Abolition, Now part 2
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In the last episode, Abolition Now, Part 1, I was talking with historian Diana Paton about the real timeline of abolition and what abolition really meant for those previously enslaved. Towards the end of the episode, we began speaking about apprenticeships and how those previously enslaved were then forced to work for the people who formerly owned them. Should they not want to work, the punishments were fast and brutal.

I'm Moelothia McLean, a journalist on the journey to discover the truth about Britain's slaving history. This is Human Resources.

Hello, Human Resources listeners. This is Renee Richardson, producer and co-creator of the Human Resources podcast. I'm popping in to let you know that even though the podcast has ended, Arisa Lumba, who was a researcher on the podcast, and I have written a new book called Human Resources, Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things. And just like the podcast, the book...

takes modern Britain items and traces their roots back to slavery. We're introducing new topics that weren't quite covered in the podcast, like accounting, the Church of England, the colour indigo, denim blue jeans, sugar, Lloyds of London. But we also revisit some topics from the podcast and go a little further, like the Bank of England, chocolate and the Green King Brewery, which was in our pubs episode.

We'd love for you to support the book and get a copy. I hope you enjoy it. It's for all ages. And just as the podcast focused on accessibility and making this history accessible, the book does the same. And we hope it encourages conversations between different generations and helps people get a step into this history and encourages more research and more reading on this subject. Thank you.

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And picking up with Diana where we left off, we've been introduced to James Williams, a teenager in Jamaica who, once he gained his freedom, came to England with leading abolitionist Joseph Sturge. What happens to Williams then? He's in Jamaica and he acquires his freedom during apprenticeship. He's actually introduced to Sturge by a formerly enslaved man named James Finleyson, who was a religious leader in the area.

So Finlayson's got quite an important role here as a kind of, I think we can see him as in some ways selecting James Williams and saying, okay, this guy will have an important story to tell and introducing him to Serge. Serge then supplies the money that enables Williams to become free and

and then james williams and joseph travel together from jamaica to liverpool in 1837 and they arrive in liverpool in the middle of 1837 and immediately they get there williams

dictates his memoir actually to another man of Scottish, a doctor called Archibald Palmer, who had served in Jamaica as a magistrate and who was critical of the system of apprenticeship and kind of come over to the side of the abolitionist movement.

So Williams has his story written for him and it's published by the abolitionists in multiple different editions. It's very successful. We've got records, for instance, of a bookseller in Reading writing to the abolitionist committee, ordering 100 copies of the Williams pamphlet. And they also produce a visual image.

of the Treadwheel and they sell that in large numbers, kind of based on Williams' story. So there's a kind of both a verbal or a print and a visual aspect to this.

And William's story is then discussed at abolitionist meetings up and down the country, but it's not told by Williams himself. It's told by Joseph Sturge, and there's even a record of one abolitionist public meeting where he refers to the fact that Williams is present that day in the crowd, but Williams is not telling his own story.

We don't really know why that is. We don't know if Williams wanted to speak but wasn't allowed to or if

Sturge simply assumed that Joseph Williams wouldn't be able to tell his story or if Joseph Sturge didn't want him to tell his story. Now there's a lot we don't know about this story and we don't have any, except for his narrative, we don't have any direct letters or anything like that from James Williams, whereas we do have Joseph Sturge's letters.

But by a few months after James Williams has been in England, Joseph Sturge writes to his friend and colleague in Jamaica, the missionary James Clark, who had known Williams in Jamaica, and basically says, "I'm worried about James Williams. I think he is becoming a liability, and I think for his own good, we need to send him back to Jamaica."

And he doesn't say exactly what it is about what James Willis has done that makes him think that he needs to go back to Jamaica. But by the end of 1837, he has returned to Jamaica. I think, in fact, by September 1837, he's on a ship going back to Jamaica. Do we know what happened to him once he was shipped back to Jamaica?

After that, we only pick up a couple of references to him. So we do know he made it back to Jamaica and we know that he was back in touch with his community because there were actually a couple of trials that came out of the narrative in Jamaica itself in 1838. So...

The people who had owned James Williams and his family and others, a man named Gilbert Senior and his sister Sarah Senior, took offense at the narrative and tried to kind of put across a different story and to kind of undermine the credibility of James Williams. And then in response, the

Several members of that community tried to take them to court, took the seniors to court for cruelty, but they were unsuccessful. And we know that Williams was part of that group. So that's the only final record we have. It's extremely striking that James Williams does not get to speak for himself, either contemporaneously or now, as we piece together his life via references made to him in the letters and documents penned by other people.

This is in August 1837, so a little bit after Williams's narrative has been published. And Joseph Sturge writes to James Clark and he says...

My dear friend, the comparatively idle life and luxurious living, but probably above all the attention James Williams has attracted and his introduction to persons and situations so different to what he is accustomed, has, or perhaps have, certainly too, expected, produced an unfavourable effect upon him.

and although he perhaps behaves as well as I ought to expect, I find him going on so very far from satisfactorily, that I believe it would be the kindest thing to him, or at least by far the best chance for him to escape complete ruin, to send him back as soon as I can. We are looking out for a vessel and suitable persons to put him under his care,

I shall if he goes direct him to proceed to the I think on landing in Jamaica for he will no doubt not be satisfied without seeing his father and family and though I think there is some risk in there being an attempt made to punish him for the facts which have been made public from his statement yet I think he is more likely to settle down over there in steady employment than anywhere else.

I was astonished when I found that quotation. So that was in a letter that's now held in a library in Oxford. It's part of a series of letters from Sturge to Clarke. And I think it makes really clear the complexity of this relationship, this alliance, which I think is an alliance between British abolitionists and Caribbean enslaved people and former enslaved people. But it's one in which Williams says,

isn't granted any kind of real autonomy. Like Sturge really wants to be in control and he finds it. I mean, it seems to me he's brought this 17 year old young man to England. He goes to school in London for a bit. We know that he went to school on the Borough Road. He meets all kinds of other people. He's establishing all kinds of autonomous relationships.

presumably. And maybe he's having some teenage adventures of some kind. Maybe he's, we could speculate in all kinds of ways, but it really troubles Sturge. And part of the reason it troubles Sturge is because he knows that

somebody like Williams is going, his behavior is going to be incredibly scrutinized. He has to be perfect or he'll be kind of presented as a liar. The authenticity of his account is completely up for challenge. And that did happen. You know, I said the seniors publish all kinds of things that say, yes, we did punish this young man repeatedly. That's because he's a really bad man. And so, yeah,

You can see how this kind of debate is almost

I think it's very familiar in some ways to the kinds of claims and counterclaims that are often made today about different kinds of abusive situations. And everyone's trying to work out, you know, well, who do I trust? And there's a dynamic of that in James Williams' story and, in fact, in Mary Prince's story as well. Take us into Mary Prince's story, please. Mary Prince is an enslaved woman born in Bermuda and

and she moves, is sold to people in Antigua who bring her to London in the 1820s. And she was married to a man who had acquired his freedom in Antigua.

And in Britain at this time, slavery hadn't been completely abolished, but the Mansfield Judgment, which had taken place in the 18th century, had ruled that enslaved people who were brought to Britain, slavery could not be forced upon them. So if they were to leave the home of the people who claimed to own them, the state would not return them, the police would not return them, there could be no forcing them back.

But that didn't mean that they were completely free. So if they were taken, in particular, if they were taken back to the colony, they would be enslaved again because slavery continued to exist in Antigua or Jamaica or wherever. So Mary Prince is in this situation in London where she's

She wants to leave the home of her owners and in fact she does leave their home and she manages to find refuge first with the Moravian community and then with members of the Anti-Slavery Society in London.

But she wants to go back to her home in Antigua. She wants to go back to her husband. And she can't do that because if she goes back to Antigua, she'll be going back into slavery. So what she wants is to either be formally manumitted, set free by her owners, or for them to sell her to the anti-slavery society who would then have set her free. And they refused to do that. So that's the kind of background to the story. And

As part of her struggle to get free, but also as a contribution to the abolitionist movement, she dictates her life story. And that's published in 1831. And it's called The History of Mary Prince.

This is like James Williams's story, Mary Prince's narrative, Mary Prince's history is very widely distributed. It becomes very widely known among the British public and sold and circulated to people who are interested in learning more about slavery. And I think there's something about personal stories that is really effective in political campaigning. And lots of abolitionists

They used all kinds of tactics, propaganda tactics about, you know, some were sort of statistical, this many people are dying and so on. And some were kind of more personalized, telling witnessing accounts of things that they had seen as white people. But these stories from the perspective and in the voice of people who had actually directly experienced slavery were incredibly powerful and they remain very

very powerful. I mean, I would urge people to read the history of Mary Prince and the narrative of James Williams. They're both short, but they tell you a huge amount about the experience of slavery. Memoirs like Mary Prince's, were they able to be explicit about everything the formerly enslaved had undergone? Or did the social mores of the day prevent that?

There is, as you alluded to, there's a kind of moralising issue here in that she had to write her story or narrate her story within conventions and expectations about women and sexuality in the England of 1831.

And her history, in fact, involved, as well as her marriage, involved quite extensive long-term relationship with a man outside of marriage. And it also involved sexual exploitation by one of her owners. And she writes about that exploitation in her history, or she talks about that exploitation in her history, not directly. She talks about it in a kind of elusive way, which...

Clearly people did understand. She doesn't say, I was raped or I was sexually violated, but she talks about how this man who owned her would force her to wash him. He would sit naked in a bathtub and force her to wash him. And she talks about how horrible that was for her. And there's a very clear implication in the way that story is told that that included sexual violation. So she was raped.

prepared to broach those kinds of issues, which were a very difficult thing to do at that time. But then after her narrative, after her history was published,

She came under attack as a witness in a particularly, a way particularly associated with the fact that she was a woman by people who said actually she was sexually immoral and they used the fact that she had had sexual relations outside of marriage to

kind of prove that she was not the kind of person that she appeared in the history, but that actually she was a loose woman, a fallen woman who therefore shouldn't be trusted. And I think, you know, that obviously tells you a lot about how all women were understood in this period, that if you weren't, if you didn't inhabit this very particular narrow box of sexual morality, then your word wasn't valuable.

If you didn't inhabit this small narrow box of a certain form of white womanhood, middle class white womanhood, respectable womanhood, you were disbelieved. And there was obviously an idea really closely associated with black enslaved women and also the environment they were in, hot climate, hot temperament, a sexuality that was projected onto them. And that's why a lot of sexual violence took place as well or found a reason to take place.

Absolutely. And I think it's much harder for a woman like Mary Prince to establish herself as a truth teller and as a moral woman than it would be for a white woman to do the same. And the kind of ease with which she is kind of kicked out of that box is very much to do with race and racism. How did the participation of Black abolitionists like Mary Prince push the abolition movement along?

I think it was really important. It's important right from the start. I think that the fact that some of the first people to really make the case for the end of slavery are Black African abolitionists is really critical to the boundaries of the movement.

I think the later period, this kind of sense of alliance between campaigns in Britain and revolutionary uprisings, if you like, in the Caribbean, even though the campaigners in Britain wouldn't explicitly say we're in favour of armed uprisings,

without those armed uprisings, it would have been much harder to make the case for the end of slavery. And then the participation of people like Williams, like Prince in the movement gave a kind of direct voice that enabled people to hear what enslaved people were experiencing, but also what they were thinking and what they were arguing. So Mary Prince

directly addresses her audience and says, "You don't know what it's like to be a slave, but I've experienced this and we enslaved people want the end of slavery." That's not a direct quote, but she's very explicit about that. And I think that creating that voice and making that case in the British public sphere was really important.

Why have some of the stories of these key black figures in the abolition movement, bar the likes of Oloado Equiano and Mary Prince, been erased in mainstream remembrance?

Yeah, I think we're getting to know a little bit more about them. I think quite a lot of people have heard about Mary Prince now, but I think these narratives have been thought of not as activist texts, not as political texts, but as kind of autobiographies that were then used by the real political actors who were the abolitionists when they've been thought of at all. I mean, for a long time, it was the...

a model that just focused very much on parliamentary politics only when looking for understanding political change that erased pretty much a lot of the movement. So that was one reason. And then we've sort of gradually been expanding our vision of what politics is and what

re-understanding that people like Williams and Prince were part of that movement. But, you know, we don't have anywhere near the kind of amount of writing by Prince or Williams as we do by, say, a Wilberforce or a Clarkson. So in some ways, it's just more difficult to get to know about them.

But I think they do challenge a kind of this very deeply ingrained understanding of abolition, which still comes up over and over again, which sees it as a kind of unprompted gift on the part of Britain as a nation and something that British people need to kind of repeatedly congratulate ourselves for.

And seeing the experiences of people like Robert Wedderburn or James Williams or Mary Prince and seeing the kind of case they had to make just to get their voices heard, perhaps is hard to understand.

put alongside that purely beneficial generosity kind of focused understanding of what abolition was and why it happened. So perhaps that's one of the reasons why we haven't heard so much about them. That's a real thought to chew over.

Who is given the mantle of a political actor? And who is seen as just the living evidence presented to furnish their argument? Who gets a voice of their own? And whose words are only quotations in a wider speech? We will stay with this theme. Next week, we look at the post-abolition experience of some of the most vulnerable people in the entire system of enslavement. Children.

Human Resources was written by me, Moyalothia McLean. Our editor and producer is Renee Richardson. Our researchers are Dr. Alison Bennett and Arisa Lumba. Production assistant is Rory Boyle. Sound design by Ben Yolovitz. This is a Broccoli production, part of the Sony Podcast Network.