A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of YorkshireWilberforce, William
History
A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of Yorkshire
Wilberforce, William
Antislavery movements -- Great Britain; Slave trade -- Great Britain
Such was Smith’s relation, near a century ago, of the judgment formed by
the Africans, of the effects of their intercourse with the Christian
nations. Such is the acknowledgment of Mr. Parke, who is certainly
disposed to paint the effects of the Slave Trade in the softest colours.
Is it possible for any one who calls himself a Christian, and a member
of the British Empire, to read the passage without the deepest
humiliation and sorrow, and without longing also, not only to stop the
guilty commerce we have so long carried on, but to endeavour to repair,
in some degree, the wrongs of Africa, and with active but tardy
kindness, to impart to her some small share of the overflowings of our
superabundant blessings?
“But surely,” you will long ere now have been ready to exclaim, “Surely
the facts which you have laid before us, though believed by the
abolitionists, could not have been established in the judgment of the
majority of the House of Commons;”—and you may justly require some
decisive evidence in proof of them.
[Sidenote: Evidence by which the above statements are established.]
To adduce all the specific testimony by which the above allegations were
established, would be to fill a volume. I mean, as a specimen of the
whole, to extract, and subjoin in an appendix, a few passages from the
vast body of evidence with which we are furnished on this subject. But
it would be injustice to the great cause I am pleading, not to declare,
that the above statements were established beyond all possible dispute;
and also, that, with occasional variations, resulting from the
difference in the forms of government, and in other circumstances, they
were found to be applicable not to particular parts only of Africa, but
to the whole of that vast district which is visited by the European
Slave ships; to be, not the exception, but the rule; not the occasional,
but the general and systematic effects of the Slave Trade ships. We have
the evidence of several most respectable Officers of the navy, to prove,
that wherever they touched, acts of depredation were common. The same
practices were found to prevail in the widely distant countries of
Senegambia and the Gold coast, by men of Science, one of whom produced a
journal, kept at the time, in which he daily entered all that appeared
to him worthy of remark; and it was from this record that the Committee
read the affecting account which has been mentioned, in which one of the
African Kings, with every appearance of sincerity, repeatedly expressed
his deep remorse for having been instigated, in a season of
intoxication, into which he had been drawn by the Slave merchants, to
oppress and pillage his subjects. Much of the Abolitionists’ information
was also obtained from those who, in different capacities, chiefly as
surgeons, more commonly as mates, and in some few instances as common
sailors, had been actually employed in Slave ships; some of these
persons had likewise been for many months on shore among the natives;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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