Abstract
This article explores the British anti-slavery writings of the mid- to late 18th century, and the meanings which they gave to the idea of owning a property in the person. It addresses the construction of a particular moral and political landscape where freedom was understood as both a kind of property and as non-domination, and slavery was constructed as a form of theft, and as the exercise of arbitrary power. This created a complex moral space, where possession, commerce, savagery, tyranny and the emergence of race were all caught up with each other and entangled with the concept of consent. The article concludes with the suggestion that our current understandings of slavery continue to be informed by our notions of contract and consent, and so by conceptions of freedom and ownership that take us back to the tensions and debates of the 18th century.
The antislavery writings of the late 18th century were famously, and significantly, saturated with sentiment. 1 They were also central to the success of the abolitionist movement, and to ‘the unfolding of history in personalized terms’. The story of abolition was told as the triumph of good over evil, and in the process the abolitionists captured and held on to the moral high ground. 2 This was a complex moral space, and the antislavery movement colonized it through their Quakerism, through a brilliant propaganda campaign and through the mobilization of sentiment and sensibility. Antislavery writers addressed their readers’ humanity through sentiment, and focused on sharing the suffering of others. 3 This means that antislavery is read as a moral movement, driven by Enlightenment ideals, and by evangelicalism, and the abolitionists themselves are understood through their membership of a highly successful, and righteous, pressure group. While this sensibility is crucial for understanding antislavery writing, radical debate in Britain had also politicized slavery through its responses to the American Revolution. 4 Abolitionists had a great deal to say about slavery and property, and about how freedom was intrinsically connected to owning a property in the person. This article concentrates on these aspects of their arguments, on their doubts about holding private property in the person of another man. 5
Mark Philp identifies the pivot of 18th-century discourse as the balance between the executive and the legislative, and the concern to preserve the ‘rights of free-born Englishmen from encroaching executive despotism or arbitrary power’. 6 The loss of the American colonies in 1783 ‘prompted a reappraisal of a host of British ideals and systems’ 7 and radical debate in Britain was saturated not just with moral sentiments but also with political questions of liberty, representation and progress. Focusing on the abolitionists’ ideas about property and natural rights reveals what John Ashworth has termed their ‘selectivity’, the extent to which they cared about the slave trade and not about slavery, and about chattel slavery rather than wage slavery. 8 It also show us a ‘radical moment’ in the relationship between liberalism and race. In their writings, we can see the potential of an argument about universal humanity that is fatally undermined where it is undercut by particular, commercial and possessive understandings of property, personhood and freedom. As Philp’s discussion of 18th-century republicanism makes clear, the republican radicals themselves spoke very little about the realities of new world slavery. The abolitionists, in turn, did not speak directly back to republican concerns about the rights of freeborn Englishmen and the balance between executive and legislative power. Their arguments about natural rights, property in the person and arbitrary power both bridge and reveal this gap between knowing and not knowing about slavery, and so some of the ‘unspeakability’ of race for both republicans and abolitionists. 9
In the late 18th century, the subject of racial difference ‘was framed by the more flexible categories of savagery, civilization, commerce, and manners’, 10 and the writings of the abolitionists made important contributions to the attempt to distinguish between politeness and barbarity, modernity and the past, and so to the emerging concept of race. These categories were all caught up with ideas about property and freedom, and so at the heart of the abolitionist response to slavery lay the problem of the ownership of freedom and the limits of commodification. The ‘true owner’, Thomas Paine declared, ‘has a right to reclaim his goods that were stolen, and sold; so the slave, who is the proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold’. 11 This political understanding of slavery tells us something about the complexity of the moral space that the abolitionists were trying to inhabit. Is it compatible with universalism to concede that freedom can be bought and sold?
Marked for slavery?
The main focus of this paper is on the writings of Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, who were central to the personalized history of abolitionism, and on a less well-known ‘second league’ of thinkers, campaigners and pamphleteers, Dissenters such as Richard Hillier and John Beatson. They all shared a belief in the fundamental natural equality of mankind, and in the impossibility of buying and selling liberty. For them all, slavery was founded on injustice. Its inhumanity and its cruelty came out of the initial, unnatural claim to own a private property in the person of another human being. To make this case they began from an imagined state of nature, and from a fundamental postulate of equality. Mankind, they argued, derived its origin from the same source, and was under peculiar obligations ‘to exercise mutual regard, independent of complexion, language, country, religion, or any other tye to the offices of kindness’. 12 In taking this approach, John Beatson was contesting a set of arguments that were beginning to describe the ‘general physiognomy and intellectual capacity’ of whole ‘races’. 13 The idea that there were distinct races of men essentially different from one another, Beatson argued, ‘can never be admitted, even for a moment, by those who believe in Divine revelation’. 14
Nicholas Hudson has identified a shift during the 18th century ‘from a fascination with national difference to a preoccupation with “race”’. Africans lost their national identities to the slave trade, and to ‘a uniform system of debasement’ that erased all differences of language, country and religion. 15 Beatson’s response was to stress not ethnic diversity, but the logic of universality. Mankind was all one blood, all God’s offspring. They all ‘partake of the same common nature’ 16 and were equally possessed of immortal souls. It was a natural equality that extended across the globe. There was, Beatson argued, no solid reason to think the intellectual capacities of Africans were inferior to those of Europeans. Arguments about the inferiority of Africans’ capacities, Thomas Clarkson agreed, were wholly malevolent and false. Black Africans shared with Europeans the spirit of liberty, the sense of ignominy and shame, and the contemplative power of reason. They could not have been given these mental qualities and powers by God ‘for the sole purpose of being used as beasts, or instruments of labour’. 17
Following Hudson, we can see that Beatson and Clarkson were writing before the emergence of the formal doctrine of ‘race’, but in a context where some authors, especially those writing from the plantations of America, ‘considered black people only in the uprooted and dehumanized condition of slavery’.
18
Hudson gives the example of Thomas Jefferson who theorized about the temperament and capacities of ‘Negroes’ on the basis of his observations of his own slaves. Edward Long and other proslavery writers appealed to a theory of racial hierarchy, with ‘Negroes’, ‘Americans’ and other groups positioned at the bottom. The conception of ‘Negroes’ as radically, biologically inferior emerged as part of the scientific theory of race as scholars like Linnaeus and Buffon ‘converted the scattered misconceptions and antagonisms of traders and travelers into coherent systems’.
19
Beatson directly opposed both the language and the conviction of inferiority. ‘Negroes’, he insisted, was intended as a ‘term of degradation, if not of infamy. You would by this invidious appellation cut the link of brotherhood, and have it thought that the blood of such men is not congenial with your own, but that they are marked for slavery.’
20
He used the language of interchangeability and of injury to make his point, but he was not appealing only to sentiment, but also to a particular conception of political freedom and natural rights: But, supposing that some opprobrious appellation were fixed on us, taken from our colour or exterior appearance, and for this reason we were treated as an inferior species in the rank of beings, and, like the beasts we use, were on that account doomed to be the mere instruments of severe labour, having no will of our own, and wholly under the lawless discretion of a stranger: Should we not feel an essential injury was done to us? Should we not be conscious that our just and native rights were violently encroached on?
21
While it is obvious to us that scientific racism ultimately won out, Beatson’s position marks an interesting moment in liberalism, a point where there were, in theory, no individuals who could be ‘encroached upon with impunity’,
22
and so no subpersons. As Abraham Booth put it, natural rights to humanity were equally sacred in Africa: ‘Nor, other things being equal, is there the least reason for us to imagine, that the white skin of a European would provide any more protection against violent seizure, than does the black skin of an African’.
23
The law of nature, Anthony Benezet argued, … is obligatory on all men, at all times, and in all places. – Would not any of us, who should be snatched by pirates from his native land, think himself cruelly abused, and at all times intitled to be free? Have not these unfortunate Africans, who meet the same cruel fate, the same right? Are not they men as well as we, and have they not the same sensibility?
24
It was, William Fox argued, European pride that suggested to us that the rights of men were limited to any nation or to any colour: ‘Are then the offices of humanity and the functions of justice to be circumscribed by geographical boundaries?’ he asked. 26 The abolitionists stressed the duties that followed from the law of nature, and from the ‘universal reach’ of justice. 27 Their project, as both Fox and Paine defined it, was to combine justice with humanity. Basic regard meant that men ‘as men, ought to be treated in a just, and (when the case requires it) in a compassionate manner’. 28 Instead of recognizing the universal reach of justice and the link of brotherhood, in a world that allowed slavery, ‘we seem to act as if we thought the relief of our fellow-creatures, protection from injuries, communication of benefits, were works of supererogation, to be granted or with-held, as caprice or custom, or inclination may suggest’. 29 This was an indictment not just of the slave owners and those directly implicated in the slave trade, but also of those who ‘enjoyed the expanding wealth of their slave colonies without troubling themselves too much about the inhumanities and immoralities which underpinned the system’. 30 The emphasis placed here on the arbitrariness of who got ‘marked for slavery’ makes clear that race ‘is by no means a permanent or unavoidable way of understanding humankind’, 31 and that the victory of Enlightenment racial science did not take place without a struggle. The focus on the arbitrary brings together the themes of humanity, commerce and slavery, the fear of the ‘social and historical volatility’ not only of trade, but also of what it meant to be human, and to be counted as a fellow creature. 32 One of the abolitionists’ key arguments was that the injustice of slavery lay in its exercise of illegal force founded on an unjustified and unjustifiable claim of superiority.
The state of nature?
The abolitionists needed to explain how the original natural equality of humankind had broken down, and the universality of justice had been breached. Thomas Clarkson was explicit in his use of a state of nature, arguing that mankind was originally free and possessed an equal right to the soil and to the produce of the earth. There was no rank, no distinction, no superior. Sounding like a mixture of Hobbes and Rousseau, he described how every man wandered where he chose, changing his residence as a spot attracted his fancy, ‘uncontrouled by his neighbour, unconnected with any but his family’. He collected what he chose without injury, and enjoyed without injury what he had collected in ‘a state of dissociation and independence’. 33 Such individuals were exposed to danger from savage beasts and from each other, and so society was formed on the principles of self-preservation and self-defence. At first, individuals were still independent and free, but as numbers increased, wants grew beyond subsistence, causing internecine strife. The growth of agriculture led to the assignation of property to enforce labour and to the introduction of government to ‘afford a security to the acquisitions of the industrious, and heal the intestine disorder of the community, by the introduction of laws’. 34 Richard Hillier adapted the state of nature to imagine the world of the innocent Africans before the slave traders arrived: ‘Before he was a slave, he tilled his little patch of ground, planted it with yams, or sowed it with rice; and felt a reward within his simple breast, from a consciousness that he was providing for his little family’. 35 In these narratives, as in Locke’s, property itself was a natural right, recognized by mutual regard, and part of the natural equality of humanity. The antislavery discourse was underpinned by this conception of righteous property.
The innocence of the African came not only from not having committed any crimes or violated any treaties, but from his understanding of property and his connection with nature. His wants were simple, provided for by a few hours of labour a day, and the rest of his time was devoted to hospitality, merriment and joy. He had, according to Hillier, ‘the easy politeness of nature’, expressed through athletic dance, an ‘animated chorus of unaffected voices’ and delicious wine. African happiness, Hillier concluded, had been sacrificed at the shrine of an avaricious policy of legalized murder that has ‘set a price upon the heads of the innocents’. 36 The ‘wretched Africans’ in Clarkson’s account were ‘torn from their country in a state of nature’ and as long as slavery continued ‘every obstacle is placed in the way of their improvement’. 37 In their own country, Clarkson argued, they were mostly in the savage state, with their powers of mind limited to a few objects, but their abilities expanded when they moved to the colonies ‘in proportion to the improvement of their state’. If they were equally improved, they would be equally ingenious. 38 The normative quality of African life for the antislavery writers was ‘affective innocence’, 39 and by sentimentalizing the African family, they placed them closer to nature. At the same time, they also sentimentalized a certain kind of uncorrupted property in land, linked to husbandry, subsistence and nature, and clearly opposed to the vicious avarice of the slave trade.
This is where the idea that there were no subpersons in the antislavery worldview becomes more problematic, because while the ‘unfortunate Africans’ may have been free by nature, they had been degraded, in ways that enlightened Europeans had not. In deciding who was wretched, and who was innocent, the abolitionists appropriated to themselves the power to define who was degraded and who was improved, and so who counted as a person with a property in themselves.
40
They moralized slavery through a recognition of, and a preoccupation with, their own guilt. Slavery, Anthony Benezet argued, was destructive to the welfare of human society. It broke all kinds of ties that bind, introduced idleness, destroyed marriage, corrupted the youth and debauched morals: With all our superior light, we instil into those, whom we call savage and barbarous, the most despicable of human nature. We, to the utmost of our power, weaken and dissolve the universal tie, that binds and unites mankind.
41
From the ‘plurality of languages’ 42 available, the antislavery writers chose not only sentiment but the Lockean language of the state of nature and of improvement. This shows us what David Goldberg calls ‘the narrative grip’ of the social contract tightening, as these tropes of the state of nature, the savage and the wretched African are ‘insinuated into its terms’. 43 In their understanding of property as a natural right, their notions of independence and their emphasis on reason as the marker of humanity, the abolitionists shared the some of the ‘foundational commitments’ of the social contract to possessive individualism, property and rights, reinforced by a ‘historicizing’ understanding of racial characterization. Racial others were not figured as naturally incapable of ingenuity or of improvement, or as permanently condemned to the condition of nature, but they were figured as lacking in industry, leaving their capacity for property in the state of nature. 44 It was a short step from athletic innocence to debauched corruption. In the abolitionist discourse, there was a discernible shift from one kind of universalism to another, mediated through the background narrative of the social contract. It was a shift that raised the possibility of partial self-ownership and the existence of subpersons.
Brandy and baubles
In their accounts of universalism, once all human beings were imbued with value and vested with rights, then all forms of encroachment became illegitimate, and the abolitionists focused on the ‘essential injury’ of slavery as the moment of exchange, the point at which one human being was sold to another. Buying and selling human beings involved disregarding justice, guilt and innocence, and acting on the principle of avarice, without remorse or shame: ‘Do not that inhuman commerce, and the consequent cruel slavery, treat vast multitudes of human creatures, as if they had no share in the capacities, the feelings, or the rights of men? as if they were mere brutes, made to be taken and sold, enslaved and destroyed?’ 45 Clarkson’s narrative of the development of slavery, like Hillier’s, was a story of commerce and corruption, carried out by men who were ‘ready to sacrifice their dearest principles at the shrine of gain’. 46 Those who engaged in the trade of man-stealing were ‘bartering “brandy and baubles” for human flesh and blood’. 47 The constant reiteration of slavery as founded on the sin of avarice, and so as associated with self-indulgence, love of ease and gain, was a way for ‘the exceptionally pious [to] expose the infidelity of their less strict brethren’, 48 and to call for the purification of their own religious society. In this moral landscape, the African slave trade acted as ‘the negative model of commerce’. 49 It was the avarice of Europeans that caused slavery, our ‘inordinate thirst for gain’ 50 that made us the chief aggressors in the slavery wars. The abolitionists kept returning to this theme of the ‘insatiable desire of gain’ that motivated the slave traders. 51 In their historical discourse the purely mercenary market, founded on nothing but the principle of profit and the thirst for gain, had become ‘the principal and moving cause of the most abominable and dreadful scene, that was perhaps ever acted upon the face of the earth’. 52 The slave traders’ understanding of property was as far as it was possible to get from the innocent African tilling his own patch of ground.
The abomination of the scene meant that the nature of the slave owner was debased. He was rendered cruel and vindictive and his misplaced power excited ‘a certain savageness of disposition and conduct’. 53 The ascription of savagery to the slaveholder makes clear that savagery, like race, was not yet an independent variable, a natural or a biological fact that inhered only to ‘Negroes’, but an unstable identity and an effect of power. Europeans and Americans could be transformed into beasts and savages through their involvement in the slave trade, and their denial of the essential humanity of black Africans. They turned themselves into savages by refusing to recognize their ties to the offices of kindness, and instead allowing themselves to be governed by caprice and inclination. The slave trader was a disturbing figure, the ‘embodiment of unregulated passions’ who disrupted traditional assumptions about Euro-Americans, 54 and complicated cultural and moral hierarchies that relied on an easily visible and verifiable distinction between savagery and civilization. He posed what Uday Mehta has characterized as ‘a constant internal threat’, and the slave trade externalized desires without innate moral principles, exposing ‘the inconstancy and extremity of desire’. 55 The antislavery writers expressed this threat as ‘Manstealing’. They kept repeating that man stealing was a moral evil, ‘universally evil, in every age and in every nation’. 56 This idea that men could be stolen, that slavery could be understood as a kind of theft, was a central theme of antislavery writing. It was part of the reduction of slavery to avarice, and of the narrative that tried to distinguish between virtuous and vicious commerce, as the abolitionists learnt to make distinctions that were invisible in their universal claims. 57 It was also a device that risked representing Africans themselves as commodities.
Gould argues that antislavery literature told the story of the slave trade through a ‘narrative of seduction’. 58 Acting like pirates, the slave traders set out to seduce ‘the attachment and confidence of the Africans’. 59 The ‘gaudy trappings of European art’ caught their attention, excited their curiosity, dazzled them and ‘compleatly intoxicated their senses with the luxuries’. 60 The abolitionists positioned themselves within the luxury debates by figuring the slave trade as the pursuit of limitless desires and unnatural appetites. 61 Luxury and slavery were both symptoms of the excesses of an unrefined civil society, and of an unregulated, unethical market. 62 The marking of slave traders as pirates was an important part of the representation of the slave trade as a negative model of commerce and the slave trader as a white savage. Pirates were low down in the status/class hierarchy, positioned as the enemies of all mankind, and characterized by an excessive, violent and autonomous hypermasculinity 63 that operated outside the domestic arena. Piracy, the pursuit of luxury and the slave trade all illustrated the dangers of what happened when commerce operated outside the constraints of morality and manners. Legitimate capitalist transactions were understood to be connected to self-improvement, productivity and rational self-control. The pursuit of wealth was only laudable where the intention was virtuous. 64 The slave trade, by contrast, was speculative, risky and dissipated, based on nothing but the maximization of profit. Like gaming, it unleashed uncontrollable passions which rendered it suspect, corrupting, dishonourable and corrosive of the self. 65 By ceaselessly pursuing exchange value and the extremity of desire, the slave traders had ‘ascertained the quantum of misery it is expedient to inflict’ and agreed upon a price for the blood of a fellow human being. 66
The many-headed monster
Alongside this seductive tale of ‘brandy and baubles’, the abolitionists told a story of enslavement as subjection, an infringement of natural rights, and of equity. Antislavery writing told how Europeans broke the treaties of peace and trade with the Africans as they needed more slaves, and avarice proved too powerful for justice. The provisos limiting slavery collapsed, prisoners of war were taken in arbitrary skirmishes and wars were waged for the sake of obtaining prisoners who could be sold on for profit, until: ‘Every African war is a robbery’. 67 Men, both in Africa and in Europe, lost their virtue and a considerable portion of their sense of shame as they turned from legitimate to illegitimate commerce and traded in human beings. By doing so, they consented to be unjust. When the African prince sentenced the slave to become his property, he was ‘usurping a power, which no ruler or rulers of a state can possess, and which the great Creator of the universe never yet gave to any order whatever of created beings’. 68 This usurpation represented encroaching despotic power and the capricious will of the tyrant. Slavery consisted in being subject to the will of another. Every petty planter was ‘an arbitrary monarch’. 69 His power was ‘a many-headed monster of tyranny’. 70 His savagery was expressed not just through his participation in the slave trade, but through his exercise of arbitrary power.
It was central to the radical discourse that slavery was a political condition. The abolitionists argued that slaves were all forcibly torn from their country and retained in their present situation by violence. They were perpetually at war with their oppressors, but they could not be charged with rebellion because they had not formally resigned their freedom, and the Europeans had no claim upon their obedience other than force: ‘If then they are your subjects, you violate the laws of government, by making them unhappy. But if they are not your subjects, then, even though they should resist your proceedings, they are not rebellious’. 71 This was linked by the abolitionists to the argument that ‘people would not tamely resign their lives and liberties, without a struggle’. 72 Following Francis Hutcheson, Benezet’s argument was that he who detained another by force, ‘the violent possessor’, was always bound to prove his title. 73 There was no contract, no agreement that limited the power of the slaveholder or could enforce obedience from the slave. The origins of slavery lay in force and despotism. The republican language of independence and resistance was woven together with the idea of owning a property in the person, making opposition to slavery a complex and contested space for freedom. As Richard Overton had put it in 1646, every individual was given ‘an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any’. An individual had to be an owner of himself ‘else he could not be himselfe’. 74 Each man was the original proprietor of his own liberty. If he was deprived of this ownership of his freedom, the burden of proof of its loss lay with the aggressor. Even if the enslaved were guilty of crimes towards one another, they remained innocent with respect to the man stealers: ‘You have no right to touch even the hair of 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.’ 75 It followed, in the narrative grip of the social contract, that ‘as nature made every man’s body and mind his own; it is evident that no man can justly be consigned to slavery, without his own consent’. 76
The ‘normative rules’ were the same for everybody, and this politicized conception of slavery as usurpation enabled the abolitionists to contest the equation of money with right and to oppose hereditary slavery and the enslavement of wives and children. 77 If no man could be consigned to slavery without his own consent, then every human being was accountable for his actions. The slave traders alleged that, once they had bought the parents, and could sell and dispose of them as they pleased, their children became ‘their property by birth’. 78 Their violent possession, and their money, had invested them with a right of ownership. It was evident to the antislavery campaigners that such a property right could not justly exist, and so that human liberty was beyond the possibility of either sale or purchase. 79 Individual accountability would be undermined if it were possible for any man to have absolute property in another, rendering the slave unaccountable for crimes his master ordered him to commit. While in theory the slave had no will beyond that of his master, the question of criminal responsibility was crucial in arguments about the status of the slave. No slave society, Orlando Patterson argues, ever ‘took the position that the slave, being a thing, could not be held responsible for his actions’. 80 The abolitionists’ arguments about the preservation of rights from encroaching arbitrary power, linked to the exercise of dominion over the self, opened up the question of who might consent to slavery. The answer was that it was not going to be ‘freeborn Englishmen’ who let themselves be treated as unworthy of respect, but ‘unfortunate Africans’ who had already been degraded and lost their righteous property.
Imaginary property
According to this political narrative of slavery, men were originally free, their minds and bodies were their own, and so they could not be consigned to slavery without their consent. By the same principle, men could not be considered as things or property in the same way as lands, houses or goods. It was necessary, as well as the law of nature and the law of the land, argued Clarkson, ‘that all property should be inferiour to its possessor. But how does a slave differ from his master, but by chance?’ 81 The slave was the epitome of the unstable, mobile property of the late 18th century, and this invocation of chance is a reminder of the fragile foundations of many forms of property. Slaves were branded to show at first sight the difference in their fortune, but ‘what mark can be found in his nature, that can warrant a distinction?’ 82 The value of property in the slave came from the imagination and from agreement, and not from nature. Slaves were integral to the credit market, which ‘floated on the turbulent tides of the collective imagination of its investors’. 83 This credit market and the modern banking system required 18th-century Britons ‘to value the existence of imaginary things’, 84 and slaves became a part of this system through the mechanism of insurance which ‘guaranteed that value was neither inherent in things nor void with their loss but was the secure product of the imagination and agreement’. 85
The antislavery thinkers contested the possibility of imagining slaves as property by arguing that slaves were the proper owners of their freedom, with the right to reclaim their stolen goods from violent possession. They struggled with the nature of the exchange at the heart of slavery, and in particular with what it meant to gain an equivalent for the loss of freedom. ‘Let us ask those who scientifically know the value of things', Clarkson suggested, ‘if any human creature is equivalent only to any of the trinkets that you wear, or at most, to any of the horses that you ride: or in other words, if you have ever considered the most costly things that you have valued, as equivalent to yourselves?’ 86 Slavery was an unnatural exchange. Every sale implied a price, an equivalent given to the seller in exchange for what he transferred to the buyer, ‘but what equivalent can be given for life and liberty, both of which (in absolute Slavery) are held to be in the master’s disposal?’ 87 As William Blackstone pointed out, this destroyed the principle of sales. 88 There always remained to the slave ‘a superior property, or right, to the fruit of his own labour; and, more especially, to his own person’ which was given to him by God’. 89
Every man who presumed to detain anyone as a slave without his own consent or without a written contract, acted without due process of the law and the ‘slave’ was free to sue for lawful imprisonment: ‘so that the Slaveholder cannot avail himself of his imaginary property, either by the assistance of the Common Law, or of a Court of Equity’. 90 The key lay in each individual’s own property in their person. The ‘mere mercenary plea of private property, cannot equitably (in a case between man and man) stand in competition with that superior property, which every man must necessarily be allowed to have in his own proper person’. 91 A claim on behalf of natural liberty would always trump the slave trader’s ‘mere mercenary claim’ of private property in his person. 92 The advocates of slavery argued their case on the basis of property rights, but they were trying to defend a form of property that was unnatural, inconvenient and contrary to the laws of the kingdom. It ‘cannot justly be otherwise esteemed, than as A PRIVATE PROPERTY in contraband goods, the forfeiture of which, no good citizen ought to regret’. 93 Sharp objected to what he called ‘the modern unnatural claims of private property in the persons of men’, 94 but as he did so, he turned the slaves themselves into ‘contraband goods’, and so into imaginary property. 95
The myth that liberty could be bought or sold was, for Sharp, at the core of the ‘clandestine and unnatural traffic’ that was the slave trade. 96 If a master brought his slaves with him to England from the West Indies, he argued, and they regained their liberty, the master could not really be said to have been injured. He could be served, just as well and as cheaply, by free English servants as he could be by his own slaves. If he was ‘by the prejudices of a West Indian education, … so far capricious and depraved, that he prefers the constrained service of Slaves to the willing attendance of freemen’, then the remedy was for him to find a sufficient number of slaves who ‘would gladly enter into a written agreement, to return to the West Indies from England’. 97 This neatly summarizes Gould’s point about the dangers posed to Europeans by the savagery of the slave trade. The superior property each individual held in his own person made him accountable for his own actions and put his liberty at his disposal. The basis for the imaginary exchange lay in the voluntary transfer of liberty, and so in contract. When the precaution of a written agreement was taken, ‘the indentured Slaves will indeed remain the private property of their masters for the term of their contracts, even in England’. 98 Their masters could legally compel them to return to the plantations provided that they did not unlawfully imprison or injure them. Contract and consent transformed the relationship so that it did not constitute an ‘essential injury’ to natural liberty. For the abolitionists, slavery was not defined by the sheer hard work that a slave or a servant may be required to perform under the terms of their contract. If the slave really owed his master service, then it must certainly be due. These arguments should remind us that, even for those who opposed slavery, there was a place for compulsion in a free market economy. 99 Apologists for slavery, Hillier argued, worked hard to confound free with compulsive labour. 100 The abolitionists worked just as hard to pull them apart, by investing in the imaginary moral and political power of the contract.
Hillier argued that the people of England were inured to labour and did not consider it a hardship, but they were accustomed to receiving a reward for it. The contrast he drew was with the ‘nakedness of slavery’. 101 It was not the labour of slavery or the compulsion that disturbed the abolitionists, but the lack of a written, voluntary contract between the parties, making it indistinguishable from encroaching arbitrary power. Society, the abolitionists argued, was justified in ‘keeping idlers and vagabonds in perpetual servitude if they consistently failed to support their families and themselves’. 102 In the abolitionists’ selective worldview, which stressed the essential injury of being bought and sold, debt bondage was acceptable. Captives were joint debtors for the sum the merchant paid for them and the voyage, and as soon as the value of their labours added up to more than this sum, they had the right to be free. Unlike slaves, indentured servants kept their status as free individuals ‘in abeyance’, so that their superior property in their person was still available to them when their contracts ended. 103 When proslavery writers asserted that that black slaves in the West Indies were not in a worse condition than the poor in England, the abolitionists responded: ‘they can plainly mean, by the word slave, nothing more than is commonly meant by the word drudge, or a person who toils hard and lives on a poor diet’. 104 Poor people in Britain suffered hardships, ‘some of which are unavoidable and some of which are the effects of their own vices’, but both had to be carefully distinguished from those ‘more galling miseries which proceed from the usurped and abused power of tyrants’. 105 Drudges were not subject to violent possession. It was the non-contractual, tyrannical, arbitrary power of the master that completed the wretchedness of the slave.
The crux came when ‘masters claim a right to the perpetual service of a man, without being able to produce an authentic written contract; for, without a voluntary contract, there cannot be ANY RIGHT’. 106 A real contract required that the contracting parties should have legal capacity, but ‘A Slave … has no more civil or legal capacity, than a man that is actually dead’. In addition, they must have an intention to contract, and ‘it can hardly be supposed that any one can intend to any contract that shall deprive him of the common rights of humanity’. To make a valid contract, an individual must have liberty, and not be obstructed by force or fear. A slave may justly be said to be under fear of arbitrary punishment ‘and cannot therefore be party to any contract, whether express or implied’. 107 This insistence on distinguishing so clearly between slavery and servitude, force and contract, places a great deal of weight on the notion of consent. 108 Tommy Lott argues that an emphasis on the moral and legal aspects of slavery means that abolishing slavery concentrates on ‘systematically granting more rights to slaves, including manumission, while maintaining a social arrangement that perpetuates virtually the same power relations of domination and servility’. 109 The particular form of the politicization of slavery at work in the antislavery writings had the same effect. The possibilities of consenting to injustice and of distinguishing clearly between slavery and drudgery were politically charged in the late 18th century, but rested on a particular constellation of personhood, property and power that carried a risk of depoliticization.
Conclusion
In choosing self-proprietorship and consent from among the plurality of languages available, antislavery discourse bound itself to the social contract, and so to a worldview that relied on the division between the industrious and the ‘no-where industrious’, 110 and on a market economy based to some extent on compulsion. The slave trade subjected human beings to a particular variant of commodification. As Ian Baucom argues, slaves became a kind of human collateral with an insurance value that did not depend on use or exchange, so that the slaves who were massacred on board the Zong slave ship in 1781 remained, even in death, a ‘still existent, guaranteed, and exchangeable form of currency’. 111 Abolitionists made clear that slaves were not beasts or instruments of labour, but they struggled with the more complicated construction of slaves as imaginary property. Slaves were constructed as something in which an investment had been made, and functioned as property ‘because two parties have agreed that it exists and have agreed to credit the fiction of its value’. 112 In arguing that slaves were contraband goods, whose freedom had been sold, the abolitionists implicitly agreed that the property in slaves existed and credited the fiction of its value. It is not that slaves were turned into things or objects in these antislavery writings, (and indeed the writers fought hard against that construction) but their existence was rendered fictive, shadowy and insubstantial. In reading these antislavery writers, the slaves feel like ghosts, the invisible ink that contracts were written in. They were only made concrete again by thinking of them as wretched and unfortunate, and as unfree labour, in other words, by marking them for exclusion. In this discourse, some individuals were industrious, not savage, and securely anchored by belonging, while others were an insurance policy for that sense of inclusion. The abolitionists constructed an opposition between slavery and freedom that left little room for understanding the complexities of consent. Freedom, in their liberal construction, risked justifying voluntary slavery.
This divide between slavery and freedom is crossed through our own consent, and this returns us to the question of who consents to slavery. As Carole Pateman argues, taken to its logical conclusion, contractarianism holds that ‘there are no limits on the property in the person that can be contracted out’, so that uncoerced slavery becomes legitimate. 113 The slavery contract is not a right violation, since each of us can waive our right not to be enslaved. 114 An individual ‘may waive her moral claim not to be a slave in return for payment or something of value, since she has the relevant moral powers over the claims and liberties that in part constitute the right not to be a slave’. 115 The freedom and rights that are protected by abolitionist discourse are conceptually and theoretically tied, through Locke, to the property relations that can make people either the property of themselves or the property of others. The risk is that this means they remain tied not to a universal mutual regard that is independent of kindness, but to caprice, custom and inclination, as arbitrary power and tyranny is replaced by the logic of the market. The narrative grip of the social contract eventually forces us all to consent to be unjust.