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ABSTRACT
The early British campaign to abolish the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade received support from a number of constituencies including Afro-British abolitionists, Quakers in London, and working people in cities such as Manchester. Overlooked in the scholarship on early British antislavery is the significant support it received from a group of academics and students at the University of Cambridge. This article examines the rise and evolution of antislavery activism at Cambridge during the 1780s and considers its impact on the broader movement. It argues that antislavery at Cambridge was led and spurred by a college master who made arguments for racial equality that were fundamentally shaped by black abolitionist writers. This context of antislavery at Cambridge gave rise to Thomas Clarkson and continued after his time there. Ultimately the article distinguishes antislavery radicalism from university practice to show that Cambridge as an institution did not adopt the ideals abolitionists espoused. Abolitionist activism at Cambridge was a dissenting movement whose ideals were not then and have yet to be fully realized at universities and in society.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Manisha Sinha for her comments on this essay and for her unwavering support of my work. I would also like to thank Craig Steven Wilder and the audience at the Organization of American Historians in Philadelphia for their questions and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Michael E. Jirik, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He also holds a teaching appointment in the Departments of Black Studies and History at Amherst College. Address: History Department, Herter Hall, UMass Amherst, 161 President’s Drive, Amherst, MA 01003 USA. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 Peter Peckard, Piety, Benevolence, and Loyalty Recommended. A sermon preached before the University of Cambridge, January 30, 1784 (Cambridge: J Archdeacon, 1784), 4–6.
2 Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species particularly the African (2nd ed., London: J. Phillips, 1788), 2, 165; idem, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London: R. Taylor, 1808), I, 203–07, 260. Note the illustration on p. 260 of Clarkson’s history of abolition where he places Peckard at the head of the antislavery coadjutor branch.
3 On Clarkson’s role in abolition, see Ellen Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (London: MacMillan, 1989); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 98–104; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3–9, chpt. 6; Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), chpt. 4; Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1975), chpt. 11; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), chapter 9 and passim.
4 Peckard’s influence on abolition at Cambridge and the broader movement, as well as on higher education, has been greatly underappreciated. If historians mention Peckard at all, his assumed role in abolition is typically regulated to a line identifying his role in setting the senior thesis question at Cambridge which Clarkson took up. See Brown, Moral Capital, 195, 435; John R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 70–1; Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 247; More recent studies of abolition omit Peckard’s role completely. See Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 211; David B. Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 160.
5 Historians John Walsh and Ronald Hyam are the only scholars who have done work on Peckard’s life. John Walsh and Ronald Hyam, ‘Peter Peckard: Liberal Churchman and Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner’, Magdalene College Occasional Papers no. 16 (Cambridge: Magdalene College Publishing, 1998); John Walsh, ‘Peter Peckard’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 5. Also see Peter Cunich, et al., A History of Magdalene College Cambridge, 1428–1988 (Cambridge: Magdalene College Publishing, 1994), 185–93.
6 Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 1–4, 98–101; Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, 41–9, 130–31; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 67, 84, chapter 4.
7 Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), passim, 26–9, 120, 128; Stephen Mullen and Simon Newman, ‘Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow: Report and Recommendations of the University of Glasgow History of Slavery Steering Committee’, (September 2018); Terry L. Meyers, ‘Thinking about Slavery at the College of William and Mary’, William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 21, no. 4 (2013): 1215–57; Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred Brophy, eds., Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2019); Alfred L. Brophy, University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jennifer Oast, Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), chapter six; Marisa J. Fuentes and Deborah Gray White, eds., Scarlett and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016); also see essays by Alfred L. Brophy, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Kelley Fanto Deetz, Jody L. Allen, and Michael Sugure in Forum on Slavery and Universities, special issue, Slavery and Abolition 39, no. 2 (2018).
8 Adeel Hassan, ‘Georgetown Students Agree to Create Reparations Fund’, New York Times, April 12, 2019; Alison Campsie, ‘Glasgow University to Pay £20m in Slave Trade Reparations’, The Scotsman, August 1, 2019; Rachel L. Swarns, ‘The Seminary Flourished on Slave Labor. Now it’s Planning to Pay Reparations’, New York Times, September 12, 2019; Ed Shanahan, ‘$27 Million for Reparations Over Slave Ties Pledged by Seminary’, New York Times, October 23, 2019; also see the Georgetown administration’s response to the student resolution as well as the student response to them, Rachel L. Swarns, ‘Is Georgetown’s $400,000-a-Year Plan to Aid Slave Descendants Enough?’, New York Times, October 30, 2019; Students for GU272, ‘Response to Degioia’s Statement’.
9 For a full history of student abolitionism, see the author’s Ph.D. dissertation.
10 Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 3 1750–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 153–58, 1–4; John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 10–11, 21; Peter Linehan, ed., St. John’s College Cambridge, A History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 120, 201, 244–45; Cunich, et al., A History of Magdalene College Cambridge, 144–45.
11 Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 21–23.
12 Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 189, 194–95; Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, 277–79.
13 Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 10–33.
14 Ibid., 126–27; James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law, and the End of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
15 Brown, Moral Capital, 192–95.
16 Richard Watson, A Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1780), 6–7. In 1807, Watson also gave a speech in Parliament supporting the end of the slave trade. Both Hinchliffe and Watson donated to the SEAST. Richard Watson, Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, Bishop of Landaff, written by himself (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1817), 452–58; Society for the Abolition of Slave Trade, List of the Society (London: 1788), 46, 47.
17 Walsh and Hyam, ‘Peter Peckard: Liberal Churchman and Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner’, 2; Walsh, ‘Peter Peckard’.
18 Peter Peckard, The popular Clamour against the Jews indefensible (Cambridge: J. Bentham, 1753); Peckard, A Sermon on the Nature and Extent of Civil and Religious Liberty (London: M. Cooper, 1754), 28n.
19 Peckard, The Nature and Extent of Civil and Religious Liberty, 29–30, see p. 4 for a condemnation of slavery in the abstract.
20 Peter Peckard, The Nature and Extent of Civil and Religious Liberty. A sermon preached before the University of Cambridge, November the 5th, 1783 (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1783), 4–5, 12.
21 Peckard, The Nature and Extent, quoted on 8, 10, 11.
22 Ibid., 11, 3, 4. On Locke’s opposition to slavery and royalism, see Holly Brewer, ‘Slavery, Sovereignty, and “Inheritable Blood”: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery’, American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (October 2017): 1038–78.
23 Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 123–24; Vincent Carretta, ed., Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (New York: Penguin, 1998); James Walvin and Paul Edwards, eds., Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade (London: MacMillan Press, 1983), 57–87, 90–9; also see Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770–1830 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
24 Peckard, Piety, Benevolence, and Loyalty Recommended, 7, 3–5, 11, 12, 13.
25 Ibid., i–ii.
26 Henry Gunning, Reminiscences of the University, Town, and County of Cambridge from the year 1780, vol. I (2nd ed., London: George Bell, 1855), 112.
27 Cunich, et al., A History of Magdalene College, 189; Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, 159.
28 Clarkson details his motivation to take up abolition and Peckard as a major influence on him as well as Benezet’s work in chapter seven of his history of the abolition of the slave trade. Clarkson, The History of the Rise, I, 203–07, 260. Also see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 23.
29 Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce (1788 revised version), 165, v.
30 Drescher, Abolition, 213–14; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 98–9.
31 Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, A List of the Society Instituted in 1787, 2–3; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 98–101; Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 256–62.
32 Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Antislavery, 41–9, especially 49.
33 Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 67, chapter 4; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 101.
34 Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, A List of the Society instituted in 1787 … (London: 1787), 28–32.
35 Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, A List of the Society, 30, 28, 29; J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, A Biographical List of all Known Students, Graduates … , part 2, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 27, 433; Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses … , part 2, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 142, 456.
36 Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, A List of the Society, 31. Cf. Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, List of the Society (London: 1788), 49–50. St. John’s contributions went from six pounds-sterling and six shillings in 1787 to approximately twenty-eight pounds-sterling and ten shillings in 1788.
37 Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, List (1788), 13, based on the author’s calculations.
38 Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 221–22; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 103, 127; Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, 412–13; Linehan, ed., St. John’s College, 210–11.
39 Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress … , I, 572; Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 221–24; Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, 320–21; Cunich, et al., A History of Magdalene College, 189; Linehan, St. John’s College Cambridge, 212.
40 Peckard, Justice and Mercy, 31, 32.
41 Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 29–31, especially 31; also see Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic, 2003).
42 Peckard, Justice and Mercy, 32.
43 Peckard, Am I Not a Man? And a Brother (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1788), 2–3, quoted on p. 1, 2, 3.
44 Ibid., 4–7, quoted on 7.
45 Ibid., 15; Peckard cited Francois Froger, A Relation of a Voyage made in the years 1695 … . On the Coasts of Africa (London, 1698).
46 Peckard, Am I Not a Man?, quoted on 18, 19, 19–20. Peckard drew on Wheatley and Sancho for his sermons as well. Indeed he might have been composing this pamphlet and his 1788 sermon simultaneously. For Caesar the conjurer in South Carolina, see Africanisms in American Culture, 2nd ed., ed. Joseph E. Holloway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 54.
47 Peckard, Am I Not a Man?, 47–50, 59, 60.
48 Tyro, ‘For the Cambridge Chronicle On the Slave Trade’, Cambridge Chronicle, March 1, 1788.
49 Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses … , pt. 2, vol. 4, 453; J. M., ‘For the Cambridge Chronicle On the Slave Trade’, Cambridge Chronicle, March 1, 1788; also see Catherine O’Neill’s excellent student essay in the Magdalene College Archives.
50 Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 43 (London 1788), 212.
51 Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 47 (London, reprint, 1803), 542.
52 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, written by himself (London: 1789); Vincent Carretta, Equiano The African: A Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 112–4. Carretta inconclusively argues that Equiano was born in South Carolina. Cf. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 126, 627n51.
53 Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 126; Carretta, Equiano The African, 334–5.
54 Olaudah Equiano to Peter Peckard, n.d., Master’s Records, Peckard Papers, folder 5 item 4, Magdalene College Archives, Cambridge. This letter is undated but is likely from late 1788 or early 1789. Equiano commenced his tour in the summer of 1789.
55 Thomas Clarkson to Thomas Jones, July 9, 1789, Papers of Thomas Clarkson, folder 1–5, item 4, St. John’s College Library, Cambridge.
56 Olaudah Equiano, ‘To the printer of the Cambridge Chronicle’, Cambridge Chronicle, August 1, 1789.
57 Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, 161.
58 Equiano, The Interesting Narrative … (3rd ed., London, 1790), vi, vii; Equiano, The Interesting Narrative … , 9th ed. (London, 1794), x, xi, xx, xxi; Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses … , part 2, vol. 3, 615.
59 Peter Peckard, The Neglect of a Known Duty is a Sin. A Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge on Sunday, January 31, 1790 (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1790), 25–8, 11, 15–6 quoted on 26, 28, 33.
60 In other writings, Peckard also supported abolition in the West Indies but without explaining the way in which emancipation would unfold. See Peckard, Am I Not a Man, 92.
61 Peckard, The Neglect of a Known Duty is a Sin, 20, 25, 27; for further critiques of commerce also see Peckard, Am I Not a Man, 91–2.
62 Ibid., 52–3, 55, 87–8.
63 Peckard, Justice and Mercy, 34; Peckard, Am I Not a Man?, 74. For a history on abolitionists supporting the use of force and violence for achieving abolition, see Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
64 Peter Peckard, National Crimes the Cause of National Punishments. A Discourse delivered in the Cathedral Church of Peterborough, On the Fast-Day, Feb. 25, 1795 (Peterborough: Jacob, 1795); Walsh, ‘Peter Peckard’, ODNB.
65 On a student debate over slavery at Magdalene College, see Romaine Hervey, ‘The Diary of the Rev. Romaine Hervey’ unpublished manuscript, diary entries December 3rd, 10th, 15th, 1796, Magdalene College Archives; Ronald Hyam, ‘Magdalene, Anti-Slavery, and the Early Human Rights Movement from the 1780s to the 1830s’, Magdalene College Occasional Paper, no. 35 (Cambridge: Magdalene College Publishing, 2007).
66 Alexander Crummell, The Man: The Hero: The Christian! A Eulogy of the Life and Character of Thomas Clarkson … (New York: Egbert, 1847), 8.
67 Crummell was likely the second black student to take a degree from a college at Cambridge. The first was likely George A. Bridgewater the famous violinist who graduated with a music degree from Trinity Hall in 1811. For more on Crummell and his time at Cambridge, see Wilson J. Moses, Alexander Crummell, A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); for Bridgewater, see Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 1555–1833 (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 212–20, especially 217.