[D66] The Long War Against Slavery

[A.OUT]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/27/the-long-war-against-slavery

The Long War Against Slavery
By
Casey Cep
newyorker.com
16 min
View Original

“Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies,” 
Samuel Johnson once toasted at an Oxford dinner party, or so James 
Boswell claims. The veracity of Boswell’s biography—including its 
representation of Johnson’s position on slavery—has long been contested. 
In the course of more than a thousand pages, little mention is made of 
Johnson’s long-term servant, Francis Barber, who came into the writer’s 
house as a child after being taken to London from the Jamaican sugar 
plantation where he was born into slavery. Some of the surviving pages 
of Johnson’s notes for his famous dictionary have Barber’s handwriting 
on the back; there are scraps on which a twelve-year-old Barber 
practiced his own name while learning to write. Thirty years later, 
Johnson died and left Barber a sizable inheritance. But Boswell 
repeatedly minimizes Johnson’s abiding opposition to slavery—even that 
startling toast is characterized as an attempt to offend Johnson’s 
“grave” dinner companions rather than as genuine support for the 
enslaved. Boswell was in favor of slavery, and James Basker, a literary 
historian at Barnard College, has suggested that this stance tainted his 
depiction of Johnson’s abolitionism, especially since Boswell’s book 
appeared around the time that the British Parliament was voting on 
whether to end England’s participation in the international slave trade.

Johnson’s abolitionist views were likely influenced by Barber’s 
experience of enslavement. For much of the eighteenth century, Jamaica 
was the most profitable British colony and the largest importer of 
enslaved Africans, and Johnson once described it as “a place of great 
wealth and dreadful wickedness, a den of tyrants, and a dungeon of 
slaves.” He wasn’t the only Englishman paying close attention to 
rebellion in the Caribbean: abolitionists and slavers alike read the 
papers anxiously for news of slave revolts, taking stock of where the 
rebels came from, how adroitly they planned their attacks, how quickly 
revolts were suppressed, and how soon they broke out again.

In a new book, the historian Vincent Brown argues that these rebellions 
did more to end the slave trade than any actions taken by white 
abolitionists like Johnson. “Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic 
Slave War” (Belknap) focusses on one of the largest slave uprisings of 
the eighteenth century, when a thousand enslaved men and women in 
Jamaica, led by a man named Tacky, rebelled, causing tens of thousands 
of pounds of property damage, leaving sixty whites dead, and leading to 
the deaths of five hundred of those who had participated or were accused 
of having done so. Brown’s most interesting claim is that Tacky and his 
comrades were not undertaking a discrete act of rebellion but, rather, 
fighting one of many battles in a long war between slavers and the 
enslaved. Both the philosopher John Locke and the self-emancipated Igbo 
writer Olaudah Equiano defined slavery as a state of war, but Brown goes 
further, describing the transatlantic slave trade as “a borderless slave 
war: war to enslave, war to expand slavery, and war against slaves, 
answered on the side of the enslaved by war against slaveholders, and 
also war among slaves themselves.”

Understood as a military struggle, slavery was a conflict staggering in 
its scale, even just in the Caribbean. Beginning in the seventeenth 
century, European traders prowled Africa’s Gold Coast looking to 
exchange guns, textiles, or even a bottle of brandy for able bodies; by 
the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves constituted ninety per cent 
of Europe’s trade with Africa. Of the more than ten million Africans who 
survived the journey across the Atlantic, six hundred thousand went to 
work in Jamaica, an island roughly the size of Connecticut. By contrast, 
four hundred thousand were sent to all of North America. (The domestic 
slave trade was another matter: by the time the Civil War began, there 
were roughly four million enslaved people living in the United States.)

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