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Bury the Chains
Adam Hochschild
Macmillan, 497pp
Review first published in Third Way, November 2005.
Tolstoy said, ‘The history of the church is a history of cruelties and horror’, and he wasn’t wrong. As someone who has perhaps spent too long in the horror section of the Christian bookshop myself, this book was refreshing, a joy in fact.
It is the story of how a small group of ardent Christians led the country in a campaign against probably the greatest evil in their world and within half a century destroyed it. Religious partisanship aside, it is a thrilling and enthralling story, well researched, well written and thoroughly gripping.
Hochschild actually seems to have little sympathy for 18th-century Christianity in general, still less for the evangelicalism of Wilberforce et al. He considers it a ‘contradiction’, for example, that someone who campaigns for human rights should also want to convert the heathen. But this does not get in the way of telling the story, and in fact just means that the faith of the campaigners has to speak for itself through their actions. And by God it bellows.
The first trickle of an anti-slavery movement came from Granville Sharp, an Anglican musician who defended slaves in British courts, and forced the Lord Chief Justice against his will to concede, in effect, that slavery was illegal on the British mainland - a staggering achievement for a man with no legal training but what he had given himself for this purpose. Other campaigners included Olaudah Equiano, a slave turned entrepreneur who had bought his freedom, and John Newton, who, whatever they told you in Sunday School, at his evangelical conversion had been a slave trader for three years and continued for another six, till he gave up for health reasons, finally seeing the anti-slave-trade light 34 years later.
But the “moral steam engine” behind the movement was Thomas Clarkson. Ordained, but nine-tenths Quaker, he refused to take a living so he could devote every hour to the campaign. He constantly toured the country drumming up support and petitions until he had created a mass movement. He risked his life walking round the docks of Liverpool and Bristol gathering evidence and testimonies.
And there was Wilberforce of course, the evangelical MP who hammered away in the House for twenty years to get his anti-slave-trade Bill through, and for another thirty against slavery itself. Wilberforce gets short shrift in this book, and this is perhaps its one serious weakness.
Hochschild has two axes to grind in Bury the Chains. One is that abolition has for 200 years been falsely represented as British patriarchal benevolence, and I think he’s absolutely right. The fact is not only that the movement was adamantly resisted (to put it mildly) by King and Parliament, but that when the acts were eventually passed, in each case what finally swung the vote was violent slave revolts that were destroying the plantations. The slaves did not achieve their freedom without British campaigners, but the reverse is also true.
The other axe is that Wilberforce has stolen the glory due to Clarkson, and Hochschild aims to restore the balance. This is a fair aim. Clarkson was every bit as committed and as indispensible as Wilberforce to the campaign, and rather more energetic, and yet it is Wilberforce’s name that we know - partly, at least, because of his lionising in the great biography of Wilberforce by his sons. Though Hochschild is entitled not to like Wilberforce, and though he has plenty of good things to say about him anyway, he is ulimately somewhat unfair to him. He characterises him for example as a reactionary opposed to Parliamentary reform, though in fact Wilberforce ardently supported attempts to broaden the franchise and even introduced his own parliamentary reform bill. (The fact that that’s Wilberforce’s face on the cover tells you something about a publisher’s relationship with its writers.)
But never mind. It’s a forgivable blip, and there is so much to fascinate and inspire here. Hochschild argues that the campaigners achieved more than they can have meant or imagined. When the anti-slave trade act was passed more than three-quarters of the human race were in bondage either to slavery or serfdom, and by 1900 both were outlawed across the face of the earth - though this does race the question of to what extent the campaigners were part of a wider sociological shift. Hochschild argues that most of the techniques of modern campaigning were created by the anti-slavery activists: mass petitions, boycotts, newsletters, campaign posters, letters to your MP.
The parallels and contrasts between this campaign and today’s to make poverty history were on mind throughout the book. For example, the whole campaign from its inception led up to the great year of 1791 when the anti-slave trade bill came before Parliament - and it was resoundingly defeated, and it took another 16 years to get the law passed. The lesson at the end of 2005 is obvious. It’s also worth noting how every time campaigners scored a success, the government moved the goalposts. The main point of course is that they took on an impossibly vast institutional evil, and won.
as someone who has perhaps spent too long in the horror section of the Christian bookshop myself, this book was refreshing, a joy in fact