What Gladstone said about the slave trade

SIR – You report (November 16) on the attempts by students at Liverpool University to remove the name of William Gladstone from a building, on the grounds that he “benefited from slavery”.

Gladstone found himself in a difficult position on this subject. His father’s family had made its fortune on the back of slavery in the West Indies. On June 3 1833, Gladstone gave his maiden speech in the House of Commons, speaking about a Bill to emancipate slaves in the Empire. John Gladstone – William’s father – was criticised in Parliament for the alleged mistreatment of his slaves.

William would not deny that dreadful treatment of slaves occurred on plantations, but argued that his father was innocent. He would not, he said, defend slavery as an institution. It was a system that “unquestionably began in crime, in atrocious crime… but I do not admit that holding slaves necessarily involves sin, though it does necessarily involve the deepest and heaviest responsibility”. (He meant, I think, that if you had slaves, you had a responsibility to treat them well.)

He said that, while he would welcome gradual emancipation, he thought that unconditional emancipation before the slaves were ripe for freedom would be “ruinous to the colonies, to the country and to the slaves”. This was a case, I think, of a son defending his father.

His attitude to slavery can be judged, perhaps, by his intervention in a debate about imported sugar from Brazil in 1841, grown by slaves. He said he could not be party to encouraging that “monster”, the slave trade – “while war, pestilence and famine, slay their thousands, [slavery] from year to year… slays its tens of thousands”.

I have taken these details from Gladstone by Philip Magnus, which is recognised as a very sound biography. John de Waal

Eastbourne, East Sussex