M.Taylor-West India Interest and Colonial Slavery in Parliament

1 The West India Interest and Colonial Slavery in Parliament, 1823-33 Michael Taylor Parliament, Politics, and People, 3 November Abstract: This paper considers the parliamentary fortunes of the British pro-slavery lobby – the West India Interest – between the advent of the anti-slavery campaign in early 1823 and the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in August 1833. First, it explains the parliamentary strength of the West India Interest under the Tory ministries of the 1820s. Second, it examines the uncertainty of the first few years after Catholic Emancipation and under Earl Grey’s Whigs. Finally, it narrates the rapid and terminal decline of the parliamentary Interest as the result of Reform and the ultimate passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. In 1823, there were no political parties in Great Britain, at least not in the modern sense. Robert Jenkinson, the Earl of Liverpool, might have been the prime minister in a ‘Tory’ government, but there was no Tory Party. Indeed, Liverpool demanded only ‘a generally favourable disposition’ from his affiliated MPs and had even declared that he would ‘never attempt to interfere with the individual member’s right to vote as he may think consistent with his duty upon any particular question’. On the opposite benches were the Whigs, led by Charles, the Earl Grey, but there was no Whig Party either. Rather, the ‘Tories’ and the ‘Whigs’ were loose coalitions of politicians who shared generally similar attitudes. Put crudely, the Tories were the conservative friends of the Crown and the Church of England who glorified the memory of Pitt the Younger; the Whigs were the friends of trade, finance, and nonconformist religion, cautious advocates of parliamentary reform, and the political descendants of Pitt’s great rival, Charles James Fox. The political landscape was more precisely defined by ‘connexions’ and ‘interests’. Connexions were rooted in personal loyalty. Some were formed when electoral magnates such as the Duke of Newcastle dictated the votes of the MPs, and this was part of the ‘Old Corruption’ against which reformers railed. Others emerged when statesmen inspired loyalty among the backbenchers: through his insouciant brilliance, George Canning, the Foreign Secretary, had procured a following of ‘Canningites’. In contrast, ‘interests’ comprised disparate figures – not just politicians, but financiers, clergymen, intellectuals, and publishers – who were bound by specific anxieties. Members of the landed interest, whether Whig or Tory, united behind the Corn Laws 2 that protected British farmers even while the same issue split the Cabinet. Likewise, the cause of Catholic Emancipation brought together religious liberals, Irish nationalists, and pragmatic imperialists who otherwise agreed on nothing. In this way, the interest was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a political lobby and, without serious competition from the wider public – before 1832 only one in twenty Britons could vote – it was the formidable political unit of the age. Few interests were as wealthy and powerful as the West India Interest, which sought to protect and promote the sugar- and coffee-producing slave colonies of the British Caribbean. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the concerns of the Interest had ranged widely. Its leadership lobbied Westminster for military defence from French and Spanish enemies, financial aid in the wake of frequent hurricanes, and fiscal protection from foreign sugar. All the while, the ‘sugar barons’, as the planters were known, became a byword for preposterous wealth. Even George III was stunned by the splendour of West Indian riches. ‘Sugar, sugar, eh?’ the King marvelled upon seeing the finery of a planter’s carriage. ‘All that sugar!’ Between 1787 and 1807, the Interest’s priority had been resisting the abolition of the slave trade; from 1823, from the very moment on 15 May that Thomas Fowell Buxton moved in the House of Commons for the amelioration and the gradual abolition of colonial slavery, it was resisting slave emancipation. II It might be natural to think that, when Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807, it also abolished slavery itself. But it did not. In fact, when the Slave Trade Abolition Act came into force in 1808, there were more than 700,000 enslaved Africans in the British West Indies; in Jamaica alone there more enslaved persons than in any British city save London. Moreover, at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain even expanded its slaving empire by taking both Trinidad and Demerara from the French. For much of the fifteen years following the abolition of the trade, the anti-slavery movement was moribund. And when the abolitionists finally stirred themselves in late 1822, emancipation was far from practicable, let alone a fait accompli. When Buxton stepped out of Wilberforce’s shadow on that night in May 1823, a lesser man could have buckled, for the House of Commons was home ground for the Interest: as Wilberforce put it, the current Parliament was ‘made up of West Indians, Government men, a few partisans, and [only] a few sturdy Abolitionists’. There were dozens of MPs who were connected to the slave colonies. The ‘Jamaican’ lobby included the Tory slaveholder Alexander Cray Grant, the Wiltshire playwright George Watson Taylor, and the pro-slavery polemicist John Rock Grossett; they were joined in the House by the leading jurist Edward Hyde East, the art collector 3 Ralph Bernal, and Charles Long, the grandson of the racist historian Edward Long. Demerara’s leading agent was a coarse and foul-mouthed Irishman, William ‘Black Billy’ Holmes, who as the government’s chief whip had curated an intimate knowledge of the ‘tastes, wishes, idiosyncrasies, weaknesses, and family connections’ of other MPs. The eastern ‘Spice Isle’ of Grenada was represented by Joseph Marryat, ‘a forceful and innovative chairman’ of Lloyd’s who was, in Wilberforce’s words, a pro-slavery ‘fanatic’. Antiguan MPs included Thomas Byam Martin, a future Admiral of the Fleet, and George Henry Rose, a diplomat whose missions included Berlin and Washington. As for Barbados, there was William Lascelles, the brother of the Earl of Harewood, while St Kitts connected two major financial figures: William Manning, a former governor of the Bank of England, and Alexander Baring, a senior partner in the eponymous bank. Family ties to Trinidad drew the radical Joseph Hume into the fight over slavery, while Tobago was represented by Lord William Douglas, a Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty. It was a dizzying, daunting roster of pro-slavery politicians who were landowners, bankers, businessmen, sailors, judges, lawyers, and intellectuals, and they were but a portion of the Interest. In an era when divisions would commonly only contain a few hundred MPs, the guaranteed attendance of the Interest on slavery matters was an imposing obstacle for the abolitionists to overcome. 4 Until the 1820s, the meetings of the London hub of the Interest – there were also provincial associations in Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow – had been split between the City, where the merchant-princes reigned, and the West End, where the absentee planters made their fashionable homes. The fight over emancipation swung this territorial squabble in favour of the West End, since it now made sense to operate closer to Westminster. The Thatch’d House and the Crown & Anchor taverns on the Strand sometimes played host, but most meetings now took place at the West India Club House at 60 St James’s Street, off Piccadilly, which was a leisurely fifteen-minute stroll from the Audley Square residence of the Interest’s chairman, Charles Rose Ellis. The heir to five plantations, Ellis had studied briefly at Oxford before entering Parliament at the age of twenty-two after paying £200,000 in today’s money for the seat of Heytesbury. Although a limited speaker and never a serious candidate for front-bench business, Ellis was a respected operative who excelled in the politics of favour and patronage. It also helped that he was the best friend of George Canning, who in 1823 was Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons, and probably the most influential figure in British politics. Indeed, Ellis was one of the few ‘who at any moment could enter Canning’s private room’, and this friendship was invaluable to the Interest, not least when Buxton urged the House to condemn slavery as ‘repugnant to the principles of the British constitution, and of the Christian religion’. The reply that Canning made to Buxton was encouraging, at least at first. He agreed that it was ‘expedient to adopt effectual and decisive measures for ameliorating the condition’ of the slaves. He appeared to be amenable to emancipation itself, proposing three of his own resolutions in favour of slave freedom. ‘This House looks forward,’ read one of them, ‘to a progressive improvement in the character of the slave population, such as may prepare them for participation in those civil rights and privileges which are enjoyed by other classes of His Majesty’s subjects.’ Canning urged MPs to vote for ‘the accomplishment of this purpose at the earliest period’ and even stated that, if the House were willing, he would take the proposals to the King at once. This could have been the immediate triumph of the anti-slavery movement, but Buxton had really walked into a trap, for Canning had attached impossibly restrictive caveats to his resolutions: even though Buxton himself had been cautious, suggesting only gradual reform, Canning stipulated that emancipation could happen only if ‘compatible with . the safety of the colonies, and with a fair and equitable consideration of the interests of private property’. It was a vague and impossible test, and a mantra that West Indian planters would repeat for a decade. Here, in the first parliamentary battle of the fight over emancipation, Buxton knew he had been outmanoeuvred and in private he would ‘anathematise’ Canning’s resolutions in such a way 5 that his friends ‘challenge[d] his Quaker descent’.

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