Insurrection at sea: violence, the slave trade, and the rhetoric of abolition

This article explores the relationship between violence, in the form of shipboard and plantation insurrections, and the British abolitionist movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beginning with Thomas Clarkson's The Substance of the Evidence of Sundry Persons on the Slave-trade Collected in the Course of a Tour Made in the Autumn of the Year 1788 (1788), I will look at how Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa, or Olaudah Equiano, the African (1789) negotiate the relationship between violence and the slave trade. Clarkson and Equiano depict the slave trade itself as violent in order to persuade the white British public to turn against the trade politically. However, while their tactic rightly points to the dehumanizing nature of the practice of slavery, it creates at the outset of the abolitionist movement a rhetoric that privileges nonviolent approaches to ending slavery. The period between 1759 and 1771, Equiano's time at sea, saw the highest incidence of insurrection, both by slaves in transit from Africa and by those who reached the plantations in the Americas. From the standpoint of captured Africans, antislavery demanded violent actions to free themselves from their captors. Yet, the work of Clarkson and Equiano thought otherwise, as indicated by the rhetoric of nonviolence they espoused. I argue that during this period, abolitionist rhetoric emerged that defined freeing slaves as abolition rather than as liberation. This early abolitionist rhetoric created representational and practical problems that would continue to plague later abolitionists.