Slave letters move campaigners
Two-hundred-year-old documents from the West Indies are helping Sue Thomas rewrite the history of anti–slavery attitudes — by incorporating the perspective of colonial communities.
This is signifi cant because most scholarly accounts of anti-slavery activity to date have focused on philanthropic attitudes and campaigns in Britain, and on slave rebellions in the Caribbean.
Professor of English, Sue Thomas, has collected around 4,000 pages of material – from missionary correspondence, newspapers, magazines, memoirs and Colonial Offi ce papers, as well as testimonies of non-white West Indians – that, she says, had also aff ected anti-slavery campaigners and public opinion.
The pages include the first biographical material by an African Caribbean woman, Anne Hart Gilbert who came from one of the earliest Antiguan Methodist families. A memoir of a recently deceased young niece published as a pious tract, the work was commissioned by William Dawes, agent of the Church Missionary Society in the eastern Caribbean.
Dawes is the historical figure on whom Kate Grenville based the hero of her recent novel The Lieutenant. With conditions in the Caribbean not conducive to the preservation of paper, Dawes sent a handwritten version of Gilbert’s work back to England in one of his letters. Professor Thomas’s discoveries have so moved others researching this period that she was asked to give the keynote paper at a conference organised by the University of London and the Caribbean Women Writers’ Alliance for the 2007 bicentenary celebration of the abolition of the British slave trade. Now the researcher has been awarded an Australian Research Council grant of $117,000 to study the documents in detail and to build up a picture of colonial sensibilities.
Professor Thomas with her original copy of Anne Hart Gilbert’s text from Antigua.
‘The discourse of “sensibility”,’ says Professor Thomas, ‘arose in late 18th century Britain, offering a language of moral and aesthetic feeling. Its excesses were lampooned by Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility.’
Scholars have argued that by the early nineteenth century, ‘sensibility’ in Britain had lost its force in the politics of anti-slavery.
However, Professor Thomas says the material from the Caribbean which she uncovered – and which circulated in ‘benevolent circles’ back in Britain – ‘reinvigorated sensibility as a political rhetoric of anti-slavery campaigning in the late 1820s and very early 1830s’.
Many of the original documents she has collected are handwritten and fragile. They include letters, tracts, annual reports, slave narratives, conversion narratives, legal testimony, obituaries and work diaries.
To raise funds, annual reports of charities were sent to organisations like the Female Society of Birmingham – the most influential of women’s anti-slavery societies – and helped shape anti-slavery opinion.
‘People from the Caribbean fed material to the Anti-Slavery Reporter which showed the gross inhumanity of slavery. People in Britain responded to the sensibility expressed by West Indian slaves and free coloured people.’
Professor Thomas says the material she has collected reveals the rise of a ‘distinctive colonial rhetoric of sensibility as a language of personal feeling and of sympathy as the basis of community, colonial reform and modernisation.’
The issue of literacy is fundamental to her study: after 1808 Church of England policy was to teach slaves how to read so they could study the bible – but it excluded them from writing.
Professor Thomas is particularly interested in the way Anne Hart Gilbert’s work incorporated African cultural practices about mothering. Known as ‘other-mothering’, they involve women also taking on maternal roles for other people’s children, thereby gaining respect and elder status.