Review
BURY THE CHAINS: PROPHETS AND REBELS IN THE FIGHT TO FREE AN EMPIRE’S SLAVES
by Adam Hochschild
Thomas Allen & Sons, 468 pp.
On a hazy morning in 1787, in the English city of Bristol, a man named Thomas Clarkson set about doing a task that suddenly struck fear in his heart. He was about to launch a local extension of a new, national campaign against the slave trade – a brutal, often murderous, form of commerce on which this city largely depended.
"I began to tremble," Clarkson later wrote, "(and) I questioned whether I would even get out of it alive."
Clarkson was one of 12 men who had formed an alliance in a London printing shop, intent on persuading their nation to stop trafficking in human beings. They had every right to fear the reaction of millionaire plantation owners, many of whom ran their Caribbean sugar-cane empires from Britain and represented a significant portion of the national economy.
And yet the abolition movement, supported strongly by Quakers, caught on at a pace nobody could have predicted, touching the hearts of people of all classes. Working men and women, politicians and entrepreneurs alike began wearing antislavery badges. John Newton, a former slave-ship captain and author of the hymn "Amazing Grace," helped lead the charge.
Within a few years, hundreds of thousands of British citizens were boycotting sugar, slavery’s chief product. The movement wasn’t victorious overnight – it took almost five decades to end slavery in the British Empire – but the infamous trafficking was indeed finally banished from British commerce, some 35 years before Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in an America torn apart by civil war.
Adam Hochschild’s account of it all is one of the best historical tales of recent years – just the sort of book you’d want to buy someone who claims history is dry but who loves a good story. Bury the Chains connects remarkably well with the modern reader, in part because the narrative relates convincingly to our world. An astonishing range of techniques for social change that we take for granted can be traced back to this antislavery movement: pamphlets, slogans, buttons, mass rallies, concerts, political lobbying and door-to-door campaigning.
And the tale has a sparkling array of characters, including the fiery organizer Clarkson, the eccentric musician Granville Sharp, the brilliant orator and ex-slave Olaudah Equiano, the London dandy James Stephen, and the Member of Parliament from Yorkshire, William Wilberforce. As Margaret Mead would later write, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, that is the only thing that ever has."
In and out of this story of dedication, Hochschild weaves testimony and journal records of the lives of slaves, whose often-appalling treatment at the hands of brutal traffickers and avaricious masters tipped the scales in the movement’s favour – most notably when a mass-circulated drawing showed kidnapped, chained Africans squeezed like anchovies between the decks of wooden, transatlantic ships.
It’s not always a pretty story, but in the end, it’s one of the most uplifting ones you’re likely to find.
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