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Huaping Lu-Adler and Julia Jorati are hosting a series of talks on 'Slavery and Early Modern Philosophy'. The talks are on zoom, but they are also posting the recordings here.
The first two talks, which I've just listened to were Carrie Shanafelt, Yeshiva University, “National Debt, Nationalized Complicity: Cugoano and Bentham on Political Economy” and Iziah Topete, Boston College, “From Experience to Concept: Equiano on Equality” Both are super clear and interesting, and the quality of the recordings is excellent, so it won't make your head ache to listen to them. I was particularly pleased to see that Topete, who has already published excellent work on Cuguano (see, for instance his Cugoano on Redressing Slavery: The Demands of Liberty, in Journal of Modern Philosophy, 2025), is now working on Equiano. I look forward to reading more about it.
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Activists in Bristol have been working hard at obtaining reparations for the heirs of the city’s victims during its time as the English hub of the slave trade. While researching traces of an abolitionist history in the city, and places I might visit when I go there next month, I came across a 1788 poem by the Bristol poet Ann Yearsley, who was a milkmaid in Bristol. And then I looked at the poem this was supposedly responding to, by Hannah More, a ‘bluestocking’, and educator, also from Bristol, who was Yearsley’s patron for a few months. More’s poem had been commissioned by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Yearsley’s poem came out two months later. More’s Slavery begins by appealing to the universal and abstract value of liberty – she calls it ‘Bright intellectual Sun!’ – claiming that it makes no sense for it to shine only on part of the world. She then proceeds to write a long passage distinguishing between ‘sober’ freedom and ‘mad liberty.’ One gets the feeling she cares more about avoiding the excesses of republican liberty or licence, than she does decrying the fate of the enslaved. Thee only, sober Goddess! I attest, Yearsley’s poem is different. Whereas More’s poem has an official purpose – it is commissioned by SEAST to address the parliament – Yearsley is writing off her own bat, even more so as she is no longer, by then, under More’s patronage. Yearsley is taking it upon herself to address those who are directly involved in the slage trade: the city of Bristol, and in particular the ship owners, the merchants, slave-ship captains and their crews. And Yearsley is not appealing to cold reason, pleading with her readers to consider the matter in the abstract. She is losing it completely. As one should. Yearsley’s appeal to emotion is in part a device to maintain her carefully curated image as the ‘natural genius’ poet, and it is giving in to the prejudice that Africans are prone to be guided by emotions rather than reason: Like More, Yearsley denies African slaves full access to language and creative expression. For example, the grief of Luco’s family is felt rather than voiced; the poet articulates their grief for them. And similarly for Luco, “words / Were no relief, he stood in silent woe” (392); the poet articulates his despair for him. For the most part, Yearsley’s characters are mute. (Cairnie, J. (2005). The Ambivalence of Ann Yearsley: Laboring and Writing, Submission and Resistance. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 27(4), 353–364, 361). I sort of disagree with this interpretation – from a place of deep ignorance, I must add. If Yearsley were to hear the words of Luco’s loved ones, she would not understand them. She is putting the English language and linguistic customs into the mouths of distant others she does not know – unlike Benn did, making Oroonoko sound like an English aristocrat. Nor is she, as Olympe de Gouges did, trying to guess at what the ‘natural’ language of the Africans would be. Instead she is portraying them as silent, as people who can be seen from a distance, but not heard, distant silhouettes, whose emotions can be perceived through their body language, as anyone else’s could (not that body language is not also culturally coded, of course). Yearsley’s poem is interesting because it shows anger, her anger at the Christians who utter meaningless ‘vaporous sighs’ at church and don’t bat an eyelid at the trafficking and enslaving of fellow beings. But she is also looking for causes and solutions. For one thing, she blames social habits: ‘Custom, Law, Ye blessings, and ye curses of mankind, What evils do ye cause?’ Instead she calls for social love Oh, social love, Social love is a form of wide-spread sympathy. The social customs she criticises are the habits brought on by bad laws and practices. But she’s not exculpating those who are the product of these customs. She calls them ‘selfish Christians’, attacks them for their brutality and savagery. She can help fix the fault in society, but she won’t forgive. Other white abolitionists have expressed anger at the slave trade and slavery. But what’s unusual about Yearsley is the particularity of her emotions. She does not call on one part of humanity to allow the other part to enjoy the same benefits they do. She yells at the people of Bristol for the harm they have done to individuals she names – though fictional, and inspired by Benn’s Oroonoko – Luco, a young man kidnapped from Africa, who is transported and sold and forced to work on a plantation, then one day is hit by the overseer, Gorgon, whips him in the face, whereupon Luco strikes him with his hoe, and kills him. Luco tries to drown himself in the sea, but he is fished out and condemned to death by roasting, with a slow fire to make the torture last longer. Back home his fiancée, Incilanda, his mother, his father, his little brothers, wonder where he is, and pine for him. The story is not melodramatic, unlike Benn’s Oroonoko, or Gouges’ Zamore and Mirza. A young man is kidnapped, accidentally commits murder in self-defence and is tortured to death. His loved ones wait for him. What is shocking about the story is the thought that it could happen to anyone, at anytime. That it did happen to many, as long as they were black. So she’s not appealing to universal reason, or even the highest commands of religion, but bringing the debate down to earth, enjoining the Bristol tradesmen to sell their own wives and children. She is seeing the evil, in the way that many of her contemporaries didn’t really, blinded by the need to put religion or universal reason before the realities of the enslaved’s lives. And Yearsley tells us that she can see what they can’t, asking the people of Bristol not to ‘nor deem Lactilla's soul Lessen'd by distance’ – she can see the evil even it happens far away. There are, nonetheless, signs of racist prejudice in the poem. Cairnie (360) notes that: A typical emotive device in abolitionist texts of this period is the depiction of slavery Slavery destroyed not just families, but entire communities, countries, and even a continent which are still struggling from the aftermath of the impact of slavery and colonization. If one were to name the main reason for Haiti’s current struggles, the fact that the island had to pay reparations to the French government for ending slavery is probably more salient than the breaking up of families – though of course that was huge part of what the island’s enslaved suffered. But, Cairnie goes on to explain that Yearsley’s take of the broken families theme is different from the usual one, because she makes the family central to the trader as well as to the enslaved: What is unique about Yearsley’s poem is that she situates both her protagonist, the African slave Luco, and her target audience, British slave traders, in families. It is on the basis of domestic identification that Yearsley hopes to influence the opinions and curb the activities of the slave traders. She forces the traders to empathize across race and class differences and to imagine what it must be like to have one’s family sold into slavery. (Cairnie, 360) This is the part of the poem where Yearsley’s anger reaches its peak: she is trying to frighten the slave trader, by forcing them to see what it would be like to put their own family on the block, next to Luco: Away, thou seller of mankind! Bring on This passage shows her scorn for the trader, who is easily frightened – he ‘starts’ – by the words of a poet, when he commits such atrocities on others as a matter of course. But she is also helping him locate the source of sympathy, his ‘heart-strings’ which he will need in order to understand that what he does is wrong.
[Note that I am using ‘he’, throughout, to denote the trader, as most traders in Bristol at that time were men, and Yearsley certainly assumes so – she admonishes them to sell their wives, not their husbands. There is also a tendency to assume that all slaves were men, which could have been the result of seeing the slave population in Bristol – mostly men working as sailors. But this is worth noting as an early version of the fallacy that ‘all women are white and all black people are men’] More, Hannah. 1788. On Slavery, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51885/slavery Yearsley, Ann, 1788. A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson. https://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/yearsley1.htm Willful hermeneutical ignorance, according to Gaile Pohlhaus is: ‘refusing to learn to use epistemic resources developed from marginalized situatedness.’ ((2012). Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of “Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.” Hypatia, 27(4), 715–735, 722) ‘I have often wondered how English people can go out into the West Indies and act in such a beastly manner. But when they go to the West Indies, they forget God and all feeling of shame, I think, since they can see and do such things. They tie up slaves like hogs-moor*them up like cattle, and they lick them, so as hogs, or cattle, or horses never were flogged; -and yet they come home and say, and make some good people believe, that slaves don't want to get out of slavery. But they put a cloak about the truth. It is not so. All slaves want to be free-to be free is very sweet. I will say the truth to English people who may read this history that my good friend, Miss S- is now writing down for me. I have been a slave myself—I know what slaves feel-I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery-that they don't want to be free-that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so. I never heard a Buckra man say so, till I heard tell of it in England.’ 23 Who were the English people who, according to Prince, thought slavery was a happy condition? One of them was Anna Maria Falconbridge, the wife of an operative of SEAST. The Falconbridge couple had been part of the first two voyages to Sierra Leone, where Clarkson and Sharp wanted to create a colony for the previously enslaved people who were languishing in London. The project was very badly managed, and Falconbridge died there, leaving his wife to team up with a local slave owner. Having been less than enthusiastic about her husband’s anti-slavery views (and about her husband), Anna Maria Falconbridge now felt she could offer up her honest view on the matter. Not only was slavery quite a pleasant condition for the slaves, but the trade itself was more like a luxury cruise than anything that had been written by SEAST. ‘All the slaves I had an opportunity of seeing in Jamaica, seemed vastly well satisfied, their conditions appeared to be far preferable to what I expected, and they discovered more cheerfulness than I ever observed the Black shew in Africa, unless roused by liquor.’ We now find it easier (most of us, I hope) to believe the testimony of the enslaved, such as that of Mary Prince, than we do that of those who denied their perspective, such as Anna Maria Falconbridge. It’s a mystery how anyone witnessing slavery could have thought that the enslaved were happy. And one is tempted to think that, in fact, they couldn’t. Saying they could was an instance of willful ignorance, a choice to put the evidence to one side and embrace a view that was clearly false, if convenient.
In the mid 1780s, Lafayette, having read Condorcet’s book on abolition, asked his friend Washington to join him in a project designed to show the world how slavery could be abolished. They would buy some land, a plantation, populate with slaves who would be gradually liberated. Washington expressed mild interest and let it go. But two years later Lafayette and his wife, Adrienne de Noailles, purchased land in Cayenne, South America, Their intendent, Louis de Geneste, purchased the human beings that would be the subject of the experiment: there were nearly 80 of them, men, women, children and infants, parents and grandparents. They were paid for their work, offered education, allowed to spend time with their family, and there was no torture of corporeal punishment Unfortunately, Lafayette had to flee to Austria in 1792 and there he was arrested and spent five years in prison. His wife, Adrienne de Noailles, who had been very active in the project, joined him there, and there was no one left to supervise the running of the colonies.  Lafayette, his wife and daughters in prison. Clarkson and Lafayette had been friends since the days of SEAST. But Clarkson had previously been mostly concerned with the abolition of the trade, not slavery itself. In 1823, however, he co-founded a new society, the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions. Aka the Society for letting Black people be free, but very carefully and not all at once because it will upset too many people otherwise. The manuscript of the letter is kept in Yale, in the Stuart Jackson collection, call number: GEN MSS 1458 This and other letters to Clarkson were transcribed and published in Melvin D. Kennedy’s 1950 Lafayette and Slavery. This can be consulted at the British Library on a good day, or online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000011251792&seq=1 I keep the spelling and punctuation as it is reproduced in Kennedy’s book, but I decided to put everything in sentence case – Lafayette Capitalizes Every Single Word Which Gets Rather Tiresome. Lafayette’s English reads like conversational French, so that the letter, once one gets used to the odd spelling and syntax, is a pleasant read. I have kept some of Kennedy’s notes, edited some and added my own. 20th September 1823, La Grange |
Recovering Marginalised Voices of the Abolitionist Debates.Between September 2024, and August 2028, I will be British Academy Global Professor at the University of York. My project is to study the abolionist debates of France and Britain in the 18th century, and in particular, to uncover marginalised voices from that debate. Here I blog about what I find out in the process. Archives
November 2025
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