Education
Thomas Clarkson also attended the grammar school, and in 1775 was sent to St Paul's School, London; in 1779 he was admitted as an exhibitioner to his father's college, St John's, Cambridge. He was raised to a scholarship the next year, and with these awards, or private money, was described as ‘rather a gay man’, keeping two horses. It is unlikely that he was really frivolous: he was a devout, assiduous soul, taking after his father, a notably conscientious parson. He seems to have had no sense of humour at all, though he liked others to be merry. Physically, he was tall and heavy, with a strong constitution. His brother John, by contrast, was small and lively, but was as strongly religious, and shared to the full his brother's strong human sympathy: he detested the navy's use of flogging as a punishment.
Thomas Clarkson graduated BA in 1783 with a solid rather than a distinguished degree in mathematics, but remained at Cambridge to prepare himself to be a clergyman. He was decidedly ambitious; after winning a university Latin essay prize in 1784 he resolved to win it again the following year. The essay topic for 1785, set by the vice-chancellor, Peter Peckard, was ‘Anne liceat invitos in servitutem’ (‘Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?’). Clarkson once more engaged in what he thought of as ‘an innocent contest for literary honour’ (Clarkson,
History, vol. 1); but it changed his life.
Clarkson's essay
Clarkson took the title to be an invitation to consider the Atlantic slave trade, and read up the subject as well as he could in the few weeks available to him, beginning with Anthony Benezet's
Historical Account of Guinea. What he discovered appalled him and oppressed him, both as a man and a Christian. He won the prize, but that now seemed a little thing, and after reading the essay in the Senate House in June he rode off to London, meditating the horrors of slavery all the way. While resting his horse at Wadesmill, Hertfordshire, he underwent a moment of conversion: ‘a thought came into my mind, 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). In later years a small monument was erected to mark the spot. After twelve months of understandable hesitation, he accepted the call and gave up all idea of a church career, though he had already taken deacon's orders.
A Wisbech Quaker introduced Clarkson to the anti-slavery movement which, unknown to him, had been gathering strength for some years among Quakers in both Britain and America. They strengthened his sense of vocation and helped to publish a translation of his essay: it was brought out by the Quaker bookseller James Phillips (who became a close associate) in 1786 as
An Essay of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African. This was the first work in what was to be a lifetime of pamphleteering: in all he published twenty-three works, most of which dealt with slavery. The
Essay had a great success and led to the creation of an informal committee to lobby MPs; its most important achievement was the recruiting of William Wilberforce, in which Clarkson played the chief part. Wilberforce was already sympathetic to anti-slavery; by the spring of 1787 he had committed himself to laying the question before the House of Commons, and on 22 May the committee for effecting the abolition of the slave trade was set up formally, with the object of giving Wilberforce every possible assistance. All the original twelve members were Quakers, except for Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and Philip Sansom. They voted the slave trade to be unjust and impolitic, and these two themes were to be constant in Clarkson's work until abolition was achieved.
The French Revolution
Thomas Clarkson's other affairs had not been going well. Year after year Wilberforce had introduced his motion for abolition in the House of Commons, and Clarkson had ridden up and down the land. Between them they had generated a national movement, but parliament never passed the bill, and the outbreak of the war with revolutionary France transformed the national temper. Clarkson's sympathy with the revolution soon became notorious (he had spent five months in Paris in 1789–90 trying to persuade the national assembly to abolish the slave trade) and brought hostility on the cause. His health was collapsing, and he had spent more than half his small capital in the cause of abolition. He decided to retire from the work; led by Wilberforce his friends raised £1500 in 1794 to compensate him for his disbursements.
John Clarkson's later life
On 24 April 1793, the day after his dismissal as governor of Sierra Leone, John Clarkson married Susan Lee (1769–1837), daughter of a successful banker. He became the manager of the Whitbreads' huge chalk and lime quarry at Purfleet in Essex, prospered, and in 1820 himself became a banker at Woodbridge, Suffolk. There were ten children of the marriage, but six predeceased their father, and only through one daughter, Sophia Maynard, did the Clarkson line survive into the twentieth century. His daughter Mary married Thomas Clarkson's son. John continued to take a keen if unobtrusive interest in Sierra Leone, and departed from the pursuits of his youth so far as to become in 1816 one of the principal founders of the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace. He never resumed an active part in the anti-slavery movement: nevertheless, he was having an abolitionist article read to him when he died of heart disease on 2 April 1828: his last words were, ‘It is dreadful to think, after my brother and his friends have been labouring for forty years, that such things should still be.’ He was buried in St Mary's churchyard, Woodbridge.
Thomas Clarkson's second campaign
Thomas Clarkson's retirement was transitory. He used it to re-establish his health, to buy for £1000 a small estate at
Eusemere on Ullswater, to take up farming, and to marry Catherine Buck (1772–1856) of Bury St Edmunds in 1796. She shared Clarkson's radicalism (they had got to know each other through anti-slavery work) but her real value to her husband lay in her charm and intelligence, which captivated Crabb Robinson, her townsman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. She became one of Dorothy Wordsworth's closest friends, and Wordsworth admired Thomas so much that on the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 he addressed a sonnet to him (‘Clarkson! it was an obstinate hill to climb’). Before then the Clarksons' only child, Thomas, was born, and they had returned to the south, as Catherine's health was thought to need a warmer climate. They lived at Bury St Edmunds from 1806 to 1816, and thereafter at Playford Hall, halfway between Ipswich and Woodbridge.
Clarkson's partnership with the Quakers strongly affected his religion. By 1795 he had renounced his Anglican orders, though he never submitted to the discipline of the Society of Friends. In 1815 he told Tsar Alexander I that he was ‘nine parts in ten of their way of thinking’ (Wilson,
Thomas Clarkson, 145). In 1806 he published
A Portraiture of Quakerism, which enjoyed great success, and in 1813 a biography of William Penn, which did not: it was the first scholarly treatment of its subject, but Clarkson had let the seventeenth century infect his style with its prolixity.
Final assessment
If it is now conceded that abolition would have been impossible but for the forces at work in the age of revolution, it is also understood that the abolitionists were themselves one of those forces, and without Wilberforce, Clarkson, and the rest slavery would not have been ended so soon and so completely, and perhaps not so peacefully. But nor should it be forgotten that British abolitionism was part of the great imperialist impulse of the age, as the story of Sierra Leone demonstrates.
HUGH BROGAN
