How the British (and evangelical Christians) ended slavery worldwide and in Canada

Mark Milke, published in The Christians.com, October 30, 2019

In this excerpt from my new book, The Victim Cult: How the culture of blame hurts everyone and wrecks civilizations, I detail how slavery was once routine in human history and how it came to be abolished. I note how even Europeans and Britons were once enslaved by attacking Moors and Barbary sailors and slave traders from the Middle Ages until the 18th century, and later, how evangelical Christians led by English parliamentarian William Wilberforce would lead the charge against slavery in the United Kingdom, Canada, and worldwide.

The core points in this chapter in The Victim Cult are two-fold: First, for all the victim narratives driven by anti-Western civilization rhetoric today, it was the British empire in specific and evangelicals who started, led and successfully fought to abolish slavery in the British empire and elsewhere. The second is that almost everyone’s ancestors were less than ideal, i.e., almost every society had the awful, evil mark of slavery on it. That should lead us today to grasp this reality: We have a lot more in common with each other than with our ancient tribes.  

Slavery in the time of Shakespeare

In July 1625, on the south coast of England, reports began to filter into villages about the arrival of corsairs (Barbary pirate ships) and which lurked near the shores. In one hamlet, the vice admiral of Cornwall was told at least “twentye sayle upon this coast.” The reference was to a fleet of corsairs in search of villagers near the English shore who could be easily captured and later sold into slavery in North Africa. As it happened, the early warnings were prescient. One village at Mount’s Bay was attacked while its villagers were at communal prayer; 60 women, men, and children were dragged from the church back to the ships.

That same summer, another Cornish settlement, Looe, was attacked: 80 mariners and fishermen were bound and taken to the corsairs, and into a life of slavery. More would have been captured but the villagers were warned and fled to the surrounding hills. In revenge, the invaders torched the town. Meanwhile, a second fleet of Barbary vessels had been spotted off the north Cornish coast; it captured Lundy Island in the Bristol channel, made it their base, raised the standard of Islam, and seized and sacked villages along the Cornish coast all summer. By one estimate, from the mayor of Plymouth, 1,000 English boats (skiffs) were destroyed that season with an equivalent number of English villagers captured and transported off to slavery in North Africa.

The Duke of Buckingham ordered a defence against the corsairs to be led by Francis Stuart; but the Duke was realistic about the odds, noting that “they [the corsairs] are better pirates than the English ships.” The attacks that summer were not unique. Fifteen years previous, one historical estimate placed the number of white Europeans (here used broadly to include those from the British Isles) already enslaved in North Africa at between 25,000 and 80,000. Thus, even before the attack on Cornwall, traffickers in human flesh had hunted for slaves among English and European coastal towns and villages for years. By the time inhabitants of Mount Bay were rounded up and into Barbary corsairs, the threats of such attacks were already long a recurring threat for those in the British Isles and for coastal Europeans.

Between 1609 and 1616, one official report notes at least 466 English ships were captured and their crews thrown into slavery, often with ex-English-sailor assistance to the corsairs. Elsewhere, the pirates and slave-traders attacked the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira in 1617 and captured at least 1,200 people. One decade later, 800 captives, mostly women and children, were snatched in Reykjavik and other Icelandic towns by Barbary forces. In 1631, the Dutch traitor Morat Rais raided the Irish town of Baltimore and carried off 20 men, 89 women, and some additional human cargo—children. One account notes that all of Baltimore’s inhabitants had been seized. Ceriale, Italy, was raided in 1637 by Algerian and Tunisian sailors, with “64 men, 94 children, and 125 women” taken; also in 1637, Algerians raided Calpe in Spain and left with a bounty of 315 captives, mostly women and children. In 1645, a night-time raid on Cornwall by a Cornish renegade and their Barbary companions resulted in “goods and prisoners, including about 200 women, some of them ladies of rank and fortune,” according to the contemporary account.

By the mid-17th century, attacks upon European shipping and populations from Iceland in the north to Sicily in the south had been ongoing for eight centuries. But that the English and Irish coasts once served up human cargo is mostly forgotten in the mists of time. The image of North Atlantic English villages raided by North African pirates and slave-traders seems at odds with the perceived power relationships of that era, for instance, the strengthening of England under Queen Elizabeth in the late-16th century and the seafaring power for which that country would later become known. But in the early-17th century, England was not yet the master of the waves and its coastline was still a source of vulnerability. There is another reason why the image of pleasant English villages near to the Elizabethan and Shakespearean eras accosted by slave-traders is forgotten: because the trade in “white flesh,” while substantial in its own time, was understandably eclipsed in our collective, historical memory by the later, much larger trans-Atlantic trade in black Africans.

Slavery in the Pacific Northwest

A world away, in the lush rainforests of the upper and isolated inlets and interior of the Pacific Northwest, the moral stain common to the rest of humanity was also present. “Slavery was a permanent status in all Northwest Coast societies,” wrote anthropologist Leland Donald in his 1997 book, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America. Slaves could end up in that predicament for any number of reasons: captured as part of inter-tribal warfare, after inter-tribal raids, born to an existing slave, or if they were an orphan (which could lead to enslavement even in one’s own tribe, as occurred among the Clayoquot, Lummi, Chinook, and Puyalup-Nisqually). A wife could be sold and enslaved through a deliberate attempt by her husband at humiliation (recorded among the Haida, for example). One could even end up in slavery voluntarily, this to pay off one’s debts, a practice that occurred in other societies where slavery was present. As with slavery elsewhere in the world, captives in the Pacific Northwest were considered property. They were sometimes given as gifts, including at potlatches; on other occasions slaves substituted as payment for fees due to shamans.

Slavery in the Pacific Northwest developed at some point between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500, long before European contact, and at contact, slaves were clearly set apart from the existing tribal ranking system and prestige-seeking in the region. Early indigenous peoples also possessed other practices that predated contact with the British and Europeans: cannibalism and the killing of slaves, the latter of which also occurred and for a variety of reasons: funeral feasts, the building of a new home, a new title, the erection of a totem pole, or as part of the ceremony at potlatches. A Russian Orthodox priest recounted how in one Sitka ceremony where a new clan chief was appointed, four slaves were strangled as part of the ritual.

On another occasion, among both the Mowachaht and the Clayoquot, a slave was killed to celebrate the first whale kill of the season. In Tlinglit folklore, a memorial potlatch was necessary so fellow spirits in the village of the dead would not despise the newly deceased. The memorial included the murder of a slave. Among the Nuu-cah-nulth, a wolf dance also occasioned the taking of a slave’s life. Lastly, in one account of a ceremony at Fort Rupert, British Columbia, two female slaves were burnt as part of a ceremonial display, though they volunteered in the belief they would be resurrected four days hence. The regional slave trade was numerically smaller in absolute terms, though similar as a proportion of some local populations, ranging from almost nil to as high as 40%; the average was 15% of the local population.

How slavery ended: England and evangelical Christians

Anti-slavery advocacy and animus in the United Kingdom and around the world was driven by evangelical Christian anti-slavery societies, whose religious objections to slavery was grounded in their view of men as made in the image of God regardless of race and equal in his eyes. Such abolitionists also found a political champion in William Wilberforce, the British parliamentarian whose decades-long efforts to abolish slavery were inspired by his own evangelical faith. Wilberforce’s first known act of opposition to the slave trade occurred in 1773, when he was 14 years old, in a letter to a York newspaper where he wrote “in condemnation of the odious traffic in human flesh.”

Seven years later, Wilberforce was elected as a member of parliament. Wilberforce’s early convictions showed publicly in his first major assault on slavery in 1789 with his May 12 speech in parliament on the matter. In it, Wilberforce condemns not the slave-holders first but instead takes responsibility himself and also for his nation: “I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself in common with the whole Parliament of Great Britain for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under our authority,” said Wilberforce. It was a long, eloquent, and even charitable speech meant to persuade slaveholders and their parliamentary supporters with reason and an appeal to conscience. Wilberforce then moved 12 resolutions including an early plea for abolition, though that and the others failed. The independent member of parliament followed up with anti-slavery bills in 1791, 1792, 1793, 1797, 1798, 1799, 1804, 1805, 1806, and 1807. Due to his efforts and others, in one month alone (in 1807), parliament received 800 separate petitions calling for an end to slavery, with 700,000 signatures. At the time, the population of Great Britain was just 10.9 million.

Wilberforce would expend his entire parliamentary career and ultimately his life to effect abolition. One of Wilberforce’s first abolition bills, in 1793, fell short by just eight votes, but successes included the Foreign Slave Trade Bill (in 1806) and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (in the House of Lords, in 1807). While the trade was outlawed in 1807, slavery in the empire was still allowed until 1833, when the government finally introduced the Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished slavery and freed slaves across the British Empire effective the following year. That was eight years after Wilberforce left parliament due to ill health. Gravely ill in 1833, when the Whig government introduced the compromises necessary to obtain passage of the Slavery Abolition Act, Wilberforce was informed of the government’s plans, and in what seems to have been a self-induced will to live until his cause reached fulfillment, Wilberforce would die just two days later on July 29, 1833, at the age of 73.

Canadian abolitionist actions

Canada’s colonial governors and justices took their lead from London and from Wilberforce. John Graves Simcoe, the governor of Upper Canada between 1791 and 1796, was himself inspired by Wilberforce and pledged from the start of his governorship that any laws and policies in his domain that provided a framework and supported slavery were henceforth under attack. Thus, two years after his arrival, Simcoe introduced a “frontal assault” on slavery within the province, which made the importation of any more slaves illegal, a first step often used by abolitionists to erode slavery as an institution. While that act did not free existing slaves—there were yet businessmen and others who held slaves and supported the practice—Simcoe’s action set in motion slavery’s decline in Upper Canada, including placing slave-owners on the moral defensive.

On the other side of the country, it was the British along with Americans who would end slavery in the region, though given the remoteness, the practice would continue for another six decades before it was fully abolished. As one example, in British Columbia, in 1840, six years after the Slavery Abolition Act took effect (it was passed in 1833 and effective in 1834), James Douglas, later a governor of Vancouver Island but then commanding Fort Vancouver, wrote of how the Taku Tlingit prized slaves above all other property, slaves being “the most saleable commodity here.” He noted that in the case of the Haida, many predatory raids for slaves were undertaken not to revenge past battles, “but simply with a sordid view to the profits that may arise from the sale of the captives taken.”

Why it matters

In the context of today’s grievance narratives, the worldwide history of slavery, including the forgotten captured from the shores of England and Europe and aboriginal-on-aboriginal slavery in the Pacific Northwest, are useful to recount to make this point: Any sensible person alive today should rather “break bread” with almost anyone in any country now rather than over-celebrate one’s ancestors, given almost everyone’s  ancestral tree has the awful mark of slavery on it, or worse. And a secondary point: It was only the colonial-era British who were determined to wipe slavery from humanity’s list of acceptable practices. That matters in an age where victim narratives are driven by a focus on the sins of Western nations but rarely those of other civilizations. Just as rarely do the critics consider what the world might look like had the West and its ideas and actions, including its positive contributions such as the abolitionist movement, been absent. Everyone’s ancestors, at some point, made everyone else’s life as per Thomas Hobbes’s description: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It helps to recall that truth, lest modern victim-cults continue to be enamoured with long-dead tribes.

Slavery touched nearly every corner of our world, and until very recently. Two centuries ago, few desired its elimination and even fewer were willing to fight that assumption. The modern bias against the colonial British is often one-sided, tallying up colonial ills but not benefits. That makes history incomplete: That nation and imperial power was the first to even attempt to remove a longstanding scourge of mankind from mankind and over the objections of rulers and populations in much of the rest of the world, who only recognized such civil rights later. It is also why romanticizing our own tribes is often faulty and folly: We too easily ignore the benefits another tribe introduced into ours.

The earliest abolitionists, British and imperial, helped rescue all of humanity’s tribes—be they European, those in the Americas, in Africa, and in the Arab world—from humanity’s most enduring sin and from their own contemporaries who practised it. It was a significant accomplishment. It is also why those of us alive today should prefer the company of each other, over too-easy identification with those of an earlier era, merely because they share some family bloodline, ethnicity, or national heritage. It is preferable to identify specific, heroic people in any society in any era and identify with them; after all, many of our ancestors were ignoble in comparison.

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From The Victim Cult: How the culture of blame hurts everyone and wrecks civilizations. Published by Thomas & Black. Copyright 2019 by Mark Milke. Foreword by Ellis Ross. Image credit: ‘Superred’, Pixabay.

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