Creating History: Evangelism and Slavery

Adam Hochschild is well-known and respected journalist and writer.  He refers to himself occasionally as a “public historian,” by which is meant someone who studies history in order convey it to the general public, rather than publish for the benefit of other historians.  Public historians, as ones who can possibly acquire a large audience, then have an even greater responsibility for their actions because history, or its interpretation, is critical to current events.  Similarly, current events are critical to the interpretation of history.  The stories we choose to tell about ourselves are rooted in historical interpretation, and those stories will influence the politics of today.  Controlling history is a good way to control politics.  To quote William Faulkner: “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”

Hochschild discusses issues related to historical interpretation in his collection of essays: Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays.

“But the longer that I work with the past, the more I realize that it is not unchangeable at all.  What we see when we look at something that happened, say, two hundred years ago is very different from the way people remembered exactly the same thing fifty or a hundred years ago.  These shifts take place not because previously hidden sources of information are newly discovered but because of events in the ever-changing present.”

The changes in historical perspectives may not be arbitrary.  Often, they are part of a concerted effort to rewrite history for political gain.  The most egregious example comes from the Soviet era in Russia, where librarians had to maintain a long and detailed history of the communist era.  The task was complicated by the fact that the government would send out frequent modifications as current events made reporting of previous events “inconvenient.”  New pages would be sent out to replace old pages.  Hochschild reports a bit of Soviet humor from those days.

“The joke in Soviet days when you spoke with people who were trying to study history was ‘You never know what will happen…yesterday’.”

Such manipulation of history is ongoing today.

“Around the world, not just the present but the past has become a battleground.  Those right-wingers were in Charlottesville to protest a plan to remove a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  In Hungary, a German ally in the Second World War, monuments have been installed and museum exhibits altered to portray Hungarians, not Jews, as victims of the Nazis.  In the 1990s, many Russians told me of their hope that a few of the old Soviet labor camps could be preserved or restored as memorials to those who had died and reminders that such events must never happen again.  Instead, at the only place where a restoration has been completed, near Perm, in the Ural Mountains, the camp has become a site of pilgrimage for enthusiastic followers of Vladimir Putin who want to celebrate the glorious days of Stalin’s rule.”

Hochschild presents a recent example of the perversion of the historical record for political gain in an article titled Sunday School History (originally published in 2007).  In it he describes how those who propagated religious justifications for the existence of slavery in the United States, who supported a century of Jim Crow laws in the American South, and who have embraced the racism and white nationalism of Donald Trump, have worked to give credit for the end of slavery in England to one William Wilberforce.

“From the mid-1700s on, roughly half the captive Africans taken to the Americas in chains were transported by ships based in Liverpool, Bristol, London, and a e few other English ports.  And so when England abolished its Atlantic slave trade in 1807, it was a historic turning point.  Parliament’s votes to end the ocean traffic in human beings and then, a quarter century later, to end British slavery itself—which affected, above all, those who worked the lucrative sugar plantations in the British West Indies—have long fascinated historians, because the country acted against its economic self-interest.”

“For many years, almost all the credit for ending the slave trade and British slavery was given to William Wilberforce, the eloquent, widely respected leader of abolitionist forces in the House of Commons and a convert to the evangelical strain of Anglicanism.  Centering the story on Wilberforce offered great comfort.  It allowed Britons to acknowledge that their ancestors had been involved in something horrendous, while at the same time giving Wilberforce credit for inspiring an unprecedented act of national benevolence.”

In 1933, one hundred years after his death, England marked Wilberforce’s contributions with a significant level of pageantry.

“Several dozen biographies of Wilberforce have appeared since then, almost all of them by evangelicals, with such titles as God’s Politician, A Hero for Humanity, Statesman and Saint, and The Man Who Freed the Slaves.”

“Many American politicians of the Christian right have adopted Wilberforce as a model…Mike Pence…calls Wilberforce one of his personal heroes, often quotes him, and has declared that Wilberforce’s ‘words hold equally true to abortion as they do to slavery.’  Congressman Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, says, ‘If we can get the word out about Wilberforce’s life and legacy, we can change this country.’…Sam Brownback of Kansas talks about the man so much that the Economist recently dubbed him and others ‘Wilberforce Republicans’.”

Hochschild does not deny the role Wilberforce played in the House of Commons, but the adulation of him disregards the decades of effort provided by ardent abolitionists, as well as historical events that suggested the economic viability of slavery was coming to an end.  All of this took place independent of Wilberforce and his speeches in Parliament.  The years 1787 and 1788 are identified with the beginning of a strong grass-roots movement against both the slave trade and slavery itself.  It resulted in a new form of political organization which resembles the way movements are organized today.  There was a central headquarters in London and satellite offices distributed around the country.  Religious leaders, mainly Quakers and Anglicans coordinated with each other and a multiracial array of abolitionists.  Activists like Thomas Clarkson spent years travelling the country organizing and recruiting other activists.  Two former slaves, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano wrote books about their experiences and travelled the country promoting abolition.  The ill treatment of England’s workers was compared to the ill treatment of slaves leading to calls for the end of slavery “both at home and abroad.”

“In 1792, more Britons signed petitions to Parliament against the slave trade than were eligible to vote.  In the same year, more than three hundred thousand people refused to buy slave-cultivated West Indian sugar.  This was the largest consumer boycott the world had yet seen, and it was driven by women, for they were the ones who did the household food shopping.  British women had no vote, and the boycott was their first mass political act.  Without boycott, petitions, and other popular pressure, Wilberforce could have done nothing in Parliament.”

The final blow to the slave industry might have been both economic and military in nature.

“A further force behind the ending of British slavery, today widely recognized at last, was a long string of West Indian slave revolts, which intensified during the 1790s.  The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803 was the greatest slave uprising in history.  First, the slaves successfully threw off their French masters.  Two years later, Britain, at war with France, tried to seize for itself this most populous and lucrative of all Caribbean territories.  After five years of hard fighting against the former slaves, British troops gave up and pulled out.  Britain’s army fought rebellions elsewhere in the Caribbean as well during this period and several officers came home from these campaigns to write and speak…against slavery.  A later revolt by some twenty thousand slaves in Jamaica in 1831-1832 was only barely contained by the British army after five weeks of fighting, and military officers and colonial and plantation officials testified before Parliament that more revolts were likely.  It was no coincidence that in 1833 Parliament voted to free the empire’s slaves.”

When the hundred-year anniversary of the end of the slave trade came in 1907, the white, male-dominated nation barely noticed.  By the time 2007 came around Britain was a different place.  It had become a modern multiracial, multicultural nation and the commemorating events were plentiful.  What draws Hochschild’s interest is a movie produced for the event with the title Amazing Grace taken from that of the famous hymn.  It was the blatant attempt to define history as evangelicals would like it to be that moved him to write his article.  Consider John Newton who wrote that hymn.

“…in the publicity material sent to film critics, the makers of Amazing Grace say: ‘Newton was captain of a slave ship for many years, until he underwent a dramatic religious conversion while steering his vessel through a storm.  Repenting and regretting the misery he had inflicted on the thousands of human cargo he had transported across the Middle Passage…he devoted his life to the Church.”

“The reality was starkly, embarrassingly different.  Most inconveniently for sin-and-repentance storytellers, John Newton was converted to evangelical Christianity before making four transatlantic voyages as a slave-ship officer, not afterward.  He left the trade for reason not of conscience but of health.  And when he was later ordained a minister, he still had all his savings invested with his former employer, who had a fleet of slave ships on the ocean.  Newton said not a word in public against the slave trade for more than thirty years after he left the sea, during much of which time he was the most famous evangelical preacher in England.”

Newton would eventually speak out against the slave trade, but not until he had no other choice but to do so.  The treatment of Wilberforce in the film is equally misleading.  While he was definitely against slavery and argued for its end, he was merely an observer of all the developments taking place around him that made his goal attainable.

“It gives the impression that William Wilberforce brought the slave trade to an end almost single-handedly.  A biography published as the official companion to the movie calls Wilberforce ‘simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world’.”

“In years past, lionizers of Wilberforce have painted that rosy picture by simply leaving out other parts of the story, like the slave rebellions.  Amazing Grace does so with far more subtlety and sophistication.  It gives short glimpses of some of the other important people and events—Clarkson’s epic travels, Equiano’s book tour, the sugar boycott, the mass petition campaigns.  But it implies, completely falsely, that Wilberforce orchestrated or supported all of these.”

Hochschild suggests that the talented producers of the film produced their inaccurate product at the urging of Philip Anschutz, who is described as “the movie’s principle financier.”

“A major backer of the evangelical Right, Anschutz has also been a significant donor to George W. Bush and to groups opposing everything from gay rights to abortion to the teaching of evolution.”

But why is Wilberforce so important to the evangelicals?  Have they no other example to call forth?  Hochschild provides this suggestion.

“This is the message the film wants us to carry away: that God’s work is best done by a wealthy, virtuous man like Wilberforce, who is against slavery and various forms of sin but questions nothing else in the social and political order.”

If Wilberforce is the example evangelicals wish to hold up for admiration, consider that while he was against slavery, that does not mean he was in favor of racial justice.  He was also against workers’ rights, against voters’ rights, against women’s rights, and presumably, would be against any of the other rights under contention in our day.  Wilberforce was a man of his time; he thought a few wealthy white men should be the ones allowed to make all the decisions.  In other words, he was similar to the politicians evangelical leaders are supporting today. 

Two hundred years have passed since Wilberforce’s time, but the evangelical Right has hardly noticed.