Are Such Things Done on Albion's Shore? The Discourses of Slavery in the Rhetoric

of English Jacobin Writers

 

 

Stephen F. Wolfe

University of Tromsø

 

 

There seems to be a growing consensus among both historians and literary critics that anti-slavery protests in prose and poetry were second only to the French Revolution in their impact on the social consciousness of writers in Britain from 1780 to 1830 (Mellor, 311). Additionally, within the last three years, building upon the work of historians such as Linda Colley, Britons, Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, and the work of literary critics such as Moria Ferguson and Ann Mellor, an argument has developed which states that the attempt by women to end British involvement in the slave trade and to emancipate the slaves in British crown colonies in the West Indies was central to the development of British feminism and to women's participation in public politics throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper will continue such arguments by exploring three different ways in which the discourses of slavery and enslavement in the later part of the eighteenth century are used by both male and female writers to evoke "a new humanitarian sensibility based upon sympathy, equality, and understanding" (Ellis, 50-55). I will argue that after 1780, the discourse of slavery is often deployed transferentially to evoke rights and to cryptically inscribe related issues (Ferguson, 186; Ellis, 55). Here the significant fact is the conjunction of race and gender  slavery is made to figure gender relations and suggest an overlapping between victims of forced marriages, imprisoned debtors, and Caribbean slaves. The final part of the paper will examine the figurative use of confinement by William Blake in which the "mind forg´d manacles" of slavery are self-created; describing possible subject positions of both victim and victimizer.

         The leading public voices of the Abolitionist movement were male in the period 1770-1800; figures such as Granville Sharp, William Roscoe, Thomas Clarkeson, and William Wilberforce. The largest and most sustained outcry against both the slave trade and the institution of slavery was organized by the Quakers, who established antislavery societies throughout England between 1780 and 1830. In these antislavery societies women were major participants. For example in the late 1780s and early 1790s, women organized a national campaign to boycott the use of sugar and became the dominate force in the petition drives to abolish slavery in British colonies. Hannah More's forthright attack on the slave trade in her poem "Slavery, A Poem" first published in 1788, is representative of work by other women writers and was widely reprinted throughout the period. In this poem, she insists on the common humanity that Africans share with Europeans   "Respect His sacred image which they bear./... Let malice strip them of each other plea,/They still are men, and men should still be free" (More, 10). An earlier poem by Thomas Day, The Dying Negro published in 1773, uses almost the same language but his argument is framed using natural law: all men are born equal with certain unalienable rights. Day's poem, in the voice of a slave, asks slave owners to consider:

 

 

                 And thou, whose impious avarice and pride

         Thy God's blest symbol to my brows denied

         Forbade me or the rights of man to claim.

         Or share with thee a Christian's hallowed name,

         Thou too farewell!   for not beyond the grave

         Thy power extends, nor is my dust thy slave.

         Go bribe thy kindred ruffians with thy gold,

         But dream not nature's rights are bought and sold. (Day, 6)

 

Both these writers arguments are based upon a shared assumption that slave and master partake of a common humanity in Christianity, and that the "right" to be free is based upon a morality which condemns the buying and selling of persons and the denial of their natural rights.

         Recently the critic Ann Mellor has argued that there is a difference in the writing of men and women abolitionists from the late 1780s to the early nineteenth century. Women writers such as Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams, and Anna Barbauld tend to condemn slavery because it violates domestic affections and relationships; while male writers such as William Wilberforce, William Pitt, and William Roscoe argue that under a just system of natural law, all individuals should be treated equally (Mellor, 315-17). Another way to make this distinction is to recognize two strategies in anti-slavery discourse operating simultaneously: on the one hand, a secular discussion of the problem of slavery mounted along moral and philosophical lines growing out of a concern with liberty and constraints upon it. On the other hand, among Quakers and later the Methodists, there is a focus on religious humanism which emphasizes issues of treatment; personal cohersion and abuse; and the desirability of conversion of slaves (Ellis, 51-55). My research has led me to conclude both sets of arguments, the rhetoric of an Anglo-Christian humanism and the rhetoric of natural rights, were equivalent for both sets of writers. In the words of historian Winthrop Jordan, "to be Christian was to be civilized rather than barbarous, English rather than African, white rather than black" (Ferguson, 5). Africans were described by most abolitionists, in the words of Hannah More, as "though dark and savage, ignorant and blind,/They claim the common privilege of kind;/Let malice strip them of each other plea,/They still are men, and men should still be free" (quoted by Mellor, 318). Note the word "still," in this quotation. It represents a desire of both men and women abolitionists to affirm their difference from and superiority to black men and women while not denying them their natural rights.

         The discourse of slavery was also a commonplace of sentimental fiction from 1750-1795 and was envoked by both men and women writers. The most famous example is the scene from Lawrence Sterne s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) in which Yorrick's caged starling becomes an emblem for amelioration of conditions of slaves. Yet the story of slavery is never told in the novel, rather "it is managed out of the novel, to be replaced or augmented by the more particular and metropolitan themes of incarceration and liberty (Ellis, 71). The black speckled bird and his four words "I can't get out" have received close and careful explication by Sterne's critics. I do not wish to sort out these arguments today, but instead to emphasize that for Sterne's readers, as well as other writers of sentimental fiction in the period, this novel provided a set of restricted scenes of incarceration in which a single captive object or person could be read as an emblem of "the millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery" (Sterne, 72). The figurative use of slavery is rhetorically slippery here transfering the signifier into varying and various signified: "articulating issues of contemporary note, such as marriage, imprisonment, or labor" (Ellis, 50).

         In 1775, the well known actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales, Mary Darby Robinson, wrote Captivity: A Poem which used the same sentimental scenario of the captured song bird (a linnet in this case) but to denote a women's life as prisoner of marriage, gender expectations, and fashion.  According to Moria Ferguson this is the first use of, what will become, a commonplace trope in late eighteenth century feminist rhetoric. In other words, these female writers use slavery as the metaphorical sign of marriage. For example Mary Wollstonecraft in her novel Maria, of the Wrongs of Women published in 1797 uses it: "Was not the world a prison, and women born slaves" or in the famous exclamation in the novel "Marriage had bastilled me for life"(Maria, 140; 148 see especially 146-150). This figurative use of slavery to depict marriage, or women's "dependence" upon their husbands or fathers is significant; however, before we analyze this figure we need to evaluate another use of slavery in the political rhetoric of the period.

         This is the association of slavery with a "servile reverence for antiquity," "dependency," and the constitutional conservatism of Edmund Burke. In the early 1790s, Wollstonecraft argued that Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France" settles slavery on an everlasting foundation" (Vindication of the Rights of Men, 23) showing him to be "a slave" or "dependent" on the sentimental sublime, a style of writing usually associated with women. A number of Jacobin writers and their sympathizers including Thomas Paine, John Thelwell, Mary Hays and William Wordsworth associated the conservative veneration of the English constitution, and English and French monarchy with an "abject slavery" to tradition. In the words of Mary Wollstonecraft:

 

The slave trade ought never be abolished if Burke's ideas hold sway; and, because our ignorant forefathers, not understanding the native dignity of man, sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to submit to the inhuman custom, and term an atrocious insult to humanity the love of our country... ." (Vindication of the Rights of Men, 23-4)

        

In contrast Wollstonecraft's, Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is based on the universal principles of an "independent" reason.

 

It is necessary emphatically to repeat, that there are rights which men inherit at their birth, as rational creatures, who were raised above the brute creation by their improvable faculties; and that, in receiving these, ... prescription can never undermine natural rights. A father may dissipate his property without his children having any right to complain;   but should he attempt to sell him for a slave, or fetter him with laws contrary to reason; nature, in enabling him to discern good from evil, teaches him to break the ignoble chain" (Rights of Man, 22-3).

 

Resistance and rebellion can be taught. Slavery is used figuratively here, as a way to frame the issue of natural rights. This passage and others like it in Wollstonecaft's writing make direct reference to laws of inheritance and marriage which were the basis of Lord Mansfield's 1772 decision to outlaw slavery in Britain (See Mellor, 311-12). In this oft-reprinted legal document, an analogy is drawn between slavery and marriage. Slavery cannot be defended by English law or custom Mansfield argued, but marriage is a municipal relationship in which "a wife and her property" are under the "coverture" (under the protection and possession) of her husband.

         This distinction, so clearly stated by Lord Mansfield, became the basis for the figurative connection between slavery and marriage in so much women's writing of the period. In fact in the eighty-one figurative uses of slavery in Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1793) over half are utilized to argue that British wives are no different than slaves: "When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense" (167). Wives are legally "dependent" upon their husbands, and "such dependence corrupts both partners ... degrading the master and the abject dependent" (5). Here slavery is used literally: Wollstonecraft's argument is that the institution of marriage in England is legal slavery, no different than that imposed on Africans in British colonies. "Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, ... only to sweeten the cup of men" (144-5)? The equation of race and gender here is problematic as recent critics have pointed out (Sharp, 39-42). Race and gender are not corresponding functions, despite the fact that people of color and white women share subordinate positions in relationship to white men within a European imperial matrix of power.

         However, this was not the only use of the trope of slavery in the 1780s and 1790s. It was also used metaphorically to attack "enslavement" or the "dependency" of women on gender ideologies of the feminine. Women are seen to be "slaves of fashion" or "dependents of their family or husband"; enslaved by the social construction of gender within education, marriage, or the family. Mary Hays writes in 1799 that "The canker most pernicious to every virtue is dependence, and the most fatal species of bondage is subjection to the demands of our imperious passions" (Victim of Prejudice, 38). Wollstonecraft and Hays also draw a parallel between the sexual abuse of female African slaves by white masters and the abuse of white British wives by their husbands. Again there is a problematic element in this too easy analogy which equates the brutality of owner/slave relationships in the colonies with the brutality of middle class English marriages.

         How do we account for these analogies and some of the difficulties of interpretation I have suggested? First, as Moria Ferguson has persuasively argued "these female writers displaced certain anxieties about the frequently masked limitations imposed on their own lives" and found in slave societies "an image of tyranny that characterized ... male control over women" (299). Focusing on the emancipation of slaves "enabled them to distance yet circulate negative facts about white women s experiences which they had little license to acknowledge openly, let alone propagandize in public" (299). Their discursive strategy was to create a connection between race and gender oppressions that had been kept artificially separate, and to explore and represent dimensions of domestic slavery that traditional abolitionist rhetoric had omitted.

         While this description goes some way to explaining the popularity of this figurative use of slavery, we need to remind ourselves of historical events of the period. After February of 1793 and war with France was declared, many in the government and outside specially linked the demands for abolition "in the traffic in slaves with the disastrous obsession with the rights of man which so damaged France" (quote cited by Thomas, 529-530). Any change in the status quo was presented as potentially subversive to public order. Additionally, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams were not encouraged or invited to speak at the large Jacobin political rallies in London or Edinburgh nor were there many women members of the Jacobin radical organizations in cities and towns throughout the British Isles. Women's exclusion, which has been carefully documented by Linda Colley and Helen Bruder, suggests that if they were to join the public political debates of the period they had to find another platform: the abolitionist movement, the newly emergent novel reading public, and journalism in the "radical press" (Colley, 250-273; Bruder, 90-132). Thus, for Jacobin women writers the trope of slavery became a way of coding revolutionary political ideology in the commonplaces of the abolitionist movement. Their contact point with the public rhetoric of universal rights was crucially mediated through print, and access to print came outside the Jacobin radical political organizations.

         Additionally, the role assigned to middle class women in the iconographic campaign for British nationalism and patriotism during this period put many of the Jacobin women writers in a difficult position. Linda Colley argues that "women were more prominently represented among the ranks of conventional patriots" and often became the embodiment of the patriotic "British family" in Britain in the last decades of the eighteenth century (Colley, 254). England was home and hearth, while revolutionary France and the home bred Jacobin political agitators were depicted using images of violation and abuse, both of women and the family. Therefore, by focusing on the violation of familial relationships as the fundamental evil of slavery and the slave trade, which became the center of the abolitionist rhetoric from 1790 to 1830, many women writers made themselves into "patriots" and associated slavery with the very imagery used to depict French "traitors" and their followers. Women writers could question existing gender ideologies while subverting them by declaring their support for a more compassionate, reasonable, and patriotic Briton.

         Finally, what of other uses of the discourse of slavery? Here I want to use two examples from male writers in the period. The first is from William Godwin's novel Things As they Are or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1793), and the second is from William Blake s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794). The Godwin novel uses metaphors and imagery associated with slavery in a commonplace manner; making only one oblique reference to the slave trade (see final pages of Volume Three of the novel). However, the central use of the figurative language of slavery is reserved for Caleb s descriptions of the technologies of power at work in society. First there is in the domestic and legal encarceration exerted by his "enemies" and then there is the tormented secret which makes him "a slave" to Mr. Falkland and his own "curiosity" or desire for knowledge. Finally, slavery is used as a metaphor for the entire system of ideological and social political control in the 1790s. Reasonableness, virtue, and justice are only possible outside the "slavery" of contemporary hierarchical relation­ships and institutional authority. In the next year, William Blake also used the trope of slavery to describe an hegemonic ideology in his poem "London".

        

  I wander thro' each charter'd street

  Near where the charter'd Thames does flow

  And mark in every face I meet

  Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

 

  In every cry of every Man,

  In every Infant's cry of fear

  In every voice, in every ban,

  The mind-forg'd manacles I hear:

 

  How the Chimney-sweeper's cry

  Every blackning Church appalls,

  And the hapless Soldier's sigh,

  Runs in blood down Palace walls.

 

  But most thro' midnight streets I hear

  How the youthful Harlot's curse

  Blasts the new-born Infant's tear

  And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.        

(Blake, 53)

 

As E.P. Thompson suggests, Tom Paine or the average supporter of the London Corresponding Society would not have written "mind-forged manacles" since they would have seen the manacles as wholly exterior, "imposed by oppressive priestcraft or kingcraft" (Thompson,184). This is how Blake saw it in his first draft of the poem in which he wrote "German forg'd links" with specific reference to the Hanoverian monarchy and his fear of Hanoverian troops being used against British Jacobin agitators (Blake, 176-77). In the revised version of the poem "London," slavery is self-induced and is stronger than any iron links of German manufacture; binding the minds not only of the oppressors but of the oppressed. Blake, like other writers of the 1790s, attacks enslavement to "bans" of Church and State, but also suggests that a cohesive "charting" of desire can lead to self-punishment and repression. Throughout the first stanza of the revised poem the word "charter'd" refers to a "charter" in the commercial or legal sense. These documents granted certain rights but which also limited the rights for others but "charter'd" could also refer to mapping or confining, as in the case of "charting" the river Thames within its banks. It is important that we remind ourselves how often in Blake's poems he uses the metaphor of the mind "fettered by invisible chains" or "charter'd" by ideology. For example, here in a manuscript fragment is the figurative use of enslavement, both imposed from without and also suggesting self-deceit:

 

  Love to faults is always blind

  Always is to joy inclined

  Lawless wingd & unconfind

  And breaks all chains from every mind

 

  Deceit to secrecy confind

  Lawful cautious & refind

  To every thing but interest blind

  And forges fetters for the mind

(Blake, 190)

 

There is more to this poem and to this story, but that is the stuff of another lecture. In this other narrative, the figurative use of slavery would mark a whole set of metaphoric acts of resistance: the breaking of chains, the snapping of constraints, or the act of "running from their fetters reddening". But today we have seen that writers in the late eighteenth century used the discourses of the sentimental novel and the abolitionist movement to discuss the ideological construction of gender, marriage, property rights, and even political power within British society. For women writers, most of their texts display a too easy equation between the enslavement of African slaves and attendant degradation of British "womanhood". The discourses about slavery within Britain and its colonies could be used to explore/represent aspects of the domestic experience for women, and abolitionist rhetoric could be made to encode the psychological consequences of "enslavement" or a radical political ideology. Additionally, I have suggested there are reasons for this based upon emancipationist rhetoric and the historical position of women within the abolitionist movement as they attempted to create a coalition between radical political demands and patriotic sentiments during the war with France. Finally for Godwin and Blake slavery is the epitome of any powerful social and political ideology, created by social and political insitutions but effecting the individual in such a way that he or she is contained by and constrained within the dominate discourses of the period.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Blake, William. Blake s Poetry and Designs. Edited by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion, London: Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1997.

Colley, Linda. Britons, Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Day, Thomas. The Dying Negro. London, 1773.

Ellis, Markman. The Literature of Sensiblity: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others, British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Godwin, William. Things As They Are or the Adventures of Caleb Williams. Edited by Maurice Hindle. London: Penguin Books, 1988.

Hays, Mary. The Victim of Prejudice. Edited by Eleanor Ty. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1994.

Mellor, Ann. "Am I not a Woman, and a Sister?": Slavery, Romaniticism, and Gender", in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834. Edited by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

More, Harrah. Slavery, A Poem. London, 1788.

Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The figure of the women in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey with The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade, The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. London: Picador, 1997.

Thompson, E.P. Witness Against the Beast, Willam Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited by Carol H. Poston, second edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Volume 5. Edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. London: William Pickering, 1989.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, The Wrongs of Women, and a Cave of Fancy, Volume 1. Edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. London: William Pickering, 1989.