I anticipated much persecution in it also; and I questioned whether I should even get out of it alive. But in journeying on, I became more calm and composed. My spirits began to return. In these latter moments I considered my first feelings as useful, inasmuch as they impressed upon me the necessity of extraordinary courage, and activity, and perseverance, and of watchfulness, also, over my own conduct, that I might not throw any stain upon the cause I had undertaken.
When, therefore, I entered the city, I entered it with an undaunted spirit, determining that no labour should make me shrink, nor danger, nor even persecution, deter me from my pursuit. Clarkson translated his prize-winning essay from Latin into English and supervised its distribution by the tens of thousands. He helped organize boycotts of the West Indian rum and sugar produced with slave labor. He gave lectures and sermons. He wrote many articles and at least two books.
He helped British seamen escape from the slave-carrying ships they were pressed into against their will. He filed murder charges in courts to draw attention to the actions of fiendish slave ship captains. He convinced witnesses to speak. He gathered testimony, rustled up petition signatures by the thousands and smuggled evidence from under the very noses of his adversaries.
His life was threatened many times, and once, surrounded by an angry mob, he very nearly lost it. The long hours, the often thankless and seemingly fruitless forays to uncover evidence, the risks and the costs that came in every form, the many low points when it looked like the world was against him — all of that went on and on, year after year. When Britain went to war with France in , Clarkson and his committee saw their early progress in winning converts evaporate.
The opposition in Parliament argued that abandoning the slave trade would only hand a lucrative business to a formidable enemy. And the public saw winning the war as more important than freeing people of another color and another continent.
But Clarkson did not relent. He, Wilberforce and the committee kept spreading the message and looking for the best opportunities to advance it. Depicting hundreds of slaves crammed like sardines in horrible conditions, it proved to be pivotal in winning the public. Isaac Milner , a leader of the Clapham Set , had a long talk with Clarkson, and then commented to Wilberforce: "I wish him better health, and better notions in politics; no government can stand on such principles as he maintains.
I am very sorry for it, because I see plainly advantage is taken of such cases as his, in order to represent the friends of Abolition as levellers. This was an attempt to help black people living in London who had been victims of the slave trade. Simon Schama has argued in Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and Empire that the harsh winter of was one of the factors that encouraged Hanway to do something for the significant number of Africans living in poverty: "In the East End and Rotherhithe: tattered bundles of human misery, huddled in doorways, shoeless, sometimes shirtless even in the bitter cold or else covered with filthy rags.
Granville Sharp came up with the idea that a black community should be allowed to to start a colony of free slaves in Sierra Leone. The country was chosen largely on the strength of evidence from the explorer, Mungo Park and a encouraging report from the botanist, Henry Smeathman, who had recently spent three years in the area. Thomas Clarkson was one of those who provided money for this venture. Richard S. Reddie , the author of Abolition! The Struggle to Abolish Slavery in the British Colonies has argued: "Some detractors have since denounced the Sierra Leone project as repatriation by another name.
It has been seen as a high-minded yet hypocritical way of ridding the country of its rising black population Some in Britain wanted Africans to leave because they feared they were corrupting the virtues of the country's white women, while others were tired of seeing them reduced to begging on London streets.
Granville Sharp was able to persuade a small group of London's poor to travel to Sierra Leone. As Hugh Thomas , the author of The Slave Trade , has pointed out: "A ship was charted, the sloop-of-war Nautilus was commissioned as a convoy, and on 8th April the first free black men and 41 black women, with 70 white women, including 60 prostitutes from London, left for Sierra Leone under the command of Captain Thomas Boulden Thompson of the Royal Navy".
When they arrived they purchased a stretch of land between the rivers Sherbo and Sierra Leone. The settlers sheltered under old sails, donated by the navy. They named the collection of tents Granville Town after the man who had made it all possible. Granville Sharp wrote to his brother that "they have purchased twenty miles square of the finest and most beautiful country The reality was very different. Adam Hochschild , the author of Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery has argued: "The expedition's delayed departure from England meant that it had arrived on the African coast in the midst of the malarial rainy season The ground was another major problem: steep, forested slopes with thin topsoil When they managed to coax a few English vegetables out of the ground, ants promptly devoured the leaves.
Soon after arriving the colony suffered from an outbreak of malaria. In the first four months alone, died. One of the white settlers wrote to Sharp: "I am very sorry indeed, to inform you, dear Sir, that I do not think there will be one of us left at the end of a twelfth month There is not a thing, which is put into the ground, will grow more than a foot out of it What is more surprising, the natives die very fast; it is quite a plague seems to reign here among us.
On 18th April Wilberforce introduced a bill to abolish the slave trade. There was no reasoned justification of slavery or the slave-trade. Thomas Grosvenor , the MP for Chester, acknowledged that it was "not an amiable trade but neither was the trade of a butcher an amiable trade, and yet a mutton chop was, nevertheless, a good thing.
However, on 19th April, the motion was defeated by to Granville Sharp came up with the idea that the black community in London should be allowed to to start a colony in Sierra Leone. In the summer and autumn Wilberforce worked with his close friend Henry Thornton to launch the company. He became acquainted with his daughter, Catherine Buck , in Clarkson was 32 and Catherine was only According to one friend she had "dark bright eyes twinkling in her delicate mobile face which smiled all over.
She was popular in West Suffolk ballrooms but prized as much for her wit as her beauty. Henry Crabb Robinson, was one of her close friends when she was a young woman. He later recalled that she had a strong interest in politics and loved to discuss the main issues of the day: "Her excellence lay rather in felicity of expression than in originality of thought. She was the most eloquent woman I have ever known, with the exception of Madame de Stael. She had a quick apprehension of every kind of beauty, and made her own whatever she learned.
Clarkson married Catherine at St. He renounced his Anglican orders, but although most of his political friends were Quakers, he decided against joining the Society of Friends. However, he attending the Penrith Quaker Meeting House and his wife, who in the past had been a free-thinker, read the works of George Fox.
A friend commented: "She is become a religionist and a believer. Her faith receives little or no aid from written revelation - but God has spoken to her heart in a most sublime and mystical manner. In short she is of a species of Quaker. He spoke as he wrote, ploddingly and pedantically, and both his readers and his acquaintances found he could be boring. His wife, in contrast, was a brilliant conversationalist and an excellent hostess. Clarkson's biographer, Hugh Brogan , has argued that "Clarkson's health was collapsing, and he had spent more than half his small capital in the cause of abolition.
William Wilberforce wrote to one friend: "The truth is he has expended a considerable part of his little fortune, and though not perhaps very prudently or even necessarily yet I think, judging liberally, that he who has sacrificed so much time, and strength, and talents, should not be suffered to be out of pocket too.
We should not look for inconsistent good qualities in the generality of men. Clarkson is ardent, earnest, and indefatigable, and we have benefited greatly from his exertions. On his farm at Eusemere Clarkson grew wheat, oats, barley, red clover and turnips and pastured sheep and cows. He sold his produce at Penrith market. He became fascinated with farming. He wrote in his journal: "The bud and the blossom, the rising and the falling leaf, the blade of corn and the ear, the seed-time and the harvest, the sun that warms and ripens, the cloud that cools, and emits the fruitful shower, these and a hundred objects afford daily food for the religious growth of the mind.
The following month the Wordsworths moved into the Town End cottage at Grasmere. The two couples regularly visited each other. Catherine was quick to see Wordsworth's talent. She wrote: "I am fully convinced that Wordsworth's genius is equal to the production of something very great, and I have no doubt that he will produce something that posterity will not willingly let die, if he lives ten or twenty years longer.
Robert Southey was also a regular visitor to the Clarkson's home. He later wrote that Clarkson was a "man who so nobly came forward about the Slave Trade to the ruin of his health - or rather state of mind - and to the deep injury of his fortune It agitates him to talk about the subject slave trade - but when he does - he agitates every one who hears him. I have called him the moral steam-engine, or the Giant with one idea.
In March , Wilberforce's proposal to abolish the slave trade was defeated in the House of Commons by only four votes. At least a dozen abolitionist MPs were out of town or at the new comic opera in London.
Thomas Clarkson commented: "To have all our endeavours blasted by the vote of a single night is both vexatious and discouraging. Very much vexed and incensed at our opponents". William Wilberforce held conservative views on most other issues. He opposed parliamentary reform and supported the suspension of Habeas Corpus that resulted in political activists such as Thomas Hardy and John Thelwall being imprisoned.
He also supported the government when it passed Combination Acts of — This made it illegal for workers to join together to press their employers for shorter hours or may pay. As a result trade unions were thus effectively made illegal. In Thomas Clarkson returned to his campaign against the slave trade and toured the country on horseback obtaining new evidence and maintaining support for the campaigners in Parliament. William Wilberforce introduced an abolition bill on 30th May The Whig leader in the Lords, Lord Grenville , said as so many "friends of abolition had already gone home" the bill would be defeated and advised Wilberforce to leave the vote to the following year.
Wilberforce agreed and later commented "that in the House of Lords a bill from the House of Commons is in a destitute and orphan state, unless it has some peer to adopt and take the conduct of it". In February , Wilberforce presented his eleventh abolition bill to the House of Commons.
Charles Brooke reported that the French slave trade was resurgent, so that abolition would merely hand British commerce over to the enemy. Wilberforce replied: "The opportunity now offered may never return, and if the present moment be neglected, events may occur which render the whole of the West India islands one general scene of devastation and horror.
The storm is fast gathering; every instant it becomes blacker and blacker. Even now I know not whether it be too late to avert the impending evil, but of this I am quite sure - that we have no time to lose. In February, Lord Grenville was invited by the king to form a new Whig administration.
Grenville, was a strong opponent of the slave trade. Grenville was determined to bring an end to British involvement in the trade. He had spoken against the slave-trade in nearly all the debates in the s. Thomas Clarkson sent a circular to all supporters of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade claiming that "we have rather more friends in the Cabinet than formerly" and suggested "spontaneous" lobbying of MPs.
Many had strong financial reasons for allowing slavery to continue and parliamentary legislation was blocked or defeated several times.
From 12th May , the date of Wilberforce's first parliamentary speech against the slave trade, it was almost eight years before Parliament finally passed an Act aboloshing it. A major part of this achievement was due to James Stephen, a new member of the Abolition Committee.
As a leading maritime lawyer he helped to write a more acceptable form of abolition legislation and to steer it through Parliment. Luck and events also played a part. The chances for abolition became even more favourable when Lord Grenville, who was extremely sympathetic to the views of anti-slavery campaigners, became Prime Minister after the death of William Pitt in The Act was finally passed on 23rd February by votes to 16, but only after a ten hour debate which lasted until four o'clock in the morning.
Letter from Thomas Clarkson to Jonathon Peckover informing him of the passing of the bill aboloshing the slave trade. John Hawkins becomes the first known English sailor to obtain slaves in Africa and sell them in the West Indies. A group of Quakers visit Barbados and suggest that the slave-owners treat their slaves with humanity and attempt to convert them to Christianity. Wilberforce's parliamentary motion to abolish the slave trade is defeated.
Sugar boycott in England. Plan of the 'Brookes', used by Abolitionists to illustrate the overcrowded conditions of slave ships. The passing of the Slave Trade Act did not put an end to slavery and Thomas Clarkson continued to write and campaign against slavery until the end of his life. He concentrated his efforts mainly on furthering the campaign internationally and as part of this he twice met the Tsar of Russia, Alexander I. One of its first acts was to organise an anti-slavery convention and as its principal speaker he received a standing ovation from the delegates and observers from nine countries.
Thomas Clarkson became a pacifist in and, together with his brother John, became a founder of the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace. For the last thirty years of his life he lived at Playford Hall in Suffolk and when he died in he was buried in Playford at St. Wisbech commemorated him by erecting the Clarkson Memorial and by naming a school in his honour.
In a tablet dedicated to him was unveiled in Westminster Abbey. John Clarkson, Thomas's younger brother, also played a significant part in the history of the anti-slavery movement.
Perhaps as a result of what he saw there, at the end of the war he joined his older brother in campaigning for the abolition of slavery. The enslaved Africans had gained their freedom in return for fighting for Britain during the American War of Independence and were initially resettled in Canada. The government, however, failed to honour its promises of land and in order to survive many were forced into a form of slavery.
This was cut by the Kindersley workshop. The inscription reads:. Ignatius Sancho is buried in the church yard not marked. North Choir Aisle. This image can be purchased from Westminster Abbey Library. I feel very privileged to work here. Designed by.
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