Bury the Chains

Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

By Adam Hochschild


Inventor and social visionary Buckminster Fuller compared the potential impact of a single individual on large societal problems to that of a ship's rudder: The rudder is relatively tiny, but by creating turbulence in the water it moves the ship.

Until the late 18th century, when the British slavery abolitionist movement began, the idea of eliminating one of the fundamental aspects of the British Empire's economy was unimaginable. Sugar was the oil of the 18th century, and the atrocious conditions of the slave plantations and slave ships were taken for granted as a disagreeable but essential prerequisite of a sweet- toothed society -- just as today many Americans might worry about global warming but would never dream of giving up their gas-guzzling SUVs. Yet through persistent effort, 12 individuals who first met in a London printing shop in 1787 managed to create enough social turbulence that 51 years later, the slave ships stopped sailing, and slavery was abolished in Britain.

The abolitionist movement marked an unprecedented shift in civil society. Slaves had rebelled throughout history, "but the campaign in England was something never seen before," writes Adam Hochschild. "[I]t was the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else's rights."

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In "Bury the Chains," Hochschild, the Bay Area author of "King Leopold's Ghost," presents a gripping and inspiring account of the abolitionist crusade. In it, he deftly teases out the movement's significance in terms of the activist techniques that evolved from it, from consumer boycotts and lapel pins to media campaigns.

Hochschild's dramatic narrative begins with the formation of the original abolitionist committee in 1787 by Thomas Clarkson, a fiery Church of England deacon -- the committee itself becoming a landmark in the history of modern civil society. Before then, national lobbying groups were primarily limited to religious sects and trade groups. After campaigning across the country by horse and joining forces with oratorical powerhouse and member of Parliament William Wilberforce, Clarkson's committee distributed 1,000 copies of "a Letter to our Friends in the Country, to inform them of the state of the Business," which Hochschild identifies as possibly "history's first direct- mail fund-raising letter."

Pottery designer Josiah Wedgwood soon joined the cause, having one of his craftsmen create a wax envelope seal depicting a kneeling African in chains, circled by the words "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" -- an image soon reproduced everywhere from books and pamphlets to snuffboxes and cufflinks, and which the author says was "probably the first widespread use of a logo designed for a political cause."

The committee achieved its greatest PR coup in 1789, when Clarkson discovered the diagram of a fully loaded slave ship, the Brookes, named after a Liverpool family, showing 482 slaves packed tightly together. The diagram soon began appearing in newspapers and magazines, and 7,000 copies of it that the committee printed up as posters were hung in pubs and homes across Britain. Hochschild argues that the iconic power of that image (which, as Clarkson wrote, "seemed to make an instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it") was equivalent in its visceral impact on 18th century viewers to the impact contemporary war photographs have on people today.

The diagram's impact was soon felt around the world: On the French sugar island of Martinique, an official reported that a wave of runaway slaves was spurred by the belief that since English slaves were on the verge of liberation, these slaves had a similar right to freedom. And the committee included the diagram in its collection of firsthand slave testimony to Parliament in 1791. "The Abstract of the Evidence," a condensed version of the testimony, was similar in its unexpectedly wide popularity to the Sept. 11 commission report. (The "Abstract" was still in print when it was used by abolitionists in the United States 60 years later.)

Buoyed by these triumphs, the abolitionist movement seemed set for victory, but slave interests fought back, waging the 18th century equivalent of a media campaign by publishing articles in newspapers.

Eventually, Parliament voted against abolition. But the abolitionist movement continued in fits and starts for three more decades, and on Aug. 1, 1838, following a revived anti-slavery campaign and electoral reform, nearly 800,000 black people in the British Empire became free.

Slavery persisted elsewhere, but the abolition of the practice in the largest empire on earth could not go unnoticed. In the United States, where slavery did not end until a quarter century later, slaves celebrated Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day.

And in terms of later social justice movements -- from the campaign for the vote to the rights of labor -- the ripple effects stirred by these abolitionists went much further. "Could any of these battles have been fought at all," asks Hochschild, "if the first and greatest, against slavery, had not been won?"

The fact that the battle against slavery was won must give us pause when considering great modern injustices, such as the gap between rich and poor, nuclear proliferation and war. "None of these problems will be solved overnight, or perhaps even in the fifty years it took to end British slavery," Hochschild concludes. "But they will not be solved at all unless people see them as both outrageous and solvable." •