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Last weekend the Legacies of British Slave Ownership workshop took place in Liverpool at the Maritime Museum. We heard of the £20 million pounds of tax-payers money that was paid out to the owners of British Empire slaves in 1837/8. Setting aside the morality of this, that appalled not a few abolitionists of the day, we heard that the sum represented some 40% of the total government budget. This might be thought to have an enormous macroeconomic effect but mitigated by the fact that government expenditure represented only 8% of the total economy at that time. The LBS Project aims to establish a publicly accessible data base from which the effect of this compensation money on the broad and local economies of the country can be established. It seems to me that in making that judgement it would be important to know how the planters and absentee planters perceived the compensation. Was it viewed as a huge windfall or as a fortunate liquidation of badly deteriorating assets? Certainly Checkland in his Gladstones biography stresses the losses recorded in John Gladstone’s accounts which greatly exceeded the compensation he received. Men like Gladstone and John Moss may well have been astute enough to realise their assets in an orderly manner and invest the proceeds in Railway ventures but what of everyone else? Did they think themselves suddenly wealthy beyond belief or lucky not to have lost their shirts? That said one should not lose sight of the fact that a considerable portion of Gladstone and Moss’s wealth in the years before abolition derived from the produce of slavery. By 1821 almost half John Gladstone’s income came from his West India assets much of which was based on mortgages and advances to planters and his considerable benefactions have to be seen in that light.

I have had a further exchange of emails with David Sekers, the editor of the Diary of Hannah Lightbody. The Diary was published as a supplement to the journal Enlightenment and Dissent No 24, 2008. It is available from
Dr. Martin Fitzpatrick,
Enlightenment and Dissent,
‘Garreg-Wen’,
Bronant,
Aberystywyth,
Ceredigion,
SY234JD.
E-mail: mhf@aber.ac.uk or Enlightanddiss@aol.com
The interchange between us is available here and features some of my comments on aspects of the journal which directly impact my MS and David Sekers responses.

I must apologise for the lack of updates in recent weeks, some matters of a personal nature arose that have taken up much of my time. These will continue to take up some time for a week or so but then things should get back to a more normal schedule.
I have received details of the Liverpool Workshop being presented by UCL on Saturday October 23rd. The flyer for the workshop is here and the programme details are here.

I have received the following e-mail from David Sekers and below that is my reply.

Hi

I was glad to stumble across your book on the Hodgsons on the web today. It's a really good read and I admire the disinterring and arrangement of a wide range of information. I particularly appreciate your thoughts and views on the Liverpool Abolitionists, who have universally and probably unfairly been given a bad press. But I am not clear how you judge Thomas Hodgson

I'll tell you where I am coming from. When I was museum director at Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, I became interested in the youthful diary of Hannah Greg. A generation later I edited it as the Diary of Hannah Lightbody 1786-90, and it is published and available from Dr. Martin Fitzpatrick, Enlightenment and Dissent, at ‘Garreg-Wen’, Bronant, Aberystywyth, Ceredigion, SY234JD. E-mail:mhf@aber.ac.uk

I am now writing a biography of Hannah, and discussing her legacy and influence, which of course includes her children and orphaned nephews Isaac and Adam Hodgson. I think Adam has been unfairly overlooked, and much enjoyed all your references to his good work.

In the course of these tasks I have come across material familiar to you and some possibly not - including a portrait of Thomas. I think you will enjoy the diary, where there are references to the Hodgsons as well as to Currie and his circle.

When I re-read your book much more slowly and carefully, I will list a number of queries and possible corrections. May I also ask you what light you might be able to throw on a failure of Samuel Hartley in June 1788 - which rocked the Hodgson household?

Finally: is there the possibility of buying your book? Or is it only available on line?

Best regards

David Sekers

Dear David,

Thank you for your kind remarks. Back last Christmas when I decided to post “the book” on the web and give up on all the tiresome publishers and agents I could think of only one advantage for doing so – that it opened up the possibility that there might be people out there who knew more about the story than I, who could correct, or indeed refute various aspects of the story. So far that has proved utterly illusory at least until your email arrived.

About 3 years or so ago I visited Quarry Bank and became aware that there were some records relating to the Gregs that would be interesting to see. I don’t really know why I didn’t follow it up as the relationship between Hannah Greg and James Currie’s circle is pretty important to the thesis really. At that time there was talk of restoring the Gregs’ house and opening that to the public and I remember being particularly impressed by some of the pictures of the Gregs which contrasted strongly with the widely known picture of Sam Greg as an older man. They struck me as being highly fashionable people of their day – there was talk of a portrait of George Washington in the drawing room. I remember also that there seemed to be two portraits of Hannah Lightbody, the one depicting a fashionable young woman with a mass of blond curls, the other a much younger dark haired girl – are they really one and the same person?

Anyhow I have sent email to Dr Fitzpatrick to obtain your work on Hannah Lightbody’s diary which I am greatly looking forward to reading.

The piece on the Liverpool Abolitionists came about after reading Ellen Gibson Wilson’s book on Thomas Clarkson. About all I had at that time was Clarkson’s own account and the Life of James Currie which I was quite unable to read in the same way as Ms Gibson. On top of this came the epitaph to Elizabeth Hodgson by William Shepherd and several documents prepared for Thomas Hodgson by Roscoe and of course the Lightbody will. This seemed to place Thomas Hodgson right among all of these people and so when Currie writes of the dawning realisation among some of the merchants ; “Men of any enlargement of mind, who have been concerned in the slave-trade, begin to reflect on their situation; and the struggle between interest and principle, between a lucrative traffic and a sense of character, is productive of such embarrassment and contradiction, as fills one with sorrow.” It was impossible not to wonder who in particular he had in mind. In combination with letters to Hannah Greg about the slave trade and about cotton mills and his visit to David Dale it is hard not to draw the obvious conclusion.

It is curious is it not that various bits of the story surface here and there e.g. the Kitty Wilkinson story from the Rathbones and through the accounts of the lives of Currie and Roscoe and yet the whole has remained concealed. It is almost as though the Hodgsons have been carefully excised from the various contemporary accounts.

I was not aware of a portrait of Thomas Hodgson and would very much like to see it. I have been trying to persuade National Museums Liverpool to take an interest in the Adam Hodgson portrait which is currently languishing in a somewhat neglected condition in Barclay’s Bank archives. They have shown some interest but things have gone quiet recently with the summer holidays. I will probably need to gently remind them about it. Not knowing where Thomas’s portrait is it would be premature to suggest that they were shown together – but it would be interesting I think.

I was not aware that Samuel Hartley went bankrupt in 1788, although it was apparent that something happened to make him withdraw from the trade. I have stressed the loss of the American market particularly Carolina following the American Revolutionary War. I have been almost defeated by the tortuous nature of the operations involving Miles Barber, Samuel Hartley and Thomas Hodgson. Gomer Williams – I know some don’t like this book but I do – depicts Hartley & Co as major Liverpool Slave Traders mentioning and listing numerous voyages apparently put together under this head. But I really don’t see him sitting in a counting house in Red-Cross Street counting out Venetian glass beads, and boxes of African quality knives. It seems to me there is a lot more to these relationships than meets the eye particularly their duplicitous dealings with Franklin and the French King, but I have only scratched at the surface I am sure. It may be there are French records that would shed some more light on this.

Moving off the subject of the slave trade, the interrelationships between these families, the Hodgsons, Gregs, Rathbones and Pares who are all variously cousins is rather curious. The Greg’s and Rathbones being Liberal dissenters and the Hodgsons (and I think the Pares too) Anglican Tories and they cannot have seen anything like eye to eye come election time. In fact I am in the dark about a huge number of matters concerning these families, where Adam and Isaac were educated to name just one huge hole in my account.

The book is only available on-line for the foreseeable future – I may at some point put it on a CD-Rom. Interest has not been so great that I am thinking of going in for a print run I’m afraid.

With your permission I would like to add your email to my comments list and if you have any more pertinent information or corrections you would like to add I would be very happy to hear and include them as well. I shall be looking forward to your biography of Hannah Greg with great interest.

Jonty

Postscript:- As soon as I have any more to add to this I will post it here – in particular how to obtain Hannah Lightbody’s diary

I have been invited by the team at UCL responsible for the Legacies of British Slave Ownership study to give a twenty minute presentation at their workshop in Liverpool on the 23rd of October 2010. This will not simply be a precis of the book. I have been asked to draw out connections between Abolitionists and Slave Traders / Owners. I will give more details as they become available. For links to the UCL study see comment dated 27/07/2010

Several books have recently come to my attention which shed further light on different parts of the story. The first two are relevant to Chapter 11 – The Merchant Prince giving some background on Adam Hodgson’s contemporaries. The Gladstones: a family biography, 1764-1851 by S. G. Checkland; Cambridge University Press, 1971 along with John Moss of Otterspool (1782-1858): Railway Pioneer Slave Owner Banker, by Graham Trust; AuthorHouse, 2010. The last gives more information about the Massacre at Old Calabar found in Chapter 6. The author’s account as far as the role of Ambrose Lace goes is somewhat different to mine and the author would clearly not have trusted Captain Lace as far as he could throw him. The two princes of Calabar: an eighteenth-century Atlantic odyssey by Randy J. Sparks; Harvard University Press, 2004. All can be browsed on Google books so that you can try before you buy or decide to fill in the form at the library.

Following an exchange of email with The Friends of St Cuthbert's, Darlington I have obtained a photo of Adam Hodgson's eldest son The Rev. Thomas Edward Hodgson (1827-1897) who was vicar of the parish for over twenty years. The image copyright is held by St Cuthbert's and may not be reproduced in any form without their permission. It is used here with their very kind pemission.

I have had some interesting comments from the team at UCL who are researching the Legacies of British Slave Ownership. The team are compiling a database of the 40,000 British Slave Owners who received compensation after the Emancipation of the Empire Slaves following the Act of 1833 and what the 10,000 or so absentee slave owners did with their wealth. Their work was featured in the June Issue of BBC History Magazine and is discussed on their website at www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs . They are holding a series of regional workshops on the work, the details of which were published on their website in due course: Glasgow: 4th September, Newcastle: 25th September, Birmingham: 9th October, Liverpool: 23rd October, Bristol: 27th November.

One comment concerned the question of the contribution of the slave trade to the industrial revolution. “Your work as you probably know contributes to some of the major historical controversies around the slave-trade, especially Eric Williams' thesis that the profits of the slave-trade fed the Industrial Revolution, which is now widely discounted, while your study of Thomas Hodgson absolutely supports it.”

I need to re-read my copy of Capitalism and Slavery. In my recollection what struck me was how he argued that the slave trade was only abolished because it became unprofitable which I am sure one historian described as a “jeu d’esprit” – quite a put down. However, it seems he argued that the slave system provided the capital for early industrial development which was later superseded by more mature industrial developments – see the introduction posted in the above link to the book. I’m not sure my work supports this for the slave-trade as exemplified by Thomas Hodgson. I have found it difficult to account for the rapid expansion of both his slaving business and cotton mills on the basis of profits from slaving and posit the idea that this wealth actually came from privateering. It is interesting that the later abolitionists represented by James Cropper and Adam Hodgson argued that the slave system must collapse when placed in competition with free labour – the latter they argued was 25% cheaper to operate. This sounds rather similar to Williams’ thesis and is featured in the recently posted Chapter 11.

On the other hand can it be seriously denied that the Lancashire Cotton Industry prior to 1865 was absolutely dependent on slave grown cotton from the Southern Plantation System in the American Deep South? Something of this will appear in Chapter 13. At the outset of the distress caused by the Lancashire Cotton Famine, itself a result of the American Civil War, William Rathbone remarked; “If Manchester suffers from the non arrival of cotton, Liverpool suffers from the non-transit of the staple and if Manchester is distressed in consequence of the non-demand for its Manufactures, Liverpool is distressed in consequence of the non-shipment..... Lancashire is one huge, deliberately organised industrial frame, of which Liverpool is the inlet and outlet.” One could also point to the development of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway and to numerous banks including the Bank of Liverpool where numerous cotton brokers and manufacturers co-operated to provide the capital to make these highly significant industrial developments possible. The first chairman of the Bank of Liverpool was William Brown of William and James Brown the biggest cotton brokers in Liverpool with offices all over the Southern U.S. Some of this is also covered in Chapter 11 though I don’t really emphasise these points in any didactic way – the facts can speak for themselves in my view.

A further comment was; “Your narrative also highlights the way in which pro-slavers and abolitionists mixed socially, in philanthropy and in business, despite their apparently fundamental differences.”

See the vituperation between James Cropper and John Gladstone in Chapter 11; both prominent Evangelicals and officers in the Liverpool Bible Society as well as co-operating over industrial developments such as those mentioned above. It seems hard to imagine that happening today and perhaps it reflects the character of the times. On the other hand it may be just a failure of the imagination.

Finally; “Our database covers slave-ownership in the early 19th century, and picksup a number of the slave-trading families you include. In addition, you might be interested to know that Adam Hodgson himself was awarded slave compensation, as the executor of the slave-owner Lister Ellis for the slaves on an estate in British Guiana. I can send you details of this claim if you would be interested.”

Lucky that his involvement was as an executor or I might have had some serious rewriting to do. Hodgson wrote in Letters from North America,”and some of our most estimable friends in England possess Negroes in the West Indies”. He was an advocate of compensation for the loss of the slave holders property something which he was in a position to influence through his co-operation with the Liverpool MP Lord Sandon and his relationship with Lord Stanley who as colonial secretary introduced the legislation – see Chapter 11. Ellis and Hodgson were involved together in the Liverpool to Manchester Rail Road. Clearly their relationship must have been closer than that of simply business but I am unable to shed any more light on that. I have asked to see these details and if allowed I will post them here.

I now have the photo mentioned below although it is of poor quaity.

The piece is by Swan giving bracketting dates of late Victorian to 1920's. The illustration clearly shows a church with clerestory implying it is of Paley's reconstruction and thus after 1865.

A reader from Hest Bank near Lancaster tells me that they have a Victorian china ornament depicting a church with the words "Caton Church". This seems to be one of those small souvenir pieces that usually bear a coat of arms and a place name.

This would be very interesting to see and so I have asked for a photograph which I hope to post here in due course.

A correspondent from the home of the Crimson Tide football team raised some interesting questions about Adam Hodgson's itinerary in the Deep South that were not covered in Chapter 2.

Adam Hodgson's book Letters from North America used to be available on Google Books but Volume 1 seems, in their typically perverse fashion, to have been withdrawn. However here is Vol 1. & Vol 2.

Several academic commentators have raised concerns about not seeing the references to source material at the end of each chapter.

My original intention was to place these all together at the end. On reflection I have very effectively created a rod for my own back by this decision. Undoubtedly I was subconciously putting off the very tedious task of checking and formatting references. Actually with the glorious June weather we are enjoying in blighty it is difficult to justify doing anything other than heading for the beach. In hopes of assuaging some of these very legitimate concerns I have placed the working bibliography here. It is not a completely satisfactory solution as the references lack a common style and format, some are abreviated, some even temporarily AWOL. Best I can do at the moment, now where's my towel.....