Slaves bound by chains, the sounds of creaking ship masts, and the
barter of human flesh all seem alien to our impressions of eighteenth century
Buckinghamshire. Yet Christians of Olney played an important
role in the long campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. Though
they sometimes made their most dramatic impact upon English laws
and society after leaving the county, their tranquil refuge by the Ouse
nurtured contemplation and conviction and led to a profound change in
all of England and even all the world.
Regard for Olney’s curate, Revd. John Newton, led the great
Parliamentary leader William Wilberforce (1759-1833) to take up the
antislavery cause. A successor curate in Olney to Newton, Revd. Thomas
Scott, had as profound an impact on Wilberforce and also on a young
Baptist intern at Olney, William Carey, who would become a pioneer
missionary to the far reaches of the globe.
Carey’s Baptist mentor, John Sutcliff, spent 39 years as a pastor in
Olney, and led the Northamptonshire Baptist Association of churches to
bear united witness against the enslavement of Africans. Poet William
Cowper, a friend of Newton and Scott and of Sutcliff, was acknowledged
by famed Quaker abolitionist Thomas Clarkson to be ‘much admired…
and a great co-adjutor’ in the cause.1 Together these men endow Olney
with a just claim to fame.
John Newton (1725-1807), curate of Olney from 1764 to 1780, was
a spiritual father to Anglican antislavery activists. He helped convince
Wilberforce to persevere in his calling to elected office when the MP
was tempted to exchange it for the Christian ministry. Newton published
eyewitness accounts of the African slave trade and even testified before
Parliamentary and royal fact-finding commissions in the efforts to
end it.2
Before John Newton became an advocate for the abolitionist cause in
his later ministry, such a role for him seemed highly unlikely. Born in
London, the son of a naval captain, Newton shared crowded slave ship
decks with white men of foul lips and hard hearts. He once became a
virtual slave of the black mistress to a slave trader on an island off the
coast of west Africa, later describing himself as a ‘servant of slaves’.
Ultimately freed by the interposition of a family friend he sailed
thrice as captain of a slave ship. He later become a priest through the
patronage of the Earl of Dartmouth, who had read the autobiographical
letters of Newton published in 1764 as An Authentic Narrative of Some
Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of [John Newton].3
The Earl arranged for him to settle in Olney as curate the same year.
When he had first begun to experience conviction of his sin John
Newton had put blasphemy, not involvement in the slave trade, at the
head of the list of sins which convicted him. He sought to reform his
life and to understand better the Word of God. As Dr Bruce Hindmarsh
has written, ‘participation in the cruelty of the slave trade did not yet
seem even to trouble his conscience’.4 Newton wrote of the experience:
‘For the space of about six years the Lord was pleased to lead me in a
secret way. I had learnt something of the evil of my heart. I had read the
Bible over and over, with several good books, and had a general view of
gospel truth. But my conceptions were in many respects confused, not
having in all this time met with one acquaintance who could assist my
inquiries’.5 Newton again wrote in 1763:
The reader may perhaps wonder, as I now do myself, that, knowing the
state of this vile traffic . . . I did not at the time [recoil] with horror at my
own employment as an agent in promoting it. Custom, example, and [self-]
interest had blinded my eyes. I did it ignorantly, for I am sure [that] had I
thought of the slave trade then as I have thought of it since, no considerations
would have induced me to continue in it. Though my religious views were
not very clear, my conscience was very tender, and I [would not have dared
to displease] God by acting against the light of my mind. . . . I should have
been overwhelmed with distress and terror, if I had known or even suspected,
that I was acting wrongly. I felt greatly the disagreeableness of the business.
The office of a gaoler, and the restraints under which I was obliged to keep
my prisoners, were not suitable to my feelings; but I considered it as the line
of life which God in His providence had allotted me, and as a cross which
I ought to bear with patience and thankfulness till he should be pleased to
deliver me from it.6
Three decades later, reflecting on his years in the slave trade, he wrote:
Perhaps what I have said of myself may be applicable to the nation at
large. The slave trade was always unjustifiable; but inattention and interest
prevented for a time the evil from being perceived. It is otherwise at present;
the mischiefs and evils connected with it have been, of late years, represented
with such undeniable evidence, and are now so generally known, that I
suppose there is hardly an objection can be made to the wish of thousands,
perhaps of millions, for the suppression of this trade, but upon the ground of
political expedience.7
Newton initially left the slave trade principally because of his health.
He spent years in Liverpool employed at the port, all the while teaching
himself theology and foreign languages before soliciting episcopal
ordination in the Church of England. Life sometimes is filled with
paradoxes. In 1793 he wrote:
I think my heart was never more warm and fixed, than during my two last
voyages to Africa, though I was engaged in a traffic, which I now see was
unlawful and abominable.8
On his own initiative in 1788, to expose mistreatment of slaves, he
published his recollections of ‘unmerciful whippings’ and ‘torture [of
slaves by] the thumbscrews’.9
A mate of a ship in a long-boat purchased a young woman with a fine child of
about a year old in her arms. In the night, the child cried much, and disturbed
his sleep. He rose up in great anger, and swore that if the child did not cease
making such a noise he would presently silence it. The child continued to
cry. At length he rose up a second time, tore the child from the mother, and
threw it into the sea.10
The eighteenth century was a time of great cruelty in many areas of
society. Criminals were kept in insanitary prisons with the insane and
debtors, child labour was commonplace, and animal mistreatment was
not only ignored but sometimes even celebrated. For a time there seems
to have been a widespread cultural deafness to matters which today we
would find appalling.
Newton’s repentance of his former ways grew to such total loathing
that he was unwilling to accept any credit for his antislavery activity
later in life, even though his proved to be vital opposition to the slave
trade. In a 1792 letter he wrote to a friend in Edinburgh:
I have been hurt by two or three letters directed to Dr. Newton. I beg you to
inform my friends in Scotland as they come in your way, that after a little
time, if any letters come to me, addressed to Dr. Newton, I shall be obliged
to send them back unopened. I know no such person, I never shall, I never
will, by the grace of God…. My youthful years were spent in Africa, and I
ought to take my degrees (if I take any) from thence. Shall such a compound
of misery and mischief, as I then was, be called DOCTOR? Surely not.11
Thomas Scott (1747-1821), curate of Olney from 1781 to 1785, helped
shape public opinion and encouraged both William Cowper and William
Carey in the antislavery cause. While in Olney he led Carey to his
evangelical faith, and after leaving Olney he wrote a Bible Commentary
which contained important antislavery sentiments and became the most
widely read in nineteenth-century America. Scott also had a profound
influence on English society. In 1807 he wrote:
I feel [proud now] that [more than] twenty years ago I withstood with all my
energy [the recommendation of one] who advised Mr. W[ilberforce] to retire
from public life. Had that counsel been followed, the slave trade might have
been continued to future generations.12
Wilberforce knew Thomas Scott for 35 years, heard his preaching
regularly in London, and wrote of
…[his] extensive acquaintance with scripture, [his] accurate knowledge of
the human heart, and [his] vehement and powerful appeals to the conscience,
with which all his sermons abounded to a greater degree than those of any
other minister I ever attended.13
In 1807 Scott received a ‘mark of esteem and regard’ from the other
side of the Atlantic Ocean. Because of his Commentary on the Whole
Bible Dickinson College awarded him the degree of DD14, no doubt also
in part because of his fearless anti-slavery stand. Scott’s Commentary
had a widespread influence and from 1808 to 1819 more than 25,000
copies and eight editions were printed in the United States.15 One
unfriendly critic had to admit that by 1864 it was the most popular Bible
commentary in America.16
John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, was a
devoted reader of Scott’s Commentary.
[Adams] had been minister to five different European courts, senator of
the United States, appointed to the Supreme [Court], had been eight years
Secretary of State, and four years President. His opportunities were great, his
advantages rare, his natural abilities strong.17
A professor at Harvard University from 1806 until 1809, he must have
noticed republication in 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where
Harvard is located) of an edition of Scott’s Essays on the Most Important
Subjects in Religion, written in Olney and published first in Britain in
1785. In one of those essays Scott asks:
What then shall we think of the accursed slave trade, which will surely bring
vengeance on this nation, if much longer tolerated! Even laws . . . [protect]
the persons concerned in this enormous guilt; and they, who should punish
the murderer and yet suffer him to escape, will be numbered among the
abettors of his crime at God’s tribunal.18
After a year as President, Adams, a regular student of Thomas Scott’s
works, wrote in his diary for 31 December 1825,
I rise usually between five and six – that is, at this time of the year, from an
hour and a half to two hours before sun. I walk by the light of the moon or
stars, or none, about four miles, usually returning home in time to see the sun
rise from the eastern chamber of the House. I then make my fire, and read
three chapters of the Bible, with Scott’s and Hewlett’s Commentaries.19
His family and political supporters discouraged Adams from any
involvement in the slavery debates, but Adams had a conscience no
doubt sensitised by his daily reading of the Bible and Thomas Scott’s
Commentary. In his last years he was urged to represent a group of
helpless black Africans who after being rescued from a Spanish slave
ship, the Amistad, which had made its way to the coast of Connecticut,
yet were threatened with deportation to forced labour in the Spanish
Caribbean plantations. The case of their liberation by the United States
Supreme Court became an American landmark in jurisprudence.20
Adams made the following entry in his diary for March 29, 1841:
I am yet to revise for publication my argument in the case of the Amistad
Africans; and . . . I find impulses of duty upon my own conscience which
I cannot resist, while on the other hand are the magnitude, the danger, the
insurmountable burden of labor to be encountered in the undertaking to
touch upon the slave-trade. No one else will undertake it; no one but a spirit
unconquerable by man, woman or fiend can undertake it but with the heart
of martyrdom. The world, the flesh, and all the devils in hell are arrayed
against any man who now in this North American Union shall dare to join
the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave-trade; and what
can I, upon the verge of my seventy-fourth birthday, with a shaking hand,
a darkening eye, a drowsy brain, and with all my faculties dropping from
me one by one, as the teeth are dropping from my head – what can I do for
the cause of God and man, for the progress of human emancipation, for the
suppression of the African slave-trade? Yet my conscience presses me on; let
me but die upon the breach.21
The impact of Thomas Scott of Olney upon John Quincy Adams
profoundly affected the course of American jurisprudence.
John Sutcliff (1752-1814), a minister of the Baptist church in Olney from
1775 to 1814, was Carey’s mentor and a leader in the Northamptonshire
Baptist Association, the fraternal fellowship of churches which financially
supported London’s Anti-Slavery Committee. A letter from Sutcliff’s
church in 1792 to fellow-Baptists gave expression to his views:
…we tenderly feel for those who are groaning under the scourge of tyranny,
or suffering in the cause of liberty; while we reprobate the conduct of those
who are engaged in the wicked business of enslaving others, and sympathize
with such as fall into their merciless hands.22
After Sutcliff came to Olney in 1775 he assumed shared leadership not
only of the local Baptist congregation but also of the larger body. It was
the practice of the Baptist Association to receive annual letters from
member churches which were read at Association meetings, and then
printed in a ‘Circular Letter’. The 1787 Circular Letter mentions that it
was
Agreed, …That as we are informed of an intended application to parliament
for an abolition of the slave trade, we will use all lawful means for the
promoting of so just and humane a design.23
The 1791 Circular Letter records that for the 6 a.m. Thursday morning
meeting, after prayer and the reading of reports, the meeting attended to
the business of the Association fund, and
It was unanimously voted that five guineas should be sent up to the Treasurer
of the Society for procuring [John Newton’s] Abolition of the Slave Trade,
that we might shew our hearty abhorrence of that wicked and detestable
merchandize; the reception of which sum has been since acknowledged in the
most obliging manner, by Granville Sharp, Esq. Chairman of the Committee;
who assures us, that the Committee ‘are now more animated, if possible, than
ever, against the iniquitous and disgraceful practices of Slave-dealers and
Slave-holders, and are firmly determined (as by an indispensible [sic] duty to
God and man) to persevere in their endeavours, by all legal means, to effect
the abolition of such enormities’.24
In 1792 another five guineas were ‘[v]oted for the Committee [f]or the
repeal of the slave trade’ by the Association ‘to be transmitted by the
moderator, to the Chairman of the Committee for procuring the abolition
of the inhuman and ungodly Trade in the persons of Men’.25 The antislavery
expenditure was the largest single contribution made.
At the very meeting when a call for missionaries to the utmost corners
of the earth was made, the messengers voted also to send substantial
financial contributions to the Anti-Slavery Committee, headed by
Anglican Granville Sharp, as evidence of the Baptists’ commitment
to the cause. The Baptists viewed both anti-slavery efforts and foreign
mission work as their responsibilities, and John Sutcliff led them.
William Carey (1761-1834), whose family came from Olney and who
served from 1785 to 1787 as an intern pastor and member of the Baptist
Church in Olney, was an ardent abolitionist. With his tract, An Enquiry
Into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of
the Heathens, he inspired a veritable army of linguists, teachers, and
physicians who went to the ends of the earth, almost as a penance for the
evils of the slave trade. Often called the father of the modern missionary
movement, Carey also was a ‘whole-souled Emancipationist’.26
The name Carey appears 60 times in the Olney parish register during
the century before his birth.27 Carey studied under John Sutcliff in Olney
for two years and afterwards was called to Leicester. A deacon of the
Baptist church in Leicester once said he ‘never heard Carey pray without
remembrance of the slaves’.28 It was part of Carey’s ‘own response to
the slave trade . . . to abandon the use of sugar that he might cleanse his
hands of blood’29. William Cowper’s poem, ‘Pity for Poor Africans’,
exclaimed sarcastically:
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see?
What! give up our desserts, our coffee and tea?30
Carey once wrote from the Serampore mission in India: ‘If there be
any thing of the work of God in my soul, I owe much of it to [Thomas
Scott’s] preaching, when I first set out in the ways of the Lord.’31
In 1791 William Carey composed An Enquiry Into the Obligations
of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens – one
hundred pages which changed the world. Permeated with anti-slavery
sentiment and fired with the missionary spirit, he wrote: ‘Is it not the
duty of Christians to attempt to do something toward spreading the
Gospel in the heathen world?’
The Northamptonshire Baptist Association had requested him to draw
up an essay on the need for prayer, the needs of the heathen around the
world, and the need to consider the times. One of Carey’s arguments
for missionary endeavour was this: ‘have not English traders, for the
sake of gain, surmounted all those things which have generally been
counted insurmountable obstacles in the way of preaching the gospel?
Witness . . . even the accursed Slave-Trade on the coasts of Africa. Men
can insinuate themselves into the favour of the most barbarous clans,
and uncultivated tribes, for the sake of gain; and how different soever
the circumstances of trading and preaching are, yet this will prove the
possibility of ministers being introduced there.’32
If slaves could be imported, why could not the gospel be exported?
The Northamptonshire Baptist Association resolved to send William
Carey to establish schools in India, translate the Bible into its native
languages, and plant a beachhead which remains even to the present
day.
In his Enquiry Carey remarks that
a noble effort has been made to abolish the inhuman Slave-Trade, and though
at present it has not been so successful as might be wished, yet it is to be
hoped it will be persevered in, till it is accomplished. In the meantime it is a
satisfaction to consider that the late defeat of the abolition of the Slave-Trade
has proved the occasion of a praiseworthy effort to introduce a free settlement,
at Sierra Leona, on the coast of Africa; an effort which, if succeeded with a
divine blessing, not only promises to open a way for honourable commerce
with that extensive country, and for the civilization of its inhabitants, but may
prove the happy means of introducing amongst them the gospel of our Lord
Jesus Christ.33
In Carey’s view, the abolition of the slave trade was a motivation for
the missionary calling, and was clearly tied to its purpose at its very
inception.
Carey from his conversion was fierce against [slavery]. His sisters never
heard him pray without reference to this traffic ‘so inhuman and accursed.’
Under the influence of Cowper he watched the collaboration of Clarkson,
Wilberforce, Macaulay, and Sharp; the Commons faced with the question;
Fox’s stand for abolition; Wilberforce’s superb effort in the House in 1789,
and the [sub]sequent mitigation of the transport atrocities; then, alas, in 1791,
the Trade’s smashing triumph, [in] spite of Wesley’s dying entreaty, through
Parliament’s reaction [to] the turbulence of France.34
Upon passage of the emancipation law in 1833, news travelled quickly
to India. The introduction of steamboats meant that news from London
to Calcutta, via Egypt, could then travel in a mere 64 days! In those last
months of Carey’s life, a Danish physician at the Serampore mission read
to him a letter which had been mailed from London. It reported that ‘the
cabinet meant to . . . emancipate the West Indian slaves.’ ‘This…news’,
says J.C. Marshman, ‘has rejoiced us all, but especially Carey. For many
years, in his every prayer, he has been pleading for the destruction of
slavery. In no public question has he taken a deeper interest. When the
particulars of the measure were [read], with tears in his eyes he thanked
God.’35
William Cowper (1731-1800), who lived in Olney for 18 years (1768-
1786), took up writing poetry while there and became one of the greatest
poets England has produced. His work was a precursor to the dawning
of the Romantic movement and he ‘was one of the most prolific and
influential antislavery poets of the eighteenth century…. During the
1780s [he] introduced powerful antislavery passages into his long
meditative poems and published shorter abolitionist lyrics in newspapers
and magazines.’36 Cowper ‘was one of the earliest, if not the first [to
have] expressed their detestation of the diabolical [slave] traffic’.37
Cowper showed great versatility in writing poems and songs to suit different
eyes and ears combatting slavery…. [He] used his influence with his old
[friends from London] to promote the anti-slavery cause, and he was careful
to solicit the attention of his Whig relations who had still an important voice
in the affairs of the nation.38
The important Quaker abolitionist leader Thomas Clarkson warmly
acknowledged Cowper’s contribution to his cause. Clarkson wrote:
The last of the necessary forerunners and coadjutors of this class, whom I
am to mention, was our much admired poet Cowper; and a great co-adjutor
he was, when we consider what value was put upon his sentiments, and the
extraordinary circulation of his works.39
When it was rumoured that Cowper had refused to sign an anti-slavery
petition because he had changed his mind, he denounced the report
vehemently. In a letter from ‘Oulney’ dated 16 February, 1788, he stated:
‘I have already borne my testimony in favour of our Black Brethren, […]
I was one of the earliest, if not the first of those who have in the present
day, expressed their detestation of the diabolical traffic in question[…].
On all these accounts I judged it best to be silent, and especially because I
cannot doubt that some effectual measures will now be taken to alleviate
the miseries of their condition, the whole nation being in possession of
the case, and it being impossible also to alledge an argument in behalf of
Man-merchandize that can deserve a hearing.40 Later, in 1792, he wrote
to a minister friend, ‘I think it would be better the negroes should have
eaten one another than that we should carry them to market.’41
Cowper had no good reason for being optimistic in 1788. Not until
20 years later would the slave trade be outlawed and not for another 25
years after that would emancipation finally be achieved. However, he
was right in his judgment that poetry has a faculty to change the heart
even more than the preached word. He once wrote, ‘It is a noble thing
to be a poet; it makes all the world so lively. I might have preached
more sermons than ever Tillotson did, and better, and the world would
have been still fast asleep; but a volume of verse is a fiddle that puts the
universe in motion.’42
In one of his most widely admired poems, Cowper described African
slavery with great sadness:
I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn’d.
No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart’s
Just estimation priz’d above all price,
I had much rather be myself the slave
And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.
We have no slaves at home.- Then why abroad?
And they themselves once ferried o’er the wave
That parts us, are emancipate and loos’d.
Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free,
They touch our country and their shackles fall.
That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then,
And let it circulate through ev’ry vein
Of all your empire. That where Britain’s power
Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.43
