Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade 1787-1807 by J R Oldfield

Author:J R Oldfield [Oldfield, J R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781136295911
Google: XmThCodnc9IC
Goodreads: 17537558
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Committees and Petitions

IN recent years historians of British anti-slavery have become increasingly preoccupied with the provinces and the dynamics of popular abolitionism. And yet we still know very little about organised activity at the local level. In particular, little attention has been paid to the committee system, at least outside Manchester. How did it operate? How active were local committees, what exactly did they do, and what was the nature of their relationship with the London Committee? Secondly, we have only incomplete accounts of the petitioning process, that is, the way in which petitions were organised, and, as yet, no attempt has been made to study the language of petitions. Perhaps this neglect has something to do with the size of the task and the intractability of the sources. Nevertheless, with patience it is possible to recapture something of the intensity of the movement at the local level, its structure and its organisation.

At the heart of organised anti-slavery was the committee system. The earliest committees were set up to orchestrate the petition campaign of 1788. Typically, these committees assumed the task of collecting subscriptions and managing the petitions, which usually meant seeing to it that they were made available for signing and, ultimately, that they reached local MPs in time to be presented to the House of Commons. Frequently, as in the case of Sheffield and Manchester, the committees also had responsibility for drawing up the form of the petitions themselves. Some committees, as a result, were quite substantial affairs, dominated by activists like Thomas Walker and Thomas Cooper; the committees at Manchester, Bristol, Norwich, Birmingham, Nottingham, and Sheffield obviously fell into this category.1 In other instances, the committees appear to have consisted of all the subscribers, any five of whom had power to ‘dispose of the Money subscribed, for the Purpose intended; and to manage the Business’.2 It was not unusual, therefore, for some local committees to survive only a matter of months, that is, as long as it took to get the petitions to London.

Later, when it became obvious that abolitionists were in for a long and hard struggle, the London Committee turned its thoughts to organising local committees on a more permanent basis, the obvious model being Manchester.3 It was with this in mind that Thomas Clarkson was requested to undertake a tour of the south coast of England in the summer of 1788. Clarkson began his journey in Kent in July. After less than a month, however, he was back in London. The Committee minutes provide few details, but they make it clear that the reason was ‘the difficulties which have occurred to [Mr Clarkson] during his late Journey of exciting a sufficient degree of public attention to form Committees’. This setback prompted the Committee to adopt a different plan—‘by writing letters to those places where there [was] any probability of Country Committees being useful either to gain information or to add to the Funds of the Society’.4 Clarkson, however, had greater success when he

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