SOURCE: Dykes, Eva Beatrice. “The Romantic Climax.” In The Negro in English Romantic Thought, or, A Study of Sympathy for the Oppressed, pp. 63-103. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1942.

[In the following essay, Dykes examines the poetry and prose of famous English authors writing on abolitionist themes, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Thomas DeQuincey, and Charles Dickens. These authors focused their attacks on British slavery until it was abolished in 1833, after which they turned their attentions to the United States.]

SECTION I—SETTING (NINETEENTH CENTURY)

Echoes of the French and American Revolutions, increasing interest in industrialism, the desire to continue humanitarian efforts in behalf of the laboring classes and the unfortunate transgressors of the law, and the eventual abolition of the slave trade in 1807 preserved in the hearts of many people the flames of freedom and a deep consciousness of the universal brotherhood of man. Certain magazines played their part in effecting this attitude. Sidney Smith, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, writes, “To appreciate the value of the Edinburgh Review the state of England at the period when that journal began should be had in remembrance. The Catholics were not emancipated—the Corporation and Test Acts were unrepealed—the Game Laws were horribly oppressive—Steel Traps and Spring Guns were set all over the country—Prisoners tried for their lives could have no Counsel—Lord Eldon and the Court of Chancery pressed heavily upon mankind—Libel was punished by the most cruel and vindictive imprisonments—the principles of Political Economy were little understood—the Law of Debt and Conspiracy were upon the worst possible footing—the enormous wickedness of the Slave Trade was tolerated—a thousand evils were in existence, which the talents of good and able men have since lessened or removed; and these effects have been not a little assisted by the honest boldness of the Edinburgh Review.”¹ The editors of the Edinburgh Journal “a few years” before 1848 refuted arguments for slavery expressed in a book said to be a translation from the French of J. H. Guenebault's The Natural History of the Negro Race. This translation proposed the thesis that Negroes are not human beings but an “inferior order of animals.” In refuting these arguments the editors of the Journal show that Negroes have displayed “intellectual and moral features” identical with those of the whites, offering as proof such men as Carey, Jenkins, Cuffee, Gustavus Vassa, and Toussaint.²

On the other hand, there were those in both England and the colonies who supported the slave trade. William Cobbett, well known writer of this period, in his Weekly Political Register and other writings, opposes abolition of the slave trade, the freeing of Negro slaves, the introduction of Negroes into the Army,³ which in his opinion “necessarily degrades the profession of the soldier,” and disapproves of the “shocking” number of English women married to Negroes. In defiance of the Act of Abolition many Englishmen continued to traffic in slaves. MacInnes says that Brougham in 1811 “carried through a Bill which made participation in the slave trade a felony punishable by transportation, and in 1824 the trade became a piracy and a capital crime. Even after that it still went on, and Englishment and Americans shared in the wicked profits.”⁴ Planters naturally from economic reasons fought the Abolition Act. A Dominican planter in 1826 writes in one of the West India papers that slaves in Jamaica were happy; in fact, they appeared to him so happy that he wished he could exchange places with them.⁵ In 1828 appeared anonymously Marly; or the Life of a Planter in Jamaica purporting to be an impartial account of conditions in Jamaica.

The abolitionists, however, were not discouraged. Romilly,⁶ Brougham,⁷ Wilberforce, Z. Macaulay, George Stephen, Clarkson, and Buxton with many others worked assiduously to accomplish their aim by speeches, by the presentation of petitions, by letters, and by pamphlets. In 1823 the Anti-Slavery Association was formed with Zachary Macaulay as editor of its monthly publication, The Anti-Slavery Reporter. The same year Buxton, succeeding Wilberforce as parliamentary leader, made his first motion for the extinction of British colonial slavery on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the rights of men.⁸ Ministers, lecturers, and public speakers urged the discontinuance of slavery. Bishop Reginald Heber's “From Greenland's Icy Mountains” (composed to be sung in April, 1820, when the author preached a sermon for a church missionary society) included the Christianizing of India and Africa.⁹ The Reverend J. M. Trew, rector of the Parish of St. Thomas in Jamaica, published in 1826 An Appeal, to the Christian Philanthropy of the People of Great Britain and Ireland in Behalf of the Religious Instruction and Conversion of 300,000 Negro Slaves. The profits arising from the sale of this appeal were to be used for the religious instruction of the slaves in St. Thomas. Four years later in 1830 appeared A Sermon on the Duty of the People towards the British Negro Slave by Charles Townsend, Rector of Calstone Wilts. The sermon was inscribed to Clarkson, “the friend of humanity, the enemy of oppression, the devoted, intrepid, unwearied assertor of the rights of the injured sons of Africa.” Between October 10, 1830, and April 23, 1831, five thousand, four hundred and eighty-four petitions were presented to Parliament in behalf of the slave.¹⁰

Thomas Clarkson's A Letter to the Clergy of Various Denominations, and to the Slave-holding Planters, in the Southern Parts of the United States of America (1841) was doubtless effective in molding public opinion. His letter is interesting for two reasons: First, the author pays splendid tribute to the intellect of the Negro, mentioning Ignatius Sancho and Henri Christophe. Concerning the latter's widow and her children he says, “Their acquaintance with history, literature, and the fine arts, and their powers of conversation, qualified them for mixing with the highest circles of English society, and they did afterward mix with them in London, and were accounted as amiable and as intellectual as others in whose company they were.”¹¹ Secondly, Clarkson uses the same arguments from an economic standpoint as Hume when he writes, “I may state here, that after an experiment of two years and a half, it has been fully established (a fact which ought to be written in letters of gold) THAT ONE ENFRANCHISED NEGRO DOES THE WORK OF TWO SLAVES.”¹²

In 1834 slavery was finally abolished throughout the whole British Empire. Thus the efforts of the Quakers, Methodists, Episcopalians, Moravians, Evangelicals; the services of Sharp, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and various committees formed for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery; the ministry of press and pulpit; the voices of lecturers, professors, and Parliamentary orators; the pleas of poets, essayists, dramatists, and novelists found a happy culmination.

But the work was not over. The condition of the former slaves in the colonies needed vigilant and constant guidance. Jan Tzatzoe, an intelligent Christian Kafir Chief, and many other African witnesses visited England to testify before a Committee of the House of Commons “instituted for the purpose of enquiring into the inhuman treatment of the injured Aborigines.”¹³ Now that slavery was abolished in the English empire, the English abolitionists desired its abolition throughout the world. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, therefore, formed branches and made alliances with similar associations in America and Europe.

Especially close was the communication between England and America. Letters were exchanged frequently between Englishmen and Americans.¹⁴ Notices of and references to slavery in English magazines were abundant. The Humming Bird or Morsels of Information on the Subject of Slavery (1825) contains anti-slavery articles and poems. On the cover of the magazine are two stanzas voicing the sentiment of the paper:

As the small Bird, that fluttering roves
Among Jamaica's tam'rind groves,
          A feather'd busy bee,
In note scarce rising to a song,
Incessant, hums the whole day long,
                    In slavery's Island, free!
So shall “A still small voice” be heard,
Though humble as the Humming Bird,
          In Britain's groves of oak;
And to the Peasant from the King,
In every ear shall ceaseless sing,
                    “Free Afric from her yoke!”

The Journal of the Quaker William Howitt¹⁵ contains reviews of books on slavery and many anti-slavery poems and articles. Americans visited England, and Englishmen visited America. For example, in 1839 Joseph John Gurney visited America and the West Indies to witness at first hand the results of emancipation. He returned satisfied with “the benefits and blessings, physical, economical, and moral, which always must in the long run, attend a course of justice and mercy.”¹⁶ George Thompson as a representative of the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade throughout the World was invited by the New England Anti-Slavery Society to lecture in various American cities in 1834 and 1835.¹⁷

American abolitionists extolled England as an example worthy of emulation by the Americans. For instance, William E. Channing in Emancipation regrets the contrast between religion in England, which vindicates the cause of the oppressed, and religion in America, which “rivets the chain and hardens the heart of the oppressor.”¹⁸ Children in America were taught to admire England as they learned an alphabet printed for the Anti-Slavery Fair (1846):

S

S is the sugar, that the slave
                    Is toiling hard to make,
To put into your pie and tea,
                    Your candy, and your cake.

U

U is for Upper Canada,
                    Where the poor slave has found
Rest after all his wanderings
                    For it is British ground.(19)

The fact that numerous quotations from English writers were utilized by both Englishmen and Americans testifies to the popularity and influence of English anti-slavery literature in America. Van Wyck Brooks informs us that “when volunteers from Germany, Italy, France exiles and revolutionists, joined in the guerilla war in Kansas, when Walter Savage Landor wrote an ode and eloquent voices rose all over the world to hearten the Abolitionists, they felt that great days had come again, like the days of '76, that America had once more become the focus of the world-old struggle for liberty.”²⁰ In 1842 the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society published An Epitome of Anti-Slavery Information designed to be “an effectionate expostulation” with Christians in America “because of the continuance of Negro Slavery throughout many districts of their country.” The writer supports his views by using many quotations from the English poet James Montgomery and also extracts from the Edinburgh Review ascribed to Lord Brougham. An American writer, Lydia Maria Child, in An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans quotes copiously from Coleridge, Shenstone, Wordsworth, Cowper, and Sterne.²¹ An American newspaper The Emancipator (May 26, 1836) contains three poetic excerpts in its poetry column under the captions “The Slave Trade” by James Montgomery, “American Slavery” by Moore, and “Oppression” by Coleridge.²² Another American anti-slavery paper The Voice of Freedom (May, 1836) carries “A Voice from Scotland to America” advocating the discontinuance of slavery. The Legion of Liberty and Force of Truth, a publication sold by the American Anti-Slavery Society contains an imposing array of English writers comprising the legion of Liberty. Some of those mentioned are Burke, Johnson, Shakespeare, Pope, Addison, Burns, Smollett, Day, S. Pratt, William Roscoe, Hannah More, J. Montgomery, Southey, Campbell, Erasmus Darwin, William Seward Hall, Shelley, Byron, Pollok, Grainger, and Coleridge.

Liberty (1837), edited by Julius R. Ames of Albany, includes among its many anti-slavery excerpts, a passage under the title of “An African Character” from Mungo Park's Travels, dealing with the hospitality of some African women.²³ Cowper and J. Montgomery are quoted in Biographical Sketches and Interesting Anecdotes of Persons of Color (1839).²⁴ On the introductory page of the Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1874) is a selection from Cowper. A poem by Cowper also appears in a Dialogue between a Slave-holder and an Abolitionist²⁵ in which each presents his individual point of view. The slave holder rebukes the abolitionist for condemning slavery and yet, for the sake of convenience and ease, eating and using the products of slave labour. Attention may be called to The Anti-Slavery Offering and Picknick; a Collection of Speeches, Poems, Dialogues, Songs, for Schools and Anti-Slavery Meetings with selections from Brougham, J. Montgomery, and Cowper (1843).²⁶The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1843 makes use of Cowper, Campbell, Montgomery, and John Wesley.²⁷

Sometimes the ironical note appears. For instance, a London bookseller, Charles Gilpin, published A Description of William Wells Brown's Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave. From His Birth in Slavery to His Death or to His First Home of Freedom on British Soil. Two quotations follow the title: the one under “Fiction” is an excerpt from the Declaration of American Independence reading,

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The second quotation from Cowper is placed under “Fact,”

They touch our country, and their shackles fall.

The Reverend Alexander Crummell, a colored minister, in 1846 delivered a eulogy, “The Man: The Hero: The Christian! A Eulogy on the Life and Character of Thomas Clarkson.” Crummell's knowledge of English champions of the Negro is evidenced by quotations from Montgomery, Wordsworth, Cowper, Milton, Baxter, Steele, Thomson, Shenstone, Warburton, and many other writers.²⁸

But enough of this. The examples cited above show that anti-slavery English literature was well known in America and doubtless was a potent means for liberating American minds from the shackles of prejudice against those whose only crime was the color of their skin.

THE ROMANTIC CLIMAX

SECTION II—MAJOR WRITERS; SOME ROMANTIC VICTORIANS

Turning to that bright galaxy of romantic writers whose brilliance begins to increase in 1798 with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, we conclude that most of them were not impractical idealists, living remote from the great questions of the day. On the contrary, they were vitally interested in current social, political, and economic problems. It is significant that all the leading writers were sympathetic toward the Negro: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Shelley, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Landor, De Quincey, and Lamb.

Wordsworth was an ardent lover of freedom. The words “free,” “freed,” “freedom,” and “liberty,” occur about three hundred and eighty times in his poems alone.²⁹ In the apostrophe to Freedom in “Descriptive Sketches,” (1791-1792) he says that wherever Liberty is found, heart-blessings exist; but where Tyranny rules, virtue and pleasure fail.³⁰ Again in “Liberty” written thirty-eight years later, Wordsworth wrote that no sea swells “like the bosom of a man set free.”³¹ Just as Wordsworth was aware of the close union between man and nature, he was aware of a lack of unity between man and man as he indicates in “Lines Written in Early Spring:”

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.(32)

When Wordsworth wrote this poem, he was twenty-eight years old. In the “Prelude,” begun in 1799 and finished in 1805, Wordsworth calls slave traders “traffickers in Negro blood;” hence his sympathetic interest in the slave began when he was a comparatively young man. In this autobiographical poem he says the sight of “Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns” and the other specimens of mankind, including the Swede, Russian, Turk, Jew, Chinese, Tartar, Malay, and Moor give him a peculiar pleasure.³³ Among the varied and motley assortment of people at St. Bartholomew's Fair is “the silver-collared Negro with his timbrel.³⁴ On Wordsworth's return from Paris to England in December, 1792, the status of the anti-slavery cause is thus described as he finds

The general air still busy with the stir
Of that first memorable onset made
By a strong levy of humanity
Upon the traffickers in Negro blood;
Effort which, though defeated, had recalled
To notice old forgotten principles
And through the nation spread a novel heat
Of virtuous feeling.(35)

Here the poet refers to the efforts of Wilberforce and Clarkson to abolish the slave trade. The unsuccessful outcome of this movement, he continues, did not give him much concern, for he was certain that if France was successful, “this most rotten branch … would fall together with its parent tree.”

The unhappy destiny of Toussaint Louverture appealed, as it appealed to other writers, to Wordsworth also. In a sonnet “To Toussaint Louverture” he urges this most unhappy man of men to have hope:

… Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.(36)

Another sonnet, “September 1, 1802”³⁷ was written as a result of the chasing of all Negroes from France by decree of the government, an act which Wordsworth, in a note prefixed to the poem, characterizes as being “among the capricious acts of tyranny that disgraced those times.” One of the fellow passengers who came from Calais was a “white-robed Negro, like a lady gay, Yet downcast as a woman fearing blame.” The sonnet closes with a prayer to the Heavens to be kind to this afflicted race.

Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were on intimate terms with the Clarksons, who lived from 1795 to 1806 in the Lake District very near them. Wordsworth's satisfaction with the outcome of the slavery issue is revealed in his sonnet, “To Thomas Clarkson on the Final Passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807.)” The author praises Clarkson for the perseverance and skill with which he pursued to the end a difficult and tedious task and assures him of ultimate satisfaction of happiness and repose.³⁸ The spark of liberty is still burning bright in Wordsworth's breast twenty-two years later when he says in “Humanity” (1829):

Though cold as winter, gloomy as the grave,
Stone-walls a prisoner make, but not a slave.
Shall man assume a property in man?
Lay on the moral will a withering ban?
Shame that our laws at distance still protect
Enormities, which they at home reject!
“Slaves cannot breathe in England”—yet that boast
Is but a mockery! when from coast to coast,
Though fettered slave be none, her floors and soil
Groan underneath a weight of slavish toil …(39)

The champion of the rights of man is speaking. Five years later the capture of an eagle evokes a thrust at slavery in “The Dunolly Eagle” (1833) as he tells the poor bird that similarly

Doth man of brother man a creature make
That clings to slavery for its own sad sake.(40)

The correspondence of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy reveals that from 1791 to 1849 they kept in close touch with the progress of the slavery question. They were on friendly terms with Thomas Wilkinson the Quaker, Thomas Poole, Coleridge, and other sympathizers of the anti-slavery question. Certainly associations played no small part in deepening the Wordsworths' abhorrence of slavery. Wordsworth wrote a poem “To the Spade of a Friend” (1804),⁴¹ which was composed when he and Wilkinson worked together on the latter's estate. Thomas Poole, co-worker with Clarkson, was very outspoken against slavery. He wrote a journal about the customs of Sierra Leone in which he observes, “It was in the year 1845 that I embarked for that part of the world, not less infamous for its nefarious traffic in slavery than proverbial for the deadly unhealthiness of its climate.”⁴² Poole was one of the many who refused to use sugar in his coffee because it was the product of slave labour. Henry Crabb Robinson's correspondence with the Wordsworth circle affords glimpses of the intimacy between the Clarksons and the Wordsworths. Wordsworth's library contained various writings of Clarkson on the slave trade.⁴³

When the Haitians rebelled against the energetic Henri Christophe, he committed suicide. His widow and daughters came to England, where they were received in the hospitable home of the Clarksons at Playford. In a letter to Mrs. Clarkson, October 24, 1822, Dorothy writes that during a discussion of Clarkson's kindness to the Negro widow and her family, Wordsworth and his wife Sarah became much amused at the thought of the “Sable princess” by Mrs. Clarkson's fireside. From her room upstairs Dorothy could hear their peals of laughter as they together composed a parody of Ben Janson's poem, “Queen and Huntress, Chaste and Fair,” which reads:

Queen and Negress chaste and fair!
                    Christophe now is laid asleep,
Seated in a British chair
State in humbler manner keep
                    Shine for Clarkson's pure delight
                    Negro Princess ebon bright!
Let not “Willy's”(44) holy shade
                    Interpose at envy's call,
Hayti's shining queen was made
To illumine Playford hall.
                    Bless it then with constant light
                    Negress excellently bright!
Lay thy diadem apart,
                    Pomp has been a sad deceiver;
Though thy champion's faithful heart
Joy be poured, and thou the giver,
                    Thou that mak'st a day of night
Sable Princess, ebon bright!(45)

Mrs. Clarkson's failure to answer at once caused Dorothy to write her three months later expressing concern that this little joke had caused some displeasure. Resumption of their correspondence, however, shows that if there was any displeasure on Mrs. Clarkson's part, it was not permanent.

Passages in Wordsworth's correspondence reveal both his antipathy to slavery and his admiration for its opponents. For instance, when the sons of Wilberforce wrote a life of their father in which Clarkson was not given the credit which his friends thought he should have been given, Wordsworth comes to the defense of Clarkson with the statement that if ever any man was “entitled to a subscription for public services that man was Mr. Clarkson.”⁴⁶

The Quaker couple, Mary and William Howitt, were friendly with the Wordsworths. In a letter of Mrs. Howitt to Margaret Gillies in 1845 we learn that one rainy day when her husband was visiting William and Dorothy, many people called, among them an American general who advocated slavery. On this question Howitt and Wordsworth had a great argument. “All the day afterwards,” Mrs. Howitt writes, “Wordsworth kept rejoicing that they had defeated the general. ‘To think of the man,’ said he, ‘coming of all things, to this house with a defense of slavery! But he got nothing by it. Mr. Howitt and I gave it to him pretty well.’”⁴⁷

When Clarkson died, Wordsworth wrote Mrs. Clarkson on October 2, 1846, that she would be consoled in her grief by recalling the perseverance which her husband exhibited in humanity's cause.⁴⁸ On March 16, 1849, he wrote Robinson that Clarkson died rich in good works. An unfinished paper of Clarkson on “Slavery in America” was interesting reading, and because of the truths it contains “cannot but prove galling to numbers in America.”⁴⁹

In 1840 Robinson wrote a pamphlet, all of which pleased Wordsworth except one passage in which Robinson accuses the “Members of the Church” of England of being very remiss in the matter of the slave trade as contrasted with the zealous Dissenters. On September 4, 1840, Wordsworth answers him, “Neither the clerical nor Lay Members of an Establishment are naturally so much given to stirring as Sectarians of any denomination; but to my certain knowledge a great many of our clergy took a deep interest in that question, and some as the World knows a conspicuous part in it.”⁵⁰

As Wordsworth neared the end of his life, increasing conservatism appeared in his attitude toward slavery. For example, he writes Benjamin Dockray on April 25 [1840], thanking him for his paper on Colonial Slavery. There are, according to Wordsworth, three parties in this question: the slave, the slave-owner, and the British people. The slave owner should be prepared to face financial loss, the slave should be willing if given his liberty to make recompense for the master's sacrifice, and the British people should pass no measure which does not take into consideration or provide for an equivalent to the owner.⁵¹ Those who advocate complete and immediate abolition forget that slavery is sometimes beneficial in that it protects the weak from the strong, for there are worse evils than slavery. He concludes, “I do not only deplore but I abhor it, if it could be got rid of without the introduction of something worse, which I much fear would not be the case with respect to the West Indies, if the question be dealt with in the way many excellent men are so eagerly set upon.”⁵²

One of Wordsworth's American friends and correspondents was Henry Reed, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1837 Reed brought out the first American edition of Wordsworth's complete poems. On July 1, 1845, Wordsworth writes Reed that one Mr. William P. Atkinson of West Roxbury, an abolitionist, had asked him for a poem for publication in behalf of humanity. “I have nothing bearing directly upon slavery,” Wordsworth informs Reed, “but if you think this little piece would serve his cause indirectly pray be so kind as to forward it to him. He speaks of himself as deeply indebted to my writings.”⁵³ The poem Wordsworth refers to is “To My Grandchildren.” In Reed's reply on August 28, 1845, he informs Wordsworth that he has made inquiry concerning the reputation of the gentleman who had written Wordsworth and thinks it advisable for him not to send the poem since it would be regrettable for Wordsworth's name to appear in any connection “where it might be perverting as sanctioning (if only by the connection) a spirit and modes of ‘Reform’ which I am satisfied you have no sympathy with. I mean a species of lawless, undisciplined philanthropy that counsel neither from sober reason, nor even legitimate enthusiasm, much less from the word of God … Much that has been done has retarded instead of promoting the abolition of Slavery.”⁵⁴ Wordsworth answers September 27, 1845, thanking Reed and asking him to inform the gentleman that he has nothing among his manuscripts that would suit his purpose.⁵⁵

This correspondence is of interest because it shows to what extent the anti-slavery sentiment in English literature affected people of like sentiment in America. We have already noted the frequency with which anti-slavery English writers were quoted in America. Wordsworth knew of his own reputation, for he wrote to Edward Moxon in February, 1838, that Miss Martineau, he was told, had said his poems were in the hearts of the American people.⁵⁶

Coleridge, another of the Lake Poets, was linked to Wordsworth by his hostility to slavery, which no doubt was promoted by friendship, correspondence, and reading. Thomas Poole, farmer at Nether Stowey and opponent of the slave trade, was his friend.⁵⁷ He was also on friendly terms with his Quaker neighbors, Thomas Wilkinson and his wife;⁵⁸ with Mrs. Barbauld “whose wonderful propriety of mind” he admired;⁵⁹ and the Clarksons with whom he corresponded and whose home he visited.⁶⁰ It was an American acquaintance of his who brought to his mind forcibly the horrors of slavery. A letter he received from “an American officer of High Rank, Grand Cairo, December 18, 1804,” convinced him that he should regard the slave trade, which had not then been abolished as “a dreadful crime, an English iniquity,” and that “to sanction its continuance under full conviction and parliamentary confession of its injustice and unhumanity, is, if possible still blacker guilt.”⁶¹

When Coleridge was a student at Cambridge, he won in 1792 the Browne Gold Medal for an ode, “Greek Prize Ode on the Slave Trade.” The Latin foreword under the title is “Sors misera Servorum in Insulis Indiae Occidentalis,” or the “Wretched Lot of Slaves in the West India Islands.”⁶² In a letter to his brother George, April [1792], Coleridge says he has been competing for all the prizes, the Greek ode, the Latin ode, and the Epigrams. He thinks that he has no hope of success since one Mr. Smith, “a man of immense genius,” is among his numerous competitors. “If you can think of a good thought for the beginning of the Latin Ode upon the miseries of the India slaves, communicate. My Greek Ode is, I think, my chef d'oeuvre in poetical composition.”⁶³ Despite Coleridge's misgivings he won the coveted prize. The first four stanzas were printed in a note to line 327 of “The Destiny of Nations”⁶⁴ (1796) in which he refers to a belief among the slaves in the West Indies that death is a passport to their native land. A similar idea is expressed in the first part of the Greek Prize Ode, a literal translation of which reads: “Leaving the gates of darkness, O Death! hasten thou to a race yoked with misery! Thou wilt not be received with lacerations of cheeks, nor with funeral ululations—but with circling dances and the joy of songs. Thou art terrible indeed, yet thou dwellest with Liberty, stern Genius! Borne on thy dark pinions over the swelling of Ocean, they return to their native country. There, by the side of fountains beneath citron-groves, the lovers tell to their beloved what horrors, being men, they had endured from men.”⁶⁵

The curse of slavery is stressed in the “Ode on the Departing Year” (1796) when the Spirit of Earth says,

But chief by Afric's wrongs
                    Strange, horrible, and foul!
By what deep guilt belongs
To the deaf Synod, ‘full of gifts and lies’!
By Wealth's insensate laugh! by Torture's howl!
          Avenger, rise!(66)

The poem “The Three Graves” (1797-1809), a sexton's tale of a mother's curse, was influenced by Bryan Edwards' portrayal of the Obi witchcraft on West Indian Negroes and Hearne's account of the Cooper Indians.⁶⁷ Turning to that vibrant apostrophe to liberty, “France: an Ode,” we behold Coleridge censuring France's conduct toward Switzerland. The poem as it appeared originally in the Morning Post (April 16, 1798) contained a fifth stanza, which alluded to the conduct of the African Slave Trade by the present ministry and its supporters.⁶⁸

In 1794 young Coleridge, Southey, and Lovell conceived the idea of founding an ideal commonwealth, Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehanna. To raise funds for this project they decided to get subscribers for certain literary productions and also to give lectures. Accordingly two courses of six lectures each were given at Bristol. The first course dealt with the Civil War under Charles I and the French Revolution. The second course dealt with the corruptions and political views of “Revealed Religion.” One of these lectures was against the slave trade. The reading of the prospectus is interesting: “Tomorrow evening, June 16th, 1795, S. T. Coleridge, will deliver, (by particular desire) a lecture on the Slave Trade, and the duties that result from its continuance. To begin at eight o'clock, at the Assembly Coffee House, on the Quay. Admission One Shilling.”⁶⁹ Nothing remains of this lecture or the addresses.⁷⁰

There was no place in this Utopian community for slavery. Coleridge's argument in a letter to Southey dated November, 1794, is that since oxen and horses have no intellect, man is justified in utilizing his labours for his own benefit. “But who shall dare to transfer ‘from man to brute’ to ‘from man to man’? To be employed in the toil of the field while we are pursuing philosophical studies—can earldoms or emperorships boast so huge an inequality? Is there a human being of so torpid a nature as that placed in our society he would not feel it? A willing slave is the worst of slaves. His soul is a slave. Besides, I must own myself incapable of perceiving even the temporary convenience of the proposed innovation.”⁷¹

On November 6, 1794, Coleridge wrote his brother George that he had been asked what was the best conceivable mode of meliorating society. He said: “My answer has been this: ‘Slavery is an abomination to my feeling of the head and the heart. Did Jesus teach the abolition of it? No! He taught those principles of which the necessary effect was to abolish all slavery. He prepared the mind for the reception before he poured the blessing.’ You ask me what the friend of universal equality should do. I answer: ‘Talk, not politics. Preach the Gospel.’”⁷²

Other references to the Negro are as follows: Cottle received in 1796 a letter from Coleridge stating that Southey's “Six Sonnets on the Slave Trade” are “worthy of the Author of ‘Joan of Arc.’ In the same year Coleridge wrote to the editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer (April 1, 1796) that the sonnet on the rejection of Wilberforce's bill was written by Southey almost two years before and not by the person who signed his name to it.⁷³ In a letter to Wordsworth, January, 1798, Coleridge mentions Kotzebue's Negro Slaves and Lewis' Castle Spectre. Lewis claimed novelty in the treatment of Hassan, one of the characters; but Coleridge says he is only a Negro with a benevolent heart, who, stolen from his country, becomes a misanthrope as a result of mistreatment by the Christians.⁷⁴

Coleridge like Wordsworth was interested in the success of Clarkson. In 1801 he characterized Clarkson in a letter to Southey as the “anti-Negro trade Clarkson.”⁷⁵ Clarkson permitted Coleridge to read in manuscript form his history of the abolition of the slave trade. His reaction is shown in a letter, February, 1808, to Southey where he writes that the dullness and commonplace of the first three pages afford a delightful disappointment, “for all the rest is deeply interesting, written with great purity as well as simplicity of language, which is often vivid and felicitous (as the monthly Rev. would say) and nothing can surpass the moral beauty of the manner in which he introduces himself and relates his own maxima pars in that Immortal War—compared with which how mean all the conquests of Napoleon and Alexander!”⁷⁶ Coleridge desired that Clarkson's book meet a favorable reception with the public. Accordingly he wrote on May 23, 1808, a very courteous letter to Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, “to intreat for the sake of mankind—an honourable review of Mr. Clarkson's ‘History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.’ I know the man, and if you knew him, you, I am sure, would revere him, and your reverence of him, as an agent, would almost supersede all judgment of him as a mere literary man.”⁷⁷ Coleridge deems it presumptuous to offer to review the work himself; yet he should like to submit some thoughts which came to him while he was reading it. When Jeffrey wrote Coleridge a “very polite” letter desiring him to write the review, Coleridge did so.⁷⁸ The review was printed in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1808.⁷⁹ On its publication Coleridge was very much mortified to see that some passages praising Pitt were deleted (on Clarkson's authority) and “abuse and detraction” substituted instead. Clarkson refused to let him make public the transaction and expressed satisfaction with the effect of the review.⁸⁰ That Coleridge for a long time afterward was affected by Jeffrey's changes is evident in a letter he wrote to Mr. T. J. Street on September 19 [1809], complaining about the shameful mutilation of his review⁸¹ and in another letter to Thomas Poole on January 12, 1810.⁸²

The well-known Abyssinian explorer Bruce in his work Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790) had vindicated the slave trade. In a letter to Mr. Hunt, Coleridge takes issue with Bruce, affirming that such things as “predatory Wars, Murder of Male Captives, Sale of the females—then (avarice prevailing over Blood-thirstiness) sale of male and female, and that accursed Slave Trade which Bruce likewise vindicates!” were not so “from the beginning” but came about as the result of the hardness of men's hearts.⁸³

In prose works other than letters did Coleridge manifest his attitude toward the Negro. For example, in The Friend, a literary, moral, and political paper (1809-1810 and 1818), he says that in the spiritual darkness that has enveloped the earth at various ages there is a need for indispensable moral truths to be proclaimed by the few who in every age attempt to build lofty and noble structures. To this small group belong Luther, Huss, Calvin, and Latimer in former times and at the present Thomas Clarkson, and his excellent confederates, the Quakers, “who fought and conquered the legalized banditti of men-stealers, the numerous and powerful perpetrators and advocates of rapine, murder, and (of blacker guilt than either) slavery.”⁸⁴

Coleridge again pays tribute to Clarkson, Sharp, and Wilberforce for their contribution to the continuance of national prosperity.⁸⁵ Again he says in a lecture: “For I have seen what infinite good one man can do by persevering in his efforts to resist evil and spread good over human life: and if I were called upon to say, which two men in my own time, had been most extensively useful, and who had done most for humanity, I should say Mr. Clarkson and Dr. Bell.”⁸⁶

In a passage dealing with the origin of man Coleridge says that the descendants of Ham went to Africa and thus verified the curse pronounced upon them.⁸⁷ In “Table Talk” for February 24, 1827, he reproduces Blumenbach's “scale of dignity” with regard to the five races: Caucasian or European, Malay, American, Negro, and Mongolian.⁸⁸ Coleridge often voiced an interest in black characters in literature. He says in his “Notes on Othello” from “Lectures upon Shakespeare and other Dramatists” that Shakespeare was not so “utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous Negro plead royal birth,—at a time, too, when Negroes were not known except as slaves.”⁸⁹ Furthermore, Othello was not a Negro but a Moor, and the dramatist could not possibly have had the “monstrous” conception of having a Venetian girl fall in love with a Negro.⁹⁰ One character that especially appealed to Coleridge evidently was the black colonel in Mrs. Bennett's Beggar Girl.⁹¹ A character that Coleridge evidently had no taste for was Zeluco, the cruel slave master and planter in Moore's novel of the same name.⁹²

Later Coleridge became more and more conservative in his attitude. On June 8, 1833, we find him saying, “You are always talking of the rights of the Negroes. As a rhetorical mode of stimulating the people of England here, I do not object; but I utterly condemn your frantic practice of declaiming about their rights to the blacks themselves. They ought to be forcibly reminded of the state in which their brethren in Africa still are, and taught to be thankful for the providence which has placed them within the reach of the means of grace.”⁹³

Southey, the third of the trio of Lake Poets, expresses through John Ball in Wat Tyler the principle that Nature made all men equal and that equality is their birthright. Hence Southey took an active interest in varied humanitarian projects to aid men obtain this birthright. One, like Southey, concerned with reforms in the army, and among criminals, laborers, and paupers would, of course, include the slave in his program. His pen, doubtless, accomplished much good; for example, H. C. R. wrote in a letter to T. R. (July 23, 1833) that “no one public writer has so invariably advocated the cause of the poor” as Southey.⁹⁴

Southey could have become interested in the Negro by various means. He was intimate with Clarkson, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, all of whom were friendly to the Negro. He dedicated The Fall of Robespierre to Hannah More⁹⁵ and visited her home at Bristol.⁹⁶ Southey's reading also enters here for consideration. He thought Bamfylde's sonnets some of the most original in the English language.⁹⁷ Sources for his Life of Wesley no doubt quickened his interest in the slavery question. In one instance he mentions Dr. Coke's tactless methods and interest in Negro emancipation.⁹⁸

In 1794 Southey's Poems Concerning the Slave Trade⁹⁹ appeared, consisting of six sonnets and three other poems. We quote Sonnet I in its entirety:

Hold your mad hands! forever on your plain
Must the gorged vulture clog his beak with blood?
Forever must your Niger's tainted flood
Roll to the ravenous shark his banquet slain?
Hold your mad hands! and learn at length to know,
And turn your vengeance on the common foe,
Yon treacherous vessel and her godless crew!
Let never traders with false pretext fair
Set on your shores again their wicked feet:
With interdict and indignation meet
Repel them, and with fire and sword pursue!
Avarice, the white, cadaverous wide and far,
And for his purveyor calls the demon War.”(100)

In Sonnet II an ironical question is addressed to a widow; she is asked why she beats her breast and rends her hair frantically as the white-sailed ship recedes from view. Since no mercy exists in the human heart, she is told to find rest in the grave. The sonnet concludes with the wish that the God of Justice may sink the ship and thereby bless the slave with “liberty and death.” Sonnet III voices the author's indignation at the inhuman treatment of the pale tyrant who whips relentlessly the already over-burdened slave. Those who at their ease “sip the blood-sweeten'd beverage” scorn thoughts like these. The poet, however, is grateful that he can feel for the slave writhing in “silent woe.” Sonnet IV expresses the grief of a slave snatched far away from his native land where his loved ones likewise grieve in hopeless despair. Unlike James Montgomery, who in The West Indies represents the master as being unable to sleep because of his conscience, Southey represents the owners “as undisturbed as Justice” in their sleep. In Sonnet V the poet defends the slave who, in contrasting his present woe with past joys, suddenly goes insane and kills his inhuman lord. Sonnet VI presents a gruesome picture of a slave hung high in the air while exposed to attacks of ravenous birds of prey. Those responsible for this crime will meet their just reward.

Turning to “The Genius of Africa”¹⁰¹ (1795), we behold the poet urging the genius to arise from her calm and avenge those suffering from Europe's guilt. The last stanza represents the genius as heeding the plea and taking vengeance by hurricane, tidal waves, and pestilences, a favorite motif, as we have seen, in anti-slavery literature.

Another poem, “The Sailor Who Had Served in the Slave Trade” (1798),¹⁰² closely resembles Coleridge's “The Ancient Mariner.” This ballad has its origin in a story of a dissenting minister of Bristol, who in September, 1798, came across a remorseful sailor groaning in a cow house. By publishing this story in the form of a poem, Southey helped to interest public opinion in behalf of the slave. He says in the introductory note that “such stories ought to be made as public as possible.” Similarities between this poem and “The Ancient Mariner” are obvious. Note the beginning:

It was a Christian minister
                    Who, in the month of flowers,
Walk'd forth at eve, amid the fields
          Near Bristol's ancient towers …

Hearing agonizing groans, he discovers a sailor—

“I have done a cursed thing!” he cried;
                    “It haunts me night and day;
And I have sought this lonely place
                    Here undisturb'd to pray.”

The sailor is haunted especially by the thought of a Negro woman whom he had beaten so severely that she died. His torments and persecution by the Wicked One give him no rest day and night. The minister then tries to console him with the thought of Christ's pardoning blood.

The poem “Verses spoken in the Theatre at Oxford upon the Installation of Lord Grenville” (1810)¹⁰³ admonishes England, the bulwark of liberty, to look to herself, for sooner or later she will meet retribution. Tributes are paid Grenville, Wilberforce, and Clarkson for their services to humanity.

In Lyric Poems appears “To Horror” (1791),¹⁰⁴ a poetical apostrophe to the fierce genius Horror to permit the author to accompany him on his travels by land:

Horror! I call thee yet once more!
Bear me to that accursed shore,
Where on the stake the Negro writhes.
Assume thy sacred terrors then! dispense
                    The gales of Pestilence!
Arouse the oppressed; teach them to know their power;
Lead them to vengeance! and in that dread hour
                    When ruin rages wide,
I will behold and smile by Mercy's side.

Southey's irony is very forceful in “The Dancing Bear, Recommended to the Advocates for the Slave Trade” (1799)¹⁰⁵ Here the fate of the Negro slave is compared to the anguish of a bear forced by his master to dance clumsily for the merriment of a callous crowd. Politicians declare that the bear forfeited his right to freedom when he first fell into the snare and that not only is he happier than he would be were he with his brother bears roaming over the “trackless snows,” but his morals will be improved by the change from savagery to civilization.

In the first stanza of Canto I of “A Tale of Paraguay” the poet says that Jenner's name will ever be blessed among mankind. It was Jenner who taught man how to conquer the terrible disease of smallpox which

… Africa sent forth to scourge the West,
As if in vengeance for her sable brood
So many an age remorselessly oppress'd.(106)

“The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo” is a long poem about the contest between England and Napoleon, and England's ensuing blessings after the victory at Waterloo. In Part IV Southey says that the nations have rejected the light given them: Egypt bears witness of the tyranny of priests; wretched Africa, of error and crimes; and the Orient is bowed in slavery.¹⁰⁷ With joy does he behold the foulest blot of Slavery effaced and the children of the “lovely isles” living in cheerful industry. In some large town square he sees three statues of men who, the Muse says, are best deserving of fame. To her inquiry who best is worthy of man's gratitude the poet says:

Clarkson, I answer'd, first; whom to have seen
                    And known in social hours may be my pride,
Such friendship being praise; and one, I ween,
          Is Wilberforce, placed rightly at his side,
Whose eloquent voice in that great cause was heard
          So oft and well. But who shall be the third?(108)

The Muse answers that Time will reveal the name of one who, worthy to stand beside Clarkson and Wilberforce, shall utterly efface the accursed word of slave from the laws of England.¹⁰⁹

Southey's enthusiasm for the Negro's cause reveals itself as ardently in his letters as in his poems. Writing to John Rickman, January 9, 1800, he deplores the fact that slavery is gaining ground.¹¹⁰ From Lisbon, he writes on May 23, 1800, to Lieutenant Southey that there the filthiest offices are performed by Negroes. When they grow too old to work, they are given their freedom like horses; therefore black beggars are numerous. The old women look so ugly that he cannot help wondering at “the frequency of Negresses in romance!”¹¹¹ December 17, 1803, finds him advising Lieutenant Southey to collect from the Negroes in the West Indies material about their superstitions, worship, burial, births and marriage ceremonies, charms, powers of priests, animals, and about Timbuctoo, a city of curiosity to travellers.¹¹² I quote in detail from a letter to Rickman, December 23, 1803, because it shows a fondness for minutiae and an industry for which Southey was famous. The poet asks Rickman to get evidence upon “the Slave Trade as printed for the House of Commons. I want to collect all materials for speculating upon Negroes. That they are a fallen people is certain, because, being savages, they have among them the forms of civilization. … I am very desirous to know whether the Negro priests and jugglers be a caste; or if any man may enter into the fraternity; and if they have a sacred language. We must continue to grope in darkness about early history, till some strong-headed man shall read the hieroglyphics for us.”¹¹³

Southey sympathized with the Negroes who had revolted in St. Domingo. To him they symbolized hurricanes and pestilences, sent as “blind instruments of righteous retribution and divine justice.”¹¹⁴ A letter to Coleridge, February 19, 1804, reveals “Parson—son [Clarkson], the Piscis Piscium sive Piscissimus” in “high spirits about the Slave Trade.” The recent success of the Negroes in St. Domingo causes Southey to hope for the abolition of the slave trade.¹¹⁵ Again on August 22, 1805, Southey writes Lieutenant Southey that if he were in England, it is likely that his testimony about the slaves in the West Indies might have some weight in the House of Lords. The poet still desires more detailed information about the institution of slavery. This time he wants to know about a planter's day, his meals, his dress, amusements, employments, education of himself and family, etc.¹¹⁶ On December 7, 1805, Lieutenant Southey is urged to collect some Jamaica newspapers and secure further material on burial customs of the Negro.¹¹⁷ Richard Druppa on March 27, 1807, is advised that the abolishment of the Slave Trade is a “great” thing.¹¹⁸

After the abolition of the slave trade, Southey's interest in the Negro did not abate. He writes to John May, February 16, 1809, “Have you seen William Taylor's Defense of the Slave Trade in Bolingbroke's Voyage to the Demerary? It is truly William Taylorish; thoroughly ingenious, as usual, but not ingenuous; he weakens the effect of his own arguments by keeping the weak side of his cause altogether out of sight. In defending the slave trade, as respects the duty of man toward man, he has utterly failed. He has succeeded in what you and I think of more consequence,—in showing what the probable end is for which wise Providence has so long permitted the existence of so great an evil. …”¹¹⁹

Southey wishes to know from C. H. Townshend, February 16, 1817, whether he has read Thomas Clarkson's history of the abolition of the slave trade. He writes, “I have heard it from his own lips, and never was a more interesting story than that of his personal feelings and exertions.”¹²⁰ Southey thinks that such men as Clarkson and Dr. Bell who lead useful lives must be “eminently happy.”

Years later Southey was criticized by Brougham and Clarkson for his apparent inactivity in the abolition cause. Brougham writes to Zachary Macaulay on September 16, 1823, that Clarkson wrote to Southey at Keswick, “and at my instigation remonstrated in our joint names, but ‘with no unfriendly voice,’ on his never having made head against the common enemy, and especially on the Quarterly Review being obstinately silent for fifteen years on the subject of Negro Slavery. He writes that all Southey's attempts to procure insertion have failed, but I enclose his letter. I replied to Clarkson in a style which I hope he showed Southey, as it was fitted to work him up to more vigorous efforts in that quarter where he really ought to have great weight.”¹²¹

There was a great outcry when the Bible Society printed a “Negro-English” New Testament. But Southey, as he writes J. W. Warter, August 25, 1830, considers himself fortunate in owning what he calls a great curiosity, and considers the Society “justified in having printed it, but every means for superseding it ought to be used by teaching either Dutch or English in all the English Schools.”¹²² Southey was one of those Englishmen who took an interest in the progress of slavery in the United States. In a letter to John Rickman, October 15, 1832, he deplores the instability of the United States Government. He does not doubt that the West Indian planters would seek America's permission to join the union and be accepted, “if the slave question were not likely to be the cause of quarrel between the southern states and the Congress. Most likely I shall write a paper upon this question for the Christmas number.”¹²³

Although Southey was despised by Byron, the latter, was like Southey in his equally hostile attitude to slavery. In the early works of Byron frequent references to the Negro exist. In “Hints from Horace” he refers to Earl Osmond's Negro in “Monk” Lewis' The Castle Spectre.¹²⁴ A note to stanza 91 in “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” (Canto III) deals with outdoor methods of worship. The success of the Methodists may be due to their practice of preaching in the field and the unstudied quality of their preaching. He continues, “Many of the Negroes, of whom there are numbers in the Turkish empire, are idolaters, and have free exercise of their belief and its rites; some of these I had a distant view of at Patras; and, from what I could make out of them, they appeared to be of a truly Pagan description, and not very agreeable to a spectator.”¹²⁵

In “Don Juan” there are many pictures of eastern slave marts and black eunuchs. Of a slave mart in Constantinople the poet says in Canto IV:

Twelve Negresses from Nubia brought a price
          Which the West Indian market scarce could bring—
Though Wilberforce, at last, has made it twice
          What 'twas ere abolition. …(126)

In Canto V Byron describes another slave mart with slaves of all nations and ages. With Byronian flippancy the author says:

All save the blacks seemed jaded with vexation,
                    From friends, and home, and freedom far estranged;
The Negroes more philosophy display'd,—
                    Used to it, no doubt, as eels are to be flay'd.(127)

In the same canto, Stanza XX, Byron pays tribute to Wilberforce:

Good people all, of every degree,
          Yet gentle readers and ungentle writers,
In this twelfth Canto 'tis my wish to be
                    As serious as if I had for inditers
Malthus and Wilberforce:—the last set free
                    The Negroes, and is worth a million fighters;
While Wellington, has but enslaved the Whites,
          And Malthus does the thing 'gainst which he writes.(128)

In Stanza LXX the author says that though he traveled much, he never has had the opportunity to trace the Negroes to “that impracticable place” called Timbuctoo; but if he should go there, no doubt he would be told that black is fair. The apostrophe to Wilberforce in Canto XIV, Stanza LXXXII, is a splendid example of those sudden transitions from serious vein to lighter for which Byron is famous:

O Wilberforce! thou man of black renown,
          Whose merit none enough can sing or say,
Thou hast struck one immense Colossus down,
          Thou moral Washington of Africa!
But's there's another little thing I own,
                    Which you should perpetrate some summer's day,
And set the other half of Earth to rights;
          You have freed the blacks—now pray shut up the whites.(129)

Very significant is the note on another passage, for it shows Byron's unqualified detestation of discrimination because of color. The passage is the first part of stanza XVIII in Canto XV:

Was it not so great Locke? and greater Bacon?
          Great Socrates? and thou, “Diviner still,”
Whose lot it is by Man to be mistaken,
          And they pure creed made sanction of all ill?(130)

From the note we learn that “Diviner still” refers to Christ. Byron says, “If ever God was man—or man God—he was both. I never arraigned his creed, but the use, or abuse—made of it. Mr. Canning one day quoted Christianity to sanction Negro slavery, and Mr. Wilberforce had little to say in reply. And was Christ crucified, that black men might be scourged? If so, He had better been born a Mulatto, to give both colours an equal chance of freedom, or at least salvation.”¹³¹

In the entry for December 7, 1814, in his Journal Byron says if he could have had a speech against the “Slave Trade in Africa and an Epitaph on a Dog, in Europe (i.e. in the Morning Post) my vertex sublimis would certainly have displaced stars enough to overthrow the Newtonian system.”¹³² Again in a tirade against political slavery Byron voices his indignation against human slavery in a striking manner. He writes in “Detached Thoughts,” “But there is no freedom even for masters, in the midst of slaves. It makes my blood boil to see the thing. I sometimes wish that I was the owner of Africa, to do at once what Wilberforce will do in time, viz., sweep slavery from her deserts, and look upon their first dance of their freedom.”¹³³

Revolt against individual subjection in any form was one of Shelley's main teachings. “Obedience” he told his father was a word that never should have existed. Slavery in all forms was extremely repellent to him as the following quotations show:

“How should slaves produce anything but tyranny—even as the seed produces the plant?”¹³⁴

“The Europeans have in this circumstance, and in the abolition of slavery, made an improvement the most decisive in the regulation of human society.”¹³⁵

“All have a right to an equal share in the benefits and burdens of government.”¹³⁶

“Every man has a right to a certain degree of leisure and liberty, because it is his duty to attain a certain degree of knowledge.”¹³⁷

A more definite expression of hostility to African slavery is in “Queen Mab” (1813). The author speaks of the tropical inhabitants as being

… changed with Christians for their gold,
And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound
Of the flesh-mangling scourge, he does the work
Of all-polluting luxury and wealth,
Which doubly visits on the tyrants' heads
The long-protracted fulness of their woe. …(138)

Some years later in 1819 Shelley wrote a poem, “Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819.” Ravens, gibbering nightbirds, vultures, scorpions, wolves, crows, vipers,—all are comparable to these two characters. Into this heterogeneous company enter shark and dog-fish waiting for the slave ship.¹³⁹

Another romanticist showing sympathy for the oppressed Negroes was the essayist Leigh Hunt. Although he was a descendant of West Indian planters, he did not agree with all the members of his families on the right of men to hold slaves. In his Autobiography,¹⁴⁰ he shows amusement at his aunt's discomfort because she was deprived of slaves on her arrival in England from the West Indies. Another source of amusement was the great astonishment of a black servant, who accompanied his aunt to England, on finding that he was free as soon as he touched English soil.¹⁴¹ The country whence men were brought to be slaves of others gave Hunt a strange glow when he first saw it. The first sight of Africa was to him an “achievement.” The voyagers seeing Africa for the first time “look at it, and repeat the word, till the whole burning and savage territory, with its black inhabitants and its lions, seems put into their possession.”¹⁴²

Some time between the ages of twelve and sixteen Hunt wrote “The Negro Boy, a Ballad,”¹⁴³ the story of a homeless boy of twelve years, forced to wander in the bitter cold streets:

Cold blows the wind, and white the tear
          Bursts trembling from my swollen eyes,
The rain's big drops quick meet it there,
                    And on my naked bosom flies!
                    O pity, all ye sons of Joy,
                    The little wand'ring Negro-boy.

In his tattered clothes he wonders whether there is not some Christian to give him relief from his sorrow. There is, he finally says, Death, who will bring him relief, and he will die “the happy Negro boy.”

In The Examiner for August 4, 1811, there appeared a contribution by Hunt called “Negro Civilization.” The occasion for the writing of the article was the arrival at Liverpool from Sierra Leone of the Negro captain, Paul Cuffee, on perhaps the first vessel owned, manned, and operated entirely by Negroes. Cuffee was on his way to London to discuss matters of interest to his race with the Directors of African Institution. His almost prodigious success in life impelled Hunt to write: “A Negro travelling upon his own, unfettered account, is a curiosity at once; but a reading Negro,—one who has thought well for himself and for his race,—who comes over the Atlantic in his own vessel,—who instead of adopting sentiments of revenge against the whites, becomes a member of society¹⁴⁴ that worships peace,—and who, to crown all, is of good countenance and a manly presence,—presents an excellent specimen of what freedom and instruction can do for the outcasts of his colour in the very infancy of their regeneration.”¹⁴⁵ Hunt then appeals to England to welcome Cuffee as “one of the forerunners of an equal race of beings.” The presence of such a person in England is more glorious to England than for Paris to have twenty representatives of slave-lands, and the abolition of the slave trade will bring more honour to England than all the glory of a Bonaparte. Hunt concludes with a recommendation that a magnificent monument be erected on the coast of Africa “as magnificent as size, and as beautiful as art, could make it; and that no emblem might be lost, it should be useful as well as glorious, and form a mighty sea-mark for the mariner.”¹⁴⁶

In The Old Court Suburb or Memorials of Kensington, Hunt describes Gore House, where Wilberforce lived from 1808 to 1825.¹⁴⁷ Although Wilberforce, according to Hunt, was “famous in the annals of evangelism and the slave trade,” he was also an incongruous combination of religious bigotry (with an interest in the next world) and a desire to get the most enjoyment out of this world.¹⁴⁸

A graphic description of St. James' Park with the band on parade in all the glory and paraphernalia of war in its most “harmless aspect” includes the blacks tossing their cymbals in the sun.¹⁴⁹ Interesting, too, is a comparison in an essay “Twilight Accused and Defended.”¹⁵⁰ A correspondent had written a facetious poem despising the ‘twaddle’ about the interloper Twilight. Hunt, surprised at such an attack, defends gentle Twilight, comparing her to a beautiful Mestiza or Quadroon that the tired slavemaster resorts to when he wearies of his white favorites and of his black.

Turning from Hunt's prose to his poetry, we come to a poem, “Descent of Liberty: A Mask” (1814). It opens with a festive scene in which reapers and vine-gathers dance in beauteous joy. This scene of loveliness is marred by a loud voice heralding a “Sable Genius,” who prostrates himself at the feet of Liberty. He describes the happiness of his brethren dancing on the peaceful green amid their “low cabins and tall-shafted trees.” But soon a peal of laughter announces the arrival of the dread ship, which leaves in its wake the grief

Of wives and children from each other torn
To glut th' accursed in their distant haunts,
Of stripes and sorrows, bitter-turning bloods,
Impatience, moist-covering agonies. …(151)

On learning that the responsibility for such a scene rests upon England, Liberty, put to shame, answers that she will heed the urgent plea of the Sable Genius.

As a companion poem to “The Feast of the Poets” Hunt wrote “Blue-Stocking Revels, or the Feast of the Violets” (1837) having as its theme ‘literary ladies.’ Such women are mentioned as Aiken, Austen, Baillie, Bowles, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Jameson, Martineau, and Opie. That Hunt knew of the interest of some of these women in the Negro is seen in the following lines:

Then came young Twalmley, nice sensitive thing,
Whose pen and whose pencil give promise like spring;
Then Whitfield, then Wortley—and acridly bright
In her eyes, but sweet-lipped, the slaves' friend, Fanny Wright.(152)

A contemporary of Hunt, the “gentle” Lamb, was proud to have among his friends, as he wrote Southey in 1823, “Allan C., the large Scot” and “Clarkson, almost the narrowness of that relation [friend], yet condescending not seldom heretofore from the labours of world-embracing charity to bless my humble roof.”¹⁵³ Lamb was also fond of John Woolman, well known Quaker in the anti-slavery movement, whom Lamb urged his readers to “get by heart.” Therefore, we cannot believe Lamb to be serious when he says he hates Abyssinians, Ethiops, etc.¹⁵⁴ In “Imperfect Sympathies” Lamb reveals his attitude toward different nations: his dislike for Scotchmen, his indifference toward Jews, whom, however, he respects and admires; his fondness for the Quakers and his love for Negroes. Concerning the last he writes, “In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces—or rather masks—that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what fuller beautifully calls these—‘images of God cut in ebony.’ But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my goodnights with them—because they are black.”¹⁵⁵ Writing of the humanitarianism of his ‘cousin’ J. E. in “My Relations,” Lamb calls him “an apostle to the brute kind.” Possessing the intensity of feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that ‘true yokefellow with Time’ to have effected as much for the Animal, as he hath done for the Negro Creation!”¹⁵⁶

Among Lamb's poems is one called “The Young Catechist,” a name also given by Lamb to a picture by Henry Meyer. In a letter to his Quaker friend, Bernard Barton, a friend of the Negro, Lamb gives an interesting account of the origin of this poem. He writes in 1827, “Apropos of Van Balen, an artist who painted me lately had painted a blackamoor praying; and not filling his canvas, stuffed in his little girl aside of a blacky gaping at him unmeaningly; and then did not know what to call it. Now for a picture to be promoted to the exhibition (Suffolk-Street) as historical, a subject is requisite. What does me I but christen it the ‘Young Catechist,’ and furbished it with a dialogue following, which dubb'd it an historical painting. Nothing to a friend at need.”¹⁵⁷

The poem which Lamb composed follows in its entirety:¹⁵⁸

While this tawny Ethiop prayeth,
Painter, who is she that stayeth
By, with skin of whitest lustre;
Sunny locks, a shining cluster;
Saint-like seeming to direct him
To the power that must protect him?
Is she of the heaven-born Three,
Meek Hope, strong Faith, sweet Charity?
Or some cherub?—They you mention
Far transcend my weak invention
'Tis a simple Christian child,
Missionary, young and mild,
From her stock of Scriptural knowledge,
(Bible-taught without a college).
Which by reading she could gather,
Teaches him to say OUR FATHER
To the common Parent, who
Colour not respects, nor hue.
White and black in him have part,
Who looks not on the skin, but heart.

Lamb continues in his letter that the artist who had “clapt in Miss merely as a fillspace” was pleased with the way in which Lamb had expressed the meaning of the picture.

In “Recollections of a Late Royal Academician” (1831) Lamb suggests that George Dawe, painter, might have gone to Hayti to produce his picture “Christophe of Hayti.” (The editor Lucas thinks that Lamb jokingly had in mind a story of Dawe as related by a friend about another picture, “A Negro Overpowering a Buffalo,” which had received a prize for its excellence).¹⁵⁹

More definite than Lamb was De Quincey in his attitude toward slavery. A passage in “Autobiographic Sketches” about the erection of a statue by the Athenians to Aesop contrasts “the awful chasm, in the abyss that no eye could bridge, between the pollution of slavery,—the being a man, yet without right or lawful power belonging to a man,—between this unutterable degradation and the starry altitude of the slave at that moment when, upon the unveiling of his everlasting statue, all the armies of the earth might be conceived as presenting arms to the emancipated man, the cymbals and kettle drums of kings as drowning the whispers of his ignominy, and the harps of all his sisters that wept over slavery yet joining in one choral gratulation to the regenerated slave.”¹⁶⁰ In “Protestantism,” an essay in Essays on Christianity, Paganism, and Superstition, De Quincey contrasts the older interpretation of Biblical teaching on slavery and the modern. There is no need for the New Testament to forbid slavery explicitly since it does so “silently and implicitly.”¹⁶¹ Like many other economists De Quincey in “The Logic of Political Economy” in Politics and Political Economy finds slavery in the West Indian colonies and in America far coarser and more animal in nature than slavery in ancient Rome, where the most brilliant intellects belonged to slaves.¹⁶² He deplores the sudden emancipation of West Indian slaves from a position below that of children to the rank of men.¹⁶³ From the context of this passage we are not to believe that De Quincey favors slavery, but that he is voicing his protest against the sudden freeing of the slaves without any provision on Britain's part for social, economic, and moral guidance.

De Quincey's aversion to slavery was no doubt inherited from his father and also promoted by his reading of literature dealing with the slaves. He portrays his father in The Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater as a West Indian merchant, but takes pains to impress upon the reader that he had no connection with the slave trade. In fact, his father, “though connected with the West Indian trade in all honorable branches, was so far from lending himself even by a passive concurrence to this most memorable abomination, that he was one of those conscientious protesters who, throughout England, for a long period after the first publication of Clarkson's famous Essay and the evidence delivered before the House of Commons, strictly abstained from the use of sugar in his own family.”¹⁶⁴ De Quincey's note giving from a rather uncertain memory the “Chronology” on the subject of slavery reveals De Quincey's reading; he mentions “Clarkson's Essay, (originally Latin) published,” he thinks, “in 1787, Anthony Benezet's book, Granville Sharpe's Trial of the Slave question in a court of justice—these were the openings: then came Wilberforce, Clarkson's second work, the Evidence before Parliament.”¹⁶⁵ We learn, further, that Cowper's moral denunciation upon all important current problems appealed both to De Quincey's father and his father's contemporaries.¹⁶⁶

From an early age Hazlitt took his stand against slavery. At the age of thirteen he wrote on July 9, 1790, to his mother about this institution. When he and a friend went to a Mr. Fisher's to dine, Hazlitt found he was a rich man; however, in Hazlitt's opinion anyone who advocated slavery was a slave himself. The young philosopher after an extended discussion on slavery says man can not improve in the state of slavery.¹⁶⁷ “Prince Maurice's Parrot or French Instructions to a British Plenipotentiary (September 18, 1814)” from Political Essays is a satirical account of Castlereagh, England's representative at the Congress of Vienna (1814), and Talleyrand, the representative of France. Some of the main sections of this article are as follows:

1. That the French people were so deeply implicated in the slave trade, as not even to know that it had been abolished by this country.
2. That such were their blind and rooted prejudices against the English, that we could only hope to convince them of our entire sincerity and disinterestedness in abolishing the Slave Trade ourselves, by lending a helping hand to its revival by others.
3. That to rob and murder on the coast of Africa is among the internal rights of Legislation and domestic privileges of every European and Christian state.
4. That his most Christian Majesty Louis XVIII is so fully impressed with the humane and benevolent sentiments of Great Britain and the allies in favour of the abolition of the Slave Trade, that he was ready to have plunged all Europe into a war for its continuance. …
5. Lastly. That by consenting to the re-establishment of the Slave Trade in France, we were most effectually preparing the way for its abolition all over the world.

Hazlitt flays Lord Castlereagh because of his indifference and acquiescence to the French on this subject while “the cries of Africa were lost amidst the nods and smiles and shrugs of these demi-puppets.”¹⁶⁸The Examiner for October 16, 1814, carried an article by Leigh Hunt in which he suggested that the slave trade should be abolished at once.¹⁶⁹ Hazlitt in the essay “Whether the Friends of Freedom can Entertain Any Sanguine Hopes of the Favourable Results of the Ensuing Congress?” (October 23, 1814), is extremely skeptical that such will be done through Lord Castlereagh.¹⁷⁰ Sarcastic reference is made by Hazlitt to a writer in The Morning Chronicle (July 17, 1817), who apologizes for expressing his approbation of the abolition of the slave trade.¹⁷¹ The essay in which the reference is made is “On the Treatment of State Prisoners,” (July 17, 1817).

Hazlitt's opinion of Wilberforce was no more admirable than that of Hunt. In “Lord Eldon—Mr. Wilberforce,” an essay in The Spirit of the Age (1825)¹⁷² Hazlitt is against Lord Eldon because he opposes such a liberal principle as the abolition of the slave trade and dooms a continent to slavery. Wilberforce is a less perfect character in his way, divided between reputation and duty, desiring not only the gratitude of one-half of the human species “(the images of God carved in ebony as old Fuller calls them)” but also the praises of the West Indian planters and the Guinea traders. Also he is frankly outspoken against the despot slave owner, but ignominiously silent in the case of the European despots and even their tyranny. In short, Wilberforce is an excellent specimen of “moral equivocation.” Hazlitt also rebukes his fluctuation in connection with the abolition of the slave trade when he apparently yielded to Mr. Pitt's dilatoriness. In contrast to this denunciation of Wilberforce, Hazlitt hails as the one who actually effected the abolition of slavery, “Clarkson, the true Apostle of human Redemption on that occasion, and who it is remarkable, resembles in his person and lineaments more than one of the Apostles in the Cartoons of Raphael. He deserves to be added to the Twelve!”¹⁷³

The horrors of the Middle Passage, the throwing overboard of sick slaves in 1775 by the captain of a Guinea vessel, and an incident from Sharp's Memoirs about a young African chieftain are used in the essay “On Reason and Imagination” from The Plain Speaker (1826) as illustrations of the point Hazlitt is trying to establish; namely, that the sufferings incurred by the slave trade cannot be compensated in a moral sense despite the claim that they are compensated commercially and politically.¹⁷⁴

A discussion of the color “black” in the Life of Napoleon is an interesting revelation of Hazlitt's lack of prejudice because of color. In forming judgments, he contends, one should not take black into consideration. Such moral principles as right and wrong, justice and injustice might depend on a distinction between black and white if these colors determined good and evil, or pleasure and pain. Better is the moral in Fuller's quaint statement that Negroes are “‘the images of God carved in ebony.’ The hand does not feel pain the less because it is black? Why then should it feel it the more because it is black, which does not alter the essence of the question.”¹⁷⁵ It should not be assumed that Negroes are incapable of civilization because of their color. Of the two, a slave and a slave driver, the former is, in Hazlitt's opinion, more respectable.¹⁷⁶ Later in the volume the author commends Fox, who, despite difficulties, redeemed “while in office one of the great pledges of humanity, by abolishing the Slave-trade.”¹⁷⁷

Those who plead custom and dislike of innovation whenever any measure for advancement is suggested receive Hazlitt's castigation in “Capital Punishments,” an essay addressed to the Edinburgh Review, July, 1821. Those who oppose reforms and abolition of capital punishment are the same ones who opposed such humane measures as the Concessions of the Catholic claims, the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, and the Amelioration of the Penal Laws. Arguments used now are similar to those used by the Solicitor-general in 1775 when one hundred and forty Negroes were thrown overboard by the captain of a Guinea trader.¹⁷⁸ In advocating the abolition of capital punishment Hazlitt mentions the work of Mrs. Fry, who belongs to a sect benevolent in creed and practice. To this sect, the Quakers, is due in large measure the abolition of the slave trade for which service they will receive their reward.¹⁷⁹

Walter Savage Landor's attitude toward slavery can be inferred in this quotation from “Diogenes and Plato”: “'Tis a dire calamity to have a slave; 'tis an inexpiable curse to be one.”¹⁸⁰ In March, 1812, he writes Southey: “I pray fervently to God that no part of America may be desolated; that her wildernesses may be the bowers and arbours of liberty; that the present restrictions on her commerce may have no other effect than to destroy the cursed trafficking and tricking which debases the brood worse than felonies and larcenies; and that nothing may divert their attention from their own immense neighborhood, or from the determination of helping to set free every town and village of their continent!” He continues that the Americans and English speak the same language, and he has no doubt of their preserving those principles of freedom that impelled their ancestors to leave England.¹⁸¹

In the “imaginary conversation” between William Penn and Lord Peterborough, Landor represents Penn as hoping that the slave ship, slave trade, and the dungeons of the Inquisition may be abolished. The one, Landor continues, who will effect the abolishing of the slave trade will have done more than all the twelve apostles.¹⁸² The conversation between Romilly and Wilberforce is devoted almost wholly to the slavery question. Romilly doubts the sincerity of those clergymen who are absent from the House whenever the question of slavery arises. He indignantly asks, “Can we believe their belief who wallow in wealth and war; in theirs who vote subsidies for slaughter; who speed the slaveship with their prayers; who bind and lacerate and stifle the helpless wretches they call men and brethren?”¹⁸³

Banos, in “Lopez Banos and Romero Alpuente,” calls Chateaubriand a “whining fox” under whose administration “more than thirty slave-vessels sailed in the present year from the port of Nantes only; all armed, all equipped with chains and instruments of torture. If he was ignorant of this, he was little fit to be minister; if he knew it, he was less.”¹⁸⁴ Another conversation, “Landor, English Visitor, and Florentine” represents Landor expressing indignation at the way in which the cruel wretch Napoleon mistreated his “enthusiastic admirer and humble follower, Toussaint L'Ouverture.”¹⁸⁵ Another reference to Toussaint is in an elegiac poem, “To Andrew Crosse,” in the lines

Hoarse whistles Wordsworth's watery flute,
Which mourn'd with loud indignant strains
The famisht Black ∗ in Corsic chains.(186)

In a note on the word “Black” Landor calls Wordsworth's sonnet on Toussaint Louverture one of the noblest sonnets in the language.

A poem, “To General Andrew Jackson, President of the United States,” (1836) pays tribute to Jackson as “a deliverer of mankind.” Then comes a prophecy for the slaves which is yet unfulfilled:

                    Up, every son of Afric soil,
                    Ye worn and weary, hoist the sail!
                    For your own glebes and garners toil
                    With easy plough and lightsome flail:
                    A father's home ye never knew,
A father's home your sons shall have from you.
Enjoy your palmy groves, your cloudless day,
          Your world that demons tore away.
          Look up! look up! the flaming sword
Hath vanisht! and behold your Paradise restored!(187)

Another poem, “To Friend Jonathan” (1850), appeals to America for freedom of the slaves. Landor voices his regrets that the Blacks still bear the “ensign on their backs” and that they must be given up “to drain the bitter cup.” The author refers to the Fugitive Slaves Bill which Congress had passed September 13, 1850. Friend Jonathan is warned that Freedom, Fraud, and Falsehood, can never exist side by side.¹⁸⁸

Landor's attitude towards the Negroes changed considerably as he grew older. In February, 1862, he writes to an American friend, Kate Fields, whom he had met in England, that he was pained by the events in America and that the Northern states had always acknowledged the right of the South to hold slaves. He proposed the following plan: first, “that every slave should be free after ten years' labor;” secondly, “that none should be imported, or sold or separated from wife and children”; thirdly, “that an adequate portion of land should be granted in perpetuity to the liberated”; “that the proprietor would be indemnified by ten years' labor. …”¹⁸⁹ In September of the same year he writes from Florence about America, “Half the nation would utterly ruin the other half—would liberate the Blacks who are well contented, and would enslave their masters under whom they were happy.”¹⁹⁰ He adds that within fifty years there will be fifty independent states with New York as the capital of the northern group and Washington as the capital of the southern. Another letter to Kate Fields in January, 1863, further shows his reaction when he voices his opinion that it is better that the Negroes should be satisfied as slaves than that the Union be disrupted. Again the old argument is advanced that Negroes are happier now than they were in Africa; and if the North succeeds, taxes will rise and much confusion will ensue.¹⁹¹ A letter written September 11, 1863, expresses Landor's sorrow at the Civil War in which the North has violated the Constitution, for slavery, though execrable, was lawful. He, however, offers again his plan, which he thinks Congress might have adopted in liberating the slaves. Briefly the plan is this: that after fifteen years every slave be freed; none are to be sold or imported; no husband or wife is to be separated; no slave under twelve is to labour; and schools to which children of both sexes from six to ten will be sent are to be established in every township.¹⁹²

Thomas Babington Macaulay, son of the energetic Zachary Macaulay, believed that all men should have equality of opportunity. His writings show a thorough and intimate acquaintance with the abolition movement in English and American history. His sympathy toward the movement is seen in the article on William Pitt in the Encyclopedia Britannica, when he calls the bill of 1788 to “mitigate the horrors” of the Middle Passage a “humane bill” and when he emphasizes Pitt's zeal in connection with the “atrocities of the slave trade.”¹⁹³ The “Essay on Milton” contains a refutation of the argument that before a people should be freed, they should know how to use freedom. “This maxim is worthy,” he says, “of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.”¹⁹⁴

It is, however, in a speech made February 26, 1845, “The Sugar Duties” that Macaulay brilliantly sets forth his attitude on slavery. The occasion was the motion of an amendment by Lord John Russell to this effect, that “it is the opinion of this House that the plan proposed by Her Majesty's Government, in reference to the Sugar Duties professes to keep up a distinction between foreign free labour sugar and foreign slave labour sugar, which is impracticable and illusory; and, without adequate benefit to the consumer tends so greatly to impair the revenue as to render the removal of the Income and Property tax at the end of three years extremely uncertain and improbable.”¹⁹⁵ In the debate on this amendment Macaulay denounces the “odious” and “demoralizing” slave trade in the United States thus: “… if there be on the surface of this earth a country which, before God and man, is more accountable than any other for the misery and degradation of the African race, that country is not Brazil, the produce of which the right honorable Baronet excludes, but the United States, the produce of which he proposes to admit on more favorable terms than ever.”¹⁹⁶ He shows that there are two classes of states in the Union, those in which the “human beasts of burden” are forced to multiply and supply with labor the second class, where sugar and cotton are produced. A contrast between the census of 1830 and the census of 1840 reveals that the slave population of two breeding states, North Carolina and Virginia, was stationary in one instance and actually decreased in the other. Yet propagation in both cases went on very rapidly. The young Negro youth of Virginia go to supply the void caused by cruelty in Louisiana.

Contrasting slavery in the United States and slavery in Brazil, Macaulay says color prejudice is less prominent in the latter country, and opportunities abound for the free Negroes to become merchants, lawyers, doctors, priests, and soldiers. “It is by no means unusual to see a white penitent kneeling before the spiritual tribunal of a Negro, confessing his sins to a Negro, receiving absolution from a Negro. It is by no means unusual to see a Negro dispensing the Eucharist to a circle of whites. I need not tell the House what emotions of amazement and of rage such a spectacle would excite in Georgia or South Carolina.”¹⁹⁷ The United States not only declares itself the champion of universal Negro slavery but takes pride in so doing. Macaulay then points out the inconsistency of the Baronet when he refuses Brazilian sugar because the Brazilian government tolerates slavery and winks at the slave trade and yet accepts cotton and sugar grown in the United States.

Announcing his intention, nevertheless, to vote with the baronet, Macaulay recalls his own activity and self-sacrificing efforts to remove from Britain's law the “foul stain” of slavery and to redress the wrongs of British subjects. But his special responsibility toward the Negro race ceased when slavery ceased in the British dominion. He, of course, feels sorry for the Negroes in the United States, and his hatred of slavery is just as intense as ever; but his first duty is to the millions of his own countrymen who are yet in the slavery of unjust labour conditions. If ever slavery is to be “peaceably extinguished” in the United States, the American people must first assume the responsibility.

In a letter of June 17, 1833, to his sister, Hannah More Macaulay, Macaulay wonders: “If the Parliament should be dissolved, the West Indian and East Indian bills are of course dropped. What is to become of the slaves? What is to become of the tea-trade? Will the Negroes, after receiving the resolutions of the House of Commons promising them liberty, submit to the cartwhip?”¹⁹⁸ On July 25, 1833, he again writes her that he supported Buxton when he moved his “instruction to the Committee on the Slavery Bill, which the government opposed.”¹⁹⁹ Macaulay's conception of the evils of slavery are also explicitly set forth in the “Indian Penal Code Notes.” He says, “The essence of slavery, the circumstance which makes slavery the worst of all social evils, is not in our opinion this, that the master has a legal right to certain services from the slave, but this, that the master has a legal right to enforce the performance of those services without having recourse to the tribunals. He is a judge in his own cause. He is armed with the powers of a magistrate for the protection of his own private interest against the person who owes him service. Every other judge quits the bench as soon as his own cause is called on. The judicial authority of the master begins and ends with cases in which he has a direct stake. The moment that a master is really deprived of this authority, the moment that his right to service really becomes, like his right to money which he has lent, a mere civil right, which he can enforce only by a civil action, the peculiarly odious and malignant evils of slavery disappear at once.”²⁰⁰ No master can obtain efficient service if he prosecutes his slaves or his servants. The best procedure is to cause the laborer or slave to work from “the motives and feelings of the freeman.”

Another prominent Victorian, William Makepeace Thackeray, in “The Yankee Volunteers”²⁰¹ humorously addresses the soldiers and signalling out a cymbal-beating black asks him whether “some Lucy Neal” had caused his ruin. The poem “Timbuctoo” (1829), a parody of Tennyson's Cambridge prize poem, was written, according to the author, to awaken sympathy for Africa.²⁰² Despite the havoc slavery has wrought in Africa, it is still a pleasant land:

Desolate Afric! thou art lovely yet!
One heart yet beats which ne'er shall thee forget.
What though thy maidens are a blackish brown,
Does virtue dwell in whiter breasts alone?(203)

Half humorously Thackeray says the day will come when Africa shall reign supreme and supply prostrate nations around with rice, sugar, and rum.

Thackeray was one of the many English visitors to America. An account of his visit in 1852 is given in his Letters to an American Family. Naturally inclined toward caricature, Thackeray drew on the cover of Putnam's Monthly, January, 1853, three caricatures of Longfellow, George William Curtis, and “Uncle Tom.” The latter is a vignette referring to an article in the magazine, “Uncle Tomitudes.” In a letter from Charleston, March 11, 1853, he tells Miss Lucy Baxter of his experience at a “black ball.”²⁰⁴ The children “with their queer faces and ways, which are exactly half-way between the absurd and the pretty” created within him a “strange feeling between pleasure and pity.” He also mentions the American custom of having Negro children stand at the dinner table and whisk flies with a feather fan or brush. He wishes that some of his countrymen could see the goodness of the masters to these children.²⁰⁵ From London, June 3, 1853, he writes of meeting Mrs. Stowe and being agreeably disappointed. From her face and behavior she impresses him as being good and truth-telling, and he announces his intention of buckling down to Uncle Tom and reading it when he gets a leisure hour in a country spot.²⁰⁶

Charles Dickens, another English visitor to the United States (in 1842), returned home filled with indignation at the mistreatment of the American slave. In “American Notes” he makes certain emphatic statements which antagonized American slave owners. Note the irony in the description of a mother with her children who have just been purchased: “The champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, who had bought them, rode in the same train; and, every time we stopped, got down to see that they were safe. The black in Sinbad's Travels with one eye in the middle of his forehead which shone, like a burning coal, was nature's aristocrat compared with this white gentleman.”²⁰⁷ Traveling from place to place in America, Dickens found plantations recalling to mind pictures of the same in Defoe's writings. In one place he noticed a sign warning every one to drive slowly. The penalty for violation by a white man was five dollars; by a Negro, fifteen stripes.

Chapter XVII of the “American Notes” is a bitter attack of the slavery institution; this attack, he says, may be substantiated with proof. He divides the slave owners into three classes: the first consists of “those more moderate and rational owners of human cattle … who admit the frightful nature of the Institution in the abstract, and perceive the dangers to society with which it is fraught.”²⁰⁸ The second class consists of those who will sell and own slaves until they die and despite evidence to the contrary deny horrors of the system and “gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery, and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by any human authority, and unassailed by any human power. …”²⁰⁹ The third class “not the least numerous or influential is composed of that delicate gentility which cannot brook an equal,” and whose pride requires that they have slaves.²¹⁰ Refuting the arguments of the slave-holders that public opinion is sufficient to prevent cruelties to the Negro, Dickens answers, “Why, public opinion in the slave states is slavery, is it not?”

Dickens later presents facsimiles²¹¹ of advertisements for mutilated runaway slaves. He asks whether we will smile at cruelties of the Christians while whimpering at tortures practised by the heathen Indians on one another. As far as his part is concerned he says, “Rather, for me, restore the forest and the Indian village; in lieu of stars and stripes, let some poor feather flutter in the breeze; replace the streets and squares by wigwams; and though the death-song of a hundred haughty warriors fill the air, it will be music to the shriek of one unhappy slave.”²¹² In December, 1842, Dickens wrote to Fields from London that the slave owners in America could cry that he had lied until they were as black as their slaves; he had the name and date of every newspaper in which the advertisements appeared.²¹³

Thus with the discussion of these early Victorians, Macaulay, Thackeray, and Dickens, we conclude our study of the major romantic poets and essayists. Their agitation for the abolition of Negro slavery was in keeping with the general agitation for improved conditions in the factories, prisons, charitable institutions, and with the general activities designed to improve the condition of brute animals, children, and the poor. This practical humanitarianism was not confined to the major writers, for the minor writers were actively raising their voices in behalf of the Negro. To them we now turn.

Notes

1. Section I.

   Charles D. Cleveland, English Literature of the Nineteenth Century, p. 449. For references to articles on slavery consult “Slave Trade” and “Slaves” in the General Index to the Edinburgh Review from Its Commencement in October, 1802, to the End of the Twentieth Volume, pp. 463, 464.

2. Armistead, A Tribute for the Negro, pp. 36-38.

3. William Cobbett, Annual Register, Vol. 1 (Jan.-June, 1802), p. 702 and Vol. 5 (Jan.-June, 1804), p. 1007; see also Advice to Young Men, pp. 278-280.

4. C. M. MacInnes, op. cit., p. 153.

5. Charles Booth, Zachary Macaulay … An Appreciation, p. 86.

6. Consult Memoirs of the Life of Sir Samuel Romilly …, Vol. 3, pp. 341 ff.

7. Henry Brougham, Works, Vol. 2. See “The Slave Trade,” p. 93; “Negro Slavery,” p. 193; “The Slave Trade,” p. 221; “Emancipation of Negro Apprentices,” p. 241.

8. Joseph John Gurney, Brief Memoirs of Thomas Fowell Buxton and Elizabeth Fry, pp. 10, 11.

9. Reginald, Heber, Poetical Works of Crabbe, Heber and Pollok, p. 26.

10. G. W. Alexander, Letters on the Slave Trade; see Letter III, April 11, 1842, p. 17.

11. Clarkson, A Letter to the Clergy, etc., p. 13, note.

12. Ibid., p. 55.

13. Armistead, op. cit., pp. 363, 365-374, also p. 365, note.

14. See Letter to a Member of the Congress of the United States of America from an English Clergyman (1835) in Miscellaneous Pamphlets, Vol. 57; also George Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections in a Series of Letters Addressed to Mrs. Beecher Stowe.

15. See p. 121.

16. An account of Gurney's findings appear in A Journey in North America (1841) and his series of letters to Henry Clay of Kentucky entitled A Winter in the West Indies (1840).

17. See Thompson's experiences in Letters and Addresses.

18. Emancipation, p. 54.

19. The Anti-Slavery Alphabet (1846).

20. The Flowering of New England, p. 396.

21. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal, etc., Chs. I, III, VI, VII, VIII.

22. Vol. 1, No. 4 in Miscellaneous Pamphlets, Vol. 57.

23. Page 146.

24. A. Mott (compiler).

25. Published by the New York Free Produce Association. For the poem of Cowper see p. 7.

26. John A. Collins (compiler).

27. L. M. Child (compiler).

28. Alexander Crummell, The Man: The Hero: The Christian, pp. 13, 14.

    Section II.

29. This estimate was obtained from the use of A Concordance to the Poems of W. Wordsworth (ed. Lane Cooper).

30. Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works, p. 18.

31. Ibid., p. 665.

32. Ibid., p. 81.

33. Ibid., p. 172.

34. Ibid., p. 178.

35. Ibid., p. 198.

36. Ibid., p. 286.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., pp. 356, 357.

39. Ibid., p. 667.

40. Ibid., p. 715.

41. Ibid., p. 317.

42. Thomas Poole, Life, Scenery and Customs in Sierra Leone and the Gambia, Vol. 1, p. 1. All of Chapter X is devoted to the slavery question.

43. Henry C. Robinson, The Correspondence … with the Wordsworth Circle, “Wordsworth's Library,” Appendix III, Vol. 2, p. 872.

44. Mrs. Wilberforce's nickname for Wilberforce.

45. William Knight, ed., Letters of the Wordsworth Family, Vol. 2, p. 190.

46. Robinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 361. See a letter to Robinson dated May 9, 1838.

47. Margaret Howitt, ed., Mary Howitt, An Autobiography, Vol. 2, p. 32.

48. Knight (ed.), op. cit., Vol. 3, pp. 335, 336.

49. Robinson, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 637.

50. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 417.

51. Knight (ed.), op. cit., Vol. 3, pp. 200-201.

52. Ibid., p. 202.

53. Leslie Nathan Broughton, ed., Wordsworth and Reed, p. 146.

54. Ibid., p. 150.

55. Ibid., p. 152.

56. Knight, ed., op. cit., Vol. 3, 156.

57. Coleridge, S. T., Unpublished Letters of S. T. Coleridge (ed. Griggs), Vol. 1, p. 36, Note 2.

58. Ibid., p. 192.

59. Ibid., p. 137.

60. Ibid., p. 188.

61. Coleridge, Complete Works (ed. W. G. Shedd), Vol. 2, p. 234.

62. Coleridge, Poetical Works, Appendix B., p. 476. The complete text of the ode in Greek appears here.

63. Coleridge, Letters (ed. E. H. Coleridge), Vol. 1, p. 43.

64. Coleridge, Poetical Works, p. 585.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid., p. 80. Coleridge calls the reader's attention to the fact that this ode was written long before the abolition of the Slave Trade by Parliament. See notes, p. 588.

67. Ibid., Notes, p. 590.

68. Ibid., Notes, p. 609.

69. Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, p. 14.

70. Coleridge, Complete Works, Vol. 3, p. 625, in the “Biographical Supplement” by H. N. Coleridge.

71. Letters (ed. E. H. Coleridge), Vol. 1, p. 96.

72. Ibid., p. 105.

73. Complete Works, Vol. 3, p. 634.

74. Letters (ed. E. H. Coleridge), Vol. 1, p. 236.

75. Ibid., p. 363.

76. Unpublished Letters (ed. Griggs), Vol. 1, p. 395.

77. Letters (ed. E. H. Coleridge), Vol. 2, pp. 527, 528.

78. Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge (ed. Thomas Allsop), pp. 184-185.

79. Letters (ed. E. H. Coleridge), Vol. 2, p. 527, note 2.

80. Letters, Conversations, and Recollections, etc. (ed. Allsop), p. 185.

81. Unpublished Letters (ed. Grigg), Vol. 2, pp. 3, 4.

82. Ibid., p. 32.

83. Ibid., p. 391.

84. Complete Works (ed. Shedd), Vol. 2, p. 64.

85. Ibid., p. 98.

86. Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 223.

87. Ibid., p. 234.

88. Ibid., Vol., 6, p. 279.

89. Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 178.

90. Ibid., p. 179.

91. Ibid., Vol. 6, p. 305.

92. Ibid., Vol. 4, pp. 190, 191.

93. Ibid., Vol. 6, p. 457. For another comment see entry under “Negro Emancipation,” June 17, 1833, in the same volume, p. 459. See also mention of an “Essay on the Slave Trade” appearing in the Fourth number of The Watchman, Vol. 3, p. 640.

94. Henry Crabb Robinson, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 244.

95. Robert Southey, Life and Correspondence (ed. by his son), Vol. I, p. 217.

96. Ibid., p. 250.

97. John Bamfylde wrote a sonnet on Raynal's effort for the abolition of Slavery. See above, page 46.

98. The Life of Wesley, Vol. 2, pp. 256-258.

99. Poetical Works, pp. 110-113.

100. Ibid., p. 110.

101. Ibid., p. 111.

102. Ibid., pp. 111, 112.

103. Ibid., pp. 112, 113.

104. Ibid., p. 127.

105. Ibid., p. 174.

106. Ibid., p. 502.

107. Ibid., p. 768.

108. Ibid., p. 771.

109. Ibid.

110. Southey, Life and Correspondence, Vol. 2, p. 46.

111. Ibid., p. 69.

112. Ibid., p. 241.

113. Ibid., pp. 243, 244.

114. Ibid., p. 247.

115. Ibid., p. 263.

116. Ibid., p. 344.

117. Ibid., p. 358.

118. Ibid.. Vol. 3, p. 68.

119. Ibid., page 221.

120. Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 243.

121. Viscountess Knutsford, Life and Letters of Zachary Macaulay, pp. 390, 391.

122. Southey, op. cit., Vol. 6, p. 113.

123. Ibid., p. 198.

124. Byron, Works (ed. E. H. Coleridge), Vol. 1, p. 409.

125. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 302.

126. Ibid., Vol. 6, p. 217.

127. Ibid., p. 220.

128. Ibid., p. 461.

129. Ibid., p. 537.

130. Ibid., pp. 548, 549.

131. Ibid.

132. Byron, Works (1849), p. 238.

133. Ibid., p. 269.

134. Shelley, Prose Works, p. 340.

135. Shelley, Essays and Letters, p. 47.

136. Ibid., p. 382.

137. Ibid., p. 383.

138. Complete Poetical Works, p. 786.

139. Ibid., p. 569.

140. Page 121.

141. Ibid.

142. Ibid., p. 365.

143. Hunt, Juvenilia, pp. 53, 54.

144. Wilson Armistead in a Tribute for the Negro says that Cuffee joined the Quaker sect, p. 464.

145. R. Brimley Johnson, ed., Shelley-Leigh Hunt. How Friendships Made History, p. 187.

146. Ibid., p. 191.

147. Hunt, The Old Court Suburb, Vol. I, p. 198.

148. Ibid., pp. 31, 32.

149. Hunt, The Wishing-Cap Papers, p. 72.

150. Miscellaneous Essays and Sketches in the same volume as The Wishing-Cap Papers, p. 266.

151. Poetical Works, p. 309.

152. Ibid., p. 184. For a discussion of Fanny Wright see page 142.

153. Works (ed. E. V. Lucas), Vol. I, pp. 229, 230.

154. See Fairchild, op. cit., p. 315.

155. Lamb, Life, Letters, and Writings, Vol. 3, p. 227.

156. Lamb, Complete Works and Letters (1935), p. 67.

157. Bernard Barton, Poems and Letters, p. 137.

158. Ibid., pp. 137, 138 (also in Poems, Plays, and Miscellaneous Essays of Charles Lamb, ed. Alfred Ainger, pp. 91, 92).

159. Lamb, Works (ed. by Lucas), Vol. I, pp. 527, 528. (For another reference to the Negro see Lamb's contribution to De Foeana II in Hone's reprint of “The Good Clerk” in Lucas' edition, Vol. I, pp. 127, 425, 426.)

160. De Quincey, Works, Vol. 2, p. 143.

161. Ibid., Vol. 8, p. 389.

162. Ibid., Vol. 10, p. 65.

163. Ibid., p. 106.

164. De Quincey's Writings, Vol. 23, pp. 11, 12.

165. Ibid., p. 12, note.

166. Ibid., p. 21.

167. W. Carew Hazlitt, Four Generations of a Literary Family, Vol. I, p. 68.

168. Hazlitt, Complete Works (ed. Howe), Vol. VII, pp. 77, 79.

169. Ibid., p. 80.

170. Ibid., p. 84.

171. Ibid., p. 216.

172. Ibid., Vol. 11, p. 146.

173. Ibid., pp. 149, 150. For a similar characterization of Wilberforce as an exponent of pretended patriotism and vacillating philanthropy, see “On the Present State of Parliamentary Eloquence,” Vol. 17, pp. 15, 16.

174. Ibid., Vol 12, pp. 47-50.

175. Ibid., Vol. 14, p. 121.

176. Ibid., pp. 121, 122.

177. Ibid., p. 275.

178. Ibid., Vol. 19, pp. 216-222.

179. Ibid., pp. 254, 255. See also Vol. 20, pp. 154, 155. “Civilization of Africa” for reference to the part Negro women might play in civilizing Africa.

180. Landor, Imaginary Conversations, Vol. I, p. 87.

181. John Forster, Walter Savage Landor, A Biography, p. 221.

182. Landor, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 111.

183. Ibid., p. 152.

184. Ibid., Vol. 5, p. 300.

185. Ibid., Vol. 6, p. 40.

186. Landor, Poems, Dialogues in Verse and Epigrams, Vol. I, p. 183.

187. Complete Works (ed. Wheeler), Vol. 15, pp. 33, 34.

188. Ibid., p. 56.

189. Kate Fields, “Last Days of Walter Savage Landor,” Part III, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1866, Vol. 17, p. 702.

190. Landor, Letters and Other Unpublished Writings, p. 128.

191. Kate Fields, op. cit., p. 702.

192. Ibid., p. 702.

193. T. B. Macaulay, Complete Writings, Vol. 19, p. 138 (or Miscellanies, Vol. 3, p. 138).

194. Essay on Milton (ed. Albert P. Walker), p. 50.

195. Complete Writings, Vol. 18, p. 1.

196. Ibid., p. 7.

197. Ibid., p. 11.

198. Ibid., Vol. 20, p. 158.

199. Ibid., p. 164.

200. Ibid., Vol. 18, pp. 264, 265.

201. Thackeray, Works, Vol. 13, pp. 73-75, in “Ballads and Miscellanies.”

202. Ibid., p. 533, note.

203. Ibid., p. 532.

204. Thackeray, Letters to an American Family, p. 51.

205. Ibid., pp. 51, 52.

206. Ibid., pp. 71, 72.

207. Dickens Works, Vol. 28, p. 159.

208. Ibid., p. 272.

209. Ibid.

210. Ibid., p. 273.

211. Ibid., pp. 277-281.

212. Ibid., p. 290.

213. James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors, p. 143.

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