Olaudah Equiano and the Argument Against Slavery

By 1788, Great Britain, after profiting enormously from the slave trade for generations, had begun to debate the question of abolition in earnest. Olaudah Equiano, who had purchased his own freedom, presented a petition to the Queen in that year as part of a broad coalition opposed to slavery. In the following year he wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano as part of this popular movement, which had proponents with strong religious backgrounds but also more secular elements who wanted to protect the value of labor in the growing industrial economy of the late eighteenth century, a time when the steam engine had begun to change the way business was done, first in England but quickly spreading throughout Europe and the American colonies.

Ottubah Cugoano, another African slave had, not long before, attempted to argue from morality in his own memoir of slavery, but his literary approach was impersonal, and the book failed to gain popularity. Learning from this, Equiano structured his narrative as a much more immediate document, which engaged the reader and made his personal trials seem both real and horrendous to any reader.

Beginning with a description of his life in Africa as a young boy, which, whether it was the truth or not, could not help but affect a sympathetic reader with its lovingly detailed descriptions of the lives of "savages," all but the most hardened reader would have had a difficult time, afterward, thinking of Africa as the brutal and lawless place those in the slave trade portrayed it as. By tracing his journey to the sea, he was able to give a sense of the complexity of customs and attitudes among the many peoples he encountered. If, as critics charged at the time, and contemporary scholars have since suggested, he was born in South Carolina, this first part of his narrative was a combination of second-hand accounts, certainly available to someone who traveled as widely and showed such facility with language as Equiano, and what could be learned from books. In that case the tale of his journey to Europe and America is no less remarkable.

Millions of Africans did make the journey, and he no doubt heard through the lore of slave culture many similar tales, enough to concoct a believable account of the passage, corroborated as it was by white abolitionists of the time who were able to publish a drawing of a slave ship as part of their literature. It would have taken little imagination to invent his own tale of the passage. As a tool in the fight for abolition, the narrative would have felt incomplete without this opening, though certainly there were abuses enough to threaten the moral foundations of slavery without ever mentioning the Middle Passage.

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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

His description of his introduction to the white world, as cargo on a slave ship, is full of details that shock and horrify: "I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I become so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste any thing. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me..." Many if not all of the slaves on board those ships would have willingly perished before allowing themselves to be transported in such inhumane circumstances. It was an incident on board the Zong, when a captain ordered dozens of slaves to be thrown overboard so he could collect the insurance, that seemed to galvanize support for abolition in England.

The most potent tool available to Equiano, aside from his own voice, was the resort to scripture, which was far more than a rhetorical ploy to a man whose chief obsession, after gaining his own physical freedom, was ensuring his spiritual salvation. Since he lived in a world of deep religious conviction, on the one hand, and almost incalculable cruelty, on the other, there was much to say about the contradiction of professing religion while enforcing or condoning inhumanity, and he was both adroit and thorough in saying it, even at his own peril.

As he wrote of Mr. King, who owned him during some of the time he spent in the West Indies, "whenever he treated me waspishly I used plainly to tell him my mind, and that I would die before I would be imposed on as other negroes were, and that to me life had lost its relish when liberty was gone." Utterly dependent upon King's good nature, after all King, or any white man, could legally have killed Equiano and been liable only for a fine of fifteen pounds, Equiano nevertheless felt obliged to make his feelings known. He was always prepared to stand up for his moral convictions despite the risk.

He may also have thought it was important to show the depth of his religious conviction. His narrative is preoccupied with the story of his search for religious fulfillment, beginning with his speculation on a relationship between the Jews and his own tribe from West Africa. He knew that the best hope for equitable relations between the two cultures lay in a common devotion to the kind of spirituality he observed among Philadelphia Quakers and other devout and humane religious people that he met in his life at sea and in London.

Although at first overawed by the whites and their advanced technologies, after three years of slavery on board English ships he said "I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them; to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners: I therefore embraced every occasion of improvement; " In February 1759 he was baptized in the Church of England as part of this program of improvement. Throughout the narrative he emphasized the struggle in his own soul over being able to live as a true Christian, an idea he certainly associated with the best qualities of white Europe, qualities he wanted to encourage in his readers.

Equiano structured an argument that could also appeal to this awakening sense of an integrated worldwide economy promising virtually unlimited prosperity. If the British could think of Africa as a trading partner rather than a source of free labor, Equiano argued, the economic benefits would be enormous. "A commercial intercourse with Africa opens an inexhaustible source of wealth to the manufacturing interests of Great Britain," as a market for textiles and household goods, in which the natives, treated as human beings of equal worth, would become valuable customers. Additionally the mineral and resource wealth of the African continent offered vast opportunity to the more advanced economies. "The hidden treasures of centuries" would be available for European exploitation. "The manufacturing interest and the general interest are synonymous, The abolition of slavery would be in reality an universal good."

To drive the point home, he asked readers to calculate the profit obtainable if the population of Africa were to spend a mere five pounds per year on European goods. He wanted his readers to comprehend the economic potential of he uncounted millions of Africans, whom he portrayed as poised and ready to begin trading for the metalwares and textiles produced at American and British factories, and upon which the growth of their economies depended.

In short, all morality aside, he tried to impress upon his readers the many benefits that could be expected to accrue from the abolition of slavery. "If the blacks were permitted to remain in their own country, they would double themselves every fifteen years, In proportion to such increase will be the demand for manufactures," in an addendum to his original manuscript, he re-emphasized the scale of the economic benefit, asking readers to visualize "the clothing &c. of a continent ten thousand miles in circumference, and immensely rich in productions of every denomination in return for manufactures."

While he lacked the modern understanding of genetics, he was acutely aware of the brotherhood of the human species, and realized that this too could be a rhetorical tool. He noted that Spaniards become darker when living in the "Torrid Zone" of the Americas, information he felt helped establish the universality of human experience and "It is hoped may tend also to remove the prejudice that some conceive against the natives of Africa on account of their colour.

"Let the polished and haughty European recollect that his ancestors were once, like the Africans, uncivilized and even barbarous, Did Nature make them inferior to their sons? and should they too have been made slaves?"

He also appealed to the slave owners themselves, hoping to weaken what he knew was a flimsy rationale for simple human avarice and brutality. "For I will not suppose that the dealers in slaves are born worse than other men--No; it is the fatality of this mistaken avarice, that it corrupts the milk of human kindness and turns it into gall." This was a compassionate argument. Rather than attacking his oppressors as inhuman brutes, he offered his understanding.

Finally, he made a compelling argument for the benefit of simple human kindness."But, above all, are there no dangers attending this mode of treatment? Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection?" He did not have to threaten the planters: only to remind them that they lived under a constant threat of their own devising. Of course, there was a way to ease the threat.

"But by changing your conduct, and treating your slaves as men, every cause of fear would be banished."

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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano