Terror versus Horror

The Atlantic slave trade was an especially violent trade, of course. Both the people who profited from it, such as African and European merchants, slaver captains and planters in the Americas, and the people caught up in the work, especially Africans from the regions of West Africa from Senegambia in the north to Angola in the south and also European sailors, understood that the trade was sustained through violence.

features of a developing merchant capitalism and showed a seeming capa­city for inhumanity among Europeans that observers thought out of step with rising Enlightenment ideas of sentimental attachment to others. In general, most abolitionists viewed the slave trade through the lenses of ‘horror', an emotion that is the feeling of revulsion after an act is experi­enced. Abolitionist writers on the slave trade were skilled at evoking this emotion, doing so through voyeuristic depictions of the violence that accompanied the slave trade. Thus, a contemporary review of James Field Stanfield's lengthy poem about the slave trade as seen through the eyes of an ordinary sailor, The Guinea Voyage, A Poem in Three Books (London, 1788), commented that Stanfield was excellent at evoking ‘horrid scenes' and that he ‘dwells on every minute circumstance in this tale of cruelty, and obliges us to witness every pang of complicated misery!'^[27] It was this evocation of horror that was largely responsible for the dramatic shift in opinion among educated Britons about slavery. Slavery moved from being seen as a necessary evil to being a sin that had to be eradicated in order to preserve European honour.

The argument of this chapter, however, is that ‘horror' was not the only emotion evoked by the Atlantic slave trade. A more significant emotion at work in all areas of the trade was ‘terror', an emotion that can be distin­guished from horror in being before rather than after the act, as a feeling of dread and anticipation that precedes a horrifying experience. ‘Terror' is a stronger and more protean emotion than ‘horror' and has a somewhat different relationship with violence, insofar as the careful evocation of ‘terror' by people in authority over those people to whom horrible things were likely to happen was an important tool of control. There is no necessary contra­diction between the slave trade being a principal site for terror in the eight­eenth century and the trade being one that was increasingly efficient and profitable. The slave trade undoubtedly was a scene of horrors but it was maintained through terror - the careful application of violence and the use of apprehension over future applications of violence were central to every part of the experience.

Most European observers, like Turner in his great painting, concentrated only on describing or depicting the ‘horror' of the slave trade, with a strong emphasis on only one part of it - the middle passage, in which naked Africans were carried in conditions of unspeakable disgustingness from West Africa to ports in the Americas in voyages lasting up to six weeks. But it was ‘terror' (the apprehension entertained by those caught in the slave trade's grip that any mistake they made would lead to dreadful violence being enacted against them) that sustained the Atlantic slave trade. It was the pervasiveness of violence within the system which allowed African rulers to terrorise their country people so as to provide the captives that Europeans were prepared to take off their hands for money or goods.

Moreover, it was terror that made possible the transformation of African captives into wretched commodities who could be made into slaves able to be put to work producing tropical goods for sale to Europe. As a Liverpool writer well after the slave trade ended argued, ‘the captain bullies the men, the men torture the slaves, the slaves' hearts are breaking with despair'.^[28] Violence was thus not incidental to the slave trade but integral to it. It was the oil that made ‘the dark mazes of th' inhuman Trade' work. Stanfeld called the slave trade ‘a vast machine'. As Marcus Rediker comments, in this ‘machine' ‘almost everyone was a captive in one way or another and subject to an institutionalised system of terror and death'.^[29]