Amazing Grace by Eric Metaxas

Author:Eric Metaxas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

In his speech, Wilberforce did not humiliate the wicked men who had given these descriptions as he might have, and if ever anyone had been given the gifts with which to verbally smash his opponents like eggs, Wilberforce had. Instead, he coolly countered each of these false accounts with facts and facts and more facts. Not much more than facts was needed.

John Newton, the “old African blasphemer,” testified too. His testimony before the Privy Council had been especially damning of the trade. Newton had great moral stature and was of course personally familiar with the trade in every detail. He explained, for instance, that many of the slaves were half-mad already when they came aboard the slave ships, having been brutalized for weeks and months or years by African slave traders. Most of them had never seen an ocean or white men, and they often earnestly believed that these white men—whether humans or demons, they knew not—were intent on eating them. Equiano too, in his account of being transferred from his brutal African captors to his brutal English captors, echoed this fear and these sentiments. For all who endured these horrors it must indeed have seemed as though they had fallen through the rotten floor of this world, and into hell itself.

The slave trade interests put forward astonishing misinformation regarding the world from which these lucky slaves had been saved, painting the slavers as saviors of these wretches rather than as their oppressors. One pamphlet, titled “Slavery No Oppression,” was typical of its kind:

It is well known that the eastern and western coasts of Africa are inhabited by stupid and unenlightened hordes; immersed in the most gross and impenetrable gloom of barbarism, dark in mind as in body, prodigiously populous, impatient of all control, unteachably lazy, ferocious as their own congenial tigers, nor in any respect superior to these rapacious beasts in intellectual advancement but distinguished only by a rude and imperfect organ of speech, which is abusively employed in the utterance of dissonant and inarticulate jargon. Such a people must be often involved in predatory battles, to obtain a cruel and precarious subsistence by the robbery and destruction of one another. The traffic has proved a fortunate event for their miserable captives.

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