Lafayette to Clarkson on Abolition: a letter and some context

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. 
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I have kept some of Kennedy’s notes, edited some and added my own. 

20th September 1823, La Grange
Lafayette to Clarkson
 
My dear friend
I most affectionately and joyfully thank you for your kind intelligence, and would I had been able to meet your friends. One of them has pursued his journey. Mr Robinson writes me from Paris on the 18th I shall in a few days go to town where I expect the pleasure to see him. 
So you are now attacking slavery itself. God bless you, and grant you success. The United States five excepted have abolished it.[1] You have been pleased to mention an attempt for gradual emancipation which, individual as it was, might have done some good had not the revolutionary storm of August 92 put an end to the experiment.[2] The French convention by uncautious measures turned a good principle into an evil both for the black and white men. Yet, after the cruel tempest was over, to which an iniquitous Bonapartian reaction added new horrors, you see the present state of Hayti not only an encouraging specimen of negro civilization, but a forcible argument in favor of emancipation, and perhaps a vent to conciliate a part of the difficulties. [3] 
It is I think a great mistake in the planters to fear your progress towards emancipation. The present system cannot last. Their danger is extreme. The only way to obivate it should be their cooperation in a prudent, sincere, humane plan of gradual freedom. But of all aristocracies, that of the planters is the most unpersuadable, which by the bye is saying a great deal. 
1500 petitions to parliament signed by a million and a half Britons is a most glorious event: I give you joy, my dear Clarkson, to have lived to promote and witness it. [4] 
I have been, thanks to your goodness, possessor of your excellent history of the abolition of the slave trade, so often I have lent it to philanthropist friends that I cannot recover it. I much wish to restore to my library the precious work [5]. Present me very respectfully and affectionately to Mrs Clarkson and believe me forever 
Your affectional friend
Lafayette. 
 
[1] This is a mistake: only 12 out of 24 states had abolished slavery and three more states were to be added to the Union which did not abolish it (Arkansas, Texas and Florida). 
[2] Lafayette fled France when the revolutionary government turned against him (in part because he ordered the army to charge the crowds at the Champ de Mars, when they gathered to sign a petition to depose the King. In Austria, he was arrested as a member of the revolution, and imprisoned for five years. This is probably what derailed his project. 
[3] Having staged a successful revolution, abolished slavery and declared independence, Haiti was then invaded by Napoleon who swiftly re-established slavery. Two years after the letter was written, Charles X’s government forced Haiti to start paying ‘reparations’ for abolishing slavery, to the tune of 150 million gold francs.
[4] this is wishful thinking on Lafayette’s part. The petition took another 7 years to reach parliament and only contained less than 200000 signatures. 
[5] History of the rise, progress and accomplishment of the abolition of the African slave trade by the British parliament. London 1808.