Abolition

The South and transatlantic slavery

As a professional historian who has worked on this subject for many years, I’m often asked about our region’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade.

Quite rightly, we tend to associate the slave trade with major centres like Bristol, Liverpool, and London.

This is true, but small ports in the South also played a part. Did you know that eight slave ships left Portsmouth between 1699 and 1711?

Others, admittedly only a few, departed from Cowes, Poole, and Weymouth.

Throughout the period of the transatlantic slave trade, British and French slave vessels also returned to South coast ports, including Southampton, Cowes, and Portsmouth, although here again the total numbers involved were very small.

More significant in many ways than our involvement in the slave trade was the South’s trading links with Britain’s slave colonies in the West Indies and North America.

Rice is a good example. Did you know that during the eighteenth century Cowes was at the centre of the South Carolina rice trade? In fact, as many as 80 rice ships annually passed through Cowes, where the rice was unloaded, washed, and then sent on its way to Northern Europe.

West Indies links

There was also a significant trade with the West Indies in sugar and timber. During the eighteenth century Southampton had its own sugarhouse, which could be found within the city walls close to Gloucester Square.

Many West Indians also settled in the region. A good example is Anthony Langley Swymmer of Longwood House, near Winchester. Another is Edward Morant, who bought property in Brockenhurst. Some of these men also went into politics.

Did you know that four of the eight MPs who represented Southampton between 1754 and 1790 had West Indian connections, among them Henry Dawkins, who left Jamaica in 1759?

Some Wiltshire and Dorset MPs also had West Indian connections, either through marriage or through trade and business interests. Some were absentee planters.

Occasionally, West Indians would also bring into the country with them their slaves and ‘servants’. Occasionally, too, Royal Navy officers would return from the Caribbean with African servants.

We will never know how large the black presence in the South actually was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but evidence from church records, and advertisements in local newspapers, suggests that the numbers may not have been insignificant.

Recovering these black ‘voices’ is a crucial part of the 2007 anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.

Fighting for abolition

This brings me to a final point. The South was never a major centre of abolitionist activity, certainly when compared with Manchester, Sheffield or Birmingham.

Nevertheless, many people in the region were abolitionists, or, at least, had abolitionist sympathies.

Did you know that in 1792 Southampton, Portsmouth, Poole, and Dorchester all petitioned the House of Commons against the slave trade, as did Whitchurch, Beaminster, Sherborne, Newbury, and Alton?

There were even petitions from smaller villages like Cerne Abbas and Sturminster Newton.

In this way, hundreds of ordinary people in the South made their concerns known, joining their voices with activists in the Midlands and the industrial North.

So, there is a lot to remember and commemorate here.

As I say, the South was never heavily involved in the slave trade, but throughout the region there were points of contact that connected us with the Atlantic economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It is to be hoped that 2007 will enable us to document these points of contact, even if some of them may make for uncomfortable reading.

Dr John Oldfield lectures in the history of slavery and its abolition; and black-white relations in modern American history.