of the continual introduction of African Slaves are so manifest as scarcely to need suggesting. The annual infusion into the West Indian Colonies of a great number of human beings, from a thousand different parts of the continent, with all their varieties of languages, and manners, and customs, many of them resenting their wrongs, and burning with revenge; others deeply feeling their loss of country and freedom, and the new hardships of their altered state; must have a natural tendency to keep the whole mass into which they are brought, in a state of ferment; to prevent the Slaves in general from emerging out of their state of degradation; and to obstruct, both in them and in those who are set over them, the growth of those domestic feelings and habits, and the introduction of those more liberal modes of treatment, which might otherwise be deemed both safe, and suitable in the case of Slaves whose characters were known and who were become habituated to their situation. But the grand evil arising from the continuance of importations from Africa, is, that till they are discontinued, men will never apply their minds in earnest to effect the establishment of the breeding system.

But all farther importations being at length stopped, the Slave market now no longer holding forth any resource, the necessity for keeping up the stock would at once become palpable and urgent. All ideas of supply from without, being utterly cut off, it would immediately become the grand, constant, and incessant concern of every prudent man, both proprietor and manager, to attend, in the first instance, to the preservation and increase of his Negroes. Whatever may have been the case in the instance of men at once both liberal and opulent, the mass of owners have, practically at least, gone upon the system of working out their Slaves in a few years, and recruiting their gangs with imported Africans. The abolition would give the death-blow to this system. The opposite system, with all its charities, would force itself on the dullest intellects, on the most contracted or unfeeling heart. Ruin would stare a man in the face, if he did not conform to it. The sense of interest so much talked of, would not as heretofore, be a remote, feeble, or even a dubious impulse; but a call so pressing, loud, and clear, that its voice would be irresistible.