Slave Wales by Chris Evans

Author:Chris Evans [Evans, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), United States, 19th Century, Social Science, Slavery
ISBN: 9780708323045
Google: _UquBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2010-09-15T00:36:59+00:00

The new science of political economy, with its predilection for free labour, was not the only intellectual current in the second half of the eighteenth century that cast slavery in an ever more unappealing light. Enlightenment thinkers were apt to think of liberty as a ‘natural right’ and to hark back to the primitive freedom that, they supposed, humankind had enjoyed in the ancient forests. To live in society with others inevitably required the surrender of absolute freedom – mutual security demanded that violent and antisocial activities be outlawed – but the right to liberty was inalienable. Any surrender of freedom should only ever be partial and conditional. As Atlantic slavery was the most thorough violation of liberty conceivable, Enlightenment thinkers were inevitably hostile. The entry on ‘The Slave Trade’ in the Encyclopédie (1751–72) of Diderot and D’Alembert shook with indignation: purchasing ‘Negroes to reduce them into slavery’ was an affront to ‘all religion, morals, natural law, and human rights’. Could it be ‘legitimate to strip the human species of its most sacred rights, only to satisfy one’s own greed, vanity, or particular passions? No … European colonies should be destroyed rather than create such misfortune!’ The sentiment was echoed in Britain, including Wales. As volume after volume of the Encyclopédie appeared in Paris a somewhat less feted publication emerged from Carmarthen.

It is not too fanciful to see the Pantheologia (1762–79) of William Williams as a distant cousin to the Encyclopédie, albeit one driven by Methodism rather than the anti-clerical animus of Diderot and D’Alembert. Pantheologia was ostensibly a history of world religions, but its seven parts also describe the geography, environment and history of the different continents at encyclopaedic length. The author, William Williams (1717–91) of Pantycelyn, Carmarthenshire, was a leading figure in Welsh Methodism and a prolific poet, natural historian and writer of hymns and devotional literature. He also stood forth as an opponent of the slave trade. The section of Pantheologia devoted to Guinea condemned it as ‘a traffick as can never be justified or defended’.14 Enslavement was in itself reprehensible, but New World slavery was doubly deplorable because of the failure of planters to spread the gospel among their bondsmen:

agreeing among themselves not to make Christians of them, lest [the slaves] should understand that the Christian religion commands everyone to do as they would have others do unto them, and that as a result they should expect to be treated as humans, who have the same God and for whom the same Christ died.15

To demonstrate that Africans could be evangelised successfully, William Williams also published a Welsh translation (1779) of the earliest first-hand account of the Middle Passage to be written by one of its survivors. A narrative of the most remarkable particulars in the life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African prince, as related by himself, first published in English in 1772, described not only Gronniosaw’s descent into slavery but his subsequent conversion to the Christian faith.

William Williams of Pantycelyn was in many ways

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