Cover Story Black History Month
The re-enactment of a slave sale scene in Guadeloupe in 1998, during a ceremony in honour of victims of slavery
shall be carried to your West India islands, there to be doomed to interminable slavery. My Lords, we have been so much accustomed to words descrip-
tive of the cruelty of this Traffick that we have almost forgotten their meaning. Would to God that a person educated as an Englishman, well acquainted with our language and able to deliver his senti- ments in it with fluency, instructed in our holy religion, and now, for the first time informed of all the horrors of the African Slave Trade, had to address your Lordships on the subject of its Aboli- tion, what would be the feelings of such a man, and how would he express himself to you upon such a subject, and what would you yourselves feel, my Lords, if it were the first time you heard of these things, and were assured of their existence, and that they were practised in the dominions of our own sovereign, but could not be continued without your consent? Is it possible to conceive that you would hesitate, for one mo-
ment, to order that such enormities should cease? But the con- tinuance of this hateful Traffick has made cruelty familiar to us; and the recital of its horrors has been so frequently repeated that we can now hear them stated without being affected as we should be. We can now hear, almost without emotion, of thousands and tens of thousands of human beings being kept in this miserable existence! Multitudes of human creatures under the arbitrary will of a cruel task-master, rising in the morning and lying down at night under the lash of his whip; who can hardly be supposed to dream of anything but torture, and who awake “only to discover sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace and rest can never dwell, hope never comes that comes to all; but tor- ture without end…” Tere is no mitigation of their sufferings, they know no change
except the humour of their master to whom their whole destiny, from day to day, and every moment of the day, is entrusted; and whose discretion is frequently so abused as to produce every ex- tremity short of murder; nay, often terminating in murder itself. Having stated these matters, I hope I may now be permitted to
conclude that no man will attempt to say that the Slave Trade is not repugnant to the principles of humanity. Why then, my Lords, is it, or is it not, repugnant to the principles of justice? It is most clear that the labour of one man should not be forced
from him wholly for the benefit of another. It is most manifestly unjust that a man should be made to labour, during the whole of his life, and yet have no benefit whatever from that labour. Tat never can be the case in a state of nature, and never should
be so, in a state of society; for a state of society should be an im- provement upon, not a degradation of, a state of nature; and by the rights of nature, prior to all law, prior to all human institu- tion, every human being is entitled to the fruit of his own labour. Te origin of all law for the protection of property is founded
upon that principle. But in this Traffick, as well as in our system of colonial bondage, there is an absolute repugnance to that principle. Te African Slave Trade is, in its very commencement, contrary,
not only to our general ideas of common justice from man to man, in a state of nature, but directly contrary to the principles of dis- tributive justice in a state of society, and those who are the advo-
50 | October 2011 | New African
cates of this Trade cannot defend it without overturning the principle on which the very extensive property of this country is secured to its owners. As between man and man therefore, social or savage, the African
Slave Trade is founded on the essence of injustice. Whatever ben- efit is derived from that Trade to any individual, or to any body of individuals, that benefit is derived from dishonour and dishonesty. Nor is it possible to debate this point with even the semblance
of reason, unless you could prove that it has pleased God to give to the inhabitants of Great Britain, a property in the liberty and life of the inhabitants of Africa. And I would ask the advocates of this Traffick, in what book, human or divine, am I to read, in what principle of ethics am I to find, or by what rule of reasoning can I say, that you, the inhabitants of the island of Great Britain, are born with a right to buy and sell the flesh and blood of human beings? For not only are the Negroes taken in a way which nothing can
justify, but that taking is accompanied with cruelty, and the most shocking outrages to humanity. If others had a right to sell, you would have no right to buy them; you would have no right to take them by force. If they were brought to your ships, you would have no right to carry them against their will. If they were brought to
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