Part Two: X-Mas Special: The Heroes Who Ended The Slave Trade

Coolzone Media.

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every year I buy Sophie a weapon. It's true.
It's also about bad people.

Except for this episode, well, this week, we're doing a reverse episode about some heroes, the people who ended the British slave trade, and eventually the whole Atlantic slave trade.

And, you know, they're good people. We haven't talked about them yet.
We've only talked about bad people so far. Episode one was really a lot of bad stuff in M1.

And I do apologize for that on the Christmas week.

Our guest today is

Big Ship Guy, James Stout. Big boatman, James Vigan Stout.
Captain James Stout. Seafarer.
Yeah,

Captain James Stout. Sir, Captain James Stout.
No, not one of those things. Again, never been near a king.
But yeah, I do like to go on a boat. I get very unwell, but I don't let that stop me.

No, I'm not afflicted with seasickness. If I've learned one thing about the history of sailing, no one has ever let being sick stop them from getting on a boat.

You can't.

You can't.

You got to power through it.

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Season three of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions is here.

Hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are going deeper than ever with bold new conversations, fresh guests, and unfiltered takes on queer sex and cruising.

This season, they're also looking out for the community, covering smart cruising in a chaotic world, including information on prep.

And yes, their call-in segment is getting even hotter and they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air. No pressure.

Tune into Snippy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, with new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaking of powering through it, you know, we just got the horrible case of the Zorg and the mass murder that happened on board it, and then a lawsuit by the Gregson syndicate saying we should get money for those people we murdered, which a British court ruled, yeah, you should.

So that's where things ended in part one. In part two, some people are going to get mad about this.
Now, there was no coverage of Gregson v. Gilbert at the time of the court case.

It was legally a minor civil trial over an insurance dispute, and there was really no reason to believe that anyone aside from the parties involved were paying attention to what happened in court or cared about what had happened aboard the Zorg.

But one anonymous person watched the proceedings that day, March 6th of 1783, and they were horrified by what they saw, right?

There's some theorizing in the book The Zorg about who this person might have been, but we don't really know.

It was just someone was there that day who had a conscience and who viewed Africans as human beings, right?

And a lot of stuff that happened, a lot of very important stuff is going to result from the fact that one person with a conscience was there that day, right?

Now, a little less than two weeks after the judge in this case issued his ruling, this person published an anonymous letter in two major newspapers, the Morning Chronicle and the London Advertiser.

The letter noted that the Zorg still had 420 gallons of water left when it put into port in Jamaica, and thus, as the underwriters argued, there was, quote, no necessity for a conduct so shocking to humanity.

This is our only first-person account of the court proceedings, and the author of this anonymous letter claims that, quote, the narrative seemed to make every person person present shudder.

He lamented that, in spite of this, the jury voted in favor of the Gregson syndicate.

The letter then takes a more philosophical turn, with the author wishing some man of feeling and genius would give poetical language to the last thoughts of one of the ten enslaved men who chose to kill themselves after seeing their little brothers and sisters hurled into the ocean, quote, whose indignation made him voluntarily share death with his countrymen rather than life with such unheard of English barbarians.

The letter then concludes with this paragraph.

It is certainly worthy of observation that our legislature can every session find time to inquire into and regulate the manner of killing a partridge, that no abuse should be committed, and that he should be fairly shot, and yet it has never been thought proper to inquire into the matter of annually kidnapping above 50,000 poor wretches who never injured us by a set of the most cruel monsters that this country can send out.

Pretty unsparing.

Yeah,

it's pretty good, too.

Yeah, yes, it's making a good point.

Do we ever found out who wrote this or does it stay anonymous? Again, we don't really know. The author, Siddharth Kara has a theory as to who it is, but it's not like it's, it's, we don't know.

We simply don't know. And we never really will to a point.

I think it's cool that two newspapers printed it. Yeah, yeah.
It's good that they printed it. Again, there's sentiment.
There's abolitionist sentiment.

There's people of like conscience and care who are informed and know how bad it is. they're just not really unified yet, right?

There's a, there's, you know, a small organization of like Quakers, but for the most part, most of the people who are like upset about slavery aren't together yet, right?

And this, it's, it's over this case that they're going to get stitched together, right?

Um, so Letter finds an audience, at first, mostly with England's small Quaker anti-slavery movement, but it doesn't cause an immediate broader uproar on its own.

However, it succeeds in reaching the one person who, it turns out, most needed to hear it, a freed man named Olada Equiano. And this guy is one of the coolest dudes I have ever heard of.

This is a fucking Equiano is a fascinating man. Have you heard about this person, James? Yeah, I love to assign Equiano to my undergraduate courses.

Yeah, yeah, he's his book is fantastic.

Yeah, and you can find it online. It's free, right? We'll be quoting from it some here.
A fascinating person.

So Equiano had been born around 1745 in Igbo, part of modern-day Nigeria, which was then part of the Kingdom of Benin.

And although he claimed his village was only nominally controlled by the king, right?

That, like, yeah, we have a king, but he's not really a factor in daily life, which is probably accurate, as a young boy, he'd never heard of white men or Europeans or even the ocean.

His father was a village elder and held a high position in local government. As a child, Olauda seems to have had a keen eye for injustice.

Because of his father's position, he spent a good deal of time watching court proceedings and later wrote that adultery for women was often punished by slavery or death.

Quote, the men, however, do not preserve the same constancy to their wives, which they expect from them. So one thing you see about Alota is that he is, he is a thinker.

This is not a man who just accepts like, oh yeah, adultery. You got to kill a woman if she does that.
He's a man who's like, but the guys are all cheating and nobody cares about that. It seems unfair.

That seems wrong.

Yeah,

he's an empathetic and intelligent man.

He was aware of slavery from a very young age. You had to be in the part of Africa he lived because there are

slavers running rampant. He later wrote about stout mahogany colored men from the southwest who traveled through town to trade firearms, gunpowder, and other goods.

Quote, they always carry slaves through our land, but the strictest account is exacted of their manner of procuring them before they are suffered to pass.

Sometimes, indeed, we sold slaves to them, but they were only prisoners of war or such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping or adultery or some other crimes which we esteemed heinous.

Now, these are his recollections of how he thought that how he justified things as a small child, right? This is not how he feels about the matter as an adult. And in fact,

he makes it clear in his autobiography that his belief that like, well, these guys, you know, they're not allowed to just take slaves willy-nilly, right? You know, we make sure that

they're not just, that's not accurate, right? That's a thing he learns, unfortunately, not long later in his childhood, right?

And he does note at the time that like, well, you know, my dad told me that, yeah, it's okay.

We always make sure that, you know, know, they're not just grabbing people off the street at random, you know, when they come through.

But he notes that like they always carry these big empty sacks with them. I wonder what those are for.

Geez, right?

For Christmas stuff, I assume. Yeah, he's a child, so he doesn't really see that as a warning sign until it was too late.

Now, there is like the, there is some.

basic knowledge that they are in danger because he writes that during the day when the grown people leave town to work the fields, the kids would assemble to play, and at least one kid at any given time would have to stand, watch, would like climb up a tree to watch for kidnappers, who, quote, sometimes took those opportunities of our parents' absence to attack and carry off as many as they could seize.

So, first off, you get a really good glimpse in Equiano's book as to like what the slave trade has done to daily life in like these small villages in this part of Africa, where it's like, yeah, the kids just know that you always have to be aware that like kidnappers might come and steal all of you.

Yeah, yeah. That's a real danger.

Yeah, they're not making it up this time.

No.

He writes, quote, one day as I was watching at the top of a tree in our yard, I saw one of those people come into the yard of our next neighbor, but one to kidnap, there being so many stout young people in it.

Immediately on this, I gave the alarm of the rogue, and he was surrounded by the stoutest of them, who entangled him with cords that he could not escape till some of the grown people came and secured him.

So this is, you know, a positive end, and this is his first direct encounter with slavers, but it's not going to be his last.

Not long after this, he and his sister are minding the house while their parents are away.

Two men and a woman jump over the walls, steal them both, cover their mouths, and sprint off with them into the woods.

For the next few days, they're taken through the woods, bound and gagged during the day.

He wrote that the only comfort we had was in being in each other's arms all that night and bathing each other with our tears. And this single comfort was not to last long.

Quote, The next day proved of a greater sorrow than I had yet experienced, for my sister and I were then separated while we lay clasped in each other's arms.

It was in vain that we besought them not to part us. She was torn from me and immediately carried away, while I was left in a state of distraction not to be described.

I cried and grieved continually, and for several days I did not eat anything but what they forced into my mouth.

So

horrific. It's pretty bad.
Yeah. He's taken first to a village several days away while he is purchased by a local chieftain.
And that's the thing.

He's not, this is not like a often you're taken straight to the coast where you're sold.

you're now a slave and you will be sold around like a lot of these people do just stay in africa right and maybe get free or maybe don't but he is a slave to local Africans for a while right his first owner is a local chieftain who treats him really well and he thinks has adopted him into the family right he works as a blacksmith assistant he spends the next month getting gaining their trust and his plan is i want to escape right it's like i'm going to get their trust so i can make an escape attempt this doesn't pan out though and he's ultimately bought and sold several times He learns three languages as he journeys across Africa.

And he ends up in a coastal village where he is sold onto a slave ship. Now, up to this point, he always emphasizes, and it's kind of a weird part of the book, but he's really emphatic.

I was always treated well. People were not mean.
I mean, what they're doing,

separating from his sister, selling him, but they're not cruel. They're not yelling at him.
They're not treating him as a subhuman, right?

They're just doing this awful thing to him.

And as an 11-year-old, it's really weird for him because they're being so nice while they do this awful thing. Like it's kind of a headfuck, right?

And yeah, he generally enjoys good food and is, you know, kept relatively healthy this whole time, right? And this ends as soon as he's sold onto a slaving vessel, right?

Quote, 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 became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything.

I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me.

But soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables, and on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely.

I had never experienced anything of this kind before, and although not being used to water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it.

Yet, nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not.

And besides, the crew used to watch us very closely, who were not chained down on the decks, lest we should leap into the water.

And I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so and hourly whipped for not eating.

Now, he is again 11

as this is happening to him.

This is about 1756 when he's transported first to the West Indies, where he witnesses the auctioning of slaves to plantation owners, but he's not sold himself because he's really sick.

Like he's just not worth anything in the eyes of these people because he seems like he's dying. So the Dutch take him back on board the slave ship and take him to America.

And he gets better enough during that time that he's sold to a Virginia plantation owner.

He gets kind of within this horrible situation, one of the better jobs you can get where he's working as a house slave. So he's able to kind of, he's not laboring in the field.

He's able to recover his strength. more effectively, right? Because it's less physically nightmarish work.

And he gets better enough and he's just proves to be very intelligent, too. So he's got a lot of value to him.

And he's sold again to the captain of a a british merchant vessel named henry pascal it's pascal who gives him his european name gustavus vasa and sometimes you'll see him and he he would go by vasa periodically throughout his life as well as uh equiano right but yeah pascal gives him this name and takes him to england and for a while things seem to be going really well he's taught about christianity he makes like a friend with a local boy who's about his age like a white boy um and they're actually very good friends the kid dies like two years later um but but they like he's adamant that, like, no, this kid was like really, we were very close.

Um, he helps him learn English, and because he's so smart, Equiano attracts wealthy British patrons. These like two, I think, older ladies pay for him to go to school.

And so, he's obviously kind of thinking, I've lucked out. I might just kind of get out of the whole slavery thing and be like English, right? Like, maybe that's my future.

Because Pascal seems to be treating him well. He's got these local ladies who are like paying for, his, you know, he seems to have fallen into a good situation.

And then out of nowhere, Pascal takes him back to sea, right? And so they spend some time on voyages together. And he's still kind of being treated more like a servant.

They're engaged in like pirates' attacks several times. Like he helps defend the ship in several desperate battles.

They travel the oceans of the world.

And Olauda says that at this time, he feels a growing loyalty and affection for Pascal, who he believes has been so kind to him because he plans to free him one day, right? So he, he's really like

as loyal to this dude as he can because he thinks that, like, I found a good one, right? Unfortunately, he has not.

That is not the case.

In an article for documenting the American South on Equiano, Jen Williamson summarizes, he is shocked at an abrupt betrayal during a layover in England when Pascal has him roughly seized and forced into a barge.

Pascal sells Equiano to Captain James Duran, the captain of a ship bound for the West Indies.

Dazed by his sudden change in fortunes, Equiano argues with Captain Duran that Pascal could not sell him to me, nor to anyone else.

I have served him many years, and he has taken all my wages and prize money. I have been baptized, and by the laws of the land, no man has a right to sell me.

After Duran tells Equiano he talks too much English and threatens to subdue him, Equiano begins service under a new master, for he is too well convinced of his power over me to doubt what he said.

Right? She was like, but like, I did all the stuff I'm supposed to to do. I feel like I'm English now.
And he's like, if you keep talking English, I'm going to beat the shit out of you. Right.

Like, that's what happens. Yeah.

So he's taken back to the West Indies. He endures the nightmare trip down the middle passage a second time, which is just an unthinkable hell to have to do twice.

He writes of seeing white members of the crew gratify their brutal passion with females not 10 years old on the journey.

Right. In other words, they're just raping anything female that is on the boat, right? They don't care about age, you know, like that's the kind of men who are doing this, right? Yeah.

Once he arrives in the Caribbean, he is horrified that he will be sold to a plantation and into a life of, quote, bondage, misery, stripes, and chains.

But here again, he meets with this crazy good luck. It's this weird situation where he's in like the, like this horror, the worst, least lucky situation he could be in.

But within that situation, he has crazy luck. Like, I don't know how else to describe it.

because it's like one in 10 million right like this happened to millions and millions of people one of them had this unique set of circumstances and was uniquely intelligent to be able to yes to take advantage of it in the way that he was right take advantage is the wrong word but like well yeah but like Like even people who would have been as smart, but maybe aren't good with languages, probably wouldn't have had the success he has, right?

That's a separate kind of thing. Like he's just a bunch of shit happens.
And he's a good writer. He is a really good writer.
Yeah. Yeah.
Maybe not, I don't know about this point, but yeah.

yeah, no, but there's not much shit from that period that I can assign in whole to undergraduates in 2025 and have them be like, wow, that's fucked up.

Like, it makes people feel things still centuries later. Yeah.
It's really powerful. Yeah, I do really recommend reading it because, among other things, it's just there's a lot.

I mean, the early portions of the book are just a lot about life in that part of Africa at the time that you're not going to run into a lot of first-hand accounts of. No, it's just interesting.

Yeah.

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Okay, if you thought season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up. Season three is here, and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper.

They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff.

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So again, within this horrible situation, he gets crazy lucky again because the next person to buy him is a Quaker. And again, most, a lot of Quakers are anti-slavery.

This guy, Robert King, clearly isn't totally against slavery, but he's also still a Quaker, right? And he's like a merchant or something.

I don't know exactly what he's there to do, but he sees, he at once recognizes, wow, this kid is smart as hell. And he already speaks a ton of languages.
There's a lot I can have him do.

So King starts having Equiano work a bunch of different jobs. And he starts like basically assigning him out to like subcontract him with other guys.

And some of these guys are like fairly decent and are like, hey, what if we hired you to do extra side work and pay you personally for it? And King is like, yeah. you know,

I have no problem with you making money on the side, right? Why not? Yeah.

And so these guys like both teach him how to, you know, train him up and help him like learn these different trades. And he's able to make side money.

And so he takes this side money and he starts buying and selling goods with the money that he makes. Right.
And basically turning his salary into even more money.

And he does well enough at this that in 1766, when he's about 21, he's able to buy his freedom. And he does.
Robert King allows him to do this, which he didn't have to do.

So again, he's he got into like the luckiest. part of a bad situation he could be.

And yeah, he's able to, he becomes a free man. He's free after this point.
So he spends the next several years taking work on merchant ships because that's what he knows how to do.

And he travels around the world. In 1773, he becomes one of the first Africans to visit the Arctic.
Equiano wrote and corresponded widely. And generally, he's like an adventurer.

This guy lives an amazing life.

Like he's one of the most incredible people who ever lived.

Now, the whole time, though, is his life is going well, right?

He remains troubled with the inhuman institution of slavery that had robbed him of his childhood and his family. You know,

he knows this is still going on. He's still angry about it.

And so he starts meeting during the times when he's back in London, he starts meeting with and befriending some of the small number of Englishmen who oppose the institution of slavery.

And after reading that op-ed, he comes across this article about what's happened on the Zorg. He's sick with horror and fury at what has happened.
I mean, it's just an awful thing.

And he has personal experience with being on those boats. So it's much, he knows much better how awful it is than an average person reading it, and he wants to do something.

However, he's also a practical guy. He knows that even a freed black man has zero political power and influence in England at the time.

So if he's going to have an impact on the situation, he's going to have to be cunning about it.

One of Equiano's friends is a writer and a lawyer who's also like an early abolitionist named Granville Sharp. And Sharp is going to be the second of our heroes for this episode.

One of the coolest dudes to ever live. Really like just an actual great man.

Born in Durham in 1735, Granville was the middle-ish child of 14. Five of his eight older brothers survived early childhood, which means his parents were better than average.

His family was working class, and as a youth, he was apprenticed to the owner of a fabric store. However, he turned out to be one of those kids who's just like irrepressibly smart, right?

Like he is not going to work at the fabric store, you know?

In Granville, this expresses itself. He has this pay-the-debate kid.

He's the good kind of debate kid, but he has this pathological need to debate with his peers to the extent he is so committed to this that he makes a Jewish friend and they start having like good-natured arguments about religion.

And because he wants to argue better with his Jewish friend, he learns Hebrew and becomes a fluent speaker of Hebrew in order to argue about like the Torah with his Jewish friend.

Yeah, that's perfect, actually. Yeah.
When he makes a friend who's a member of a weird Greek Christian sect, he learns Greek for the same reason.

Like, again, like Equiato, he's one of these guys who just picks up languages. He's just crazy.

Yeah. In 1757, he gets a job as a clerk in the ordinance office, which is so far as I can tell is like a mid-level bureaucratic position.

This leaves him with ample free time, which he spends idly studying the law and presumably learning more languages in order to argue with his friends.

One of his older brothers is a doctor who holds, and you get the feeling this is like a family of good people because his older brother, the doctor, runs a free clinic out of his house for the poor of London, right?

Yeah. And Granville periodically will just like show up to hang out with him and his patients and like talk.
There's not TV at the time. What else are you going to do, right?

No podcast.

No podcast, right? Yeah. So Granville shows up one day in 1765, the year before Equiano buys his freedom, and he happens to meet a black enslaved person named Jonathan Strong.

Strong had been taken from Barbados to London by his owner, slave trader David Lyell. He was 15 or 16

when Lyell has him baptized.

Now, religion is confusing at the best of times, and Strong, like many enslaved people, misunderstood the purpose of baptism and was under the impression that now that this was done, he was a free person because he had been baptized, right?

You can't hold a Christian as a slave, right? That'd be fucked up.

Pretty weird. Pretty weird.
And so he tells Lyle, well, like, I'm free now, right?

And Lyle, being a slave owner and trader, doesn't have a great control over his anger and just immediately pistol whips this adolescent boy nearly to death.

He beats him so badly with the butt of a handgun that Strong goes temporarily blind and can barely walk upright.

So he, I, and you get the feeling he just loses his temper and beats this kid nearly to death because he's immediately like, oh shit, I killed him.

And he just tosses him out onto the street like a piece of trash. He's like, well, he's not worth anything anymore.
Bye.

So somehow this dying boy manages to like crawl or find help and he gets to Granville's brother's free clinic where his immediate injuries are treated, but it's clear he needs more treatment.

And it just happens to be on a day that like Granville Sharp is there with his brother.

And so he and his brother take Jonathan to a nearby hospital and pool their money to pay for him to stay there for four months and recover.

And when he's released, because they're just treating him like a freedman at this point, they find him paying work with a Quaker pharmacist they knew. So they get this guy to the hospital.

He heals, he recovers pretty well, And they find him a job and he starts living a life, right? Like he's an independent free person making money.

For a year and change, things are pretty good for Strong. But then in 1767, his former owner, Lyle, sees Jonathan on the street and is like, he's alive and healthy.
And he gets really fucking angry.

How dare that boy have the temerity to survive my beatings and not hand himself back over to me? He stole himself, basically. He stole himself.
Yeah.

Yeah.

So

Lyle doesn't want to deal with Strong anymore, but he works. He says, like, hey, I own this guy and he's really healthy.
You just got to go get him if you give me 30 pounds.

So he like sells this guy and then he hires slave catchers to abduct Strong out of his new life.

Yeah.

So

real stand-up guy.

Great dude. Months of conflict.
Granville Sharp, who has been studying the law is like, you can't do this. He's a free man now.
You can't make him leave.

You can't take him to another foreign country right like you can't do that um so there's a conflict follows there's like this goes on for a while before like the court case actually resolves and at one point during the proceedings lyle challenges sharp to a duel and sharp's like let's settle this in court basically um and At another point, lawyers that Granville consulted warned him that English law saw slaves as property, even once they were taken onto English soil.

And Sharp has a law, a moment of horror where he's like, there's no way the laws of my beloved England are this bad.

So he spends the next like two years making himself an expert in the law and fighting this case, fighting Lyle and the man Lyle had sold Strong to, James Kerr.

And he eventually wins. Strong's legal defense wins.
This is a significant case in like British like legal history.

And it's the kind of thing where they win Strong's freedom, but they don't get a ruling that alters English law in respect to the rights of enslaved people. Right.

Yeah. So

it's good because Strong doesn't have to be sold into slavery again.

But it also doesn't like, it doesn't go any further, right? And Sharp is disappointed by this.

And because by this point, after two years of fighting this case and immersing himself in the law, Granville Sharp has become, in Siddharth Kara's words, the first British person to devote his life to the extirpation of slavery.

And his influence actually goes beyond that, though. It's wild how influential this motherfucking dude is.
One of Sharp's overseas friends is an American of some notoriety named Benjamin Franklin.

And in his off time, Sharp had a habit when he wasn't fighting slavery. He would write essays that were often published as pamphlets or tracts.

And he sends one of these pamphlets to his buddy Benjamin Franklin, which lays out Sharp's argument that Americans shouldn't be taxed if they don't have parliamentary representation.

This dude's like at the center of the entire power of global history. It's fucking amazing.
Like, yeah, just writing a lot of letters and absolutely

forest gump history. Yeah.
18th century. He's like a really smart forest gump.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
If forest gump had done a whole lot of very more impressive stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just a, I didn't know anything at all really about Granville Sharp until he started this.
I'm like, yeah, we should probably talk more about this guy.

Yeah, this dude probably should be on money or something. Yeah.
Yeah, put this fucking 20-pound note.

Yeah, yeah. We got some people who really shouldn't be on money.
Uh, we could probably switch them out, yeah, that would be fine.

It's like those people, I'm sure you, I mean, Robert, you and I have experienced this together.

When you are working in conflict zones, sometimes you will that often the people who you work with are like the most remarkable people, like they speak several languages, and they and like yeah, you taught ourselves yourself Chinese because you were bored after learning English.

Like,

what?

And like your grasp of our culture and politics and the way we talk is perfect. Yeah.
And you're the same in five other languages and you can argue about domestic issues in the U.S. with me

with a great degree of intelligence to many American people. Yeah,

and who have like devoted their life in between like the stuff they're doing with you to like rescuing other people and like helping to provide like emergency medical care or get food to different like, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

You'll find out that, yeah, on Sundays, they rescue puppies from fucking burning buildings and, like, it just fits perfectly with who that person is.

I'm so tired after my work week, I just sit on the couch in the weekend. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How do I become more like you? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Granville Sharp is one of those, like, well, fuck, I'm not getting enough done, guys, right? And Equiano is, too, to be honest. They're both like, Jesus Christ.

Like, I wouldn't believe you if you were in a story.

So, Sharp's primary primary focus in the years after the Strong case was in expanding his studies as a lawyer so he could make an unimpeachable legal case for banning slavery.

In 1769, he publishes a tract titled A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men in England.

He wasn't good at titling. He was good at a lot of stuff, but not titles.

This became one of the first popular arguments against the system of slavery in England, not just arguing that it was immoral, but that it was foreign to the spirit and intention of British law and cultural values, right?

That's a key part of his argument is that, like, this isn't really English, right?

Like, we shouldn't, based on the things we say about our shared values, this is not a natural thing for us to be doing, right? Why are we so committed to this? Is it just venal profit? It is. Yeah.

Yeah.

I wonder if there's a modern analogy for that, Robert.

What's interesting here, though, is that Sharp is not just wishcasting a legal argument, right?

His extensive study of the law had found precedent as far back as 1569 for the assertion that slavery was not legal on British soil.

Now, I'm not going to go into detail about centuries-old British like court rulings and rulings of like kings and shit, but there are cases from the 1600s to the 1700s that back up this argument.

And one thing that was definitely true is that no law was ever passed in England to make it legal to own Africans. That's never, there's never like a law that just says you can do this.
Yeah.

People just start doing it and they're like, well, this is property. Yeah.
It's happening now. Yeah.

The best pro-slavery advocates could do is point out a 1729 legal opinion in which an attorney general had argued that the legal status of a slave didn't change just because they set foot in England, right?

Which is something, but it's not the same as like there being a law saying you could do this. Yeah.
Right. You can't point to it as a slavery act.
Yeah, exactly. Even like.

When we go back in American history, like when we're looking for like when shattle slavery begins, you can see cases where there are like

indentured servants, right? And as as a form of punishment, that their terms of service are extended.

But then it appears that the black people's terms of service are not extended, presumably because they are assumed to be in servitude for their entire life by nature of who they are, right?

But like we can't point to a, this is when they decided it was going to be like that, and those were the rules. Right, right.
Yep.

So, Granville comes into the 1770s, well armed to argue that slavery is not really legal.

Uh, next, per Mike Kay's piece for antislavery.org, in 1772, Sharpe defended James Somerset, a slave who had escaped and been recaptured.

This proved to be a crucial test case, as Sharpe argued that slavery itself was unlawful in Britain.

Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice and Presiding Judge, was reluctant to reach a conclusion on whether the right to property outweighed the right to freedom and tried to persuade the parties to settle out of court.

When this failed, he attempted to word his decision so that he freed Somerset without setting a precedent.

Despite Mansfield's efforts, most observers, including other judges, thought that the effect of the judgment was to free slaves that were brought to Britain and that this provided a legal avenue for many slaves to obtain their freedom.

So this is the kind of the case where Mansfield is doing everything he can for this not to have any wider effect. But all people hear is that like, well, this guy got freed, right?

Let's try it some more.

Yeah, yeah.

I feel like this makes me free, right?

So large numbers of enslaved people in England start fleeing their masters in an errant belief that slavery had ended on the island.

Many abolitionists who misunderstood the ruling celebrated it as a sign of the fundamental justice and equality of English law.

Judge Mansfield had to issue a note that the case was only really relevant to a specific niche situation, which caused Ben Franklin to joke that English abolitionists were celebrating the majesty of their legal system for its virtue and, quote, setting free a single Negro, right?

Where he's like, okay, guys, like it's good, but like, maybe calm down a little bit, you know?

Yeah, this is this is one guy. There's still a lot of guys.

Still a net negative.

Now, this judge, the Earl of Mansfield, is a really interesting guy because not only is he the judge in the Somerset case, he's going to be the judge in the Zorg case.

Now, this isn't weird because he's one of the most significant figures in the whole history of English law. He's the judge for a lot of big cases at the time, right?

But he's a particularly interesting guy to rule on cases like this because he has no child of his own, but he's raising his illegitimate niece, Dito Bell, as his daughter, and she is a black woman of mixed race, right?

So he is simultaneously repeatedly being like, enslaved people are property, and my ruling should not be seen to free anyone.

And is also clearly capable of understanding that they're human beings because he is

a black woman, right?

And there's all, there are a couple of moments where, because he never talks in a way that's very sympathetic to this, but there's a couple of of rulings where it's like, well, maybe this is where his sympathy moved him a little bit.

Not to give him much credit, because I don't think he's a very nice guy, but

it's a really, he's a really interesting judge to be trying in this case, right?

Now, and again, he is not considered a friendly judge. Sharp considers him a deeply hostile judge, in fact.
And in the Zorg case, Mansfield has no trouble ruling that enslaved Africans are property.

Anyway, by the time we hit 1783, Sharp is well established as the guy to talk to if you're trying to defend or create rights for enslaved people in England, right?

And so it's not hard to see why our friend Olada Equiano would like Granville Sharp, right? Seems like a pretty natural friendship.

And so once Equiano reads that article about the Zorg case, he does the 1700s equivalent of pasting a link to a news article in the group chat and he like sends a copy to his friend Granville Sharp.

Granville writes in his diary, Gustavus Vassa called on me with an account of 130 Negroes being thrown alive into the sea from on board an English slave ship.

And this is the start of a process that is going to

terminate in the creation of the first mass movement against slavery in British history, right? Like this, this is the inciting instant is Equiano sending this letter to Granville Sharp.

So Sharp hits the ground running.

He starts meeting with the lawyers who'd represented the insurers in that case and is like, hey, I think we can file an action against the Gregson syndicate and request a new trial.

And I think we can win that new trial because

we didn't really have a full trial last time.

If we really make a thing of this, we can make them go through discovery and we can look at the logbooks and the other documentation kept by the crew of the Zorg, right?

And we can see, did they really need to kill those people? You know?

Yeah. He also starts barraging influential figures in the country with letters demanding the Admiralty Court charge the crewmen of the Zorg with murder.
He's going to do this the rest of his life.

It never works, but he does keep trying, right?

Most of his efforts don't bear fruit, but he succeeds in getting a hearing over a motion to set a new trial.

And this hearing is scheduled for May 21st, 1783, less than two months after the first trial. Gregson v.
Gilbert, which is the hearing, is not going to be a tiny, largely ignored case.

It's going to be a major court thing with exacting notes taken on court proceedings and a huge amount of media attention covering every twist and turn.

Sharp is not technically the lawyer here, but he's basically acting as an advisor to the defense council, which consisted of three lawyers.

The most important of these was a fellow named Samuel Haywood. And Haywood's a really interesting person.
He was born in Liverpool in the 1750s. He went to Cambridge.

And he comes from like a very rich family, right? I mean, he goes to Cambridge, right? And he's rich because his dad, Benjamin, is a slave merchant in Liverpool.

And his younger brother, also Benjamin, Benjamin Arthur, is a slave merchant in Liverpool.

And over like the years they'd been doing this, something like 130 different slave voyages had been financed and operated by the Haywood family, right? They had transported,

at least according to Siddharth Kara, they had transported something like 42,000 enslaved people over the course of their time in this industry.

And in fact, the Haywoods had invested in at least one slave ship with William Grigson, with like the Grigson syndicate, right? Oh, wow. Yeah.

So this is a kid whose money and whose child, like schooling and stuff is paid for by slave money. And he's an abolitionist by now.
He fundamentally objects to the slave trade. Right.

And so he just he like when he's representing the underwriters in this case, he's probably pissing off his family. So it's just very introverted.

Chris is a kid from slave money who's like, nah, this is bad. Nah, bro.

Just if anyone ever says people who grew up in that culture couldn't know it was wrong. Like, yeah, a lot of them.
Here's a dude. This guy.
Here's a dude.

I don't know that if he was like a committed full-on abolitionist because a lot of these guys were just anti-the slave trade and thought that that was the like the middle passage and stuff with the triangle trade was the worst part of it.

But that's still a better than not being against that, right? It's a step. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's an unusual position still and a brave one to assert at that time.
Right, right. If you're

when your whole family are slave traders. Yeah.
Yeah.

So from the jump, there are some uncomfortable tensions behind the scenes in this case.

The insurers and their counsel benefited from Granville Sharp's lobbying and legal mind, but they're not on the same side precisely. The insurers are slavery profiteers.

They don't want the trade to end. They don't want abolition

making money off of it, right? They just don't want to pay money in this case.

Sharp is on board with them because he also doesn't want Gregson to get a bunch of money for killing these people or for his people killing these people.

But he also sees this case fundamentally as a way to set further precedents on the road to ending the slave trade, right?

He is thinking about this from the jump, that I am doing this because it's a step to something better.

Now, Judge Mansfield tries to deny that possibility from the outset of the trial, insisting that this case is purely regarding the insurance policy on the Zong or the Zorg.

Mansfield insists the case of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.

And for the most part, the actual arguments in the case do not rely on enslaved Africans having more rights than a horse, right? That is kind of what's going on here.

The central legal question is not, was it bad that they killed these people?

It's did these people have to die because disasters that the Zorg's crew were not in control of had caused a situation where it was impossible to keep them alive, right?

Is this a situation where there was no other option, where people were going to die one way or the other, and they were trying to save a portion of the crew and the cargo?

Or was this a case where the people operating the ship had fucked up constantly and unnecessarily murdered a bunch of people and were now trying to get insurance money to cover up the fact that they fucked up, right?

Which of these is what happened here, right?

And to be clear, if you approach the case of the Zorg from just that standpoint, ignoring the crime against humanity, the Gregson Syndicate and its employees are in the wrong, right?

Because they did fuck up repeatedly and horribly. Yeah, you know,

you do not have to be like morally against slavery to be like, well, but like, you guys didn't know what the fuck you were doing. You just threw them overboard.

You had 400 gallons of water on the boat.

You know who else has a lot of water?

I can make a guess. Yeah,

this podcast is sponsored entirely by the pistachio farmers of Central California. Jesus.
You know?

Yeah. Pistachios.
We've got enough water, probably. Yeah, fuck the Colorado River.
Yeah.

Actually, it's doing okay right now.

Happy for it. At an all-time high, which means climate change is solved.
Oh, good. I'm glad I've been worried about that.
Yep, we did it.

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And we're back.

So,

diligent cross-examination, you know, early in the court proceedings here comes across a bunch of examples of the crew of the Zorg fucking up hideously, right?

It finds out, because they're talking to Stubbs, and they're talking to that, to his first mate.

And Stubbs admits like a bunch of shit he shouldn't on the stand, including it, like, wait, wait, you guys, you guys sailed past other islands that had water, but didn't, because you were like worried that they might have been taken by like an enemy who would take take your boat, but you didn't know.

And you just went past the islands that were full of water.

And then he admits that like, well, we thought we had enough water when we passed those islands, but then we looked inside and realized that the water barrels weren't as full as we thought.

And it's like, you didn't check on your water.

You didn't check to see if you had enough water.

Seems like a pretty important thing to check. Yeah.
Likewise, the lawyers point out that the Gregson Syndicate had a responsibility to hire a competent captain.

Not only was Collingswood not that, but when he got sick, he passed on command to a demonstrably incompetent man when a skilled sailor and navigator was locked in his room, forbidden from doing his job.

It was not the sea's fault or the underwriter's responsibility if the syndicate hired a captain who couldn't, and this is a line from the court case, tell Hispaniola from Jamaica.

Wow.

We'll burn on the dead guy. Good in the 18th century.

Now, much of the case came down to the fact that further interrogation of the ship's stores and the actual documentation of their journey showed that when they landed in Jamaica, they had days of water left.

And if they'd been close to running out, there were, again, multiple islands they could have gone to to get their water within a day or so.

In addition to that, on the stand, Stubbs revealed that it had rained several times near the end of the journey, and he'd failed to have the crew collect rainwater.

Stubbs really continues to just the best case.

Should we get water? No, let's just kill some more guys. Yeah, that's fine.
Sorry, kill some more women and children. Yeah.

Fuck.

So this case, which had been rushed through the first time on second viewing, seemed much more disturbing, even to skeptics like Mansfield.

The dark question that hovered over the whole proceeding was this. If not out of necessity, why would Stubbs and the crew have thrown 130 people overboard?

And the answer that people kept thinking was probably the obvious one is this.

After a too long journey on a slave ship crammed with twice its maximum occupancy without enough food or enough water and disease endemic, many of the enslaved people on board were too sick and visibly ailing to fetch much of a price at auction.

So if you just kill them, the insured value is higher than what they would sell for.

We don't know that that's what was going on. Right.
But this is what people start talking about. And it's not an unreasonable proposition.
Yeah, no, it's pretty ghastly. It lines up.
Yeah. Yeah.

But everything else they've done is ghastly. Right.
And this changes the thinking of a lot of people like Mansfield, who are not abolitionists, but who are like, oh, shit.

But if like, if we establish this precedent, people might just start murdering ships full of enslaved people to just get the insurance money. And that seems like a nightmare.

Like, that's even bad to me. And I kind of suck ass, you know?

So,

this fact is shaking even to guys like Judge Manfield. And he ruled, quote, to be sure, what Mr.
Haywood has observed is a very material circumstance.

So many Negroes thrown overboard after the rain came without any account of how they came to do it. It is so uncommon a case.
I think, upon the ground of re-examination, it ought to go to a new trial.

And he grants a motion for retrial. Now, this is never to be.

There's not a second trial because William Grigson, head of the slaving syndicate, decides that a second trial is not going to to go well, right? And it's just going to waste money.

So let's just cut our losses and return to operating the slave trade at a max, massive, massive level. His insurers celebrate their victory.

But you could be forgiven for seeing that at this point, the case is like an overall like mixed bag or even a wash for the cause of abolitionism, right?

Because, you know, The people who won are still involved in the slaving industry. No one has attained any additional rights.
No one's ruled that enslaved people are human beings.

They're still the same as cargo, right? How is this?

You could see someone, especially like a political radical at the time, being like, this is the worst kind of incrementalism. You've achieved nothing, right? You can see how someone might think that.

That is not the case. And in fact, part of why I think the story is important is it illustrates how critical small and seemingly pyrrhic victories can be in pursuit of sweeping social change.

First off, while there's no second trial, the fact that a retrial was granted means that slave merchants had been given a warning, you can't just kill people and claim the insurance money on them, right?

And then as Siddharth Kara writes in the Zorg, even if just for a moment, the Africans who lay at the bottom of the ocean thousands away were seen as people, not property.

And Kara is arguing that this causes kind of a perceptual shift in a lot of people who can't help, as they're hearing how horrible what this is, sympathize with these people who are still legally just property and that that's an important shift.

But the larger victory in the case was that it had started the process of gathering together and galvanizing great legal minds, writers, and agitators towards pursuing an end to the slave trade in an organized fashion, right?

And that's what we're going to talk about in part three.

But I should conclude today by saying a little about our main villains for these episodes, William Grigson and Robert Stubbs.

During the first case, Stubbs had high hopes of getting a job with the syndicate and perhaps even support to regain his lost gold by helping Gregson make good on the slaves that they'd killed.

When this failed, he gets cut loose. Now, Stubbs never makes it back to Africa.
He scrapes together a meager living for the next few years and he dies aged 60 in 1787.

In his will, he gave his son George all my wearing apparel, which wasn't much use to the boy, who never made it back from Africa and died there earlier that same year, aged 19.

Oh, Stubbsy, one more at the end, one more real piece of shit.

Yeah.

Leave his kid his clothes.

His old man clothes. He literally does.
He doesn't give his kids any money. I don't think he has much, but he's like, I already paid to raise them.
Why would I give him money?

Paid to ship that one kid off to Africa. Jesus, what a piece of shit.
Yeah, what a turd. Yeah.
Find his grave and piss on it if you're in the region. Yeah, if you can find it, pee on it.

William Gregson, unfortunately, lives until 1800 when he dies age 79 after having financed more than 150 slave voyages that tore nearly 60,000 Africans from their homes.

Roughly 16% of these people died en route. Gregson died wealthy and respected, having never been called to account for his crimes against humanity, which is a bummer.
Yeah, that sucks.

I'm sure his descendants aren't still rich today.

I'm not sure that's something you can be so sure of, Robert.

I think there's a good chance they might be. No,

the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, James. Ah, yeah, but it moves slowly, is the problem.
It moves real fucking slow,

a little bit too slowly sometimes. Be good if someone would give it a bit of a giddy up, you know.

And it's less of an arc and more of like one of those one of those needles they have on like a seismograph. So it's just like jumping back and forth

pretty often. Sure, doesn't seem to be bending in a good direction recently.
Yeah, I don't know, man.

But yeah,

that's the story.

Oh,

Stubbsy, man.

Stubbsy. Yeah.

At least he died reasonably young. Like, he could have made it to 100 like the other dude.
I can't imagine what's happening. I don't know, 60 in 1787.

Yeah, I mean, he lives longer than poor little George. That's right.
He lives longer than his son. Yeah.

What a fucking dude. Yeah.
Who he presumably doesn't even know has died because he gives that few shits. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, here, have some old shirts.

Kid. My old death clothes.
Wow. That I i wore as i fucked up again and again over a series of fuck-ups that lasted my entire life well i'm glad that guy is dead

we all are i think yeah james do you want to plug your book real quick yeah you won't encounter any any stubbsy type characters but there's some heroes in here i think some people who have done some really remarkable things uh yeah i wrote this about anarchists at war it's called against the state you can pre-order it from aka press uh you can hear about some people trying to build a better world uh less incrementally than this,

in many cases, kind of with a bit more, I guess,

kinetic means. But nonetheless, I think

there's some stories and things that we can learn in our much less violent lives from these people and the way they organize and the way that they have gone about things.

And I hope people will read it and enjoy it. You can buy it from AK Press.
Pre-order link will be in the episode. Description should.

Yeah. Yeah, you should.
Yeah. Don't buy it from Jeff Bezos.

He's not as bad as some of the people on here but not a great dude not a great dude and yeah you know until next time folks well which we will be like tomorrow but just in general i guess as you look at how fucked up things are remember that things change pretty quickly and uh

things evils that seem entrenched and impossible to fight generally aren't and that even victories that seem pyric or meaningless can lead to much greater things just by virtue of the fact that through the act of fighting people are brought together who become capable of fighting more effectively even greater injustices.

So

keep fighting.

And again, piss on that guy's grave if you find it. Yeah.
Yep.

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