Making Room for Conscience

and Simon Simon Charlie needs no introduction and so I went other lenders say that it is an enormous pleasure and a privilege to welcome back a very distinguished alumnus and an old friend thank you everybody hearing me first for in question yes because I'm quite capable of you know doing without this technology my father who in in mistaken benevolence used to train me for sort of public debates as well as are they embarrassing Shakespeare performances when I was eight years old only had one crucial piece of advice which he would project from the back of the hall usually and say louder Steinman louder which in some horrible way has applied not to my voice my clothes my general demeanor is you know it's really wonderful being here Thank You Vice Chancellor I find amazing really cool male friend Allison British as she as she was quite properly cooled Vice Chancellor will somehow become without noticing it institutions really or in my case about to be surrendered to an institution you know as I enter what gore Vidal rather accurately describes the springtime of senility example of which you may be about to witness on the subject of which actually is wonderful I helped move my daughter who's here into Christ her of course and then M Phil in which she's going to get a wonderful refreshment of education and it made me think as I went into first quarter of a moment when sort of all history was really summed up for me by conversation passing between two American ladies just coming out of the Yale doubt heraldic gateway one turn to the other and said Oh Martha don't you just adore history it's so old exactly what they meant no that's quite enough jokes for you from this afternoon now settle down to us there will be an exam as you go out actually they did tell you this didn't they actually yeah two kinds of abolition two routes through I the moment I think when I realized how extraordinary the intensity in ubiquity of the proceedings commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade was actually while standing in a pulpit something to which I'm absolutely as a kind of not very observant Jew not accustomed in full and parish church and the vicar the current incumbent Reverend Joe Hawes had done something absolutely wonderful not inviting me to stand in the pulpit but that was sort of part of the deal he discovered that the great rather still under some hero of the abolitionist movement man called Granville sharp who died in 1813 and whose history kick-starting the abolitionist movement went back a long way it went back in fact one moment I'll describe a bit later on to 1765 when he died had not been granted what was his do a proper as the Reverend horse put it church funeral instead he'd had some difference he was a cantankerous vicar but what would the world be without figures of richly creative cantankerous Ness and he'd had some sort of obscure argument over they thought he was sort of you know disguised Methodists in those days that was a shocking thing to be masquerading as somebody authored Oxley is still within the Church of England so The Vicar rather peevishly had denied him his church Phelan said there been a kind of summary funeral in the churchyard where a grand bluff sharpey's bear it and rather beautiful to you and and the vicar had not really asked anybody but all of abolitionist London and Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson and their friends had come irritating the vicar even further so the Reverend Joe halls decide you know almost 200 years later 190 something years later to sort of make amends and actually give him his church funeral and there came the Sharps with inimitably sort of rather bony heroically bony features would be the way I described him looking almost unnervingly like portraits we have of Granville totally no beautiful painting painted by Johan so fahnny the court artist who painted the Sharpe family Sharpe family as I I want to say actually were famous for floating concerts which they they all played musical instruments and they then owned barges and river boats and they would go up and down the Chan's mooring at Chizik and not full of manic Chelsea and occasionally the King in the Prince of Wales came but these concerts were very famous and indeed the one of the one of the main objections that Granville sharp had to the iniquity of slavery and to the abolition of the slave trade wasn't it was a violation of the holy ordinance of harmony harmony between men and women as well and racists as well as in other orders of the political universe - so Granville in came the rest of sharps and in came everybody from from that around London and members of that community and there and I had to do my thing in the pulpit which I did discharged as best as I was able but the moment where the centre is simply collapsed and folded into themselves was an absolutely amazing moment before early on at this moment where the English horns were played and by two soloists playing music composed by Graham Bell sharp but those were sharps own horns in fact Heath the provenance was perfect I think his nephew or niece had given them to the Horniman museum which is the Museum of classical instruments in London and have been preserved and all the documentation was absolutely impeccable and these things were really quite harsh playing at fowls and so on I mean musicians among you on better than I but the sense in which actually the home playing granville sharp sort of hero of early abolitionism could be heard through his music at that moment of reparation to the rather as I say act of peevish oblivion that have been imposed on him by a ticked-off vicar was really quite wonderful and it was one of those moments as I say when it seemed to be the immediacy of the celebration of what there was in rather genteel form of British culture that got it to sort of be ardently agitating about this what grampa sharp himself called the accursed 'add thing that was his name for the enormity of the slave trade and you probably can't possibly have missed other forms of commemoration I'll always remember the sound of African drums in the nave of Westminster Abbey and the day the Queen Kay murmurs was wonderful to creamers you may remember on this occasion rather fiercely upbraided by by a member of the sort of black community in Grand sort of tribal robes and this upbraiding which we could hear was taking place in the choir asked very much the hoi polloi sort of in in the main part of the nave and he heard it carrying on it went on the British way I mean if it had been in the United States many people would have been shot actually but they were shot and John and next to me rather wonderfully speaking of you know sort of gloriously benevolent inbreeding was a descendant of William Wilberforce Kate Dobson still lives in Yorkshire family still lives in Yorkshire and she read a piece from one of wills forces speeches which was deeply deeply moving and we were talking a little bit after the incident when the service was over and I thought she would sort of mind that you know it happened almost immediately after she finished speaking and she said oh no she said of course they are very upset about ruthless that's exactly what Wilberforce sort of said you know he would mind if at all and then there other many wonderful things Westminster Hall the grey nowhere transfers has dried I'm Richard the seconds great Curia Regis marvelous little exhibition organized my friend the Speaker of the House laws Elaine Haman which where you can see I think it's still a factual you can see Thomas Clarkson's traveling box complete with horrible manacles and sort of hideous I am where I use the class and used to take round the country ceremony marvelous day in the British Museum I read a little bit two kids sitting you know nine and ten-year-olds so told them about who plants and was and lar dick we are a lots of so just I and you know lots and lots of moments of combination more than one can imagine film Amazing Grace and so on and there is do I indulge in a piece of shameless self-promotion oh why not rough crossings becomes a play which which I which is tour in the country and opens in London next week you're not under any obligation to see it but no one will be let out of here alive before buying a ticket and in America one thing has been missing from all this extraordinary and actually Christopher Leslie brown who's written very very eloquently my colleague at the moment at Columbia who wrote a book called moral capital which is an absent Magisterial book about the movement crystal said to me the other day he said it's just he was astonished naturally at the degree and intensity and seriousness as well as the attempt to reach a broad public of this particular commemoration so I remember anything like it in British history and he's right recent pretty efficient I think is right and then of course one crucial fact gets forgotten and that is that Thomas Jefferson as president signed an act abolishing the slave trade into law three weeks before George 3rd in the very same month in March 18 hundred and seven and so one would think actually that there'd be an equivalence or something like at least of a code really of the same sort of commemorative attentiveness in the United States not a peep there is some talk of a commemorative stamp since no one except really you know wanting to send you yet more catalogs for redecorating your kitchen or you know Dunning letters for back payments on unpaid parking tickets really bothers really all that much with with snail mail anymore and since also commemorative stamps will also in the United States tend to include more pictures of native wildflowers and lichens and mosses and liverworts possibly could ever want not a good not so really a particularly striking form of commemoration if indeed it happens there is some talk in the united states of having a monuments they're sort of monument mania going on in a mall in washington at the moment two black soldiers in the history of american republic including it said but i'd be amazed at this happens the black loyalists soldiers the soldiers who fought for the king under the terms of the proper lord and mores proclamation that i'll talk about in a beard that may have may not happen charles rangel one of our local congressmen in New York actually urged and succeeded in having one hundred and first present Congress since the hundred festivities passed an act of commemoration and congratulations and remembering the abolition of the slave trade but it was the British slave trade that he got his fellow members of Congress to acclaim not noticing that actually it had happened in the United States as well why why this extraordinary discrepancy what is it what does it tell us well the first place I think actually it tells us I was talking about this a little earlier on today and there is a sense in which of course multicultural Britain for better or worse and very much from my point of view prefer better when not a craven piece of political correctness has woken up to want to have a dialogue about what Britain has been in its Imperial years and then it's post Imperials and that's all to the good but I think in the United States case and there are I'm sure lots of Americans among you here and so I'd welcome contentious interruption well because I wouldn't but I'm even all ask questions providing they're really easy but I think in the United States that's first state you can't possibly say about United States now that it's uninterested or cool towards consuming history books in its literature or indeed even on television we're about to get a multi-part epic history by Ken Burns who made the phenomenally powerful series on the Civil War this time called the war meaning the Second World War and it's entirely about American service new in the Second World War you know and the work you know I'm my memory as an historian may not be serving me too well but I seem to remember there were other soldiers involved actually on the Allied side just a few yeah but there we get the war but it's true I think actually that the more Grievous a public sense of perplexity about the present war or indeed about present history or where present history has led the Republic the more successful history books have become at presenting a moment in American history of kind of prelapsarian splendor the founding fathers a moment in American history where all the leaders seemed to be wise strong virtuous intelligent and victorious so that history hence partly it's understandable wanting to recover such a prelapsarian movement when the future of America was boundlessly possible and open any inconsistencies would somehow be find their way in something other than the slaughters that eventually came about of course in in the mid 19th century civil war so that biography is all Hamilton and Jefferson and so on huge great doorstop is very very good David McCullough John Adams and and rancheros wonderful book about Hamilton water Isaacson's on Franklin are very very popular for this reason because they seem to feature a cast over who machado had not yet grown so history is sort of treated i would say in here i may be a bit childish but it's treated i would say come in a consulate or amana the tone is one of elegiac consolation rather than inquisitively and of course actually the word historia comes from agree the beginning of Herodotus to history where historia means an inquiry essentially from a minute western history is born it poses itself as an interrogator self interrogation the question and inquiry and the great glory and strength and honor and integrity of the kind of western history that was born with facilities in particular in history of the company from wars was that it was a kind of gadfly for the complacent through sudanese is of course a protagonist in the Peloponnesian wars he's a general and it's very telling to me that that extract which is used all over the United States including my own University of though there's more read of festivities than just this is the famous funeral oration of Pericles in which the case to set out for the glory of dying for freedom of speech which the acidities himself who was very tough on Herodotus from making things up fabulously in the literal old sense of that but through Sidney who said was what Pericles might have said as he'd heard report from someone who claimed he'd been a witness and we've never been allowed to get away with that now actually and yes I actually I'm sometimes taken to task for you know excesses of imaginative reconstruction what wha then in fact I'm very careful in rough crossings and other history books to avoid this so for example if I say it was as I do at the beginning of one chapter the rain stopped just long enough for the freshly man to be properly burned I knew that it was raining every single day in Charleston because Henry Lawrence Ferg written to his son every single day and he was began with a kind of weather report so I knew that although I was taken to task by Neal Malcolm this was a chastening moment really I think that was one moment where I dared to say a very important summit conference which I'm going to talk about a little bit later between George Washington and the last commander-in-chief of British forces in America and a sort of standard imperial nitwit but tremendously good egg called Sir Guy Carleton and they're in front of a small house in in Japan where the summit conference took place and there was a duck pond we know there was that pond we know there were ducks commented on by and there engravings of darks and I you know some demon in me said in the sentence and the darks paddled around oblivious to the moments of thee and know Malcolm said how does shaman know they're oblivious alternatives though you know the Ducks pavol around possibly oblivious or possibly riveted by the mighty yeah so my way actually yes so there is there is the sense actually I think in viscid idea in sort of the sense in which really assess a sort of history is it may be excessively use as a means of consolation for the perplexed and it's it's in a peculiar way the kind of quietness of the American response to the commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade is entirely in keeping with what we know to be the case unlike the gorgeous sort of hyperbolically trumpeted the the the scenes in parliament in early 1807 are gorgeously ripe for the most fabulous or a traitor particularly from Charles James Fox and most spectacularly all from Samuel Ramallah the Solicitor General then and I want to talk about that in a minute but what's interesting in America again famous for its sort of excesses of sort of foot stamping demagoguery in Congress even then and and very sort of loud and raucous rough-and-tumble politics absolutely almost so it wasn't happening Jefferson barely if you look at the private papers of Jefferson and Madison and most of the kind of protagonists you know it passed it passed in through the House of Representatives then by fairly easily but there are not many people there to vote Matthew Mason excellent historian has pointed out that in the papers and virus and gerbils is fairly mentioned what Jefferson and pretty much everybody else in politics were more concerned with were the effect on the American economy of the Napoleonic intervention trade blockades the brick and a British response to it the British embargo and British naval activity to the ink the continuing trouble with Barbary Corsairs in North Africa and particularly to the Aaron Burr conspiracy in as it was thought to be in and II was in in the West so you have to really hunt for people's mind on this enormous Lee an important issue now there were debates and it's very telling in America in other words there was sort of but indeed sort of inclination and the inclination to not really make this front and center an issue seems to me also of a piece with why there's a reluctance to think it's an event worth celebrating in America now and that is of course while in Britain it seems to point the British Empire which had been you know in trouble after the war of the American Revolution and was still facing a very daunting enemy in the gigantic Napoleonic Empire in as it was then point Britain a new director I want to talk about very much because actually the language used by the major protagonists from Wilberforce and Fox is all about the indispensability of committing an act of virtue for the future of the English nation it's all one very often ascribed rather egregiously as England not yet Britain and in America of course actually the abolition of the slave trade is seen as a kind of blip still on the route retrospectively to the much greater tragic carnage of what would be the civil wars so it seems to me merely a kind of almost a misleading moment in a much larger subtly ology which leads towards this ferocious reckoning that will happen at Bull Run and antia turn and and Gettysburg and there it's very telling that most of the protagonists were aware in some ways of what the stakes were in in the abolition of the slave trade Jefferson beginning with the President himself the president of course famously still a slave held her unlike George Washington it freed slaves at his death or more accurately when his wife Martha finally died Jefferson still very much a slave holder and with of course as we know had for a long time as a slave mistress but Jefferson the man who had tried to insert into the Declaration of Independence because he was so aware of the inconsistency between arguing for liberty for America while at the same time being presiding over a slave owning world Jefferson had tried to insert her an absolutely unequivocal paragraph about the abolition of slavery only to have it sub stricken out of course by particular delegates to the Continental Congress coming from the lower or deep south and prepared to accept that Jefferson deeply conflicted knowing along with everybody else even people from the north like John Adam that the price of becoming America of winning the war was that north and south should stay together the war would not be won unless unless the views of the South were conceded to in terms of not interfering of what they call their property so a Faustian deal had pretty much been made at the moment of the revolution to put off this great issue not just of the institution of slavery itself but of the trade there had been there was some issue enos in South Carolina and in the deep south in any case but not particularly altruistic kind about the effects of unlimited imports the slave from Africa there was nervousness that the demography which in Virginia was you know somehow almost at one point forty percent I think with the population of Virginia and 1790s were unfree blacks population situation might get completely out of control and it because there were rebellions going very fierce rebellions going on in Suriname and in San Vincente and for a while in Jamaica that the that if there were too many imports of enslaved Africans the situation may simply sort of get out of control so some move from a kind of containment pragmatic to simply stabilize the numbers nonetheless the issue is put off it comes up again but the debates on the Constitution in 1789 where it's put off again and the reason is that delicate some South Carolina like for example like John Rutledge and many others threatened to secede they threatened exactly what would be threatened in Abraham Lincoln's day should in fact the slave trade with the possible consequence of the eventual abolition of slavery before stood on them and should their states rights to actually secure as again they put it their own property be infringed in any way so in eighteen I and again the issue has said there will be was would be put off for twenty years and those twenty years those twenty years store the poison chalice of slave America Oh Bryn an overflow more slaves were imported into the United States and it should be said into the Caribbean Empire Britain than any other point during the 18th century period before it some like fifty thousand slaves during that period those twenty years were imported into South Carolina allowed huge numbers huge numbers and of course those who were in control of the slave economy assumed simply by process of natural reproduction they wouldn't supposing it would be a ban as a result of that when they're twenty years of delay elapsed then in fact they'd have a sufficient stock of slaves as again they put it not to need any any further imports so Jefferson really quite clearly had a kind of mixed conference about that but not so mixed that he was prepared to do anything until this particular moment the Louisiana Purchase the acquisition of gigantic waves of American territory which did what I think Quinta pulled the territorial size of America or something like that again made him a pragmatist about needing at all times to keep the south with him John Randolph in the debates over the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 still continued with the same sort of language he said that he wanted it to be understood and have it in writing that Congress would disavow all constitutional rights title authority whatsoever by any legislative act to modify or effect the right of property of masters of slaves that were not imported after eighteen hundred and seven said if in fact that would not be the case he simply said let us secede and and go home there were debates in Congress when the act for the abolition slave trade over what would happen to slaves who are misled trade was made illegal then of course the American Navy could intercept illegal ships that were full of slaves as the Royal Navy was already was about to do and the issue is what would happen to the probably thousands thousands of slaves and there were about 20,000 who would indeed fall into this category what would happen to them under the authority of the American Navy and the southerner South simply wanted the brought back to the south and auctioned and the issue was because they said we can't possibly tolerate a large population of free blacks alongside our slaves here's Peter early from the state of Georgia if free blacks were allowed into the south say for example brought back to a port like Savannah Charleston we must in self-defense gentlemen he said on the floor of Congress get rid of them in some way we must either get rid of them or they us there is no alternative not one of them would be left alive in a year so you can see the sort of grim ominous prognosis that colors the debates now if we listen to so there is in some sense in which this moment the abolition of the slave trade is a moment that's pregnant with the possibility of the unmaking of the American nation in Britain it is and I don't think we should claim any you know egregious self-congratulation about us it just happened to be or maybe be show it don't know certainly tribute to Wilberforce and ko but certainly it's the case in Britain I believe that just the opposite obtained it's a weird paradox that the Americans are in this bind American northerners who like in despite in this grip of this Faustian bargain that have been made at time of the revolution as a result of their victory our defeat in America had led to an extraordinary moment of introspection about what will Britain as it now was certainly well since 1800 and one Linda Colley is very eloquent and brilliant about this what will Britain and the British Empire be and there ought to be a debate on such a thing and here for example is the voice of here's for example the voice of them of consul ray not really famous as a particularly liberal figure quite the opposite the famously reactionary bike outcasts are in the House of Lords at the time of the debate here's what he says I think this to proposition on which no human being can entertain a doubt namely that the slave trade is a great evil in itself so resort to universal principles that certainly also happened among abolitionists in America then he goes on to say it is the duty and policy of Parliament duty of Parliament to abrogate that evil and to extirpate it being a stain on the national character this is extreme arch reactionary Tory saying this here is the Solicitor General Romley I've mentioned a great and magnificently grandiloquent figure the eloquence is actually exhilarate intoxication jury laughter after all these years and Wilberforce is by no means the greatest of the auratus I think actually but not bad God it was great time when rhetoric was i gay I gave a speech to the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard who very generously asked me called the fate of eloquence in the age of Ozzy Osbourne which was the Korean vertex really I must have happened to it there was a time when all American high school students in fact ought to graduate from the University as well had to read works of rhetoric you can go to the University Library here I know and certainly Butler library at Columbia University and see shelf after shelf of the practice and art of rhetoric you know would that were the case now and the greatest most famous textbook was written by a Scottish Devine they say and professor called Hugh Blair no relation who was some who was the the book to read United States where here's Rommel a definitely a Blair right now sir after it has been proved after has been ascertained by indisputable evidence that this trade could not be carried on without the most iniquitous practice that repine robbery and murder are the foundations of it that men are falsely accused known for school accusations condemned to supply its victims that the most disgusting cruelties attended I you say this trade or not to be suffered to continue for an hour it is sustained upon again the phrase our national reputation and ought to be wiped away since the period we originally resolved to abolish this trade vis 1796 no less than 360,000 individuals have been torn from the coast of Africa to supply this trade such is the accumulation of guilt that hangs on the English nation at this moment and the sense really of needing a great national Reformation around which this campaign could build its support was extraordinarily powerful extraordinary strong and it extended really into all the sort of Citadel's of English public life into law into religion into the economy as well as into politics as I say the figure who because he is so unlikely and was certainly not an orator at all but a very brilliant and fierce and tenacious Terry alight polemicist grandeur sharp I've already mentioned here in sharps there in mind this was what was at stake Sharpe interestingly if those of you don't know about him was the son of an Archdeacon of York and of Durham of Northumberland and the grandson of the Archbishop of York but he was sort of dreamy belong to a family one brother was surgeons the King one of the surgeons to the King another brother was an ironmonger another brother was vicar still up in the north country he was a dreamy rather I'm worldly person who was mostly interested in biblical extra Jetix and then really one day he I mean the amazing sort of epiphany happened sometimes these really do happen in history his brother used to they used to have rehearsals at his brother surgery near the Tower of London and they had a free day for the poor and destitute of the city in East London and it was a big kind of cue is to get in to the surgery and one day Granville was coming out from the rehearsal and he fell over almost literally stumbled over body of a black man called Jonathan strong who had been beaten up so horribly and thrown into the street to die he was covered in blood he'd be beaten up by a sadistic master and just chucked away and had crawled as we know from Strong's own account of it which is kept in most moving letter in Grandville shops got bits of ground ball shops correspondence that are preserved in the New York Historical Society oddly enough and they take him in he takes the the black in two william and william's a doctor and they clean up his wounds and then they he goes to think of some Bart's Hospital and he stays there and after he is relatively better he bears the marks of this thrashing he'd been thrashed pistol-whipped so hard with the gun that his master's gun had broken actually on his face on his jaw and they find him a job as a messenger essentially and also as a kind of coachman to an apothecary and he goes about as his job for two or three years and one day he's actually writing I think has postilion in the coach of fetching from dispensary to from the dispensary to the apothecary and his old master sees him and he thinks he was supposed to be dead and he looks pretty damn good and finally dressed to me and he does what many slave masters in London did when they happen to see runaway slaves of slaves who disappeared from their place of lodging he hires slave catchers who were all over the street of London but the object being to catch as it were their property for resale and they have forcibly taken into the ships at Tilbury or Deptford and then take it off to the West Indies or erricka for resale and this poor man is actually taken as you know escaped property but something has happened to Jonathan strong he's learnt to read a write and he sends a message to grambler Sharpe who after not remembering much about drugs and straw comes to the prison where he's being held at a poultry counter and actually secured through habeas corpus the relief temporary release and it goes complicated story gates of trial but he wins it was from that moment that Sharpe decides that he must master the law and Sharpe then embarked and it's a long story I'm certainly not gonna tell you now but embarks on an amazing autodidact process of educating himself in English common law and on the serious of court challenges sometimes done with professional advocates and solicitors sometimes not sometimes himself with the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield which ends famously in July 1772 with Mansfield reluctant ruling in the case of one James Somerset another escaped slave who was going to be resold that there was no right of a master to coercively transport a figure that was that ruling was not to say slavery is illegal in England only that an escaped slave could not be transported back to the West Indies against their will of course it would be against their will but but she was taken by both blacks and whites alike we have a very moving account in in the newspapers of those days of the blacks crowding into King's Bench which was then in Westminster Hall and bowing to Mansfield and his two associate judges when they took it as a sign that slavery had indeed been made they misread his judgment to mean slavery was illegal in England and for Sharpe the first unit of sharps fiery indignation about the abominable nature of the atrocity of the slave trade was that it was an indecent violation of the traditions of English common law the famous phrase was the air of England is too pure to breathe too pure for slaves to breathe slavery that all human subjects of the King were entitled to the same legal dispensation and you could never in England reduce a man or woman to a thing to a commodity to a property that you entitled to come under the Kings protection and he believed and argued this with it was for him a matter the integrity of the English stroke British nation that this should be upheld and he finally believes he has his victory in the case of some say what's terribly interesting historians have discovered before the way before me and that was that the news of the Somerset decision the vindication of the common law went all the way into the world of the slaves in the southern United States because we know there are many many runaway advertisements for runaway slaves in Virginia and the Carolinas which report Pompey or Kate or Suki or Sally running away to the two British ships in the false belief that slavery is outlawed in old England so the masters themselves had caught something remember you know we're not just talking about a population of n surfed field hands in the black population many of them are River pilots Dockers stevedore sailors there are large numbers of blacks in this transatlantic world in the Royal Navy and a Merchant Marine there are many many way and many of them are self-taught not that we don't know how many but there are many ways in which indeed the world of the sails could have caught this inkling of information it was why when in the beginning of the Revolutionary War cynically and expediently the last governor of Virginia down to his last few hundred redcoats Lord Dunmore its user Proclamation offering freedom to all slaves who could escape from rebel plantations and serve under the Union Jack in some former Arthur it was why first tens then hundreds then thousands then ten years of thousands of such escaped slaves try and make their way through to British lines during the war it's the first great mass migration and rebellion if you call the voting with your feet a form of rebellion doesn't matter how brutally we betray them and we do how much distress and destitution and smallpox ridden catastrophe they are walking into from the beginning of the war to the very last months of the war but you know the numbers are in contention but they're certainly not less than 50,000 and maybe as many as seventy or eighty thousand forty thousand men are under arms in the American War approximately goes up to including Hessians and something like twenty thousand of those working as sappers and drummers but also as cavalry dragoons and sometimes infantryman are black makes you think rather differently about red coats isn't it some of them are in uniform some some are not during during the war anyway that is why there is this great response and there is a moment you know it's historians are quite rightly prone to be sardonic when the mood of self-congratulatory national state nervous comes over us especially in this country and good for us too it's sort of you know instinctively a repugnant to the skeptical mentality which is the oxygen of historical profession the certainly ought to be but there is one moment which we can forever really feel good about and at the moment at the end of the war 1783 and washington is arranging it was that duck paddled summit conference i was talking about in old Japan where Washington and guy Carlton means and they were meeting in order to discuss as Washington thought the implications of article 7 of the provisional peace Treaty of Paris which have been negotiated there by Franklin and others which said there shall be no carrot it was a last-minute addition to the treaty actually it said there should be no carrying off of property or Negroes unquote so the notion was that to start with the 3,000 freed slaves who living under British protection in New York for the first time legally married their babies legally baptized many of them carrying little certificates which initial BB born free of I'm British lines would would remain free and Washington's idea because he was being shouted at by his fellow slave owners in Virginia was that they are all going to be returned at the end of the war to their masters there was a vent Mary moving quotation which it's too late by Boston King who is one of those slaves and who became the Methodist minister and and Boston King describes how seeing slave catchers in the street of New York was absolute terrifying thing and those spectacles of slaves being seized from their beds houses broken into dragged off to the ships and Boston King expresses himself possibly overly grateful to the British for issuing passports because what some say guy Canton says to George Washington when Washington raises this issue it says my dear general I must be misunderstanding here beyond sure they're not suggesting he had his way of patronizing George Washington which was absolutely drove Washington mad sound sure you can't possibly be suggesting that His Majesty's Government should actually violate a solemn undertaking to people he said of all color who'd served under his Majesty's flag now that and really had not been said before in official or unofficial hearing at all and watch what was Washington to do they've still 18,000 troops and a lot of ships of Staten Island you could start the war but every the colonial the Continental Army had been disbanded he wasn't in a position really to restart the war so brining his teeth and with a guilty conscience as we know about slaves himself or a conflicted conscience he accepts this as a fait accompli and the slaves go to yet more freed slaves to more difficulties which I write about in my book to Nova Scotia so all this began really as an act of the recovery of the dignity of the common law underground off sharps auspices then religion is very very important obviously to Wilberforce to Thomas Clarkson to four sharp and most of the people actually who are involved on some of them are famously dissenters Wesley example publishes a ferocious attack on slavery itself in 1774 I want to quote Wesley a little just in a minute or two it's no weight now but by and large most in Clarkson was supposed to have been ordained as an Anglican cleric most Tamar within the Church of England the one exception are the Quakers the Quakers will forever earn the proper recognition of history as from the 17th century onwards being medially out there really in in attacking it didn't prevent some Quakers actually from owning slaves but they're very prominent on both sides of the Atlantic in the early abolitionist movement essentially what a frontier both Quakers and Granville sharp was the notion that there should be any distinction of color whatsoever in the access of all sinners to God's grace we're all sinful we all deserve the same act of intercession Airy compassion embodied and the sacrifice of the Savior the meaning of the passion was getting since day after Yom Kippur so forgive me for getting the slightly laps of Jews version of this as I understand it you Christians out there the meaning meanie will your own particular peculiar form of sacrificial ritual was that God the Father will you know delivered his son to crucifixion as an act of compassion as an act to salvation so that the sins of mankind could be redeemed it's a very moving thing so for that the notion that you've sort of made distinctions about you know which color you had to be in order to qualify for great saving grace for Amazing Grace was deeply offensive to to seriously believe in Christians now in this country now we are incredibly we historians goodness doesn't find flight when you're having fun I'm having fun your people made up it you know we're the most secular country in Europe were constantly nearing and the Americans wrongly I think for them all being not merely massive but fanatically deluded ranting and raving about God but were sort of were sort of and you know in the 60s no one did religious history at Christ Cambridge unless they were doing the Reformation then they weren't to do with Geoffrey altima Claire and although unless they were working they did it a bit when if you're talking about Cromwell in the Civil War but it was always thought under the influence of Christopher Hill then the religious hysteria in the Civil War was some sort of eppy phenomenon some disguise for class interests or something complicated shift in the nature of balance between social groups or just about political power but it you know it was intensive about religion of course I remember there was a good friend of very distinguished historian quit Edward Royal who worked on Methodism was himself I think of Methodists and God we gave him a terribly hard time for sort of such peculiar so he was you know doing sort of Studies in higher Hinduism or something we thought had nothing to do with what really should be like how stupid and blighted and obtuse we were really especially if we had to really recover the history of the laity you

Channel: Cambridge University

Views: 19,354

Keywords: Cambridge University, Conscience, Alumni Weekend, 2007, Slave Trade, Abolition, Professor Simon Schama, Fellow, A History of Britain, The Power of Art, Rough Crossings, War of Independence, Honours List, CBE

Id: cRqMpZOGLwI

Length: 48min 49sec (2929 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2009