Manchester’s historic fight to stop slavery
RAMAZANI MWAMBA LOOKS AT HOW THE CITY FOUGHT FOR BLACK LIVES, BUT ALSO PROFITED FROM THE TRADE
EARLIER this month, at a Black Lives Matter rally, a group of protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, tied ropes around the monument and threw it into the harbour.
This historic moment has since sparked difficult conversations that are long overdue about the nation’s involvement in the horrific transatlantic slave trade, how it has profited and what it is doing to make amends.
The protests were initially sparked by the death of African-American security guard, George Floyd, at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.
They have galvanised people from nations across the globe to come together to raise awareness and fight for a change in the treatment of black people from institutions of power in our society.
Thousands of people have flocked to Manchester to join protests to voice their grievances, tell their stories and let it be known that to them, Black Lives do indeed matter.
The history books will show that the people in Manchester have been on the right side of history when it came to the fight for the abolition of slavery.
At the top of Rooley Moor Road in Rochdale is a historic Victorian stone road that is widely known as the ‘Cotton Famine Road.’
The monument recalls how Rochdale cotton workers sided with the Union cause during the American Civil War which began in 1861 and ended with the slavery-supporting Confederacy being beaten, and the abolition of slavery in the US.
By refusing to touch cotton produced by slavery in the South, during that war, Lancashire workers weakened the Confederacy in solidarity with the African slaves of the
Americas who were beaten, brutalised and viewed as cattle by slave owners and cotton merchants.
The workers supported Abraham Lincoln’s pledge to abolish slavery despite the fact the Union’s blockade of Confederate ports had caused a shortage of cotton supplies to Rochdale, resulting in ‘cotton famine’ which starved thousands of men and women of their livelihoods.
Manchester was just as resolute as Rochdale. In 1862, pledging their support for the Union and opposition to slavery, at the Free Trade Hall, ‘The Working-Men of Manchester, England,’ wrote: ‘Justice demands for the black, no less than for the white, the protection of the law,’ in a letter to Abraham Lincoln.
The American president was grateful for their support - which he described as ‘sublime Christian heroism’ – and his message of thanks to the working people of Manchester is inscribed on the plinth of his statue in Manchester city centre.
Many of the signs at Manchester’s Black Lives Matter demonstration had the words ‘The UK is not innocent’ written on them. And, while Manchester is known for being on the right side of history and campaigning for an end to slavery, it did profit from it.
To find examples of how Manchester profited from the slave trade, all you have to do is look at the grand buildings found in the city centre, especially those on Mosley Street, Piccadilly, and Portland Street.
Directly or indirectly, profits of slavery fuelled Greater Manchester’s Industrial Revolution.
When renowned American, lecturer and abolitionist, Sarah Parker Remond, was in Lancashire to appeal to mill owners and cotton workers to support the anti-slavery movement in 1859, she said the words: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125m worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”
In the 1700s Manchester’s thriving textile industry was built on slavegrown cotton from the West Indies, the same cotton that was woven into textiles, a major export item for Liverpool slave traders.
Manchester’s cotton mill industry generated up £200,000 per year (equivalent to £28m today) through clothes, fabrics, silks and handkerchiefs made from cloth that was traded for captured African men and women.
Some merchants continued profiting from slavery even after the British government outlawed the trading of slaves from the US in 1807.
Textiles from Manchester were seen as vital to the Liverpool slave trade for their price and quality, they were also purchased by Spanish West India traders who then resold the textiles in Africa.
There were many prominent Manchester families who had direct links with the slave trade. The Hibberts owned sugar plantations in Jamaica and a Manchester MP – Samuel Touchet – was a cotton and slave merchant who was in partnership with a West Indian business.
In spite of this, Manchester was at the forefront of the abolitionist movement, years before Abraham Lincoln was even born. In 1787, 11,000 people – about half the adult population of the city – signed a petition calling for the abolition of slavery.
Black Mancunians would have been among those who signed the petition, which followed a sermon at what is now Manchester Cathedral, in a packed public meeting which was the first ever in the country dedicated to the cause of abolishing slavery.
The speaker was the Quaker abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, who noted: “I was surprised also to find a great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit. There might be 40 or 50 of them.”
The black presence in Britain dated back years before that.
It was significant enough for calls for black people, described as ‘negroes and blackamores,’ and Muslims, described as ‘infidels,’ to be deported in the late 16th and early 17th century.
The expulsion didn’t happen, and parish records of baptisms and burials reveal a continued black presence in the Manchester area in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century, by which time there were thought to be 20,000 black people in Britain.
A grave inscription at the church of St Michael and All Angels, in Ashton-under-Lyne reads: ‘Here was interred the body of Augustin Leonard, a black man a native of the island of Martinique, who died in this town April 2, 1793, aged 42. He was a faithful servant, an affectionate husband, sincere friend and cheerful companion.’
By the 19th century, prominent African-American abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass and Sarah Parker Remond, were visiting our region as a centre of abolitionist sentiment.