Amazing Grace
Bristol and slavery were once synonymous as this West country port was built on the proceeds of human suffering. The triangular trade was extremely profitable and every ship owner’s dream because their vessels were never empty. To West Africa they carried cloth
from Manchester and steel from Sheffield, slaves were transported across the Atlantic to the West Indies and the ships then returned home stacked with rum, sugar and cotton.
When Michael Mansfield QC reminded our 10th anniversary dinner audience of the similarities between the slave trade and modern livestock farming, I don’t think anyone was aware of just how closely the one mirrors the other. There are shockingly obvious comparisons such as branding, the method of transport, the ‘breaking’ of trouble makers and enforced breeding to produce saleable offspring. But it is the nature of the campaign that eventually ended this obscenity that I find extraordinary and which confirms the old saying that there’s little new in this life.
The whole thing started with a court case. Captain Luke Collingwood, incompetent skipper of the vessel Zong, doubled the crossing time to Jamaica because of bad navigation. His cargo of 440 slaves became ill and as many would have no value on arrival, he ordered his men to throw 133 of the sickest overboard. Those who resisted were dumped in the ocean still wearing their iron shackles. He later falsely claimed the maritime law of ‘jettison’, saying these were sacrificed so that others could live because water was so short. Such an action was perfectly legal and the vessel’s owners would be entitled to claim insurance of £30 for each body. The court case was not about his murdering so many men, women and children but because the insurers contested his claim that water was short.
This was 1787 and sparked the start of a campaign which was to last 51 years before ending in success. Every step of this struggle is eerily familiar as are the atrocities we now fight against – including the slow asphyxiation in multi-tiered ships of thousands of sheep for Australia’s Middle East livestock exports and the dumping of the sick ones into the sea.
Just as in factory farming, the death rate of slaves was built into the economic equation – death brought about by the barbarous belief that a black person had no feelings, was a beast and was utterly dispensable. It is only six years since animals in Europe were granted the status of sentient creatures and not goods.
Of course, the church had a view on this exploitation just as it has a view on modern farming. The Church of England then owned one of the most prosperous sugar plantations in Barbados which, like every other sugar plantation, systematically worked slaves to death. Today it invests in factory farming and meat retailing and proudly boasts of its market skills: “Beef and sheep showed good results; dairy alone languished.” Well, they’re only beasts and beasts warrant no mention of any kind in this supposedly moral giant’s ‘ethical investment policy’.
Then, it was left to the Quakers to oppose slavery from a religious standpoint and now it is still the Quakers who largely oppose animal exploitation for moral reasons. So, no change there!
Twenty-five-year-old divinity student, Thomas Clarkson, was spurred into action by the Zong case and for years was the anti-slavery movement’s only full-time organiser. He learned then what many are still learning now – that organising is not enough, a media campaign is essential. He also produced a newsletter to keep in touch with his supporters and began what was the first-ever direct mail campaign, asking his followers to make regular donations. No change there, either!
A diagram of the sailing ship Brookes, from Liverpool, and the precise number of shackled slaves it would carry. It was the same philosophy which produced factory farming – minimum space, maximum profit
Within a few years, Clarkson was urging a consumer boycott, encouraging people to avoid all goods which were a product of slavery. Hundreds of thousands responded and soon, some manufacturers began labelling their goods with welfare claims ‘Produced by the labour of free men!’ Others tried to mislead the public by pretending that their slaves were cosseted and pampered. When parliament looked like it might regulate the treatment of slaves, planters quickly drew up their own voluntary code of practice, packed with claims of care and concern – little different to the so-called self-regulated quality assurance schemes that litter today’s meat counters – Assured British Meat, the Little Red Tractor and the RSPCA’s Freedom Food scheme.
Slaves were transported under the very best of conditions, they said: “If the weather is sultry and there appears the least perspiration upon their skins, there are two men attending with cloths to rub them perfectly dry and another to give them a little cordial. They are then supplied with pipes and tobacco.’ And, of course, when they arrived at their destination, things were equally as considerate and each happy slave family was allocated ‘a snug little house and garden and plenty of pigs and poultry’– slavery’s equivalent to ‘the best animal welfare in the world’.
One pro-slavery writer even suggested changing the name from ‘slave’ to ‘assistant planter’ to quell the cries of outrage. Just this year, a meat industry committee suggested changing the name of the cruel, metal-barred cage called the farrowing crate to… the ‘freedom nest’.
The fact that people were boycotting sugar was damaging profits and so it was promoted as an essential foodstuff. ‘Sugar is not a luxury but a necessary of life and great injury have many persons done to their constitutions by totally abstaining from it.’ Sound familiar?
The press played a similar role to the one it plays now, with The Liverpool General Advertiser running a doom-laden editorial complaining about the ‘infatuation of our country (with abolishing slavery) running headlong into ruin’. Before parliament would take up the issue it insisted on lengthy hearings, made even longer by the delaying tactics of the slave industry which stretched the process out for years.
When it did eventually reach parliament, again a familiar pattern emerged. The Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of George III, in his maiden speech to the House of Lords, claimed that he was: “…an attentive observer of the state of the negroes” and found them well cared for and “in a state of humble happiness.”
The cries of today’s UK farmers that improvements in animal welfare will only lead to a flood of foreign imports of cruelly-produced meat is nothing new either. The Duke addressed this issue from a slavery perspective, claiming that if the trade was abolished it would be taken up by foreigners ‘who would not use them with such tenderness and care’.
Betrayal came from other parliamentarians who, with their words, pretended to support the abolition of slavery – spoke passionately against it – and then slipped the knife home by demanding it happen ‘gradually’. The gradualist argument won the day. Such tactics have been deployed by modern Conservative MPs to ‘talk out’ legislation to ban such obscenities as the sow stall. But you know that when the opposition begins to adopt your own rhetoric, no matter how duplicitously, you have won the moral argument.
As I write this, the House of Lords has rejected a Bill to ban fox hunting, passed by an overwhelming majority of the lower house. And so it rejected in its entirety the Bill to phase out slavery. The main difference between the two events was that in 1792, the prime minister William Pitt, spoke eloquently for an end to slavery while in 2004, prime minister Blair tried every possible tactic to sabotage the anti-fox hunting Bill and it was only fear of his own backbenchers that eventually allowed it through. We will now wait to see if the law is enforced or weakened in some way.
Posters and other images of intensive farming have been fundamental to advancing animal issues – and it was the same back then. The plan on p40, showing the true conditions in which slaves were transported, was printed in its thousands and appeared in pubs and houses across Britain. It required no argument or explanation.
The trade in slaves was finally banned by parliament in 1807 but it was a further 29 years before slavery itself was abolished. On August 1, 1838, 800,000 slaves across the British empire became free in law. You could argue that it was another 100 years or more before it became a fact.
There is one remaining similarity between the campaign to end slavery and that for animal rights – both are entirely altruistic in that those who fight them stand to gain nothing if they succeed. They are born out of a desire for a better, more equitable, more just world where relieving the suffering of others is an end in itself. Both are noble, both are born of the finer aspects of the human spirit and both are opposed by bigotry, spite, ignorance and self interest. Surely no one would argue that the world is not a finer place because most slavery has ended. And one day, that judgement will be applied with equal certainty to the end of animal exploitation.
John Newton was born in 1725 and served as a slave ship captain for many years. His experiences affected him deeply and he eventually became a preacher, writing the hymn, Amazing Grace. The first verse reflects the experiences of many of us and could serve as an anthem in the battle to turn the world away from its casual abuse of sentient creatures (and I speak as an atheist). Amazing grace how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me, I once was lost, but now I’m found; Was blind, but now I see.
I’ll give the last words to anthropologist – and Quaker – Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has!”