Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Debbie Lee
efforts. One of the landmark events in the abolition movement took place in 1789, when William Wilberforce moved for twelve antislave trade resolutions in the House of Commons. Wilberforce objected to the slave trade on the grounds of British national guilt. This very idea, in fact, formed the moral center of his parliamentary speech: “The motion he meant to offer, was perfectly reconcileable to political expediency, and at the same time to national humanity. It was by no means a party question, nor would it, he hoped, be so considered; … He came not forward to accuse the West India Planter; he came not forward to accuse the Liverpool Merchants; he came forward to accuse no one; he came forward to confess himself guilty, for the purpose of shewing to the House, that if guilt any where existed, which ought to be remedied, they were all of them participators in it.”28 The magnitude with which the British exported slaves was now matched, in the popular imagination, only by the guilt each person bore because of it.
Indeed, even though transatlantic slavery was an inherited problem for Romantic audiences, it carried some peculiarly shameful aspects compared to other forms of slavery. Transatlantic slavery was different for several reasons. First of all, its sheer dimension is staggering. By the early nineteenth century, the African slave trade represented the largest migration of people in human history to that point.29 Millions of people were torn from their homeland and deposited on foreign shores. Just how many millions is a matter of historical debate. The number seems to range from between ten and fifty million. Toni Morrison dedicates her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved to “Sixty Million and more.”30 Most recent research suggests that around twelve million Africans entered the Atlantic slave trade between 1500 and 1867 with ships of the British Empire alone carrying nearly three and a half million of those slaves from Africa between 1662 and 1807.31 It is also estimated that 10 to 15 percent of those transported from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas died on slave ships during the middle passage, which is one of the most horrible and resonating memories of slavery.
Besides its unparalleled magnitude, the other particularly shameful aspect of the trade, one that abolitionists and poets were well aware of, is that plantation slavery turned people into chattels, and this led to the interpretation in Western culture of slavery as the polar opposite of freedom. Transatlantic slavery gave European culture its definition of freedom because in a very real sense, enslaved blacks created freedom for whites in Europe and America. Slavery within Africa, by contrast, did not carry this connotation. While slaves there still suffered in profound ways—for instance, they lost their status and social identity—a slave was not turned into property.32 Similarly, slavery in the Muslim world included intricate laws and customs regarding how people once enslaved could still make themselves full members of Muslim society.33
By the early nineteenth century the dismantling of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves was inevitable, but Britons expressed extreme insecurity about its consequences. This feeling is registered most strikingly by George Canning, the leader of the House of Commons, on 16 March 1824, in what is now a famous speech in the history of British slavery. “The question is not,” he said, “a question of right, of humanity, of morality merely. It is a question that contemplates a change, great and difficult beyond example; one almost beyond the power of man to accomplish;—a change in the condition and circumstances of an entire class of our fellow creatures;—the recasting, as it were, of a whole generation of mankind.”34
But what Canning does not admit here is that change was endemic to the period. The American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 were seen to inaugurate a period of upheaval in which people all over the world could set themselves free from tyranny. The revolutions in Spanish America began around 1810. Simón Bolívar, the liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru, set up the Congress of Venezuela and the Congress of Colombia in 1819, but he dreamed of a united South America, free from Spanish rule. Closer to home, the Greek war of independence had been sparked as early as 1821 against the Turks of Moldavia and Wallachia. The revolutionary flavor of world politics inevitably spread to the system of slavery—most notably the Haitian revolution of 1791, which lasted many years. On a smaller scale, British slave colonies had continual problems with day-to-day resistance and with major uprisings, such as those of 1816 in Barbados, of 1823 in Demerara, and of 1831–32 in Jamaica. The Jamaica rebellion, in particular, was just what was needed to prompt Parliament to pass the emancipation bill. Samuel Sharpe, a feisty figure who has achieved heroic status, was the leader of the rebellion where 200 slaves were killed and at least 340 more put to death in torturous trials that followed the uprising. Sharpe himself was one of the last to die, on 23 March 1832, a week before Parliament appointed a committee “for the purpose of effecting the Extinction of Slavery.” Sharpe reportedly said, just before his execution, “I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery.”35
III
But just as Britain was planning a change in the status of slaves, the British were figuring out ways they could exploit Africans in Africa itself. In some bizarre way, they were drawn to Africans or Africa for the entire nineteenth century, whether through slavery or African exploration. At the beginning of the century, as the abolition movement swung into full momentum, Britain was not only the major European sea power, it was the leader (though not far ahead of France) in exploration. At the time, the major contours of Europe, Asia, and North and South America had already been charted, so it was the interiors that presented the most challenging sites for exploration. But those explorers who went in their country’s name, and in the name of discovery, also knew that the lands they described would soon become zoned for commercial activity, and beyond that, for colonial exploitation.
Following the three celebrated journeys of Captain James Cook, executed between 1768 and 1779, Britain initiated thousands more voyages, in an effort to chart the entire globe. In the South Seas, not only Cook wrote up his travels, but his shipmates Georg Forster and John Hawkesworth came out with their own versions. These were followed by other South Seas travelogues, such as George Keate’s 1788 Account of the Pelew Islands. In North America, travelers meticulously recorded flora and fauna, as well as Native American Indian customs, as found in William Bartram’s 1791 Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country … together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. The more hearty explorers braved the snows and ice of Canada in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, as recorded in Samuel Hearne’s 1795 Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean. No place was out of reach. The Middle East, India, China and Japan were scoured under the traveling eyes of men and women alike: James Morier’s 1812 Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, and James Wathen’s 1814 Journal of a Voyage, in 1811 to 1812, to Madras and China. Even the places that had been occupied by Britons for hundreds of years were worthy of travel accounts. There were travels to Scotland, Ireland, and all the countries in Europe. Caribbean histories and travels also abounded, from William Beckford’s early Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790) to the celebrated gothic writer Matthew Gregory Lewis, with his Journal of a West India Proprietor, published in 1834, after his death from yellow fever.36
As this worldwide exploration and description went on in reasonably systematic fashion, Africa was pursued with more attention than the rest of the world put together. Africans did not put up a united front against white explorers the way the Chinese and Japanese did, so this made exploration a more viable option for the British and the French. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, Africa was also attractive because it offered an expansive market for European trade goods, and the British were determined to corner that market before the French.37 So the British set up an official association devoted to learning more about the continent and how it could be used to Britain’s advantage in the face of the worldwide changes of slavery and French imperialism. The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa—or the African Association, as it was called—came into being in 1788 owing to the inspiration of Sir Joseph Banks.38
A round, heavy figure, with darkly defined eyebrows, a dimpled chin, and sturdy hands, Banks was at the imperial center of Britain for at least fifty years. Although Banks does not survive in the popular consciousness the way other figures have—like Cook, or Wordsworth, or Napoleon—he