‘Bury the Chains: The British struggle to abolish slavery’, by Adam Hochschild

Helen Porter reviews 'Bury the Chains: The British struggle to abolish slavery', by Adam Hochschild

In 2014 I read Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars, his brilliantly-written ‘story of protest and patriotism in the first world war’, which served as a useful corrective to the centenary commemorations. Bury the Chains is not a new book but it is tragic, compelling and as empowering as the later one. It is of interest to Quakers today for two reasons.

Firstly, the author is clear about the role that Friends played in the campaign. It begins with the twelve men who met at the London printing shop of Quaker James Phillips in 1787, which set the campaign in train. Among the others we meet are the Quaker convert Elizabeth Heyrick ‘whose passionate stand against all compromise helped re-ignite a movement in the doldrums’. We arrive in 1838, when all slaves throughout the British empire were finally declared free, to see the Quaker William Allen, ‘who had sworn off eating sugar as an eighteen-year-old in 1789’, finally able to put a spoonful of sugar in his tea.

One of the more unexpected sympathisers with the cause was the pious young tsar Alexander of Russia (with something of a blind spot about Russian serfdom). Visiting England to discuss the peace treaty after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte he was ‘intensely interested in Quakerism. He found time to visit a Quaker family and attend a Quaker Meeting’. He also granted an audience to William Allen ‘who, true to Quaker custom, did not remove his hat before a mere earthly monarch’.

Working with the other key players in the movement, Quakers provided the network and strategies for what was the first campaign to mobilise mass public support. In the run-up to the 1792 debate on abolition, 519 petitions came into parliament within a few weeks, from all over England, Scotland and Wales, totalling at least 390,000 names. Petitions were traditionally read out before debates. One from Edinburgh, when unrolled, extended along the whole length of the House of Commons floor.

The second reason why this story is relevant today is that the campaign was tackling an evil that was completely integrated into society. The men who sat down in the printing shop were setting themselves to turn the world upside down. And the response they generated surprised even themselves. The West Indian planters were taken aback that the petitions were ‘stating no grievance or injury of any sort affecting the petitioners themselves’. Some groups petitioned against their own interests, as with the knife-makers of Sheffield who had profited from the sale of their goods for use in the trade.

The campaign was founded on the belief that ‘because humans had a capacity to care about the sufferings of others, exposing the truth would move people to action’. Hochschild is clear-eyed about the persistence of slavery, but the profound change that took place in Britain and its empire, brought about by persistent truth-telling and the mobilisation of compassion, perhaps ought to undercut our discouragement and timidity in tackling the apparently entrenched evils of our own day.

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