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

In this episode we introduce two great heroes: freed slave and adventurer Olaudah Equiano, and crusading abolitionist lawyer Granville Sharp.

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 (00:06):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every
year I buy Sophia weapon. It's also about bad people,
except for this episode. Well, this week we're doing a
reverse episode about some heroes, the people who ended the
British slave trade and eventually the whole Atlantic slave trade.
And you know, they're good people. We haven't talked about

(00:28):
them yet. We've only talked about bad people so far.
Episode one was really a lot of bad stuff in
one and I do apologize for that. On the Christmas week, our.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Guest today is is big ship Guy James Stow.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Big big boat Man James big Stout, Captain James.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Stow, James Stout, Sir Captain James Stowe.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Not one of those things again, never been near a king.
But yeah, I do like to go into I get
very m well, but I don't let that stop me.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
No, I'm not.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
We did we see sickness.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
If I've learned one thing about the history of sailing,
no one has ever let being sick stop them from
getting out a boat.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
You can't. You got to power through it.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Speaking of powering through it, you know we just got
the horrible case of the Zorg and the mass murder
that happened on board it, and then a lawsuit by
the Gregson syndicate saying we should get money for those
people we murdered, which a British court ruled, yeah you should.
So that's where things ended in Part one. In Part two,
some people are going to get mad about this. Now,

(01:40):
there was no coverage of Gregson v. Gilbert at the
time of the court case. It was legally a minor
civil trial over an insurance dispute, and there was really
no reason to believe that anyone aside from the parties involved,
were paying attention to what happened in court or cared
about what had happened aboard the Zorg. But one anonymous
person watched the proceedings that day, March sixth of seventeen
eighty three, and they were horrified by what they saw.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
There's some theorizing in the book The Zorg about who
this person might have met, but we don't really know.
It was just someone was there that day who had
a conscience and who viewed Africans as human beings. Right,
And a lot of stuff that happened, of a lot
of very important stuff is going to result from the
fact that one person with a conscience was there that
day right now. A little less than two weeks after

(02:25):
the judge in this case issued his ruling, this person
published an anonymous letter in two major newspapers, The Morning
Chronicle and The London Advertiser. The letter noted that the
Zorg still had four hundred and twenty gallons of water
left when it put into port in Jamaica, and thus,
as the underwriters argued, there was quote no necessity for
a conduct so shocking to humanity. This is our only

(02:46):
first person account of the court proceedings, and the author
of this anonymous letter claims that quote the narrative seemed
to make every person present shudder. He lamented that, in
spite of this, the jury voted in favor of the
Gregson Syndicate. The letter then takes some more philosophical turn,
with the author wishing some man of feeling and genius
would give poetical language to the last thoughts of one

(03:06):
of the ten enslaved men who chose to kill themselves
after seeing their little brothers and sisters hurled into the ocean, quote,
whose indignation made him voluntarily share death with his countrymen
rather than life with such unheard of English barbarians. The
letter then concludes with this paragraph, it is certainly worthy
of observation that our legislature can every session find time

(03:27):
to inquire into and regulate the manner of killing a partridge,
that no abuse should be committed, and that he should
be fairly shot. And yet it has never been thought
proper to inquire into the matter of annually kidnapping above
fifty thousand poor wretches who never injured us, by a
set of the most cruel monsters that this country can
send out pretty unsparing.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah, it's pretty good right too. Yeah, yes, I make
it a good point.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
We ever, do we ever found out who wrote this?
Or does it stay anonymous?

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Again, it's we don't really know the author. Sidharth Kara
has a theory as to who it is. But it's
not like it's it's we don't know. We simply don't know.
We never really will.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
To a point, I think it's cool that two newspapers
printed it.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Yeah, yeah, it's good that they printed. Again, there's sentiment,
there's abolitionist sentiment. There's people of like conscience and care
who are informed and know how bad it is. They're
just not really unified yet. Right. There's there's you know,
a small organization of like Quakers, but for the most part,
most of the people who are like upset about slavery
aren't together yet, right, And this it's it's over this

(04:35):
case that they're going to get stitched together. Right. So
letter finds an audience, but first mostly with England's small
Quaker anti slavery movement, but it doesn't cause an immediate
broader uproar on its own. However, it succeeds in reaching
the one person who, it turns out most needed to
hear it, a freedman named Olata Equiano. And this guy

(04:57):
is one of the coolest dudes I have ever heard of.
This is a fucking Equiano is a fascinating man. Have
you heard about this person, James.

Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yeah, I'd love to assign Equiana to my undergraduate courses. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah. His book is fantastic book. Yeah, and you can
find it online. It's free. Right, we'll be quoting from
it some here. A fascinating person. So Equiano had been
born around seventeen forty five in Ebo, part of modern
day Nigeria, which was then part of the Kingdom of Benin,
and although He claimed his village was only nominally controlled
by the king, right that like, yeah, we have a king,

(05:30):
but he's not really a factor in daily life, which
is probably accurate. As a young boy, he'd never heard
of white men, or Europeans, or even the ocean. His
father was a village elder and held a high position
in local government. As a child, allowed us seems to
have had a keen eye for injustice. Because of his
father's position. He spent a good deal of time watching
court proceedings and later wrote that adultery for women was

(05:51):
often punished by slavery or death. Quote. The men, however,
do not preserve the same constancy to their wives which
they expect from them. It's one thing you see Battaloda
is that is he is a thinker. This is not
a man who just accepts like, oh, yeah, adultery, you
gotta kill a woman if she does that. He's a
man who's like, but the guys are all cheating and
nobody cares about that. It seems unfair. Yeah, he's an

(06:15):
empathetic and intelligent man. He was aware of slavery from
a very young age. You had to be in the
part of Africa he lived because there are slave slavers
running rampant. He later wrote about stout Mahogany colored men
from the Southwest who traveled through town to trade firearms, gunpowder,
and other goods. Quote, they always carry slaves through our land,

(06:36):
but the strictest account is exacted of their manner of
procuring them before they are suffered to pass. Sometimes indeed
we sold slaves to them, but they were only prisoners
of war or such among us that as had been
convicted of kidnapping, or adultery or some other crimes which
we esteemed heinous. Now, these are his recollections of how
he thought that, how he justified things as a small child. Right,
This is not how he feels about the matter as

(06:58):
an adult. And in fact he cut it makes he
as to clear in his autobiography that his belief that like, well,
these guys, you know, they're not allowed to just take
slaves willy nilly, right, you know, we make sure that
they that they're not just that's not accurate. Right, That's
the thing he learns, unfortunately not long later in his childhood. Right,
and he does note at the time that like, well,

(07:19):
you know, my dad told me that, yeah, it's Okay,
we always make sure that you know, they're not just
grabbing people off the street at random, you know, when
they come through. But he knows, like they always carry
these big empty sacks with them. I wonder what those are,
four jeez for Christmas stuff. Yeah, he's a child, so
he doesn't really see that as a warning sign until

(07:39):
it was too late. Now there is like that there
is some basic knowledge that they are in danger, because
he writes that during the day, when the grown people
leave town to work the fields, the kids would assemble
to play, and at least one kid at any given
time would have to stand watch, would like climb up
a tree to watch for kidnappers who quote sometimes took

(07:59):
those opportunities of our parents' absence to attack and carry
off as many as they could seize. So, first off,
you get a really good glimpse in Equiato's book as
to like what the slave trade has done to daily
life and like these small villages in this part of
Africa where it's like, yeah, the kids just know that
you always have to be aware that, like kidnappers might
come and steal all of you. Yeah, yeah, that's a

(08:21):
real danger. Yeah again, I'll make it up this time, no,
he writes, quote, one day, as I was watching at
the top of a tree in our yard, I saw
one of those people come into the yard of our
next neighbor, but one to kidnap, there being so many
stout young people in it. Immediately on this I gave
the alarm of the rogue, and he was surrounded by
the stoutest of them, who entangled him with cords that

(08:42):
he could not escape till some of the grown people
came and secured him. So this is, you know, a
positive end. And this is his first direct encounter with slavers,
but it's not going to be his last. Not long
after this, he and his sister are minding the house
while their parents are away. Two men and a woman
jump over the walls, steal them both their mouths, and
sprint off with them into the woods. For the next

(09:03):
few days, they're taken through the woods, bound and gagged.
During the day, he wrote that the only comfort we
had was in being in each other's arms all that
night and bathing each other with our tears, And this
single comfort was not to last. Long quote. The next
day proved of a greater sorrow than I had yet experienced.
For My sister and I were then separated while we
lay clasped in each other's arms. It was in vain

(09:25):
that we besought them not to part us. She was
torn from me and immediately carried away. Well, I was
left in a state of distraction not to be described.
I cried and grieved continually, and for several days I
did not eat anything but what they forced into my
mouth so horrific. It's pretty bad. Yeah, he's taken first
to a village several days away while he is purchased

(09:46):
by a local chieftain. And that's the thing he's this
is not like a often you're taken straight to the
coast where you're sold. You're now a slave and you
will be sold around like a lot of these people.
Do just stay in Africa, right and maybe get free
or maybe don't. But he is a slave two local
Africans for a while.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
Right.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
His first owner is a local chieftain who treats him
really well and he thinks has adopted him into the family. Right,
he works as a blacksmith assistant. He spends the next
month gaining their trust, and his plan is I want
to escape, right, It's like I'm going to get their
trust so I can make an escape attempt. This doesn't
pan out, though, and he's ultimately bought and sold several times.
He learns three languages as he journeys across Africa, and

(10:26):
he ends up in a coastal village where he is
sold onto a slave ship. Now, up to this point,
he always emphasizes and it's kind of a weird part
of the book, but he's really emphatic. I was always
treated well. People were not mean. I mean what they're
doing selling separated from his sister, selling, But they're not cruel.
They're not yelling at him, they're not treating him as
a subhuman. Right, They're just doing this awful thing to him.

(10:48):
And as an eleven year old, it's really weird for
him because they're being so nice while they do this
awful thing. Like it's kind of a headbuck, right. And yeah,
he generally enjoys good food and is kept relatively healthy
this whole time. Right, And this ends as soon as
he's sold onto a slaving vessel. Right. Quote. I was
soon put down under the decks, and there I received

(11:10):
such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never
experienced in my life. So that with the loathsomeness of
the stench and crying together, I became so sick and
low that I was not able to eat, nor had
I the least desired to taste anything. I now wished
for the last friend death to relieve me. But soon
to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables,
and on my refusing to eat, one of them held
me fast by the hands and laid me across I

(11:32):
think the windlass and tied my feet, while the other
flogged me severely. I had never experienced anything of this
kind before, and although not being used to water, I
naturally feared that element the first time I saw it.
Yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings. I
would have jumped over the side, but I could not.
And besides, the crew used to watch us very closely,
who were not chained down on the decks, lest we

(11:52):
should leap into the water. And I have seen some
of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting
to do so, and hourly whipped for night eating. Now
he is again eleven as this is happening to him.
This is about seventeen fifty six, when he's transported first
to the West Indies, where he witnesses the auctioning of
slaves to plantation owners. But he's not sold himself because

(12:15):
he's really sick, like he's just not worth anything in
the eyes of these people, because he seems like he's dying.
So the Dutch take him back on board the slave
ship and take him to America, and he gets better
enough during that time that he's sold to a Virginia
plantation owner. He gets kind of, within this horrible situation,
one of the better jobs you can get, where he's
working as a house slave, so he's able to kind

(12:36):
of he's not laboring in the field. He's able to
recover his strength more effectively, right, because he's it's less
physically nightmarish work, and he gets better enough, and he's
just proves to be very intelligent too, so he's got
a lot of value to him. And he's sold again
to the captain of a British merchant vessel named Henry Pascal.
It's Pascal who gives him his European name, Gustavas Vasa,

(13:00):
and sometimes you'll see him and he would go by
Vasa periodically throughout his life as well as Equiano, right
but yeah, Pascal gives him this name and takes him
to England, and for a while things seem to be
going really well. He's taught about Christianity. He makes like
a friend with a local boy who's about his age,
like a white boy, and they're actually very good friends.
The kid dies like two years later, but they like

(13:23):
he's adamant that, like, no, this kid was like really,
we were very close. He helps him learn English, and
because he's so smart, Equiano attracts wealthy British patrons, these
like two I think older ladies pay for him to
go to school, and so he's obviously kind of thinking
I've lucked out. I might just kind of get out
of the whole slavery thing and be like English, right,

(13:45):
like maybe that's my future. Because Cascal seems to be
treating him well, He's got these local ladies who are
like paying for you know, he seems to have fallen
into a good situation. And then out of nowhere, Pascal
takes him back to see right, and so they spend
some time on voyages together and he's still kind of

(14:05):
being treated more like a servant. They're engaged in like
pirates attacks several times like, he helps defend the ship
in several desperate battles. They travel the oceans of the world,
and Alouda says that at this time he feels a
growing loyalty and affection for Pascal, who he believes has
been so kind to him, because he plans to free
him one day, right, So he he's really like as

(14:28):
loyal to this dude as he can because he thinks that, like,
I found a good one, right Unfortunately he has not,
that is not the case. In an article for documenting
the American South on Aquiano, Jin Williamson summarizes he is
shocked at an abrupt betrayal during a layover in England,
when Pascal has him roughly seized and forced into a barge.

(14:49):
Pascal sells Equiano to Captain James Duran, the captain of
a ship bound for the West Indies. Days by his
sudden change in fortunes, Equiano argues with Captain Duran that
Pascal could not sell him to me, nor to anyone else.
I have served him many years, and he has taken
all my wages in prize money. I have been baptized,
and by the laws of the land, no man has
a right to sell me. After Duran tells Equiano he

(15:10):
talks too much English and threatens to subdue him. Equiano
begins service under a new master, for he is too
well convinced of his power over me to doubt what
he's said. Right, So he's like, but like, I did
all the stuff I'm supposed to do. I feel like
I'm English now. And he's like, if you keep talking English,
I'm gonna beat the shit out of you, right, Like
that's what happens. Yeah, So he's taken back to the

(15:31):
West Indies. He endures the nightmare trip down the Middle
Passage a second time, which is just an unthinkable hell
to have to do twice. He writes of seeing white
members of the crew gratify their brutal passion with females
not ten years old on the journey, right. In other words,
they're just raping any big female that is on the boat, right.

(15:54):
They don't care about age, you know, Like that's the
kind of men who are doing this, right. Yeah. Once
he arrives in the Caribbean, he is horrified that he
will be sold to a plantation into a life of
quote bondage, misery, stripes, and chains. But here again he
meets with this crazy good luck with it's this weird
situation where he's in like the like this horror the

(16:15):
worst least lucky situation he could be in, but within
that situation, he has crazy luck. Like I don't know
how else.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
To describe it, because it's like one in ten million, right,
Like this happens to millions and millions of people. One
of them had this unique set of circumstances, and we're
uniquely intelligent to be able to, yes, to take advantage
of it in the way that he was, right, take
advantages a wrong word.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
But like well yeah, but like like even people who
would have been as smart but maybe aren't good with languages,
probably wouldn't have had the success he has. Right, that's
a separate kind event. Like he's just a bunch of
shit happens, and he's a good writer. He is a
really good writer. Yeah, yeah, maybe not I don't know
about at this point, but yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
No, But there's not much shit from that period that
I can assign in whole to undergraduates in twenty twenty
five and have them being like that's fucked, Like it
makes people feel things still centuries later.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
Yeah, it's really powerful. Yeah, I do really recommend reading
it because, among other things, it's just there's a lot
I mean, the early portions of the book are just
a lot about life in that part of Africa at
the time that you're not gonna run into a lot
of first hand accounts of.

Speaker 3 (17:16):
No, it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeah. So again within this horrible situation, he gets crazy
lucky again because the next person to buy him is
a Quaker, and again most a lot of Quakers are
anti slavery. This guy, Robert King, clearly isn't totally against slavery,

(17:38):
but he's also still a Quaker, right, And he's like
a merchant or something. I don't know exactly what he's
there to do, but he sees he once recognized as Wow,
this kid is smart as hell, and he's he already
speaks a ton of languages. There's a lot I can
have him do. So the King starts having Equiana work
a bunch of different jobs, and he starts like basically
assigning him out to like subcontract and with other guys.

(18:00):
And some of these guys are like fairly decent and
are like, hey, what if we hired you to do
extra side work and pay you personally for it, and
King is like, yeah, you know, I have no problem
with you making money on the side, right, why not?
And so these guys like both teach him how to
train him up and help him like learn these different trades,
and he's able to make side money. And so he

(18:22):
takes this side money and he starts buying and selling
goods with the money that he makes, right and basically
turning his salary into even more money. And he does
well enough at this that in seventeen sixty six, when
he's arout twenty one, he's able to buy his freedom,
and he does. Robert King allows him to do this,
which he didn't have to do. So again he's he
got into like the luckiest part of a bad situation

(18:44):
he could be and yeah, he's able to he becomes
a free man. He's free after this point. So he
spends the next several years taking work on merchant ships
because that's what he knows how to do, and he
travels around the world. In seventeen seventy three, he becomes
one of the first Africans to visit the Arcticano wrote
and corresponded widely and generally he's like an adventurer. This
guy lives an amazing life, like he's one of the

(19:07):
most incredible people who ever lived. Now the whole time, though,
is his life is going well, right, he remains troubled
with the inhuman institution of slavery that had robbed him
of his childhood and his family. You know, he knows
this is still going on. He's still angry about it,
and so he starts meeting during the times when he's
back in London, he starts meeting with and befriending some

(19:30):
of the small number of Englishmen who opposed the institution
of slavery. And after reading that op ed, he comes
across this article about what's happened on the Zorg. He's
sick with horror and fury at what has happened. I mean,
it's just an awful thing, and he has personal experience
with being on those boats, so it's much He knows
much better how awful it is than an average person

(19:51):
reading it, and he wants to do something. However, he's
also a practical guy. He knows that even a freed
black man has zero political power and influence in England
at the time, so if he's going to have an
impact on the situation, he's going to have to be
cunning about it. One of Equiano's friends is a writer
and a lawyer who's also like an early abolitionist named Granville.
Sharp and Sharp is going to be the second of

(20:13):
our heroes for this episode. One of the coolest dudes
to ever live, really like just an actual great man.
Born in Durham in seventeen thirty five, Granville was the
middle Ish child of fourteen. Five of his eight older
brothers survived early childhood, which means his parents were better
than average. His family was working class, and as a
youth he was apprenticed to the owner of a fabric store. However,

(20:35):
he turned out to be one of those kids who's
just like irrepressibly smart, right like he is not going
to work at the fabric store, you know in Granville
this expresses itself this he's a debate kid. He's the
good kind of debate kid, but he has this pathological
need to debate with his peers to the extent he
is so committed to this that he makes a Jewish
friend and they start having like good natured arguments about religion.

(20:58):
And because he wants to argue better with his Jewish friend,
he learns Hebrew and becomes a fluent speaker of me
in order to argue about like the Tora with his
Jewish friend.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
Yeah, that's perfect, totally. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
When he makes a friend who's a member of a
weird Greek Christian sect, he learns Greek for the same reason.
Like again, like Equioto, He's one of these guys. He
just picks up languages. He's just crazy smart. Yeah. In
seventeen fifty seven, he gets a job as a clerk
in the Ordnance Office, which is, so far as I
can tell, is like a mid level bureaucratic position. This

(21:31):
leaves him with ample free time, which he spends idly
studying the law and presumably learning more languages in order
to argue with his friends. One of his older brothers
is a doctor who hold and you get the feeling
this is like a family of good people because his
older brother, the doctor, runs a free clinic out of
his house for the poor of London, right yeah, and
Granville periodically will just like show up to hang out

(21:53):
with him and his patients and like talk. There's not
TV at the time, what else are you gonna do? Right?

Speaker 3 (21:58):
That podcast? No podcasts?

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Right? Yeah? So Granville shows up one day in seventeen
sixty five, the year before Equiano bias his freedom, and
he happens to meet a black and slaved person named
Jonathan Strong. Strong had been taken from Barbados to London
by his owner, slave trader, David Lyle. He was fifteen
or sixteen when Lyle has him baptized. Now, religion is

(22:23):
confusing at the best of times, and Strong, like many
enslaved people, misunderstood the purpose of baptism and was under
the impression that now that this was done, he was
a free person because he had been baptized. Right, you
can't hold Christian as a slave, right, that'd be fucked up.
Pretty weird, pretty weird. And so he tells Lyle, well, like,

(22:44):
I'm free now, right, And Lyle, being a slave owner
and trader, doesn't have a great control over his anger,
and just immediately pistol whips this adolescent boy nearly to death.
He beats him so badly with the butt of a
handgun that Strong goes temporarily blind and can barely walk
up right. So, and you get the feeling he just

(23:04):
loses his temper and beats this kid nearly to death
because He's immediately like, oh shit, I killed him, and
he just tosses him out onto the street like a
piece of trash. He's like, well, he's not worth anything anymore. Bye.
So somehow this dying boy manages to crawl or find help,
and he gets to Granville's brother's free clinic where his
immediate injuries are treated, but it's clear he needs more treatment,

(23:25):
and it just happens to be on a day that
like Granville Sharp is there with his brother, and so
he and his brother take Jonathan to a nearby hospital
and pull their money to pay for him to stay
there for four months and recover. And when he's released,
because they're just treating him like a freedman at this point,
they find him paying work with a Quaker pharmacist they knew,
so they get this guy to the hospital. He heals,

(23:48):
he recovers pretty well, and they find him a job
and he starts living a life right like he's an independent,
free person making money For a year in change. Things
are pretty good for Strow. But then in seventeen sixty seven,
his former owner Lyle sees Jonathan on the street and
is like, he's alive and healthy, and he gets really

(24:09):
fucking angry. How dare that boy have the temerity to
survive my beatings and not hand himself back over to me.
He stole himself, Basically, he stole himself. Yeah, so Lyle
doesn't want to deal with Strong anymore, but he works.
He says like, Hey, I own this guy and he's
really healthy. You just got to go get him if
you give me thirty pounds. So he like sells this

(24:31):
guy and then he hires slave catchers to abduct Strong
out of his new life. Yeah, so you really stand up,
gut great dude. Months of conflict, Well, Granville Sharp, who
has been stranging the law, is like, you can't do this.
He's a free man now. You can't make him leave.
You can't take him to another foreign country, right, Like,
you can't do that. So there's a conflict follows. There's

(24:55):
like this goes on for a while before like the
court case actually resolves, and at one point during the proceedings,
Lyle challenges Sharp to a duel, and Sharp's like, let's
settle this in court. Basically. At another point, lawyers that
Granville consulted warned him that English law saw slaves's property
even once they were taken onto English soil, and Sharp

(25:16):
has a law a moment of horror where he's like,
there's no way the laws of my beloved England are
this bad. So he spends the next like two years
making himself an expert in the law and fighting this case,
fighting Lyle and the man Lyle had sold Strong to
James care and he eventually wins Strong's legal defense, wins.
This is a significant case in like British like legal history,

(25:39):
and it's the kind of thing where they win Strong's freedom,
but they don't get a ruling that alters English law
and respect to the rights of enslaved people. Right, So
it's good because Strong doesn't have to be sold into
slavery again, but it also doesn't like, it doesn't go
any further right, and Sharp is disappointed by this, and

(25:59):
because by this point, after a two years of fighting
this case and immersing himself in the law, Granville Sharp
has become, in Sidharth Kara's words, the first British person
to devote his life to the extirpation of slavery, and
his influence actually goes beyond that. Though it's wild how
influential this motherfucking dude is One of Sharp's overseas friends

(26:20):
is an American of some notoriety named Benjamin Franklin, and
in is oft time, Sharp had a habit when he
wasn't fighting slavery, he would write essays that were often
published as pamphlets or tracts, and he sends one of
these pamphlets to his buddy Benjamin Franklin, which lays out
Sharp's argument that Americans shouldn't be taxed if they don't
have parliamentary representation.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
This dude's like at the center of the global history.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
It's fucking a mazing, Like, yeah, just writing a lot
of letters and absolutely changing the forest of gum history.
He's like a really smart Forest Gump.

Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah yeah, yeah, Forrest Gump done a whole lot of
very more impressive stuff.

Speaker 2 (27:03):
Yeah. Yeah, It's just I I didn't know much anything
at all really about Grandville Sharp until I started this,
and like, yeah, we should probably talk more about this guy.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
Yes, dude, probably should be on money or something.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Yeah, yeah, twenty pound note.

Speaker 3 (27:19):
Yeah, yeah, we got some people who already shouldn't be
on money. Probably switch them out. Yeah, it'll be fine.
It's like those people, I'm sure, I mean, Robert you
and I have experienced this together. When when you are
working in conflict zones, sometimes you will often the people
who you work with are like the most remarkable people,
Like you speak several languages, and they and like, yeah, you.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Taught ourselves yourself Chinese because you were bored after learning English.

Speaker 3 (27:48):
Yeah, and yeah, like your grasp of our culture and
politics and the way we talk it is perfect. Yeah,
and you're the same in five other languages. And you
can all you about domestic issues in the US with
me with a great degree of intelligence to many American people.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, and who have like devoted their life in between
like the stuff they're doing with you to like rescuing
other people and like helping to provide like emergency medical
care or get food to different like yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yeah, yeah, you'll find out that Yeah, on Sundays they
rescue puppies from fucking burnie buildings, and like it just
fits perfectly with who that person is.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
I'm so tired after my work week. I just sit
on the couch in the weekend.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
Yeah, how do I become more like.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Grandville Sharp is one of those like, well, fuck,
I'm not getting enough done guys, right and equianoist. To
be honest, they're both like Jesus Christ, Like I wouldn't
believe you if you were in a story. So uh.
Sharpe's primary focus in the years after the Strong case
was in expanding his studies as a lawyer so he

(28:54):
could make an unimpeachable legal case for banning slavery. In
seventeen sixty nine, he publishes a tract titled A Representation
of the injustice and dangerous tendency of tolerating slavery or
of admitting the least claim of private property in the
persons of Men in England. He wasn't good at titling.
He was good at a lot of stuff, but not titles.
This became one of the first popular arguments against the

(29:15):
system of slavery in England, not just arguing that it
was a moral but that it was foreign to the
spirit of an and intention of British law and cultural values.

Speaker 3 (29:23):
Right.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
That's a key part of his argument is that like
this isn't really English, right, Like we shouldn't based on
the things we say about our shared values. This is
not a natural thing for us to be doing. Right,
Why are we so committed to this? Is it just
venal profit it is.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Yeah, yeah, I wonder if there's a modern analogy for that, roebit.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
What's interesting here, though, is that Sharp is not just
wish casting a legal argument, right. His extensive study of
the law had found precedent as far back as fifteen
sixty nine for the assertion that slavery was not legal
on British soil. Now, I'm not going to go into
detail about centuries old British court rulings and rulings of
like kings and shit, but there are cases from the
sixteen hundreds to the seventeen hundreds that back up this argument.

(30:04):
And one thing that was definitely true is that no
law was ever passed in England to make it legal
to own Africans. That's never there's never like a law
that just says you can do this. Yeah, people just
start doing it and they're like, well, this is property.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
Yeah, it's happening though.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yeah. The best pro slavery advocates could do was point
out a seventeen twenty nine legal opinion in which an
Attorney general had argued that the legal status of a
slave didn't change just because they set foot in England, right,
which is something but it's not the same as like
there being a lot saying you could do this.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
Yeah, right, right, you can't point it as a slavery act,
yeah exactly. Even like when we go back in American history,
like when we're looking for like when shuttle slavery begins,
you can see cases where there are like indentured servants,
right and as a form of punishment that terms of
service are extended. But then it appears that the black

(30:56):
people's terms of service are not extended, presumed because they
are assumed to be in servitude for their entire life
by nature of who they are. Right, But we can't
point to a this is when they decided it was
going to be like that, and those were the rules.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Right right yep. So Granville comes into the seventeen seventies
well armed to argue that slavery is not really legal. Next,
per Mike Kay's piece for antislavery dot Org in seventeen
seventy two, Sharp defended James Somerset, a slave who had
escaped and been recaptured. This proved to be a crucial
test case, as Sharpe argued that slavery itself was unlawful
in Britain. Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice and presiding judge,

(31:36):
was reluctant to reach a conclusion on whether the right
to property outweighed the right to freedom, and tried to
persuade the parties to settle out of court. When this failed,
he attempted to word his decision so that he freed
Somerset without setting a precedent. Despite Mansfield's efforts, most observers,
including other judges, thought that the effect of the judgment
was to free slaves that were brought to Britain, and
that this provided a legal avenue for many slaves to

(31:57):
obtain their freedom. So this is the kind of the
case where Mansfield is doing everything he can for this
not to have any wider effect. But all people here
is that like, well this guy got freed, right, Yeah, yeah,
I feel like this makes me free, right. So large

(32:17):
numbers of enslaved people in England start fleeing their masters
in an errant belief that slavery had ended on the island.
Many abolitionists who misunderstood the ruling celebrated it as a
sign of the fundamental justice and equality of English law.
Judge Mansfield had to issue a note that the case
was only really relevant to a specific niche situation, which
caused Ben Franklin to joke that English abolitionists were celebrating

(32:38):
the majesty of their legal system for its virtue and
quote setting free a single negro right where he's like, okay, guys,
like it's good, but like maybe calm down a little bit,
you know, Yeah, this is this is one guy. There's
still a lot of guys. It's did a net negative
now this this judge, the Earl of Mansfield, is a

(33:00):
really interesting guy because not only is he the judge
in the Somerset case, he's going to be the judge
in the Zorg case. This isn't weird because he's one
of the most significant figures in the whole history of
English law. He's the judge for a lot of big
cases at the time, right. But he's a particularly interesting
guy to rule on cases like this because he has
no child of his own, but he's raising his illegitimate niece,

(33:22):
Dido Bell as his daughter, and she is a black
woman of mixed race. Right, So he is simultaneously repeatedly
being like, enslaved people are property and my ruling should
not be seen to free anyone, and is also clearly
capable of understanding that they're human beings because he is
a black woman, right, And there's all there are a

(33:44):
couple of moments where because he's never talks in a
way that's very sympathetic to this, but there's a couple
of rulings where it's like, well, maybe this is where
his sympathy moved him a little bit. Not to give
him much credit, because I don't think he's a very
nice guy, but it's a really he's a really interesting
judge too, trying this case right now, and again he

(34:04):
is not considered a friendly judge. Sharp considers him a
deeply hostile judge in fact, and in the Zorg case,
Mansfield has no trouble ruling that enslaved Africans are property anyway.
By the time we hit seventeen eighty three, Sharp is
well established as the guy to talk to if you're
trying to defend or create writes for enslaved people in England. Right,
And so it's not hard to see why our friend

(34:26):
a lot of Equiano would like Granville Sharp right, seems
like a pretty natural friendship. And so once Equiano reads
that article about the Zorg case, he does the seventeen
hundreds equivalent of pasting a link to a news article
in the group chat, and he like sends a copy
to his friend Granville Sharp. Granville writes in his diary,
Gustavas Vasa called on me with an account of one

(34:47):
hundred and thirty negroes being thrown alive into the sea
from on board an English slave ship. And this is
the start of a process that is going to like
terminate in the creation of the first mass move against
slavery in British history, right, Like this is the inciting instant,
is Equiano sending this letter to Granville Sharp, So Sharp

(35:09):
hits the ground running. He starts meeting with the lawyers
who represented the insurers in that case and is like, Hey,
I think we can file an action against the Gregson
Syndicate and request a new trial. And I think we
can win that new trial because we didn't really have
a full trial last time. If we really make a
thing of this, we can make them go through discovery
and we can look at the log books and the
other documentation kept by the crew of the Zorg, right,

(35:32):
and we can see did they really need to kill
those people?

Speaker 3 (35:35):
You know?

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah? He also starts barraging influential figures in the country
with letters demanding the Admiralty Court charge the crewmen of
the Zorg with murder. He's going to do this the
rest of his life. It never works, but he does
keep trying, right. Most of his efforts don't bear fruit,
but he succeeds in getting a hearing over a motion
to set a new trial, and this hearing is scheduled

(35:58):
for May twenty first, seventeen eighty three, less than two
months after the first trial. Greg's and v. Gilbert, which
is the hearing is not going to be a tiny,
largely ignored case. It's going to be a major court thing,
with exacting notes taken on court proceedings and a huge
amount of media attention covering every twist and turn. Sharp
is not technically the lawyer here, but he's basically acting

(36:20):
as an advisor to the defense council, which consisted of
three lawyers. The most important of these was a fellow
named Samuel Haywood. And Haywood's a really interesting person. He
was born in Liverpool in the seventeen fifties. He went
to Cambridge and he comes from like a very rich family, right,
I mean he goes to Cambridge, right, and he's rich
because his dad, Benjamin is a slave merchant in Liverpool

(36:43):
and his younger brother, also Benjamin, Benjamin Arthur, is a
slave merchant in Liverpool. And over like the years they'd
been doing this, something like one hundred and thirty different
slave voyages had been financed and operated by the Heywood family. Right,
they had transported at least a According to Sidharth Kara,
they had transported something like forty two thousand enslaved people,

(37:04):
like over the course of their time in this industry.
And in fact, the Heywoods had invested in at least
one slave ship with William Grigson with like the Grigson Syndicate.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
Right, Oh wow, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
So this is a kid whose money and who's child
like schooling and stuff is paid for by slave money,
and he's an abolitionist by now. He fundamentally objects to
the slave trade, right, and so he just he like
when he's representing the underwriters in this case, he is
probably pissing off his family. So it's just very interesting, Right,

(37:35):
Chris is a kid from slave money who's like, nah,
this is bad nah r. Just if anyone ever says
people who grew up in that culture, couldn't know what
was wrong.

Speaker 3 (37:44):
Like, yeah, yeah, dude, this guy here's a dude, I'm.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
Not I don't know that if he was like a committed,
full on abolitionist, because a lot of these guys were
just anti the slave trade and thought that that was
the like the Middle Passage stuff with the trianglear was
the worst part of it. But that's still a better
than not being against that, right, it's a step yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:04):
Yeah, And it's an unusual position still in the brave
one to us at that time, right, right, if you're
visiting a whole family a slave trader is yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah. So from the jump, there are some uncomfortable tensions
behind the scenes. In this case, the insurers and their
counsel benefited from Granville Sharp's lobbying and legal mind, but
they're not on the same side precisely. The insurers are
slavery profiteers. They don't want the trade to end. They
don't want abolition yeah yeah, making money off of it, right,
they just don't want to pay money. In this case,

(38:33):
Sharp is on board with them because he also doesn't
want Gregson to get a bunch of money for killing
these people or for his people killing these people, but
he also sees this case fundamentally as a way to
set further precedents on the road to ending the slave trade. Right,
he is thinking about this from the jump that that
I am doing this because it's a step to something better.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
Now.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Judge Mansfield tries to deny that possibility from the outset
of the trial, insisting that this case is purely regarding
the insurance policy on the Zong or the zoo. Mansfield
insists the case of the slaves was the same as
if horses had been thrown overboard, and for the most part,
the actual arguments in the case do not rely on
enslaved Africans having more rights than a horse. Right. That

(39:13):
is kind of what's going on here. The central legal
question is not was it bad that they killed these people?
It's did these people have to die because disasters that
the Zorg's crew were not in control of had caused
a situation where it was impossible to keep them alive?

Speaker 1 (39:27):
Right?

Speaker 2 (39:28):
Is this a situation where there was no other option,
where people were going to die one way or the other,
and they were trying to save a portion of the
of the crew and the cargo or was this a
case where the people operating the ship had fucked up
constantly and unnecessarily murdered a bunch of people and were
now trying to get insurance money to cover up the

(39:49):
fact that they fucked up? Right? Which of these is
what happened here?

Speaker 3 (39:54):
Right?

Speaker 2 (39:55):
And to be clear, if you approach the case of
the Zork from just that standpoint, ignoring the crime against himanity,
the gregs and Syndicate and its employees are in the
wrong right because they did fuck up repeatedly and horribly. Yeah,
you know, you do not have to be like morally
against Slaver to be like, well, but like, no, guys
didn't know what the fuck you were doing. You just
threw them over. But you had four hundred gallons of

(40:16):
water on the boat.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeh uh.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
You know who else has a lot of water? Hm?

Speaker 3 (40:23):
I can make a guess.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
Yeah the spot. This podcast is sponsored entirely by the
Pistachio Farmers of Central California. Jesus, you know, yeah, pistachios.
We've got enough water probably Yeah?

Speaker 3 (40:37):
Fuck the Colorado River.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah. Actually, it's doing okay right now, happy for it
at an all time high, which means climate change is soft.

Speaker 3 (40:46):
Oh good, I'm glad it'd be worried about that.

Speaker 2 (40:49):
Yep, we did it, and we're back so diligent cross examination.
You know, early in the court proceedings, here comes across
a bunch of examples of the crew of the Zorg
fucking up hideously, right, it finds out because they're talking

(41:12):
to Stubbs and they're talking to that to his first mate,
and Stubbs admits, like a bunch of shit he shouldn't
on the stand including it, like wait, wait, you guys
sailed past other islands that had water but didn't because
you were like worried that they might have been taken
by like an enemy who would take your boat, but
you didn't know. And he just went past the islands

(41:33):
that were full of water. And then he admits that, like, well,
we thought we had enough water when we passed those islands,
but then we looked inside and realized that the water
barrels weren't as full as we thought. It was like,
you didn't check on your water. You didn't check to
see if you had enough water. It seems like a
pretty important thing to check. Yeah. Likewise, the lawyers point

(41:55):
out that the Gregson sindicate had a responsibility to hire
a competent captain. Not only was Collins would not that,
but when he got sick, he passed on command to
a demonstrably incompetent man. When a skilled sailor and navigator
was locked in his room forbidden from doing his job,
it was not the sea's fault or the underwriter's responsibility
if the syndicate hired a captain who couldn't And this

(42:17):
is a line from the court case, tell Hispaniola from Jamaica, Wow,
burn on the dead.

Speaker 3 (42:26):
Guy good in the eighteenth century.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
Now, much of the case came down to the fact
that further interrogation of the ship's stores and the actual
documentation of their journey showed that when they landed in
Jamaica they had days of water left, and if they'd
been close to running out, there were again multiple islands
they could have gone to to get their water within
a day or so. In addition to that, on the stand,
Stubbs revealed that it had rained several times near the

(42:52):
end of the journey and he'd failed to have the
crew collect rain water. Stubbs really continues to us, should
we get water now, let's just kill some more guys sorry,
kill some more women and children. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
Fuck.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
So this case, which had been rushed through the first time,
on second viewing seemed much more disturbing, even to skeptics
like Mansfield. The dark question that hovered over the whole
proceeding was this, if not out of necessity, why would
Stubbs and the crew have thrown one hundred and thirty
people overboard? And the answer that people kept thinking was
probably the obvious one, is this, after a too long

(43:33):
journey on a slave ship crammed with twice its maximum occupancy,
without enough food or enough water, and disease and dimmick,
many of the enslaved people on board were too sick
and visibly ailing to fetch much of a price at auction.
So if you just kill them, the insured value is
higher than what they would sell for. Jeez, we don't

(43:56):
know that that's what was going on, but this is
what people start talking about, and it's not an unreasonable proposition. Yeah, no,
pretty ghastly yeah yeah, ghostly right, And this changes the
thinking of a lot of people like Mansfield, who are
not abolitionists, but who are like, oh shit, but if, like,
if we established this precedent, people might just start murdering

(44:19):
ships full of enslaved people to just get the insurance money.
And that seems like a nightmare, Like that's even bad
to me, and I kind of suck ass, you know.
So this fact is shaking even to guys like Judge Manfield,
and he ruled quote to be sure, what mister Haywood
has observed is a very material circumstance. So many negroes

(44:40):
thrown overboard after the rain came, without any account of
how they came to do it. It is so uncommon
a case. I think, upon the ground of re examination,
it ought to go to a new trial. And he
grants a motion for retrial. Now this is never to be.
There's not a second trial because William Grigson, head of
the slaving syndicate, decides that a second trial is not
go well, right, and it's just gonna waste money. So

(45:02):
let's just cut our losses and return to operating the
slave trade at a massive, massive level. His insurers celebrate
their victory. But you could be forgiven for seeing that
at this point the case is like an overall mixed
bag or even a wash for the cause of abolitionism, right,
because you know the people who one are still involved

(45:26):
in the slaving industry. No one has attained any additional rights.
No one's ruled that enslaved people are human beings. They're
still the same as cargo. Right, how is this? You
could see someone, especially like a political radical at the time,
being like, this is the worst kind of incrementalism. You've
achieved nothing. Right. You can see how someone might think
that that is not the case. And in fact, part

(45:47):
of why I think the story's important is it illustrates
how critical small and seemingly pyrrhic victories can be in
pursuit of sweeping social change. First off, well, there's no
second trial. The fact that a retrial was grand means
that slave merchants had been given a warning. You can't
just kill people and claim their insurance money on them. Right.
And then, as Sidharth Kara writes and the Zorg, even

(46:10):
if just for a moment, the Africans who lay at
the bottom of the ocean thousands away were seen as people,
not property, and Kerr is arguing that this causes kind
of a perceptual shift in a lot of people who
can't help as they're hearing how horrible what this is,
sympathize with these people who are still legally just property,
and that that's an important shift. But the larger victory

(46:30):
in the case was that it had started the process
of gathering together and galvanizing great legal minds, writers and
agitators towards pursuing an end to the slave trade in
an organized fashion, right, And that's what we're going to
talk about in part three. But I should conclude today
by saying a little about our main villains for these episodes,

(46:51):
William Grigson and Robert Stubbs. During the first case, Stubbs
had high hopes of getting a job with the syndicate
and perhaps even support to regain his lost gold by
helping Grickson make good on the slaves that they'd killed.
When this failed, he gets cut loose. Now Stubbs never
makes it back to Africa. He scrapes together a meager
living for the next few years, and he dies aged

(47:11):
sixty and seventeen eighty seven. In his will, he gives
gave his son George all my wearing apparel, which wasn't
much used to the boy who never made it back
from Africa and died there earlier that same year, age nineteen.
All Stubsy one more, one more real piece of yah.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
His kid, his clothes, his old man clothes.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
He literally does. He doesn't give his kids any money.
I don't think he has much, but he's like already
paid to raise him. Why would I give him money?

Speaker 3 (47:43):
Paid the ship that one kid off to Africa?

Speaker 2 (47:46):
Jesus, what a piece of shit?

Speaker 3 (47:47):
Yeah, what a what a could Yeah find his grave
and piss on it if you're in the region.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Yeah, if you can find it, pee on it. William
Gregson unfortunately lives into eighteen hundred when he dies aged
seventy nine, after having financed more than one hundred and
fifty slave voyages that tore nearly sixty thousand Africans from
their homes. Roughly sixteen percent of these people died en route.
Gregson died wealthy and respected, having never been called to
account for his crimes against humanity, which is a bummer.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
Yeah, that sucks.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
I'm sure his descendants aren't still rich today.

Speaker 3 (48:19):
I'm not sure that's something you can be so sure of,
rob It. I think that's a good chance they might be.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
No. The of the moral arc of the universe bends
towards justice, James, Ah.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
But it moves slowly as a problem. It moves real
fucking slow, a little bit too slowly sometimes because if
someone give it a bit of a gidea up, you know.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
And it's less of an arc and more of like
one of those one of those needles they have on
like a seismograph. So it's just like jumping back and forth. Yeah,
pretty often.

Speaker 3 (48:47):
Sure doesn't seem to be bending in the direction recently.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah, I don't know, man, Yeah, that's the story.

Speaker 1 (48:56):
Oh, stubbsy man, stubbsy.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
Yeah, at least he died reasonably young, like he could
have made it to one hundred that the other dude, No,
can't imagine what.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
When I was sixteen seventeen eighty seven.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
Yeah, I mean he lives longer than poor little George.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
That's right, he lives longer than his son.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
Yeah, what a fucking did Yeah, he presumaly doesn't even
know who's died because he gives that few shits. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
Yeah, Like, here have some old shirts, kid.

Speaker 3 (49:27):
My old clothes. Wow, that I wore as I fucked
up again and again over a series of fuck ups
that lasted my dire life.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
Oh I'm glad that guy is dead.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (49:37):
We all are I think, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
James, do you want to plug your book real quick?

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Yeah, you won't encounter any any stubsy type characters. But
there's some heroes in here. I think, some people who
have done some really remarkable things. Yeah, I wrote this
about anarchists at war. It's called Against the State. You
can pre order it from ak Press. You can hear
about some people trying to build a better world less
incrementally than this in many cases, kind of with a

(50:04):
bit more I guess kinetic means. But nonetheless, I think
like there's some stories and things that we can learn
in our much less violent lives from these people and
the way they organize and the way that they have
gone about things, And people will read it and enjoy it.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
You can buy it from ak Press.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Pre order link will be in the episode change should.

Speaker 3 (50:26):
Yeah, yeah you should. Yeah, don't buy it from Jeff Bezos.
He's not as bad as some of the people on here,
but not a great dude.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
Not a great dude. And yeah, you know, until next time, folks, well,
which we will be like tomorrow. But just in general,
I guess as you look at out how fucked up
things are, remember that things change pretty quickly, and the
evils that seem entrenched and impossible to fight generally aren't,
and that even victories that seem pyic or meaningless can

(50:54):
lead to much greater things, just by virtue of the
fact that through the act of fighting, people are brought
together who become capable of fighting more effectively even greater injustices.
So keep fighting and again, piss on that guy's great
if you find.

Speaker 1 (51:12):
It, Yeah, Yeah, Behind the Bastards is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes

(51:33):
every Wednesday and Friday.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 1 (51:35):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards