Thomas Clarkson

“ I have no doubt, that this prejudice has been one of the great causes why the improvement of our slave population by law has been so long retarded, and that the same prejudice will continue to have a similar operation, so long as it shall continue to exist. Not that there are wanting men of humanity among our West Indian legislators. Their humanity is discernible enough when it is to be applied to the whites; but such is the system of slavery, and the degradation attached to this system, that their humanity seems to be lost or gone, when it is to be applied to the blacks. ”

“ Neither must the treatment of the Negroes be made to depend upon what may be called contingent humanity. We now leave in this country neither the horse, nor the ass, nor oxen, nor sheep, to the contingent humanity even of British bosoms;—and shall we leave those, whom we have proved to be men, to the contingent humanity of a slave colony, where the eye is familiarized with cruel sights, and where we have seen a constant exposure to oppression without the possibility of redress? ”

“ I admit it to be less hazardous to emancipate a new than an old slave. And yet the case of the Sierra Leone captured Negroes is a very strong one. They were all Africans. They were all slaves. They must have contracted as mortal a hatred of the whites from their sufferings on board ship by fetters, whips, and suffocation in the hold, as the West Indian from those severities which are attached to their bondage upon shore. Under these circumstances then we find them made free; but observe, not after any preparatory discipline, but almost suddenly, and not singly, but in bodies at a time. ”

“ Neither have the masters of slaves in our colonies any title to their slaves on account of any charters, which they may be able to produce, though their charters are the only source of their power. It is through these that they have hitherto legislated, and that they continue to legislate. Take away their charters, and they would have no right or power to legislate at all. And yet, though they have their charters, and though the slavery, which now exists, has been formed and kept together entirely by the laws, which such charters have given them the power to make, this very slavery is illegal. ”

“ If you put into one scale the gold and jewels of the Planters, you are bound to put into the other the liberty of 800,000 of the African race; for every man's liberty is his own property by the laws of Nature, Reason, Justice, and Religion? and, if it be not so with our West Indian Slaves, it is only because they have been, and continue to be, deprived of it by force. ”

“ Forced labour, again, sends many of them to the sick-houses. Here is, at any rate, a loss of their working time. But it drives them also occasionally to run away, and sometimes to destroy themselves. Here again is a loss of their working time and of property into the bargain. Forced labour, then, is one of those striking parts in the West Indian husbandry, in which we see a constant source of loss to those who adopt it; and may we not speak, and yet with truth, as unfavourably of some of the other striking parts in the same system? ”

“ They distribute an equal system of law and justice to all without respect of persons. They dispell the clouds of ignorance, superstition, and idolatry, and carry with them civilization and liberty wherever they go. You, on the other hand, have no code of justice but for yourselves. You deny it to those who cannot help themselves. You hinder liberty by your cruel restrictions on manumission; and dreading the inlet of light, you study to perpetuate ignorance and barbarism. Which then of the two competitors has the claim to preference by an English Parliament and an English people? ”

“ It cannot be expected during a war, in which every man was called to arms to defend his own personal liberty, and that of every individual of his family, that we should see plantations cultivated as quietly as before, or even cultivated at all. But this was not the fault of the emancipated Negroes, but of their former masters. It was owing to the prejudices of the latter, that this frightful invasion took place; prejudices, indeed, common to all planters, where slavery obtains, from the very nature of their situation, and upon which I have made my observations in a former place. ”

“ Is it reasonable, is it just, that a poor infant who has done no injury to any one, should be subjected, he and his posterity for ever, to the arbitrary will and tyranny of another, and moreover to the condition of a brute, because by mere accident, and by no fault or will of his own, he was born of a person, who had been previously in the condition of a slave? ”

“ Now the West Indian slavery is of such an arbitrary nature, that it may be termed proper or absolute. The dominion attached to it is a despotism without control; a despotism, which keeps up its authority by terror only. ”

“ There must also be new laws, positive, certain, easy of execution, binding upon all, by means of which the Negroes in our islands shall have speedy and substantial redress in real cases of ill-usage, whether by starvation, over-work, or acts of personal violence, or otherwise. There must be new laws again more akin to the principle of reward than of punishment, of privilege than of privation, and which shall, have a tendency to raise or elevate their condition, so as to fit them by degrees to sustain the rank of free men. ”

“ In fact, the Colonial system is an excrescence upon the English Constitution, and is constantly at variance with it. There is not one English law, which gives a man a right to the liberty of any of his fellow creatures. Of course there cannot be, according to charters, any Colonial law to this effect. If there be, it is null and void. Nay, the very man, who is held in bondage by the Colonial law, becomes free by English law the moment he reaches the English shore. ”

“ Perhaps he takes this treatment indignantly. This only secures him a severer punishment. I say nothing of his being badly fed, or lodged, or clothed. If he should have a wife and daughters with him, how much more cruel would be his fate! to see the tender skins of these lacerated by the whip! to see them torn from him, with a knowledge, that they are going to be compelled to submit to the lust of an overseer! and no redress. ”

“ The truth is, that so long as overseers, drivers, and others, are entrusted with the use of arbitrary power, and so long as Negro-evidence is invalid against the white oppressor, and so long as human nature continues to be what it is, no order from the Master for the better personal treatment of the Slave will or can be obeyed. It is against the system then, and not against the West Indians as a body, that I am warm, should I be found so unintentionally, in the present work. ”

“ It is now sixteen years since the slave trade was abolished by England, and it is therefore to be presumed, that no new slaves have been imported into the British colonies within that period. The slaves, therefore, who are there at this day, must consist either of Africans, whose spirits must have been long ago broken, or of Creoles born in the cradle and brought up in the trammels of slavery. ”

“ If through the medium of the abolition of the slave trade they have not accomplished, as they expected, the whole of their object, they have no alternative but to resort to other measures, or to attempt by constitutional means, under that Legislature which has already sanctioned their efforts, the mitigation of the cruel treatment of the Negroes, with the ultimate view of extinguishing, in due time and in a suitable manner, the slavery itself. ”

“ But if, on the other hand, it be the revealed will of God, that all men, without exception, must be left free to act, but accountable to God for their actions;—I contend that no man can be born, nay, further, that no man can be made, held, or possessed, as a proper slave. I contend that there can be, according to the Gospel-dispensation, no such state as West Indian slavery. But let us now suppose for a moment, that there might be found an instance or two of slaves enlightened by some pious Missionary, who would refuse to execute their master's orders on the principle that they were wrong ”

“ If they had been paid for their labour, they must have acquired something like a spirit of industry. If they had been made to pay rent for their cottage and land, and to maintain themselves, they must have been made to look beforehand, to think for themselves and families from day to day, and to provide against the future, all which operations of the mind are the characteristics only of free men. The case, therefore, of Mr. Steele is most important and precious: for it shows us, first, that the emancipation, which we seek, is a thing which may be effected. ”

“ Adam Smith, and all the modern writers on political economy, that the labour of free men is cheaper than the labour of slaves. If therefore I should be able to show that this maxim would be true, if applied to all the operations and demands of West Indian agriculture, I should be able to establish my proposition on a new ground: for it requires no great acuteness to infer, that, if it be cheaper to employ free men than slaves in the cultivation of our islands, emancipation would be a profitable undertaking there. ”

“ And as the right to slaves, because they were born slaves, cannot be defended either upon the principles of reason or of justice, so this right absolutely falls to pieces, when we come to try it by the touchstone of the Christian religion. Every man who is born into the world, whether he be white or whether he be black, is born, according to Christian notions, a free agent and an accountable creature. ”

“ And here it must be observed, that, if ever emancipation should be begun by our planters, this must be (however they may dislike to part with arbitrary power) as much a first step with them as it was with Mr. Steele. Forced labour stands at the head of the catalogue of those nuisances belonging to slavery, which oppose the planter's gain. It must be removed before any thing else can be done. See what mischiefs it leads to, independently of its want of profit. It is impossible that forced labour can be kept up from day to day without injury to the constitution of the slaves ”

“ Here we see men working without any rational stimulus to elicit their exertions, and therefore they must be followed by drivers with whips in their hands. Well might it be said by Mr. Botham to the Committees of Privy-council and House of Commons, "Let it be considered, how much labour is lost by the persons overseeing the forced labourer, which is saved when he works for his own profit;" and, notwithstanding all the vigilance and whipping of these drivers, I have proved that the slaves do more for themselves in an afternoon, than in a whole day when they work for their masters. ”

“ Neither does ancient history give us in the cases of manumission, which it records, any parallel, from which we might argue in the case before us. The ancient manumissions were those of individuals only, generally of but one at a time, and only now and then; whereas the emancipation, which we contemplate in the colonies, will comprehend whole bodies of men, nay, whole populations, at a given time. We must go therefore in quest of examples to modern times, or rather to the history of the colonial slavery itself ”

“ In fact, the slaves in our Islands have no more real protection or redress from law, than when the Abolitionists first took up the question of the slave trade. It is evident therefore, that the latter have still one-half of their work to perform, and that it is their duty to perform it. If they were ever influenced by any good motives, whether of humanity, justice, or religion, to undertake the cause of the Negroes, they must even now be influenced by the same motives to continue it. ”

“ But when we talk of consistency on this occasion, let us not forget that old law of Barbadoes, made while the charter of that island was fresh in every body's memory, and therefore in the very teeth of the charter itself, which runs thus: "If any slave, under punishment by his master or by his order, shall suffer in life or member, no person shall be liable to any fine for the same: but if any person shall wantonly or cruelly kill his own slave, he shall pay the treasury 15l." ”

“ There is not an individual, who holds any of the slaves by a legal title: for it is expressed in all these charters, whether in those given to William Penn and others for the continent of North America, or in those given for the islands now under our consideration, that "the laws and statutes, to be made there, are not to be repugnant, but, as near as may be, agreeable, to the laws and statutes of this our kingdom of Great Britain." But is it consistent with the laws of England, that any one man should have the power of forcing another to work for him without wages? ”

“ But if a new Code of Laws be indispensably necessary in our colonies in order to secure a better treatment to the slaves, to whom must we look for it? I answer, that we must not look for it to the West Indian Legislatures. For, in the first place, judging of what they are likely to do from what they have already done, or rather from what they have not done, we can have no reasonable expectation from that quarter. One hundred and fifty years have passed, during which long interval their laws have been nearly stationary, or without any material improvement. ”

“ But if he be a free man, while he is working for himself, and if in that capacity he does twice or thrice more work than when he works for his master, it follows, that it would be cheaper for his master to employ him as a free labourer, or that the labour of free men in the West Indies would be cheaper than the labour of slaves. ”

“ He hates the sight of his features, and of his colour; nay, he marks with distinctive opprobrium the very blood in his veins, attaching different names and more or less infamy to those who have it in them, according to the quantity which they have of it in consequence of their pedigree, or of their greater or less degree of consanguinity with the whites. Hence the West Indian feels an unwillingness to elevate the condition of the Negro, or to do any thing for him as a human being. ”