Revelation of The Horrors of Slavery
It was at Cambridge in 1785 that Clarkson entered a Latin essay competition that was to set him on the course for most of the remainder of his life. The topic of the essay, set by university vice-chancellor Peter Peckard, was Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare (Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?), and it led Clarkson to consider the question of the slave trade. He read everything he could on the subject, including the works of Anthony Benezet, a Quaker abolitionist. Appalled and challenged by what he discovered, Clarkson changed his life. He also researched the topic by meeting and interviewing those who had personal experience of the slave trade and of slavery.
After winning the prize, Clarkson had what he called a spiritual revelation from God as he travelled on horseback between Cambridge and London. Having broken his journey at Wadesmill, near Ware, Hertfordshire, as he stopped, "A thought came into my mind", he later wrote, "that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end" (Clarkson, History, vol. 1). This experience and sense of calling ultimately led him to devote his life to abolishing the slave trade.
Having translated the essay into English so that it could gain a wider audience, Clarkson published it in pamphlet-form in 1786 as "An essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation", which was honoured with the first prize in the University of Cambridge, for the year 1785.
The publication of the essay had an immediate impact, and Clarkson was introduced to many others who were sympathetic to abolition, some of whom had already published and campaigned against slavery. These included influential men such as James Ramsay and Granville Sharp, the Quakers, and other Nonconformists. The movement had been gathering strength for some years, having been founded by Quakers both in Britain and in the United States, with support from other Nonconformists or from Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1783, 300 Quakers, chiefly from the London area, presented Parliament with the first petition against the slave trade.
Following this step, a small offshoot group sought to form the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, a small non-denominational group that could lobby more successfully by incorporating Anglican and Parliamentary support (Quakers were barred from Parliament until the early nineteenth century, whereas the Anglican Church had the right to seats in the House of Lords). The twelve founding members included nine Quakers, and three pioneering Anglicans – Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce — all evangelical Christians sympathetic to the religious revival that had predominantly nonconformist origins, but which sought wider non-denominational support for a "Great Awakening" amongst believers.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Clarkson
Famous quotes containing the words revelation of the, revelation of, revelation, horrors and/or slavery:
“In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance.... In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her for ever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“And consequently when wee Believe that the Scriptures are the word of God, having no immediate revelation from God himself, our Belief, Faith, and Trust is in the Church; whose words we take, and acquiesce therein.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)