Bury the Chains

Adam Hochschild’s 2005 non-fiction book, Bury the Chains, explores the British abolitionist movement, revealing “something new […] making its first appearance: the systematic mobilization of public opinion” for human rights. During the eighteenth century, three-quarters of the people in the world were not free, but lived in some type of bondage. Slavery was so widespread and normalized, that, prior to 1788, there was no real debate about trafficking slaves throughout the British empire. However, as reviewer Robin White writes, “At the end of the eighteenth century, a small group of men (and one woman) took on the vested interests of state, church, and big business – and won.”

Hochschild begins with John Newton, who would become a priest in 1764 and write “Amazing Grace.” In 1750, however, he is the captain of a slave trade ship, trafficking commodities, human and otherwise, between West Africa, the West Indies, and England. Known as “triangle trade,” this shipping route delivers African slaves to Haiti and other Caribbean islands where they are exchanged for the sugar the British consume voraciously. In notebooks and letters to his wife, Newton records his cold-blooded methods for subduing rebellious Africans on board, which includes whipping them and putting “them slightly in the thumbscrews.”

For those Africans who survive the brutal conditions of the ship’s cargo hold, their plight as slaves on sugar plantations is hardly less grim. Hochschild calls the Caribbean “a slaughterhouse.” Harvesting the sugar is grueling work, and it is not uncommon for exhausted slaves to lose their arms or worse in the milling equipment. While trading his sugar for more slaves, a plantation owner tells John Newton that his policy regarding slaves is “with hard usage, to wear them out before they became useless, […], and then, to buy new ones, to fill up their places.” A total of two million Africans are sold into bondage in the West Indies, but only 670,000 remain by the time slavery is abolished there.



Although Newton experiences a religious conversion and repents his sins, he is not converted to abolitionist beliefs until he meets Thomas Clarkson, the central figure of Hochschild’s story. In 1785, Clarkson, a twenty-five-year-old Cambridge student, enters an essay contest addressing whether or not slavery is “lawful.” His research into the atrocities of slavery, including interviews with those who have witnessed firsthand the institution’s inhumanity, earns his essay first prize. It also moves him to launch a tireless campaign against slavery, to “see these calamities to their end.”

With profitable investments in Jamaican sugar production, the Church of England is no ally of the anti-slavery efforts, but the Quakers are. Believing in the equality of all people, the Quakers organize in 1783 to promote abolitionist arguments, but as a small sect of unconventional Christians, their actions have little impact. Clarkson talks with members of the Quaker community but realizes that to effectively agitate against slavery, they need to rally public opinion behind their cause.

On May 22, 1787, Clarkson and several Quakers convene a meeting in London of a dozen men to develop a campaign strategy. Calling themselves the Committee for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, they plan to advance their agenda using tactics that have become fundamental to the activist’s playbook: speeches, pamphlets, petitions, letter-writing campaigns, and boycotts. Among those who join the emerging movement is Granville Sharp, who in 1772 advocated in court on behalf of a slave nearly beaten to death by his owner. When the court granted the slave his freedom, the ruling effectively outlawed slavery within England. John Newton, now a clergyman, also adds his voice to the outcry against the slave trade, as does former slave Olaudah Equiano with his bestselling memoir, published in 1789.



Elizabeth Heyrick is one of the most prominent female activists in the movement. When abolitionists organize a boycott of slave-produced sugar, Heyrick visits grocery stores to encourage owners to participate. Due to the boycott, 300,000 Britons stop buying sugar.

In just a few years, the campaign against the slave trade becomes a nation-wide preoccupation, and Clarkson is the engine of the operation. He distributes thousands of copies of his prize-winning essay. He travels across England on horseback to collect testimonies on the horrors of human trafficking from slave ship crews and merchants. He gives speeches, writes pamphlets, and reproduces a diagram of how to optimally pack slaves as cargo in a ship. The diagram then appears in pubs and print media throughout the country. Soon, almost every major city in England has a committee circulating abolitionist petitions and sending tens of thousands of signatures to Parliament.

While the abolition movement rapidly gains traction and, by 1790, success seems imminent, two events occur that impede its progress. In 1791, Toussaint L’Ouverture leads a successful uprising of the slaves in Haiti. They ruthlessly kill their white oppressors, thereby undermining the British populace’s newfound sympathy for them. The French Revolution is also underway. When the revolutionaries declare war against England in 1793, the crisis stifles anti-slavery agitation in the interest of national unity.



Indefatigable, Clarkson continues to press his case to the British public and to Parliament by way of William Wilberforce, the only Parliamentarian who supports the abolitionist campaign. Year after year, Wilberforce introduces antislavery bills in Parliament without success. Finally, in 1807, Parliament votes in favor of Wilberforce’s bill and outlaws slave trading in the empire, but not slavery itself.

According to Hochschild, Clarkson’s strategic leveraging of the “press-ganging” practice accounts for his political triumph. Uniquely British, the tradition of press-ganging permits the Royal Navy to seize any man on the street and press him into marine service. By capitalizing on the Britons’ fears of this home-grown slave system, Clarkson fosters sympathy for the Africans’ plight.

Dissatisfied with limiting abolition to slave trading only, Elizabeth Heyrick emerges, in the 1820s, as a crusader for the total abolition of slavery in the empire. Parliament finally legislates the emancipation of all British slaves in 1838.



Modern-day environmental groups have reportedly drawn inspiration from Hochschild’s book. For twenty-first century activists, Hochschild isolates three valuable lessons from the British abolitionist movement: build coalitions, broadcast your message through a variety of media outlets, and “never give up.”