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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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The campaign for abolition was one of the first great extra-Parliamentary agitations. Its leadership was remarkably broad. The founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, were Anglicans, but most of their close associates were Quakers. Support for the cause extended beyond Clapham to embrace the Younger Pitt, the ex-slaver John Newton, Edmund Burke, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the king of the Potteries, Josiah Wedgwood, himself a Unitarian. Men from all these different denominations made common cause against slavery in meetings like the one attended by the young David Livingstone at Exeter Hall.
The most impressive thing about the campaign was the extent of the support that it mobilized. Wedgwood produced thousands of anti-slavery badges, depicting a black figure on a white background and bearing the motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ They were soon ubiquitous. When 11,000 people in Manchester alone – two-thirds of the male population – signed a petition calling for an end to the trade, it amounted to a call for an ethical foreign policy, a call so widespread that the government did not dare ignore it. In 1807 the slave trade was abolished. From now on convicted slavers faced, by a nice irony, transportation to Britain’s penal colony in Australia. Nor were the reformers satisfied with that victory. In 1814 no fewer than 750,000 names were put to petitions calling for the abolition of slavery itself.
This was the birth of a new kind of politics, the politics of the pressure group. Thanks to the work of zealous activists armed only with pens, paper and moral indignation, Britain had turned against slavery. Even more remarkably, the slave trade had been abolished in the face of determined opposition from some powerful vested interests. The West Indian planters had once been influential enough to intimidate Edmund Burke and hire James Boswell. The Liverpool slave traders were not much less formidable. But they were simply swept aside by the Evangelical tide. The only way the Liverpool merchants could survive was to find a new line of business. Appropriately enough, they found a substitute in the importation of West African palm oil for the manufacture of soap. Literally and metaphorically, the ill-gotten gains of the slave trade were to be washed away after abolition.
One victory led to another. For once the slave trade had gone, slavery itself could only wither. Between 1808 and 1830 the total slave population of the British West Indies declined from about 800,000 to 650,000. By 1833 the last resistance had crumbled. Slavery itself was made illegal in British territory; the helots of the Caribbean were emancipated, their owners compensated with the proceeds of a special government loan.
That did not of course put an end to the transatlantic slave trade or slavery in the Americas. It continued not only in the southern United States but also on a far larger scale in Brazil: all told, around 1.9 million more Africans crossed the Atlantic after the British ban, most of them to Latin America. However, the British did their utmost to disrupt this continuing traffic. A British West Africa Squadron was sent to patrol the African coast from Freetown, with bounties offered to naval officers for every slave they intercepted and liberated. With the true zeal of the convert, the British were now determined ‘to sweep the African and American seas of the atrocious commerce with which they are now infested’.
The Spanish and Portuguese governments were bullied into accepting prohibitions on the trade, enabling the Royal Navy to proceed against their nationals with impunity; international courts of arbitration were even established. The French rather half-heartedly joined in the patrol, grumbling that the British were interested only in preventing other countries profiting from what they had been foolish enough to prohibit. Only ships flying the flag of the United States defied the British regime. Here was a measure of the strength of the campaign against the slave trade: that it could mobilize not only legislators to ban the trade, but the Royal Navy to enforce the ban. That the same navy could more or less simultaneously be engaged in opening the ports of China to the Indian opium trade makes clear that the moral impulse for the war against the slave trade did not come from the Admiralty.
The memorial to the Clapham Sect on Holy Trinity Church’s east wall salutes Macaulay and his friends who ‘rested not until the curse of slavery was swept away from all parts of the British dominions’. But that was only the first stage of a much more ambitious plan. Significantly, the memorial also praises them for labouring ‘so abundantly for national righteousness and conversion of the heathen’. That in itself was a new departure. For two hundred years the Empire had engaged in trade, warfare and colonization. It had exported British goods, capital and people. Now, however, it aspired to export British culture. Africans might be backward and superstitious, but to this new generation of British Evangelicals, they also seemed capable of being ‘civilized’. As Macaulay put it, the time had come to ‘spread over [Africa’s] gloomy surface light, liberty and civilization’. Spreading the word of God and thereby saving the souls of the benighted heathen was a new, not-for-profit rationale for expanding British influence. It was to be the defining mission of the century’s most successful non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The missionary societies were the Victorian aid agencies, bringing both spiritual and material assistance to the ‘less developed’ world. Their origins can be traced back to the Society for the Promotion of the Christian Gospel (1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1701), but these were almost exclusively concerned with the spiritual welfare of British colonists and servicemen posted overseas. Like the anti-slavery movement, the movement to convert indigenous peoples took off in the late eighteenth century. In 1776 the
Evangelical Magazine
devoted an editorial to ‘Africa, that much injured country’. It was to ‘this benighted and oppressed country’ that the magazine’s editors were ‘desirous of sending the Gospel of Christ ... that essential blessing which outweighs the evils of the most suffering life’. Sixteen years later William Carey preached a seminal sermon in Nottingham, exhorting his listeners to ‘Expect great things from God; Attempt great things for God’; shortly after this, he and some friends formed the first Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen. This was followed in 1795 by the London Missionary Society, which accepted missionaries from all the non-conformist sects, and in 1799 by the Anglican Church Missionary Society which declared that its aim – indeed, its Christian duty – was ‘to propagate the knowledge of the Gospel among the Heathen’. There were also Scottish societies formed in Glasgow and Edinburgh in 1796.
The obvious place to start missionary work in Africa was Freetown. As early as 1804 the Church Missionary Society had begun work there, followed soon after by the Methodists. Both set about converting the Yoruba ‘Recaptives’ (freed slaves brought to Freetown by the intervention of the Navy). But the intention from the outset was to send missionaries not just to Africa. Anglican missionaries went out to the most remote of British colonies, New Zealand, as early as 1809. On Christmas Day 1814 Samuel Marsden preached from the text ‘Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy’ to a congregation of uncomprehending Maoris. His survival seems to have attracted others. The Methodists established a mission there in 1823, the Roman Catholics in 1838. By 1839 the Anglicans had eleven mission stations in New Zealand to the Methodists’ six. Perhaps the most successful of the early New Zealand missionaries was the Anglican Henry Williams, a fearless exsailor who worked there from 1823 until his death in 1867, building the first church (at Paihia) and translating the Bible into Maori. Williams succeeded in winning the respect of the Maoris, not least by intervening to remind them of the Gospel in the middle of a pitched battle. But not every missionary could get away with such challenges to traditional mores. The Revd Carl S. Volkner came to New Zealand in the 1850s, but fell out of favour with the Opitiki Maoris by urging them to desist from bloodshed when war broke out with a rival clan in 1865. One of the Opitiki chiefs hanged him, shot him, decapitated him in his own church, drank his blood and swallowed both his eyes.
Converting the heathen was a dangerous enterprise. To succeed, the missionary movement needed an army of young men – idealistic, altruistic adventurers, willing to go to the ends of the earth to spread the Word. There could not be a greater contrast between the missionaries’ motives and those of previous generations of empire-builders, the swashbucklers, the slavers and the settlers.
William Threlfall sailed for South Africa in 1824 at the age of just twentythree, one of the Methodist Mission’s brightest hopes. Even the voyage south came close to killing him when typhus broke out on board his ship, and shortly after going ashore he was taken gravely ill. It gives a flavour of the new idealism of the time that, as he lay on what he feared was his deathbed in Cape Town, he seized hold of a friend’s hand and, ‘with the most impressive earnestness expressed a wish that he was black, that he might go among the natives of the country without being liable to the suspicion of being influenced by sinister or worldly views’. This time Threlfall recovered. But less than a year later he and a companion were hacked to death by bushmen.
Threlfall and thousands like him were the martyrs of a new evangelical imperialism. Their readiness to sacrifice themselves not for gain but for God was what made the Victorian Empire different from all that had gone before. And behind every missionary – indeed, behind all the Victorian NGOs – were the far more numerous men and women at home who supported and sponsored their work: the type satirized by Dickens in
Bleak House
as Mrs Jellyby, criminally neglectful of her immediate family but passionately devoted to good causes;
a lady of very remarkable strength of character who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects at various times and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa, with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry – AND the natives – and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population ... She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if ... they could see nothing nearer than Africa!
 
In many ways, the model mission in Africa was the London Missionary Society’s Kuruman establishment in Bechuanaland, nearly 600 miles north-east of Cape Town. Kuruman was regularly cited in LMS literature to show what a well-run mission should be, and you can see why when you go there. It looks like a smart little Scottish village in the heart of Africa, complete with thatched kirk, whitewashed cottages and a red post-box. The essence of the Kuruman project was simple: in turning Africans into Christians, the mission was at the same time civilizing them, changing not just their faith but also their mode of dress, hygiene and housing. The progress made at Kuruman in these respects was enthusiastically reported in the
Missionary Magazine
:
The people are now dressed in British manufactures and make a very respectable appearance in the house of God. The children who formerly went naked and presented a most disgusting appearance are decently clothed ... Instead of a few wretched huts resembling pigsties we now have a regular village, the valley on which it stands which till lately was uncultivated is now laid out in gardens.
 
In other words, it was not just Christianization that was being attempted here. It was Anglicization.
Then, on 31 July 1841, this ideal mission was struck by a human thunderbolt: a man who was to revolutionize the missionary movement, and to change the relationship between Britain and Africa forever.
Victorian Superman
 
The son of a tailor turned tea salesman, David Livingstone was born in 1813 in the textile town of Blantyre in Lanarkshire, where he started work in the mill at the age of just ten. He was a prodigious autodidact. Despite a twelveand-a-half-hour day, six days a week, he buried himself in books, teaching himself Latin and the rudiments of Classical Greek, literally reading as he span. In Livingstone the two great intellectual currents of early nineteenth-century Scotland met: the reverence for science of the Enlightenment, the sense of mission of a revived Calvinism. It was the former that drew him to study medicine; the latter convinced him to put his energies and skills at the disposal of the London Missionary Society. He paid his own way through Anderson’s College in Glasgow, then applied to become a missionary in 1838. Two years later, in November 1840, he qualified as Licentiate of the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons in Glasgow. That same month he was ordained as a minister.
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