Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Part Three: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade About this episode We conclude the story of how Britain ended its role in the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Against the State by James Stout available for preorder here: https://www.akpress.org/against-the-state.html
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0:06 Robert Evans? We're back. Yeah. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is this week not about bad things. It's about good things. Well, kind of. It's still about bad things, but it's about how good things were done to fight a bad thing. Anyway, we're talking about the end of the slave trade with our guest, James Stout, author James Stout, author Dr. James Stout.
0:36 Speaker 01 That's right. Yeah, I am both of those things. I have written, recently written a book, written two books, actually. The first one you should get your library. You shouldn't pay for it. It's far too expensive. But the second one, I would love it if you pre-ordered. It's called Against the State. It's about anarchists and comrades at war in Spain, Myanmar, and Rajava. And it contains many of the things I have learned while being fortunate enough to share small parts of these two revolutions and study the other in an academic fashion. I think there's a lot you can learn if you're not particularly interested in conflict and war. And I hope that people will preorder it from AK Press.
1:13 Robert Evans? Yeah, preorder that from AK Press and you'll be a hero too. Although, you know, not quite as much of a hero as the people we're talking about today, because they ended the slave trade. And, you know, that's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's the thing to do in your life. Yeah, it's a pretty high bar.
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3:12 Robert Evans? So yeah, when we left off here, there's just been, we had that case and then we had Gregson v. Gilbert, like they revisited it to see like, should we retry Gregson v. Gilbert? And they decide, yeah, probably. And then Gregson was like, actually, no, I know I'm at a loss, so I'm just kind of bouncing. And so the abolitionist movement is left with, we've had this big win, but it didn't really change anything. But now we've got a group of people who are kind of like increasingly motivated and angry to fight against slavery. And the head of the group is Granville Sharp, right? And Granville's like, well, in the wake of this case, since we're not going to continue
3:56 Robert Evans? it, my priority is I need to document every single horrific detail about what happened on the Zorg and in general, everything I can get about how common some of these other awful things that happened are just in the slave trade as a whole. And I need to publicize that. So as many people can read it as possible in order to build support for an end to the whole institution. So he has the notes from the court case transcribed. He can duck a further interview with Robert Stubbs and another crew member as part of his attempt to secure murder charges against them. It's, I don't think they have to sit down for this, so it's weird that Stubbs and Kelso do.
4:33 Speaker 01 Stubbs never misses a chance to fuck himself over, does he?
4:36 Robert Evans? Yeah, never misses a chance to fuck himself over. Every wrong step he can take, oh, Stubbs, he's gonna take. Um, on June 2nd, 1783, Sharp sends a hundred and eighty something page document to the Lords of the Admiralty demanding murder charges and quote, "an entire stop to the slave trade", which he argued would damn the entire country and unquestionably mark it with "the avenging hand of God, who has promised to destroy the destroyers of the earth." This doesn't work. Uh, somehow they don't take this seriously. Like you respect, but I, yeah, I'm not surprised that they see like, it's in this like 200 pages and it says that God's gonna kill us if we don't shut down the money funnel. Ah, let's just keep being rich, right?
5:20 Speaker 01 It's one in the manifesto bucket.
5:22 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yeah. Classic Lords of the Admiralty behavior. So his letter to them is ignored, but he doesn't stop pushing forward. Uh, he sends the info he was gathering to the Prime Minister and to other public figures, warning them that God would smite the whole empire if they keep doing this shit. Most of these letters were ignored, but one of the letters he sent to prominent members of the Anglican community did provoke a response from a reverend named Peter Peckard, who had, which is, I, we'll just move past that name, but
5:50 Speaker 04 Will we?
5:51 Robert Evans? It's silly, right? Peter Peckard. It's silly. It's a silly name, but he's a good guy. So whatever, we'll give him a pass. Um, now Peckard had been paying attention to Gregson v. Gilbert, and he had concluded from the information in the case that the slave trade was a crime against humanity. The two became friends and their correspondence influenced Peckard when a year or so later, he was made Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University. So this guy gets kind of radicalized by this case and by his friendship with Sharp. He reads what Sharp collected and he gets increasingly horrified. And then he gets a really prominent position at Cambridge. And one of his duties at this position is to organize the annual Latin essay contest. And so in 1785, he picks this topic for the contest.
6:36 Robert Evans? Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will? Now, putting aside for a moment the question of how might you make a person a slave, not against their will. This topic, which, yeah.
6:49 Robert Evans? I mean, there are, there were like in Greek, some Greek people would sell themselves into slavery during the Roman Empire and work is like basically household tutors to rich folks and stuff, but it's still making someone a slave implies against their will, I would argue. Anyway. The topic provokes a high degree of involvement from divinity students at Cambridge, one of whom is a young man named Thomas Clarkson. And he's the next hero we're going to learn about in detail. Born March 28th, 1760 in the Isle of Eli. He was the oldest son of a reverend and a headmaster. His mother, I assume, was a very nice person. We have basically no details on his childhood or early life. But he comes from what you might call an upper middle class background and enjoyed a good education and as much stability as anyone got to have back in those days.
7:34 Robert Evans? Right? So this is a, he's a child of privilege, like for certain, you know, not like crazy rich, but very comfortable. Clarkson is an excellent student and, and he was admitted to St. John's College at Cambridge in 1779. He gets his BA in 1783 and he continues at Cambridge with a plan of following in his father's career as a reverend. Right? So he's continued his education to become like a religious studies expert or whatever, so he can be a reverend. He's ordained in 1783 as a deacon, but his original plans for a life spent serving the church are derailed by a greater cause in 1785 as a result of that essay contest. So when that contest is announced, he is still planning, I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to spend my life in the church like my dad did, right?
8:19 Robert Evans? And then he, he starts working on this essay to try to win this contest. And this is maybe the single best historic example of how one good teacher can change the world. Because Clarkson's whole life and the lives of millions of people turn in part as a result of this essay. Per the Zorg by Siddharth Kara. A towering figure with reddish hair and a compassionate gaze, Clarkson confessed he was wholly ignorant of the slave trade when he first began his research for the contest. He read everything he could find on the subject and was most impacted by a pioneering abolitionist tract authored by an American Quaker, Anthony Benizet. Quakers were among the first communities to advocate against slavery, believing it was necessary for every lover of God and man to use their best endeavors that a stop may be put to this unnatural and barbarous traffic.
9:04 Robert Evans? Following the Somerset case, Benazet became a staunch ally of Grandal Sharp. The two abolitionists collaborated in 1772 on a petition to King George III against the toleration of slavery in the colonies. In 1775, Benazet founded the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first anti-slavery organization in America. One of its earliest presidents was Benjamin Franklin. Right? So, Benazet, really influential guy and a partner with Sharp, and he writes this book that Clarkson reads while he's prepping for this essay, called Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants, with an inquiry into the rise and progress of the slave trade. Again, we didn't know how to write titles back then.
9:47 Robert Evans? There hadn't been a good one to come up with yet.
9:50 Speaker 01 I had no discomfit that.
9:51 Robert Evans? No. The first good title is Moby Dick, right?
9:53 Speaker 01 Yeah. I like Equiano, she just calls it an interesting narrative. You don't know what you're gonna get, but it's gonna be interesting.
10:03 Robert Evans? It is interesting how fucking crazy your life was, yeah. You're right, Equiano knew how to title a fucking book, but none of these other guys do. That said, the quality of the book is good, even if the title is kind of unwieldy, and Clarkson devours it. He is horrified by each new fact he learns, and he finds himself obsessively driven to read and learn more. He writes later, "It was but one gloomy subject from morning to night. In the daytime I was uneasy, in the night I had little rest. I sometimes never closed my eyelids for grief," which is a relatable way to feel about reading too much about the realities of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation systems. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of a nightmare.
10:46 Speaker 01 Relatable fear of it.
10:47 Robert Evans? An ending nightmare, yeah.
10:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:49 Robert Evans? I think anyone who spent a period of time studying this is like, yeah, kind of is just consuming for a while. It's really bad.
10:56 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, it's one of the worst things that humans have ever done to each other.
11:00 Robert Evans? Yeah, very upsetting stuff. So that summer Clarkson finishes and submits his essay for the essay contest. He cites Granville Sharp in it and the court case against the Gregson Syndicate two years previously in his introduction. And he describes the massacre of enslaved prisoners aboard the Zorg as "a deed unparalleled in the history of man, and one he was worried that future generations wouldn't believe." That like, if we don't document this well enough, they won't believe anyone did anything this bad. It's so crazy evil, right? Um, now the essay itself is a banger. It is animated by the kind of inchoate rage that academics rarely allow themselves to express. Clarkson gave voice to the kind of repellent nausea any decent person ought to feel upon investigating
11:45 Robert Evans? the slave trade. He wrote in a section directed to slave traders, "You have no right to touch even the hair on their heads without their own consent. It is not your money that can invest you with a right. Human liberty can neither be bought nor sold. How wicked must be that servitude which cannot be carried on without the continual murder of so many innocent persons. No custom established among men was ever more impious, since it is contrary to reason, justice, nature, the principles of law and government, the whole doctrine in short of natural religion and the revealed voice of God." Pretty good stuff. It's a kind of a banger originally. Yeah. Yeah, I like the, yeah, "You have no right to touch even a hair on their heads if
12:26 Robert Evans? they don't say you can." Like, "How dare you think otherwise?" That's nuts.
12:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, even God hates you.
12:34 Robert Evans? He wins. Yeah, even God hates you for what you're doing. And he wins first prize. It's a good essay. And because he wins first prize, he gets to read his whole essay in Latin to the Senate House at Cambridge. Again, it's a Latin contest. Um, "The abolitionist cause is at this point not yet a mass movement in England, but it's becoming one. And Clarkson's success here is evidence that even in the halls of power, something had started to change." When you're winning this essay contest at Cambridge, this is not like a fringe radical thing entirely anymore, right?
13:06 Robert Evans? Something had started to change within Clarkson, too. On paper, he's still following the path that he would need to take in order to become a reverend. But as he's, he like rides a horse from Cambridge back to London, right? When he's kind of, and I think he's heading to London to continue his, the process of becoming a reverend. And in the middle of that journey, he has an awakening. And here's how he describes it. "I became at times very seriously affected while upon the road. I stopped my horse occasionally and dismounted and walked. I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my essay could not be true. The more, however, I reflected upon them, or rather, upon the authorities on which they were founded, the more I gave them credit.
13:48 Robert Evans? Coming inside of Wade's Mill in Hertfordshire, I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind that if the contents of the essay were true, it was time some person should see those calamities to their end." Which is such an interesting way for that to go. Where he's like, "I couldn't have been writing about real stuff, right? It's too fucked up. It's too fucked up." And as he's just, yeah.
14:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's just like, "No, that's happening." I think there is a difference, right? Between like these colonial metropoles that were somewhat removed from the violence and the experience, say, in parts of the southern United States where like the violence of chattel slavery was right there.
14:32 Robert Evans? Right.
14:32 Speaker 01 Like it was visible to everyone. And it's remarkable, I guess, that like the people who come to first come. I mean, it's not that there weren't anti-slavery people in the United States. There were, including presumably all of the enslaved people. But like the fact that they, the people who come to this realization that, "Yo, this is fucked up and organized", are the ones removed from it at first. Like, yeah.
14:58 Robert Evans? Yeah, and that's, I think you would find similar sentiments of like, this can't be real, from a lot of people in the North during like, the worst of the period leading up to the Civil War, right? Like, you run into that a lot.
15:09 Speaker 01 I think so, yeah.
15:10 Robert Evans? This is just too fucked up. It can't be this bad, right?
15:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, right. Like, I think, especially at a time when, you know, all you had to trust was a text, right? Like, it's not like you can see a video, right? It can't be that bad. No one would do that. Like, humans wouldn't do that to each other.
15:26 Robert Evans? And the norm for people in this position, right, is to like, convince themselves, I'll just forget about it, right? And it says a lot about his moral character, that he goes through this day-long period of like, walking back through the sources in his head, and being like, no, these are really solid sources. And so if this is true, the only step I can take forward is to dedicate my entire life to destroying this slavery, right? Like, there's no other option at this point, right?
15:57 Robert Evans? Yeah.
15:57 Speaker 01 And it makes sense from looking back, but like, for him, that's a remarkable choice to make, right?
16:02 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's a really significant leap that he goes on there. So now that he's set on this new path, Clarkson starts meeting with Quaker anti-slavery activists, including one who owned a printing shop and had already been publishing pamphlets and tracts. The next year, his essay was published as one of these tracts, and it starts to circulate widely among educated Englishmen. This helps Clarkson get into contact with other seasoned veterans of the fight, including Granville Sharp, who he meets in mid-1786. The two hit it off famously, and I kind of think Sharp picks this kid right away as the heir apparent to his own efforts to fight slavery, where he's like, this is gonna be the guy who like, keeps the fight going after I'm gone, right? You just kind of get that feeling. And while
16:45 Robert Evans? public support for the cause is the highest it's ever been, there's still not a unified anti-slavery movement, nor even an agreement as to how one should look. Again, a lot of people just want to ban the Atlantic trade, but leave slavery intact. Otherwise, I think for most of these people, it's just pragmatism, where they're like, well, we just, we're never going to get that done, but we can at least stop the worst part of the system. I'm sure some people are like, well, slavery wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for this other part, right? Those are definitely some people, you know?
17:12 Speaker 01 This type of guy, yeah.
17:13 Robert Evans? Yeah, there are other divisions. Quakers, as I've repeatedly noted, have been central to the antislavery cause from the beginning, but because of their niche religious views, they're also opponents of a bunch of other stuff, like being in the military, or paying taxes, or following the Anglican Church. And so a lot of people who might be open to the broader cause are like, well, I don't want anything to do with Quakers, right? They're nuts, you know?
17:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:37 Robert Evans? That's how, I'm not Quaker listeners, I'm not shit talking here. That's how a lot of people feel at the time.
17:41 Speaker 01 Right.
17:42 Robert Evans? Who are otherwise maybe down for the cause, yeah.
17:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, the idea of being teetotal is not comprehensible to average 18th century British person, right?
17:51 Robert Evans? They don't drink or kill people. Well...
17:53 Speaker 01 What do they do all weekend?
17:56 Robert Evans? Yeah. Look, I'm fine with getting rid of slavery, but I draw the line at not drinking and shooting Frenchmen. So, it was clear to Sharp and to Clarkson and their fellows that the cause needed a central organizing hub that lacked any of this baggage and could act as a big tent. So they formed a committee and they all met together to hash things out. Here's how Mike Kay described what happened next. Clarkson and Sharp brought more than their individual skills to the community. They were important figureheads who could forge alliances with people the Quakers could not reach. They were instrumental in bringing the movement into the mainstream by forming partnerships with people like William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament who later became the movement's parliamentary spokesperson. We're not going to talk enough about Wilberforce
18:40 Robert Evans? in these episodes, but he's also a big hero here. The committee agreed to focus on the slave trade as a first step towards total emancipation and called themselves the Society for Affecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. This society had a clear objective: access to a printing press, and a distribution network, and a growing number of influential allies. What they needed was evidence to prove that what they said about the slave trade was true. Right? So this is going to send Clarkson on a personal quest. He's going to be the member of the society who goes out into the world to gather this information and bring it back, right? So that they can prove to everyone that this is not just the Zorg wasn't a one-off. This is just how bad things always are in the slave trade. And we'll return to Clarkson a bit later.
19:22 Robert Evans? He's heading off right now to go find a bunch of dirt on the slave business, right? And while the society is getting itself up off the ground, other activists who are not a part of this group are hard at work providing firsthand documentation of the hideous evils of the slave trade. And this brings us back to our friend Equiano, right? And another guy, because the next year, 1787, the same year Robert Stubbs dies, a former slave named Otoba Kugwano publishes his autobiography. He'd been kidnapped at age 13 and trafficked to England in 1772. Kugwano is a close friend of Olada Equiano, and his example likely helps to convince Equiano to write the autobiography that I quoted from earlier in the last episode.
20:06 Robert Evans? It was published two years later, and both books become bestsellers in their time and are reprinted in multiple languages. They're very influential, right? And these books have a huge influence on the course of the abolitionist movement. Previously, most ideological bystanders in England had passively accepted the claims made by pro-slavery advocates that Africans were happy being forced laborers and that life on plantations was an improvement from their situation back home. Equiano and Kugwano's books blasted those myths apart, right? You can no longer believe that when you're reading these guys being about like, here was my life before I got enslaved, you know? As Mike Kay wrote, "It was difficult for those who read the book not to associate
20:49 Robert Evans? themselves with the African hero who was courageous, resourceful, literate, cultured, and Christian, all qualities." Right? Like, you can no longer view these people as somewhere less than you when you've read the whole book one of them wrote about his incredible life, right? And that makes you start, yeah, yeah.
21:07 Speaker 01 Like, this guy's done things that most, most people in Britain, even wealthy people wouldn't have dreamed of doing, right? Like, it's very hard to see him as a lesser human being.
21:16 Robert Evans? No, and then once you start being like, wow, this, this one guy was really incredible in a way they said none of these people are. Is it possible that they're all just people? And that what we're doing is one of the greatest crimes in human history? I'm gonna have to think on that before I get back to my job dying of the black lung, which is what I assume most English people are doing at the time, or on boats. You know?
21:39 Speaker 01 Those are our two main industries, scurvy and black lung.
21:42 Robert Evans? Scurvy and black lung.
21:44 Speaker 01 That's a cornerstone to the economy.
21:47 Robert Evans? So Equiano organizes a group of formerly enslaved black men together called the Sons of Africa. And together they begin campaigning independently of white allies like Sharp in order to spread public disgust at the institution of slavery. And this is a really important fact, right? Equiano and his fellow freedmen have no political power and they start from a position of basically zero cultural influence. And they aren't just being like, oh, thank God, I met a nice white person who was able to take the fight for me. Equiano, they never do that. Equiano, not like he and Kugwano, publish books that give them cultural influence because they're so popular. And then they start organizing other freedmen to become a political lobby in their own right and start writing letters and having
22:29 Robert Evans? meetings with members of the government and people of cultural influence in order to push abolitionist sentiment. They are very much active and strategic participants in the abolitionist cause, right? That's really important. So Equiano orchestrates a nuanced and elaborate PR campaign, augmenting the work Granville Sharp and his, the other folks on that side of things are putting together. The Sons of Africa do these letter writing campaigns and they succeed in, you know, it's, it's, it's an uneven progress, right? Because the, the society right around this time gets hearings before the Privy Council on the abuses of the slave trade, and none of the sons are called to testify. So Equiano writes directly to the Chair of the Council and then publishes the letter he wrote that
23:12 Robert Evans? guy in a prominent newspaper so that no one could ignore it, right? To be like, and I sent this to this guy. If he ignores it, he has it, you know? By 1788, Equiano is considered one of the leading abolitionists in the country. A newspaper at the time described him as "well-known in England as the champion and advocate for procuring a suppression of the slave trade." He and Kigwano spent years touring the country with their books, bringing hundreds of new activists into the cause every single year, right? They're showing up and they're meeting face to face with people and basically radicalizing folks one-on-one to get involved. You know, that's like a big part of their conscious effort here. Yeah. Cool guys. You know who also radicalized people?
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23:57 Robert Evans? That's right. They radicalized me to advertise for them.
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26:42 Robert Evans? And we're back. So, by 1789, the lobbying of the society, and in particular, Member of Parliament Sir William Wilberforce, had brought another William into the fold, Sir William Dolbin. Williams are pretty load-bearing for this part of the antislavery campaign. He proposed a bill, Dolbin did, known as the Dolbin Act, that he described as the first bill to put fetters upon the barbarous and destructive monster that was the slave trade. This is the definition of an incrementalist solution. It is not banning anything. It is not saying these people aren't property. But it requires slave ships to hold no more than two slaves per ton for the first 100 tons of weight of the vessel, and no more than one slave per ton after that. This is directly inspired by the Zorg,
27:27 Robert Evans? which had held roughly four slaves per ton for most of its journey. The Act also reforms some of the language around insurance policies to make sure someone like the Gregson Syndicate doesn't try another similar gambit again. And while the bill is being pushed forward, Equiano leads a delegation of free black men to the House of Commons. There, they meet with the Prime Minister, as well as Dolbin and several other members of Parliament, right? Which is a really important moment. These guys have gone from nobody, who don't even get called to talk to the Privy Council, to they're meeting with the Prime Minister and a bunch of NPs about the passage of an act regulating the slave trade. That's a big deal. You know, just in the history of English democracy, right? Right, yeah, yeah. They've had that many black dudes meeting with the prime minister at that point in time.
28:13 Robert Evans? Had, it doesn't seem like it had happened a lot, right? And their testimonies, the fact that these guys are all talking about what happened to them, don't stand alone, right? So in the Dolben Act is not just like, it's not just kind of the testimonies of these of these freedmen that is influencing how people think at the time. One of the most influential firsthand accounts of the slave trade that comes out in 1788, which helped spur support for the abolitionist cause, is written by a former slave ship captain, a guy we talked about in our first episode, John Newton. Newton published his book Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade in 1788. He'd been born and he's, you know, I, I, I don't know if we call him a hero, but he's on the right side by the end of his life.
28:58 Robert Evans? This is a complicated man, right? That we're going to talk about here, but let's get, he's a fascinating guy, too. His story says a lot about why people became slave ship captains. Like who got into that business, right? Yeah.
29:14 Robert Evans? He was born in 1725 to a father who captained merchant vessels in the Mediterranean and a mother who was a Protestant nonconformist. I don't understand this super well, but I think from what I can gather, it means she rejected the legitimacy of the Church of England, but was still super religious, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Biographer John Dunn writes that the boy, as a child, Newton, quote, feared his father and dreaded the times when the old sailor was home from the sea. And from what we can tell when his dad's home, he spends most of his time drinking. One of John's earliest memories is his father heading off to the bar and his mother using the opportunity to have him memorize essays and tracts written by religious scholars she admired. Mrs. Newton wanted her son to become a reverend, but she died two weeks before his seventh birthday.
29:59 Robert Evans? I think it was tuberculosis, you know? Probably a little bit of guestimating just based on the symptoms, but yeah. Uh, after this point, none of the adults in John's life really care about his religious instruction or him. He prays alone sometimes, but he drifts further and further from belief as his childhood gets steadily worse. His father forces him to attend a boarding school for two years with an incredibly cruel headmaster who's very abusive. Uh, and by the time John leaves the school at age 10 or 11, he is no longer religious. He's, he's just not interested at all. His dad is by this point gotten hitched to a new wife, but at age 11, he takes his son to sea for the first time. Now, the upside of this is that because his dad is the captain, John gets to stay in
30:43 Robert Evans? the spacious captain's quarters. The downside is that his dad is his dad, which means he's trapped in a fairly small room with an incredibly abusive father. Right? Newton later wrote, "I was with him in a state of fear and bondage." He is, this is a very unpleasant childhood.
30:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:00 Robert Evans? He and his dad go on six voyages together. John has two near-death experiences at sea during this time at age 12 and then at age 15, and he becomes very anxious about dying unsaved. So periodically he'll work himself up into a lather about this and he'll try to get back to being faithful, who try to get into the rhythm of praying regularly and attending services, but he, he keeps falling out of it. Nothing seems to take. He would later write, "I saw the necessity of religion as a means of escaping hell, but I loved sin and was unwilling to forsake it."
31:30 Speaker 01 Just a funny way. I'm just such a big fan of sin. What a universal human sentiment. Mm-hmm. God, I don't want to go to hell, but sin is awesome. Yeah. I enjoy sinning. What are you gonna do? What do you? Yeah. Perfect. I love that he wrote that as well. Yeah, yeah. No shame, no shame about it. Okay.
31:55 Robert Evans? The elder Newton gets his son an apprenticeship on a different ship, uh, but teenage John is too rebellious. Dunn describes him as switching between fits of aggressive rage and non-conformity, followed by days of obsessive meditation and prayer, begging God to forgive him for his sins. He would fast for days at a time, which was also not conducive to his career. And 17, yeah, it's just not great working at a boat while starving. Um, although a lot of sailors are starving a lot of the time anyway, so it's not that weird either. Sailing.
32:25 Speaker 01 It's good if you could, the points when you don't have to be starving, if you can not be starving, it's probably better for your longevity if you don't.
32:32 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, you really want to eat when there is food.
32:36 Speaker 01 Cause there might not always be food.
32:37 Robert Evans? Yeah, cause you're on a boat. Yeah. In 1742, his dad retires. John is now 17 and his father tries to secure him another job. This one is the overseer on a Jamaican plantation, one of his friends owned, right? And he's like, look, it's a great job. You'll make money. It's safe. You know, you can get rich and then come home with money, right? John doesn't flake because he doesn't want to be a slave overseer. He flakes because he falls in love with a 15 year old, right? And he really wants to marry this teenager.
33:07 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
33:10 Speaker 01 That's not the kind of sin I'd been hoping he was into, to be honest.
33:14 Robert Evans? To be fair, he's not a lot older than her, right? I think she's actually like 13 or so, but when they fall in love. So it is a little weird, but he's not that, like he's a teenager too. I think when they start, he starts flirting with her.
33:29 Robert Evans? But yeah, it's not good.
33:31 Speaker 01 It's not great.
33:33 Robert Evans? He feels like things are settling into place in his life. He gets another job. He's working on a boat. He feels like he's definitely going to marry this girl. He gets over the worst of his religious anxieties and becomes basically an atheist, right? Which he writes about some, and it's kind of, it's fairly interesting if you do read his book, him talking about how he kind of comes to that conclusion. And then in 1744, while hanging out with some friends one night, Newton gets press ganged and forced to serve in the Royal Navy, right? This is how a lot of boat stuff worked at the time. You know, both the Navy and also a lot of slave ships, by the way, even a lot of the white guys running slave ships in the early period of the slave trade are not there of their own free will. They were picked up drunk one night and made to work on a boat.
34:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:20 Robert Evans? This is something the Navy is going to crack down on around a little later. But yeah, not by the time when he's a teenager. That said, his dad is a man of influence within the say, within the boat world. And he finds out his son's been kidnapped and he's able to basically like, hey, I think he needs a job, so keep him on the boat, but you gotta promote him to midshipman. You know, you gotta, you can't, you gotta give him a better gig. So John gets promoted and he actually likes his new job. Things are going well until his boat, the Harwich, announces their next mission is going to take five years. And again, he's pretty sure he's gonna marry this, this girl, right? Who is by this point, he's a little older now, she's 15 now. And he goes to her parents and they're like, never come here again.
35:08 Speaker 01 I'm gonna get married and leave for half a decade. Probably not the best, best pitch.
35:13 Robert Evans? It's not a good pitch. So John goes kind of crazy and he tries to desert from the Harwich. He gets caught and he gets punished. And here's Dunn describing what happens to him after he gets caught trying to go AWOL. All 350 of the crew were assembled on deck to witness Newton's court martial infogging. The captain was determined to make an example of him and so discourage any other malcontents from thoughts of desertion. He was stripped and lashed to a grating. Give him the first dozen. The catanine tail swung, repeatedly lashing his bare back until his white skin was red with lacerated flesh. His audience watched in sickened silence. One young marine fainted, lash after lash pounded his torn back, eight dozen strokes and all, stripped of rank and degraded to his original position. His former comrades now dared not even acknowledge that they had ever known him and were forbidden
35:58 Robert Evans? by the captain to have any communication with him. So this fucks him up. This leaves some, this does some damage to our, to Newton, right?
36:07 Speaker 01 Can imagine, yeah.
36:09 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yeah, and that's a lot of lashes.
36:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, right. That's like a potentially dying from loss of blood amount of lashes.
36:17 Robert Evans? Yeah. And it's because he's trying to make an example of him, right? So Newton's not happy after this. He makes plans to murder the captain and then kill himself, but he never goes through with it. Instead, he manages to use his clout to transfer to his dad's cloud to transfer to a different boat, the Pegasus, which is a slave ship working the, you know, the doing the slave trade thing, right? So this is how he starts working on a slave boat, but he doesn't like it immediately. It proves a worse fit than the Harwich at first because Newton is by this point, an angry atheist and his main hobby when they're not working is making fun of everyone else's religion and then trying to convince them to commit sins, right? And this does not make him popular with the crew.
37:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:02 Robert Evans? People, people don't like it when you're stuck in a boat together and you keep calling them stupid for believing in whatever they believe in.
37:10 Robert Evans? Yeah. So he gets left in West Africa. It's a little unclear. Do they fully strand him? Or is there is partly mu- it seems to have been somewhat mutual. Dunn's book suggests Newton makes a, there's a passenger on board is a slave dealer named Amos Klau and Newton's like, shit, being a slave dealer, I could just get rich, you know? And then I could go home and I can marry that teenager, right? You just do some slave dealing for a few years and then marry that teenage girl I like. Yeah. Perfect plan. So Amos is like, well, I'm heading, I'm heading back home, you know, hang out at home for a while. I live on this island off the coast of Africa. You want to come like chill with me? I'll teach you the ropes, right? And I think Klaus sort of cons Newton, right?
37:55 Robert Evans? Because when they get dropped off at this island, the only people there are Klow, his mistress slash wife, who's apparently a princess in a local tribe. I don't know if they're telling the truth about this. I don't know if Newton's telling the truth about this. He's not a perfectly reliable narrator. But basically he's on an island with a slave dealer. His wife and their household, right? And his wife does not like Newton. She immediately hates this guy as done rights. Clow immediately sent him to work building a house, though he refused to pay Newton any wage at all for his hard work. Clow's lady had no liking for Newton and viewed him with suspicion and hostility. The combination of climate and hard manual labor soon took its toll and the 19-year-old
38:40 Robert Evans? succumbed to fever. Newton was too ill to accompany Clow on his next trip and was left in his wife's care. Far from looking after him, she virtually left him to die. "I had sometimes not a little difficulty to procure a draught of water when burning with fever. My bed was a mat spread upon a board or chest and a log of wood for my pillow. She lived in plenty herself, but hardly allowed me sufficient to sustain life, except now and then, when in the highest good humor, she would send me victuals in her own plate after she had dined." And again, I don't know if he's lying because he just didn't like this lady. I don't know if this is true. The way he describes it, he's basically made into a forced laborer for a period of time.
39:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:19 Robert Evans? By a black woman primarily. So again, I don't know. But also, she's the wife of a slave dealer and I could totally believe a slave dealer would be like, "Yeah, man, I'll teach you the ropes, but first you gotta build a house for free and then just leave," right? That also doesn't seem possible.
39:36 Speaker 01 So, yeah. No one's a good person here.
39:39 Robert Evans? Right?
39:41 Robert Evans? Yeah, unclear to me what the truth is here, but this is his story, right? And if this is true, you might think the experience would have made him more sympathetic to people who were enslaved, but it does not, at least not immediately. After he's rescued, because his dad sends a rescue when he finds out what's happened. He gets saved in 1748 and kind of on the journey back to England, his boat encounters a storm or something, has another near-death experience, and he converts back to Christianity, right? So he lands in Liverpool and as soon as he's back, he immediately gets a job on a different slave ship. He becomes first mate due to nepotism. His dad's influence is apparently pretty far-reaching and starts his career, right?
40:23 Robert Evans? In 1750, after just two years, he's made captain and he leads three successful voyages before having a stroke in 1754, which forces him to quit captaining slave ships. But he starts just taking the money he has and investing in slave ships now, right? And that's how he makes his money for a while, right? Okay. So his life goes on at this point. He's guilty, not because of the slaving initially, but because of his years as a nonbeliever. And this eventually pushes him to become a reverend and fulfill his mother's hopes for him, that he would, you know, get into the clergy and make religion his life. And over the course of years, he starts to rethink a lot of the things that he had accepted as a younger man.
41:05 Robert Evans? I don't know when he becomes an abolitionist exactly. I think it's the kind of thing that happened in stages, right? But by the late 1780s, he had fully rejected his past life, describing it as "an unhappy and disgraceful trade that stood against the feelings of humanity and was ashamed to the entire country," right? Like, he writes pretty, like, clearly about, like, "It was a terrible thing I did. It's a terrible thing that still exists. I can't believe I did it. It's completely contrary to my current beliefs," right? Like, that's essentially his line from this point forward, right? And Newton, by the time that he comes out against slavery, is a fairly prominent religious leader. He's kind of controversial for reasons I don't fully understand, very Anglican stuff.
41:51 Robert Evans? But he's also fairly prominent, and a lot of people respect him. And one of the people who respects him is a young politician, William Wilberforce, who comes to meet with him in 1785, right? Not about slavery, just because he needs advice. And Newton becomes his mentor, right? But this is a two-way street. And as Wilberforce grows more involved in the fight against slavery, he seems to have influenced Newton to write an account of his own experience as a captain in the slave trade, which hit at a perfect time to shock and horrify Britons. Newton wrote unsparingly about how most slave ship captains governed through ferociousness, both against their crews and the chained humans kept below decks. So much money was at stake, and insurrection was such a constant terror that cruelty was seen as pragmatic. He described how sailors were whipped bloody and had their wounds rubbed with pickle spices.
42:36 Robert Evans? He discussed how an obsession with maximizing profit led captains to cram their boats with every kind of merchandise they could find, further cramping the already pestilential confines of the slave hold and leading many captains to bring insufficient amounts of food and water, working their crews and keeping their slaves at the brink of famine. He described how women were loaded onto slave ships, naked, trembling, terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold fatigue and hunger. As they were forced below decks, these women were exposed to the wanton rudeness of white savages. And he's kind of in saying, like, you know, this, he's talking about the sexual violence that occurs here, right? In a way that's palatable for this audience, but that's what he's talking about.
43:15 Robert Evans? Newton expressed revulsion that "I was once an active instrument in a business which, at which my heart now shudders." So while the sons of Africa are lobbying, and Newton's book is starting to like fly off the shelves, Clarkson is spending several years engaged in deep on-the-ground investigation, traveling to Liverpool and other key ports for the slave trade, where he would sneak aboard to document living conditions, conduct interviews with sailors and auctioneers, and generally gather as much documentation as he could about the ongoing crime against humanity. And he's in a lot of danger doing this. He has to have a bodyguard with him. After a certain point, he's like armed, right? Because people want to kill him for what he's doing. He's fucking with the money. Yeah.
43:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's fucking with the bag. That's, what a remarkable transformation.
44:00 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah. From like a kid who wanted to be a reverend to, he's now doing like in vet, dangerous investigative journalism, trying to like, blow the lid on the most evil industry of the day, right? That's really a lot of what's going on here, you know?
44:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, remarkable.
44:16 Robert Evans? Yeah. Uh, per that article in antislavery.org, Clarkson himself had carried out interviews with sailors in London, Bristol, and Liverpool to document the conditions and treatment African slaves were forced to endure. In Liverpool, Clarkson bought shackles, thumbscrews, and a device for force-feeding slaves who went on hunger strike, to provide physical evidence which confirmed the testimonies he collected. Clarkson and a friend, Richard Phillips, also went through official records, which allowed them to document exactly what happened to British sailors on slave ships. On average, 20% of each ship's crew died from disease or ill treatment before the ship returned. Of the 5,000 sailors engaged in the British slave trade in 1786, 2,320 came home, 1,130 died, 80 were discharged
44:58 Robert Evans? in Africa and unaccounted for, and 1,470 were discharged or deserted in the West Indies.
45:06 Speaker 01 Which is, it's a pretty remarkable attrition rate, right? You're getting less than half of them back.
45:11 Robert Evans? Yeah, that's nuts. Like, that's a crazy rate of death. And again, I know, like, the instinct is not, when we're talking about slavery, to feel bad for the poor slave ship crews. But again, a lot of these guys are forced to work. They're press-gagged, right? They don't have much of a choice here either, and they're being worked to death in a nightmare, right? Like, this is a pretty bad situation all around here.
45:34 Robert Evans? It's also important, like, this matters in part because of how they're talking, how the pro-slavery side of things is talking about what the slave trade does for British sailors, right? Britain is a naval power. The navy is what keeps Britain free and what keeps it influential. And one of the arguments the pro-slavery side will make is that, like, well, these slave ships are a great training ground for British sailors, right? This is actually important to national defense because all of these guys are learning the ropes of how to work in very difficult conditions that can then come and fill our navy with skilled sailors, and that makes all of us safer, right? And Clarkson's research proves that's a lie because he's like, no, man, they're all fucking dying. Like, they're being forced to work, they don't want to be sailors, and you're killing half of them. This is not making the navy stronger.
46:19 Robert Evans? You're fucking crazy.
46:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, no one's gonna want to be a fucking sailor after half your friends die. They're like, yeah, this is a career for me.
46:29 Robert Evans? Yeah, you know what I want to do again? Get on another death boat, this one with guns.
46:35 Speaker 01 See, that, you add fighting to that, it's not gonna get better.
46:38 Robert Evans? Yeah, boy, the only thing that made that trip that killed all my friends better is if we'd fought the French at some point.
46:46 Robert Evans? So Clarkson also befriends some of his sources. One of them is a sailor named James Stanfield, who'd worked on slave ships. And he convinces Stanfield to publish an account of his experiences in the slave trade, which also comes out in 1788. So alongside Newton's account, you've got this kind of barrage of both the sons of Africa's accounts of what it's like being enslaved and being a victim of this system. And then on the other side, the people actually working the ships who are also being, no, no, no, this is as bad as they're saying. And I used to run the boats. Like, that all, that all matters. It matters that it comes out this way. Like, that makes this a lot more convincing. Clarkson inspires another writer, Alexander Falconbridge, to investigate and publish an account of the slave trade that was also released that year.
47:30 Robert Evans? Educated Britons were thus deluged into tailed reputable accounts about the evils of the system. William Wilberforce, the Member of Parliament that is like the major activist in Parliament, is inspired that year by Clarkson's essay to sponsor a bill in the House of Commons to ban the slave trade. This led to the first parliamentary investigation into the Atlantic slave trade, which in turn inspired the slave syndicates and their agents in the West India Committee, an organization that still exists today, but was founded to promote trade with the Caribbean to strike back. It's still around, but at this point, it's just how slave owners like do their propaganda.
48:07 Speaker 01 It's amazing. What does it do now?
48:12 Robert Evans? I think it's just about promoting trade with the Caribbean, I guess.
48:16 Speaker 01 Okay, but they didn't see any need to like shut that one down.
48:19 Robert Evans? Rebrand it, make a new one. Yeah, imagine getting on boarded there and being like, so yeah, how did this start? Well, it started in 1735. Oh yeah, doing what? Well.
48:30 Speaker 01 We don't really need to talk about that.
48:32 Robert Evans? Yeah, that's best if you don't really think about it.
48:35 Speaker 01 They don't have the old photos on the walls as you go in, you know, they pick up a bit later. That's wild.
48:42 Robert Evans? You know what else picks up a little later?
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48:48 Robert Evans? Hymns. That's right. Yep, hymns.
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51:03 Robert Evans? So, we're talking about the pro-slavery lobby striking back via the West India Committee. The committee brings witnesses before Parliament who make claims that like, one of their big claims is that slave ships are actually really nice. Like, I don't know what these guys are talking about. I would love to be in a slave ship, honestly. They just won't let me on, right? Because I'm not a slave. Like, so they bring on, they bring on a captain who says, "The space between the decks is sufficiently large to contain the number of people loaded on board, and the slaves in general do not show any great concern on their first coming on board. They're comfortably lodged in rooms fitting for them. When they come on deck, there are two men attending with cloths to rub them perfectly dry and another to give them a little cordial.
51:46 Robert Evans? They are amused with instruments of music peculiar to their own country, and when tired of music and dancing, they go to games of chance." It's basically a cruise. We give them a little drink. He's talking about a cruise. Yeah. What a fucking insane thing to say. Yeah. And they have, they also bring on like plantation owners who are like, they love working on plantations. They barely even work. They're dancing all the time. Dancing.
52:14 Robert Evans? Um, yeah. So the society and its allies fight back with skilled propaganda of their own as well as factual legal arguments. Josiah Wedgwood, an anti-slavery activist hires a woodworker to make a seal for the movement, which features an African man kneeling and raising his chained hands above the slogan, "Am I not a man and a brother?" This becomes the logo of the movement and it goes like really 18th century viral. It is printed on flyers and books and sold in medallions. We'll show you a picture of like, this is like a medallion, some of the merch that they had for this, but like, you know, it's a very effective piece of Yeah. visual advertising art. I mean, it's, yeah, I don't know exactly what, how you want to categorize it, but yeah.
53:00 Robert Evans? Perhaps the most influential image in the whole campaign is a diagram of a slave ship sent to Clarkson by an abolitionist group in Plymouth, Massachusetts. And one thing you're seeing here is the abolitionist movement in the States is much less advanced, but they're starting to not just get things organized, but they're also connecting from an early point directly across the sea. This is a, from fairly early point, an international cause, right? Among the, these abolitionists, right? And so these, these, these folks in Plymouth send a diagram of like a slave ship's slave quarters in, and it becomes one of the most like important pieces of like propaganda that they, the anti-slavery cause uses. Per the website antislavery.org,
53:44 Robert Evans? they sent Clarkson a plate or diagram of a slave ship, the Brooks, which showed sections of the ship from different angles and graphically illustrated how inhumane the conditions were for the slaves. Clarkson and other abolitionists reworked the diagram to show the Brooks loaded with 482 slaves. The ship had carried over 600 slaves in the past, but they did not want to be accused of exaggeration. In 1789, they printed 7,000 posters of the slave ship and soon the shocking and iconic image was appearing everywhere. And I mean, you can see in the, in the image there, particularly in the bottom right corner, it's the, the bottom of this vessel is almost black with the number of people drawn in just because like they're covering every available inch. There's no room in this thing whatsoever.
54:25 Speaker 01 No, like they're actually like sardines in a can of sardines, right? They're like.
54:29 Robert Evans? And this is the fullest. Yeah, yeah, yeah, front to head. Yeah.
54:33 Speaker 01 It had 50% more people than this.
54:36 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, at times, yeah.
54:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like, yeah, they're geometrically maxed, like that little triangle at the top there.
54:44 Robert Evans? Yeah.
54:44 Speaker 01 It's it's wild to think of packing human beings.
54:47 Robert Evans? And like that. Yeah. So you can see why people are getting pissed and why this starts to have an effect. By the start of 1789, nearly 200 petitions had been sent to Parliament with tens of thousands of cumulative signatures. Popular momentum is clearly with the cause of abolition, but the society's progress was interrupted by a constitutional crisis over whether or not King George was crazy. So we're not going to get into that, but it does, it does degrade, it does a, it puts a stopper to things for a little while, right?
55:19 Speaker 01 Great system.
55:20 Robert Evans? And the answer is kind of, yeah.
55:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:22 Robert Evans? The answer is they're all kind of crazy because they've been.
55:24 Speaker 01 They're all kind of crazy.
55:25 Robert Evans? Centuries. Yeah. Oh, mad King George. So things grind to a halt for a little while until in late 1791, the Haitian Rebellion launches in Saint Domingue, right? And two months later, former slaves are in charge of much of the island. Thousands of white slavers are dead. More than 1,000 plantations have been looted. And white people who are pro-slaver are kind of freaking out about this, right? Parliament doggedly refuses to consider outlawing slavery, but the success, I was surprised to hear this, the success of the rebellion, its primary influence on like in England is to fuel abolitionist sentiment. Because a lot of people, instead of being like, oh, my God, it's so scary. Look at like this uprising and what they did. They're like, wait, is the only way we can keep these people slaved is by like holding guns at them at all times?
56:11 Robert Evans? Is this evil?
56:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:12 Robert Evans? Is this bad? They don't seem happy over there.
56:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't think they really are going on a cruise.
56:20 Robert Evans? They burned a lot of plantations if they like plantations. I don't know why they do that if they're fans of them.
56:27 Speaker 01 Sure seems like they weren't having a nice time.
56:30 Robert Evans? Yeah, that same year, 1791, a series of popular pamphlets incite a boycott of sugar produced on slave plantations and incredibly some 300,000 people get on board. This is like a big deal. William Wilberforce, yeah, which is like, yeah, good thing to be boycotting. Yep.
56:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, go for it. But it's very early for that kind of like consumer activism to be, you know, so so effective.
56:55 Robert Evans? This is pretty foundational in a lot of ways and just like the history of Western activism. William Wilberforce capitalized on the newfound momentum in 1792, introducing a new bill to abolish the slave trade. This time, public support was so strong that parliamentarians actually feared opposing the bill. They didn't want to pass it because again, money, but they were scared to piss people off, right? Which is an important sea change. It passes the House of Commons in a compromised form, right? And the version that passes has an amendment that says, we'll gradually abolish slavery, right? We're not going to do it all at once, right?
57:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:30 Robert Evans? But it doesn't get through anyway because the Lord, the House of Lords has a say and they block the bill because they're the House of Lords, right? It's, it's the chunk of Parliament with all of the assholes in it.
57:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, no, that's not fair, Rob, but there are some assholes in the House of Commons as well.
57:46 Robert Evans? You're right. You're right. It has a higher portion of assholes in it.
57:50 Speaker 01 Right, yeah.
57:52 Robert Evans? In 1793, war with France interrupts the anti-slavery cause again, the whole, you know, that Napoleon stuff is getting going. And it makes it hard to want to do things that might upset the economics of the entire empire, like when they're now fighting a series of wars. And now, you know, because a war is on, there's anti-sedition laws that makes it difficult to organize during the war years. So this is again, another, another kind of like, period of time in which things get delayed and off track in terms of the abolitionist cause. But history keeps happening. And during the war years, there's a series of slave rebellions in the Caribbean, right? They're not as successful as the Haitian one, but they keep the human and financial cost of forcing slavery on Africans in the public consciousness. People
58:37 Robert Evans? are constantly hearing, oh, a bunch more people died in this horrible slave uprising, right? They really don't seem happy, you know? By 1806, it's time for things to move forward again. And finally, the abolition of slave, of the Slave Trade Act is passed on March 25th in 1807, which brings an immediate ban to the Atlantic slave trade. The Royal Navy is now pressed into service, searching for slave vessels. Right? So this is the culmination of Sharp and Clarkson and Equiano and Newton and all of these people's efforts is they ban the slave, the Atlantic, the slave trade. Right? In 1807, within or the empire, right?
59:18 Robert Evans? You cannot, British ships are no longer supposed to be taking slaves and they're not supposed to be importing them to British colonies. Right? This is, again, not enough. You know, this is not at all an end to slavery. There's still slavery in the empire, but it's the beginning of the end for slavery within the empire. And it's, it's the end of the beginning for the abolitionist fight. Now, there is, one of the downsides is because this is a big victory, there's a loss of momentum within the cause. Right? Because people are like, well, isn't that enough? A sizable chunk of people are. Sharp is not, Clarkson isn't, but a lot of people are like, I feel like we did okay. You know?
59:58 Speaker 01 Move on to something else.
59:59 Robert Evans? Yeah. So there's a loss of momentum, but abolitionists, the most dedicated ones, do continue to mobilize and fight while the British government uses its power to pressure other European states to pass laws prohibiting the slave trade. And this is happening at the time. Right? It starts with just being a British thing, but they are able to get other European states to sign on to basically saying, yeah, we're not going to participate in this anymore. Right? And that is an important step too, towards full abolition. It's going to take until 1833 for slavery to be abolished in the British Empire. And that is another story that we're not, because this is again about the, the slave trade being ended. But that fact, the fact that they do abolish slavery in 1833 is directly tied to the abolition of the slave trade.
1:00:43 Robert Evans? Right? And even this act is imperfect. You know, when slavery is abolished, slave owners are compensated financially for the slaves they don't have anymore, which is not great.
1:00:52 Speaker 01 Nope.
1:00:52 Robert Evans? But it's better than the situation that it existed. Previously, um, and it provides a shot in the arm to the abolitionist cause in the United States. And in fact, everything we've talked about in these episodes helps to form and inspire the abolitionists who fought to end slavery in the US. Granville Sharp, our goat, never lives to see full abolition, but he plays a major role in the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, and he lives to see that. It comes at the end of 42 years of ceaseless work on his behalf. By the end of his life, Sharp was one of the most admired men in the world. John Adams wrote that he, quote, "merited the esteem and respect of all men, among whom liberty and humanity are not disregarded." He dies in 1813, aged 77. His protege, Thomas
1:01:37 Robert Evans? Clarkson, continued the fight and saw it through to the general abolition of slavery in the empire. After that was done, he devoted himself seamlessly to ending slavery in the Americas. Clarkson's like, okay, we got that done. Time to get over to the States. Like, that's the next fight, right?
1:01:52 Speaker 01 What a Chad. Yeah.
1:01:54 Robert Evans? Yeah. What a cool guy. What a really cool dude.
1:01:57 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad he went for that horse ride.
1:02:00 Robert Evans? The note we end on is so fucking cool. I can't wait to read it to you here. Um, but yeah, so in 1840, the first world anti-slavery convention is held in London. To commemorate the event, a painting is commissioned by one of the best-known British artists of the day, JMW Turner. Inspired by Clarkson's writing and the horrible case of the zorg, Turner made a painting called Slavers Throwing Overboard: The Dead and Dying, which Sophie's gonna show you, it's a very affecting piece. And it's, I mean, it's not directly named after the zorg, but it's people being, it's enslaved people being thrown overboard to die in the ocean, right? Um, and this is kind of like the, the head image of the conference, right? To remind people, again, they're, they're harkening back to the zorg to remind people of the inhumanity
1:02:45 Robert Evans? of what they're fighting for, because it is such a difficult fight and a painful fight. You need to do that, right? Clarkson gives the keynote speech at this conference and he urges his American allies to continue their fight against the planters in the South and persevere to the last in their quest to abolish slavery. Six years later, at another abolition movement gathering near the very end of his life, Clarkson meets with Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Douglass viewed Clarkson as a hero and he wrote later about the moment that he met Clarkson. And this is one of the most affecting things I have ever read. This is Frederick Douglass talking about meeting Clarkson.
1:03:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:21 Robert Evans? "He took one of my hands with both of his and in a tremulous voice said, 'God bless you Frederick Douglass. I have given 60 years of my life to the emancipation of your people and if I had 60 years more, they should all be given to the same cause.'" Yeah.
1:03:37 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:03:38 Robert Evans? And he dies a couple of weeks after this, at the age of 86.
1:03:41 Speaker 01 Geez.
1:03:42 Robert Evans? Yeah.
1:03:43 Speaker 05 Wow.
1:03:44 Speaker 01 Yeah. Wow. What a hero.
1:03:47 Robert Evans? Yeah, cool guy. Some cool guys in this story.
1:03:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's nice.
1:03:53 Speaker 05 You picked a, you picked a good story.
1:03:55 Robert Evans? Uh huh. Yeah, that last bit gets me.
1:03:58 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:03:59 Speaker 01 Yeah. So that's wild to think like, and then like the direct link from like that.
1:04:08 Robert Evans? Straight to Fred, hand to hand. Yeah.
1:04:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, for Frederick Douglass to, you know, like that goes to women's suffrage and the civil rights movement in the United States and like many of the best things happened in the last 200 years.
1:04:17 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah. All because a lot, a number of peoples, you know, Equiano and Sharp and Clarkson and, you know, all of their allies, Wilberforce, got the ball rolling and spent years fighting for very little at a time. It would have seemed like that constantly, that like, well, we got fucking, this was years of effort and what did we get, you know?
1:04:39 Speaker 01 Right. So much human suffering in the meantime, it would have been so easy to give up.
1:04:43 Robert Evans? Nightmare continuing and just be like, it's impossible, things are just fucked forever. You can't fix any of this. But they didn't. Again, Clarkson was fighting 60 years.
1:04:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, like an entire lifetime.
1:04:59 Robert Evans? Mm-hmm.
1:05:00 Speaker 01 Of struggle.
1:05:01 Speaker 05 Wow.
1:05:02 Speaker 01 Inspiring, very inspiring.
1:05:06 Speaker 05 Sorry Truman Truman's yelling at me because I'm carrying her sister, not her.
1:05:11 Speaker 04 Yep.
1:05:13 Speaker 01 You got a double dog carry.
1:05:14 Speaker 05 So, so this is the last episode of the year. I thought the audience deserved an Anderson yawn.
1:05:20 Robert Evans? That's right. You're getting one for me too. I'm tired.
1:05:23 Speaker 05 I'm tired.
1:05:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's been a long year, friends. Yep. Hopefully the next one is better.
1:05:31 Robert Evans? Yeah. Yeah. Be the Clarkson you want to see in the world or
1:05:37 Speaker 05 Second dog, second dog.
1:05:40 Speaker 01 A second dog has hit the podcast.
1:05:42 Speaker 05 A second dog has hit the podcast.
1:05:47 Speaker 05 James, you want to plug your book one more time?
1:05:49 Speaker 01 I would love to plug my book. Yeah. If you want to read more about people who are struggling to make the world better, you can buy my book. You can preorder it now at AK Press. AKpress.org/againstastate will have a link for you. Book is called Against the State. Looks at the revolutionary struggles in Myanmar, Rojava and in Spain. If you don't know what Rojava is, you can also listen to Robert's excellent podcast, The Women's War. And but I hope that just like this podcast, my book leaves you feeling a little hopeful. And certainly like the time that Robert and I have spent talking to young people fighting for liberation in Myanmar is one of the things that I go back to when I, when I need a little hope these days. So I hope the book can share some of that with all of you.
1:06:35 Robert Evans? Yeah. I hope that too. And I hope you all have a good, whatever you celebrate or don't celebrate, or just a good end to December, or a good Christmas, or if I assume there's other holidays this time of the year.
1:06:48 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:06:48 Robert Evans? New years, whatever. Have fun.
1:06:50 Speaker 01 Yeah. If you don't have to work, that's nice, isn't it?
1:06:53 Speaker 05 We'll be, we'll be back with some new episodes in 2026.
1:06:58 Robert Evans? Yes, we will.
1:06:59 Speaker 01 So many new episodes.
1:07:00 Speaker 05 So many episodes. Bye bye.
1:07:03 Robert Evans? Bye.
1:07:07 Speaker 05 Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.
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Previous Part Two: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade Next CZM Rewind: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult & The Zizians: Birth of a Cult Leader Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
