Part Three: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade

We conclude the story of how Britain ended its role in the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Against the State by James Stout available for preorder here: https://www.akpress.org/against-the-state.html 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
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,

(00:34):
doctor James Stout. That's right.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
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

(00:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Pretty high bar.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
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

(01:58):
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

(02:20):
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

(02:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Missus a chance to fuck himself, a.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
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

(03:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
Right, it's one in a manifesto bucket.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
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

(04:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:23):
Now.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
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

(04:45):
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

(05:06):
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

(05:26):
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

(05:47):
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

(06:10):
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

(06:31):
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

(06:55):
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

(07:15):
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

(07:37):
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

(07:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
Right, yeah, I like he just calls it an interesting narrative,
and then you know what you're gonna get.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
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

(08:48):
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

(09:10):
a an ending nightmare. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
Oh yeah, it's one of the worst things that humans
haven't done to each other.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
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

(09:47):
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

(10:10):
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

(10:31):
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

(10:52):
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

(11:15):
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

(11:35):
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

(11:56):
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

(12:17):
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,

(12:40):
he's just like none that's happening.

Speaker 3 (12:41):
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

(13:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
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

(14:13):
is to dedicate my entire life to destroying this slavery. Yeah,
Like there's no other option at this point, right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
And it makes sense from looking back, but like for him,
that's a remarkable choice to make.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
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

(14:47):
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

(15:09):
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

(15:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
People, you know, this type of guy.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
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

(15:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
Yeah, yeah, the idea of being teetotal is not comprehensible.
Person were to kill people, well, what did they do
a weekend?

Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah? Look, I'm fine with getting rid of slavery, but
I draw the line at not drinking and shooting Frenchmen.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
You know.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
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

(16:53):
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

(17:14):
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

(17:35):
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

(17:57):
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

(18:19):
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

(18:42):
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

(19:03):
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

(19:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
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

(20:02):
on boats, you.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
Know, invY and black Line, Scurvian Blacklockstone, the economy.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
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

(20:34):
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

(20:57):
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

(21:19):
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

(21:41):
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.

(22:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
The products and services that support the show.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
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.

(22:46):
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

(23:09):
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

(23:30):
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

(23:52):
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

(24:13):
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.

(24:34):
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

(24:55):
guy too. His story says a lot about why people
became slave ship atens, like who got into that business?

Speaker 3 (25:02):
Right yeah?

Speaker 2 (25:04):
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

(25:26):
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

(25:48):
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

(26:09):
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

(26:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
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

(27:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
I just what a universal human sentiment.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
M M God.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
I don't want to go to hell, but sin is awesome.
I enjoy sinning. What are you gonna do? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (27:37):
What perfect? He wrote that as well. Yeah, no shame
of no, shame of that?

Speaker 2 (27:43):
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

(28:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, yeah, you really want to eat when there is food, Yeah,
because you're on a boat. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
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

(28:52):
a fifteen year old, right, and he really wants to
marry this teenage Yeah, that's.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
Not the kind of saying I'd been hoping he was into.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
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

(29:25):
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,

(29:47):
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,

(30:10):
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

(30:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
When you get married to leave for haaf decade. It's
probably not best pitch.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
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

(31:24):
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

(31:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:03):
Yeah, rightly, that's like a potentially dying from loss of
blood amount of lashes.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
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

(32:28):
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

(32:49):
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

(33:12):
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

(33:33):
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.

(33:55):
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

(34:18):
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.

(34:39):
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

(35:02):
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.

(35:23):
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,

(35:44):
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

(36:06):
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

(36:27):
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

(36:49):
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

(37:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
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

(37:51):
he needs advice, and Newton becomes his mentor.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
Right.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
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.

(38:16):
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

(38:36):
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

(38:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
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,

(39:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:44):
Yeah, yeah, he's fucking with the bag. That's what a
remarkable transformation.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah, remarkable, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
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

(40:29):
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

(40:50):
hundred seventy were discharged or deserted in the West Indies like.

Speaker 3 (40:56):
Which is it's a pretty remarkable attrition rate, right, You're
getting less than hoff them back.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
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,

(41:25):
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,

(41:47):
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

(42:08):
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,

(42:29):
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

(42:51):
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

(43:16):
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

(43:38):
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

(44:01):
it do now? I think it's just about promoting trade
with the Caribbean.

Speaker 3 (44:06):
I guess okay, But if they didn't see any need
to like shut that one down.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (44:26):
They don't have the old photos on the walls as
you go in, you know, they pick up a bit later.

Speaker 2 (44:31):
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.

(44:55):
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

(45:15):
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

(45:38):
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.

(46:00):
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

(46:22):
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

(46:46):
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,

(47:11):
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

(47:32):
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

(47:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:09):
No, Like they're actually like sardines in account of sardines, right, they're.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Like, and this isn't the fullest yeah yeah yeah, front
to head, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:17):
I had fifty percent more people than this.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah yeah at times, yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
And like that.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
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

(48:56):
going to get into that. But it does, it does, degree,
it does.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
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,

(49:22):
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

(49:42):
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?

Speaker 3 (50:00):
Yeah, I don't think they're really all going on a cruise.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
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

(50:26):
Wilberforce cat Yeah, which is like, yeah, good thing to
be boycotting. Yep, yeah, go for it.

Speaker 3 (50:33):
But it's very early for that kind of humor activism
to be. Yeah, you know, it's so so effective.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
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,

(51:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:21):
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
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

(51:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
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

(52:35):
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

(52:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:09):
Right.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
Now.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
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

(53:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Right.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
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,

(54:21):
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

(54:42):
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

(55:04):
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

(55:24):
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

(55:46):
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

(56:07):
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

(56:28):
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

(56:49):
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

(57:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
Geez yeah wow, yeah wow. I want to hear.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
Yeah, cool guy, some cool guys in the story.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
Yeah nice, you picked, you picked a good story.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
Uh huh yeah, that last bit gets me.

Speaker 3 (57:43):
Yeah yeah, yeah, so that's the wild to think like.
And then they did direct link.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Straight to hand to hand. Yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:54):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
Know, so much human suffering. In the meantime. It would
have been so easy.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
Yeah, it's like an entire lifetime of struggle. Yeah, inspiring,
very inspiring.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
Sorry, Truman's yelling at me because I'm carrying her sister, not.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
Her, but yep, double dog carry.

Speaker 1 (58:58):
So this is the last episode of the year. I
thought the audience deserved and Anderson.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
That's right, you're getting one for me too. I'm tired.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Yeah, it's been a long year friends.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (59:12):
Hopefully the next one is better.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (59:31):
James, you want to plug your book one more time?

Speaker 2 (59:34):
I would love to plug my book. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
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

(59:56):
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

(01:00:17):
with all of you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
We'll be back, well, we'll be back with some new
episodes in twenty twenty six.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
Yes, we will.

Speaker 3 (01:00:43):
So many new episodes, so many episodes. Bye bye, bye bye.

Speaker 1 (01:00:51):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
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(01:01:12):
at Behind the Bastards