The Book of Books (28 page)

It is impossible to locate the impulse for the reconstruction of character and the exceptional release of energy undergone by Wilberforce. I sketched in the society in which he had immersed himself to show how far he had to move and how deep was the slough out of which he had to heave himself. It was his own version of Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress
. It also brought to him the energy and the compulsion to act. His newborn Anglicanism was dynamic. A key element was a disciplined daily reading and study of the King James Version which seems to have given him such strength that he turned against the morals and the manners of the age in which he lived and set out to change them.

He helped organise the Bible Society and spoke at its first meeting in 1804 and stayed in the society until his death. He helped found the Church Mission Society. He forced the rich, mighty and
arrogant East India Company to change its charter, in law, so that it would provide for teachers and chaplains for missionary work. He supported the work of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. His correspondence was mountainous; his workload prodigious. It is the contemporary fashion to provide psychological explanations for such a change but Wilberforce himself and his contemporaries had no doubt whatsoever that he had seen the Light and found God. Thereby he had found the way to a true Christian life, in faith and in works.

His first cause was nothing less than to mobilise the whole country against vice. He saw moral improvement as the only way to redeem and fortify the country and he founded the Proclamation Society for the Reformation of Manners. He enlisted the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the King, the Queen, several bishops whom he visited in their distant dioceses, ten peers and six dukes. He was satirised by Sydney Smith and William Hogarth but this remarkable release of Christian zeal would not be easily stoppered and his Proclamation Society ploughed on. To the astonishment of many observers, it became a force, eventually, in helping to move the licentious Hanoverian society to the sober and more civic-minded Victorian. Perhaps his success helped impede the recognition of the worth of Mary Wollstonecraft.

He is remembered and honoured for his opposition to the slave trade. The historian G.M. Trevelyan wrote that it was ‘one of the turning circumstances in the history of the world'. Wilberforce needed to be persuaded of his fitness for the essential role which he would be required to perform. This was to become the parliamentary spokesman and public leader of what, at the outset, seemed even more hopeless than reforming the manners of the people. This time his success had an impact which rang around the world.

Between 1600 and 1800 about 11 million slaves had been transported from Africa to the Americas. The trade had a long line from the Arab slavers who brought the slaves across Africa to the west coast, to the African traders who bartered with the European traders, the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French and Dutch who carried the slaves across the Atlantic to the American traders who bought them and used them and their offspring as property with no rights.

By the end of the eighteenth century the commercial sea power of Britain, with the armoured protection of the world's most powerful fleet – the Royal Navy – put it in the dock as the key culprit in that long line of abuse, violence and injustice. British cities and industries and traders benefited greatly from the slave trade. Other countries did too but Britain's overall booming post-Industrial Revolution wealth made it the target, then and since, often the sole target, for criticism and obloquy. All the more dangerous, though, for someone to take up arms against what was seen as a vital pillar to the economy. All the more need to do so, some thought. A movement began in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which would seek and find the only way to stop the trade – to secure an Act of Parliament for which they needed a champion. Wilberforce became their man.

His opening speech on the subject is still considered to be among the greatest acts of oratory recorded in the Houses of Parliament. It was a speech that lasted four hours in a packed House of Commons in 1789. It impressed parliamentarians and public alike. Yet it was not until 1807, after eighteen years of embattled persistence during which his life was threatened, he had to hire bodyguards, his name spat on by among others Admiral Nelson, that he succeeded in getting the British Atlantic slave trade abolished. Moreover he got the British navy to enforce this. From a starting point at which the idea of abolition was
unthinkable, he won through. Many had worked for that day. But it was Wilberforce, through his speeches in Parliament, the crucial forum, who won the day.

His arguments in that four-hour speech were grounded in the morality of Christ's teaching in the New Testament. His research and his passion gave a picture of horrors which no Christian could support. ‘Let us put an end to this inhuman traffic – let us stop this effusion of human blood.'

‘The true way to virtue,' he said, ‘is by withdrawing from temptation . . . wherever the sun shines, let us go round the world with him diffusing our benevolence . . . total abolition is the only cure for it.'

Wilberforce drew on all his resources. His wealth went into the campaign as did his contacts in society from the court to the Prime Minister. His ease in the fashionable world opened up the cause. The small group of dedicated and politically suspect nonconformists (who could not sit in Parliament) who had initiated the movement would never have had the necessary social clout to roll up the influential support which Wilberforce brought in. There were the expensive Wedgwood brooches, for instance, depicting African slaves with the words ‘Am I not a man and your brother' which became advertisements as well as ornaments fashionably worn by young women.

It would be a long trek to the abolition of slavery itself. But after the 1807 vote, the Atlantic trade was abolished by the United States in 1808, and by 1838 throughout the British colonies. There still remained the matter of slavery itself. Wilberforce just lived to see it abolished in the British Empire in 1833. The planters were unbelievably richly compensated by the British government and turned their hand to developing what became a thriving internal slave trade in America itself.

But a new dawn had arrived. ‘Thank God that I have lived to
witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of Slavery,' Wilberforce said, three days before he died. It is impossible to imagine he would have done all that without his conversion to Christianity and his faith in the words he knew so well in the King James Version.

But slavery and the King James Bible and the American people still had an account to settle. The final outcome would reshape America and change the perceptions of the world.

THE IMPACT ON SOCIETY

SLAVERY AND THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA (1)

O
ne of the greatest blots on American history is slavery. One of its greatest triumphs is the liberation of the slaves. Their progress through American society, from enslavement to full equality, is the triumph of humanity and courage over prejudice and savagery.

The slave trade between Africa and America and the treatment of the slaves in America tested the King James Version to its limits. The sickening story of horror and brutality has been often told. That it ended in triumph is every bit as remarkable a story. That such victory should come from such beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have seemed unimaginable.

The captured or kidnapped slaves were treated as things. No rights, no release, neither family nor liberty allowed. The ‘Middle Passage' – the journey across the Atlantic on barbarically crowded ships prone to disease, subject to malnourishment, resulted in death at sea for many. It has been described and revisited many times from the graphic speech of Wilberforce in 17 89 onwards.

The slaves' existence on many of the plantations was often made even more unendurable by the deployment of iron face masks, shackles, mouth clamps, and other instruments of torture. Their
accommodation was bestial, their food minimal, their exploitation total. The purpose of the slaves was to reap harvests of cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, rice and other goods, much of which would go back to the European countries on the boats which had shipped them over from Africa.

If strongest proof were needed of the crucial role played by the Bible in modern English-speaking history, it is here in the American experience of slavery. It was coupled with the integral part the Bible played in the American Civil War which became a battleground for the liberation of the slaves.

The Bible in the debates over slavery and democracy was overwhelmingly the King James Version. Would other versions have had the same impact? To some extent, in the first half of the seventeenth century, the Geneva Bible did have a strong impact. But the overlapping of Geneva and King James has been noted. More importantly, as the seventeenth century progressed, the King James Version became the sovereign book. It was
the
book of the English-speaking nations. It achieved the status of being a holy object. The unequalled number of copies, the growing literacy (mostly through the study and reading of the King James Bible) and the veneration for what this version had achieved gave it an unrivalled authority. In the key developments of the argument on slavery and democracy, it was from the King James Version that people drew their examples and ideas.

Slavery seems to have been embroidered into the tapestry of civilisation. The Babylonians had slaves as did the Jews; the Assyrians had slaves and so did the Indian and Chinese warlords; the Greeks had tens of thousands of slaves; the Romans had, it has been estimated, more than 2 million. As did the Arabs. The Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons had slaves, as did the Africans. Christians kept slaves in the Roman Empire and after the fall of that empire, Christians were enslaved by the Moors in the Middle
Ages. Slavery reveals an exceptionally early and profound division of opinion in Christianity. St Augustine in the fourth century was a supporter of slavery. A few generations later there was St Patrick who opposed it.

The Afro-American experience stands out as the apotheosis and the nemesis of the slave trade. Perhaps because it was so heavily documented, certainly because it was on such a scale, it showed plainly then and now the evils of that practice. The unshackling of slavery and the success of the Afro-Americans in enduring, defying and destroying the system that had enchained them is a beacon to the world.

There
can
be change, the Afro-American experience tells us, and it can be on a deep and global level if the spirit and the strength of the cause are relentlessly determined. In this case they were. In the end, the slaves and the ex-slaves themselves ended slavery. But nothing comes of nothing and along the way there were allies – like Wilberforce, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, like the black Baptist preachers; and there was always the lantern, the guiding light, the Book of Books, the King James Version.

In both the Old and the New Testaments, slavery is taken for granted. It is difficult now to retrieve and imagine that state of mind: but to own slaves was seen as commonplace as in later ages it was to employ servants and in more contemporary times to rely on ‘helpers'. Slavery was simply and unquestioningly part of the daily lives of many of our ancestors for centuries.

The Bible reflected that. But it also provided lines of help to the slaves. The Bible could be read as both pro and anti slavery. Noah cursed Canaan, son of Ham, and all his offspring to slavery. Muslim and Christian slave traders took that as their validation: thereby they stood on holy ground. The fatal shift was when the fact of slaves, among religious Christians and Muslims, became bound up with the fact of being black. The Canaanites cursed by
Noah were not black. Many slaves in the first millennium AD were black. It became the ignorant opinion of the slave traders that the black ‘race', as they saw them, were born to be slaves.

This convenient ignorance might have died out after it had run its commercial course but it became registered in what was considered to be acceptable scholarship.

Diarmaid MacCulloch points out that ‘the link between blackness and slavery reached the Christian West late and it was ironically via Judaism.' Isaac ben Abravanel, a Portuguese-Jewish philosopher, suggested that Canaan's descendants were black. Therefore, under the curse of Noah, all black people were liable to be enslaved. Genesis gives no support to this, but it proved extremely convenient for some Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Another pseudo-scholarly but nonetheless accepted as authentic reading of the story of Cain declared that black people were descended from Cain when God punished Cain for killing Abel, his brother. The ‘mark of Cain' was to be black. This baseless scholarship was a boon to the Christian and Muslim slave trade. These interpretations were to be lethal.

So began the battle of the verses. Every bit as deadly as the verses used in the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars in the British Isles and the verses to be used with just as much fatal effect in the American Civil War.

A useful starting point in the American experience occurred in the public apology of Judge Samuel Sewall who had behaved disgracefully and unforgivably. When he was in authority during the Salem Witches trial innocent citizens were persecuted and sentenced to death on the hysterical evidence of adolescent girls whose murderous ‘visions' were taken to be from God.

The Christian judge took a course of action since widely followed and sought forgiveness or public favour in a belated apology. However, in his self-serving grovelling, he brought up a line
from Exodus which became an important rallying cry for the abolitionists in America. ‘He that stealeth a man and selleth him,' it read, ‘or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.' In short, anyone enslaving anyone else ought himself to be punished by death.