Part 22 (2/2)
As it was a pity that such correct information as that taken down in writing upon the spot should be lost (for all the other evidences, except Dr. Spaarman and Mr. Wadstrom, had spoken from their memory only), I made all the interest I could to procure a hearing for Mr.
Arnold. Pleading now for the examination of him only, and under these particular circ.u.mstances, I was attended to. It was consented, in consequence of the little time which was now left for preparing and printing the report, that I should make out his evidence from his journal under certain heads. This I did. Mr. Arnold swore to the truth of it, when so drawn up, before Edward Montague, Esquire, a master in Chancery. He then delivered the paper in which it was contained to the lords of the council, who, on receiving it, read it throughout, and then questioned him upon it.
At this time, also, my brother returned with accounts and papers relative to the Slave Trade from Havre de Grace; but as I had pledged myself to offer no other person to be examined, his evidence was lost.
Thus, after all the pains we had taken, and in a contest, too, on the success of which our own reputation and the fate of Africa depended, we were obliged to fight the battle with sixteen less than we could have brought into the field; while our opponents, on the other hand, on account of their superior advantages, had mustered all their forces, not having omitted a single man.
I do not know of any period of my life in which I suffered so much, both in body and mind, as from the time of resuming these public inquiries by the privy council, to the time when they were closed. For I had my weekly duty to attend at the committee for the abolition during this interval. I had to take down the examinations of all the evidences who came to London, and to make certain copies of these. I had to summon these to town, and to make provision against all accidents; and here I was often troubled, by means of circ.u.mstances, which unexpectedly occurred, lest, when committees of the council had been purposely appointed to hear them, they should not be forthcoming at the time. I had also a new and extensive correspondence to keep up; for the tables of questions which had been sent down to our correspondents, brought letters almost innumerable on this subject, and they were always addressed to me. These not only required answers of themselves, but as they usually related to persons capable of giving their testimony, and contained the particulars of what they could state, they occasioned fresh letters to be written to others. Hence the writing often of ten or twelve daily became necessary.
But the contents of these letters afforded the circ.u.mstances, which gave birth to so much suffering. They contained usually some affecting tale of woe. At Bristol my feelings had been hara.s.sed by the cruel treatment of the seamen, which had come to my knowledge there: but now I was doomed to see this treatment over again in many other melancholy instances; and, additionally, to take in the various sufferings of the unhappy slaves. These accounts I could seldom get time to read till late in the evening, and sometimes not till midnight, when the letters containing them were to be answered. The effect of these accounts was in some instances to overwhelm me for a time in tears, and in others to produce a vivid indignation, which affected my whole frame. Recovering from these, I walked up and down the room: I felt fresh vigour, and made new determinations of perpetual warfare against this impious trade. I implored strength that I might succeed. I then sat down, and continued my work as long as my wearied eyes would permit me to see. Having been agitated in this manner, I went to bed; but my rest was frequently broken by the visions which floated before me. When I awoke, these renewed themselves to me, and they flitted about with me for the remainder of the day. Thus I was kept continually hara.s.sed: my mind was confined to one gloomy and heart-breaking subject for months. It had no respite, and my health began now materially to suffer.
But the contents of these letters were particularly grievous, on account of the severe labours which they necessarily entailed upon me in other ways than those which have been mentioned. It was my duty, while the privy council examinations went on, not only to attend to all the evidence which was presented to us by our correspondents, but to find out and select the best. The happiness of millions depended upon it.
Hence I was often obliged to travel during these examinations, in order to converse with those who had been pointed out to us as capable of giving their testimony; and, that no time might be lost, to do this in the night. More than two hundred miles in a week were sometimes pa.s.sed over on these occasions.
The disappointments too, which I frequently experienced in journeys, increased the poignancy of the, suffering, which arose from a contemplation of the melancholy cases which I had thus travelled to bring forward to the public view. The reader at present can have no idea of these. I have been sixty miles to visit a person, of whom I had heard, not only as possessing important knowledge, but as espousing our opinions on this subject. I have at length seen him. He has applauded my pursuit at our first interview. He has told me, in the course of our conversation, that neither my own pen, nor that of any other man, could describe adequately the horrors, of the Slave Trade, horrors which he himself had witnessed. He has exhorted me to perseverance in this n.o.ble cause. Could I have wished for a more favourable reception!--But mark the issue. He was the nearest relation of a rich person concerned in the traffic; and if he were to come forward with his evidence publicly, he should ruin all his expectations from that Quarter. In the same week I have visited another at a still greater distance. I have met with similar applause. I have heard him describe scenes of misery which he had witnessed, and on the relation of which he himself almost wept. But mark the issue again.--”I am a surgeon,” says he; ”through that window you see a s.p.a.cious house; it is occupied by a West Indian. The medical attendance upon his family is of considerable importance to the temporal interests of mine. If I give you my evidence I lose his patronage. At the house above him lives a East Indian. The two families are connected: I fear, if I lose the support of one, I shall lose that of the other also: but I will give you privately all the intelligence in my power.”
The reader may now conceive the many miserable hours I must have spent, after such visits, in returning home; and how grievously my heart must have been afflicted by these cruel disappointments, but more particularly where they arose from causes inferior to those which have been now mentioned, or from little frivolous excuses, or idle and unfounded conjectures, unworthy of beings expected to fill a moral station in life. Yes, O man! often in these solitary journeyings have I exclaimed against the baseness of thy nature, when reflecting on the little paltry considerations which have smothered thy benevolence, and hindered thee from succouring an oppressed brother. And yet, on a further view of things, I have reasoned myself into a kinder feeling towards thee. For I have been obliged to consider ultimately, that there were both lights and shades in the human character; and that, if the bad part of our nature was visible on these occasions, the n.o.bler part of it ought not to be forgotten. While I pa.s.sed a censure upon those, who were backward in serving this great cause of humanity and justice, how many did I know, who were toiling in the support of it! I drew also this consolation from my reflections, that I had done my duty; that I had left nothing untried or undone; that amidst all these disappointments I had collected information, which might be useful at a future time; and that such disappointments were almost inseparable from the prosecution of a cause of such magnitude, and where the interests of so many were concerned:--
Having now given a general account of my own proceedings, I shall state those of the committee; or show how they contributed, by fulfilling the duties of their several departments, to promote the cause in the interim.
In the first place they completed the rules, or code of laws, for their own government.
They continued to adopt and circulate books, that they might still enlighten the public mind on the subject, and preserve it interested in favour of their inst.i.tution. They kept the press indeed almost constantly going for this purpose. They printed, within the period mentioned, RAMSAY'S, _Address on the proposed Bill for the Abolition; The Speech of Henry Beaufoy, Esq., on Sir William Dolben's Bill_, of which an extract is given in Chap. xxiii.; _Notes by a Planter on the two Reports from the Committee of the Honourable House of a.s.sembly of Jamaica_; _Observations on the Slave Trade_ by Mr. Wadstrom; and d.i.c.kSON'S _Letters on Slavery._ These were all new publications. To those they added others of less note, with new editions of the old.
They voted their thanks to the Rev. Mr. Clifford, for his excellent Sermon on the Slave Trade; to the pastor and congregation of the Baptist church at Maze Pond, Southwark, for their liberal subscription; and to John Barton, one of their own members, for the services he had rendered them. The latter, having left his residence in town for one in the country, solicited permission to resign, and hence this mark of approbation was given to him. He was continued also as an honorary and corresponding member.
They elected David Hartley and Richard Sharpe, Esqs., into their own body, and Alexander Jaffray, Esq., the Rev. Charles Symmons, of Haverfordwest, and the Rev. T. Burgess (afterwards bishop of Salisbury), as honorary and corresponding members. The latter had written _Considerations on the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade, upon grounds of natural, religious, and political Duty_, which had been of great service to the cause.
Of the new correspondents of the committee within this period I may first mention Henry Taylor, of North s.h.i.+elds; William Proud, of Hull; the Rev. T. Gisborne, of Yoxall Lodge; and William Ellford, Esq., of Plymouth. The latter as chairman of the Plymouth committee, sent up for inspection an engraving of a plan and section of a slave-s.h.i.+p, in which the bodies of the slaves were seen stowed in the proportion of rather less than one to a ton. This happy invention gave all those who saw it a much better idea, than they could otherwise have had, of the horrors of their transportation, and contributed greatly, as will appear, afterwards, to impress the public in favour of our cause.
The next, whom I shall mention, was C.L. Evans, Esq., of West Bromwich; the Rev. T. Clarke, of Hull; S.P. Wolferstan, of Stratford, near Tamworth; Edmund Lodge, Esq., of Halifax; the Rev. Caleb Rotheram, of Kendal; and Mr. Campbell Haliburton, of Edinburgh. The news which Mr.
Haliburton sent was very agreeable. He informed us that, in consequence of the great exertions of Mr. Alison, an inst.i.tution had been formed in Edinburgh, similar to that in London, which would take all Scotland under its care and management, as far as related to this great subject.
He mentioned Lord Gardenston as the chairman; Sir William Forbes as the deputy-chairman; himself as the secretary; and Lord Napier, Professor Andrew Hunter, Professor Greenfield, and William Creech, Adam Rolland, Alexander Ferguson, John d.i.c.kson, John Erskine, John Campbell, Archibald Gibson, Archibald Fletcher, and Horatius Canning, Esqrs., as the committee.
The others were, the Rev. J. Bidlake, of Plymouth; Joseph Storrs, of Chesterfield; William Fothergill, of Carr End, Yorks.h.i.+re; J. Seymour, of Coventry; Moses Neave, of Poole; Joseph Taylor, of Scarborough; Timothy Clark, of Doncaster; Thomas Davis, of Milverton; George Croker Fox, of Falmouth; Benjamin Grubb, of Clonmell in Ireland; Sir William Forbes, of Edinburgh; the Rev. J. Jamieson, of Forfar; and Joseph Gurney, of Norwich; the latter of whom sent up a remittance, and intelligence at the same time, that a committee, under Mr. Leigh, so often before mentioned, had been formed in that city[A].
[Footnote A: On the removal of Mr. Leigh from Norwich, Dr. Pretyman, precentor of Lincoln and a prebend of Norwich, succeeded him.]
But the committee in London, while they were endeavouring to promote the object of their inst.i.tution at home, continued their exertions for the same purpose abroad within this period.
They kept up a communication with the different societies established in America.
They directed their attention also to the continent of Europe. They had already applied, as I mentioned before, to the king of Sweden in favour of their cause, and had received a gracious answer. They now attempted to interest other Potentates in it. For this purpose they bound up in an elegant manner two sets of the _Essays on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, and on the Impolicy of the Slave Trade_, and sent them to the Chevalier de Pinto, in Portugal. They bound up in a similar manner three sets of the same, and sent them to Mr. Eden (afterwards Lord Aukland), at Madrid, to be given to the king of Spain, the Count d'Aranda, and the Marquis del Campomanes.
They kept up their correspondence with the committee at Paris, which had greatly advanced itself in the eyes of the French nation; so that, when the different bailliages sent deputies to the states-general, they instructed them to take the Slave Trade into their consideration as a national object, and with a view to its abolition.
They kept up their correspondence with Dr. Frossard of Lyons. He had already published in France on the subject of the Slave Trade; and now he offered the committee to undertake the task, so long projected by them, of collecting such arguments and facts concerning it, and translating them into different languages, as might be useful in forwarding their views in foreign parts.
They addressed letters also to various individuals, to Monsieur Snetlage, doctor of laws at Halle in Saxony; to Monsieur Ladebat, of Bordeaux; to the Marquis de Feuillade d'Aubusson, at Paris; and to Monsieur Necker. The latter in his answer replied in part as follows: ”As this great question,” says he, ”is not in my department, but in that of the minister for the colonies, I cannot interfere in it directly, but I will give indirectly all the a.s.sistance in my power. I have for a long time taken an interest in the general alarm on this occasion, and in the n.o.ble alliance of the friends of humanity in favour of the injured Africans. Such an attempt throws a new l.u.s.tre over your nation. It is not yet, however, a national object in France; but the moment may perhaps come, and I shall think myself happy in preparing the way for it. You must be aware, however, of the difficulties which we shall have to encounter on our side of the water; for our colonies are much more considerable than yours; so that in the view of political interest we are not on an equal footing. It will therefore be necessary to find some middle line at first, as it cannot be expected that humanity alone will be the governing principle of mankind.”
But the day was now drawing near, when it was expected that this great contest would be decided. Mr. Wilberforce, on the 19th of March, rose up in the House of Commons and desired the resolution to be read, by which the house stood pledged to take the Slave Trade into their consideration in the then session; He then moved that the house should resolve itself into a committee of the whole house on Thursday the 23rd of April, for this purpose. This motion was agreed to; after which he moved for certain official doc.u.ments necessary to throw light upon the subject in the course of its discussion.
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