"These Disorders Had Been Brought On By Degrees, In Consequence Of The
Severe Labors Necessarily Attached To The Promotion Of The Cause.
For
seven years I had a correspondence to maintain with four hundred
persons, with my own hand; I had some book or other annually to write
in behalf of the cause.
In this time I had travelled more than thirty-five
thousand miles in search of evidence, and a great part of these journeys
in the night. All this time my mind had been on the stretch. It had been
bent, too, to this one subject, for I had not even leisure to attend to my
own concerns. The various instances of barbarity which had come
successively to my knowledge, within this period, had vexed, harassed,
and afflicted it. The wound which these had produced was rendered still
deeper by those cruel disappointments before related, which arose from
the reiterated refusals of persons to give their testimony, after I had
travelled hundreds of miles in quest of them. But the severest stroke was
that inflicted by the persecution, begun and pursued by persons interested
in the continuance of the trade, of such witnesses as had been examined
against them, and whom, on account of their dependent situation in life,
it was most easy to oppress. As I had been the means of bringing these
forward on these occasions, they naturally came to me, when thus
persecuted, as the author of their miseries and their ruin. From their
supplications and wants it would have been ungenerous and ungrateful
to have fled. These different circumstances, by acting together, had at
length brought me into the situation just mentioned; and I was, therefore,
obliged, though very reluctantly, to be borne out of the field where I had
placed the great honor and glory of my life."
I may as well add here that a Mr. Whitbread, to whom Clarkson
mentioned this latter cause of distress, generously offered to repair
the pecuniary losses of all who had suffered in this cause. One
anecdote will be a specimen of the energy with which Clarkson pursued
evidence. It had been very strenuously asserted and maintained that
the subjects of the slave trade were only such unfortunates as had
become prisoners of war, and who, if not carried out of the country in
this manner, would be exposed to death or some more dreadful doom in
their own country. This was one of those stories which nobody
believed, and yet was particularly useful in the hands of the
opposition, because it was difficult legally to disprove it. It was
perfectly well known that in very many cases slave traders made direct
incursions into the country, kidnapped and carried off the inhabitants
of whole villages; but the question was, how to establish it. A
gentleman whom Clarkson accidentally met on one of his journeys
informed him that he had been in company, about a year before, with a
sailor, a very respectable-looking young man, who had actually been
engaged in one of these expeditions; he had spent half an hour with
him at an inn; he described his person, but knew nothing of his name
or the place of his abode; all he knew was, that he belonged to a ship
of war in ordinary, but knew nothing of the port. Clarkson determined
that this man should be produced as a witness, and knew no better way
than to go personally to all the ships in ordinary, until the
individual was found. He actually visited every seaport town, and
boarded every ship, till in the very _last_ port, and on the very
_last_ ship, which remained, the individual was found, and found
to be possessed of just the facts and information which were
necessary. By the labors of Clarkson and his contemporaries an
incredible excitement was produced throughout all England. The
pictures and models of slave ships, accounts of the cruelties
practised in the trade, were circulated with an industry which left
not a man, woman, or child in England uninstructed. In disseminating
information, and in awakening feeling and conscience, the women of
England were particularly earnest, and labored with that whole-hearted
devotion which characterizes the sex.
It seems that after the committee had published the facts, and sent
them to every town in England, Clarkson followed them up by journeying
to all the places, to see that they were read and attended to. Of the
state of feeling at this time Clarkson gives the following account: -
"And first I may observe, that there was no town through which I
passed in which there was not some one individual who had left off the
use of sugar. In the smaller towns there were from ten to fifty, by
estimation, and in the larger from two to five hundred, who made this
sacrifice to virtue. These were of all ranks and parties. Hich and
poor, churchmen and dissenters, had adopted the measure. Even grocers
had left off trading in the article in some places. In gentlemen's
families, where the master had set the example, the servants had often
voluntarily followed it; and even children, who were capable of
understanding the history of the sufferings of the Africans, excluded,
with the most virtuous resolution, the sweets, to which they had been
accustomed, from their lips. By the best computation I was able to
make, from notes taken down in my journey, no fewer than three hundred
thousand persons had abandoned the use of sugar." It was the reality,
depth, and earnestness of the public feeling, thus aroused, which
pressed with resistless force upon the government; for the government
of England yields to popular demands quite as readily as that of
America.
After years of protracted struggle, the victory was at last won. The
slave trade was finally abolished through all the British empire; and
not only so, but the English nation committed, with the whole force of
its national influence, to seek the abolition of the slave trade in
all the nations of the earth.
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