As an avowedly liberal newspaper committed to economic and individual freedom, the Manchester Guardian condemned slavery and supported its abolition. But it also excused enslavers and supported payment to compensate them for their loss of human “property”.
“The most important object of the statesman”, the paper announced in an 1828 editorial summarising its ideology, was “whatever is calculated … to aid the creation of wealth”. The paper vocally backed the campaign against slavery in the British empire – going so far as to encourage readers to sign petitions to this effect. But its stance on the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act insisted on the “justice” of a £20m payment to enslavers – which would be worth billions today – as well as the requirement that enslaved Africans served additional years in bondage as apprentices to their erstwhile owners.
The paper’s editorial columns, which expressed the views of its proprietor – and his ties to the cotton trade – deplored the existence of slavery in the United States, but disapproved of any radical prescriptions to end it. The Manchester Guardian did not support slavery in the American south, but regarded the civil war as an effort by the overbearing north to prevent the independence of the Confederate states – a war whose true motive, it claimed, had nothing to do with slavery. Above all, the paper resented and disputed the implication that any enemy of slavery should give unqualified support to the northern side.
In the eyes of the editors, slavery was above all an economic error. They believed that slavery would expire when forced into economic competition with the products of free labour, whether in British colonial territories or the United States.
ON BRITISH SLAVERY AND ABOLITION
The paper’s first decade saw the revival of the movement that had successfully won the abolition of the slave trade. Most publications in Britain were hostile to the campaign for emancipation, but Manchester was a centre of abolitionism, and the Guardian played a significant role through its persistent advocacy. Slavery was regularly covered by the paper through reports of Commons debates and antislavery lectures, publishing letters (similar to comment pieces) from abolitionists, articles from other papers and the occasional editorial. There was broad support from the paper for the antislavery campaigners, albeit with some reservations about tactics.
On 3 May 1823, the editorial column included a brutal account of the lives of the enslaved, followed by a call for “our fellow townsmen to lose no time in recording their detestation of slavery, by signing the petition against it” – a copy of which was available at the Guardian’s own offices. A week later, the paper reported that the petition “measures 129 feet in length, and contained 29,664 signatures”.
A few months later, on 15 November, a lengthy piece on the the evils of slavery from a Liverpool merchant appeared, along with a detailed graphic of the world showing areas of slavery. Meanwhile, a republished article from the Edinburgh Review on 4 September 1824 about slavery in America described slavery as a “national disgrace” and predicted a bloody war if not corrected.
A few days later, in response to a riot in Jamaica, the paper said: “Slavery thus brings its own curse, even to those who appear to profit by it; and the poor negro is, in some degree, revenged for the wrongs he has endured, but the terror and alarm which his slightest movements instil into the breasts of those who hold him in bondage.”
The editors often repeated the claim that free labour was more productive than slave labour – and therefore believed that slavery would come to an end around the world if the products of slave states, such as sugar, were forced into open competition with free states. “The great obstacle to the cheap growth of West India produce is, unquestionably, to be found in its being exclusively raised by the labour of slaves,” the paper wrote in May 1823. “The value of the labour performed in a given time by any number of slaves is much less than would be derived from a like number of freemen. The former have none of those incentives to exertion which perpetually invigorate the latter.”
In an 1827 editorial, the paper condemned the “odious West Indies monopoly” of the planters, adding: “The sole effect of it is to keep up the present horrible system of slavery in the colonies.”
The paper strongly backed the Slavery Abolition Act as it moved through the Commons in 1833, including support for the large sum of compensation to be awarded to enslavers, and the requirement that enslaved people serve for at least four years as apprentices before obtaining their full freedom.
An editorial from 15 June 1833 strongly defended the payment of compensation: “Nevertheless we are convinced, that no plan for the abolition of slavery could have been worthy to be proposed by the government, or adopted by the legislature, of Great Britain, which was not based on the great principles of justice to the planter as well as to the slave – none other could have satisfied the feelings of right-minded people of this country.”
It added: “The guilt of slavery attaches far more to the nation which has introduced, legalised, and supported it, than to the planters, many of who have, without any fault – indeed without any choice on their parts, become connected with the system. It is a national crime, and as such the pecuniary sacrifice which its destruction involves should be national also.”
This view was repeated on 10 August 1833, when, while talking about “the removal of a monstrous evil”, the paper stated: “We rejoice, that government has had the firmness and the honesty not to make this action [the abolition bill] the occasion of inflicting a deliberate wrong on a class of the community who were on every account entitled to great sympathy and consideration. The compensation to the West Indies proprietors has been rightly fixed on a liberal scale. Whether it may be somewhat more than strict justice requires is a point that we do not care nicely to investigate, because we consider that they are well entitled to the turn. Slavery was a national crime, and it is meet that the full sacrifice requisite for expiating it should be borne by the nation.”
An editorial on 4 July 1838, praised the success of the apprenticeship requirement, and contrasted the paper’s position with the more radical prescriptions of abolitionists who had opposed both compensation for enslavers and apprenticeship: “The most recent accounts from the West Indies afford strong grounds for hope, that the colonial legislatures … will themselves take means for putting an end to the negro apprenticeship system on the 1st of August next.
“We need scarcely repeat our conviction of the superiority of this mode of settling the question, over that proposed to parliament by the abolitionists … The termination of the apprenticeship will now, there is every likelihood, be brought about without any breach of the national honour, and under circumstances far more likely to render satisfactory the future relations between the white and the coloured population, than if it had been forced upon the planters by the British legislature.”
ON AMERICAN SLAVERY
Stories about slavery in America appeared regularly in the paper, often in the form of reprinted dispatches from American newspapers. Much of this coverage concerned the simmering conflict between forces for and against slavery in the United States. A typical dispatch, from 1836, reported that “the popular hatred against the slavery abolitionists, in the United States, continues to be exhibited occasionally in acts of violence. On the night of the 30th of July, the printing office of an abolition paper, the Philanthropist, published in Cincinnati [Ohio] was sacked; and the editor, Mr Birney, a lawyer and an accomplished gentleman, narrowly escaped with his life. Several negro-houses were torn down; and no attempt was made to arrest the mob until they threatened a building in which two of the city banks carried on their business – then the mayor interfered, and order was re-established”.
A number of American abolitionists, including formerly enslaved Black people, visited Britain in the 1840s and 1850s to deliver lectures on slavery, racism and lynching in the United States. As Manchester was a growing industrialising city with a dependence on slave-picked cotton, it was an obvious destination for many of these visitors, and the Guardian regularly advertised, and then often summarised, their public lectures.
One such visitor was Frederick Douglass, who spent 19 months in Britain and Ireland beginning in 1845, and delivered more than 300 lectures. (After his departure, the paper noted that his “eloquence, modest bearing, high character, and amiable disposition have won him ‘troops of friends’ in this country”.) The Guardian printed several short extracts from his autobiography in November and December 1845, as well as several reports from public meetings that Douglass addressed, in Manchester as well as Rochdale and Oldham. A very long account from an antislavery meeting in Chorlton-on-Medlock in 1847 reported that Douglass “said he was most happy to see so many assembled to hear the wrongs of his fellow countrymen set forth and was heartily glad that in Manchester such a congregation should assemble for the purpose of hearing the question of slavery discussed”.
The paper’s editorials consistently condemned the persistence of slavery in America, but complained that abolitionists underestimated the complexity of eliminating it – and bristled at any suggestion that the paper’s position was practically equivalent to approval.
After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which authorised federal authorities to seize and return those who had escaped their enslavement, and required officials and citizens in “free” states to assist in the recapture of the formerly enslaved, the Guardian’s editorial noted the many protests against “the operation of this obnoxious measure”, which “seems destined to trouble the history of the United States far more seriously than its authors can be supposed to have foreseen”.
But it reserved the most severe criticism for “the tone which many of our English contemporaries adopt … the indignation which they lavish upon [its] authors”.
This outrage was misplaced, the editorial argued, because “the evil lies more deeply than they imagine” – the controversial act was “the natural corollary of the existing law on slavery”. Though it was “lamentable” that “in certain states, coloured men are as legal property as cattle”, the law must enforce property rights or else risk “the very fabric of society”.
“If men have property, they must be protected in its possession … It is utterly impossible that communities bound together … can live side by side in peace, while one half of them are weekly and hourly purloining the legal property of the others.”
“It must not be supposed that we are defending slavery,” the editorial concluded. “Far from it; but we recognise its existence and the complications it has produced.”
When the United States supreme court issued its infamous “Dred Scott” decision in 1857, ruling that enslaved Africans could never obtain the rights of citizenship and striking down the “Missouri compromise” that had limited the expansion of slavery into new states, the Manchester Guardian’s editorial correctly observed that civil war was likely: “On the monstrous immorality of the decision pronounced in the case of Dred Scott we have commented more than once. It solemnly commits the United States to the doctrine, of unparalleled injustice and barbarity, that persons born in the country, and fulfilling all the conditions of citizenship prescribed by law, are disqualified for civil privileges by reason of an African descent.
“In a political point of view, however, there is something more remarkable than the cruelty of this judgment, and that is the hopelessness of altering the infamous state of things which it proclaims … In any other part of the world the advent of this conflict … might safely be said to involve a certainty of civil war.”
ON THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
In the 1857 editorial on Dred Scott, the paper argued that this irreconcilable conflict had been caused by “the outrageous extreme to which the slaveholding interest” had pushed its cause in reaction to the “opportunity” created by the “fanaticism of the northern abolitionists”. When war began, the paper took the view that it should not be expected to condemn the southern states for seeking self-determination, nor to support the north’s war to prevent it.
In the paper’s account, the Union had kept the south in a backwards state for its own advantage – a condition that a famous editorial of May 1861 crudely likened to slavery itself: “The north supplied the south with everything upon which skilled labour had been employed, and the south paid for it in the slave-grown products of the soil. To the north this arrangement has secured a great home market for every kind of commodity that New England could produce, and for every article of merchandise that New York could import.
“A highly protective American tariff has enhanced the price of everything received by the south in exchange for its raw products and, while the population of the north has increased enormously, and every branch of northern industry has been developed, the population of the south has remained unprogressive and planters, tradesmen and the population generally are as poor, as indolent, and as extravagant as they have always been.
“To the south the bonds of the union have been as burdensome as the fetters to the negro, whom the south has kept in hopeless bondage.”
The paper argued that this economic arrangement effectively ensured the continuation of slavery; an independent American south would eventually eliminate it on its own, just as the north had once done: “When the war of the revolution severed the connection between England and the colonies, Massachusetts and New York were the South Carolina and Georgia of the time; and as the colonists began to supply themselves with manufactured articles England had before supplied, slavery in New England gradually expired.”
The British ruling class and its press were almost unanimous in their support of the south and distaste for the north, but the Guardian took particular umbrage at the suggestion its own position was in any way a compromise with slavery.
The paper’s tortured stance on the civil war was on full display in a long editorial of 2 November 1861, written in response to a letter published in the Times by Theodore S Fay, an American diplomat stationed in Europe. The editorial began with mocking praise: “When the rebellious southern states of America have been conquered and the Union restored, one of the wants of the hour will be to find a suitable reward for every one who has helped with the sword, with the voice, or with the pen, to promote the winning cause.”
Fay, the editorial continued, had exceeded even Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, “in those particularities of style imparted by a real, or professed, belief in one’s own exclusive claim to divine favour and protection … We have not seen anything like it for a combination of unctuousness and length.”
The Guardian position on the war asserted the evils of slavery and declared them obvious. But there was considerable scepticism that ending slavery was the real motive of the north, and scepticism as well that this was a just course of action even if it were the war’s true end. Editorials on the subject often displayed a simmering English liberal resentment at the suggestion, especially from impertinent and naive Americans, that opposition to slavery required full support for northern war aims, or the implication that anyone who did not fully support the north must therefore be in favour of slavery.
The 2 November 1861 editorial summarised the “abolitionist” view as such: “In the argument, if not the sincere belief, of [Fay], one circumstance colours the whole contest. On the part of the north, it is a war waged against slavery. The sin and the shame in our conduct, which will justly bring down on us national destruction, is our refusal to see the entire question in this simple light, and to act accordingly … No mixed feelings, no compromise, no halving between two opinions, is possible. Whosoever is not with the abolitionist is against him, and the abolitionists of the United States have always relied on being supported by the mother country whenever they should resolve to resort to force for the purpose of casing out the crying iniquity of their land.
“We should like to know on what part of our conduct, in recent time at any rate, this expectation was founded. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is as clear as Mr Fay would have it to be that the object with which the northerners are carrying on hostilities is the extermination of negro slavery.
“There are a great many things in the world which we do not like, but which we do not go to war to put down. Probably, the institution which, as a nation, we have the strongest hereditary antipathy to, is the Roman Catholic church, but there is not much probability of our inverting the conduct of the kings of Spain, and endeavouring to compel weaker peoples to renounce it at the point of the sword.”
Finally, citing British involvement in the Crimean war to protect the Ottoman empire from Russian incursions, the editorial likens the freedom of the Turks to pursue “a debased religion” to the freedom of the southern US to continue “an unjust an impolitic system of labour”, also known as slavery.
“The last time we went to war, it was to support a Mahometan nation [the Ottoman empire] in maintaining their position in Europe. We certainly do not think Mahometanism preferable to the Greek [Orthodox] form of Christianity. There are not many of us who do not consider it a moral and political abomination. But we uphold, as superior to our personal likings and dislikings, the right of a people, within very wide limits, to have what institutions they please, and we do not think that either a debased religion, or an unjust and impolitic system of labour constitutes an exception to the general rule.”
• A special Cotton Capital magazine will be published on Saturday 1 April. To order copies from the Guardian bookshop visit guardianbookshop.com/cotton-capital
