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 t
was a glorious Monday at the Wall Street Journal. Dorothy
Rabinowitz, who truly is a national treasure, finally
won a Pulitzer, in part for slicing up child "welfare" cranks who
destroy lives by wielding false charges of child abuse. The morning
her Pulitzer announcement was made, Robert Bartley published a nice
piece reminding us of the seismic role that Christianity has played
in the moral and intellectual life of the Free World. Good news often
comes in threes, so some of us sat around waiting for word that Al
Hunt had finally wised up and joined a militia, but no such luck.
(In fact, the day got even more glorious for the Journal —
Ian Johnson of its Beijing bureau won a Pulitzer in international
reporting for a series of articles on Chinese persecution of the Falun
Gong religious movement.)
As it happened, however, Bartley's excellent piece was brought back
to mind late Monday when a terrible news story came in: Authorities
announced the possibility that 250 child slaves had been tossed
into the sea off West Africa. The ship bearing these children, some
as young as ten, was in danger of being seized by authorities and
so its crew, it is feared, may have gotten rid of the evidence in
the most horrific way possible: Feeding the children to the sharks.
Bartley's piece came to mind because of a similar atrocity that
took place in the later eighteenth century, an incident that drew
a sharp reaction from Christians active in the anti-slavery movement.
That incident, known as the Zong slaughter, occurred in 1781 after
the slave ship Zong left Sao Tome with 442 slaves on board. The
ship lost its way and as a result food and water grew short. The
man in charge, Luke Collingwood, made a cold calculation: If the
slaves died on board, their loss would come from the hides of those
who owned them. But if their presence on board the stricken ship
could be said to threaten the crew, the Africans could be thrown
into the ocean and charged off to the insurance company.
The result: 133 slaves were cast overboard. This greatly upset a
devout Christian named Granville Sharp, who believed it was morally
wrong to drown 133 Africans for insurance purposes. But as the great
historian Hugh Thomas reminds us, Sharp was out of step with the
powers that be. The Court of the Admiralty's Solicitor General,
John Lee, dismissed Sharp's murder charge as a "pretended appeal
to humanity" and further held that a master could drown slaves without
"a surmise of impropriety."
This is a harsh attitude to our ears, because we forget that blacks
were truly held to be subhuman. The best friends they had were Christian
activists who, it should be pointed out, did not share the slaves'
religion and in fact rarely if ever set eyes on a slave. For their
troubles, these Christians were dismissed as zealots and ignorant
meddlers. As Thomas informs us, intellectuals such as David Hume
readily agreed that blacks were "naturally inferior to whites" and
once commented that a Jamaican black hailed for his brains was "admired
for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few
words plainly." Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and even Mr. Rights
of Man himself, John Locke, sung the same tune. Locke wrote a provision
for slavery into his draft of the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina
— and invested in the Royal Africa Company, which held the
British monopoly of the African slave trade.
This was, in modern terms, a very polarized debate, and the Christians
fought not only on behalf of slaves, but also against the mindset
that made their bondage acceptable. Historian David Brion Davis
notes that the crude racism of Hume and his pals "enabled orthodox
Christians to make defense of the Africans a defense of religion
itself. John Wesley called Hume "the most insolent despiser of truth
and virtue who ever appeared in the world." Other anti-slavery leaders,
including Sharp, "repeatedly identified the theory of racial inferiority
with Hume, Voltaire, and materialistic philosophy in general; they
explicitly presented their attacks on slavery as a vindication of
Christianity, moral accountability, and the unity of mankind."
Meanwhile, the sense of compassion toward the sufferers was expressed
by John Wesley in his Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774): "Do you
never feel another's pain?" he rhetorically asked slavers. "Have
you no sympathy? …When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving
breasts, or the bleeding sides or tortured limbs of your fellow
beings, were you a stone or a brute?"
Methodist preacher George Whitfield asked whites to consider the
children of slaves as equal to their own. "Think your children are
in any way better by nature than the poor negroes? No! In no wise!
Blacks are just as much, and no more, conceived and born in sin,
as white men are; and both, if born and bred up here, I am persuaded,
are naturally capable of the same improvement."
The anti-slavery crusaders took on two huge adversaries: monied
interests and the intellectual climate of the day — which,
one would think, would make them perfect heroes for modern cinema.
Yet as Robert Bartley points out, the religious fervor of Lewis
Tappan — a New York industrialist deeply committed to the anti-slavery
cause — was ironed out of his character (as portrayed in Steven
Spielberg's Amistad). As it happens, Spielberg makes much
of his own enlightened views, noisily leaving the Boy Scouts's board
the other day over their policies about openly gay scoutmasters.
Yet when he and other screen moguls scour history for pedestal material,
they uniformly overlook the heroes of the greatest human-rights
campaign in our history — or they strip these characters of
their Christian beliefs, which, as it happens, were the very inspiration
for their inspirational acts. To the untrained eye, this looks a
great deal like prejudice — prejudice that is as ugly and debilitating
in our day as in all days past.
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