The slave trade has been abolished, but the number of slaves within the British Empire remains colossal. Thomas Fowell Buxton, the Elephant, has taken the mantle of leadership from William Wilberforce with one singular aim: the complete abolition of slavery. But how will he fare against the West India Interest? Listen as William and Anita are once again joined by Michael Taylor to discuss how much of the British establishment united to try and block his efforts.

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Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnon

And this is part 2 on the abolition of slavery.

And if you didn't hear Tuesday's, go back and listen.

It's brilliant because we have a fabulous guest in the shape of historian Michael Taylor, who's written this wonderful book called The Interest, which catalogues the stages from Britain being the biggest slave owning nation in the world to actually being the spearhead of the abolition first of the trade and then of slavery itself.

So the last episode was really about how it wasn't the same thing.

There were 2 different things going on here.

The abolition of the trade was 1 thing, which was supported by the Royal Navy that went out and stopped slave carrying ships.

But that is not the same as saying that actually slavery was abolished on the same day because actually as Michael pointed out rather startlingly in the last episode of the pod, the number of slaves increased after that abolition of the trade.

And so we pick up now, you had introduced us to this rather marvelous character, Thomas Fowl Buxton, the leader of the Anti-Slavery Society.

I'm going to read you just something that he said in Parliament in May 1823.

The state of slavery is repugnant to the principles of the British Constitution and of the Christian religion.

It ought to be gradually abolished throughout the British colonies.

And this is a new message isn't it Michael Taylor, that actually the whole thing has got to go now, not just part, the whole thing.

It is for the first time the abolitionists who had for so long disavowed any intent to emancipate the slaves themselves.

They would not go after property, they would not go after the bedrock of colonial society, have now decided that they need to act and that they need to encourage the abolition of slavery throughout the colonies.

Michael, is there a road to Damascus moment that leads to that change of tack?

Because it seems to me that's a huge moment when they decide to disavow their former promises to the slavers that they're not going to go after their property.

What happens is that in late 1822 James Cropper, who is a merchant from Liverpool who is an abolitionist and it will not surprise you to learn is a Quaker, writes to all of his old friends and says right okay we've got to do something now because the abolitionists had assumed that slavery would wither and die out if the planters were forbidden from refreshing the slave population by importing new blood, as they called it, from Africa.

That they would, by gradual stages, have to improve the livelihoods and the conditions in which the slaves lived, and that the slave population would gradually become what the abolitionists hoped would be a free black peasantry, which is what they called it.

What's the any, I mean, this is a sort of maybe not question, but given the terrible conditions in the slave colonies and given the fact that the numbers continue to keep rising and yet the ports are being policed, the Royal Navy is out there capturing slave ships and sending them back or send them to Sierra Leone or the free colonies.

How do the slave owners manage to keep the numbers up?

Do they have I mean, it's a horrible idea.

What are they doing to maintain their number?

when you said it made me feel sick actually.

But we've seen before in this episode that even Thistlewood, our demon planter from Tacky's Revolt, does indeed have something like this.

Yes, so the comparison that I made, and it's quite a distasteful comparison in the last episode, was that the slaveholders are now forced to look at the enslaved people on their plantations, not as disposable property, but as long-term investments.

So they do begin to take better care of them, although everything is relative.

These are still fearfully dreadful conditions.

The numbers are relatively static, maybe increase a little bit in the existing colonies, but the British Empire has expanded.

It has gotten new slave colonies in Demerara in South America, what we now call Guyana, and in Mauritius.

was combined with the colonies of Rabis and Essequibo to become Guyana in 1831.

these slavers who have been very resistant for enormously compelling economic reasons, they do all though, I mean, they have a sort of a union of sorts called the London Society of West India Planters and their heroes are dug in quite deeply except there is a friendship that is at the heart of a change here too.

So, you've got the man who is running this London Society of West India Planters is a man called Charles Rose Ellis and he happens to, you know, we talked so beautifully about this dinner party that William Pitt happened to be at and who becomes very important later on in the politics of abolition.

But he is best friends with a man called George Canning.

So this friendship, you're right, is absolutely essential to understanding the early part of the campaign against slavery.

George Canning had for the past 20 years been 1 of the most important and influential politicians in Britain.

He had been a disciple in his early days of William Pitt the Younger.

He famously duels with Castle Ray and gets shot in Putney Heath after a disagreement about troop movements.

kills himself in 1822 and so Canning who had been out of favour is called back in to be not only leader of the House of Commons but also the Foreign Secretary and he is arguably the most important person in the government.

Lord Liverpool is Prime Minister but it's Canning who is really driving everything.

And you're right, he is best friends with Charles Rossellus who is the chairman of the West India Interest which is the interest of the title of my book.

We should quickly maybe add that Lord Liverpool is an Anglo-Indian.

We had our only Anglo-Indian Prime Minister.

I'm just gonna let that fact just sit on my shoulder for a little while.

I don't think it was something he trumpeted from the depths of Downing Street, but it's the nearest thing we had to Rishi Sunak before Rishi Sunak.

Well, may I just issue a bloody hell, that was 1 of those bloody hells, I didn't know that.

Okay, so yes, Canning, the most important, most influential parliamentarian under Liverpool, and what does he believe, what does he care about, Canning?

So his own self-promotion is 1 thing but Canning is also 1 of these statesmen who no matter how much you might disagree vehemently with the positions that he takes and the opinions that he has.

He really does care about British greatness and the interests of the state.

And he is incredibly important in not only the famous phrase he says, he brings the new world into existence to balance out the old.

He's essential to the Monroe Doctrine, he's essential to recognizing the independence of all the former Spanish imperial colonies that become places like Mexico and Peru and Colombia.

And what he wants above all else is to guarantee British strategic security in the Western Hemisphere.

And we've talked before about how there is a fear, a prevalent fear, that if slaves are emancipated too soon, there might be scenes of rebellion and bloodshed and the colonies could be lost.

So for Canning, the idea that we should emancipate immediately is completely inconceivable.

And to be fair to Buxton, he is politically aware to this, and there's an important word that you mentioned, which is gradually.

And so the abolitionists are not going after the immediate emancipation of slavery, they want it to be a gradual process, at least at first.

And the importance of Canning's friendship to Charles Rosellis is that whenever Buxton stands up and says, right, we should do something about this, we need to start acting about slavery, and Canning from the other side of the house nods sagely and says that's a very good thing to do in fact I will recommend a process of amelioration which is the improvement of the condition of the slaves and this appears to be a wonderful victory for the abolitionists they think right we've got the Tories we've got the government on side they're going to do something The problem is that a month before that night in the House of Commons, the West India interest, tipped off by Canning, had already met and proposed the measures to the government.

So it's the West Indian planters themselves who are drafting the resolutions that the government will adopt.

And Michael, just to be clear about this, who are the members of the London Society of the West Indian Planters?

Are they aristocrats with large landed interests or is it a joint venture with the Liverpool and Manchester merchants?

What sort of people are we talking about in this group?

Well so certainly cities like Glasgow and Liverpool and Bristol have got their own West Indian societies, their own West Indian interests but it is the London interest which is really the controlling committee.

And just who is a member of the interest can vary quite wildly depending on how you define it.

But, you know, looking through the legacies of British slave ownership website and looking through Hansard at the time, we can say with reasonable confidence that there are about a hundred MPs at this moment who are connected to the West India interest.

There are quite a lot of members of the House of Lords, somebody like the Earl of Harwood from Yorkshire is a West Indian slaveholder.

There are lots of journalists, there are lots of financiers, there are judges, soldiers, it's really, really a powerful interest.

And could you compare this to a modern political lobbying group like the National Rifle Association or something in the States?

Are they giving money to journalists to write articles for them and this sort of thing?

I think that's probably quite a fair comparison.

They have a clubhouse there, which is very close to the houses of Parliament and they put an awful lot of money into the right-wing press.

Through bribery or I mean literal paying journalists to write pieces?

Some bribery, some direct payments, some just very good friendships in the conservative press.

So John Murray which is the still excellent publishing house is the most influential publisher probably in the English-speaking world in the 1820s.

Yeah absolutely so he puts his publishing house basically at the West Indians disposal.

The quarterly review which is the most important magazine in the world, is a home for pro-slavery literature.

Okay, but I mean they've got printed matter on their side but so do the abolitionists.

So I mean this is really important to remember this is a time of print war.

So pamphlets carry a great deal of impact.

There are other newspapers, people are voraciously reading at this time.

And Buxton's message, the anti-slavery message is also being proliferated around the world.

Most importantly, it reaches places like Demerara.

And some people credit actually the seeping of the ink towards places like Demerara for a slave revolt that takes place because those who are, you know, those enslaved Africans who are working on Demerara get to hear that there is such a thing as an anti-slavery society, there is a man called Buxton who is trying to free us.

You know, is Buxton's proliferation of his message the cause of that uprising because some people certainly blame him for it those who don't thank him for it do blame him for it.

So it's important to remember some of the incidents we talked about in the first episode.

So whenever the Haitian Revolution happens abolitionists are blamed, whenever the rebellion and Barbados happens in 1816 the slave registry is blamed.

from a plantation owned by the Liverpool merchant prince John Gladstone, the father of future Prime Minister William Gladstone, there is a rebellion of slaves in Demerara.

It is once again the abolitionists who are blamed for this.

Now I don't necessarily credit that, I think the horrors of slavery itself are a pretty good excuse for an enslaved uprising but certainly there's some blame attached to Buxton for raising the issue of rights being denied to enslaved Africans in Parliament and some blame is attached to the missionary John Smith who has been preaching the gospel and attempting to convert the enslaved Africans in Demerara to Christianity.

And you have some of these missionaries actually being physically attacked by mobs in the West Indies.

You have this guy Shrewsbury attacked in Barbados.

Yeah, so Shrewsbury, you know, an incredibly earnest, hopeful young man goes out to Barbados and establishes a Methodist chapel on the island.

And his great sin, apart from not being an Anglican, because most of the planters and the aristocracy in the island are Anglican, is to preach to not only the slaves but to the free blacks on the island.

And there are a few free black people on Barbados.

And so over the course of 1823 Shrewsbury becomes a figure of persecution by what is basically a pro-slavery Anglican mob.

They gather rounds his church, they throw you know the equivalent of stink bombs and petrol bombs through the windows of the church, hurting the black congregants.

And eventually they chase him off the island.

They tear down his house and they compare this to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.

And Shrewsbury and his pregnant wife have to hurry down a cliffside into a boat and they beat away trying to get to Dominica and to safety.

It was a very very dangerous thing in Jamaica, in Demerara, in Barbados to be preaching to slaves but also to be preaching a version of Christianity which emphasizes things like the Exodus and liberation rather than rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

And also I mean these things happening to you know Shurah Hezbollah and his wife and as you say that I mean that that is a compelling piece of propaganda for those who want to, you know, ha ha I told you what would happen if you, you know, give an inch and this is the kind of thing that will happen to, you know, good white Christian folk.

Is that how it translates back here in Britain and what impact does that have?

So if you're already predisposed to favour the persistence and the continuance of slavery you're going to look at something like the Demerara Rebellion and you're going to blame it on the abolitionists just as the abolitionists had been blamed for the uprising in Barbados in 1816 and even for the Saint-Domingue Revolution in

But it does cut both ways because the terrible treatment of John Smith, who the Demerairon authorities imprison and who dies in prison of consumption, means that he becomes a martyr for the anti-slavery cause and it maybe seems a little bit perverse that no matter how many hundreds of thousands if not millions of black people have died in slavery over the course of the previous couple of hundred years in British colonies, it's the death of this 1 white man, a good Christian missionary, that finally gives them this figurehead to rally around.

So I mean that's interesting, so you know the Shrewsbury case is all-powerful because it is a white man and a white woman fleeing for their lives and then the man who they blame for that, who's put in prison and dies in prison is a white man and upon these 2 people history pivots, you put it beautifully.

Okay, so what is the government's reaction to the slave revolt?

Well for somebody like George Canning who receives the news of the uprising in Demerara, at the same time that Buxton is meeting with him, he is absolutely aghast.

This reinforces his belief that whatever action is taken cannot happen too quickly and perhaps should be reversed.

I mean, that's not to say that there is nothing that happens because after Smith's martyrdom, there is a groundswell of abolitionist activity.

And in 1824, the government issues an order in council.

So basically an executive order, which applies to the island of Trinidad.

Trinidad doesn't have its own constituent assembly, it doesn't have its own charter, so the government can use it as a sandbox for abolitionist activity and it imposes the resolutions that had been agreed the year before in Trinidad.

But this is really a kind of sop to the abolitionist movement.

1 island out of the whole of the Caribbean and these measures aren't really designed to do all that much.

In fact, they're designed as a kind of a dead letter to appease the abolitionists at home, to give the appearance that something is being done for the slaves.

And Canning comes into battle now reaffirming his pro-slavery credentials with this horrible speech about Frankenstein.

To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, he's talking about the liberation of the slaves, in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.

It's a terrible, terrible quote from Canning.

It is, it's this constant fear that because in the opinion of the pro-slavery lobby and their allies in government, that Africans are uncivilised, that they are still savage and barbarous and basically children in the great scale of civilization that if you were to emancipate them too soon that they, like Frankenstein's monster, would wreak a terrible vengeance upon the people who had created them and oppressed them beforehand.

Now enter the scene, anyone who listens to this podcast will know I love a kick-ass woman, I live for kick-ass women and enter the fray Elizabeth Heydrich who you know is looking at all of these sort of the ebbs and flows of sympathies, the nation's sympathies towards the complete abolition of slavery.

She comes forward, she's also a Quaker isn't she?

Tell us more about Elizabeth Heydrich and how much impact she has on this debate.

So it's important to emphasize that all of the official abolitionist activity is undertaken by men, Not just because only men can sit in the House of Commons but also because leading abolitionists like Wilberforce did not think that it was right and proper for women to be involved in this kind of stuff.

Hayrick has got absolutely no time for that.

She's also got absolutely no time for the mealy-mouthed gradualism of some of the abolitionist leaders.

I feel a new Anita biography coming on here.

Sitting up straight in my chair, William.

No, And she understands that even if the abolitionists are making these incredibly sophisticated complicated arguments about the impropriety and the inefficiency of slavery, the man in the street just is not going to care or understand them.

But what she knows is that if she can organise a widespread boycott of slave-grown sugar this is something that people can buy into and this is something that will hurt the West Indians on the bottom line.

the kind of BDS or the anti-apartheid struggle?

It is, It's a boycott of West Indian produce.

And it's the encouragement instead of buying in sugar or other comparable produce from admittedly other colonial territories such as the East Indies, that is cultivated by people who are nominally free even if they are also working under horrendous conditions.

This is very important and the East India Company goes to town on this and starts producing sugar in jars that you still see in museums with this phrase not made by slaves.

I just want to spend a bit more time on our girl, Elizabeth.

Yes, I mean, so she's, I've just been looking at pictures of her because I could become obsessed at trying to crawl into somebody's life through their face, but she's a very stern looking.

I'm not sure what age she is when she's doing it, but certainly the portraits of her.

Very dark eyes, very prominent but elegantly arched eyebrows and she looks stern.

She's there in sort of her lace bonnet, But she's in charge in these portraits that I've seen of her.

She is 1 of the great grassroots organisers and this is a campaign that involves so many more people than anything like a high political campaign could do.

Because at the time, if you are a woman in charge of the purse strings of your household.

That gives you quite a considerable degree of power in the marketplace.

And if you can swing all of your household's expenditure towards places like the East Indies, and the East India Company is accused of conspiring with the abolitionists because of this, and people like Buxton and Wilberforce are accused of being East India Company lackeys, then you can make a real difference in the way that, you know, high-minded arguments in Parliament maybe don't reach as many people.

So she's, you know, so she's launching this incredibly successful campaign about, you know, buy sugar with a conscience in effect.

I mean, today we're used to, say, the BDS movement or the campaign against apartheid and using economic boycotts as a means of political pressure.

Is she the person that invents this technique?

She resurrects this during the campaign against slavery, but it's also very active during the campaign against the slave trade itself and there are there are companies who will only deal in free grown produce and in fact there are companies such as the 1 that Macaulay is involved in so the historians father Zachary is involved in the company which sells goes it goes out to Sierra Leone and tries to deal with the African chiefs who are selling their people to slave traders.

It tries to sell them goods so they will not be bartering with people.

They were trying to sell things for cash.

Okay, and at this point, I mean, we've sort of lost sight of our friend William Wilberforce, but he then re-enters the fray in a way, you know, sort of the voice comes back.

I mean, he hasn't stopped doing things, but others have moved into the forefront of this campaign.

But now Wilberforce is back and he says, look, we want commissions, a Royal Commission to investigate slavery and that is a really, I mean that's a very important point in the history of the abolition of slavery because people are looking and they're going to be stats, economic stats which are very convincing placed against some horrifying descriptions.

Well I would say that it probably should have been 1 of the great turning points in this campaign.

So Wilberforce gets this commission appointed, and 2 commissioners are sent out to the to the West Indian island of Tortola to examine how the Africans who have been liberated from slave ships are faring.

The commissioners that they send out, 1 is a reformed slaveholder and now a sturdy abolitionist.

The other is 1 of the most virulently pro slavery characters of this whole drama, Colonel Thomas Moody.

And so they both spend weeks and months out there, they conduct their surveys and their interviews.

The problem is that Duggan, who's the abolitionist, dies during the writing of the reports and Moody gets to dictate everything that happens.

So he produces this report and then he gets rewarded with a job at the colonial office looking at the slavery and the slave trade.

So again there's this kind of regulatory capture of the whole governmental process.

And and rising at this point as a champion of the pro-slavery lobby is the Duke of Wellington, who again, you know, these characters that we have on our bank notes who like Churchill and Duke of Wellington, the closer you look at their views on anything to do with empire or slavery, the worse that these things get.

So what is the Duke of Wellington's position?

So the political context of this is really really important.

So Lord Liverpool dies in 1827, he's a stroke where he retires then he dies the next year.

George Canning takes over but Canning himself dies in August 1827.

The slightly more liberal Viscount Goodrich takes over and by January 1828 you have the Duke of Wellington, 1 of the most reactionary Tories as Prime Minister.

At this time the anti-slavery movement is almost dead.

Buxton himself falls really seriously ill, in fact he's knocked out unconscious for 10 days by an illness.

He refuses to believe that he's been asleep for so long and they have to show him a copy of the Times with the day's date on it to convince him that he's been asleep for so long.

Things are not looking terribly good, but there is a bright spot on the horizon for the abolitionist movement and that, coming from left field, is the issue of Catholic emancipation.

The Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, who was his Home Secretary at the time, do not want to grant Catholics rights, such as the ability to enter Parliament, but they realise that if they don't, there's the risk of civil war in Ireland.

Wellington, the old soldier, knows he doesn't really want to fight that war because it will be brutal and it will be terrible.

reluctantly, they pass Catholic emancipation and this splits the Tories apart.

So finally there is a political gap for the Whigs who are much much more likely to support emancipation and in 1830 Earl Grey and the Whigs are invited to form a minority government and this for the abolitionists is their chance.

Okay Earl Grey many will know for his excellent cups of tea, but tell us more about Earl Grey, tell me what kind of figure he is.

So I've just actually finished editing the papers belonging to 1 of Earl Grey's sons who was an admiral in the Navy, so hopefully I should know enough.

He's been in Parliament for about 40 years by this stage.

He has always supported parliamentary reform as his primary objective.

But he is now invited to form this government in 1830.

This is not to say that he's a radical or a liberal.

In fact, the government that he forms is perhaps the most aristocratic in British history and it involves a number of Grey's own family and it's a minority, it hasn't got that much power and it's not going to address itself directly to slavery first of all.

In fact Earl Grey is really quite concerned that his son who's called Viscount Howick at the time is a little bit too ardent in his support for abolition but he's not a Tory, he's not in the pocket of the slaveholders and this really really matters over the next few years.

It's a really good point and now I've mentioned tea, it's all I can think about.

To take a little tea break, we're going to take a break here.

Join us after the break where we continue with this rather marvellous story in the company of an excellent historian, Michael Taylor.

Hi, Pauline MacLynn here sharing something really important.

When someone's having a stroke, minutes matter because 2000000 brain cells die every minute.

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Slavery's Demise