SOURCE: “The Black Presence,” in Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing, Associated University Presses, 1988, pp. 17-42.

[In the following excerpt, Sandiford examines the social and cultural situation of blacks in England before 1800 and discusses the lives and works of prominent black writers and intellectuals—including Ignatio Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and Job Ben Solomon—whose works would spur literary reactions and philosophical debates about blacks and the institution of slavery.]

Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano were undoubtedly the three best-known Africans in eighteenth-century England. But it is important to establish at the outset that they were also members of a considerable Black community that grew up in England as a direct consequence of that country's participation in the slave trade. The fact that several thousand Africans made their home in England during this period is not yet as fully appreciated as it might be, mainly because standard histories have tended either to minimize or to ignore altogether the significance of the African presence at this early time in Europe as a whole.

This chapter will delineate the social environment created for Blacks by the special conditions of slavery and by their own racial identity. For the literary achievement of Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano can be properly understood only in relation to those specific conditions and within the wider context of the Black community's group experiences. One of the major propositions of this study is that these three writers were highly conscious of their social responsibility as literate members of that community. This chapter will show specifically that their sense of racial awareness was deeply rooted in a longer tradition of literacy and learning begun by earlier African scholars and personalities who were exposed to European culture and education. Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano were distinctive as the first to transfigure Black awareness into a literary form, celebrating the validity of their common racial origin and advocating the liberation of their fellow Africans from the disabilities that circumscribed their lives and actions, both on the plantations of the West Indies and within the bounds of freedom-loving Britannia itself. …

Yet, the very image of Blacks and the assumptions that defined their relationships with the white colonial and metropolitan society were in large measure a legacy of history, with foundations anterior to the period of slavery. To the older myths about the darkness of Africa and the barbarism of her peoples were added new arguments calculated to promote the expediency of a new economic order. Thus, a complex of attitudes was evolved that justified the commerce in Black human flesh in the West Indies and in England alike and relegated Blacks to a status of degradation which they were to endure until legal redress was finally won in the nineteenth century.

The earliest history of African peoples in Britain predates the period of this study. Latin chroniclers of the Roman conquest record the presence of dark-skinned inhabitants among the primitive tribes of the island. In his account of Britain under Agricola's governorship, Tacitus describes a people of “swarthy complexion and curled hair” coexisting alongside the ruddy-haired, large-limbed Caledonians.¹ The Afro-American ethnologist and historian, J. A. Rogers, states that these people were undeniably of African extraction.² More recent commentators suggest that the Romans may have had Black soldiers among their legions in Britain.³ This view is usually based on the following incident from the life of Severus, the Roman emperor:

On another occasion when he [Severus] was returning to his nearest quarters from an inspection of the wall at Luguvallum in Britain, at a time when he had not only proved victorious, but had concluded a perpetual peace, just as he was wondering what omen would present itself, an Ethiopian soldier, who was famous among buffoons and always a notable jester, met him with a garland of cypress boughs.⁴

Severus is reported to have been enraged and frightened by the soldier's “ominous” skin color and the color of the garland. It seems clear that the emperor was reacting to the traditional equation of black with evil. The term “Ethiopian,” used in antiquity as a generic denotation for all Africans, is the most definite evidence here of the African presence in early Britain. Archaeological excavation on the site of a Romano-British cemetery in use at Trentholme, York, between a.d. 140 and the end of the fourth century, provides further, if not entirely conclusive, evidence for the African claim. Several of the human remains have been identified as approximating the physical features of negroid peoples.⁵

In Tudor and Stuart times Africans continue to appear in the literary and official documents under the designation of “moors” and “blackamoors.” Descriptions of Elizabethan and Jacobean court entertainments and public ceremonies attest to the participation of authentic African characters—not white faces painted black.⁶

The English entered the slave trade in 1562 as interlopers in a market monopolized by the Portuguese. Thereafter the gentlemen and merchant adventurers of the trade supplied slaves not only to the Spanish colonies of the New World, but also to the households of the rich and titled of England. Queen Elizabeth herself retained a Black page and a Black entertainer at court.⁷ Still, the influx of Africans into the realm in the closing years of the sixteenth century, although as yet comparatively small, was considerable enough to incur the royal displeasure.

In a letter to her Privy Council, dated 11 July 1596, Elizabeth adverted to “divers blackamoores brought into this realm of which kinde of people there are already too manie.” Seven days later, the queen issued a license to have several newly arrived Blacks deported.⁸ Elizabeth's was the first official measure designed to forestall the potential competition such Africans offered to native English subjects as household servants. Her complaint was to be reiterated with greater urgency and alarm by several observers in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the Black population in England reached twenty thousand.

In the seventeenth century, the number of Blacks in England grew in proportion to England's commercial excursions on the slave coast of Guinea. These were at best spasmodic and generally unofficial. But in 1662, Charles II rationalized the haphazard slaving practices of Englishmen on the Guinea coast by granting a monopoly to the Company of Royal Adventurers.⁹ By this gesture, and with the financial backing of other members of the royal family, the country committed itself to full partnership in the “curious” institutions of slavery and the slave trade. Hereafter, Blacks came to be defined as merchandise, commodities to be bought and sold, like horses or fine wines—and were traded as such. Inevitably, as the merchants did a brisk trade in human cargo at the port towns of London, Bristol, and Liverpool, citizens of substance came increasingly to staff their households with Black servants. Captains of slaving ships and government officials returning from colonial outposts all followed the fashion of appearing in public attended by Black body servants to signify their rank and opulence.

Sailors smuggled into England Africans stolen on the slave coast and sold them to willing buyers. Again, literary sources and the public press provide the clearest reflection of the growing vogue for Black servants and of the newcomers' impact on English life. Samuel Pepys records having seen a little Turk and a Black boy in the home of a friend and notes that the two were being kept as pages for his host's daughters. Seven years later, we find that Pepys himself occasionally hired “a black moor of Mrs. Betelier's who dresses meat mighty well. …”¹⁰ African serving boys were to be found in several households, and ladies of quality appeared in public with their lap-dogs on leash and their blackamoors in tow.

Advertisements for the sale of Black servants and for the recovery of runaways were common.¹¹ The following is typical: “On Monday last, a Negroe Boy, about 14 Years old, of a good Complexion, indifferent Tall, speaks good English, with a Drugget Coat, silk waistcoat, with red and yellow stripes, run away. …”¹²

By the year 1700, the English had sent some 200,000 slaves to the colonies. In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht gave Britain the right to transport slaves to the Spanish colonies. Her participation in the slave trade was now legally and internationally recognized. The way was paved for plantation slavery to flourish into a mature economic system.¹³

As could be expected, this intensification of Britain's role in the trade swelled the numbers of Africans within her own shores. The new century saw a diverse collection of these uprooted people settling in England for different reasons; their influence on England's social and economic life became fully visible and often worrying. In the key ports of the trade, London, Bristol, and Liverpool, slaves were being landed by the hundreds to be sold at auction.¹⁴ Some were stowaways who quickly vanished into enclaves already established by their fellow Africans near the docks and rivers. Others were servants destined for wealthy households. It was in this wave of Black humanity that Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano came to England.

It is convenient at this point to classify and describe the various conditions of Blacks to be found in England during this time. They may be divided into three main groups: (1) those brought to England by returning planters and colonial officials; (2) those brought by merchants and traders for sale or personal use; and (3) those African youths, usually sons of local chiefs and officials, studying in England, either on the initiative of their fathers or under the sponsorship of English philanthropic organizations.¹⁵

Servants accounted for the majority of the first group. Until their status became the subject of legal debate later in the century, their masters treated them as chattels, to be retained or disposed of as the masters pleased. They were not usually paid wages but were maintained in food and clothing. In the household, they performed the duties of valets, servingboys, and stable lads. In public they were paraded in colorful liveries, their necks girded by metal collars inscribed with their owners' initials. Both of these insignia identified Blacks as slaves and exemplified their masters' affluence and prestige.

It appears that younger Africans were commonly kept as pets. Some became the playmates and companions of their owners' children; others were the favorite pages of noble ladies. Almost all were saddled with pompous names of oriental and classical origin. Sultan, Socrates, Pompey, and Caesar were not uncommon appellations. The many Black pages retained at Knole by the earls and dukes of Dorset were all styled “John of Morocco.”¹⁶ Ignatius Sancho got his own name as a token of his owners' partiality for Don Quixote's famous squire.

The second group was composed of those slaves who were brought to England by merchants and captains of the Guinea trade. On the slave ships, they were manifested as common cargo. Landed in England, they were set up for sale on the steps of popular coffeehouses, in public squares, and even in the custom-house. According to one historical account, “The personal traffic in slaves resident in England had been as public and authorised in London as in any of our West Indian possessions. …”¹⁷

The third group was the smallest, but its members, by virtue of their social rank in Africa, enjoyed privileged treatment and high visibility in England. They were usually the sons of chiefs, sent to England (as well as to other parts of Europe) to be educated in Western languages, diplomacy, and commerce. Perhaps the most distinguished members of this group were Anthony William Amo and Philip Quaque, both natives of the Gold Coast.¹⁸ Together with other European-educated African scholars, they vindicated the moral and intellectual capabilities of Blacks in a century when it was convenient to deny these in the interest of economic expediency. Their academic achievements were celebrated in Europe and will be discussed later in this chapter. It will be shown that the precedence of their literacy and the excellence of their academic achievements cooperated with other factors to lend credibility to Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano and, ultimately, to facilitate the movement toward emancipation of the slaves.

It ought not be supposed, however, that the fundamental tools of literacy were reserved only for this small and exclusive group. While there was no concerted attempt to educate even lower-class Englishmen until the later part of the century, and education for slaves was stoutly resisted and prohibited by law in the colonies, it suited the peculiar needs of English employers at home to provide their Black servants with limited instruction in the rudiments of English.¹⁹ In 1734, the duke of Marlborough paid some £10 15s. for the books and tuition of two blacks in his service.²⁰ Both Colonel Bathurst, father of Samuel Johnson's associate, and Johnson himself supported the well-known manservant, Francis Barber, in acquiring a rather sound education.²¹ Although Sancho's early education was neglected through the narrow-mindedness of his first guardians—they feared that with learning he might forget his place and prove intractable—the duke of Montagu, his first patron, encouraged his avid interest in books by supplying his needs from his library. Cugoano relates that he was taught to read and write by the gentleman who rescued him from slavery in the West Indies. Equiano received regular instruction from the very beginning of his life as a slave; first he was sent to school by his mistress, Miss Guerin, and later, in his seafaring days, he was frequently provided with books and tutors. Thus, Black slaves and servants in England came to acquire skills that were essential for smooth communication with their masters and for their functional intercourse with the society at large.

The picture of Blacks in eighteenth-century England would be incomplete without some reference to those who were not restricted by bonds of servitude or protected by indulgent patrons. Some free Blacks made their living as musicians, entertainers, actors, apprentices, and sailors in the slave trade.

From all accounts, Black performing artists were extremely popular with English audiences.²² A Black woman played the part of Polly in The Beggar's Opera, according to John Jackson's History of the English Stage. Another Black is reported to have appeared on stage as early as 1770 at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin.²³

It appears that many Blacks were taught to play musical instruments out of a curious myth that they were possessed of an extraordinary racial aptitude for music. African drummers and trumpeters became popular figures in military bands and ceremonial parades, penetrating even the elite ranks of the Life Guards, the Grenadiers, and the Cold Stream Guards.

Such Blacks lived largely independent and transient lives; their greater mobility was a powerful magnet to others, who had escaped from service or servitude either in the West Indies or in England itself, and to those who were unable to find employment. For this latter element the specter of poverty and hardship was no less haunting than it was for those derelicts of white society whose abject misery and despair William Hogarth depicted in “Gin Lane” and “Calais Gate.”²⁴ Many undoubtedly took to stealing, gambling, and other illicit activities; some were recommitted to slavery in the West Indies. On the whole, their freedom was precarious, if not illusory.²⁵

The English showed warm appreciation for artistically talented Blacks by providing avenues for their gainful employment; they were not so ready, however, to encourage those who were skilled in manual crafts and mechanical trades. The traditional conservatism of the guilds institutionalized this discrimination into an almost impregnable barrier. Still, some youths managed to find apprenticeships as artisans, but it was costly to train them, and sponsors were reluctant to invest in members of a group that was growing restive for freedom and making increasing demands for social equality. The fears of the establishment were formally expressed in an ordinance, passed by the lord mayor and aldermen of the city of London in 1731, prohibiting the admission of Blacks into trade apprenticeships.²⁶

Another group of Africans, who were at least part-time residents of London, was made up of those who found employment as sailors on ships plying the slave coast. They were usually taken on by the trading companies and taught English in order to assist the English crews in the management of their human cargoes. When not on the sea, their home ports were London, Bristol, and Liverpool. But the very nature of their life made them a highly transient, though not invisible, group.

“Hundreds” of American ex-slaves were among the Loyalists who returned to England in 1783 with the British forces after the revolutionary war ended.²⁷ Fired by the prospect of freedom, they had thrown in their lot with the supporters of the king, who in turn promised to compensate them with land and provisions. Now they were suddenly transplanted to a strange country, with different laws and unfamiliar customs. Their adjustment was all the more problematic because the commission appointed to examine their claims proved generally unsympathetic. Only a small number secured compensation. A few found jobs, but the great majority were reduced to vagrancy and destitution. White poverty was already a dire social problem; now this new wave of Black immigrants, together with their previously settled brothers and sisters, aggravated the situation. At the best of times, the English attitude to the poor was one of fear and distrust: they considered them as a class of shiftless, improvident (and therefore disloyal) citizens. The presence of this alien community of Blacks was, accordingly, calculated to exacerbate these traditional tensions and sensitivities to the point of xenophobia.

For some time now in the eighteenth century, the total Black population of England had become the subject of wild and widely varying speculation, especially among individuals espousing what they claimed to be the national interest. In 1764, the Gentleman's Magazine estimated the number of Blacks living in London to be 20,000 and growing.²⁸ One year later, the Morning Chronicle raised that number to 30,000. The latter figure was patently unreliable. It was only during the celebrated Somerset trial (1772) that the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield adopted an official estimate of 15,000. Granville Sharp, that tireless champion of the Black cause, himself placed the figure at 20,000 for all England.²⁹ Even the best contemporary sources are inexact, but in view of Sharp's association with the Black community through political and humanitarian activism, his estimate seems the most acceptable.

In the face of growing hostility from their English hosts, therefore, the Black community was forced to pool its own resources and devise strategies for the group's protection and survival. Contemporary sources all concur in their testimony that the community was a tightly knit, cohesive body, supporting its members in a variety of ways. The literature of Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano often reflects those writers' sensitivity to their people's plight and shares something of the solidarity that was to become part of the ethos of Black community life in England.

Sancho's effusive sympathy for human suffering moved him to intercede with his privileged connections on behalf of the needy. In Letter 25, he appealed to Mr. B—to take a fellow Black into service.³⁰ Evidence from other letters suggests that he made similar appeals regularly, although he kept his representations on a private level.³¹ His distaste for overt political action did not, however, diminish in his eyes the several public philanthropic organizations working for the improvement of conditions among the plantation slaves and London's Black poor.

Cugoano planned to use the proceeds from the sale of his book to start a school for Blacks in London. He was deeply concerned that conditions there were fast driving his brothers into a state of mental torpor and moral decadence. He wrote: “Nothing engages my Desire so much as the Descendants of my Countrymen, so as to have them educated in the Duties and knowledge of that Religion which all good Christian people enjoy …” (Thoughts and Sentiments, introduction, xiii).³²

Of the three, Equiano was the most instrumental—because the most personally involved—in the struggle to win freedom and human dignity for the Blacks in England. Unprincipled white masters and their marauding slave hunters were in the habit of recapturing freed Blacks and placing them under constraint in England or shipping them back to slavery in the West Indies.³³ In the spring of 1774, Equiano found a job for another black, John Annis, as a cook on board the ship in which he was then sailing. Two months later, Annis was illegally apprehended by his former master. Equiano intervened personally on his behalf and himself initiated some of the legal proceedings, meanwhile drawing on the more expert assistance of Granville Sharp in an abortive attempt to secure the man's release.³⁴ “I proved the only friend he had who attempted to regain him his liberty if possible, having known the want of liberty myself,” Equiano wrote (Narrative 2: 121).³⁵ It was Equiano also who brought to Sharp's notice the shocking details of the “Zong Case,” in which 132 Africans were willfully drowned at sea in 1783. Later he was to serve on the London Committee for the Black Poor, and in 1786 he was appointed Commissary of Stores for the Sierra Leone expedition, organized to resettle destitute London Blacks. Equiano's energetic activism was a prime force in shaping the literary character of his Narrative. …

Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano were exceptional in possessing a higher level of literacy than most Blacks in their time. Their special relationships with the privileged classes and with influential humanitarians were decided personal advantages. But for the faceless masses who could claim no such connections, the evidence shows that their greatest security lay in a strong sense of racial identity and in a social cohesiveness forged by the legal uncertainty of their status in a society that was growing progressively resentful of their presence.

Proslavery interests consistently abused and vilified Blacks. They exploited the English people's ordinary distrust of strangers by denouncing the Black community as a refuge for criminal escapees from abroad. They also promoted the idea that Blacks were displacing English workers. The hard facts of poverty and distress shared by Black and white masses alike scarcely supported these fears: “Life was so hard and enjoyments so few, it could scarcely be claimed that immigrant Blacks were taking anything from the whites; there was nothing to take in the first place.”³⁶ Despite some antipathy whipped up by racist foes, Blacks in general seemed to have continued popular both with the masters they served and with the English lower classes among whom they lived. This considerable harmony that prevailed in the latter case was nowhere more evident than in specific demonstrations of solidarity and in the high incidence of interracial marriage.³⁷

Fugitive slaves and Black victims of injustice often found aid and comfort among white working-class communities. Bands of sympathetic whites regularly wrested Blacks from the hands of their captors or kept such captors at bay with threats of mass violence.³⁸ Kenneth Little suggests that without the spirit of friendship at this level and the support of the liberal classes higher up, the Black poor could hardly have survived.³⁹

Lower-class white women showed a strong partiality for Black mates. The story is told of a female haymaker who followed Frank Barber all the way from Lincolnshire to London. The romantic appeal Barber held for this and other white female admirers was not lost on his master Johnson: “Frank carried the Empire of Cupid further than most men,” Johnson told his friends.⁴⁰ Naturally, such liaisons provoked widespread anxiety and exacerbated tensions in the minds of the conservative middle class.⁴¹

The specter of miscegenation was horrifying to the orthodox English imagination. The fear that sexual commingling would be an inescapable consequence of Black immigration was the foremost ground for objection to the Black presence from the very beginning. Perhaps Elizabeth I, that supreme symbol of English purity, beauty, and virtue, ever watchful of the national interest, intended to forestall “contamination” of the pure English genetic strain by deporting the blackamoors in her 1596 decree.⁴² Thereafter critics of the Black presence followed her lead in yoking together fears of over-crowding with insinuations about the supposed deleterious effects of Black-white unions. In the eighteenth century, plantocratic interests often veiled their fear of the greater “evil” of interracial marriage beneath the more credible, if specious, objection that Blacks were displacing too many whites in domestic service. A letter in the London Chronicle clearly illustrates the typical conjunction of these two attitudes:

Was a full enquiry to be made, it would appear that their [the Blacks'] numbers now in this kingdom amount to many thousands, and as they fill the places of so many whites, we are by this means depriving so many [Englishmen] of the means of getting their bread, and thereby decreasing our native population in favour of a race whose mixture with us is disgraceful, and whose uses cannot be so various and essential as those of white people.⁴³

That most implacable detractor of the African race, Edward Long, in an alarming opinion typical of his racist reactionism, denounced miscegenation as “a venomous and dangerous ulcer that threatens to disperce [sic] its malignity far and wide until every family catches the infection from it.”⁴⁴

However, such strictures did little to discourage Black-white unions. Circumstances made them inevitable. The numerical predominance of African males over females, arising from the peculiar needs of plantation economy, ensured that the former would turn to native English women for companionship. Even individuals as proud of their racial identity as Cugoano and Equiano married English wives. The products of such unions drew responses ranging from gaping curiosity to irrational fear. The sensation created by the “Spotted Negro Boy,” “a fanciful child of nature formed in her most playful mood,” was the subject of gossip columns for many a month. The hapless child was at various times set up for public viewing and depicted in several art forms.⁴⁵

James Tobin, a planter who lived in Saint Kitts, saw the proliferation of this “dark and contaminated breed” as an “evil” requiring urgent redress.⁴⁶ And Philip Thicknesse, a former governor of the West Indies who was captious about many things in his travels, noticed on his return to England, “in almost every village, a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkeys, and infinitely more dangerous.”⁴⁷

For all the prejudice and emotion with which these observations are charged, it is significant that they had little effect in mobilizing anything like mass hostility against Blacks. Historians analyzing the general public attitude towards the immigrants are in broad agreement that virulent racism of the kind proclaimed by vested interests like Tobin and Long was not widespread.⁴⁸ The unintended effect of extremist reactions was to bind the Black community closer together. The same mixed unions that race purists were opposing became one of the specific recourses Blacks used to strengthen their foothold in Britain.

Sensitive to at least the antipathy of the English middle and upper classes, Blacks therefore formed societies to protect their interests and to promote the welfare of their fellows. The functions of these societies seem curiously to approximate those of modern social service and counseling agencies. In particular, they encouraged servants to desert their masters and contract marriage as soon as possible after their arrival in the country. The notion prevailed within the Black community that marriage conferred automatic freedom on slaves. Sir John Fielding, a noted jurist of the period, described what seemed to have been the regular pattern:

Many of these gentlemen [merchants and absentee planters] have either at a vast expense caused some of their blacks to be instructed in the necessary qualifications of a domestic servant, or have purchased them after they have been instructed; they then bring them to England as cheap servants having no right to wages; they no sooner arrive here than they put themselves on a footing with other servants, become intoxicated with liberty, grow refractory, and either by persuasion of others or from their own inclinations, begin to expect wages according to their own opinion of their merits; and as there are already a great number of black men and women who made themselves troublesome and dangerous to the families who have brought them over as to get themselves discharged, these enter into societies and make it their business to corrupt and dissatisfy the mind of every black servant that comes to England; first by getting them christened or married, which, they inform them, makes them free (tho' it has been adjudged by our most able lawyers, that neither of these circumstances alter the master's property in a slave).⁴⁹

A further index of the high level of organization within the Black community is the solidarity it showed to those of its members who from time to time were caught in the clutches of an uneven justice. During the celebrated Somerset case of 1772, a delegation of Blacks attended the courtroom daily, and when on 22 June 1772 Chief Justice Mansfield delivered his final judgment, they made visible and vocal demonstration of their approval. The report in the London Chronicle reads:

Several [Africans] were in Court to hear the event of the above cause so interesting to their tribe, and after the judgment of the court was known, bowed with profound respect to the Judges, and shaking each other by the hand, congratulated themselves upon the recovery of the rights of human nature, and their happy lot that permitted them to breathe the free air of England. No sight could be more pleasingly affecting to the mind, than the joy which shone at that instant in these poor men's countenances.⁵⁰

In a similar expression of fraternalism, London Blacks came to the aid of two men committed to Bridewell for begging in 1773. Some three hundred visited them and the whole community subscribed to their support while they remained in prison.⁵¹

There is strong evidence that members of the servant class formed the organizing nucleus for such social and political causes. Their leadership and modus operandi have already been referred to in the foregoing citation from Fielding. Philip Thicknesse was piqued by their astuteness: “London abounds with an incredible number of these black men, who have clubs to support those who are out of place,” he squirmed.⁵² That they were able to respond so successfully and function so effectively is certainly a tribute to their organizing ability and an indication that they had developed their network of clubs and societies to a high order of efficiency.

Through these agencies they developed a social life distinct from that of the dominant culture and marked by a style that has been closely identified with the universal Black experience across the ages. Numerous notices reflect the fact that they celebrated the occasions of communal life in a manner that was uniquely their own and under circumstances calculated to emphasize their cohesiveness and separate racial identity. One of their “fashionable routs,” held in 1764, was described thus: “On Wednesday last, no less than fifty-seven of them, men and women, supped, drank, and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns, and other instruments, at a public house on Fleet Street, till four in the morning. No whites were allowed to be present, for all the performers were black.”⁵³ Servants visited each other in their masters' homes, where they held parties and “assemblies.” Francis Barber was invited by the servants of the Thrale household to their annual party, and he reciprocated by having his friends over to Johnson's.⁵⁴ After the Mansfield decision, the Blacks celebrated the triumph of their cause in a Westminster tavern. Tickets for admission were five shillings each.⁵⁵ Although the commentator in the following record seems to praise with faint damns and damn with faint praise, there is no mistaking the characteristic quality of Black festive culture in his description of the christening:

1st came the reputed Father, a Guiney Black, a very clever well-drest Fellow, and another Black who was to be the Godfather. 2ndly, the Midwife or rather her deputy, a White Woman, carrying the little sooty Pagan, who was to be metamorphos'd into a Christian. 3rdly, the Mother, who was also a Black, but not of the Guiny Breed, a well shaped well dress'd woman. 4thly, the Two intended Godmothers, attended by 6 or 8 more, all Guiney Blacks, as pretty, genteel Girls, as could be girt with a girdle, and setting aside the Complexion, enough to tempt an old frozen Anchorite to have crack'd a commandment with any of them.⁵⁶

Together with weddings and funerals, such occasions helped to transmit and preserve the communal nature of their past lives in Africa.⁵⁷ No doubt these experiences laid the groundwork for that solid sense of community which saw its full maturity in the writings of Cugoano and Equiano.

So far, this discussion has illustrated how the lower orders of Blacks in eighteenth-century England used their artistic talents, the expedient of marriage, and the common bond of racial affinity to legitimize their human validity in English eyes. These were necessary survival measures in a legal environment more inclined to maintain the status quo of a thriving economic system than to extend to these uprooted strangers the basic human rights and freedoms enshrined in English law.

But there was a class of Africans whom the English (and the Europeans at large) accorded unreserved equality at the highest levels of social and intellectual life. This privileged group consisted of African protégés of European nobility, youths sponsored by philanthropic organizations, and individual sons and relations of African officials. Their credentials were those of intellect—proven or promised—and such other personal qualifications as served to extenuate the facts of their race and color. This group of Blacks is important as a contextual factor in this study because the tradition of its members' moral and intellectual qualities helped to facilitate the acceptance of Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano when they came to propose themselves as serious exemplars of Black intelligence and as credible spokesmen for the ultimate vindication of African selfhood.

A tradition of African literacy and learning was established in Europe at the height of the Spanish Renaissance. While the West might persist, through blindness and deceit, in denying to African peoples any significant achievements in science, arts, or letters, it could hardly controvert the educability of the African, exposed to the influences of its own intellectual systems. The achievement of the sixteenth-century Black, Juan Latino, is eloquent testimony to the intellectual equality of his race.⁵⁸

Juan Latino was born in Guinea in 1516. At the age of twelve, he was brought with his mother to Spain, where they both became the slaves of Dona Elvira Fernandez, daughter of the distinguished general, Gonzalo Fernandez. Latino's duties were to attend a young master, Dona Elvira's son, to school and to carry his books. In due course, his inquiring mind prompted him to read them also. Within a short time, he was admitted to the Cathedral School of Granada, where he studied alongside his master. Later, he proceeded to the University of Granada, where he excelled in Latin. It was to mark this excellence that he changed his original slave name, Juan de Sessa, to Juan Latino. He took his bachelor's degree in 1546. His career from then on was one of distinguished scholarship and teaching in Latin Grammar and Humane Letters. In 1556 he was appointed to the chair of Latin in his alma mater, with the full concurrence of the claustro (faculty). It was his good fortune and crowning honor to be invited to give the Latin address for the opening of the academic year in 1565.

Juan Latino's most celebrated work is the Austrias (1573), a Latin eulogy to Don Juan, victor of Lepanto, whom he had met and played cards with in 1569. Latino wrote another work, the Translatione, under royal commission, to mark Philip II's solemn ingathering of his ancestors' remains from their original resting places to a mausoleum in the monumental Escorial, then only recently completed. The six-hundred-line poem, finished in 1574, was dedicated to the king and extolled his virtue and filial piety.

Latino was widely acclaimed both in and after his own time. His lecture halls were filled with students from every social class. They came with fervid enthusiasm for the fruits of the New Learning that he dispensed with generosity and zeal. Cervantes himself recognized Latino's excellence by naming him alongside other illustrious figures in the invocatory verses of the Quixote. Diego Jimenez de Enciso immortalized him in The Famous Drama of Juan Latino, a play based on Latino's life. Latino's contribution to the revival of classical learning in Renaissance Spain was a labor of love for humane scholarship: Miguel Gutierrez paid tribute to that devotion by describing him as “a Negro who spoke in the ex-court of the Moors the language of Virgil with the purity of Horace, and expounded profound doctrines in the Royal and Pontifical University created by Charles V, the Emperor.”

Juan Latino lived and made his mark during the grandest epoch of Spanish history—from the accession of Charles V until after the defeat of Philip II's armada. There is some uncertainty about the exact date of Latino's death, but it is believed he lived to a ripe old age and died some time between 1594 and 1597.

Although we cannot claim that Sancho, Cugoano, or Equiano knew Latino or that his work influenced theirs, it is important to elucidate Latino's achievement so that eighteenth-century Black writers can be seen in the light of his precedence. It must be more than a coincidence that Latino's works demonstrate that pervasive conflict between Black self-awareness and Western acculturation which is to be found prominently in the three writers of this study. Herein lies a crucial affinity. In it, a kinship of common blood is bound up with a kinship of common experience, notwithstanding a distance of two hundred years that separated the Renaissance man on the one hand from the Enlightenment trio on the other. The persistence of that shared consciousness transcends time and local experiences to create an independent text or a single oeuvre. This might well be the subject of another inquiry.

Two other African scholars, more nearly coeval to the subjects of the present inquiry, continued the tradition of black learning in Europe by acquitting themselves with distinction in academic study and scholarship. The first was Anthony William Amo.⁵⁹ Like Latino, he was born on the Guinea Coast, at Axim in Ghana. He was brought to Europe in 1707, when he was four years old, and educated under the patronage of the duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. His outstanding career started at the University of Halle about 1726. In 1729 he made the public defence of his dissertation, “De Jure Maurorum in Europa.” In it he argued that, through royal patents granted by the Roman Emperor Justinian, Africans were entitled to legal exemption from enslavement by Christian Europe. From Halle, Amo went on to the University of Wittenberg where he became Master of Philosophy (Kant was yet a boy) in 1734. His dissertation on this occasion was entitled “Dissertatio Inauguralis Philosophica de humanae mentis …,”⁶⁰ an inquiry concerning the presence of sensations in the body and their absence in the mind. According to report, some of his conclusions were quite in advance of his time. He could not accept that ideas of perception existed in the mind. He found self-contradictory the proposition that the mind was both active and passive. Amo's philosophical critiques bear closely on the rationalism of Leibnitz, whom he met at the duke of Brunswick's. Also in 1734, he published another work on a related subject: the distinctions between the operations of the mind and the operations of the senses.

In 1738 Amo published his masterpiece, a work on logic, theory of knowledge, and metaphysics. One year later, he took up a teaching post at the University of Jena.

Highly respected in the German academic community, Amo was proficient in the classical languages—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—as well as in the three main European languages—Dutch, French, and German. The great measure of respect accorded his scholarship was echoed by the president of the University of Wittenberg who declared that Amo's dissertation “underwent no change, because it was well executed.”

Evidently, Amo prosecuted his intellectual convictions in the traditional spirit of academic freedom. He could hardly have felt any fear or reservations on account of those disabilities which traditionally limited the actions of his fellow Africans in diaspora. For, in defiance of an official edict made by Frederick of Prussia against the works of Christian von Wolff, he asserted his intellectual independence by lecturing on Wolff's political ideas at the University of Halle.

The chairman of the faculty commended Amo's entire achievement in this encomium: “Having examined the system of the ancients and moderns, he selected all that was best of them.” And as an example of that fine eclecticism, Amo chose this maxim of Epictetus as his motto: “He that accommodates himself to necessity is a wise man, and he has an inkling of things divine.”

Amo was equally well recognized in public life. In 1733 he was chosen to lead the procession during the visit to Halle of Frederick of Prussia. He was later to be nominated as Counselor to the Court of Berlin.

The second African scholar and writer of this period was Jacobus Eliza Capitein.⁶¹ He was born in Africa—the exact place is unknown—in 1717. At about age seven, he was sold to Arnold Steinhart, a ship's captain, who took him to Holland and gave him to a friend, Jacobus van Goch. First, Capitein applied himself to the study of painting and later to the disciplines of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Dutch at the Hague.

In 1737 he entered the Divinity School of the University of Leyden, after completing his classical training in rhetoric, logic, and catechism at the Hague Latin School. On 10 March 1742 he had the signal honor, not unlike Juan Latino at Granada, of delivering a public oration at Leyden. Ironically, it was a dissertation defending slavery. Capitein contended that there was no specific biblical injunction against slavery and that the state did not preclude Christian freedom.⁶²

Capitein was ordained to the sacred ministry on 17 May 1742 in Amsterdam. Later that same year, he was appointed to the position of preacher and school teacher at the Dutch trading post of Elmina on the Gold Coast (Ghana). There he taught mulatto children the rudiments of reading and writing. He was one of the earliest native pioneer scholars to commit African vernacular languages to writing. His vernacular translations of the Lord's Prayer, the Twelve Articles of Belief, and the Ten Commandments were published in Holland in 1744. His more extensive and better known scholarly works are De Vocatione Ethnicorum, which reached three editions, and a book of sermons in Dutch.

Probably about the same time Amo and Capitein were starting their university careers on the Continent, a free Black from the West Indies was studying Latin, literature, and mathematics at Cambridge University in England. Francis Williams was born in 1702 in Jamaica. There the duke of Montagu (later Sancho's patron) took a fancy to him and decided to have him educated.⁶³ The duke's motive was “to see whether a black boy taken and trained at an English school and then at a university, could not equal in intellectual attainments a white youth similarly educated.” Williams went down from Cambridge with his bachelor's degree and moved immediately into the fashionable circles of Georgian society. He soon tired of that leisured life, however, and returned sometime between 1738 and 1748 to his native Jamaica.⁶⁴ The duke, eager to follow through with his experiment, nominated him to sit on the Council of the island. That prospect was, however, denied him on strong objections from the conservative Governor Trelawny.⁶⁵

Unfortunately, the most extensive account of Williams's life was written by a prejudiced witness, Edward Long. Out of Long's fabric of distortion and innuendo, one may extricate a few substantive facts about Williams's personality and achievements. By the time of his return, Williams had attained a standard of education equal to that of most Cambridge graduates of his day. He opened a school in Spanish Town, where he taught reading, writing, Latin, and elements of mathematics to the children of local planters.

Williams mastered the formal features of conventional eighteenth-century verse, even if his productions are markedly imitative. He found the ode congenial to [his] abilities and wrote several occasional poems in this manner to mark successive inaugurations of the island's governors. One of the odes, “Integerrimo et Fortissimo Viro …,” was addressed to George Haldane,⁶⁶ who became governor in 1758. It is written in the balanced, stately manner of neoclassical poetry. The sentiment is high and the images are drawn from the well of Greek and Roman antiquity. Although the distinctive qualities of poise, order, and optimism associated with the spirit of neoclassical poetry predominate in Williams's verses, these beauties do not conceal the ambivalence and tension he felt about his status as an educated Black in slave society. The diffidence and self-abasement evident in the following lines are more a reflection of inner confusion than of the usual rhetorical convention of modesty:

Yet may you deign to accept this humble song,
Tho' wrapt in gloom and from a faltr'ing tongue;
Tho' dark the stream on which the tribute flows,
Not from the skin, but from the heart it rose.

(“Integerrimo et Fortissimo Viro …,” trans. Long)⁶⁷

Long considered this poem highly labored, artificial, and derivative but conceded grudgingly that it showed some imagination and skill.⁶⁸ He thought that Cambridge ought to have produced greater excellence, but the truth is that Williams was no better and no worse than scores of versifiers who were to be found pleading the virtues of their pedestrian verses around the fashionable coffee house of London. David Hume, another critic of Black intellect, refused to pay Williams even a modest compliment: “Tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.”⁶⁹

Two other commentators of more reasonable persuasion (and one, more eminently qualified than either Long or Hume) were better disposed toward the West Indian's poetry. The Reverend Robert Boucher Nicholls, dean of Middleham, gave the lie to narrow-minded colonists like Long who were in the habit of ranking Blacks physically and intellectually with apes. Nicholls objected: “I have never heard that an orang outang composed an ode. Among the defenders of slavery we do not find one half of the literary merit of Francis Williams.”⁷⁰

James Ramsay, whose observations on the African in the West Indies were the antithesis of the slavocrats' malicious calumnies, saw Williams's poems in a vastly different light:

Though his verses bear no great marks of genius, yet, there have been bred at the same university a hundred white masters of arts, and many doctors, who could not improve them and, therefore, his particular success in the field of science cannot operate against the natural abilities of those of his colour, till it be proved, that every white man bred there outstripped him. But allowance is to be made for his being a solitary assay, and the possibility of a wrong choice having been made of him.⁷¹

While Long painted Williams as a pompous, self-opinionated “white man acting under a black skin,” scornful of other Blacks and conceited in his learning, Ramsay reported that “other gentlemen of Jamaica speak highly of [his] abilities and of the favour they procured for him.”⁷²

Whatever the truth of these opinions, the importance of Francis Williams as one of the first Blacks from the West Indies to excel academically ought not to be overlooked. His attainments attested, both to the curious patrons of African intelligence and to the unremitting denigrators of the slaves, that the Black was after all an intelligent being, capable of cultivation and improvement. As we will see later, Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano each personified these assumptions, and each was conscious that to vindicate them was one of the critical imperatives of black literary expression in the eighteenth century.

A considerable portion of Black scholarship has demonstrated that it is well nigh impossible to reconstruct the truth of the Black past without resorting to a certain amount of stridency and exaggeration. This is perhaps pardonable, if not entirely desirable, because the scholar labors always against a formidable historical structure of systematic negation, vicious calumnies, grudging concessions, artful diminishing, and downright denial of everything that was reputable in the African past. He inherits a critical tradition that is by necessity and definition corrective. It is a severe duty whose object must be to retrieve and repair the image of Africa and her peoples, so that their achievements can be irremovably established among the legitimate acts of human civilization.

Were it possible to reverse history, it might be possible not to have to mention Francis Williams in the same breath as another, more gifted Black poet of the last quarter of the century, Phillis Wheatley. For when all is said and done, Williams, despite his enviable qualifications, was only a minor versifier. Miss Wheatley, on the other hand, was a prodigy for her time and social condition.⁷³

The little girl who was later to be named Phillis Wheatley landed in Boston on a slave ship, probably in July 1761. She was bought by Susannah Wheatley, wife of John Wheatley, a respectable Boston tailor. She was then little more than seven years old, frail and sparsely clad, but was destined to become the darling of the Wheatley family. Mary, one of the Wheatley girls, took her in hand and supervised her early education. Her initial mental growth was exceptional: from an untutored Senegalese girlhood, she emerged with a competence in reading, writing, grammar, history, geography, and Latin, uncommon even among white Bostonians of her age. Her favorite reading was the Bible, Virgil, Ovid, and Pope's translation of Homer. Her own essays in verse writing followed naturally from these influences and quickly superseded the original purpose for which Mrs. Wheatley had bought her; namely, to be her personal attendant. Phillis was given access to some of the best libraries and introduced into the circle of Boston literati.

In 1771, Phillis was baptized in the Old South Meeting House in Boston. In that year, too, her childhood friend and tutor, Mary Wheatley, left home to be the wife of the Reverend John Lathrop. New England winters impaired Phillis's health, and her doctor recommended a sea voyage for her convalescence.

Phillis sailed for England in May of 1773 aboard the Wheatley ship, London, accompanied by Nathaniel Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley had announced her arrival in advance in a letter she wrote to the countess of Huntingdon on 30 April 1773. The countess was a patroness of the Calvinist Evangelicals, George Whitefield's sect of Methodism.⁷⁴ Phillis's earliest biographers all state that she met the countess on this occasion, but evidence subsequently advanced shows that the countess was in Wales at the time.⁷⁵ It is not unlikely, however, that the noble lady was instrumental in getting Phillis introduced into the most fashionable circles of London society.

The notables Phillis met in England treated her with great deference and hospitality. Brook Watson, afterwards lord mayor of London, presented her with a copy of the 1770 Glasgow folio edition of Paradise Lost and a copy of Smollett's translation (1770) of the Quixote. Lord Dartmouth and other English nobility entertained her royally, and she would have been presented to King George III, had Mrs. Wheatley's illness not occasioned her hasty return to Boston.⁷⁶

Phillis Wheatley's visit to England was not only a rare personal triumph, but also a landmark in the history of Black literature. Her volume, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in London in 1773, was not only the first volume of poetry to be published by a Black American, but it was very likely the first published work of any Black writer in England.⁷⁷ Yet Phillis's fame had been made in England before 1773. She had composed an elegy on the death of George Whitefield in 1770, with a dedication to the countess of Huntingdon, and at least four poems later included in the 1773 volume had been printed previously.⁷⁸

The 1773 volume, then, established her reputation and counterposed a solid, coherent collection of literary works written by a Black poet to the strictures of biased negrophobes. Eighteen of Boston's most respected citizens vouched for the authenticity of her poems by signing a testimonial letter that was appended to the collection. Among them were Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts; the Honorable Andrew Oliver, lieutenant-governor; John Hancock, signatory of the Declaration of Independence; the Reverend Matthew Byles, Tory poet; and Phillis's master, John Wheatley.

Phillis Wheatley wrote almost exclusively in the formal manner of neoclassical poetry. Influenced primarily by Alexander Pope, her verses reflect the strictest attention to those features of felicitous diction, regular rhythmic patterns, and decorous sentiments that are characteristic of Pope and his school. Her allusions are abundant, drawn from biblical and classical lore; the feelings are controlled, and the presiding consciousness is one of moderation, remarking the general rather than the particular in the whole universe of experience:

Creation smiles in various beauty gay,
While day to night, and night succeeds to day:
That Wisdom, which attends Jehovah's ways
Shines most conspicuous in the solar rays:
Without them, destitute of heat and light,
This world would be the reign of endless night.

(“Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” 1773)

Critical opinion has been as sharply divided over Phillis's claim to poetic merit as over her identity as a Black poet. Her most generous critics were those who marveled at her high aspirations in relation to her tender years, the fact that she was a woman, and that she was an African by origin. All through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, her poetry was widely reviewed both in England and America, particularly at the height of the abolitionist movement.⁷⁹

The reviewer in the London Magazine for 1773 wrote: “These poems display no astonishing power of genius; but when we consider them as the production of a young untutored African, who wrote them after six [sic] months casual study of the English language and of writing, we cannot suppress our admiration of talents so vigorous and lively.” Sancho, whom she preceded in publication by seven years, praised the truth of nature and the genius he found in her poetry.⁸⁰ Peter Peckard did not think her a poet of the first water but still considered her poems of “great and uncommon merit.”⁸¹ Thomas Clarkson included some of her verses in his Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species and pointed to her achievement as an index of the potentiality of the African mind when given full scope for development.⁸² Joseph Snelling, reviewing her Memoir and Poems for the Christian Examiner in 1834, devoted over three pages to a fair, balanced commentary. He allowed for Phillis's limitations, while at the same time affirming her superiority over poetasters who had been acclaimed for much less. “What proportion of the rhymesters who enrich our newspapers and magazines with their effusions, can write half so well as Phillis Wheatley? She had no assistance. … Accordingly we find some ill-constructed and harsh and prosaic lines, but not so many by half as in the verses of most of her contemporary American poets,” Snelling wrote.⁸³

Critics from Thomas Jefferson to Imamu Baraka (Leroi Jones) have been severe about her faults, although with diverse motivation. Jefferson could not disavow his habitual bigotry towards Blacks to discover anything of merit in her poetry. He wrote: “Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Wheatley but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”⁸⁴ A scurrilous, satirical piece, entitled “Dreadful Riot on Negro Hill …” and written anonymously in New York in 1828, attempts to ridicule Phillis's image as a Black poet by identifying her with the dialectal speech of her illiterate brethren.

Adverse critical reaction from black critics has mainly concerned itself with the absence of any strong racial themes or any militant protest against slavery in Phillis's work. Addison Gayle claims that she could have adapted neoclassical forms “to call a new nation into being.” “Oblivious of the lot of her fellow blacks,” he continues, “she sings not of a separate nation, but of a Christian Eden.”⁸⁵ Baraka dispraises her imitation and, in an ill-considered judgment, rates her as only mediocre when placed alongside other Black practitioners of formal literature.⁸⁶

To judge Phillis Wheatley by any kind of absolute criterion, applicable either to her own time or to ours, is to disregard the ambiguities with which she, like Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano, lived and wrote. Too many modern commentators, blinded by a curious habit of reading history backwards, pass sentence on these early writers from the safety of a world vastly different from the world Blacks knew in eighteenth-century England and America. They forget that in those times Blacks exercised literacy only at the sufferance of a few benevolent whites and often under risk of prosecution. They discount the fact that even those whites who supported abolition often drew the line at universal equality. They protest the absence of vehement denunciation of social and political inequalities as though they think that Blacks then owned or controlled the organs of communication. Because they overlook these things, their impatience with what appears superficially as a weak, compliant rhetoric blinds them to the finer levels of subtlety and ambivalence that recent critics are uncovering through harder, more perceptive scrutiny.⁸⁷ This study will reveal similar subsurface meanings, particularly in Sancho's letters.

In appraising the social and political consciousness of both Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho, critics will have to turn more diligently to what might be called a quality of immanence if they are to discover the assertiveness they say they miss. Sancho was quick to recognize that Phillis's power lay in her immanent condemnation of society through emphasis on moral values; for it was through that seemingly harmless manifesto that he too expressed the tensions he felt about the status of Blacks. He must have recognized, in her emphasis on Christianity and other subjects of general morality, affinities and intentions kindred to his own emphasis on benevolence and virtue; for such appeals were the only form of remonstrance white audiences found palatable issuing from Black voices.

To complete this description of the main categories of educated Africans whose demonstrated mental abilities helped to ameliorate English attitudes to Blacks, it remains only to refer to the “student princes.”⁸⁸ These were the sons of African royalty, chiefly those living in close proximity to European trading forts, who were traditionally sent abroad to learn the “white man's book.”⁸⁹ Their parents hoped that their exposure to Western civilization would prepare them for wise and enlightened leadership as well as equip them to handle commercial transactions with Europeans more efficiently in their own interest. The Europeans, on their part, found it sound policy actively to encourage African chiefs to send their sons away in the charge of ships' captains or under sponsorship of organizations like the African Committee and the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. The young boys thus became the means by which governments and their agents cemented their relations with Africa. Sometimes the princes also became hostages and were held in Europe or at European forts in Africa, while their chieftain fathers worked out their disagreements with the foreigner. Kidnapping was not unknown, especially in cases where persuasion failed. Cases have been documented of merchants violating the trust of African chiefs by detaining their sons in England, France, and Spain or even selling the African youths into slavery.⁹⁰

Philip Quaque, son of Birempon Cudjo, a Gold Coast district chief, was one of the most widely noticed of these students.⁹¹ He arrived in England in 1754, when he was thirteen years old, along with two other African youths, Thomas Caboro and William Cudjo. The three boys were sponsored by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and entered a school in Islington, where they were instructed by a Mr. Hickman, the headmaster. Their early lessons were in preparation for Christian baptism, and, after satisfying an examining committee of their knowledge of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Catechism, they were baptized in Islington Parish Church on 17 January 1759.

Shortly thereafter, the students were put in the care of the Reverend John Moore, a member of the society and curate-lecturer of Saint Sepulchre's Church. Philip Quaque's African schoolfellows did not survive their training in England. Thomas Caboro died of consumption in 1758, and William Cudjo of a mental breakdown in 1764.

Philip Quaque probably received the kind of education typical for students of this group who studied in or near London.⁹² Religious instruction, Latin, and other classical subjects were almost certainly the main subjects in their curriculum. In March 1765 he was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Exeter in the Chapel Royal of Saint James's Palace, and in May he was elevated to the priesthood by the bishop of London.⁹³ That same month he was also married to Catherine Blunt, an Englishwoman. In May 1765, Quaque was appointed catechist, missionary, and schoolmaster to the natives of the Gold Coast.

He returned to that region in 1765 and opened a school for mulatto children. “The rougher sort” were admitted later. Both his educational and pastoral activities were beset by intractable problems. Quaque was himself an enigma to the very people he endeavored to serve: he had forgotten his native language and had to speak through an interpreter, and the fact that his wife was a white foreigner further alienated him from the Africans' support. He was ridiculed by certain governors and European officials at the fort, who refused to attend services conducted by a Black man.

Philip Quaque's importance lies more in his contribution to the idea of African educability than in any exceptional learned attainments. While he does not rank with Amo and Capitein because he was not as extensively trained, he was one of the first Africans to be ordained to the priesthood in England and, like Capitein, was a pioneer both in the missionary and educational fields. To Quaque's early work as a teacher may be traced the earliest foundations of modern Ghanian education.

The last royal visitor who will be described here was perhaps the best known and certainly the most highly born and learned of this group. Job Ben Solomon was born in 1701, the son of Solomon Diallo, the Moslem high priest of Boonda, in Gambia.⁹⁴ In February 1730, while on an errand to sell two Africans for his father, Job was captured by Mandingoes and sold to the captain of an English ship. Conscious that his new state was incongruous with his princely rank, he asked leave to send word to his father for his release. The message took some fifteen days to reach his home-town, during which time the ship sailed for Maryland where Job was handed over to Mr. Vachell Dunton, the ship's agent there.

In Maryland, Job was sold to Alexander Tolsey. He was put to work first in the tobacco fields and later to tend cattle, but his background as an assistant priest to his father and as a serious student of Islamic learning unfitted him for both of these occupations, and he soon ran away to Kent County on the Delaware. There he was seen by Thomas Bluett (who was later to become his English teacher and biographer), a clergyman with the mission of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Bluett discerned immediately that Job was no ordinary slave, and, after further signs and the interpretations of a Jolof slave, Job was returned to his master.

Two distinctive features identified Job to his white masters as a special person. He had been noticed regularly to withdraw for private prayer, and he could write Arabic. Indeed it was a letter he wrote to his father in Arabic that turned the tide of his fortunes for the better. That letter came to the attention of James Oglethorpe, then a member of Parliament and deputy governor of the Royal African Company.⁹⁵ Oglethorpe sent the letter to Oxford for translation and entered into a bond to purchase Job. In March 1733, the young African sailed for England, but owing to a delay, he missed Oglethorpe, who had by this time sailed for Georgia. Arrangements were made to have Job placed in the care of the Royal African Company.

Unlike his princely counterparts, Job did not come to England to receive formal education; instead, he became the source through which an eager audience of English hosts was enlightened concerning the highest potentialities of the African. Thomas Bluett, who had traveled on the ship with him from Maryland, introduced him into a circle of intelligent and cultivated persons at Cheshunt, where the gentry “were mightily pleased with his Company, and concerned for his misfortunes.”⁹⁶ Job's English was, understandably, halting at first, but he improved with time and practice, his conversations providing a wealth of new knowledge about the flora and fauna, the customs and the peoples, the agriculture, morality, and religion of his native Africa.

The English marveled at Job's remarkable qualities of mind and his demonstrated capability for superior reasoning. He was found to have a prodigious memory and was puzzled that forgetting seemed so common among his new acquaintances: Bluett said “he hardly forgot Anything in his life, and wondered that anybody ever should.”⁹⁷

The news of this extraordinary personage reached Sir Hans Sloane, celebrated botanist and antiquary. Sir Hans was then physician to Queen Caroline and introduced Job to George II and other members of the royal family. Job's extensive erudition in those Arabic texts that then constituted the corpus of knowledge in the Islamic world impressed Sir Hans and his circle of learned associates. He became an invaluable assistant to scholars and virtuosi interested in matters oriental and was elected to the Gentlemen's Society of Spalding on 6 June 1734. That society numbered among its members many distinguished scholars, antiquaries, scientists, and men of letters, three of the best known being Alexander Pope, Sir Isaac Newton, and Sir Hans Sloane himself.

In his house at Bloomsbury, Sloane kept a large collection of birds, stones, Egyptian and Roman antiquities, coins, medals, and some forty-two thousand books and manuscripts. Job most probably assisted Sir Hans in translating some Arabic texts and inscriptions. Sir Hans's collection later became the nucleus of the British Museum.⁹⁸

Job's profound knowledge of the Koran and his unwavering faith in the precepts of Islam recommended him to his English hosts as a remarkably devout and moral person. Bluett states in his biographical account that Job could recite the entire Koran before he was fifteen, and that, while he was in England, he made three copies of that book without any reference to a text.⁹⁹ Job engaged his hosts freely in discussions of religious doctrine and belief, although (perhaps to the dismay of his evangelical friends like Bluett) he could not bring himself to accept the idea of the Trinity.

Moving freely as he did among the great and powerful, Job did not fail to extract some tangible advantages from them on behalf of his fellow Moslems in Gambia. He secured from the Royal African Company an undertaking that they would release any Moslems sold to them in Gambia in exchange for two other non-Moslem Africans. The company duly instructed their agents on the Coast to honor the terms of that agreement.¹⁰⁰

There is a strange irony in Job's relationship with the company. Throughout the entire fourteen months he spent in England, he remained technically their legal property. For some time, his friends feared for his safety, suspicious that he might be resold into slavery after all. Yet the company, on its part, spared no effort to see that he was properly accommodated while he remained in its custody. Although his final departure was long delayed—the fitting out and provisioning of a ship for Gambia was a complicated operation—they seem to have sent him home as soon as they could. When Job finally sailed on 15 July 1734, he took with him many gifts and tokens of his English hosts' appreciation. The company gave specific instructions that he be treated with all deference and hospitality during the voyage. They were anxious that the bond of friendship they had formed with Job should enhance their commercial and trading interests in his country.

The presence of a person of such excellent moral and intellectual qualities could not but transform the climate of English opinion about Africa and her sons. Job Ben Solomon consciously disabused the English of many of their prejudices and misconceptions; unconsciously his gifts of mind and person added to the tradition of Black learning that this chapter has aimed to illuminate. His noble character and irreproachable manners helped pave the way for the more radical revaluation of African humanity that Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano were later to vindicate in literary terms. Job was a living antislavery document; he was perhaps the nearest human equivalent to the intellectualized image of the “noble Negro” that was to be used so forcefully by antislavery writers in the coming years of abolitionist agitation.

The Black presence in eighteenth-century England, then, spurred a literary reaction that was at once dual and complementary: it generated a species of writing from sources within and without itself whose impact was part favorable and part unfavorable. Each point of view attracted an audience sympathetic to its particular premises and tendencies; together both points of view set in train a philosophical debate about the Black man and slavery that was to give these two subjects a place in the broader domain of the history of ideas.

As we have seen, the English public did not accord Blacks automatic human value on their first appearance among them as a group; the Blacks themselves were forced to contrive forms and expedients that would ensure their survival as individuals and solidify them as a nation in exile. The strategies they adopted were dictated by impulses that are in fact cognate with the most primordial of human faculties—the creative instinct—and operated insensibly to prepare the English mind for a literature celebrating these uniquely human attributes in the African.

Just as the community created its own meaning in the practical terms of survival, so Sancho, Cugoano, and Equiano (as well as those talented African figures described in this chapter) transfigured those terms into a literary and intellectual expression that would present Black life wholly and truthfully. The elevation of the Black experience to the level of art lent credibility to the image of the Black as creator. It furthered the debate over the moral and intellectual equality of the African race, thereby calling more firmly into question the legality of slavery itself.

But the Black response, while it was born of impulses towards racial autonomy and of circumstances peculiar to African life in Britain, neither developed independently of, nor was likely to succeed isolated from, the broader currents that circulated in the mainstream of eighteenth-century intellectual life. …

Notes

1. The Works of Tacitus, The Oxford Translation, rev. ed., (London, 1884), 2:355.

2. J[oel] A. Rogers, Sex and Race (1944; reprint, New York: H. M. Rogers, 1967), 1:55.

3. See Kenneth Little, Negroes in Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 187; and Paul Edwards and James Walvin, “Africans in Britain, 1500-1800,” in the The African Diaspora, ed. Martin Kilson and Robert Rotberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). These sources do not consider the Roman evidence sufficient to support the African claim.

4. Scriptores Historiae Augustae, trans. David Magie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-61), 1:424-27.

5. For a full analysis and description of the evidence, see Roger Warwick, “Skeletal Remains,” in The Romano-British Cemetery at Trentholme Drive, York, ed. Leslie P. Wenham (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1968), 146-57.

6. Edward Scobie, Black Britannia (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1972), 5-11. Chapter 1 of this book gives a lively account of the social impact of Blacks in England.

7. Edwards and Walvin, “Africans in Britain,” 177.

8. Acts of the Privy Council of England, 1542-1568, n. s. 1596-97, ed. John Roche Dasent (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1902), 26:16-21.

9. James Walvin, Black and White (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 36-37.

10. Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert C. Latham, 11 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 3:95, 9:510.

11. Folarin O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 3-5.

12. James Sutherland, Background for Queen Anne, quoted in Wylie Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 3.

13. Scobie, Black Britannia, 12-13.

14. Michael Craton, James Walvin, and David Wright, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (New York: Longmans, 1976), 72. Although slavery was illegal in England, the sale of Black slaves was carried on quite openly. A street in Liverpool was nicknamed “Negro Row” to announce this commerce.

15. In this classification, I am following the categories described by J. Jean Hecht in “Continental and Colonial Servants in Eighteenth-Century England,” Smith College Studies in History 40 (1954): 1-61. This is the most extensive account of Blacks in domestic service in England during the period. See also Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), and Dorothy Marshall, “The Domestic Servants of the Eighteenth Century,” Economica 9 (April 1929): 15-40.

16. J. J. Crooks, “Negroes in England in the Eighteenth Century,” Notes and Queries 154 (1928): 173-74.

17. Craton, Walvin, Wright, Slavery, 172. See also Hecht, “Continental and Colonial Servants,” 37.

18. The records of the Royal African Company, the African Committee, and philanthropic bodies like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel provide circumstantial details about these scholars and the arrangements made for their studies in England. J. J. Crooks (“Negroes in England”) documents the expenses of two other native youths who visited England from 1753 to 1755.

19. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925; reprint, London: Kegan Paul, 1951), 219-22.

20. Philip Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 15.

21. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), 160.

22. Scobie, Black Britannia, 24-25; Walvin, Black and White, 70-72.

23. Sir Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches and Recollections of His Own Times (Glasgow and London: Cameron and Ferguson, 1876), 367.

24. In addition, Hogarth's pictures, like those of Zoffany, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Gainsborough, reflect the ever widening spheres of Black involvement in English social life. Both Scobie (Black Britannia) and Walvin (Black and White) reproduce a good selection of representative prints.

25. Carl Bernhard Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization (1794; reprint, New York: A. M. Kelley, 1986), 695. See also Walvin, Black and White, 59.

26. Walvin, Black and White, 52-53.

27. The most thorough treatment of the displaced Loyalists' problems can be found in Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), 138-39.

28. The Gentleman's Magazine 34 (October 1764): 493.

29. Walvin, Black and White, 46-47.

30. Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, introd. Paul Edwards, 5th ed. (1830; reprint, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968). This is the most authoritative edition, from which all textual references in this study will be drawn. Sancho followed an invariable practice, perhaps out of his Shandean whimsy, of identifying his correspondents only by the initial letters of their surnames; but his first editor, Mrs. Crewe, has numbered the letters, and references throughout this study will follow her ordering.

31. See also Letters 13, 14, and 58.

32. Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, introd. Paul Edwards (1787; reprint, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), hereafter cited as Thoughts.

33. Slaves, and even free Blacks, were commonly kidnapped by such agents for a price in England. The practice was a gainful one for whites who were themselves often poor and needy.

34. Equiano's efforts were unsuccessful. Such incidents tested the true import of the landmark Mansfield decision (1722) in the case of James Somerset (see chap. 5) and were to continue well into the nineteenth century.

35. Olaudah Equiano, The Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, introd. Paul Edwards, 2 vols. (1789; reprint, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), hereafter cited as Life.

36. Walvin, Black and White, 57.

37. For further discussion of mixed attitudes to Blacks, see Philip Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 35; and J. Jean Hecht, “Continental and Colonial Servants,” 43, especially for her discussion of the popularity and unpopularity of Black servants.

38. Edwards and Walvin, “Africans in Britain,” 183; Sir John Fielding, Extracts from the Penal Laws, quoted in Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 1553-1833 (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 97.

39. Little, Negroes in Britain, 219-20.

40. George Birkbeck Hill, Johnsonian Miscellany (Oxford, 1817), 1:291.

41. Notwithstanding a hostile public posture, intimate black-white liaisons existed on the upper rungs of society. Hogarth's paintings mirrored several such relationships; gossip circles rang with the scandal of the duchess of Queensberry's relationship with her Black protégé, the incomparable and dashing Soubise. For further details, see Scobie, Black Britannia, 89-95, and Walvin, Black and White, 52-55.

42. Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 93.

43. The London Chronicle 16 (29 September-20 October 1764): 317.

44. Edward Long, Candid Reflections, quoted in Walvin, Black and White, 55.

45. “Spotted Negro Boy,” Notes and Queries, n. s., 6 (1900): 55-56.

46. James Tobin, Cursory Remarks (London, 1785), 117, 188n.

47. Cedric Dover, Hell in the Sunshine (London: Secker & Warburg, 1942), 159.

48. Both Hecht (“Continental and Colonial Servants,” 46) and Curtin (Image of Africa, 35) propose that the popular English attitude was one of moderate xenophobia rather than of racism as we know it today.

49. Sir John Fielding, quoted in Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 97. Similarly, as Fielding mentions, baptism and church membership were thought to render slaves free. See also Walvin, Black and White, 64-67.

50. The London Chronicle 31 (23 June 1772): 598c.

51. Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 81, 119.

52. Philip Thicknesse, quoted in Dover, Hell in the Sunshine, 159.

53. The London Chronicle 15 (18 Feb. 1764): 166c.

54. Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings (London: Arden Press, 1912), 2:15.

55. Hecht, “Continental and Colonial Servants,” 49.

56. St. James' Evening Post, quoted in Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 81.

57. Shyllon, Black People, 81.

58. Scobie Black Britannia, 31. The most complete account of Latino's life and literary work is Valuarez Spratlin's Juan Latino, Slave and Humanist (New York: Spinner Press, 1938), on which I have drawn extensively. Short biographical notes on Latino can also be found in Jahnheinz Jahn's Neo-African Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 31-34.

59. The best account of Amo's life is given in William E. Abraham's The Mind of Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 128-30, which is my chief source here. For purposes of comparison I have used Henri Gregoire's Moral and Intellectual Faculties of Negroes (1808; reprint, College Park, Maryland: McGrath Publishing Company, 1967), 173-76, a generally valuable text, which must be used with care, because Gregoire is not always scrupulously accurate, and his text is often vitiated by errors factual and technical. Both Scobie, Black Britannia, and Curtin, Africa Remembered, make brief notice of Amo.

60. The full title of Amo's Latin treatise is “Dissertatio inauguralis philosophica de humanae mentis AΠAΘEIAsuae sensionis ac facultates sentiendi in mente humana absenta et carum in corpore nostro organico ac vivo praesentia.” There is now also a full modern English translation entitled The AΠAΘEIA of the Human Mind or the Absence of Sensation (Halle and Wittenberg: Martin Luther University, 1968).

61. Except as otherwise indicated, the substantive facts of Capitein's career have been drawn from F. L. Bartels' “Jacobus Eliza Capitein, 1717-1747,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 4, no. 1 (1959): 1-13.

62. Gregoire conjectures that Capitein may have been influenced by Dutch planters to take this proslavery position. See 204.

63. For the broad outlines of Williams's life, I have followed the memoir in Edward Long's History of Jamaica (London, 1774), 2:475-84. As Long's expressed intention was to prove the inferiority of Blacks and assert the superiority of whites, his work is naturally biased. For a fairer assessment, see Gregoire, Moral and Intellectual Faculties of Negroes, 207-12, and Scobie, Black Britannia, 27-31.

64. None of Williams's biographers is any more precise about the date of his return.

65. T.H. MacDermot, “From a Jamaican Portfolio,” Journal of Negro History 2 (1917): 147-59. This is an objective and refreshing critique of Williams.

66. MacDermot, “Jamaican Portfolio,” 153.

67. All the sources cited above on Williams reprint this ode, as well as a selection of his other works.

68. Long, History of Jamaica, 484.

69. David Hume, “Essay on National Characters,” in Essays Moral Political and Literary (1742; reprint, London: Longmans Green, 1875), 1:252n.

70. Quoted in Scobie, Black Britannia, 29.

71. James Ramsay, the author of Essay on the Treatment and Coversion of Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London, 1784), 238. Ramsay was an Anglican clergyman who lived in the West Indies for twenty years.

72. Ramsay, Treatment and Conversion of Slaves, 239.

73. Unless otherwise indicated, the biographical details on Phillis Wheatley have been taken from Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), and from William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings (Detroit: The Broadside Press, 1975), a brief but perceptive appreciation. A more comprehensive critical study is Merle A. Richmond's Bid the Vassal Soar (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974).

74. The countess was patroness of two other eighteenth-century Blacks: James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, who dedicated his autobiography, Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars …, to her; and John Morrant, an ex-slave from America, whose Narrative (1785) and Journal (1789) seemed to have been published at the countess' encouragement. See Loggins, Negro Author, 31-33.

75. See Richmond, Bid the Vassal Soar, 33.

76. William Legge (1731-1801), earl of Dartmouth, became secretary of state for North America in 1772. He was also president of the British Board of Trade and a steadfast proslavery advocate. Phillis Wheatley dedicated a poem to him.

77. Gronniosaw's Narrative is often dated 1770, but this is dubious; 1774 is thought to be a more reliable date.

78. The elegy had seen over ten editions in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, and two editions in London. At least four poems from the 1773 volume had been printed previously. An early version of the poem “On Recollection” appeared in March 1772.

79. For a useful review of critical notices about Phillis Wheatley's poetry, see Julian D. Mason, ed., The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), xxxvi-xlviii.

80. See Letter 58.

81. Quoted in Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 197.

82. Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African (Philadelphia, 1786), 110-12.

83. Quoted in Mason, Poems of Phillis Wheatley, xxxix. According to Mason, the Christian Examiner was a critical journal of high caliber, perhaps the most important in America between 1830 and 1835.

84. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 140.

85. Quoted in Robinson, Phillis Wheatley, 28.

86. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley, 28.

87. Robinson adduces evidence based on Phillis' own revisions and changes made by editors and censors to show that she was not as benign as many critics believe. He finds a fairly clear racial consciousness covertly conveyed through biblical allusions and moral themes (see Phillis Wheatley, 57-62). He finds greater self-assertivemess in her London poems, especially the poem addressed to Lord Dartmouth. Finally, he recognizes realistically that if Phillis had been any more explicit, the colonial press would have rejected her work (see 30-38).

88. I base my descriptive details for this group on Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 45-66.

89. The first group of such students were twenty Congolese princes who arrived in Portugal in 1516.

90. Cf. Shyllon. Black People, 45-46. The most famous of these cases was that of the young Prince Annamaboe. He was entrusted to a slaving captain and sent to be educated in England; but the captain sold him. The captain's treachery reached official circles, and the British government ransomed the prince.

91. Biographical details of Quaque follow those in Bartels, “Philip Quaque 1741-1816,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 1, part 5 (1955): 153-77.

92. Those youths were sent to Liverpool whose fathers desired them to acquire a practical education in trade and business matters.

93. Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 58.

94. My account of Job's life derives mainly from the biographical sketch in Curtin, Africa Remembered, 17-59. Curtin's source, the earliest and most comprehensive record of Job's enslavement and travels, is Thomas Bluett's Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa (London, 1734).

95. Oglethorpe was later to become the first governor of Georgia. He was a reformer and philanthropist and had initially refused to permit slavery in the colony.

96. Bluett, quoted in Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 90. This is the most complete modern biography of Job and a highly valuable source on other related matters.

97. Grant, Fortunate Slave, 94.

98. Grant, Fortunate Slave, 99-101.

99. Grant, Fortunate Slave, 94.

100. Grant, Fortunate Slave, 108.