Revulsion and the Role of Violence in Abolitionist Discourse

Why did the slave trade move from being a bulwark of British trade and an essential part of the functioning of Britain's most economically important and dynamic colonies, as well as the location of a ‘great brood of seamen' who were the source of ‘a formidable nursery of Naval Power', to being the symbol of Britain's sinfulness?^{^[49]} One striking theme in abolitionist campaigns was that anti-slavery rhetoric served to show the superiority of Britain over other European nations.

It was argued that the country that best represented a commitment to liberty - and what stronger commitment could there be than voluntarily giving up a lucrative economic enterprise solely because it was morally wrong? - would gain a particular advantage in a world of growing western European domination. It is significant that the sudden and unprecedented explosion of anti-slavery sentiment in 1787-8 happened when British confidence in its future economic prosperity, global presence and moral righteousness was at an unparalleled high. For the most visionary of abolitionists, anti-slavery could be married with an assertive imperialism in order to create utopian schemes of colonisation in which slavery was not present.^{^[50]} It has also been connected to a sentimentalist discourse where abolitionists made strategic use of the rhetoric of sensibility in the hope of influencing a reading public thoroughly immersed in the mid-eighteenthcentury ‘cult of feeling'.^{^[51]}

Yet it is noticeable that one constant theme in the rhetoric used by abolitionists to convince the public that the slave trade was fundamentally evil was an emphasis upon scenes of violence carried out against sailors and captives. This rhetoric resonated with the public, who were outraged by the tales of brutality and cruelty that they read about in best-selling abolitionist texts.

Thomas Clarkson, an important early British abolitionist, set the tone at the start of the abolitionist campaign. He deliberately focused on violence on slave ships because he knew that the way to get the public to sympathetically identify with Africans was to see them as helpless victims of barbaric cruelty. He concentrated, moreover, on targeting ships' captains rather than sailors as the particular brutes whose cruelty was destroying the good reputation of Britain. These particular tropes - the slave as victim and the captain as monster - proved long-lasting and highly effective in mobilising public opinion, as was seen in a high-profile case in 1792, when Captain John Kimber was put on trial (and acquitted) for the murder of two girls on a slave ship.^{^[52]} Clarkson fashioned this narrative through collecting sailors' testimonies that piled together story after story of depredations at sea. Unsurprisingly, such stories focused as much on the plight of sailors as upon the ordeal of African captives. Clarkson showed the slave ship as a place of radical disorder, an essentially lawless place that was presided over by cruel tyrants. His presentation of evidence was carefully selected, less a collection of first-person accounts and more a co-authored document with witnesses, in which he conducted a distinctive narrative about the sinfulness of the Atlantic trade.

All of which leads us back to the Zong and Turner's painting. It was the calculated and calculating violence of the Zong case that made it so shocking. It was an event, moreover, that combined both cold-blooded terror (the crew debating the merits of mass murder before proceeding to enact it) and hot- blooded horror (the imagined screams of victims entering a watery grave). Turner captured the horror, if less the terror, in his painting. The Zong was such a powerful indictment of the slave trade because it was very easy to imagine the horror of the scene of shackled captives drowning and being devoured, as Turner evoked so powerfully.

Just as importantly, the case of the Zong served as a supreme example of the callous financial calculations upon which the slave trade was based and the reality of the omnipresence of death occasioned by violence in every aspect of the trade. Moreover, it tugged at the sentiment of nationalism. It raised the question of what it meant to be British in a world of amoral commercial and imperial competition. It galvanised young men like Thomas Clarkson (in 1783 a student at Cambridge, as yet unaware of the evils of the slave trade) to take up their pens and start, almost from scratch, one of the greatest reform movements in British history. In 1788, by now a dedicated abolitionist, Clarkson wrote of the Zong that it is an event ‘unparalleled in the memory of man... and of so black and complicated a nature... it could not possibly be believed'.^{^[53]} Abolitionists were drawn to the movement because they were upset about how violent it was. In devising ways to end the slave trade, in the process they made important contributions to an Enlightenment and modern discourse on how violence against innocent people - first slaves, then children, women and even animals - was both a sin and also a condemnation of ideas that humanity was improving.^{^[54]}

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Source: Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p.. 2020

Revulsion and the Role of Violence in Abolitionist Discourse

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