Bury the Chans: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
Bury the Chains traces the rise and fall and finally the success of the abolitionists in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its primary focus is a handful of players whom Hochschild considers either emblematic or important in the campaign to convince the public of the evils of slavery. We meet lawyer James Stephen, converted to the cause in Barbados after witnessing a trial where four slaves were sentenced to be burned alive; Olaudah Equiano, one of the few Africans to write an account of the Middle Passage; and the best known of the British abolitionists, William Wilberforce, an evangelical Christian do-gooder and member of parliament who introduced antislavery legislation almost every year of the 1790s without success. In reading their stories, we manage to learn about slave revolts in Haiti, the French Revolution, farming in Africa, the horrible conditions endured by British seamen, and the state of the English infrastructure at the time. Slavery, Hochschild argues, touched virtually everyone in the world, and the narrative breadth of Bury the Chains alone goes a long way toward proving the point.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
There seem to be two reasons. First, Clarkson lived a long time. He was there when parliament first debated abolition in the late 1780s, he was there when the cause foundered in the 1790s, and he was there when it was taken up again in the early 1800s. He saw the slave trade banned in 1807 and was still alive to celebrate when all British slaves were finally freed in 1838. Large sections of Bury the Chains don’t mention Clarkson at all, but the narrative always comes back to him, still committed, still plugging away.
The history of modern activism, however, suggests that things aren’t quite so simple. Hochschild writes that the abolitionists would be thrilled by the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, for example, but I think their imaginations would be fired by a less legalistic campaign. The antiabortion movement–with its ties to evangelicals, its focus on helpless, infantile victims, its gripping horror stories–is much closer to abolitionism in spirit than is any left-wing movement I can think of. The pro-lifers are well aware of this: in 1977, Jesse Jackson (now pro-choice) argued that “there are those who argue that the right to privacy is of higher order than the right to life. . . . That was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside of your right to be concerned.” Peter Fitzgerald used the analogy in his Senate campaign against Carol Moseley Braun in 1998, and Alan Keyes tried it against Barack Obama last summer.
