Abolition of Slavery : at Liverpool Cathedral, by the Rt Rev James Jones
24 March 2007
Tomorrow 200 years ago King George III gave the Royal Assent to the Bill to abolish the Slave Trade.
When news came through to Wilberforce he asked his cousin “Well Henry, what shall we abolish next?” Henry Thornton who was an earnest Evangelical said “The Lottery”! (I thought the Culture Minister David Lammy would be interested in that historical detail!)
But when news of the Act reached Liverpool the Slave Ship sailors supported by one of the local MP’s got two young black men to walk the streets with placards promising to bring back the Trade.
This is a city haunted by voices of protest.
Those who protested at the Abolition and those who protested at the Trade itself.
It was a city divided by the Trade in Slaves.
Long before it became a city divided by religion, it was a city divided by Slavery.
Over the years we’ve seen and experienced in our own souls the healing of religious division and here today and down by the River Mersey we will take yet another step in the healing of racial division that is one of the legacies of the enslaving of black people.
Much of my ministry has been in Bristol, Hull and Liverpool. And here the Anglican Diocese is linked with Virginia in America and Akure in Nigeria in a deliberate replicating of the Slave Trade Triangle.
I shall never forget in Bristol the leader of one of our Black-led churches saying how when 60 years ago he came to Britain from the West Indies his mother had told him “Son …. first find a church so you can thank God for a safe journey, second find a Post Office so you can write and tell me you got there safely and third find yourself a friend”. He paused and said wistfully … “I eventually found the Post Office!”
Even though our sisters and brothers came as Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists and Catholics they found the church Race Resistant.
What were the roots of our hostility?
The more I have read, immersed and baptised myself in the history of slavery the more I believe our racism is rooted in the dehumanising treatment of black people by white people.
John Newton the Christian convert who commanded a slave ship before becoming Surveyor of the Tides in Liverpool before then becoming a priest in the Church of England was the only Slave Ship Captain to give evidence to the Parliamentary Commission.
I’m going to read part of the evidence. It’s vile and offensive. It exposes the attitudes of white slave owners to black slaves.
“Two methods of his punishment of the poor slaves, whom he sentenced to die, I cannot easily forget. Some of them he jointed; that is, he cut off, with an axe, first their feet, then their legs below the knee, then their thighs; in like manner their hands, then their arms below the elbow, and then at the shoulders, till their bodies remained only like the trunk of a tree when all the branches are lopped away; and, lastly, their heads. And, as he proceeded in his operation, he threw the reeking members and heads in the midst of the bulk of the trembling slaves, who were chained upon the main-deck. He tied round the upper parts of the hands of others a small platted rope, which the sailors call a point, so loosely as to admit a short lever; by continuing to turn the lever, he drew the point more and more tight, till at length he forced their eyes to stand out of their heads; and when he had satiated himself with their torments, he cut their heads off…..”
And in case we should try and comfort ourselves with the fact that this was 200 years ago we need to know that in this very Cathedral 18 months ago we gathered to bid farewell to Anthony Walker whose murder also with an axe was driven by the same brutal racism.
That’s why we need to repent and keep on repenting, setting our face against the racism that both dehumanises and destroys others.
Much is being made of the fact that John Newton commanded a slave ship after his conversion to Jesus Christ.
I too have pondered this long and hard. When he repented he confessed NOT to the way he had enslaved people BUT how he had blasphemed God’s name. And how could he have carried on studying the Bible while literally feet beneath children, men and women were in barbaric chains?
There were several reasons but here is one. His conscience had been seared, cauterised, desensitised, numbed by the brutality of slavery. He later bore witness to it:
“I know of no method of getting money, not even that of robbing for it upon the highway, which has so direct a tendency to …. rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition, and to harden it, like steel”.
My friends, the resurrection of a conscience that has died, suffocated by so many scenes of brutality, requires more than a shipwreck to bring it back from the dead.
But eventually by God’s grace,
by God’s amazing grace
he who was BLIND began to SEE
To see what he had done
To see how lost and how blind he had become
To see who it was that he had brutalised
In brutalising the slaves
he had brutalised himself
and he had brutalised someone else!
The one who had said “In as much you do it to the least …. you do
it to ME”.
And according to the Gospel, to the Scriptures
he had enslaved Jesus
he had traded Jesus
he had sold Jesus
he had betrayed Jesus
He confessed and repented of blasphemy.
He was right.
More right than he realised.
In doing this to the slaves and therefore doing it to Jesus he had indeed blasphemed and desecrated the image of God.
But God had mercy on him and may God have mercy on us too.
The Rt. Rev. James Jones
Bishop of Liverpool