Confronting the Darkness

In the last blog, we learned how William Wilberforce had given his allegiance to Jesus the King. Heeding the wise advice of his friend John Newton, Wilberforce resolved to honor the Lord Jesus through his service in Parliament. This decision would in time change the world. Wilberforce did not yet know exactly what God would call him to accomplish, but he now looked upon the world from a very different perspective – a perspective informed by God’s Word and God’s Spirit.

Great Britain was afflicted by great darkness in those days. Evil flourished throughout British society. Wilberforce biographer Eric Metaxas writes: “life in 18th century England was particularly brutal, decadent, violent, and vulgar. Slavery was only the worst of a host of societal evils that included epidemic alcoholism, child prostitution, child labor, frequent public executions for petty crimes…and unspeakable public cruelty to animals.” It has been estimated that fully 25% of all unmarried women in London at this time were prostitutes. Many of these women were under 18 years of age and some brothels even specialized in selling young girls to their depraved customers. Alcoholic intoxication was ubiquitous in British society. It was not unusual for members of Parliament to arrive at Westminster notably inebriated. Among the lower classes, the situation was even worse. Overwhelmed by hopelessness, many of the poor drank constantly. Incapacitated by alcohol, they were unable to work or even care for their children. Many drank themselves to death, leaving their offspring as helpless orphans. Keep in mind that there existed no government social safety net at this time. The British nobility either ignored the poor or looked down upon them with condescension. Although there was some Christian outreach by the methodists, most of the Anglican Church offered little or nothing to those who suffered in abject poverty.

Meanwhile, the monstrous evil of slavery itself was largely invisible to the British population. British slave ships began their shadowy commerce in English ports such as London, Liverpool and Bristol. There they were loaded with English goods like muskets, cloth, and manufactured items. These ships then departed for the west coast of Africa where they would moor their ships offshore and exchange their cargoes for slaves. The Europeans rarely acquired these slaves directly. Rather, they would rely upon the African tribes themselves to accomplish their villainous purposes. Incentivized by European wealth, African tribes would raid their neighbors, kidnapping as many slaves as possible. These unfortunate captives were then marched to the coast where they were packed into the bowels of slave ships. Some African chieftains were so infected with greed that they were even willing to sell their own people to the Europeans.

Once the English ships were filled with slaves, they would sail west across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Most of the slaves were transported to the islands of the British West Indies where there were extensive sugar plantations. There the slaves would be sold to English plantation owners. The slave ships would then be loaded with the products of these plantations: sugar, molasses, rum, cotton and tobacco. The three part journey would be completed when the ships returning to their home ports in England. This pattern became known as the triangle trade. It was a highly lucrative venture for the ship owners and their captains. The slave trade flourished for roughly two hundred years during the 17th and 18th centuries. During this time period, it has been estimated that roughly 3 million Africans were kidnapped and pressed into slavery.

The second leg of the triangle trade – the transport of slaves from West Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas – was referred to as the “Middle Passage.” However, this benign moniker utterly fails to communicate the misery experienced by those wretched souls aboard English slave ships. The Middle Passage was nothing less than a living hell. To prevent their escape, the slaves were chained together by their wrists and ankles. They were then pressed into the ship’s black hold. Each slave was allotted about 16 inches of width, so little room that many of the slaves couldn’t even lie on their back but were forced onto their side. Stuffed onto shelves, the slaves had only about 2 1/2 feet above them. Thus they could not even sit up, let alone stand. In this way, hundreds of slaves were loaded onto these floating nightmares. The sketch below shows the arrangement of 454 slaves crammed onto an actual slave ship named the Brookes.

Once aboard the ship, the anguish had only begun. Each ship afforded the slaves only a few small buckets as latrines. Yet many would suffer profuse dysentery and seasickness during the long westward journey. One can only image the scene: slaves suffering bouts of bloody diarrhea and vomiting on a ship with hardly any receptacles – receptacles they could hardly reach anyway, given the fact that they were shackled to at least one other person. The slaves most often could only relieve themselves were they lay side-by-side with hundreds of others. It did not take long before they were awash in their own excreta.

Many of the Africans had skin abrasions or lacerations from their violent kidnapping. These wounds would quickly become infected in such unsanitary conditions. Moreover, the reeking holds of the slave ships had virtually no ventilation or light. Most ships had only a few tiny windows in the hull, but even these were usually closed on the choppy waters of the open ocean. Slaves ships making the Middle Passage were traversing the tropics. Temperatures on deck would often exceed 90 degrees. One can only speculate on the infernal heat experienced below decks where the slaves could only gasp the stifling, fetid air. One British naval surgeon who witnessed these conditions wrote: “It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture a situation more dreadful or disgusting.”

No doubt most slaves longed for death. Indeed, suicides were common. The slaves would typically be given a few minutes to move around on deck each day before returning to the hold. Some would simply take their own lives by throwing themselves overboard – although that usually entailed taking at least on other slave into the watery abyss on account of their chains. The Middle Passage took roughly 80 days, although it could be longer due to stormy weather or navigational errors. Historians have estimated that the overall mortality of the slaves during the Middle Passage was 10-15%. It is well documented that mortality exceeded 50% on some ships. Considering the conditions, it is perhaps surprising anyone could survive this ordeal.

Once they arrived in the British West Indies, the situation would hardly improve. Metaxas writes, “Conditions on the West Indian sugar plantations were so brutal that most of the slaves were literally worked to death in just a few years and most of the female slaves were too ill to bear children.”

Now that he had become a Christian, these massive injustices struck the heart of William Wilberforce in a whole new way. He could no longer look away as evil reigned. He knew that the God of heaven was filled with wrath when he looked upon the murder and malignancy of the slave trade. If God was angry, how could God’s servants not be indignant as well? Wilberforce now began to see clearly why God had granted him such a influential position in the British Parliament. On October 28, 1787, Wilberforce famously wrote in his diary, “God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of [morals.]”

To be sure, there was already a significant abolitionist movement in Britain when Wilberforce joined the fray. The abolitionist movement was decidedly a Christian endeavor. Virtually every significant abolitionist was a committed evangelical Christian – what the English would then refer to as a methodist or enthusiast. This fact is crucial in order for us to gain proper historical perspective. Remember, until this time period, slavery had been embraced throughout the world by people of every race and color. Some contemporary voices in our culture claim that Anglo-American slavery is a horrible exception. These voices suggest that people had been living in happy accord with one another until evil white Americans and Europeans decided to oppress their black brothers and sisters in West Africa. This narrative is utterly false. The reality is that slavery was present in every human culture and context. All through human history, subjugation was considered to be a normal and even necessary part of human existence. The strong imposed themselves upon the weak. Was this not simply the way the world worked? Yet this mindset suddenly changed in the late 17th century, when a dedicated band of overwhelmingly white, evangelical Christians decided to speak for God.