Time for a different thought or two, for another slant on this weird moment in history if only to try for a sense of perspective.
Lockdown is encouragement to read what has always been on a long-list/on a bedroom chair, though the sluggishness that goes with losing freedom to roam may make some long-promised reading shorter than intended.
In 2007 academic Nini Rodgers published Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865, her life’s work in almost 400 pages of detailed research. In 2000, though, she produced for Belfast Society Publications a 27-page miniature, at £5, the text an article on ‘Equiano in Belfast’ published three years before in the journal Slavery and Abolition.
Here she picked out burning, impassioned words aired at around the same time, 1791 and early 1792, by writers selling their work and their causes in a place that revered reading, writing, argument. Both are well-known outcries at injustice, set alongside each other by a scholar who has had far less notice than she deserves in the world beyond academic studies.
‘You compel them to live with you in a state of war, and yet you complain that they are not honest and faithful! You think it necessary to keep them in a state of ignorance and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning.’ This is former slave Olaudah Equiano, in ‘Interesting Narrative’, the book he sold around Dublin and Belfast.
And in his ‘Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland’ this was Wolfe Tone: ‘We make the incapacity we have created an argument for exclusion from the common rights of man.’
Rodgers called Equiano in Belfast, ‘A study of the anti-slavery ethos in a northern town’. The booklet is just right for now, with apologies to the historian for scanting her and in the hope this will spur the less lazy-minded to seek out the big book (as the writer will.) In 1790, 91, 92, on the 14th of July Belfast celebrated the French Revolution. Vivid in a way many academic historians fumble, Rodgers’ style and keen eye light up the almost totally Protestant small city six years before the Rebellion of the United Irishmen.
She has Equiano arriving into radical circles, finding anti-slavery thinking among those whose protests had deterred local merchants tempted to join the slave trade.
He lodged with Samuel Neilson, Presbyterian minister’s son, thriving woollen draper. ‘In such sociable, hard drinking, often fiercely religious company’, Rodgers writes, ‘Equiano could relax.’ In December 1791 the ‘well-dressed, middle-aged African could be found selling his Interesting Narrative at local bookshops, outside on the quay and from Neilson’s business at the Four Corners, then the commercial heart of the town.’
Equiano’s compelled, kept in ignorance, were those made slaves. ‘When you make men slaves,’ he wrote, ‘you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine and cruelty...You stupefy them with stripes...’
Tone’s incapacitated were the Catholics of Ireland. Many agreed, particularly Presbyterians, non-Anglicans, that the Anglican, landed-gentry, notionally independent parliament in Dublin was in dire need of reform. Extend the franchise, though, emancipate Catholics? Rodgers puts it neatly: ‘Presbyterian reformers struggled to achieve an intellectually coherent position, whilst practical politics propelled them towards a Catholic alliance.’
Tone the fiery pamphleteer came to Belfast to help tackle a difficulty - for those who argued that Irish Protestants could not be free if Catholics were slaves. Traditional Presbyterianism thought Catholicism ‘unfitted its adherents for constitutional liberty’ because it ‘enslaved the mind.’ Tone said Catholicism was no longer a sinister force, though Irish Catholics were deliberately denied enlightenment. Like Equiano he argued ‘We plunge them by law in gross ignorance...We plead our crime in justification of itself.’
Rodgers does not say these two met. What a town, though, to entertain such minds and more like them. Yet a decade later what was left in Belfast of Enlightenment thinking? More reading needed.
