What Book Helped To Draw Attention To The Abolitionist Cause In Great Britain?
The Interesting Narrative
Olaudah Equiano's epic book bout for his bestselling firsthand account of slavery changed the British abolitionist motility.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Excerpted from Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co.
This article supplements Episode 2 of the History of American Slavery, our inaugural Slate Academy. Please join Slate's Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion for a different kind of summertime school. To learn more and to enroll, visit Slate.com/university.
In the spring of 1789, in the same calendar month that the Commission for the Abolition of the Slave Merchandise sent the pioneering British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson to campaign confronting the slave trade in France, a freed British slave, Olaudah Equiano, set off on a mission of his own. Calling on a clergyman named Jones at Trinity College, Cambridge, he handed him a letter:
Love Sir,
I take the Freedom of introducing to your Observe Gustavus Vasa, the Bearer, a very honest, ingenious, and industrious African, who wishes to visit Cambridge. He takes with him a few Histories containing his own life written past himself, of which he means to dispose to defray his Journey. Would you lot exist so good every bit to recommend the Sale of a few and yous will confer a favour on your already obliged and
obedient Retainer,
Thomas Clarkson.
Yet known by his slave name, Olaudah Equiano had written his autobiography, at present considered the starting time widely read and influential slave narrative. The visit to Trinity Higher was the commencement of what would be an epic-length book bout.
Equiano was no stranger to the printed give-and-take. In the preceding two years he had written some dozen forceful letters to London newspapers, praising new anti-slavery books, defending abolitionist friends, and protesting a pro-slavery spoken communication he had heard from the House of Lords visitors' gallery. Knowing that George Three was hostile to abolition, he wrote instead to the queen. He besides signed—and probably organized and drafted—more than a one-half-dozen articulation messages nearly slavery from groups of black men in London, who once or twice referred to themselves as the "Sons of Africa." He did non shy from controversy, and even strongly praised intermarriage—something never endorsed by white abolitionists. For well over a century to come, it would be almost unheard of for anyone to speak as Equiano did in i open letter to a West Indian plantation owner:
A more foolish prejudice than this [against interracial union] never warped a cultivated mind. … Why not constitute intermarriages at home, and in our Colonies? and encourage open up, free, and generous love upon Nature's ain wide and extensive programme … without distinction of the color of a pare?
In this stream of letters to the press, he at least one time subtly touted the autobiography he was preparing, and when information technology appeared, its two volumes totaled 530 pages: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African . At seven shillings—almost $48 today—information technology became a all-time-seller. The Interesting Narrative was speedily translated into German, Dutch, and Russian, and during the 3 years after publication was the sole new literary work from England reprinted in the Us.
Its timing could not have been better. As the volume appeared in the jump of 1789, the privy council was winding up its hearings, the abolition committee was plastering the country with slave ship diagrams, and William Wilberforce was arguing for abolition in the House of Eatables. Equiano, who clearly saw his writing as function of the entrada, began the volume with a petition addressed to Parliament and ended it with his anti-slavery letter of the alphabet to the queen. His was the commencement great political book bout, and never was ane undertaken with more determination. He began in London, then went on to other cities, later writing to a sympathetic chaplain in Nottingham: "I trust that my going about has been of much use to the Cause of the abolitionism of the accu[r]sed Slave Merchandise—a Gentleman of the Committee the Revd. Dr. Bakery has said that I am more use to the Cause than half the People in the Country—I wish to God, I could be and so."
Nothing is of more employ to a cause than a person who seems to embody it, as, in our own fourth dimension, the crusade of freedom in Tibet has seemed embodied by the Dalai Lama or in apartheid-era S Africa by Nelson Mandela. The tens of thousands of Britons who read Equiano's book or heard him speak got to come across slavery through the optics of a onetime slave.
And wherever he went, Equiano demonstrated his skills of promotion and diplomacy. He offered a discount to readers who bought six copies or more of his book; there was also a deluxe edition "on Fine Newspaper, at a moderate advance of price." After a particularly friendly welcome in Birmingham, one of the new manufacturing cities now becoming anti-slavery strongholds, he wrote the local newspaper, thanking by name more than 30 people whose "Acts of Kindness and Hospitality have filled me with a longing desire to see these worthy Friends on my ain Estate in Africa, when the richest Produce of information technology should be devoted to their Entertainment; they should there partake of the luxuriant Pine-apples and the well-flavoured virgin Palm Vino, and to raise the Elation, I would burn down a certain kind of Tree, that would afford united states of america a Light, as clear and vivid every bit the Virtues of my Guests."
In the midst of his book tour, a newspaper reported that Equiano, "well known in England equally the champion and advocate for procuring a suppression of the Slave Trade, was married at Soham, in Cambridgeshire to Miss Cullen daughter of Mr. Cullen of Ely, in the same County, in the presence of a vast number of people assembled on the occasion." Equiano did not know his year of birth but was probably in his mid-40s. Except that he was putting his conventionalities in intermarriage into practice, we know next to cypher about his new married woman, whom he may have met through his friendship with the Rev. Peter Peckard, the abolitionist vice chancellor of Cambridge. Only his focus on selling his book pushed even his matrimony into the background, for he wrote his Nottingham friend shortly before the nuptials, "I now mean … to … take me a Married woman … & when I accept given her nigh 8 or 10 Days Condolement, I mean Straight to go [to] Scotland—and sell my 5th. Editions."
Any publisher would be delighted to have such an energetic salesman as an author. Equiano, even so, was his own publisher, something more common and so than information technology is today. Self-publishing promised him more profit. Dissimilar many white abolitionists, he had no family wealth or connections to fall dorsum on, and in his early years he had had the biting experience of white people cheating him out of money due him.
Publishing his own volume was a successful business concern movement, just like the trading deals he had made while nevertheless a slave earning money to purchase his freedom. The book caught on speedily and the first edition of more than 700 copies was presently sold out. He issued viii more editions of the Interesting Narrative during his lifetime, each prefaced by an ever-lengthening listing of "subscribers"—people who had ordered copies and paid half the book's price in advance, thereby financing the press costs.
The subscriber list at the front of Equiano's first edition included the bishop of London, plus an impressive roster of MPs, earls, dukes, and even the pro-slavery Prince of Wales—how Equiano got to him we do non know. He would circular up similar lists of notables from the provincial cities where several later editions appeared: 211 people in Hull, 248 in Norwich, and the majority of the professors at the Academy of Edinburgh. Eventually his subscriber list totaled well over 1,000, some of them buying multiple copies. The pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed information technology, and Methodism'due south founder, John Wesley, read information technology on his deathbed.
Existence his own publisher gave Equiano control over every aspect of his book. For the frontispiece to the beginning volume, for instance, he chose an engraving of himself. The image is one of simply a handful from the England of this fourth dimension that show black men or women whose identities nosotros know. Gazing direct at the viewer, Equiano holds an open Bible and wears the gentlemanly attire of the twenty-four hour period: ruffled cravat, waistcoat, elegant jacket, lace cuffs. The artist has made no endeavour to Europeanize his features; his curly hair, night skin, and thick lips marking him every bit a proud African. The frontispiece to the second volume shows a scene from his adventurous life, of Equiano rescuing some white boyfriend sailors after a shipwreck.
Equiano essentially spent the rest of his working life on a book bout. For more than v years he crisscrossed the British Isles. In Ireland, where activists were agitating for better representation in Parliament and confronting their condition as 2nd-class citizens, he met an especially receptive audience, selling 1,900 copies during an viii½-month stay. He establish that the Irish, as well, felt themselves to be victims of oppression. He was in Ireland when a procession wound through the streets of Belfast to gloat the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. On one side of a slap-up banner was a scene of a oversupply storming the prison; on the other was a chained figure representing Ireland; the adjacent banner in the parade denounced the slave merchandise. This was a heady mix, a sign of ascension democratic hopes in a world where upward until at present hierarchy and domination had been the club of the twenty-four hour period.
The Interesting Narrative said much that abolitionist literature past whites could not. Although Equiano'due south pages on the middle passage and the horrors of W Indian slavery are searing, he knew that most of his audience had past now heard such stories. Nor does he devote much space to the familiar argument that United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland'south businessmen had much more to gain from legitimate merchandise with Africa ("except," he wryly noted, "those persons concerned in the manufacturing [of ] neck-yokes, collars, chains, hand-cuffs, leg-bolts … thumb-screws, atomic number 26-muzzles …").
Instead, most of the book is the tale of his own redemptive passage from liberty in Africa through slavery to precarious freedom in England. Equiano wrote with a modern, personal sensibility; he had obviously noticed the huge affect on readers of John Newton's and Alexander Falconbridge'south eyewitness accounts and the similar effect on audiences when he spoke of his experiences. He knew that the most powerful statement confronting slavery was his ain life story.
When Equiano brought his book into the world in 1789, almost Britons idea of Africans equally heathen illiterates, with minds and bodies alike scorched into strangeness by the intense heat of the tropics. Now suddenly here was a human being who was Christian, who could wield the English language language well, who had earned his freedom by his skill in trading, who had learned to navigate and to play the French horn. Could whatsoever reader imagine a more than impressive tale of rising in the world through the hard piece of work that the British prized so dearly? "I … embraced every occasion of improvement," wrote Equiano of his early days in England, "and every new thing that I observed I treasured up in my memory." He presented himself, in short, every bit an estimable black Englishman.
Equiano had noticed the well-nigh pop forms of literature around him—the gamble travelogue, the riches-to-rags-to-riches tale, the religious catechumen's testimony —and skillfully combined elements of them all. But, more important and lasting, the Interesting Narrative is the voice of a brave, resourceful, and compassionate man who on occasion risked much to help those still trapped in slavery. Equiano put on newspaper a story matched past none of his contemporaries, and ane that has lasted. Of the hundreds of books that argued for freedom for the British Empire's slaves, his is the only one a reader can hands notice in a British or American bookstore today. Each yr more people read it than did so during his entire lifetime.
Excerpt from Bury the Chains past Adam Hochschild. Copyright (c) 1998 by Adam Hochschild. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/06/olaudah-equianos-autobiography-the-most-successful-political-book-tour-of-the-british-abolitionist-movement.html#:~:text=Olaudah%20Equiano's%20epic%20book%20tour,changed%20the%20British%20abolitionist%20movement.
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