In August 1671 the 47-year old George Fox took ship for Barbados. He was a tough and inspired itinerant preacher who had spent most of the last 30 years walking around England, clad in leather breaches, preaching the rejection of the Anglican church and the primacy of individual spiritual revelation. Much of the time England was in the throes of a Civil War which ended in Cromwell’s Puritan-inspired commonwealth. Even so, George Fox’s militant rejection of all existing forms of organized religion and the social priorities which went with it regularly landed him and his followers in trouble. Fox himself had been thrown into jail at least eight times, and indeed, shortly before embarking for Barbados, his wife had just been released from prison.
His lifelong pilgrimage though, had borne fruit, as his followers were organized into the Society of Friends, the Quakers. The Quakers turned out to be the most consequential and lasting English contribution to the religious ructions of the 17th century. George was travelling to Barbados, with twelve companions, to shore up the Quaker communities in the West Indies and England’s colonies in America.
He was not a happy sailor, and when in October he made land in Barbados, his first task was a week’s recuperation. He was to stay for three months, with Thomas Rous. Three years earlier, in 1662, Thomas Rous bought the Clifton Hall plantation on the eastern coast of Barbados, where refreshing breezes blow in from the Atlantic, a healthy distance from the heat and discomfort of Bridgetown’s swampland.
It is probably there that George Fox first rested up for a week, and subsequently made his base of operations. He was among friends in both senses: not only was Thomas Rous a Quaker, with his house being used for Friends meetings. But the Rous family was more closely connected, with Thomas’s son eventually to marry a daughter of George Fox’s wife Margaret Fell. So Thomas was what you might call Quaker aristocracy. But it was Thomas’s plantation, worked by his slaves, that brought him his money.
The political background was unsettled, with the island still coming to terms with the wealth and dangers which the mass-adoption of chattel slavery which accompanied Barbados’s development of the sugar industry since 1640. It was only a decade ago that the explicitly racist laws of 1661 had been passed which sought, successfully, to establish preferential treatment for white indentured servants, mostly Irish who survived Cromwell’s campaign of Catholic suppression, over African chattel slaves. Those laws were intended to fend off the fear of the plantation owners, that Irish indentured servants might ally with black chattel slaves in rebellion. Whilst Barbados had yet to experience any significant slave rebellion, from time to time slave ‘conspiracies’ were uncovered, and when confessions were extorted under torture, they bore a marked similarity in design to those actually experience in Ireland.
The atmosphere, then, was twitchy with sudden wealth and fears of its dangers.
How, then, did George Fox bring his vision of God to bear on this situation?
The first thing to be said is that in his writings, George Fox almost never used the word ‘slave’. Something, some unease perhaps, kept the word from his lips. Rather, he regularly included slaves, and their children, as an extension of the slave-owners’ family: ‘Must you not gather all your Families together, Men, Women, Children and Strangers within your Gates, and such as you bought with Money, and and such as are born of them in your Families, that they may hear the New Covenant.. . . ‘ (Gospel, Family-Order).
Within that framework, he clearly gave thought to the treatment of slaves, digging in to the Old Testament framework of the relations between the Jews and Ethiopians.
‘Therefore now you should preach Christ to your Ethyopians that are in your Families, that so they may be free Men indeed and be tender of and to them, and walk in Love, that ye may answer that of God in their Hearts being (as the Scripture affirms) all of one Blood and of one Mold, to dwell upon the Face of the Earth; for Christ (I say) shed his Blood for them as well as for you, and tasted Death for them, as well as for you, and hath enlightened them, as well as he hath enlightened you, and his Grace hath appeared unto them, as well as it hath appeared unto you, and he is a Propitiation for their Sins as well as for yours, for he is the propitiation for Sins of the Whole World.’ (Gospel - Family Order, from a testimony given in Rous’ house in 1671).
‘It will doubtless be very acceptable to the Lord, if so be that Masters of Families here would deal so with their Servants, the Negroes and Blacks, whom they have bought with their Money, to let them go free after a considerable Term of Years, if they have served them faithfully; and when they go, and are made free, let them not go away empty-handed.’
At this point, it may be relevant that our knowledge of the key Gospel- Family Order comes from 23 years later, in a version produced and edited by Thomas Elwood. Specifically, it seems that Fox may have said not ‘considerable Term of Years’ but rather may have specified 30yrs slavery.
This is a passionate appeal for decency, and it comes with a warning: ‘And therefore let these Things be amended, as you expect the Blessing and Favour of God, or otherwise must expect his Judgements and Curse upon you and your Families and your Plantations (who should order these Things according to the Reformation and Mind of Jesus and the Law) even Blastings, Mildews, Caterpillars, which is the Portion from God upon debauched Families and People; and therefore let the Law of Jesus be set up in every Family’
The warning, moreover, comes with a reminder of the radical uncertainties which are afflicting the 17th century, and which especially commend the Golden Rule. ‘And further, consider with your selves, if you were in the same Condition as the Blacks are (and indeed you do not know what Condition you or your Children or your Children’s Children may be reduced and brought into, before you or they shall dye), who came as Strangers to you, and were sold to you as Slaves; now I say, if this should be the Condition of you or yours, you would think it hard Measure; yea , and very great Bondage and Cruelty.’
These are fine sentiments, but what they are not is a condemnation of slavery as an institution. And Fox took care to ensure he was not taken as some revolutionary firebrand out to subvert Barbados. His ‘Letter to the Governor of Barbados’ of 1671 is first and foremost an assertion of an almost complete conformity to the Anglican Church, complete with affirmations of great chunks of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer creed.
And then to business: ‘Another slander which they have cast upon us is, ‘that we teach the negroes to rebel;’ a thing we utterly abhor in our hearts; the Lord knows it, who is the searcher of all hearts, and knows all things, and can testify for us, that this is a most abominable untruth. For that which we have spoken to them is' ‘to exhort and admonish them to be sober, and to fear God; to love their masters and mistresses and to be faithful and diligent in their masters’ service and business; and then their masters and overseers would love them, and deal kindly and gently with them. . . ‘
He ends with his familiar argument that slave-owners have a familial duty to the slaves: ‘it is no transgression for a master of a family to instruct his family himself, or for some others to do it in his behalf; but rather it is a very great duty incumbent upon them.. . . . Now Negroes, Tawnies, Indians, make up a very great part of the families in this island; for whom an account will be required by him who comes to judge both quick and dead, at the great day of judgement, when everyone shall be ‘rewarded according to the deeds done in the body, whether they be good or whether they be evil’ ‘.
This, then, is George Fox’s reaction to the slavery seen around him in Barbados for his three-month stay. Twenty-five years later, Quakers made three anti-slavery declarations. And a century later, nine of the 12 founding members of the Abolition Society were Quakers, and in the US Quakers Benjamin Lay, Anthony Benezet, and probably most famously John Woolman and would be in the forefront of the fight for abolition. Quakers are proud of their role in abolition, but they cannot find inspiration in George Fox’s Barbados days.
The exhortation that slave owners should treat their slaves well seems inadequate to the moral problem of slavery, even acknowledging the the squint in hindsight’s vision. Regardless of how Thomas Rous personally treated his slaves, it seems quite impossible that Fox could have spent three months in Barbados without witnessing that the slavery was made possible only by violence and the threat of violence, supplemented by over-work and malnutrition. These were the methods, the only methods, by which men could be subdued and reduced to the abject dependency which mass slavery required. They were the very essence of slavery, and it is astonishing that George Fox could not, or would not, see this. The emblem of slavery is not so much chains as the whip.
Richard Ligon, who arrived in Barbados in 1647, and spent three years as an overseer, explained how the African slaves were kept under control: ‘That they are held in such awe and slavery, as they are fearfull to appear in any daring act; and seeing the mustering of our men, and hearing their Gun-shot (than which nothing is more terrible to them) their spirits are subjugated to so low a condition, as they dare not look up to any bold attempt.’ (True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657))
The most generous explanation, and one which tallies with the rest of George Fox’s life, is that his concern was always with personal rather than institutional salvation. Had it been otherwise, he could hardly have survived the tumult of the English civil wars of the 1640s and 50s, let alone the royal restoration of 1660, during which time his preaching established the Quakers. Twenty years earlier (in 1651) when Fox was languishing in Derby jail, he had been offered his freedom on condition he became a captain in Cromwell’s army. He rejected this on the grounds that he ‘lived in virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all war’. Ten years later, in 1661, that determination blossomed into the Quaker’s ‘testimony of peace’, or ‘A Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God, Called Quakers, Against All Sedition, Plotters, and Fighters in the World Concerning Wars and Fightings.’
However, during the middle of the 17th century, this embrace of non-violence was demonstrably not as thorough-going as later Quakers have insisted, and there is plenty of evidence that there were occasions and situations which Fox believed justified taking up the sword. The fight against slavery was not one of them.
What is inescapable is that both John Locke and George Fox were confronted by the practice and institution of slavery in the West Indies and whilst both felt obliged to respond to it, neither delivered a full-throated condemnation of what they found. This is extraordinary: John Locke was, after all, the founding father of the Anglo-Saxon liberal political tradition; George Fox was, after all, the founder of a characteristically English high-minded form of religious practice. Arguably we have here the leading English political intellectual of the age, and its leading religious reformer. If slavery was the test - and surely we would now see it as the test - they both failed it, with eyes open.
Why? It seems preposterous simply to answer ‘because they were bad men’ because in their own times, and after, they were held to be conspicuously virtuous. The answer must be that in the years immediately prior to the Enlightenment, slavery was one among many institutions which were then thought natural or at least inevitable in ways we cannot now reach. Let’s think of a list: the divine right of kings; the legal subjugation of women; the enthusiastic persecution of religious establishments; the right of military conquest and the efficacy of systems of justice we now describe as barbaric. And, of course, the near-universal existence of slavery throughout all the world’s known history.
When George Fox warned that slaves should be treated as you would wish yourself or your descendants to be treated, the lesson would not necessarily be taken to be merely hypothetical. Indeed, that same year, on a journey back to Britain, Thomas Rous’s son John was himself taken prisoner by a Dutch privateer and carried off to Spain (from which he escaped by buying himself a ship).
Above all, if the life of a slave was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”, as Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651, then this also was the common lot of many, and the threat hanging over more. The 17th century was a miserable time to be alive, slave or not: the average life expectancy in England didn’t struggle over 40 years until the dawn of the 18th century. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040159/life-expectancy-united-kingdom-all-time/)