Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, March 1829

Footnote 1:

The poet Cowper seems to have entertained much the same opinion as the Bishop of Salisbury; for in one of his Letters, dated April, 1788, we find him saying: “Laws will, I suppose, be enacted for the more humane treatment of the Negroes; but who shall see to the execution of them? The planters will not, and the Negroes cannot. In fact, we know that laws of this tendency have not been wanting, enacted even amongst themselves; but there has been always a want of prosecutors, or righteous judges, deficiencies which will not be very easily supplied. The newspapers have lately told us, that these merciful masters, have on this occasion, been occupied in passing ordinances, by which the lives and limbs of their slaves are to be secured from wanton cruelty hereafter. But who does not immediately detect the artifice, or can give them a moment’s credit for any thing more than a design, by this show of lenity to avert the storm which they think hangs over them? On the whole, I fear there is reason to wish, for the honour of England, that the nuisance had never been troubled; lest we eventually make ourselves justly chargeable with the whole offence by not removing it. The enormity cannot be palliated: we can no longer plead that we were not aware of it, or that our attention was otherwise engaged; and shall be inexcusable, therefore, ourselves, if we leave the least part of it unredressed. Such arguments as Pharaoh might have used, to justify his destruction of the Israelites, substituting sugar for bricks, (‘ye are idle; ye are idle,’) may lie ready for our use also; but I think we can find no better.”

If these arguments of the Bishop be well founded, it follows, first, that the great mark at which every friend of humanity ought to aim, by all lawful expedients, is complete and irrevocable emancipation; secondly, that in the interim, as laws, when committed to the guardianship of the slave-holder, are merely waste paper, the Government and Legislature of this country should take the matter into their own hands, and shape their course to an ultimate extinction of an evil from which they cannot extract all the venom but by slaying the hydra itself; and thirdly, that too much weight should not be given to the representations of persons even of the “best principles and most generous natures,” when “perverted by the influence of passion and habit,” to apologize for, or wish to perpetuate, the enormities of this accursed system.

The Bishop in reply to those who defend or connive at West India slavery as a “dispensation of Providence,” and as, indirectly at least, sanctioned by the word of God, observes,

“Many attacks,” says his lordship, “have been made on the authority of Scripture; but nothing would more effectually subvert its authority than to prove that its injunctions are inconsistent with the common principles of benevolence, and inimical to the general rights of mankind. It would degrade the sanctity of Scripture; it would reverse all our ideas of God’s paternal attributes, and all arguments for the Divine origin of the Christian religion drawn from its precepts of universal charity and benevolence.” “That any custom so repugnant to the natural rights of mankind as the slave trade, or slavery the source and support of the slave trade, should be thought to be consonant to the principles of natural and revealed religion, is a paradox which it is difficult to reconcile with the reverence due to the records of our holy religion.”

His Lordship then proceeds to shew, 1st, That slavery and the slave trade are inconsistent with the principles of nature (in allusion to his opponent’s argument), deducible from Scripture. 2d. That no conclusion can be drawn in favour of West India slavery or the African slave trade (which the Bishop always classes and brands together) from particular transactions recorded in Scripture; both because the trade in slaves bears no resemblance to the slavery and slave trade in question, and because transactions merely recorded in Scripture history are not sanctioned by the record. 3d, That no conclusion can be formed from Hebrew laws respecting West Indian Slavery, because the conditions are by no means analogous; and because, even if they were, laws neither introduce nor justify every custom which they regulate. 4th, That the clearest and fullest permission of slavery to the Jews under the Law of Moses does not make it allowable to Christians, because the new law has succeeded to the ritual and judicial ordinances of the old; and we cannot reason from one state of things to another when any great revolution has intervened in the progress of religion. 5th, That, however such permission might appear to make slavery in any degree allowable to the first Hebrew Christians under the Roman government, it does not by any means make it allowable under the free government of this country, because we cannot reason from one form of government to another. 6th, That whatever may be the commercial and national advantages of slavery, (which however the Bishop does not estimate very highly: on the contrary, he strongly insists on its improvidence, and the vast superiority of free labour,) it ought not to be tolerated, because of the inadequacy of those advantages to their many bad effects and consequences. 7th, That slavery and the slave trade ought to be abolished on account of the good which would follow to religion, to mankind, and to ourselves.

We have not space to condense the whole of the Bishop’s arguments, but we shall present our readers with a few succinct notices. As for the atrocities of the African slave trade, or the cruelties of West India slavery, he says there is nothing in Scripture that is parallel to either; but he argues that “slavery itself (in every form) is inconsistent with the law of nature deducible from Scripture, and therefore with the will of God;” and that, therefore, “_much more so_ are the cruelties of West India slavery, and the African slave trade.” Slavery, he further remarks, “even in its mildest sense, considered as unlimited, involuntary, uncompensated subjection to the service of another, is a total annihilation of all natural rights.” This forcible abduction of liberty, he contends, is inconsistent with the natural rights of society, as deducible from Scripture. In God’s first commission to man he gave him dominion over the brute creation; but there is no expression by which Adam or any of his posterity could collect that they had a right of dominion over their own species. The extent of this primary charter, remarks the Bishop, cannot be more forcibly expressed than in the language of our great poet:

O execrable son, so to aspire Above his brother! to himself assuming Authority usurped, from God not given. He gave us only over beasts, flesh, fowl, Dominion absolute. That right we hold By his donation: but man over man He made not lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free.

To those advocates of slavery who would use in its favour the golden rule of doing as we would be done by, the Bishop in reply exclaims,

“Detestable perversion ... of the most benevolent of all precepts!” Yet there is one very obvious view, he adds, in which the precept applies to the case of slavery; “for as no person would wish to be reduced to slavery or to continue so, no person whatever should reduce, a fellow-creature to slavery or keep him in that condition.” “The precept may enjoin the submission of the slave to his master, but it does not enjoin slavery: it neither makes the occasion nor justifies it. Submission is a virtue in a slave; but the exercise of this virtue neither justifies the making of slaves nor the keeping of them. Offences must come, and injustice will prevail; but woe be to them by whom the offences come! It should not be forgotten that, if the precept enjoins submission in the slave, it applies doubly to the master; for it enjoins humanity in the treatment of his slaves, AND CONDEMNS HIM FOR KEEPING THEM AT ALL.”

That the slaves are in a happier condition, and “far better off than the British peasantry,” is another old argument, which has of late been newly furbished; and the Bishop of Salisbury well replies to it, as well as to the absurd opinion, that where there is no positive physical cruelty, (and would there were nothing even of this!) there is nothing to complain of.

“If no other circumstance could be proved,” says the Bishop, “yet the mere privation of liberty, and compulsion to labour without compensation, is great cruelty and oppression. If no other fault could be alleged, the involuntary submission of so many thousands to a few individuals implies, beyond a doubt, the employment of means the most tyrannical and oppressive to secure such subjection.” “The condition of West India slaves,” he continues, “some of the apologists for slavery have endeavoured to recommend, by asserting that the slaves are happier than the poor of our own country. However inadvertently this opinion may have been admitted by many, it could have originated only from the possession of inordinate authority and insensibility to the blessings of a free country. Where the poor slaves are considered mere brutes of burden, it is no wonder that their happiness should be measured by the regular supply of mere animal subsistence. But the miseries of cold and want are light when compared with the miseries of a mind weighed down by irresistible oppression. The hardships of poverty are every day endured by thousands in this country for the sake of that liberty which the advocates of slavery think of so little value in their estimation of others’ happiness, rather than relinquish their right to their own time, their own hovel, and their own scanty property, to become the pensioners of a parish. And yet an English poor-house has advantages of indulgence and protection which are incompatible with the most humane system of West India slavery. _To place the two situations of the English poor and West India slaves in any degree of comparison, is a defamation of our laws, and an insult to the genius of our country._”