"Freed" (book review part 2)

[william42]

Hochschild has written eloquently about the importance of this kind of historical forgetting in ''King Leopold's Ghost,'' his account of the policies of the Belgian king Leopold II in the Congo in the early 20th century, which are estimated to have taken 10 million lives. There he writes, ''The world we live in -- its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence -- is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.'' How consistently and with what lethal effect we choose not to be aware.

Nevertheless, Hochschild interprets the success of the British abolitionist movement as a triumph of empathy, a humane response to horrors of which the public only gradually became conscious. His heroes are Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp and the former slave Olaudah Equiano, among others. These men did indeed work patiently and passionately for emancipation. Certainly it is uplifting to find empathy and law together championing justice, as they do in the narratives of both Hochschild and Wise. The intention of the writers is clearly the honorable one of finding an instance in history in which justice has prevailed and the world has been changed, and of finding as well a model of the kinds of activism by which present enormities are, or might be, addressed. Yet, again to the credit of both writers, these narratives include elements incompatible with this kind of interpretation, indeed consistent with the opposite and very bleak conclusion that movements based on empathy and law, when proceeding from exalted tributes to the essential decency of a population, can flatter indifference or complicity.

In fact, the slave trade was at home in a world where the appropriation of lives and the extortion of labor were astonishingly commonplace. Hochschild describes the virtual abductions by which slave ships were manned, and tells how these sailors were subject to flogging and starving, and died in numbers as great as did the abducted Africans they helped to transport. And the British Navy was manned in the same way. None of this was at all exceptional, as it would have to have been if there were indeed a presumption of freedom embedded in English culture, as both books assert. No consensus in support of freedom can be demonstrated. The industrialist Robert Owen, writing in 1813, years after the Mansfield decision, describes the transfer to factories of the children of British paupers by the hundreds, 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds who worked 13 hours a day through seven-year apprenticeships. These little workers died quickly and were replaced by other pauper children. They were not slaves in the strictest sense. The system did resemble Caribbean slavery, however, in that it set a negative value on their well-being.

The literature on such practices is immense because they were pervasive and long lived and of interest to many generations of activists. Indeed, if there were not economic motives behind British abolition, then the speed with which that reform came about is miraculous compared with the laggardly pace of reforms affecting the laboring classes who were the great majority of the British population. Owen asks, ''Shall the well-being of the poor, half-naked, half-famished, untaught and untrained . . . not call forth one petition, one delegate, one rational effective legislative measure?'' Just at the time of the emancipation of the British West Indies, a reform bill passed by Parliament created the ''Poor Law Bastilles,'' a system of punitive incarceration for the indigent. Hochschild describes how the Parliament paid the West Indian slaveholders extravagant sums for their emancipated slaves, who then became their oppressed and wretchedly paid employees, driven to frequent rebellion just as the slaves had been. If Britain taught the world by ending actual slavery, it gave the world a second lesson in establishing virtual slavery. As Hochschild remarks in ''King Leopold's Ghost,'' empathy is fickle.

The primacy of England in these narratives slights the fact that a consensus against slavery had been building for a generation in New England, and longer in Quaker Philadelphia. The role of England in sustaining slavery in its colonies is demonstrated in the abolition of slavery immediately after the American Revolution, in Vermont in 1777 and in Massachusetts in 1780. The institution of human bondage became truly peculiar to the South only after the Revolution, because it was legal everywhere in the colonies while they were under British law. And years after the emancipation of slaves in the empire, Britain came near intervening in the American Civil War on the side of the slave states. The arguments in Somerset v. Steuart treat the laws of the colonies as alien to England, though members of the royal family were major stockholders in the slave trade, and what is more English than the Church of England, which was a great slaveholder in Jamaica? While every good effect of an important precedent must be welcomed, the fact remains that the claim to an exclusive English purity that is the basis for the legal arguments associated with Steuart v. Somerset was and is a denial of history, a part of the great forgetting.


Correction: February 6, 2005, Sunday A book review on Jan. 9 about two volumes on the abolition of slavery and the slave trade Though the Heavens May Fall, by Steven M. Wise, and Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild referred incorrectly in one passage to the Somerset case of 1772, in which a court ruled that the owner of a slave in England could not compel him to go abroad to be sold. While many scholars consider the courts decision a symbolic step toward ending slavery, the ruling by itself did not free the estimated 15,000 African slaves in Britain.

The review also referred incorrectly to the abolition of slavery in Vermont in 1777 and Massachusetts in 1780; those events occurred during the American Revolution, not after it.



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