Thomas Clarkson 

Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) – In June 1787 Thomas Clarkson arrived in Bristol to gather evidence he would share with William Wilberforce and the select committee holding hearings on the slave trade in the House of Commons. Clarkson had recently joined with Granville Sharp and many prominent Quakers in London to form the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. News of Clarkson’s efforts in London had preceded him, and his supporters in Bristol welcomed him with much applause.  Clarkson, however, had come not just to establish an auxiliary to the Abolition Committee in Bristol, but also to see first-hand the work of the slave trade and to gather information from any sailor or slave he could find who had participated in sea voyages to Africa and the West Indies.  He visited Bristol several times that summer and recorded many accounts of the slave trade that he would later send to representatives of Parliament and would include in his important publications, An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (1788), and The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (1808).  Before leaving Bristol in August 1787, he wrote,

The next attempt was to lay the foundation of a committee in Bristol, and of a petition to Parliament from it for the abolition of the Slave-trade.  I had now made many friends.  A gentleman of the name of Payntor had felt himself much interested in my labour.  Mr. Joseph Harford, a man of fortune, of great respectability of character, and of considerable influence, had attached himself to the cause.  Dr. Fox had assisted me in it.  Mr. Hughes, a clergyman of the Baptist church, was anxious and ready to serve it.  Dr. Camplin, of the Establishment, with several of his friends, continued steady.  Matthew Wright, James Harford, Truman Harford, and all the Quakers to a man, were strenuous, and this on the best of principles, in its support.  To all these I spoke, and I had the pleasure of seeing that my wishes were likely in a short time to be gratified in both these cases.

During his time in Bristol, however, Clarkson became a controversial figure. Bristol was at that time one of the leading seaports in England, and much of its commerce and wealth was derived from activities related to the slave trade. Some of the most prominent business, clerical, and political figures in Bristol benefited, either directly or indirectly, from the profits of the slave trade (John Latimer, The Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (Bristol, 1893), vol. 2, 472-473.). These individuals detested Clarkson’s activities in Bristol, as well as the work of Granville Sharp’s Abolition Committee in London, and did their best to discredit both him and the Committee. On the other hand, numerous ministers and laypersons in Bristol, representing both Anglicans and Dissenters, were taking, in most cases for the first time, clear positions against the continuation of trafficking in human cargo. 

    Clarkson also wrote An Abstract of the Evidence delivered before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in the years 1790 and 1791: on the Part of the Petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade. This pamphlet, printed by James Phillips, deserves some attention, for it also pertains to Martha Gurney and William Fox and has never been properly identified. Thomas Clarkson and several other members of the Committee had been hard at work that spring on completing the Abridgment of the Minutes of the Evidence, taken before a Committee of the Whole House, to whom it was referred to consider of the Slave-Trade, a one-volume abridgment of the four-volume Minutes of the Evidence, which appeared in early March 1791. The Abridgment was completed in little more than a month and presented to members of Parliament one week prior to Wilberforce’s motion on 18 April to abolish the slave trade. The Committee hoped that a condensed version of the evidence would be more accessible to the M.P.’s and help persuade them to vote in favor of the abolition bill. The motion failed, however, and on 26 April the Committee commissioned Clarkson to prepare for publication “an Abstract of the Abridgment of the Evidence in favour of the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” which, as Clarkson later wrote, would be “sent into different towns of the kingdom, that all might know, if possible, the horrors … of this execrable trade; and as it was possible that these copies might lie in the places where they were sent, without a due attention to their contents, I resolved, with the approbation of the committee, to take a journey, and for no other purpose than personally to recommend that they might be rea” (Clarkson, History, vol. 2, 348-49).

    On 29 August Clarkson left London with copies of his Abstract and began another tour of Great Britain, “traversing the Country upon the Errand of Humanity,” as his friend Joseph Hardcastle put it (Joseph Hardcastle to John Clarkson, 9 November 1791, Clarkson Papers, British Library, ADD. MS. 41262A, ff. 17-18), seeking additional evidence against the slave trade and gathering petitions of the people to be presented at the next session of Parliament (see Joseph Hardcastle to John Clarkson, 9 November 1791, Clarkson Papers, British Library, ADD. MS. 41262A, ff. 17-18). As he traveled around England that fall, the effect of Fox’s Address was evident everywhere he went. “There was no town,” he observed, “through which I passed, in which there was not some one individual who had left off the use of sugar.  In the smaller towns there were from ten to fifty by estimation, and in the larger from two to five hundred, who had made this sacrifice to virtue,” estimating that “no fewer than three hundred thousand persons had abandoned the use of sugar” (Clarkson, History, vol. 1, 349-50). Clarkson’s Abstract, however, was having considerable success as well. William Burgh in York wrote to Wilberforce on 10 December 1791, exclaiming, “Who do you think we had in yesterday but T Clarkson who has been disseminating the Abstract through all the realm I trust with such effect that it will grow up & ripen to an abundant harvest” (Wilberforce Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, d.17, f.20). The Committee apparently thought so, for three days later they directed Phillips to print an additional 3000 copies of the Abstract “in a cheap Edition” (Fair Minute Books, ADD. MS. 21256, ff. 23r, 26r, 33r). Clarkson, however, seemed to sense that Fox’s pamphlet and the medium of the boycott were more capable of creating enthusiasm among abolitionists than the testimonials within his Abstract. He also realized that neither he nor his publisher Phillips could compete with the discounted price that Martha Gurney had affixed to the sale and distribution of the Address. Accordingly, when he returned to London the first week of January 1792, he immediately published a printed letter to Josiah Wedgwood, noting the “astonishing effect” of the Address in converting people to the boycott and praising the pamphlet’s distributors, primarily Martha Gurney, for “paving the way for signatures to the different petitions which we have all of us at heart; & … in disposing the minds of such persons towards our cause, as we ourselves should have otherwise never reached.”  Clarkson urged Wedgwood to promote the pamphlet in Staffordshire as an “auxiliary” to petitioning efforts of the Committee (Correspondence of Josiah Wedgwood 1781-1794, ed. Katherine Eufemia Farrer [London: Women’s Printing Society, 1906], 184).

    Clarkson’s Abstract, complete with its fold-out view of the slave ship that Martha Gurney so proudly displayed in her shop, was effective in shocking the public with its graphic testimony of the horrors of the slave trade; Fox’s Address, on the other hand, though weighted with its disturbing images of ethnic cannibalism, offered a practical remedy for this evil practice through a boycott of its tainted produce. For Hughes reference above, see Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols.  (London: Longman, 1808), vol. 2, 366-367; E. L. Griggs, Thomas Clarkson:  The Friend of Slaves (London, 1936). See also Minutes of the Evidence taken before a Committee of the House of Commons, being a Committee of the Whole House, to whom it was referrred to consider of the Circumstances of the Slave Trade, complained of in Several Petitions which were presented to the House in the Last Session of Parliament, Relative to the State of the African Slave Trade. 4 vols., 1789-1791 ([London]: [n.d.], [1792]); and Abridgment of the Minutes of the Evidence, taken before a Committee of the Whole House, to whom it was referred to consider of the Slave-Trade, No. 1-4, 1789-1791 ([London]: [n.d.] [1791]).