Real Heroes Page 6

  Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites—in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

  Liberty and Authority

  Edmund Burke died in 1797 at age sixty-eight, leaving behind a legacy of eloquence in the defense of liberty and of those oppressed by authority, from Catholics to Americans to Indians. Winston Churchill summed him up well when he wrote:

  On the one hand he is revealed as a foremost apostle of Liberty, on the other as the redoubtable champion of Authority. But a charge of political inconsistency applied to this life appears a mean and petty thing. History easily discerns the reasons and forces which actuated him, and the immense changes in the problems he was facing which evoked from the same profound mind and sincere spirit these entirely contrary manifestations. His soul revolted against tyranny, whether it appeared in the aspect of a domineering Monarch and a corrupt Court and Parliamentary system, or whether, mouthing the watch-words of a non-existent liberty, it towered up against him in the dictation of a brutal mob and wicked sect. No one can read the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority without feeling that here was the same man pursuing the same ends, seeking the same ideals of society and Government, and defending them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the other.

  Lessons from Edmund Burke

  Resist assaults on liberty wherever they occur: Often taking unpopular positions, Edmund Burke rose in Parliament to defend the rights of Americans, Catholics, and Indians. He also warned that the anti-liberty excesses of the French Revolution would generate great bloodshed.

  Cherish liberty, order, and tradition: Burke saw liberty as impossible without order and respect for honorable traditions; he also championed liberty as a natural source of order itself.

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  Thomas Clarkson

  A Moral Steam Engine That Never Quit

  At sea in late November 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong did the unspeakable. He ordered his crew to throw 133 chained black Africans overboard to their deaths. He reckoned that by falsely claiming the ship had run out of fresh water, he could collect more for the “cargo” from the ship’s insurer than he could fetch at a slave auction in Jamaica.

  The captain and crew were found out, but no one in the Zong affair was prosecuted for murder. A London court ruled the matter a civil dispute between an insurance firm and a client. As for the Africans, the judge declared that their drowning was “just as if horses were killed,” which was not far removed from the conventional wisdom of the time.

  Slavery, after all, was an ancient institution. The number of people who have walked the earth in bondage far exceeds the number who have enjoyed even a modest measure of liberty. As horrifying as the Zong captain’s actions were, the standard treatment aboard slave ships was little better. Mortality rates aboard such vessels reached appalling levels, sometimes running as high as 50 percent. Even if an African captive survived the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, that was only the start of a hellish experience: life at the end of a lash, filled with endless and often excruciating toil, with death coming at an early age.

  Moved by the fate of the Zong’s victims and the indifference of the court, a vice chancellor at the University of Cambridge chose this question for the university’s Latin essay contest for 1785:

  “Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare?”—Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?

  The contest was known throughout Britain, and the honor of winning it was highly prized.

  A twenty-five-year-old Cambridge student named Thomas Clarkson decided to try his luck in the essay contest. That contest started Clarkson on a quest that would define his life and change world history: the quest to consign slavery to the ash heap of history.

  Mobilizer

  Before he entered the essay contest, Thomas Clarkson hoped to become a minister. He had not previously displayed an interest in the topic of slavery. Still, he plunged into his research with the vigor, meticulous care, and mounting passion that would characterize nearly every day of his next sixty-one years. Clarkson won first prize for his essay, which drew on the vivid testimony of those who had seen the unspeakable cruelty of the slave trade firsthand.

  What Clarkson had learned in writing his essay distressed him to his core. Shortly after claiming the prize, he was riding on horseback along a country road when his conscience gripped him. Slavery, he later wrote, “wholly engrossed” his thoughts. He could not complete the ride without frequent stops to dismount and walk, tortured by the awful visions of the traffic in human lives. At one point, falling to the ground in anguish, he determined that if what he had written in his essay were indeed true, it led to only one conclusion: “It was time some person should see these calamities to their end.”

  Words of Wisdom from Thomas Clarkson

  “I entered . . . with an undaunted spirit, determining that no labour should make me shrink, nor danger, nor even persecution, deter me from my pursuit.”

  The significance of those few minutes in time is summed up in a splendid book by Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves:

  If there is a single moment at which the antislavery movement became inevitable, it was the day in 1785 when Thomas Clarkson sat down by the side of the road at Wades Mill.… For his Bible-conscious colleagues, it held echoes of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. For us today, it is a landmark on the long, tortuous path to the modern conception of universal human rights.

  Thus began Clarkson’s all-consuming focus on a moral ideal: no man can rightfully lay claim, moral or otherwise, to owning another. Casting aside his plans for a career as a man of the cloth, he risked everything for the single cause of ending the evil of slavery.

  He sought out and befriended the one group that had already embraced the issue: the Quakers. But the Quakers were few in number, and British society wrote them off as an odd fringe element. Quaker men even refused to remove their hats for any man, including the king, because they believed it offended a higher authority. Clarkson knew that antislavery would have to become a mainstream, fashionable educational effort to have any hope of success.

  On May 22, 1787, Clarkson brought together twelve men, including a few leading Quakers, at a London print shop to plot the course. Alexis de Tocqueville later described the results of that meeting as “extraordinary” and “absolutely without precedent” in the history of the world. This tiny group, which named itself the Society for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, was about to take on a firmly established institution in which a great deal of money was made and on which considerable political power depended.

  Powered by an evangelical zeal, Clarkson’s committee became what might be described as the world’s first think tank. Noble ideas and unassailable facts were its weapons.

  “Looking back today,” writes Hochschild, “what is more astonishing than the pervasiveness of slavery in the late 1700s is how swiftly it died. By the end of the following century, slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost everywhere.” Thomas Clarkson was the prime architect of “the first, pioneering wave of that campaign”—the antislavery movement in Britain, which Hochschild properly describes as “one of the most ambitious and brilliantly organized citizens’ movements of all time.”

  The credit for ending slavery in the British Empire is most often given to William Wilberforce. He was the longtime parliamentarian who never gave i
n to overwhelming odds, introducing bill after bill to abolish the slave trade, and later slavery itself. His boyhood pastor was John Newton, the former slave trader who converted to Christianity, renounced slavery, and wrote the enduring, autobiographical hymn “Amazing Grace.”

  Wilberforce was a hero in his own right, but Thomas Clarkson was prominent among those who proposed to Wilberforce that he be the movement’s man in Parliament. Moreover, it was the information Clarkson gathered while crisscrossing the British countryside—logging thirty-five thousand miles on horseback—that Wilberforce often used in parliamentary debate. Clarkson was the mobilizer, the energizer, the fact finder, and the very conscience of the movement.

  Indomitable

  In Thomas Clarkson: Friend of Slaves, biographer Earl Leslie Griggs writes that this man on fire was “second to no one in indefatigable energy and unremitting devotion to an ideal” and that “he inspired in his friends confidence in his ability to lead them.”

  In a diary entry for Wednesday, June 27, 1787, Clarkson tells of the moment he arrived in the slave ship port of Bristol. Genuine misgivings about his work gave way to a steely determination that served him well in the battles ahead:

  I began now to tremble, for the first time, at the arduous task I had undertaken, of attempting to subvert one of the branches of the commerce of the great place which was then before me. I began to think of the host of people I should have to encounter in it. I anticipated much persecution in it also; and I questioned whether I should even get out of it alive. But in journeying on, I became more calm and composed. My spirits began to return. In these latter moments I considered my first feelings as useful, inasmuch as they impressed upon me the necessity of extraordinary courage, and activity, and perseverance, and of watchfulness, also, over my own conduct, that I might not throw any stain upon the cause I had undertaken. When, therefore, I entered the city, I entered it with an undaunted spirit, determining that no labour should make me shrink, nor danger, nor even persecution, deter me from my pursuit.

  Clarkson translated his prizewinning essay from Latin into English and supervised its distribution by the tens of thousands. He helped organize boycotts of the West Indian rum and sugar produced with slave labor. He gave lectures and sermons. He wrote many articles and at least two books. He helped British seamen escape from the slave-carrying ships they were pressed into against their will. He filed murder charges in courts to draw attention to the actions of fiendish slave ship captains. He convinced witnesses to speak. He gathered testimony, rustled up petition signatures by the thousands, and smuggled evidence from under the noses of his adversaries. His life was threatened many times, and once, surrounded by an angry mob, he very nearly lost it.

  The long hours, the often thankless and seemingly fruitless forays to uncover evidence, the risks and the costs that came in every form, the many low points when it looked like the world was against him—all of that went on and on, year after year. None of it ever made the smallest dent in Thomas Clarkson’s iron will.

  When Britain went to war with France in 1793, Clarkson and his committee saw their early progress in winning converts evaporate. The opposition in Parliament argued that abandoning the slave trade would hand a lucrative business to a formidable enemy. And the public saw winning the war as more important than freeing people of another color and another continent.

  The indomitable Clarkson did not relent. He, Wilberforce, and the committee kept spreading the message.

  At Clarkson’s instigation, a diagram of a slave ship became a tool in the debate. Depicting hundreds of slaves crammed like sardines in horrible conditions, the diagram proved pivotal in winning over the public.

  Clarkson’s committee also enlisted the help of famed pottery maker Josiah Wedgwood in producing a famous medallion with the image of a kneeling, chained black man, uttering the words, “Am I not a man and a brother?”

  Clarkson’s imprint was on almost everything the committee did. It even produced one of the first newsletters and, as Hochschild suggests, one of the first direct-mail campaigns for the purpose of raising money.

  The effort finally paid off. The tide of public opinion swung to the abolitionists’ side. Parliament outlawed the slave trade when it approved one of Wilberforce’s bills in 1807, some twenty years after Clarkson formed his committee. After twenty-six more years of laborious effort by Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others, Britain passed legislation in 1833 to free all slaves within its realm. The law took effect in 1834, forty-nine years after Clarkson’s epiphany on a country road. It became a model for peaceful emancipation everywhere. Wilberforce died shortly afterward, but his friend devoted much of the next thirteen years to the movement to end slavery and improve the lot of former slaves worldwide.

  “Courageous, Visionary, Disciplined, Self-Sacrificing”

  Clarkson died at the age of eighty-six, in 1846. He had been the last living member of the committee that gathered at that London print shop back in 1787. Hochschild tells us that the throngs of mourners “included many Quakers, and the men among them made an almost unprecedented departure from sacred custom” by removing their hats.

  In Thomas Clarkson: A Biography, Ellen Gibson Wilson summed up her subject well when she wrote, “Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) was almost too good to be true—courageous, visionary, disciplined, self-sacrificing—a man who gave a long life almost entirely to the service of people he never met in lands he never saw.” With good reason the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Clarkson a “moral steam engine” and “the Giant with one idea.”

  As a former university professor, I’ve read thousands of students’ essays. Occasionally, the process of researching and writing influenced a student’s future pursuits. But of all the student essays ever written, I doubt that any had as profound an effect on its author and on the world as the one that Clarkson penned 230 years ago. It struck a spark, which lit a beacon, which saved millions of lives and changed the world.

  Lessons from Thomas Clarkson

  Fight for what is right, even against long odds: In the 1780s it would have seemed fanciful to believe that the greatest slave-trading power of the day, Britain, could be brought to its moral senses and abolish an institution that was widely accepted around the world. But to Thomas Clarkson, the obstacles to abolition didn’t matter. He set himself to accomplish what was right.

  Never doubt the power of perseverance: Clarkson’s story illustrates how much just a few people can accomplish when they are armed with passion, a righteous cause, and a willingness to persevere no matter the threats and setbacks. As Clarkson wrote, “extraordinary courage, and activity, and perseverance” are necessary to see through a just cause.

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  Frédéric Bastiat

  Liberty’s Masterful Storyteller

  “Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it,” wrote novelist N. D. Wilson. “The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself.”

  In the last six of his forty-nine years of life, brought to an untimely end by tuberculosis, the classical liberal Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat produced an astonishing volume of books and essays in defense of free markets and free people. He towered over the smug intellectuals and politicians of his native France, most of whom were mired in the country’s ancient traditions of statist central planning of the economy.

  “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws,” Bastiat reasoned. “On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

  Bastiat also gave us perhaps the world’s most succinct description of the redistributive apparatus of government: “The State is the great fiction through which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else.”

  If a posthumous Nobel Prize were to be awarded to just one person for crystal-clear writing and masterful storytelling in econo
mics, no one would be more deserving of it than Bastiat. His selfless courage in expressing timeless, irrefutable truths while almost all around him wallowed in fallacy constitutes a great moral victory indeed.

  Spying the Statist Threat

  Bastiat was born in 1801 in the port village of Bayonne in southern France. He was just fourteen when the French defeat at Waterloo dispatched the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte and put the old monarchy back in place.

  As a teenager, Bastiat worked for his family’s export business, where he experienced firsthand the absurdity of protectionism and other wealth-stifling trade restrictions. In The Triumph of Liberty, Jim Powell writes: “He observed, for instance, how the 1816 French tariff throttled trade, resulting in empty warehouses and idle docks around Bayonne. In 1819, the government put steep tariffs on corn, meat, and sugar, making poor people suffer from needlessly high food prices. High tariffs on English and Swiss cotton led to widespread smuggling.”

  Inheriting the estate of his grandfather upon the elder’s death in 1825, Bastiat could afford to devote considerable time to thought, reading, and debate. In the early 1830s he was elected to two minor public positions: justice of the peace and county assemblyman.

  Bastiat published his first article in 1844. He was forty-three years old, but he understood the economic world better than almost anyone twice his age, and he knew better than anybody how to explain it with an economy of words. He employed everyday language and a conversational tone, and he was devastatingly to the point. To this day, nobody can read Bastiat and wonder, “Now what was that all about?”