Our journey to that freedom begins, interestingly enough, with the life of a slave, Olaudah Equiano, who was born around 1744 in Essaka, in southeastern Nigeria.  Sometime around 1755 he and his sister were captured by slave traders.  He was separated from his sister, whom he would never see again, and subsequently survived transport to the Americas in the confined quarters of a slave ship:

Olaudah Equiano was purchased by a Royal Navy Lieutenant, Michael Pascal, based in the British colony of Virginia.  Equiano served on Royal Navy vessels during the Seven Years War against France where he ran supplies of gunpowder across the decks of war ships in the midst of battle.  He also visited London, where he first saw snow, survived smallpox and watched a man hanged.   He earned pocket money by working as a barber to the sailors on board the ships.  Pascal would sometimes lend Equiano out to his London friends who helped him learn to read and write and took him to be baptized at St. Margaret's Westminster Church.  He also saw the Royal Navy's thirst for manpower firsthand when he was put to work under Pascal's supervision roaming the streets of London as a member of a naval press gang, a captive black man now putting white men in chains.  Although there were slaves in London at thi time, among the five thousand blacks in the city, many had been granted their freedom, others had bought their freedom and still others had simply taken it by slipping away to the small black communities in London.  Samuel Johnson, the great British scholar, left much of his estate to his beloved valet-butler-secretary, Francis Barber, originally brought to England from Jamaica as a slave. 

In 1762 Pascal sold Equiano to a planter from Montserrat.  Equiano reflected on his new home: “ At the sight of this land of bondage, a fresh horror ran through all my frame and chilled me to the heart.”  However, he was soon recognized for his intellect and was put to work as a clerk in the owners warehouse and later as a crew member on the fleet of company ships plying the eastern seaboard and the Caribbean.  In his travels he observed: “I have seen a negro beaten till some of his bones were broken, for only letting a pot boil over.”  He also would have heard about slave revolts, the largest being in Jamaica in 1760. The leader of the revolt, Tacky, was soon captured and beheaded, but skirmishes continued for many months, resulting in the death of hundreds of slaves.

 Equiano began to trade goods as his master's vessels worked the various ports of the Caribbean and the east coast of North America.  For example, he would buy barrels of salted pork in South Carolina and resell it, at a handsome profit, in the Caribbean.   By this means he was able to accumulate enough cash, about $420,000 JA in today's money, to buy his freedom in 1766.  To ensure his freedom he was determined to leave the Caribbean as quickly as possible, where he was potentially at risk for being kidnapped and sold back into bondage.  He was soon on his way to roaming the world working as crew on vessels sailing to Turkey, Greece, Portugal and six times to the Americas.  In 1773 he was among the first Africans to visit the Arctic on a voyage to find the Northwest Passage, where he ate polar bear meat. 

Granville Sharp (1735-1813)

Meanwhile Granville Sharp was beginning his own journey of discovery.   Sharp was born in 1735, in northern England and after attending grammar school taught himself Greek and Hebrew in his spare time while working as a lowly clerk in the civil service.  His life would change forever as a result of a chance meeting in 1765 while visiting the London clinic of his physician brother, William.  In the waiting room he noticed a young black man who had been very badly beaten.  In turned out that the man, Jonathan Strong, had been beaten by his owner with the butt of a pistol and thrown into the street as if dead.  The brothers cared for Strong until he recovered.  His master then saw him in the street and attempted to reclaim his slave and arrange to sell him to a Jamaican planter about to sail for the Caribbean  Upon hearing of this Sharp appealed to the Lord Mayor of London, who agreed that Strong had committed no crime and should be set free.  Sadly, Strong would die in 1770 as a result of the damage inflicted by his master. 

Sharp now devoted all of his available time to forcing a legal ruling on whether slaves could be compelled to leave the country, and on the legality of slavery itself.  He searched out a number of cases of slaves being forcibly sold to plantations in the America's.  However, the courts carefully refrained from making a definitive ruling that would set a precedent and thus hamper the activities of the slave traders.  Soon however Sharp appeared to have the case he needed to press for a decision on the legality of slavery.  Charles Stewart, of Boston, had brought his slave James Somerset to England in 1769.  In 1771 after a brief escape, Somerset was recaptured by his master and imprisoned on a ship destined for Jamaica.  Sharp brought the case before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield.  Lawyers for Somerset successfully argued that colonial law might permit slavery: but those laws did not apply in England, nor could such laws exist in England unless they had been specifically enacted by Parliament.  In his landmark ruling in June, 1772 Lord Mansfield ruled that: “No master was ever allowed here to take a slave by force to be sold abroad because he deserted from his service, or for any other reason whatever.”  Although the ruling had not abolished slavery on the slave islands it would lead to the de facto end of slavery in Britain.

Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846)

In 1787 Sharp  would become one of the founders of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade.  Although Sharp was viewed as the elder statesman of the anti-slavery movement, the key member in the coming campaign would in fact be Thomas Clarkson.  Born in 1760,  the son of an Anglican Minister, Clarkson was educated at Cambridge where he was a divinity student.  Clarkson's awareness of slavery started with the writing of an essay submitted in the annual Cambridge essay competition.  The question put by the vice-chancellor Peter Peckford, one of the few scholars of his day concerned by the immorality of slavery, was: 'Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?'.  Clarkson took to researching the essay topic with the same tenacity and thoroughness that would mark his later work for the cause. He was perhaps the first investigative journalist.  He won the essay contest, the equivalent of winning a Rhodes Scholarship today.   In the spring of 1785, his studies finished, he mounted his horse and headed to London for what seemed a promising career.  Riding to the capital in the black garb of a clergyman-to-be, he found himself, to his surprise, thinking neither of his prospects in the church nor of the pleasure of winning the prize.

This single moment in the life of Thomas Clarkson would reverberate through the remaining sixty-one years of his life and beyond. 

Clarkson's essay immediately caught the attention of other like minded gentlemen, including Granville Sharp.  This would lead to a May 22, 1787 meeting of twelve men in the London book store and  printing shop of James Phillips.  Their objective was to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth.  Among those in attendance were nine Quakers, including James and Richard Phillips and William Dillwyn and two Anglicans, including Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp.  When the committee first gathered, the handful of people in Britain who openly called for an end to slavery, or the slave trade, mostly Quakers, were regarded as oddballs, or at best as hopelessly idealistic.  To the Anglican establishment that ran Britain, Quakers were: ”Not members of our tribe”.  The Quakers would not date letters, remove their hats in front of royalty, nor address them as My Lord.  To the Quakers there was only one Lord!  As a result, the campaign against slavery was having absolutely no effect.  But now, with Clarkson as spokesman, the Quakers had found a match made in heaven.

Although Anglicans like Sharp and Clarkson would capture the headlines, it was the Quakers who really shaped the campaign.  Their church had no bishops, nor ordained ministers and their form of worship was the most open imaginable: any man, or woman, in a Quaker meeting could stand up and speak.  The spirit of this most democratic and non hierarchical of Western religions would become the very foundation of the anti-slavery movement throughout Britain.   

In a universe that took slavery for granted the committee members faced a central decision:  what exactly would be their objective?  Were they going to agitate only for abolition of the slave trade, or would they call for the total emancipation of all slaves?   Granville Sharp alone spoke for full emancipation.  However a more modest strategy would prevail.  Abolishing the slave trade looked possible, while the immediate freeing of all slaves did not.  For emancipation to happen, Parliament would have to override the lawmaking powers of the West Indian colonial legislatures, not likely with the influence of the planters in both Houses of Parliament.  Even more daunting, in a country where property rights were: 'sanctified by tradition and law', the committee feared that emancipation would be seen as: “...meddling with the property of the planters”, as Clarkson recalled.

On behalf of the committee Clarkson took on the role of fact-finder and for the next two years travelled the country, including the major slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool, gathering evidence against the trade.  He would search out former crew members and others with firsthand experience with the slave trade and attempt to record their stories and try persuade them to testify to its horrors.  At the same time, activists in major centres were gathering up petitions against the trade and for the first time articles against slavery were starting to appear in newspapers.  The up-and-coming artist George Morland exhibited the first antislavery painting, at the Royal Academy: 'Execrable Human Traffick' showing a protesting African being hustled into a ship's longboat by white traders.  Even a new children's book, 'Little Truths Better Than Great Fables', included a description of slaves in a ship 'pressed together like herrings in a barrel, which caused an intolerable heat and stench.'  Before long, nearly two thousand people had contributed financially to the cause and there were contacts, most though not all of them Quakers, in thirty-nine counties. Another sign of  the rising public interest came from the Gentlemen's Magazine, a bell weather journal of news and gossip with no love for the abolitionist cause.  In 1787, its index listed not a single item about slavery or the slave trade; for 1788 there are sixty-eight references.

Along the way the anti-slavery crusaders would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on today, from wall posters and mass mailings, to boycotts and lapel pins.   Eight thousand posters, showing an overhead view of a packed slave ship, were printed and posted in pubs all over England.  One of the movement's new supporters was Josiah Wedgwood, the famous pottery designer and manufacturer.  Besides money, he had something every movement needs, a flair for publicity and marketing.  When Wedgwood was made Potter to the Queen, he promptly sold a line of china as Queensware; after Catherine the Great of Russia ordered a 952 piece set of table service, he marketed his 'Russian pattern'.  He had one of his craftsmen design a seal for stamping the wax used to close envelopes.  It showed a kneeling African in chains, lifting his hands beseechingly, encircled by the words “Am I Not a Man and a Brother? “.  The image was an instant hit.  Wedgwood reproduced the design in a cameo with the black figure against a white background and donated hundreds of these to the cause.  Women wore them in bracelets and attached to pins in their hair. Wedgwood's kneeling African, the equivalent of the lapel buttons we wear today during election campaigns, was probably the first widespread use of a logo designed for a political cause.  Antislavery sympathizer Benjamin Franklin knew a good piece of propaganda when he saw one and declared the impact of the image; 'equal to that of the best written pamphlet.'

Olaudah Equiano would also have a major impact on public opinion by, for the first time, putting a human face on slavery.   In 1789 he self published, 'The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Odaudah Equiano, the African'.  The two volume 530 page book sold for seven shillings, equivalent to about $3000 JA today.  Equiano was supported and encouraged in this enterprise by Sharp, Clarkson, Wedgwood and others in the anti-slavery movement. His   memoir became a best seller and was soon translated into German, Dutch and Russian.    Equiano clearly saw his book as part of the campaign to end slavery and launched himself on what would become the first great political book tour.  The thousands of Britons who read his book, or heard him speak, would for the first time see slavery through the eyes of a former slave.  Prior to the arrival of Equiano's book most Britons thought of Africans as heathens and illiterates.  As publisher, author and marketing department Equiano was relentless in the quest to sell more and more books.  He would offer a discount to anyone buying six copies and later printed a luxury edition.

In the midst of his book tour Equiano married Susanna Cullen, of Cambridgeshire, putting his belief in inter-racial marriage into practice.   His bride would accompany him on his book tour and in each town they visited Equiano would immediately look up the local abolitionists for help in making sales.  Publishing his own book was a very smart business move, just like the trading deals he had made to buy his freedom.  The book caught on quickly and the first edition of more than seven hundred copies was soon sold out and he would go through another eight printings.  Of the hundreds of books advocating for the end to slavery Equiano's is the only one a reader can easily find today in book stores in Britain and North America.  By the time of his passing in 1797 he had done what most writers can only imagine: he had earned a good living from his pen and left his one surviving daughter a substantial inheritance.

 Meanwhile,Thomas Clarkson was continuing his campaign, encouraged the developing slave sugar boycott, a remedy which the people were taking into their own hands: ”There were 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 was from ten to fifty and in the larger from two to five hundred...they were all ranks and parties.  Rich and poor, churchmen and dissenters...even grocers had left off trading in the article...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.”

William Wilberforce (1759-1833)

Clarkson was working with William Wilberforce on presenting his findings to Members of Parliament.   Wilberforce was perhaps the best known of the abolitionists.  He came from a prosperous merchant family from the North Sea port of Hull.  At age 21, in 1780, he was first elected to Parliament.  Despite his side whiskers, the blue-eyed William Wilberforce, at less than five feet four inches tall, looked more like an earnest choirboy than a member of Parliament.  However, Clarkson, and his Quaker friends, thought Wilberforce would be the ideal voice of the anti-slavery trade campaign in the House of Commons.  He had a reputation for integrity, he was a political independent, he was wealthy and he was an Anglican, as all MPs had to be.  Prime Minister William Pitt suggested to Wilberforce that he take up the abolitionist cause in Parliament.  After reviewing the evidence amassed by Clarkson, Wilberforce was genuinely horrified and resolved to give the movement his undivided attention.  He introduced abolition bills almost every year throughout the 1790's, but little progress was made.  In fact, 1787 to 1792 would prove to be the halcyon days of the movement, then public interest in the cause started to decline and Wilberforce was unsuccessful in gaining passage of an anti-slavery bill in Parliament. 

Clarkson would continue to throw himself into the task with increased dedication, but seven years of non-stop campaigning were taking a toll on his health. He had logged 35,000 miles and his doctor was now insisting that he limit himself to 10 miles per day.   In July 1794 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to retire from the campaign.  He had also spent all of his modest inheritance.  In 1803 he would return to the campaign. 
However, the dawn of the 19^th century found British abolitionists deeply discouraged.  Repressive legislation had brought almost all reform-minded political activity to a stop and Prime Minister Pitt subordinated everything to the long war with France.  The slave economy appeared more firmly rooted than ever, the West Indian colonies accounted for more than 30 percent of British imports and British slave traffic was near record levels, averaging more than forty thousand Africans carried to the New World each year.

Until this point the abolitionists had lacked a first-rate strategist who could figure out how, within the confines of Britain's tradition-bound, half-democratic political system, they could transform into law the great reservoir of public opinion.  The sorely needed strategist was now on the scene.  James Stephen, a prominent lawyer, a writer on the affairs of the day and a behind-the-scenes adviser to MPs and cabinet members would take up the anti-slavery cause.  Earlier in life Stephen had fled to the West Indies to escape a tangled love life.  Like Wilberforce, he was a conservative on most issues other than slavery.  But, unlike Wilberforce, his hatred of slavery, was deep and visceral, born of his ten years spent on the slave islands.  Stephen was one of the empire's leading maritime lawyers and it was this grounding in the world of international commerce that would give him a crucial tool in the fight for abolition of the trade in slaves.  One day in early 1806, as Wilberforce was about to leave his home for Parliament, planning doggedly to introduce another doomed abolition bill, Stephen called on him to suggest and help draft something quite different.  The bill, the Foreign Slave Trade Act, would ban British subjects, shipyards, outfitters and insurers from participating in the slave trade to the colonies of France and her allies.  Britain was in the midst of a decade long war against France.  Who would not want to punish France?  In the short debate over the bill, abolitionists barely mentioned the evils of slavery, and Wilberforce himself did not speak.

Stephen had in fact crafted a very skillful piece of legislation, much wider in scope than most Parliamentarians had realized.  Because many slave ships were in fact owned and crewed by Britons, although flagged in the United States, France or its allies, the law effectively cut off about two thirds of the British slave trade.  Stephen's tactics had effectively split the parliamentary slave lobby, dividing the slave ship owning families from the British West Indian planters, who did not mind seeing competing French, Spanish or American planters deprived of new slaves.  As a result, the abolitionists now had more members of Parliament with them than they had previously dared dream of.  As it became apparent which way the wind was blowing, many pro-slavery MPs, preferring to appear enlightened, jumped to the winning side.  In early 1807, with a divided oppostion, Wilberforce was able to push through a bill abolishing the entire British slave trade.  The Solicitor-General, Sir Samuel Romilly, spoke passionately in support of the bill:

 “Wilberforce was overcome by the power of Romilly's concluding passages and sat with his head on his hands, tears streaming down his face.  As Romilly reached his final sentences the House broke into one of those scenes that it reserves for great occasions.  Members stood and cheered him tumultuously.”

It would be Wilberforce's finest hour.

Clarkson was now celebrated as a national figure and in 1808 published a comprehensive history of the campaign.  Although he would continue to campaign for the abolition of slavery, not just the trade in slaves, his failing health prevented him from fully participating in the ongoing battle. Today, the world headquarters for the Anti-Slavery International, in London, is housed in Thomas Clarkson House and Clarksonville, in St. Ann's Parish, Jamaica also proudly carries his name. 

Meanwhile in the slave islands, without new supplies of imported slaves, owners knew that they had to 'encourage healthy propagation', and so they began offering their slaves better diets and treating them somewhat less harshly; they also installed improved sugar mill machinery, including a relatively simple safety screen that made it less likely that slaves' hands would get caught between the rollers.  As a result of such changes, slave birth rates were increasing.

Even with the newly emerging energy of the women's anti-slavery societies it was proving impossible to move a grossly unrepresentative Parliament to end slavery.  In the face of this unyielding obstacle, by the end of the 1820's, the movement lost steam, James Stephen, who now backed immediate emancipation, published a brilliant two-volume work on slavery in the West Indies, reflecting his lifetime of gathering evidence against it.  In the book, he declared: 'I shall not live to see' the end of slavery.'  He died soon after at age seventy-four.

Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845)

In 1825, with the retirement of Wilberforce, Thomas Buxton, became the new champion of the cause in Parliament.  Buxton, an Anglican of course, became friends with a Quaker family, the Gurneys and would later marry Hannah Gurney.  Inspired by the Quakers, Buxton became an advocate for many social causes.  In 1818 he was elected to House of Commons where he worked for changes in the criminal code, for prison reform and for the abolition of slavery.  In  May 1823 he delivered a very compelling speech in Parliament on the need to end the brutality that was slavery:

“The slave sees the mother of his children stripped naked and flogged...he sees his children sent to market to be sold at the best price...he sees himself not as a man, but a thing, an implement of husbandry, a machine, a beast of burden...”

Buxton would eventually oversee the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which as we will see, would prove to be a false start to freedom.

As the 1830s began the anti-slavery leadership would belong to a new generation of campaigners, including Joseph Sturge, Elizabeth Heyrick, William Knibb and James Stephen's son, George.  George Stephen later wrote of the old guard: “The very demon of procrastination seemed to have possessed our leaders”.  But, by late 1831, a pivotal event was about to unfold that would immediately accelerate the journey to freedom.  The Christmas Rebellion, or Sharpe's Rebellion, began on December 27,1831 with the burning of the Tulloch Estate near Kensingston, in St. James Parish, Jamaica.  This would signal the lighting of hundreds of fires across the western half of the Island. 

Sam Sharpe 1801-1832

Sam Sharpe, a creole slave, was the leader of what would become the largest slave rebellion in Jamaican history.  He was born in 1801 on the Croydon Estate, in St. James and would marry a slave from the nearby Content Estate.  Sharpe would learn to read and write and became a lay minister in the Baptist Church and an eloquent spokesman for his people.  With Christmas falling on a Sunday in 1831, the Governor, with support from the Colonial Office in London, decreed that slaves would not be given any additional time off, other than their normal Sunday day of rest.  At the same time, Sharpe was asserting that the King had granted freedom to the slaves and that the Governor was withholding the information.  Sharpe had also been meeting with select groups from the various churches he visited in the Montego Bay area.  He hinted that the planters were planning to kill all of the black men and keep the women and children in slavery.  He was encouraging people not to return to work after Christmas Day unless the planters freed them and met their demand to pay them at one half the going rate.  This was in fact a very reasonable demand and was backed by the knowledge that the sugar cane was quickly ripening and would require harvesting before it spoiled. Sharpe was planning a kind of sit-down strike.   The slaves would only take up arms if they were attacked first.  However in a country ruled by the whip and the gun the protest soon took on a life of its own and soon became the largest ever slave rebellion in Jamaican history. The planters had built their Great Houses on the ridges and hilltops and as these were set ablaze the flames would signal the spread of the rebellion.  Soon multiple fires and violence had spread across western Jamaica, from Westmoreland in the west to Manchester in the central mountains.  Some 200 plantations would be destroyed or substantially damaged, along with thousands of huts and gardens belonging to the slaves.

It would be almost the end of January 1832 before the militia subdued the rebels and took Sharpe into custody.  It is estimated that about 200 slaves and 14 whites died in the fighting and a further 500 slaves were executed, along with one white plantation official who showed the rebels how to make bullets.  At the same time vengeful white mobs were targetting the Baptist missions established by William Knibb ,Thomas Burchell and others, who they blamed for the Rebellion. These were dark days for slaves and missionaries alike in Jamaica.  However, Rev. Henry Bleby, the head of the Baptist mission in Montego Bay, describes a very dignified and calm Sam Sharpe as he prepared for his execution:

“His execution excited a good deal of interest; and a considerable number of spectators assembled to witness it.  He marched to the spot...with a firm and even dignified step, clothed in a suit of new white clothes, made for him by some female members of the family of his owner, with all of whom he was a favourite, and who deeply regretted his untimely end.  He seemed entirely unmoved by the near approach of death (and) addressed the assembled multitude at some length in a clear unfaltering voice.”

On May 28, 1832 Sam Sharpe was executed in the square in Montego Bay that now bears his name.  He is remembered by all Jamaican's for his farewell to slavery:

 “ I would rather die upon upon yonder gallows than live in slavery.”

Through his actions Sam Sharpe had forced the hand of Parliament.  Military commanders were advising MPs and the Colonial Office that the next rebellion would be much worse and would be unstoppable.  However, there would still be another six years of struggle.  In the meantime, the Governor paid Sharpe's owner 16 pounds, 10 shillings in compensation for loss of property.

REFERENCES:

Equiano, Olaudah “The Life of Olaudah Equiano, The African” (Dover Publications, Mineola, New York 1999)

Hochschild, Adam “Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves  (Houghton Mifflin Company, New York 2005)
National Library of Jamaica

Walvin, James “Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (Fontana Press, London 1992)

Abolitionist's Biographies www.brycchancarey.com/abolition