The Sugar Barons (60 page)

The campaigners took the tactical decision to go after the trade, rather than the institution of slavery, in the hope that if it ended, the planters would be forced to treat their slaves better and ultimately move towards emancipation. They also recognised that they needed representation in Parliament; in 1787, Clarkson called on William Wilberforce, a wealthy independent MP for Hull and evangelical Christian. He gave Wilberforce a copy of his essay, and became a regular visitor. Clarkson also toured the country, organising petitions, holding public meetings and encouraging the establishment of local chapters of the Society.

With the encouragement of William Pitt the Younger, in May 1789 Wilberforce made his first speech in the House of Commons condemning the slave trade, and in April 1791 he introduced his first Parliamentary Bill to abolish the trade, calling the ‘bloody traffic’ a ‘scandal’. ‘Posterity’, he said, ‘looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country.’ But Parliament, alarmed at the radicalism of the French Revolution, defeated the Bill comfortably.

Nonetheless, Thomas Wildman, writing to his brother in Jamaica in May 1791, predicted that ‘the Slave Trade will in a few years be abolished, as the party against it will never rest’. He urged the stocking of the Beck-ford plantations to the maximum while they still could.

In response to the defeat of the Bill, an attempt was made to effect social reform through economic pressure. Every person who consumed West Indian produce was ‘guilty of the crime of murder’, wrote one pamphleteer. Tea was a ‘blood-sweetened beverage’. Furthermore, he went on, West Indian sugar contained the pus from sores on the bodies of blacks suffering from yaws and jiggers. As for rum, in a puncheon of the product from Jamaica ordered lately by a merchant it was said there had been found ‘The whole Body of a roasted Negro’. In turn, writers sympathetic to the planters fought their corner. As this debate continued, the import of East Indian sugar increased tenfold as buyers called upon their grocers to supply them with the free-labour product from the Orient. In the United States a similar campaign was waged, which saw a huge increase in the production of sugar from maple.

Wilberforce tried again the following year, supported by more than 500 anti-slave trade or anti-slavery petitions, with the signatures of nearly 400,000 ordinary people as well as those of such parliamentary giants as Charles James Fox and William Pitt. The latter declared: ‘no nation has
plunged so deeply into this guilt as Great Britain’. A compromise solution – that the trade would be outlawed in four years’ time – was passed, but the Bill met defeat in the House of Lords.

Wilberforce introduced further measures during the decade, but public interest was now waning, and the sugar lobby in Parliament still strong enough to keep abolition at bay. On 4 March 1795, Jamaica’s agent in London, Stephen Fuller, wrote to the island’s council: ‘I have the great pleasure to inform you that on Thursday last we mustered up Force enough in the House of Commons to put off Mr Wilberforce’s Motion for six months, by a Majority of 17.’

In the United States, individual northern states had started outlawing the importation of slaves from the 1780s onwards (with partial measures enacted even earlier). In 1787, Rhode Island became the first state to ban its citizens from any involvement in the slave trade. Moses Brown, together with the Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport, had led the campaign that produced this victory. Hopkins described Newport as the ‘town the most guilty, respecting the slave trade, of any on this continent, as it has been, in a great measure, built up by the blood of the poor Africans’. In 1789, Moses Brown organised an abolitionist society in Providence that was instrumental in achieving passage of the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794, prohibiting ships destined to transport slaves to any foreign country from outfitting in American ports. The Abolition Society, wrote an anonymous critic in the
Providence Gazette
, was ‘created not to ruin only one good citizen but to ruin many hundreds in the United States … these people you have called “Negro Dealers” and “kidnappers” are some of the “very best men” in Rhode Island’. The diatribe was signed ‘A Citizen’, but it was actually John Brown, Moses’s brother. In 1797, John would be prosecuted by Moses’s Society having once more fallen for the lure of the ‘Guiney’ trade. Although he was acquitted, his vessel, the
Hope
, was condemned.

John remained the foremost defender in Rhode Island of the slave trade, while his brother Moses emerged as one of its fiercest opponents. When in 1800 Congress passed an Act to strengthen the law of 1794, John Brown was one of only five House of Representatives members to vote against the bill, and also spoke in opposition to it.

The same year, Moses Brown wrote a letter that sought to explain his brother’s behaviour. Long ago, he wrote, referring to the disastrous experience of the
Sally
, John ‘Drew his Brothers with him into a Voyage in that Unrighteous Traffic … happily they and I may say we Lived to Regret
it, and to Labour to have it Relinquished in this State; but my Brother John … most Unhappily … has often appeared in Support of a Trade [because of] his Love of Money and Anxiety to acquire it’.

In England, the absentee sugar barons fought a vigorous and expensive rearguard action against the march of abolition. In 1793, Thomas Wildman warned his brother James that Beckford of Fonthill was calling for ‘large supplies’ from his Jamaica plantations to ‘exert himself to support the West India Int. in the next Parliament’. Jack Fuller, elected as a Sussex MP in the early 1800s, rushed to Parliament during an abolition debate, and there made a huge uproar, swore at the Speaker, whom he called ‘the insignificant little fellow in the wig’, and was publicly reprimanded for the offence. The latest Lascelles, Henry, whose family had called in their debts and were now major landholders in the West Indies, stood against Wilberforce in Hull, and lost, in spite of spending a fortune. Draxes and Codringtons were also represented in the anti-abolition group in Parliament.

After the waning of interest in the ‘plight of the Negro’ in the late 1790s, in 1803 the publicising of lurid accounts of the torture of blacks in Trinidad – taken over by the British in 1797 – reignited protest. In 1804, Clarkson, after a period of illness, resumed his campaigning work and the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade began meeting again, strengthened by prominent new members such as Zachary Macaulay.

Macaulay, father of the historian, had gone out to Jamaica in 1784, and worked as a bookkeeper. ‘I was exposed not only to the sight, but also to the practice of severities over others, the very recollection of which makes my blood run cold’, he later wrote. He recalled that at first, he was ‘feelingly alive to the miseries of the poor slaves’, but that he had resolved to ‘get rid of my squeamishness as soon as I could … And in this I had a success beyond my expectations … now I was callous and indifferent.’ He returned to England in 1794 and, under the influence of his evangelical brother-in-law, converted to abolitionism, contributing to the campaign his first-hand experience of slavery.

In June 1804, a new Bill proposed by Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade successfully passed all its stages through the House of Commons. However, it was too late in the parliamentary session for it to complete its passage through the House of Lords. On its reintroduction during the 1805 session it was defeated. But during the general election of autumn 1806, slavery was an issue, resulting in many more abolitionist MPs being returned.

William, Lord Grenville, the Prime Minister, was determined to introduce
an Abolition Bill, but decided to do so in the House of Lords first, where it faced its greatest challenge. When it came to a vote, however, the measure passed by a large margin. A second reading was scheduled for the Commons on 23 February 1807. As tributes were made to Wilberforce, whose face streamed with tears, the Bill was carried by 283 votes to 16. The Slave Trade Act received royal assent on 25 March 1807, and came into force on 1 January 1808.

In the West Indies, the measure did, as had been hoped, lead to sensible planters treating their enslaved workforces better. It also pretty much ended manumission and saw the beginning of mass importation of indentured ‘coolie’ labour from south-east Asia. Inevitably, the costs of producing sugar rose sharply.

William Beckford of Fonthill had already seen his income from Jamaica dwindle. By 1805 it had fallen from more than £100,000 to somewhere in the region of £30,000. But almost as if it was ‘dirty money’, he was still spending at a colossal rate. In 1796 he had engaged the country’s leading architect, James Wyatt, to build him an abbey at Fonthill to rival the grandeur of nearby Salisbury Cathedral.

Fonthill Abbey was to be vast, with a cruciform shape 312 feet from north to south, the same as Westminster Abbey, and 270 feet west to east, with an enormous tower. Soon 700 men were at work, throwing up a structure the like of which had taken the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages decades to construct. The following year, the first spring gale brought the tower crashing down. But work pressed on. Wyatt told a friend that he reckoned Beckford was spending £120,000 a year, mainly on the abbey. In 1800, the tower collapsed again, Beckford’s only regret reportedly being that he was not there to see it happen. By the summer of 1807, although far from finished, parts were ready for habitation, and Beckford moved into the south wing. Access was through huge oak doors, 30 feet high and weighing more than a ton. These would be opened to visitors by Beck-ford’s dwarf, dressed in gold and embroidery, his tiny and somewhat grotesque figure accentuating the size of the doors.

The same year, Beckford had his father’s Splendens pulled down, in spite of protests from Wyatt and others that it was a classical masterpiece. The elaborate formal gardens were also ripped up, to be replaced with landscaping more to Beckford’s Gothic taste.

Fonthill Abbey was, like Jack Fuller’s sugar loaf, or the Draxes’ tower, a folly, but on a massively grand scale. Inside it was very uncomfortable and impractical. The kitchen was situated a huge distance from the oak
parlour where Beckford took his meals. There were 18 bedrooms for the guests who seldom if ever came, only reachable by twisting staircases and corridors, and 13 were so small, poky and ill-ventilated as to be unusable. The whole structure was so cold and damp that 60 fires had to be kept burning, even in the summer.

There was also something irredeemably fake and hollow about the whole thing. If anyone looked closely at the furniture, they could see that many of Beckford’s ‘James I’ coffers were obviously nothing of the kind. The ebony state bed that ‘belonged to Henry VII’ was seventeenth century; ebony chairs that had ‘belonged to Cardinal Wolsey’ were made in the East Indies also in the seventeenth century. A cabinet ‘designed by Holbein’ was clearly built a century after the artist’s death. Everywhere there were ‘ancestral’ Beckford coats of arms – on windows, vault bosses and fabrics. An elaborate family tree had been drawn up – Beckford, it fortuitously emerged, was descended from the royal blood of Scotland, and from King Edward III of England.

By 1812, with most of the originally planned structure complete at huge expense, Beckford ordered a new wing be built, even though the Wild-mans were still merrily embezzling the profits of his Jamaica plantations. Then, in 1821, he was forced to sell his Drax Hall and Harborhead estates for £62,000 to partially offset an estimated debt of £125,000 on Fonthill Abbey.

The following year, he suddenly got bored with the whole enterprise, and put Fonthill and much of his collection of art and
objets
, including 20,000 books, up for public auction. This generated huge excitement and curiosity, with 72,000 copies of the contents brochure printed by Christie’s sold at a guinea each.

The Times
commented in reaction that Beckford’s collection marked him as ‘one of the very few possessors of great wealth who have honestly tried to spend it poetically’. Essayist William Hazlitt was less complimentary, writing that Fonthill and its contents were ‘a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy shop, an immense museum of all that is most curious and costly and at the same time most worthless … the only proof of taste he has shown in the collection is his getting rid of it’.

Two days before the sale was to be held, everything was bought by a private bidder, a gullible nouveau riche East Indies trader with more money than sense. Three years after the sale, the grand tower collapsed once more, for the last time, in a cloud of cheap mortar.

However, the proceeds of the sale, some £330,000, allowed Beckford to
clear his debts – estimated at £145,000 – and to live out the rest of his days in idleness at a grand house in Bath. He kept his favourite paintings by Titian, Rembrandt, Bronzino, Holbein and Velasquez, as well as the portrait of his father by Reynolds and of himself by Romney. His whim in his latter years was to have the dinner table laid elaborately each day for a number of guests but to dine in solitary state. He was having problems with his teeth and his bladder, and was steadily losing his Jamaican properties through Chancery suits to the Wildmans. When he died in 1844, lonely and eccentric, the unprecedented Beckford fortune built up by his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, on the back of the labour of thousands of slaves under the burning Jamaican sky, had all been frittered away.

In the West Indies, there was an almost palpable sense of decline in the years following the abolition of the slave trade. The sugar price rose briefly in 1814–15, but by 1822 had fallen by half, as sugar from newly exploited territories in Cuba, Mauritius and India started flooding the market. A visitor to Bridgetown at this time described it as ‘having an antique appearance … what strikes the stranger’s attention is the number of old women, cats, and parrots’. A writer on Jamaica from around the same time noticed how ‘bad times and untoward events’ had curbed even the planters’ ‘natural tendency to extravagance’.