Clive Norris, a historian of Methodism who works with the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, has been asked by the Methodist Church of Great Britain to investigate its historic links with the enslavement of Africans.
It is at first sight an odd request, for two reasons.
First, John Wesley (1703-91), who is widely recognised as the founder of Methodism, was an active campaigner for the abolition of enslavement. Lying on his deathbed, he asked a friend to read to him from the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, formerly an enslaved African himself, a publication to which Wesley had subscribed.[1] And the last of his letters which has survived, written a week before he died, was to fellow-abolitionist William Wilberforce, and urged him to continue his ‘glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. . . Go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.’[2] Second, Methodists were typically artisans and other working people; few would have the means to invest in trafficking enslaved Africans or in Caribbean sugar estates. The movement was financed primarily by the regular giving of its members, and the going rate was a mere penny a week, perhaps £5 today.
However, we cannot escape the fact that the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans was a significant component of the eighteenth-century British economy, comprising as it did the ‘triangular trade’ between Africa, the Americas and the homeland; the extensive production of cotton and other commodities on plantations worked by enslaved Africans; and the many industries in Britain which depended on these activities for their raw materials or markets. Overall it is estimated that ‘economic activities equivalent to around 11% of British GDP were directly involved in or associated with the American plantation complex.’[3]
One early stronghold of Methodism was Bristol, which was a major port serving the triangular trade. Bristol became involved in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans in 1698, when the London-based Royal African Company lost its monopoly of the English trade with West Africa.[4] Between 1698 and 1807 Bristol merchants financed at least 2,060 voyages to Africa merchants, most before 1750;[5] between 1756 and 1786 Bristol sent 588 slave ships to Africa, though the rising port of Liverpool sent 1,858.[6] Between 1698 and 1807 it is estimated that Bristol slaving ships carried some 587,000 abducted Africans to the Americas, of whom 486,000 (82.8 per cent) survived the Atlantic crossing. This represented around one-sixth of the British empire’s slave trade, and Bristol was probably the third largest Atlantic slave port.[7]
The tentacles of the trade reached into every corner of Bristol’s economy. Bristol’s merchants financed the voyages of the ships which abducted thousands of men, women and children from Africa, and took them to the Americas to be worked to death. Bristolians captained the ships and provided their crews. Bristol shipwrights built and maintained the vessels, local dockers manned the port, and local traders furnished the food and other supplies.[8] Bristol coffee houses hosted endless business meetings; local people also worked as builders and tradesmen, servants, and in many other ways to service the slave trade indirectly. And crucially, Bristol banks such as the ’Old Bank’ on George Street financed the slave trade and the wider commercial life of the city. As one historian has observed: ‘In the period of Bristol’s greatest prosperity, few of its citizens did not have some connection, direct or indirect, with slaving ventures.’[9] It seems likely, therefore, that—even if many had principled objections—some of the 750 or so members of Bristol’s Methodist society had links with the trafficking and subsequent exploitation of enslaved Africans, and Clive is exploring this possibility.
Establishing the facts will be challenging but it is of course only part of the story. It immediately prompts the questions: why did people act as they did and how should we respond to that? Take for example, Sir Philip Gibbes (1731-1815), a prominent Barbados slaveholder with Bristol connections. He was widely admired for his piety and humanity. In his autobiography, Equiano described him as ‘a most worthy and humane gentleman’ who ‘saves the lives of his negroes, and keeps them healthy, and as happy as the condition of slavery can admit’.[10] John Wesley counted him as a friend.[11] Gibbes sought to provide for the spiritual welfare of his enslaved workers but only in a strictly limited way. Thus he encouraged the saying of grace before their breakfast (‘bless our labours . . . grant that this present meal may convey to our bodies nourishment and health, and to our minds gratitude and love’); but not before lunch, which would be too disruptive to the working day.[12] Hero or villain? The answer is that the eighteenth century was an age of complexity, contradiction, and confusion, much like our own.
[1] Journal and Diaries VII (1787-1791) [vol. 24 of The Works of John Wesley], ed. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003), 348.
[2] John Wesley to William Wilberforce (24 February 1791), The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., ed. John Telford, 8 vols (London: Epworth Press, 1931), VIII:265.
[3] Klas Rönnbäck, “On the economic importance of the slave plantation complex to the British economy during the eighteenth century: a value-added approach,” Journal of Global History 13 (2018), 327.
[4] David Richardson, The Bristol Slave Traders: a collective portrait (Bristol: Historical Association, Bristol Branch, 1985), 1.
[5] David Richardson, “Slavery and Bristol’s ‘golden age’,” Slavery & Abolition 26, no. 1 (2005), 36.
[6] C. M. MacInnes, Bristol and the Slave Trade (Bristol: Historical Association, Bristol Branch, 1968), 6.
[7] Richardson, ‘Slavery and Bristol’, 36, 38.
[8] Richard B. Sheridan, “The Commercial and Financial Organization of the British Slave Trade, 1750-1807,” Economic History Review New Series, Vol. 11, no. 2 (1958), 249. There was a trend over time for enslaved Africans increasingly to be sold on credit; the slavers returned home in ballast, while the planters marketed their sugar and tobacco directly; ibid., 252.
[9] C. Duncan Rice, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery (London and Basingstoke, 1975), 131.
[10] Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, Fourth Edition, Enlarged, 2 vols. (London: Printed for, and sold by the Author, 1789), I:210.
[11] John A. Vickers, ‘The Gibbes Family of Hilton Park: an unpublished correspondence of John Wesley’, Methodist History, vol. 4 (1968), 43-61.
[12] Philip Gibbes, Instructions for the Treatment of Negroes (London: Shepperson and Reynolds, 1786, reprinted with additions 1797), 79-81.
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