Two Bristol Poetesses speak out against slavery

Hannah More (1743-1833)

Ann Yearsley (1753-1806)

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,
In smiles chastised, and decent graces dressed;
To thee alone, pure daughter of the skies,
The hallowed incense of the Bard should rise:
Not that mad Liberty, in whose wild praise
Too oft he trims his prostituted bays;
Not that unlicensed monster of the crowd,
Whose roar terrific bursts in peals so loud,
Deafening the ear of Peace; fierce Faction’s tool,
Of rash Sedition born, and mad Misrule;
Whose stubborn mouth, rejecting Reason’s rein,
No strength can govern, and no skill restrain;
Whose magic cries the frantic vulgar draw
To spurn at Order, and to outrage Law;
To tread on grave Authority and Power,
And shake the work of ages in an hour:
Convulsed her voice, and pestilent her breath,
She raves of mercy, while she deals out death:
Each blast is fate; she darts from either hand
Red conflagration o’er the astonished land;
Clamouring for peace, she rends the air with noise,
And, to reform a part, the whole destroys.
Reviles oppression only to oppress,
And, in the act of murder, breathes redress.

​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,
Thou universal good, thou that canst fill
The vacuum of immensity, and live
In endless void! thou that in motion first
Set'st the long lazy atoms, by thy force
Quickly assimilating, and restrain'd
By strong attraction; touch the soul of man;
Subdue him; make a fellow-creature's woe
His own by heart-felt sympathy, whilst wealth
Is made subservient to his soft disease.

​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
as (among other things) a disruption of the family unit. This device, which is a central
feature of both More’s and Yearsley’s poems, is disturbing in that it reduces a system
of economic, social, and cultural exploitation to a domestic problem.

​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
Thy daughter to this market! bring thy wife!
Thine aged mother, though of little worth,
With all thy ruddy boys! Sell them, thou wretch,
And swell the price of Luco! Why that start?
Why gaze as thou wouldst fright me from my challenge
With look of anguish? Is it Nature strains
Thine heart-strings at the image?

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