Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729-1786: Manhood, Race and Sensibility 3031374193, 9783031374197

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Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786 Manhood, Race and Sensibility G. J. Barker-Benfield

Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786

G. J. Barker-Benfield

Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786 Manhood, Race and Sensibility

G. J. Barker-Benfield State University of New York Albany, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-37419-7 ISBN 978-3-031-37420-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Linda, with all my love.

Acknowledgements

Distinguished anthropologist and fellow scholar, Linda Layne has been my loving sounding board, full of fruitful suggestions, sustaining me every moment. Lori Saba had done wonders in typing several drafts of this, as she has all my previous work. Timothy Jackson generously and efficiently supplied many primary and secondary materials. Nicholas Guyatt gave an early draft invaluable criticism. Larry Wittner and Tony Axon have kept me going through thick and through thin. John Callahan and Jim Walvin have continued to inspire me. David Alexander took us to Shandy Hall: as always, he has been a knowledgeable and supportive friend. Catherine Clinton has been as helpfully resourceful as ever. I am honoured by Kathleen M. Brown’s generous support of my work. Lucy deLap suggested I send it to Palgrave, and put me in touch with George Morris, who made the excellent index, as she had George Severs of my previous book, both of them first-rate historians. Lucy Kidwell, of Palgrave, found three very encouraging readers. I thank Preetha Kuttiapan for helping steer me through the Press. Along with his love, Jasper Wilson sent me invaluable Parker jotters and Scotch tape. Brycchan Carey helpfully answered my questions about obtaining pictures. I owe a special debt to Vincent Carretta’s edition of Sancho’s Letters. I hope my footnotes adequately acknowledge my other debts. And, as throughout my life, I have had the example of Donald Meyer, my intellectual father, before me.

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Contents

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Introduction

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“Considering Slavery—What It Is,” Ignatius Sancho Appeals to Laurence Sterne

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“So Many of Her Brethren and Sisters”: Sterne Replies to Sancho

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“The Black Must Be Discharged” Mansfield’s Decision and Its Aftermath

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“The Poor Fellow Foams Again.” Castration for the Public Good

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“A Son of Afric,” Amid Riots and Imperial War

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“To Produce Remorse in Every Enlightened Reader.” Frances Crewe’s Publication of Sancho’s Letters

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“Too Well Known to Make Any Mention Necessary.” Sancho’s Impact

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 1807, the British Parliament passed the “Act for the Abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire.” That this Act served British economic interests is an explanation now long dismissed, or else fundamentally recast. Christopher Leslie Brown has persuasively defined “moral capital” as the foundation of British abolitionism. David Brown Davis notes the “frequent blurring of the distinction between slavery and the slave trade” proponents of that Act saw it as a stage in abolition.1 Fundamental to that moral capital was the possession of “sensibility,” which helps to explain why white, male MP’s and their constituents, also white and male, supported the cause of abolition on behalf of people they emphasized were manifestly different and inferior to themselves. So influential was the appeal to sensibility seen to be, that defenders of enslavement appealed to it, too, but defining it as a natural constituent of white psychology that Africans conveniently lacked. The increase of literacy among both genders had been fundamental to the creation of a “culture of sensibility,” shared by women and men, although it was gendered. That coincided with Britain’s entry into and coming to dominate the slave trade.2 One person who came to be seen as the exemplar of the existence of sensibility in “an African” was Ignatius Sancho (1729–82). The title of his collected letters included that identification, Letters of the late Ignatius Sancho, An African. They are the subject of this book.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3_1

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Of course, appeals to “feeling” have become pervasive, with profound effects on politics, both positive and negative. Sancho’s first letter (published in 1775) stimulated Lawrence Sterne’s influential sympathy for enslaved Black people. The letters with which his editor, Frances Crewe, chose to open their publications in 1782, perhaps in collaboration with Sancho (who died that year) expressed his criticism of racism and slavery in Britain’s growing empire. They frequently expressed the self-conscious complexity of his being Black and African in eighteenth-century Britain, a pervasive issue for his readers in modern Britain. Sancho participated in the public debate that followed the 1772 Mansfield decision, against the enslavement of Blacks in Britain, but provoking widespread fear over the subsequent presence of free Blacks there; that opposition has resonance with the current Tory plan to deport refugees to Rwanda. The lynching of George Floyd in 2020 in Minneapolis re-energized the opposition to racism on both sides of the Atlantic, provoking intense reaction, as well as re-energizing the history of British and American participation in the slave trade and slavery among the public at large. According to John Jekyll, his near-contemporary biographer, the African child to be baptized Charles Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship in 1729, during its voyage from Guinea to Cartagena in Colombia. It was luck that his adult voice survives, not to have died young like most of the twelve million people captured in Africa, sold to traders and then plantation owners across the Atlantic.3 Indigenous peoples there were enslaved in their millions, too, from 1492 at least, but they did not survive as forced, field labourers.4 Initial deracination was crucial. If Africans did not die en route, many of them and their descendants were worked to premature death, growing sugar and tobacco, forms of mass murder of those Sancho called “my miserable black brethren.” Survivors resisted and lived to create new cultures in “the Black Atlantic.”5 What they grew they processed into the luxuries to be consumed very largely by customers back in Europe, the culmination of this triangular trade, from Europe to Africa to the Americas, to Europe as well as to other parts of the world. The hostile climate quickly killed baby Sancho’s mother; his father “defeated the miseries of slavery by the act of suicide,” by no means a unique form of assertiveness. Sancho was much too young consciously to remember the horrors of his first voyage. About two years later, Sancho was brought to London by an Englishman, to live with his next owners near Blackheath, another piece of luck because the child, seen there as a “little Negro,” was selected by the Duke of Montagu,

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who lived by the heath with his Duchess, and often brought Sancho to their mansion. The Duke had patronized two other black males, Francis Williams the Jamaican poet, and prince Ayuba Suleiman Diallo a.k.a. Job ben Solomon, rescued from slavery because of his rank, soon to be sent back to his native Senegal, in hopes he would be an agent for the enslaving Royal Africa Company.6 Conflict with the three “Maiden Ladies” who owned him led to their threatening “to return Sancho to his African slavery,” and his running away to the home of the widowed Duchess, who eventually employed him as her butler. Her death and a bequest left him free, but he returned to the household of the next Duke of Montagu, where he became his valet. He married Anne Osborne, “of West Indian origin.” Sancho composed and published sixty-two pieces of music between 1767 and 1779. In 1773, illhealth prevented Sancho’s continuing in the Montagu’s service, but his own savings and “ducal munificence” enabled him and his wife, with their children (four daughters and two sons), to set themselves up in a grocery shop at 19 Charles Street, Westminster, as one of his advertisements told customers, very close to the centre of metropolitan government.7 In his vivid if brief biography, James Walvin writes, there Sancho “tended to his counter and customers, taking tea with favoured or famous, as…Anne helped by their children, worked close by, “breaking down the sugar loaves into…smaller parcels.” The scene “illustrates the intertwinings of elements of empire.” His property ownership, moreover, entitled Sancho to vote which he did in two elections, in 1774 and in 1780, shortly before his death. His candidate in that second election, Charles James Fox, was in all likelihood one of their customers, and I suggest in Chapter 7, can be linked to the publication of his Letters. It is from this shop-tending phase of his life that we have nearly all of Sancho’s letters.8 But it had been in 1766, while he was in service to the first Duke of Montagu (of the second creation), when Sancho made his own luck, by writing an appeal to Laurence Sterne on behalf of those enslaved black brethren; he chose Sterne because of his celebrated reputation for humanity. This was the earliest of Sancho’s remaining letters, one referring to Sterne’s sermons and his previous words on slavery. And Sterne replied, Sancho’s appeal and Sterne’s reply were always publicly associated from

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From Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), an Early African Composer in England, The Collected Editions of His Music in Facsimile, ed. Josephine R.B. Wright (Copyright, 1981, Garland Publishing)

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From Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), an Early African Composer in England, The Collected Editions of His Music in Facsimile, ed. Josephine R.B. Wright (Copyright, 1981, Garland Publishing)

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From Tobacco, vol. 86 (1888), 37 1775, when they were published cheek by jowl, although in a collection devoted to Sterne’s letters made by his daughter.9 Sancho’s letters were collected, edited and published by Frances Crewe, one of his correspondents. Ryan Hanley contends she was part of a “network” surrounding the Letters ’ “composition, publications, and dissemination,” illustrating his view that publications by black authors were powerfully influenced “by such networks.” Certainly, without Crewe’s actions, the antislavery campaign would have been unable to circulate Sancho’s letters—only four of them had been published during his lifetime. Crewe’s editorship was anonymous like the work of the vast majority of women in antislavery. While “as writers they engaged in potential political debates from the…Glorious Revolution to …abolitionism,” upper-class women “signified political allegiances by the clothing and Cockades they wore to assemblies…they attended

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debating societies and responded to politically flavored plays”; workingclass women, too, participated in “riots, demonstrations, chairing, and processions.” But antislavery “was the first, large-scale political campaign by middle-class women, and the first movement in which women aroused the opinion of the female public in order to put pressure on Parliament.” This was despite their exclusion from formal citizenship. They were unable to vote or to sign petitions because of their gender, but they “took a hand in the petitioning process itself.” Women raised money by subscription, by selling sewn and embroidered items at fairs and bazaars. Actions in boycotting slave-produced goods for domestic use were similarly gendered. Campaigners for abstention “appealed to women’s supposed sensitivity.”10 Famously, Josiah Wedgwood’s contribution to antislavery included mass production of the jasper cameo depicting a kneeling slave with the motto supplied by the Rev. Peter Peckard, “Am I Not A Man And A Brother,” one which Sancho’s Letters had represented, and which, Clare Midgley writes, was to exploit the “role of women as the leaders of fashion.” The design decorated “ladies bracelets and hairpins” as well as men’s snuff boxes. Thomas Clarkson wrote that at “length the taste for wearing them became so general and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, but for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice humanity, and freedom.” Quoting that passage, Mary Guyatt points out Clarkson tells us women and men “took it upon themselves to customize the piece at their own expense,” showing “a mutually advantageous reciprocity between two objects of unequal moral worth: frivolous jewellery was lent moral value by this incorporation of an image associated with a popular and moral cause.” She writes, too, that the inclusion of Wedgwood’s image in a hairpin or bracelet as mere feminization “helped to lessen the potential embarrassment experienced by women wearing images of semi-naked black males.” Of course, those males were permanently kneeling and suppliant, a posture Sancho scorned, although Jekyll presented him as having been wild before he was domesticated.11 Crewe made her gender known by referring to the editor three times as she “and one as “her.” Of the eleven hundred and eighty-one who subscribed to the publication of Sancho’s letters (as Peter Fryer points out, more than any publication since the Spectator, early in the century), three hundred and twenty at least (two just gave their initials) were women, agreeing to have their names published.12 J.R. Oldfield writes, “subscribing to any type of project, cultural or otherwise, was

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a form of self-advertisement.” Presumably, subscribers agreed with the editor’s intention: “the desire of showing that on untutored African may possess abilities equal to an European,” as well as “to serve his worthy family,” a high proportion were aristocrats and ladies and gentlemen, reflecting Crewe’s contacts. The list included “Mr. Osborn,” Sancho’s African British brother-in-law, and other members of his circle, highstatus servants, artists, local businessmen and officials, from whom Crewe said she collected his letters. Sancho had published three letters during his lifetime under the name, AFRICANUS, which Crewe included, one reason she had for placing An African in opposition to her title. That was followed by In Two Volumes, To which are prefixed Memoirs of His Life, that brief anonymous biography, in fact by Jekyll (named in latter editions), which, together with Crewe’s editorial note, rebuked the most egregious forms of racism.13 Sancho’s letter to Sterne and Sterne’s letters to Sancho are the subject of my first two chapters. They were nearly always published together from 1775, when Sterne’s daughter, Lydia Sterne Medalle, published them in her collection of her father’s letters. I elicit the significance of Sancho’s cryptic and not so cryptic references to Sterne’s sermons and novels in greater detail than previous scholars have done to emphasize their shared milieu, the culture of sensibility.14 Chapter 2 takes up their discussion, implicit and explicit, of slavery, of race and of manhood. Sancho’s praise for Sterne’s Uncle Toby has particular significance because of the wound, actual and symbolic, he suffered to his groin, effectively castration, a central subject of Chapter 5, and black male’s sexuality hovering over Sancho, linked to what becomes his well-known relation to the licentious Sterne.15 Chapter 3 describes Sterne’s careful replies to the issues of gender, race, religion and slavery which Sancho had raised, and the connections which can be made to Sterne’s novels. The episode of the starling in the Bastille in A Sentimental Education is of a significance not fully appreciated before, although my positive interpretation may be controversial.16 S.S. Sandhu has concisely described the impact of Sterne on Sancho’s writing and summarized the value they each placed on “generosity, toleration, and philanthropy.” Sandhu also refers to a “nudge-nudging lewdness” in Sancho’s letters; it is a characteristic of Sterne’s writing but Sancho keeps it to a minimum, if it is there at all. Markman Ellis interprets his letters as expressions of “Sentimental Libertinism,” placing them in a tradition of such correspondence written by eighteenth-century rakes,

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including Sterne. In fact, as a black man facing the “sexualized stereotyping” of black males, Sancho distinguished himself from Sterne in this regard. That is not to say that on a few occasions he was not flirtatious with two women he addressed together, one of them Crewe. Typically, he undercut that at once, as he frequently playfully undercut his points in writing self-consciously as a black man to whites.17 Brycchan Carey begins his fine book, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807 (2005), by referring to Sancho’s 1766 letter to Sterne. He judges Sancho to have been “engaging in a form of antislavery.” His letter was “an important moment in the development of a rhetoric of antislavery.” Carey sees the episode of “the poor Negro girl” in Tristram Shandy as an excellent example of “a sentimental parable,” although Wylie Sypher dismissed it as mere fashionability.18 Carey provides detailed analyses of sentimental rhetoric in a wide variety of forms, in prose and poetry, “in the pamphlet wars of the 1780s,” and in Parliament, in the pulpit and courts of law, to conclude that, “while most political questions of the day were dismissed in sentimental terms,” “none gave rise to quite as much sentimental rhetoric as the debate over slavery.” It is evident that writers and speakers who “demanded a fundamental change to the way Britain did business with the world” believed that such rhetoric would affect their readers and listeners. Clare Midgley writes, women “writers were aware of the power they possessed,” which could arouse “public feeling to the extent of influencing events” in Parliament, even if they could not vote. Such power was the result of the dramatic increase in their literacy over the previous century. Oldfield’s history of the mobilization of public opinions against the slave trade is the story, Walvin writes, of “rallying popular feeling,” and Oldfield describes the intention of antislavery pamphleteers was to “arouse” the “sympathy” of their readers. The petitions they persuaded thousands sign demonstrated the “strength of popular feeling on abolition.” This was the intention of antislavery agitators across the political spectrum.19 According to David Brion Davis, “Sentimentalization” “conditioned many people to an active support for abolition.” Like eighteenth-century critics, he also saw that sentimentalism could be merely self-indulgence or a fashion. It had to be acted on. Wollstonecraft and Austen agreed, “it requires sense to turn sensibility into the broad channel of humanity.” In the end, the culture of sensibility was incompatible with enslavement, of wives, as well as black people. It was a culture that had evolved in tandem

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with the rise of literacy, among both genders. In 2007, Davis wrote that “in both Britain and America women played an absolutely central role in the antislavery movement.”20 In her Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850, Christine Levecq presents Sancho as “the foremost black representative of eighteenth-century sensibility.” She describes “the common interest” of Sancho and Sterne “in the details of interior life, specifically the life of the emotions,” a dimension comparable to “the special style of self-consciousness” which Christopher Leslie Brown suggests Thomas Clarkson brought to the antislavery campaign he led.21 In the opening paragraph of his History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808), Clarkson wrote of “the joy we ought to feel on its abolition from the contemplation of the nature of it.” He describes “the passions interwoven into our nature,” the conflict between virtue and vice, “the counteractive power” to “wrong” within “us,” meaning both genders. The “victory” over our “corrupt affections” results in “an immediate perception of pleasure, like the feeling of a reward divinely conferred upon him.” If “one, by suffering his heart to become hardened, oppresses a fellow-creature, the tear of sympathy starts up in the eye of another, and the latter instantly feels a desire of flying to his relief.” By “our nature,” he again means women’s as well as men’s, although the number of women he lists as “forerunners and coadjutors,” who have added their stream to procure such feeling is a mere handful.22 Brown paraphrases Clarkson’s explanation for the success of the campaign he led as “the working out of impulses deeply embedded in the society from which it emerged, the elaboration of principals essential to British Protestantism,” essentially inflected by Latitudinarianism. As we shall see in Chapter 8, it was hearing Sancho’s recently published words quoted in a Latitudinarian sermon given by the Rev. Peter Peckard as an undergraduate in Cambridge that helped inspire Clarkson to his lifelong work against the slave trade and slavery.23 Brown’s Moral Capital shows the importance of women to the politicization of the antislavery campaign through the Teston Circle, a group of women and men, presided over by Lady Elizabeth Bouverie and Lady Margaret Middleton. They were inspired by evangelical Christianity (describing Latitudinarians’ commitment to feeling), to reforms of many kinds, an orientation shared with William Wilberforce, a member of their

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circle and the close ally of Clarkson. Lady Middleton encouraged and helped the Rev. James Ramsay with An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves (1784); Clarkson went to visit Ramsay in Teston before completing his prizewinning Latin essay for Peckard in 1785, publishing the English version An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, in 1786.24 The reverberations from Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s freeing of the enslaved African-Virginians, James Somerset in 1772, lasted for years, on both sides of the Atlantic. Two of Mansfield’s first critics were white, West India plantation owners, Edward Long and Samuel Estwick, then residing in London. They amplified Mansfield’s concern over the effects of his decision on the white population of releasing thousands of emancipated black men into Britain. The issue was taken up and perpetuated alongside increasing expressions of antislavery, animating Somerset’s defence. This is the subject of Chapter 4. In 1778, a writer signing himself “Pro Bono Publico” (“for the public good) echoed Long’s and Estwick’s warnings, which had been resounding through popular culture. Sancho joined with his closest white friend, John Meheux, to write a rebuttal, signing it with the alias, “Linco,” derived from Sancho’s friend David Garrick’s dramatic romance, Cymon. This answer drove Pro Bono Publico to propose that Parliament pass legislation requiring the deportation of white women who bore children to black men, and to castrate the fathers. This public correspondence is the principal subject of Chapter 5, placing it in the context of the castration of blacks in Britain’s American colonies as well as later, in Kenya. It also describes Sancho’s responses under the nom de plume, AFRICANUS, to the racism directed against black people. Sancho was identified as a black man already publicly associated with the morally dubious, even licentious Sterne, and in any case, wanted to represent Africans. Mansfield’s decision was soon followed by the American Declaration of Independence and renewal of Britain’s war with France, to which Sancho referred in his remaining years, the subjects of Chapter 7, adding to his expressions of the ambiguities of being black and British. Immediate pressures included his being an eye-witness to the Gordon riots of 1780, provoked by the British government’s need to raise troops. They coincided with Sancho’s fatal decline, a subject he addresses with humour and sensibility, as he reached out to family and friends. Crewe decided to open each volume of her edition of Sancho’s Letters with two written to Jack Wingrave, who had gone to India to make

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his fortune. They had occasional Sancho’s clearest expressions of antislavery to someone he saw as an agent of imperialism. Metropolitan politicians were uneasy over British expansion, its conquest and exploitation of millions more people very different from familiar, white Britons, as Sancho suggests, looking more like him. Crewe’s political purpose was emphasized by her inclusion of germane letters not by Sancho. This chapter also illustrates more of Sancho’s versions of sensibility in relation to the young, attractive Crewe and her companion, Mrs. Margaret Cocksedge. It suggests the connection between Crewe and Charles James Fox, an early critic of Britain’s expansion, and Sancho’s new MP. The concluding chapter describes the reception of Sancho’s Letters . Hannah More, a member of the Teston Circle, an ostentations advocate of sensibility and of antislavery, illustrates the risks Sancho had run by his association with Sterne. The chapter concludes by describing the impact of Sancho’s words on Peckham, on Clarkson and the antislavery movement.

Notes 1. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 152–53; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionists (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 12–15, 357–62, and passim, Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1975]), 407. 2. G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Thomas L. Haskell wrote a antislavery and sensibility in 1985, but he did not give the latter term its historical meaning. His influential article was republished as chapters in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 3. [John Jekyll], “The Life of Ignatius Sancho,” in Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1998 [1782]), 5–9: 5. For approaches to this subject, about which we are learning more each day, see Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African Americans,” in Strangers in the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Morgan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 157–219;

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INTRODUCTION

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and David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Mariner Books, 2017), 4–9. Ignatius Sancho to Laurence Sterne, July, [1776], Letters of Sancho, 73– 74; 74; Roger Bastide, The African Civilization in the New World, trans. From the Frank by Peter Green (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 5; for Francis Williams, see Edward Long, The History of Jamaica; Or a General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of that Island, etc. 4 volumes (London: Lowndes, 1774), 1: 476; Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda, in Africa, Who Was a Slave About Two Years in Maryland (London: Richard Ford, 1734). For the use of “Negro,” “Black,” “Blackamoor” and other synonyms in England, 1660–1812, see Kathleen Chator, Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales During the Period of British Slave Trade, c. 1660–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 23. The source for the idea that Montagu patronized Francis Williams is a chapter devoted to Williams in Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, etc., 3 volumes, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [London: T. Lowndes, 1774]), 475– 85. Vincent Carretta casts doubt on the accuracy of this account, notably that Montagu sent Williams to Cambridge, Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams,” Early American Literature, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2003): 213–37. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 5–7; Josephine R.B. Wright, Ignatius Sancho xi (1729–1780) An Early African Composer in England: The Collected Editions of His Music in Facsimile (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), xiii. Catherine Molineux reproduces two advertisements Sancho commissioned in 1779 “for the tobacco that he sold in his Westminster grocery. One used black cherubs to stress the sensual pleasures of his Trinidadian brand. The other, titled ‘The Wish,’ depicted a white man holding hands with a Native American-African figure, standing on a fleur-de-lis.” Fades of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 171, see Figs. 5–19, 5–20. The second card gives his shop’s address, 19 Charles Street Westminster. Walvin, “Ignatius Sancho: The Man and His Times,” in Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, ed. Reyahn King, Sukhdev Sandhu, James Walvin, and Jane Girdham (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997). This collection contains valuable essays on Sancho by all of those editors on different aspects of his life and work. For Sancho’s voting, see ch. 6, below. Walvin first described Sancho briefly in a book he co-wrote with Paul Edwards, Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade (1982)

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9.

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11.

12.

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15.

16.

Edwards was, with Polly Rewt, the first modern editor of The Letters of Ignatius Sancho (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). Laurence Sterne, The Letters, Part 2: 1765–1768, Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. VIII, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009), 504–05, n. 1. Ryan Hanley, “Ignatius Sancho and Posthumous Celebrity, 1779—1782,” ch. 1 of Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing c. 1773–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 49; Kathleen Wilson, “Citizenship, Empire and Modernity in the English Provinces, c.1720–1790,” Eighteen-Century Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall, 1995), 69– 96; 79; Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaign, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 35–40; J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Antislavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (London: Routledge, 1998), 139; Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 12 and passim. For “subscription” see Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vii vols. vol. V, 1695–1830, ed. Michael F. Sucrez, SJ and Michael L. Turner (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 143, 659–60. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 37–38; Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (York, UK: William Sessions, 1989), 39–40; Clarkson, History of Abolition, 2: 60; Mary Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion: Values in Eighteenth-Century Design,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2000), 93–105; 97. Sancho, Letters , 4; Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2010 [1984]), 968. Fryer derives 1,216 names from Alexander Chalmer’s The General Biographical Dictionary (1812–17), the source of his reference to the Spectator; Carretta, Sancho’s Letters, 247 n. 1. I counted 1181, including the 320+ names of women. Carretta’s edition prints “subscribers Names,” 10–24. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, 45; for Crewe’s intentions, Sancho, Letters , 4. For Crewe’s role, see Carey, Rhetoric of Sensibility, 62–63. See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Brycchan Carey’s “Ignatius Sancho: A Bibliography,” last updated, January 16, 2020, is available online. Markman Ellis refers to the view that wound was “celibacy,” the Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 69. Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, 71–78; Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing,

1

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

INTRODUCTION

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1770–1850 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008), 75–76. S.S. Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne,” Research in African Literatures, Special Issue “The African Diaspora and its Origins,” Vol. 29, No. 4 (1998), 88–106; 94, 97; Ellis, “Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Politics of Form,” in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 199–217; 206; others have agreed with Felicity A. Ellis including Hanley, Slavery and Abolition, 35, and John Saillant “The Invisible Man of Indecency, Profanity and the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782),” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2020), 221–238); Felicity A. Nussbaum, “The Theatre of Empire: Racial Counterfeit, Racial Realism,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71–90; 73. See, too, Nussbaum, “Being a Man: Olandah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho,” Genius in Bondage, 54–71; 62; Sancho to Frances Crewe, May 9, 1778, Sancho Letters , 117–19. Carey, Rhetoric of Sensibility, 1, 5; Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIII the Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 151. Carey, Rhetoric of Slavery, 2; Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 32; Oldfield, Popular Politics and Antislavery, vii, 44, 49, for antislavery among eighteenth-century conservatives, Nicholas Hudson, “‘Britons Never Will Be Slaves,’: National Myth, Conservatism, and the Beginnings of British Antislavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Summer, 2001), 559–576; for working-class origins, see John Donoghue, “‘Out of the Land of Bondage’: The English Revolution and Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” American Historical Review, Vol. 115, No. 4 (October 2010), 943–74. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 357; Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Penguin, 1975 [1792], 295; Austen, Sense and Sensibility (New York: New American Library, 1961 [1811]; Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge 2014 [1992]); David Brion Davis, “Declaring Equality: Sisterhood and Slavery,” Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 3–17; 11. Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment, 73, 74; Brown, Moral Capital, 434.

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22. 2 vols. (Lexington, KY: 2013 [London: Richard Taylor, 1808), 1: 3–4. Carey writes of Clarkson’s rhetoric of sensibility in his Essay on Slavery, see Carey, Rhetoric of Sensibility, 130–37. 23. Brown, Moral Capital, 5. 24. Brown, Moral Capital, 341–45, 346–49, Clarkson, Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1: 75–76. See ch. 7, below.

CHAPTER 2

“Considering Slavery—What It Is,” Ignatius Sancho Appeals to Laurence Sterne

In July 21, 1766, Ignatius Sancho, an African British servant in the household of the Duke of Montagu, wrote a letter to Laurence Sterne, one that would motivate Sterne to reach out to his avid audience on behalf of those Sancho called, “the millions of my fellow creatures born to an inheritance of slavery.” This letter, and Sterne’s response to it, first published together in 1775, permanently identified Sancho with Sterne and both, eventually with antislavery.1 Why did Sancho write to Sterne? Before looking at the letter itself (the earliest of Sancho’s extant writings), we can note that Sterne was the brightest star in the literary firmament of Sancho and his contemporaries. Although the planetary Richardson and Dr. Johnson still lived, neither of them was dazzled by their new rival. The publication of the first two volumes of Sterne’s Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in London, December 1759, “catapulted” the “work and its author to fame almost overnight,” raising them, “to a position in the public eye…practically unbroken until his death in 1768.” They remained powerful referents through the rest of the century. To an upper-class culture whose members competed with each other to lead the “ton,” and those in the ranks below them who aspired to it, Sterne’s style became the fashion, “Shandyism” and “Shandean,” as he called it. It spawned a flood

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3_2

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of imitations as well as artefactual spinoffs, as had Richardson’s Pamela, twenty years before.2 Sterne came to London from distant Yorkshire in March 1760. He had prepared for his first book’s London reception in a letter he had had transcribed by his lover, Catherine Fourmantel, to David Garrick, the actor, writer and producer at the heart of metropolitan, artistic culture. Fourmantel, a singer, would follow Sterne to London. The letter told Garrick that Sterne’s novel already had a “prodigious Run” in York; “it has a great character as a witty smart book, and if you think it so, your good word in town will do the Author, I am sure, great service.” The letter told Garrick the author’s name was Sterne, and that he held office at the church at York. The letter’s linking gender/sex to controversy was also intended to stimulate Garrick’s interest and prospects for the novel’s popularity: “The Graver People, however, say ‘tis not fit for young Ladies to read his book, so perhaps you’ll think it not fit for a young Lady to recommend it. However, the Nobility and great folks stand up mightily for it and say ‘tis a good Book, tho’ a little tawdry in places.” Garrick complied, and by the end of the same month, Sterne wrote to thank him.3 “Garrick and Sterne were well acquainted with Ignatius Sancho,” wrote John Jekyll in “The Life of Ignatius Sancho,” published in 1782 after Sancho’s death, along with Sancho’s letters. He tells us, too, of Sancho’s eagerness to see Garrick (“the greatest actor of the eighteenth century”), during the brief period in the early 1750s, when he was not in service to the Montagu household; “his last shilling went to Drury Lane, on Mr. Garrick’s representation of Richard.” It was in this connection that Sancho offered to play Othello and Oroonoko (black characters in plays by Shakespeare and Southerne), at Drury Lane, a subject to be discussed in Chapter 4, below. Two of the songs Sancho published in 1769 were settings of verses from an “Ode” by Garrick. The first of A Collection of New Songs Composed by an African was “The Complaint,” his setting of “The Words from Measure for Measure, Act 4th , Scene 1st ,” linked to Garrick by its being immediately followed by “Sweetest Bard,” “The Words from Mr. Garrick’s Ode.” He included a second song from the same Ode, “Thou Soft Flowing Avon.”4 Sancho’s Letters show his continuing acquaintance as well as admiration for Garrick. In July 1772, he held him up as a characterological model to Charles Browne, probably the son of the steward to the Bunbury family, with which servants Sancho had close ties. (The

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Bunbury’s knew Garrick, too.) Sancho assumed the role of mentor to several young men (and occasionally, a young woman). At the outset of this letter to Browne, he called him, “my worthy young man,” and later “my child,” advising him to “ever let your actions be such as your heart will approve,” assuming the culture of sensibility’s absorption of the moral sense. In addition to that internal monitor, “always suppose yourself before the eyes of Sir William [Bunbury?] and Mr. Garrick,” to whom Sancho referred as “your noble friend – his virtues are above all praise –he not only has the best head in the world, but the best heart, also – he delights in doing good” another central quality of sensibility. From London, he reported that your “mother and father called on me last week to show me a letter which Mr. Garrick to has wrote to you – keep it my dear boy, it is a treasure beyond all price – it would do honour to the pen of a divine…indeed I know of no being that I can reverence so much as your exalted noble friend and patron Mr. Garrick.”5 Another letter to Browne showed that Sancho solicited aid from Garrick for a distressed scholar, named de Groote. Sancho told Browne that he was a descendant of Hugo Grotius, and “married the widow Marchioness de Malaspina. He is 86, has had a paralytic stroke – and has a rupture…his eyes are dim…he comes close to Shakespeare’s description of the last age of man – “sans teeth – sans eyes – sans taste - sans everything.” In July, he reported to John Meheux, a close friend to whom Sancho sent many letters, “Mr. Garrick called upon on Tuesday night, and won his heart: he called upon to pay De Groote’s lodgings, sat with him some time, and chatted friendly.” The editor suggests that “S” was probably John Spink a banker, who “helped to arrange, Garrick’s payment of…de Groote’s rent.” Spink would come to Sancho’s aid at the end of his life.6 Sterne had capitalized on the sensational fashionability of Tristram Shandy by publishing a two-volume collection of sermons with two title pages, the first, THE SERMONS of Mr. YORICK, and the second, “SERMONS by LAURENCE STERNE, A.M. Prebendary of York, and Vicar of Sutton on the Forest, and of Stillington near York.” He wrote in the Preface that he supposed it “needless to inform the public the reason for printing these sermons, arises altogether from the favourable reception, which the sermon given as a sample of them in TRISTRAM SHANDY, met from the world”; although he preceded that admission with, “I hope the most serious reader will find nothing to offend him, in my continuing these two volumes under the same title.” The Sermons had

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660 subscribers, including Elizabeth Montagu, bluestocking and relative of the house employing Sancho, and of Sterne, with whom she corresponded.7 Markman Ellis writes it was possible that “Sterne and Sancho became aware of one another even before 1760 – and it is more than probable that Sancho would have known of Sterne and of his connection to the Elizabeth Montagu set” as early as 1760.8 Publicly, the authorship of Tristram Shandy had been ambiguous, ostensibly autobiographical but confused with texts by Parson Yorick, one of its characters. “Actually, the public learned not about one man but about three; and Yorick, Tristram Shandy, and Laurence Sterne became hopelessly entangled in the public mind.” In the Sermons ’ Preface, Sterne had continued, that, lest the serious readers be offended, “I have added a second title page with the real name of the author: - the first will serve the bookseller’s purpose, as Yorick’s name is possibly of the two the more known; - and the second will ease the minds of those who see a jest, and the danger which lurks under it, where no jest was meant.”9 That Sterne thereby revealed his clerical status further inflamed those readers already provoked by Tristram Shandy’s frequent sexual wordplay, usually the double entendre (a jest because danger lurked beneath possibly innocent words), which Sterne did not resist in his novels, although he mostly did in his Sermons . His behaviour too was sexually loose, becoming well known.10 But just a Tristram Shandy was often praised for its “great benevolence and sensibility of mind,” in the words of one reviewer, so the Sermons were “almost universally recommended for their strain of benevolence.” In his 1766 advertisement for Tristram Shandy, Sterne called it a “moral work, more read than understood” and expressed the widespread view that, “Lessons of wisdom have never such a power over us, as when they are wrought through the heart, through the ground work of the story which engages the passions,” comparing their operation to a mechanical one: “we are first like iron and must first be heated before we can be wrought upon.” James Work has pointed out that the morality Sterne said he wished to disseminate was “the benevolent philosophy – the teaching of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson which had wide Latitudinarian, as well as philosophical sanctions,” although Work writes, too, that the book was written “primarily to provoke laughter.” Obviously, one must bear in mind that such provocation operated differently in Sterne’s time than ours.11 Sterne was a Latitudinarian Anglican. Latitudinarianism was the form of Anglicanism first shaped in the 1660s by Cambridge Platonists, a via

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media between the Puritanism and neo-Catholic High Church view that they thought had brought England to civil war earlier in their lifetimes. Like his contemporaries, Sterne drew on his predecessors in this tradition, notably John Tillotson, who marked the Latitudinarian ascent within the establishment by being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1691. R.H. Crane demonstrated long ago that “the preaching of the Latitudinarian clergy,” from the latter seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth propagandized “benevolence and tender feeling,” and “contributed to the formation of the state of mind,” culminating in the “man of feeling,” an ideal male who was to be ubiquitous in sentimental literature. (That the phrase “woman of feeling” was so rare represented the assumption that women were by nature, more “feeling” than men.) Richardson’s prime example, Sir Charles Grandison, hero of the novel published in 1753–54, “might have been a parishioners” of Crane’s Latitudinarian ministers, and “Parson Yorick their successor.”12 Sterne’s technique followed the absorption by Anglican culture of the lesson preached, for example, by the Rev. Isaac Barrow in 1661, as a way of transmitting “the new state of mind,” its morality, and in the amplification of the listener’s imagination as the influential Spectator would also recommend: stories of calamities long since past have happened to persons in no wise related to us, yea, the fabulous reports of tragical events, It do…melt our hearts with compassion and draw tears from our eyes; and thereby signify that general sympathy which naturally intercedes between all men, since we can neither hear of, nor imagine another’s grief without being afflicted ourselves.

This was intended to counter the view of Hobbes and others who shared the notion that human nature was entirely self-interested, entirely selfish. Hobbes asked: “From what passion proceedeth it, that men take pleasure to behold from the shore the danger of them that are at sea in the tempest, or in a fight,” and so on. He answered, it was chiefly pleasure: “Our feeling is made not of pity, a source of grief and novelty and remembrance of our own security present, two sources of delight.” We would say schadenfreude: “But the delight is so far predominant, so that men are content in such a case to be spectators of the misery of their friends.” One heir of the Latitudinarians’ refutation of this view was Adam Smith, who argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published the same year

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Sterne began publishing Tristram Shandy, that it was by an act of identification, stimulated by the same imaginative process Barrow had described that “we” can bestir ourselves from “our ease” to put ourselves in the place and have the feelings of “our brother upon the rack.”13 One can see Sterne’s reference to that very striking opening passage in Corporal Trim’s sermon, asking his congregants (Tristram’s father and uncle Toby), inflected by anti-Catholic tradition, to “go with me for a moment into the prisons of the inquisition…propp’d up with racks and instruments of torment. Hark! – hark what a piteous groan!” Trim is moved to sympathy simply by the words he is preaching—“Here the tears began to trickle down.” He urges his listeners to envision themselves as witnesses. “Behold this helpless victim delivered up to his tormenters, – his body so wasted with sorrow and confinement.” Trim imagines it is his blood brother, Tom, not the imagined brother of Smith’s humanity. “Oh! tis my brother cried poor Trim, in a most passionate exclamation, dropping the sermon upon the ground” and eliciting the responsive Smith had called for, “My father’s and my uncle Toby’s hearts yearn’d with sympathy for the poor fellow’s distress,” but Trim repeated and developed the scene, his adjuration identical to Smith’s: “Consider the nature of the posture in which he now has stretched – what exquisite tortures he endures by it.”14 Smith has also been seen as the rationalizer for the liberation of the individual energies propelling modern, Anglophone capitalism: that had been the context for Hobbesian, selfish psychology, the “possessive individualism,” of “a bourgeois market society,” wherein “everyone” – every man – can and does continually compete for power against others. It was a view (called “Hobbist and “Hobbesian”) perpetuated in the period following Hobbes, continuing to insist on the value of self-interest in the eighteenth century (indeed, to today). As Crane pointed out in explaining the Latitudinarian origins of the literature of sensibility, those ministers took Hobbes and Hobbesians (as well as Calvinists) as their main opponents. Their successors challenged those they depicted as hard, merely self-interested, merely materialist, profiteering men, hoping to convert them into “men of feeling.”15 Yet the Latitudinarians were themselves exponents of the Protestant ethic, and accepted market society, in fact were modifiers of the individualism they criticized. Their view of the operation of human psychology tended to be as material as the one Hobbes expounded. It was crucially modified, they argued, by the innate, Godimplanted orientation Crane describes. Man was naturally compassionate;

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sensibility, at its best, meant being conscious of and acting benevolently to ameliorate their distresses, as well as on behalf of other’s happiness.16 Sterne complicated this religious and intellectual heritage, developing the ideology of “tender feeling” in a logical direction, given the materialism of natural philosophy behind it, that is, toward sexual feelings. Margaret C. Jacob explains the coming into existence of the “materialist worlds of pornography” of the eighteenth century (one to which Sterne also attached himself) as in part the result of the “mechanization of nature,” including “the relations among and between human bodies.” Tillotson preached there was “no sensual Pleasure in the world that is comparable to doing good.” Implicitly that kind of pleasure had to compete with the alarming increase in the number of sensual pleasures made available to many more people by the consumer revolution. The Latitudinarian argument, moreover, depended on the same psychophysiological model used by proponents of the economic value of consumption to the nation. It was materialist. So there was a congruence, despite the appeal of cultivators of the moral value of sensibility, between what they said of “feeling,” and Thomas Rowlandson’s two cartoons, both entitled “The Man of Feeling,” each showing a dirty old man groping a woman. The contrast represented a profound cultural struggle, fundamentally bound up with definition of gender and sex, one that persisted from the seventeenth century through the first third of the nineteenth, at least. We can see Sterne in the midst of this struggle, playing both sides and creating his own.17 In 1747, Sterne preached and published “A Charity Sermon” on the widow “Zerepath, who had charitably taken Elijah under her roof.” “God certainly wove the friendly softness in our nature to be a check upon to great a propensity of self-love,” the position he shared with other Anglicans facing the rise of commercial capitalism in Britain. Yorick, the narrator of Sterne’s second novel, A Sentimental Journey (1768), asked, “if nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece – must the whole web be rent in tearing it out? Whip me such stories.” Sterne’s collection of pornography probably included the representation of flagellation for sexual arousal— certainly he knew of it. “Wherever thy providence shall place me for the trials of my virtue – whatever is my danger – whatever my situation – let me feel the movements which shall rise out of it, and which belong to me as a man – and if I govern them as a good one – I will trust the issues to this justice for thou had made us – and not we ourselves.” Evident are

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the double entendre and the apparent adherence to the materialism that rationalized the joys of sex and the pornography that could celebrate and exploit them.18 Janet Schaw’s private criticism (in 1774) of Sir Robert Walpole’s nephew and namesake helps us understand the varied reactions to this salient characteristic of Sterne’s innovations. While “polite to our company, I could not help observing he is fond of a certain species of wit, to which he is too much encouraged by some Ladies he talked to.” Some ladies enjoy a man’s talking that may but not Schaw: “This I can easily see is considered as taste, yet it certainly affords no great triumph, as of all the others it is what is practiced by the lower class with greatest success.” She tells her dear friend, another well-connected, Scots lady, “I know you will tell me there is a vast difference between vulgar language and a delicate double entendre.” The former was direct, not veiled by ambiguity. “But I deny that there can be a delicate method of creating indelicate subjects.”19 Alan Howes suggests that Sterne’s “unprecedented popularity” among a rapidly expanding reading public should be attributed to his having pitched Tristram Shandy “in many different keys, ranging from buffoonery, grossness, and a rather artificial wit…to delicacy and a refined sentimentality in others.” At one point, Tristram/Sterne entered into discussion about double entendres with “Eugenius,” in fact Sterne’s close friend, John Hall-Stevenson. He began with his use of the world “Nose,” ambiguously a phallic symbol throughout. It had been inexcusable not to define “Nose” in such a book of “strict morality and close reasoning,” as Tristram Shandy was: he had left “so many openings to equivocal strictures” and heaven had “revenged itself upon me…for depending, so much as I have gone all along, upon the cleanliness of my reader’s imaginations.” Of course, “opening” was itself available for stricture. And Eugenius pointed to the word “Crevice,” referring to the page and volume where it appeared in Tristram Shandy, and crying out, “Here are two senses,” to which Tristram replied, “And here are two roads – a dirty and a clean one, – which shall we take? The clean – by all means replied Eugenius.” But Tristram refuses, declaring “to define is to distrust.” He intends to maintain the playfulness of ambiguity. Then, he continues, “I defined nose as follows,”—pausing to beseech his readers, “both male and female”—he is thinking of sexual meaning—“to guard against the temptation and suggestions of the devil…to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into my definition.” He maintains the phallic meaning

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(or, it could be said, the dirty along with the clean one) and concludes appropriately: “I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less.”20 Sterne compared Tristram Shandy to the many handled walking stick an American fan sent him, whereby a reader could “take the handle which suits their passions, their ignorance or sensibility,” privileging the latter as those few readers of “true feeling,” amidst “the herd of the world.”21 Yorick left “analysis” of one character’s movements to “the few who feel,” the select among Sterne’s readership, an address to the reader characteristic of the literature of sensibility, including private letters. Sancho included himself in this group, also identified with “humanity” (a word practically synonymous with sensibility), with obvious but profound significance to the debate in metropolitan and colonial Britons over the mental and moral capacities of “Africans” and their descendants. I will return to Sterne’s “handles” of gender later on, but Sancho’s letter shows that he found two of them were attached to race and slavery.22 Sancho addressed Sterne, “REVEREND SIR,” and his first sentence declared, “It would be an insult to your humanity (or perhaps look like it) to apologize for the liberty I am taking.” To introduce himself to his letter’s recipient with such a degree of self-consciousness, complicated by the ambivalent of a parenthesis that included “perhaps,” and referring to the hierarchical relation between writer and reader, was typical of many of Sancho’s subsequent letters. His next sentence’s continuity with the first one is emphasized by a dash: “– I am one of those people whom the vulgar and illiberal call ‘Negurs’”—and implicitly extend the connotations of “liberty” from deferential politeness (marking a writer’s usual acceptance of social constraint), to the subject of slavery, to which the letter soon refers. It had the connotation re-stimulated by ongoing wars with absolutist, Catholic France. Sancho’s letter was written between two of them. During the preceding one with Catholic Spain, in a 1747 newspaper article, Sterne had observed, “let fall the Mask and uncovered under it, more of the Spirit of Slavery than Liberty,” maintaining the political critique implicit in James Thomson’s poem, “Liberty,” for example. During his journey through France (anticipating A Sentimental Journey), Tristram exclaimed, “O England! England! thou land of liberty, and climate of good sense, thou tenderest of mothers – and gentlest of nurses, cried I, kneeling upon one knee, as I was beginning my apostrophe –” the context a contrast with Catholic France’s imprisoning advocates of freedom in

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the “Bastile.” He appeals to the same liberal tradition as Thomson, his gendering sharing the same deferential psychology of a man embodying sensibility.23 Sancho expressed the “monstrous inconsistency” between this nationalistic self-characterization and Britain’s prominence in the slave trade and possession of slave-worked colonies.24 The contrast between liberty and “illiberalism” invoked, too, Sancho’s sense of being subjected to, if not enslaved by racism. Turning specifically to his biography, Sancho told Sterne: “The first part of my life was rather unlucky, as I was placed in a family who judged ignorance the best and only security for obedience.” This “family” gave him the name, “Sancho” an event described in John Jekyll’s brief biography to be published at the beginning of the 1782 Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African: he referred “to the family in which I was placed,” the biography will tell readers, three sisters living in Greenwich, “whose prejudices had unhappily taught them that African ignorance was the only security for his obedience.” They surnamed the child Sancho out of “petulance of disposition, from a fancied resemblance to the ‘Squire of Don Quixote,” perhaps insofar as Sancho Panza was illiterate. Don Quixote was well known in England long before Smollett’s popular 1755 translation.25 Sterne would have been especially responsive to a letter signed “I. Sancho” (Sancho’s telescoping his name in this way potentiated a parallel with Cervantes’ dyad), because Sterne made it clear he identified with the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, referring to “my beloved CERVANTES” writing, “I myself ever have some Dulcinea in my head,” and incorporating allusions to Don Quixote in A Sentimental Journey, as well as throughout Tristram Shandy.26 Of particular relevance to the letter he received from Sancho was this passage from Tristram Shandy. Finding himself considered, “heir apparent to the Shandy family,” Tristram declares: “Was I left like Sancho Panca to choose my kingdom it should not be maritime – or a kingdom of blacks to make a penny of – me, it should be a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects.” Work reminds us that Cervantes’ Sancho’s “frequently flagging spirits were as frequently raised by his master’s solemn assurances that he should shortly become governor of a land of negroes and, quoting Don Quixote”; “What care I, growth he [Sancho], tho’ they be black? Best of all, ‘tis but loading a ship with ‘em, and having ‘em into Spain, where I shall find chapmen know to take ‘em off my hands, and pay real money for ‘em…’” Sterne’s contrast with Cervantes’ in this regard was consistent with his response

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to Ignatius Sancho’s plea to him, as we shall see. It is tempting to link it to Sterne’s father’s fate: an officer in a British regiment sent to Jamaica to put down rebellion by enslaved black people; he died of a fever in 1731, when Laurence was eighteen. In any case after 1775, when his letter to Sterne was published, Sancho was inevitably linked in the public mind to the English Cervantes.27 Sancho told Sterne he resisted that family’s efforts to keep him subordinate by way of ignorance, instead teaching himself to read and write. “–A little reading and writing I got by unwearied application.” So much for the unlucky part of his life. Then, “The latter part of my life has been – thro’ God’s blessing, truly fortunate, having spent it in the service of one of the best families in the kingdom.” This was the family of John, second Duke of Montagu, “famed as a generous-hearted philanthropist.” He had patronized other Africans, including Ayub Suleiman Diallo, a.k.a. Job Ben Solomon. Montagu also gave his patronage to the Jamaican poet, Francis Williams, perhaps sending him to Cambridge and then helping him to publish his poetry. (Montagu had been Governor of Jamaica.) Sancho would be a witness to Francis Williams’ marriage in a Richmond church, near a villa owned by Montagu.28 Sancho also served the family of a succeeding Duke of Montagu: George Brudenell, fourth Earl of Cardigan, had married Lady Mary Montagu (1717–1775) the younger daughter of John, the second Duke, Sancho’s first patron, who had died without heirs. In accordance with the will of his father, the first duke, and an act of Parliament, Brudenell changed his family name to Montagu, the name of his wife. Hence, in 1766, George III named Brudenell first Duke of Montagu of the new creation, although he would not be raised to that rank until November 1766, three months after Sancho’s letter to Sterne. This nobleman made Sancho his valet and was a subscriber to his Letters. (He died in 1792.)29 It was while Sancho served this Montagu that Thomas Gainsborough painted his portrait in Bath (November 29, 1768); he painted portraits of the duke and duchess “around the same date,” although Montagu’s butler, Sancho was depicted posing as a navy commander, “his right hand hidden in his coat.” Gainsborough took an hour and forty minutes to paint this portrait of Sancho, in November 1768, in Bath, when Sancho was thirty-nine. We can imagine they talked of Garrick, whom Gainsborough had painted six years earlier, leaning “on a pedestal surmounted by Shakespeare’s bust,” of Shakespeare, perhaps, Othello, whom Sancho once thought of playing; or of John Hamilton Mortimer, the portraits

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and landscape painter, who wrote Jekyll, “came often to consult with [Sancho],” painting being “so much within the circle of Ignatius Sancho’s judgement and criticism.” If his dress was chosen because of the aesthetic value of the contrast with his complexion, Gainsborough shows Sancho as essentially dignified, self-possessed. The portrait “has nothing in common with previous representation of

Thomas Gainsborough, Ignatius Sancho, 58 ‘Blackamoors’ as little black pages or black footnotes or hairdressers in livery.” Surely, it was significant that Sancho had already taken it on himself to write to Sterne. Certainly, his association with the benevolent Montagus was crucial. It was with the publication of his letters in 1782 that “Gainsborough’s portrait was the model for the frontispiece engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi.”30 The year after he first wrote to Sterne, Sancho had printed the first of four collections of music, “Minuets, Cotillions & Country Dances for the Violin, Mandolin, German-flute, & Harpsichord with obligato French horn. Composed by an African.” It was “most humbly inscribed

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to his Grace. HENRY, DUKE of BUCCLEUGH” “(Printed for the Author).” Josephine R. B. Wright, who has published facsimiles of all of Sancho’s music, suggests that “the grateful servant might have written this collection as a wedding present to his patron’s new son-in-law.” Buccleugh married Montagu’s second daughter, Elizabeth, a connection, Paul Edwards and Polly Rewt note, which led Sancho to Scotland (the Duke’s seat), for a short time. We can imagine Sancho had his own wedding to Ann(e) Osborne in mind. (She was, Jekyll’s 1782 biography tells us, “a very deserving young woman of West-Indian extraction.”).31 Sancho’s second musical publication, A Collection of New Songs, Composed by An African, Humbly Inscribed to the Hou.ble Mrs. James Brudenell, by her most humble, Devoted & obedient Servant, was published in London, in broadsheet form, c. 1769 (three years after his letter to Sterne). Mrs. Brudenell, born Ann Legge, was the sister-in-law of the second Montagu Sancho served.32 The first piece in this collection was a setting of words from Measure for Measure, the second and fourth, settings for words from an “Ode” “Garrick” wrote for the Shakespearean Jubilee at Stratford-on-Avon in 1769. The following year, Sancho dedicated a third collection of instrumental music to John Brudenell’s only son, created Lord Montagu of Boughton in 1762. This collection was in two books, printed in London and sold by Richard Duke, “at his Music Shop” in Holborn, under the title, Twelve Country Dances for the Year 1779, Set for the Harpsichord. (Sancho’s other pieces had been for groups of instruments along with the harpsichord.) It was “Humbly Dedicated to the Right Honourable Miss North by her most obedient Servant, Ignatius Sancho (London: S. and A. Thompson, 1779).” Miss North was also kin to Montagu: her father, Lord Frederick North, Prime Minister, 1770–1782), was stepbrother of Mrs. James Brudenell. Prof. Wright suggests that this Miss North was his eldest daughter, Catherine Anne North (1760–1817), “of dancing age, for the titles of the dances in this collection…refer to important people, places, events and things in this young lady to life – even her favorite dessert,” strawberries and cream. She, her father, together with Lady North and the rest of their children were subscribers to Sancho’s Letters .33 Sancho entitled his last dance in this collection “Mungo’s Delight.” An antislavery Quaker had recorded in 1715 that American slavemasters had replaced their enslaved Africans’ names with “Toby, Mando, Mungo, Jack, Hector, and Hagar, and such like Names they give to their

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Dogs and Horses.” By 1779, it had become a conventional name for the part of black servants on the stage, the first (or one of the first), the servant in Charles Dibdin’s comic opera, The Padlock (1768), to a text by Irish playwright, Isaac Bickerstaffe, its plot derived from one of Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares. Most apparently, Sancho must have delighted in writing his own minuet and even seen his employers dance to it, governed by the rhythm he gave them. (You can see it performed by historical dancers on YouTube.) The character, played by a white actor in blackface, declaiming in an ostensibly Jamaican accents, was made to be laughed at, although Bickerstaffe’s version also expressed bitterness. Oldfield suggests that behind his exchanges with white characters “there was a more serious intent,” to provide a critique of the master-slave relationship, “gently prodding [white] audiences in a manner that was both light and entertaining”: Dear heart, what a terrible life I led! A dog has a better, that’s sheltered and fed;

Night and day, ‘tis the same, My pain is dere game.

Me wish to de Lord I was dead.

Whate’ers to be done, Poor blacky must run, Mungo here, Mungo dere, Mungo every where; Above and below, Sirrah, come, and do so. Oh! Oh!

Me wish to de Lord me was dead.

Bickerstaffe had also criticized slavery in a 1767 play Love in the City. In one scene, Priscilla the white, Jamaican mistress of the enslaved Quasheba threatens, “I will have you horse whipp’d till there is not a bit of flesh left on your bones.” Overhearing this, the white heroine exclaims

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Oh, poor creature?” Priscilla retorts, “P sha – what is she but a Neger?” the term we recall Sancho told Sterne the year before that “the vulgar” and illiberal” applied to him; to which Penelope responds, “I suppose then you imagine they have no feeling?” then Priscilla, “Oh! we never consider that there—.”34 “Mungo” was adopted as “a typical name for a negro,” derisively comic, Sancho’s playing with it when he did, had a particular context, as we shall see. Because of its Cervantic origins, Mungo could be conflated with Sancho Panza, and, in any case, his composing “Mungo’s Delight” as a minuet was wonderfully self-referential. It is Sancho’s “dynamic personality that allows him to bypass the schizophrenia of being a black in Britain.”35 Showing his consciousness of how whites saw him (and most of his correspondents were white), Sancho referred to his colour seriously and playfully at different times (a dimension, of course, missing from Sterne), which Felicity A. Nussbaum describes in “Being a Man: Olandah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho.” It is a quality Christine Levecq links to Sancho’s artistic versatility. “He was a lover of literature, a critic of theater and painting…. He was a good friend of David Garrick.” In his letters, he seemed deliberately to mix “high and low culture” in Levecq’s account, in “overlaps between a delicate artistic sense and a down-to-earth, epicurean enjoyment of the good life,” which she illustrates with a letter he wrote from Scotland (travelling with the Montagus), mixing “references to architectural beauties, herring, Rousseau’s Eloisa, Garrick’s comic opera Cymon,” and finally commenting, “we have fine weather – fine beef – fine ale – and fine ladies.” Levecq describes this quality as “self-conscious playfulness,” his correspondence “an extended attempt to transform the existing aesthetic hierarchy through mixture and exchange, and to stimulate a new vision of the world.” Evidently, the Montagus allowed Sancho the time for his musical compositions. His last set, however, was not published until after he had left the Montagus in 1773, when “repeated attacks of the gout and a constitutional corpulence rendered him incapable of farther attendance in the Duke’s family.” Their patronage would allow him to set up a grocery shop at 20 Charles Street, Westminster, near the centre of national power, where he could observe and be visited by some of the great and the good. And property ownership allowed him to vote.36 In sum, after his childhood, Sancho spent his life to 1773, in elite households. Earlier in 1766, Brudenell was appointed “Governor” to George III’s heir, the Prince of Wales, and his brother, the Duke of York,

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bringing Sancho into a degree of contact with the royal family, allowing his Theory of Music to be dedicated to the Princess Royal, Charlotte Augusta-Matilda, later Queen of Würtenberg. George III had a leatherbound copy of Sancho’s Letters in his library; his daughter, that Duchess of Gloucester, subscribed to it. Shortly after they were published, Crewe married John Phillips, another subscriber, and physician in the household of the Prince of Wales, the friend and patron of Charles James Fox, to whom Crewe’s family was also connected. These facts help explain the social prominence and extraordinary number of subscribers to the posthumous publication of Sancho’s letters. His chance meeting with Montagu at Blackheath and employment by his eventual successors set him up. Evidently, Crewe had access to the Montagus, in getting Sancho’s portrait engraved to enhance her purpose.37 In his reply to Sancho, written within a week of Sancho’s letter, Sterne felicitated him on having “broke” the “chains of darkness” and the “Chains of Misery,” the former ones by way of Sancho’s “laudable diligence.” And, “by falling into the hands of so good and merciful family, Providence has rescued you from the other.” This was a response to Sancho’s account of his good fortune, in service to the Montagus, and to his subsequent sentence, “My chief pleasure has been books.” Sterne shared the widespread view illustrated by Sancho’s first owners, that keeping people ignorant was a form of enslavement.38 Having told the most famous writer of the day that his chief pleasure lay in books, Sancho had made a second declaration: “Philanthropy I adore.–” both leading to his specifying the effect on him of reading Tristram Shandy and Sterne’s Sermons . Sterne had written in the latter book’s Preface, “they turn chiefly upon philanthropy,” but I think Sancho referred to the collection’s third sermon, “PHILANTHROPY recommended,” in which Sterne imagines the thoughts of the Samaritan in Christ’s parable: “I am no stranger to his condition – misfortunes are of no particular tribe or nation, but belong to us all, and have a general claim upon us, without distinction of climate, country or religion,” a vision related to the sermon’s definition of humanity, which I will quote in a moment. The vision was the same as Dr. Johnson’s quoted at the conclusion of Jekyll’s essay introducing Sancho’s Letters . Johnson rejected as “wild” the opinion that “retrains the operations of the mind to particular regions, and supposes that a luckless mortal be born in a degree of latitude too high or too low for wisdom or for wit.” (That Johnson had a Jamaican ex-slave, Francis Barber, for his manservant, is well known.

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Johnson opposed slavery and helped Barber to be educated, employing him as his literary assistant. Like Sancho, Barber opened a shop with him master’s legacy and established a family.) The biography in Sancho’s Letters made explicit the application of Johnson’s words to “the colour of a common integument,” and we can imagine how Sancho read Sterne’s words on the same subject.39 Sterne’s definition of humanity in this sermon began with an account of motive that would be as central to the humanitarianism that eventually focused on antislavery as the assertion that compassion should transcend race: “there needs no stronger argument to prove how universally and deeply the seeds of this virtue of compassion are planted in the heart of man, than in the pleasure we take in such representation of it”: this illustrates the kind of pleasure Latitudinarians advocated, illustrated by the quotation from the Tillotson sermon quoted above, very widely celebrated in the literature of sensibility. It was fundamental motive in Thomas Clarkson’s lifelong campaign against the slave trade and slavery. Sterne continued, “and though some men have represented human nature in other colours,” referring to the Hobbesianism which provoked the theology that Sterne perpetuated (we can imagine how Sancho, recording how some called him “Negur” in this letter, may have read that), “that the matter of fact is so strongly against them, that from a general propensity to pity the unfortunate, we express that sensation by the word humanity, as if it was inseparable from our nature.” Racists declared black people lacked it, a view challenged by Sancho. “Sensation” betokened the apparently mechanical operation of unperverted sensibility, contrary to the psychology illustrated by Sterne’s Levite, who in Christ’s parable of the Samaritan passed by the injured man in the street, “a deliberate act of insensibility proceeding from a hard heart.”40 “PHILANTHROPY” further detailed the operation of a compassion which crossed all social barriers, and including “benevolent natures,” whose “impulse to pity is so sudden that like instruments of music which obey the touch–” a frequent metaphor for such a degree of sensibility, and a degree that can be referred, perhaps, to the idea of “those who feel” among “the herd of the world, “–the objects which are fitted to excite such impression work so instantaneous an effect, that you would think the will was scarce concerned, and that the mind was altogether passive in the sympathy which his own goodness has created.” This was “the irresistible compassion” of which Norman Fiering has given the intellectual history, that phrase referring to a sentence of Thomas Jefferson’s (“Nature

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has implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct…which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses…”) Doubtless Jefferson knew this sermon.41 Sterne’s further explanation of this apparent instantaneity is a reminder that his theological forbears had absorbed Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul, a book ostentatiously distinguishing between the passions of the soul (including “our will to love God”) and those of the body, although according to Descartes’ own account, they were profoundly interrelated. “The truth is, the soul is generally in such cases so busily taken up and wholly engrossed by the object of pity, that she does not attend to he own operation, or take leisure to examining the principle upon which she acts.” This process was at work in the Samaritan; in Sterne’s view (and that of his contemporaries), it could be characteristic of human nature, transcending time, as well as those other, only apparent boundaries between people. “So that the Samaritan, though the moment he saw him he had compassion on him, yet sudden as the emotion is represented, you are not to imagine that it was mechanical, but there were settled principles of humanity and goodness which operated within him, and influenced not only the first impulse of kindness, but the continuation of it throughout the rest of so engaging a behavior.” It was the dawning understanding that Cartesianism, including its psychology, was “mechanical,” like that of Hobbes, despite their original hope, that had disillusioned the Cambridge Platonists and their Latitudinarian successors with Descartes, and led to their identification with Shaftesbury, because they asserted the existence of “a settled principle of humanity,” to be defined especially by the Rev. Francis Hutcheson as the “moral sense.”42 The view that the operations of human nature were mechanical (we would say instinctive or hard-wired) continued powerfully in British and Enlightenment thought generally, capable of justifying greater sexual freedom. As we saw illustrated by Yorick’s prayer in A Sentimental Journey, “let me feel as a man,” Sterne in particular played with such a potential, but it is clear that the very definition of the operation of sensibility was implicitly mechanical, as Sterne’s quick defensiveness in this sermon suggests. Sterne laid such ideas out in length in his sermons, and they frequently appear in his novels. Sancho’s letters show that he shared them.43 Sancho’s declaration that he adored Philanthropy brought one of Tristram Shandy’s characters to his mind: he followed that reference with, “—How much good Sir am I (amongst millions) indebted to you for the

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character of uncle Toby!” Howes observes, “Uncle Toby was certainly the most admired and loved of Sterne’s creations.” Uncle Toby loved “mankind,” opposed the “plunderings of the many by the few and prized “humanity and fellow feeling.” While he was obsessed with siege warfare, Toby was eloquent on “the distresses of war.” Sancho celebrated British victories in the war with American and France in the 1770s, but he was appalled at its carnage.44 In A Sentimental Journey, Parson Yorick recalled the old soldier Uncle Toby as, “the dearest of my flock, his manners softened by a profession that makes bad men worse,” and “whose philanthropy I never think of…but my eyes gush with tears.” Tristram Shandy’s eponymous hero knelt to pay tribute to his uncle’s goodness, which had kindled “virtue” in his bosom with “the warmest sentiments of love”: “Thou envied’st no man’s comforts, - insulted’st no man’s opinion – Thou blacken’st no man’s character, - devoured’st no man’s bread; gently with faithful Trim behind thee, didst thou amble round the little circle of thy pleasures, jostling no creature in thy way: for example, the wish that he gave the fly which buzz’d about his nose as dinner time, — ‘Go poor devil,’ quoth he, ‘—get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? This world is wide enough to hold both thee and me.’” The kneeling nephew’s tribute had concluded, “for each one’s sorrows, thou hadst a tear – for each man’s need, thou hadst a shilling.” Of all the male characters in the novel, Toby was the most perfect “man of feeling,” or the most extreme. This was the aspect of uncle Toby that one supposes Sancho had in mind when acknowledging his and the debt of millions of readers had contracted.45 Toby’s prizing of “humanity and fellow feeling” was expressed, too, in his extraordinary “modesty,” in his attitude to sexuality and his treatment of women. “Humanity” in Sterne’s era could stand for common ground between women and men, and invoke changes in men’s self-definition and their rejection of the brutalization of women. By the same token, being a man of feeling (implicitly critical of a man who was not) made the former vulnerable to the charge he was not really a man, was effeminate.46 Yorick raises directly the question how his uncle came by his “modesty,” whether it was “natural or acquired,” only to postpone an answer. Toby’s modesty “arose to such a height in him, as almost to equal, of such a thing could be, even the modesty of a women.” (The Spectator held: “Modesty, is not only an Ornament, but also a Guard to Virtue. It is a kind of quick and delicate feeling in the Soul, which makes her shrink and withdraw herself from everything that has Danger in it. It

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is such an exquisite Sensibility, as warns her to shun the first appearance of everything that is hurtful.” Modesty here, and the exquisite sensibility with which it was identifiable were personified as female.) Yorick went on to expand his account, addressing a female reader: “That female nicety, Madam, and inward cleanliness of mind and fancy, in your sex, which makes you so much the awe of ours.” In approaching the question still hanging, how Toby came by this modesty, Sterne suggests he was imitating women, that he was even woman—identified: “You will imagine, Madam, that my uncle Toby had contracted this from this very source – that he had spent a great part of his time in converse with your sex; and that from a thorough knowledge, and the force of imitations which such fair examples render irresistible – he had acquired this amicable turn of mind.” Toby’s imitating a woman— being woman-like—was one explanation for his “unparallel’d modesty of nature.”47 In fact, Tristram tells the reader, Toby “knew not…the right end of a Woman from the wrong, and therefore was never at his ease near any one of them – unless in sorrow or distress”—that is, when he was able to adopt a particular persona, one he could see originating or overlapping with his martial identity, “then infinite was his pity; nor would the most courteous knight of romance have gone further, at least upon one leg, to have wiped away a tear from a woman’s eye.” To have “looked stedfastly “into a woman’s eye” was almost…as bad as talking bawdy.” He was in Work’s phrase, “modest as a maiden.”48 So familiarity with women and being able to imitate them was not the explanation for Toby’s modesty. No, Tristram tells his putative woman reader, “he got it Madam, by a blow…from a stone, broke off by a [cannon] ball from [a] parapet…at the siege of Namur, which struck full force upon my uncle’s groin.” And “groin” (still a euphemism for genitalia, usually a male’s) remained the ambiguous word for where this wound was made (just as “nose” was for the site of the injury Tristram suffered during birth), with repeated opportunities for sexual wordplay throughout the novel, signifying questions about Toby’s manhood, already distinguished from that of other men, above all, his conventionally bawdy and sexist brother Tristram’s father. Whereas uncle Toby exclaimed of women, “God bless ‘em all,” his brother exclaimed, “Duce take ‘em all.”49

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With his wound, Toby was invalided out of the army and sent back to England, confined for four years in order to recover. While the conversations he held with visitors turned with relief to the subject of the 1692 siege of Namur (to become an obsession of Toby’s, the effect of the trauma he had suffered), the conversations also “brought him into some unforeseen perplexities,” relieved by the ensuing re-enactments of the siege. “What these perplexities were, — ‘tis impossible for you to guess”; but they had to do with his gender, with that wound to this “groin” “—if you could [guess], — I should blush; not as a relation, - not as a man, - nor even as a woman—but I should blush as an author,” so Tristram/ Sterne veers away from the self-evidently physiological subject capable of provoking blushes, “the groin,” to his pride in obscuring it, “that my reader has never yet been able to guess at anything.” Elsewhere, Tristram writes flatly, “that my uncle Toby got his modesty by the wound he received upon his groin.”50 The Widow Wadham was no modest maiden but as capable of sexual wordplay as the men in the novel. She was persistently curious about the existence or not of Toby’s genital organs because she wanted to marry and have sex with him. Uncle Toby reads the widow’s “constant and tender enquiries after my sufferings” as the expression of “the compassionate and singular humanity of her character” that is, seeing her as a woman of sexless sensibility, but giving a short cough, Trim wrote down the word. “HUMANITY…………………………………….thus.”51 Full of “the tenderest disposition with a heart inclining him to kindness, and the love and protection of the species”: so uncle Toby represented the widespread wish by certain women, and the men who shared it, that male culture be reformed, be made men of feeling, coming closer characterologically to women, both subsumable under “humanity.” But it was accompanied by “the question of effeminacy,” the apprehension accompanying the elevation of the reformed ideal, “the man of feeling,” in contrast to, say, the manhood represented by the “rake.” Sterne took “the man of feeling” to new and exquisite heights (“l’amour n’est rien sans sentiment”) most clearly in A Sentimental Journey, a trajectory encouraged by the increasing popularity of the sentimental parts of Tristram Shandy. At the same time, the latter novel was full of the humour of unreformed male culture, and A Sentimental Journey can be read as a rakish progress through France by “Yorick,” muffled and combined with sentimentalism. Sterne himself was seen as a sexually

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immoral figure. These ambiguities emerged between proponents of antislavery and slavery, as the former’s case was very importantly strengthened by its appeal to the culture of sensibility.52 One could also interpret that wound as an early expression of the “problematics of effeminacy” which Kathleen Wilson describes as an aspect of the attempted creation in Britain of a gendered, national identity, wherein “forays” of women in to the public sphere could be “a focus of intense male anxiety.” Referring to Wilson, Nussbaum suggests the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) “seemed to fuel British anxieties about metaphorical castration in the late eighteenth century.”53 In the 1766 letter under discussion, Sancho followed his reference to “your Uncle Toby” with one to the Captain’s loyal subordinate, Corporal Trim: “-I declare, I would walk ten miles in the dog days, to shake hands with the honest corporal.” If uncle Toby, “courteous knight of romance” resembled Don Quijote, in loyalty and sympathy for the hobby horse of his master, Trim resembled Sancho Panza, who showed emotional sympathy for Don Quijote, whereas his master was not so demonstrably sympathetic. By contrast, in these literary descendants, uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, “the heart, both of the master and the man, were alike subject to sudden over flowings.” But like Cervantes’ Sancho, Trim could be sexually engaged and aroused. The three weeks Trim was nursed by the Beguine culminated in her massaging him to orgasm.54 But he compares being in the marriage bed to being in the hands of the inquisition. “Nothing” said Corporal Trim, “can be as sad as confinement for life – or so sweet…as liberty.” Uncle Tom muses over this; then, “Whilst a man is free – cried the Corporal, giving a flourish with his stick, its movement, shown by a half –page, squiggle, evidently phallic,” because Yorick observes: “A thousand of my father’s most subtle syllogisms” often double enendres “could not have said more for celibacy,” although his behaviour contradicts that. It can be noted that while men were sometimes said to be enslaved by marriage, perhaps psychologically, but more generally a conventional projection, it was far more a frequent characterization of wives’ very real legal and customary subordination.55 That Sterne’s “Sermons,” Sancho explained, “touch’d me to the heart…brings me to the point. –In your tenth discourse, page seventyeight, in the second volume – is this very affecting passage – ‘Consider how great a part of our species – in all ages down to this – have been trod under the feet of cruel and capricious tyrants, who would neither

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hear their cries, nor pity their distress. –Consider slavery – what it is – how bitter a draught – and how many millions are made to drink it!’”56 The sermon he quoted was entitled, “Job’s Account of the SHORTNESS and TROUBLES of LIFE, considered.” Sterne takes for granted his audience’s common ground with Biblical characters. His text (Job xiv 1,2) is “Man that is born of woman, is of few days, and full of troubles: -He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not” Before he turned to “the troubles,” which include enslavement, Sterne expands on man’s birth and flowering that is, everybody’s: “Man”—mankind—“is sent into the world the fairest and noblest part of God’s works – fashioned after the image of his creator with respect to reason and the great faculties of the mind; he comes forth glorious as the flower of the field; as it surpasses the vegetable world in beauty, so does he the animal world in the glory and excellence of his nature.”57 That all people, black and white, slave and free, God created in his own image, distinctly above the animal, was a major antislavery argument. Sterne’s Sermons were altogether “tremendously popular, having a subscription list of over 661 names and running through eleven editions prior to 1769.”58 The transition in the sermon Sancho quotes from the first consideration (“Consider how…our species”) to the second (“Consider slavery”) is striking. The first pertained to the “tyranny” continually invoked in eighteenth-century British republicanism to which Sancho glancingly alluded earlier in this letter. The second consideration was of the enslavement of millions, above all of Africans and their descendants, and part of “our species.”59 Sancho continued, “—Of all my favorite authors, not one has drawn a tear in favour of my black brethren – excepting yourself, and the humane author of Sir George Ellison.” (The beginning of that novel, published anonymously by Sarah Scott, was set in Jamaica, presenting slavery there.) Sancho amplifies the connotations of being called “Negur” and insists that Sterne’s tenth sermon’s, “Consider slavery,” refers to Britain’s imperial enslavement of Africans.60 So far, Sancho’s point is that Sterne has the power to create sympathy for Sancho’s enslaved black brethren. Having been as direct as this, Sancho repeats the qualified deference of his letter’s opening, saying he can trust Sterne’s responsiveness. “—I think you will forgive me; — I am sure you will applaud me for beseeching you to give one half hour’s attention to slavery as it is this day practiced in our West Indies.-”

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This “our” follows “our species” (echoing Sterne’s phrase in the sermon Sancho quotes to him), but here it refers to the British, Sancho showing a common identity with all Britons, owning imperial outposts, and with “my black brethren,” at once a British citizen, albeit not yet a voter as he would be when he took up residence in Westminster, eight years on), and a person akin to people owned by British citizens across the Atlantic. “That subject,” Sancho went on in his gentle exhortation (referring to Sterne’s giving “one half hour’s attention to slavery…practiced in our West Indies—”), “handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke perhaps of many – but if only of one – Great God – what a feast to a benevolent heart!” To focus “only” on “one,” rather than a large number, was a technique of “the rhetoric of sensibility,” affecting a reader thereby more easily identifying herself or himself with the person in distress. Other readers publicly urged Sterne to shape forthcoming volumes of Tristram Shandy in particular ways. Bishop William Warburton acknowledged Sterne’s literary “power” to stir his audience to violate “decency and good manners,” assuming the general belief in the underlying potential in passions. Ralph Griffith told Sterne, “Excite our passions to laudable purposes…and the grateful applause of mankind will be your reward.” The “universal admiration of the La Fever episode in the sixth volume, and its frequent reprinting in magazines and newspapers,” led Sterne, always keen to sell as many copies as he could, “to cater to the public taste in working through this sentimental vein, and the critics obliged whenever it occurred.” Over the course of the publications of the nine volumes of Tristram Shandy, “praise for Sterne the satirist was replaced by Sterne as the master of the pathetic.”61 Ian Campbell Ross notes that Sterne copied “but a fair version of the La Fever episode to present to Lady Spencer as a gift”—these volumes were publicly dedicated to Viscount and Lady Spencer (who would subscribe to Sancho’s Letters ), and “the dedication was artfully designed to reassure genteel female readers that they, too, might not be ashamed to read Tristram Shandy.” They could be moved but not to the extent of being sexually aroused (a slippery slope). Ross suggests that many reviewers “chose to overlook the sexual innuendo in which Wadham’s courtship of uncle Toby” “in the next volume, praising that volume’s “delicacy.”62 Sancho wished Sterne to respond to this public taste by stimulating it to “feast” on his representation of slavery. He kept up the metaphor by referring, implicitly, to another of Sterne’s sermons “—and, sure I am

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you are an epicurean in acts of charity.” The fifth sermon in the volume he cited to Sterne (that Charity sermon on the widow who succoured Elijah) also addressed the pleasure generated by virtue. It wasn’t easy, Sterne said, to add “weight to the wisest man,” Solomon, “upon the pleasure of doing good”; but “the evidence of the philosopher Epicurus is very remarkable whose word in this case is more to be trusted, because a professed sensualist; who amidst all the delicacies and improvements of pleasure which a luxuriant fancy might strike out, still maintained, that the best way of enlarging human happiness was his communication of it to others.” On the one hand, this reached out to the influence of Epicureanism by way of Lucretius’ De Rerum Nature; on the other, it connects it to that Latitudinarian insistence that the greatest pleasure lay in doing good.63 Reiterating his sense of Sterne’s popularity and the power of his writing it reflected, Sancho’s letter next imagines “the grateful applause” of a particular group of “mankind” who, in Griffith’s review, asserted Sterne could win over: “You who are universally admired – you could not fail – Dear Sir, think in my you behold the uplifted hands of thousands of my fellow Moors,” a symbolic representation, referring to his earlier appeal, “if only of one.” It is possible to see this as Sancho’s version of what George Boulokos calls “the dominant trope in eighteenth-century fiction about slavery,” that is “the grateful slave,” the dust-jacket of Boulokos’s book a reproduction of the eighteenth-century painting, “The Kneeling Slave – ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother,” which the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade took for its seal in 1789, to be reproduced and widely distributed in various forms, most famously, Joseph Wedgwood’s cameo on Jasper, mass-produced and circulated as antislavery propaganda, its effectiveness registered by Thomas Clarkson.64 Sancho develops this picture of Sterne’s imagining those thousands of grateful slaves: “—Grief, you pathetically observe, is eloquent; —figure to yourself their attitudes; hear their supplicatory addresses! – alas! –” and his last sentence returns to the assertiveness of his first: “you cannot refuse – Humanity must comply – in which hope I beg permission to subscribe myself, Reverend Sir, &c I. Sancho.” To respond to this plea would demonstrate Sterne was humane; conversely, to refuse it was unthinkable given Sterne’s own words and reputation. It would put him in the same category of those vulgar and illiberal whites who denied that black people were of the same species, that they part of humanity.

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Notes 1. Ignatius Sancho to Laurence Sterne, 21 July 1766, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, ed. Vincent Carretta (Harmondworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1998), 73–74. In the subsequent footnotes, “Sancho; Letters ” refers to this edition. In the original 1782 publication, this letter was dated July 1776. 2. Alan B. Howes, Yorick and the Critics: Sterne’s Reputation in England, 1760–1868 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1971 [1958]), 2, 3, 162; Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. James Aikin work (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940), 436; J.C.T. Oates, Shandyism and Sentiment 1760–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1968); G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 167–68. 3. Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London: Routledge, 1992), 47–48; Work, “Introduction,” Tristram Shandy, ix; Sterne paid tribute to Garrick’s talents in Tristram Shandy, 180, 278. Ian Campbell Ross describes Sterne’s “ingenious strategy to secure Tristram Shandy’s success in London,” “Laurence Sterne’s Life, Milieu and Literary Career,” The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5–20; 10. For Sterne’s letter of thanks to Garrick, see Howe, Yorick and the Critics, 4. 4. [John Jekyll], “The Life of Ignatius Sancho,” in Sancho Letters , 5–9; 8, 7; Carey, “‘The Extraordinary Negro; Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Jekyll, and the Problem of Biography,” British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2003), 1–14; 5; Josephine R.B. Wright, Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780): An Early African Composer in England: The Collected Edilious of His Music in Facsimile (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), xix; the pieces mentioned are reproduced in this book. 5. Sancho to Charles Browne, July 18, 1772, Letters, 44–45, 260; The Letters of Ignatius Sancho, ed. Paul Edwards and Polly Rewt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 56; Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 105, 119. 6. Sancho to Charles Browne, Sancho, Letters, 119–20. This letter was published in the Public Advertizer, May 13, 1778. 7. Sterne, The Sermons : Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 4, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1996), Preface; Sterne, Notes to the Sermons, Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 5, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1996), 2; Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (London: Methuen, 1975), 84; Howes Yorick and His Critics, 12; Ross, “Laurence Sterne’s Life,” 11; Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years, 25.

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8. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibilitys Race, Gender and the Commerce of the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 61. 9. Ross, “Laurence Sterne’s Life,” 12–13; Howes, Yorick and His Critics, 5. 10. “Sterne was widely considered by his strait-laced neighbours as ill-suited to the cloth…above all, for his ill-concealed and eventually notorious sexual liaisons with servants…and prostitutes in York,” Ross, “Laurence Sterne’s life,” 8. See Ellis, “Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Politics of Form,” Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 199–217; 203–04. 11. Howes, Yorick and His Critics, 10; Sterne, Tristram Shandy, xxxi, lxvi, lxx. For such 18 a laughter, see Charles, Michael Pawluk, “‘Almost a Savage’: The Rhetoric of Comic Violence in Ignatius Sancho’s Letter,” Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2021), 1–19. 12. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 66–70; R.S. Crane, “Suggestions toward a Geneaology of the ‘Man of Feeling,” English Literary History, Vol. 1, No. 3 (December 1934); 205–30; 229; Barker-Benfield, Abigail and John Adams, 26–28. James Downey Writes that Sterne’s Theology in His Sermons was “as much a religion of the heart as was Wesley’s, The Eighteenth-Century Pulpit: A Study of the Sermons of Butler, Berkeley, Secker, Sterne, Whitefield, and Wesley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 133. See, too, S.S. Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne,” Research in African Literature, Special Issue, “The African Diaspora and Its Origins,” Vol. 29, No. 4 (1998), 88–106, 93. 13. Barrow quoted in Crane, “Geneaology,” 223; A.O. Aldridge, “The Pleasure of Pity,” English Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1949), 76–87; 76; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.M. MacPherson (New York: Penguin, 1985, [1651]); Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. MacFie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1979 [1759]), 9. 14. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 138–39; Tristram’s sermon goes on for another three pages. Works notes that Sterne preached it in York Cathedral, where he was prebendary, July 29, 1750, and it was published in August, as well as the last sermon of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick in 1766. This scene anticipated one in A Sentimental Journey, where the author identifies himself with such a prisoner in the Bastille, represented by a caged bird, a scene stimulated by Sancho’s plea to him, as we shall see. 15. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Andrew Skinner (New York: Penguin, 1979 [1776]), II; Quentin Skinner, “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1966), 286–317; Albert O. Herschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political: Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ:

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Princeton University Press, 1997 [1977]); Hobbes, Leviathan, 38 and see C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, from Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, ch. 5, 2. For the influence of Smith’s ambiguity on Sancho, see Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008), 74. Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689– 1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 52–53, 45; Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Native and Context of the Passions and Affections, with Illustration of the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003 [1728]), 8 and passim. Jacob, “The Materialist World of Pornography,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 157–202; 157; Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Paladin Books, 1990), illustrates Jacob’s thesis, extending it from France to England and America; he refers to Sterne’s participation and exemplification throughout. He includes the Rowlandson cartoons, plates 60, 61. For the cultural struggle, see Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, chs. 2, 6, 7 and Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in EighteenthCentury London (New York: Walker, 2006), Pt. IV. See, too, Ellis, “Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Politics of Form,” Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 199–217; 205. Sterne, Sermons, 43; for a chronology of the onset of greed in Briton’s commercialization, see Joyce Appleby, “Ideology and Theory: The Tension Between Political and Economic Liberalism in SeventeenthCentury England,” American Historical Review, Vol. 81, No. 3 (June 1976), 499–515; Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, with The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968 [1768]), 94; Wagner, Eros Revived, 4. For illustrations of arousal by flagellation, see Jacob, “World of Pornography,” Fig. 4–8 and John Cleland, Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (New York: Penguin, 1985 [1748–9]). [Janet Schaw], Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal in the Years 1774 to 1776, ed. Evangeline McLean Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 241, Electronic Edition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Academic Affaire Library, 2001), 99. Howes, Yorick and His Critics, 2 1S, 39; Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 218.

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21. Sterne to Dr. John Eustace, February 9, 1768, Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, VII: The Letters, Part II, 1765–1768, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009), 645. For a comparable use of “handle,” see Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 [1748]), 30. 22. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 20. 23. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (London: Mettinen, 1975), 97–98; James Thomson, “Liberty,” The Poetical Works James Thomson, James Beattie, Gilbert West, and John Bampfylde (British Library Historical Print Edition, [1878]), 205–334; Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 526–27. 24. The phrase is Winthrop Jordan’s, writing of slaveholding American revolutionaries, resisting their “enslavement” by Britain, but they inherit it from Britons’ claim to identify their country with liberty. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1969), 289. 25. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 5. Henry Fielding added to the title, of The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andres and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams,” “written in, Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote.” 26. Quoted in Work, Introduction to Tristram Shandy, xxxvii, Yorick refers to “my beloved Cervantes,” 628, to my dear Rabelous and dearer Cervantes,” 191, and Yorick remarks after a loss of some papers, “Sancho Panza, when he lost his ass’s FURNITURE, did not exclaim more bitterly,” 529. See, too, Sentimental Journey, 12. 27. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 338 and note. For the continuing slave rebellious against Britons in Jamaica, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 164–74. 28. Sancho to Sterne, 21 July 1766, Sancho, Letters, 73; Sancho, Letters , 249 n 6; Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne,” 93–94; Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 106–07, 108, 199; Wright, Ignatius Sancho, xvi. See, too, Vincent Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams?” Early American Literature, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2003), 213–37; and the article on Francis Williams in Wikipedia. 29. Sancho, Letters, 250 n. 13. 30. Sancho, Letters , 251 n. 21; Francoise LeJeane “‘Of a Negro, a Butler and a Grocer’ – Ignatius Sancho’s epistolary contributions to the abolition campaign (1766–1780)” Etudes anglaises 2008 (61), 1–11; 1; James Hamilton, Gainsborough: A Portrait (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2017), 241–42; Jack Lindsay, Gainsburough: His Life and Art (London:

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31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

Granada, 1982), 90, 66; Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment, 80; contrast Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchange: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 191–217, and Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Wright, Ignatius Sancho, xxv, xix; Letters of Ignatius Sancho, 3; Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 7. Wright, Ignatius Sancho, xxv. Wright, Ignatius Sancho, xix, xxii. Wright, Ignatius Sancho, 62; Isaac Bickerstaffe, The Padlock: A Comic Opera (Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Print Editions: Facsimile of Balfast: James Magee, 1769 ed.), “Advertisement,” 15; J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (London: Routledge 1998 [1995]), 31, 29. Sancho’s “Mango’s Delight” can be seen danced by performers in historic dress on YouTube. All of the music performed with Paterson Joseph, Sancho: An Act of Remembrance is by Sancho: see the note in the play’s published version (Oberon Books, Con.). See, too, Paterson Joseph, “Staging Sancho,” in Britain’s Black Past, ed. Gretchen H. Gerzina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 197–214. Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment, 80. This contradicts the view that Sancho had a “split personality,” destructive to his “self-consciousness and his identity.” Andre Dommerques, “Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), the White-Masked African,” The History and Historiography of Commonwealth Literature, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider (Tübingen: Gunter NarrVerlag, 1983), 189–197, 195–96. See, too, Colin Kidd, “Ethnicity in the Atlantic World, 1688–1830,” A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 260–277; 267–68. Nussbaum’s essay is in Genius in Bondage, 54–71; 65 and see 67; Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment, 80–81, quoting Sancho to James Kisbee, 16 July, 1770, Sancho, Letters, 38–39; Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 7. Wright, Ignatius Sancho, xvii, xxv n. 20; Stanley Ayling, Fox: The Life of Charles James Fox (London: John Murray, 1991), 103–04, 113, 123,136– 37, ch. 11 passim. Sterne to Sancho, July 27, 1766, Sterne, Letters, Part II , 504–05; 505. Compare, the “vicious web of the white world imprisoned him, Dommerques, “Ignatius Sancho, the White-Masked African,” 195. The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Text, ed. Melvyn New, Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 4 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), Preface, 1–2; Sermon III, “Philanthropy Recommended,” 21–30; 28; Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 9; Jekyll does not give

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42.

43.

44. 45.

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Johnson’s name, referring to “a learned writer of these times,” identified by Vincent Carretta); Michael Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Barber appears quite frequently in Boswell’s Life of Johnson and was with him when Johnson’s wife died (London: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1904]), 170–71. Sterne, “Philanthropy Recommended,” 26–27; 25. Sterne, “Philanthropy Recommended,” 26–27; Norman S. Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 37 (1976): 195– 218; Jefferson to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, the first quotation in Fiering’s article, Sterne cites authorities for and illustration of the fact that “it is an irresistible and natural passion to weep for the loss of our friends or children,” Tristram Shandy, 351. Another illustration was published in “On Imprisonment,” The Bee, 1 (February 9, 1791), 214–17, also showing Sterne’s influences although the idea was widespread: “The very sympathy that nature irresistibly extorts from every person who beholds another in distress, affords a healing balm that tends to administer comfort to the afflicted,” 214. For Jefferson’s great admiration of Sterne, especially his Sermons, see Andrew Burstein and Catherine Mowbray, “Jefferson and Sterne,” Early American Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1994), 19–34. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, an English translation of Les Passions de l’âme, by Stephen Voss (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing 1989 [1649, 1650]), 19–20, 28–29; Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 119–20, 128–34; Sterne, “Philanthropy Recommended,” 27. For this paragraph’s conclusion, see n. 12, above. Sterne, “Philanthropy Recommended,” 26–27; contrast, Paul Moore, “Sterne, Tristram, Yorick, Birds, and Beasts,” British Journals for Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1987), 43–54; 46; Tim Darnell, “The Sermons of Mr. Yorick: The Commonplace and the Rhetoric of the Heart,” The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 64– 78; 72; Thomas Keymer “A Sentimental Journey and the Failure of Feeling,” Cambridge Companion to Sterne, 79–94; 85–86. For Sancho and Hutchinson, see Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment, 73–74. Howes, Yorick and the Critics, 25. For Sancho’s views of Britain’s war with America and France, see ch. 5, below. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 56; Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 224, 162; for uncle Toby’s sympathy, see Tristram Shandy, 350, 366. For the episode with the fly, see Jessica Van Sant, 18th Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 103.

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46. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 100. See Barker-Benfield, “The Question of Effeminacy,” ch. 3 of Culture of Sensibility. 47. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 66–67; Spectator quoted in Barker-Benfield, Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 31–32. 48. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 602–03; Work, “Introduction,” liii. 49. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 67, 78–80. 50. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 78, 80, 134. 51. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 569, 578, 624, 626, 633. 52. Work, “Introduction,” liii; Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, ch. 5; Cash, Sterne: The Later Years, 26. 53. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 355; Wilson, “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c. 1720–1790,” Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall, 1995), 69–96; 78–79; Nussbaum, “Being a Man,” 58. 54. Sancho to Sterne, 21 July, 1766, Sancho Letters, 73–74; Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 568, and see 605. 55. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 573; 603–04. 56. Sancho to Sterne, 21 July 1766, Sancho, Letters , 74. The editors of Sterne’s letters note that “Sancho was looking at the second or later edition (the 7th appeared in 1765), where the passage does indeed appear on page 78.” Sterne, Letters: Part II , 698. 57. Sterne, Sermons X, Sermons, 91–102; 91, 95. 58. Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 56–57. This is part of Ellis’s discussion of Sancho’s Letter to Sterne. He notes the importance of the subject of this sermon to Sterne and emphasizes its applicability to slavery. 59. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Common-wealth Man: Studies in the Transmission Development, and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II Until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987 [1959]); The English Libertarian Heritage, ed. David L. Jacobson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1967); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought in the Atlantic Political Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) and Virtue, Commerce and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Marilyn Butler, Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrent in British Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 60. Scott’s noval is the subject of ch. 3, below. 61. Sterne refers to Warburton, Tristram Shandy, 298–99 and 610, see 298 n. 2, 610 n. 1; Griffiths quoted by Howes, Yorick and his Critics, 19; Ross, “Laurence Sterne’s life,” 14–15.

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62. Ross, “Laurence’s Sterne’s life,” 15. 63. Sterne, “The Case of Elijah and the Widow of Zerepath,” Sermon V, Sermons, 41–56; 49; see Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). Compare James c’s observation on what he calls Sterne’s “sublimation” of his melancholy in Eliza’s departure: he “began to feel a pleasure in this kind of resigned Misery arising from this Situation, of heart unsupported by ought but its own tenderness.” Work writes: “This epicureanism in emotion is Sterne’s significant contribution to the development of sentimentalism in the eighteenth century,..which reached its culmination in A Sentimental Journey.” Sterne, Tristram Shandy, lxx. 64. George Boulokos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishments of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London: George Taylor, 1808), 1:147–8.

CHAPTER 3

“So Many of Her Brethren and Sisters”: Sterne Replies to Sancho

Sterne responded to Sancho’s plea both in Tristram Shandy and, more dramatically, in A Sentimental Journey. But first he replied to Sancho in a letter dated July 27, 1766, six days after Sancho dated his, claiming that he was already writing the kind of subject for which Sancho asked, first remarking on the “strange coincidence…: for I had been writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless negro-girl; and my eyes had scarce done smarting with it, when your Letter of recommendation in behalf of so many of her brethren and sisters came to me.”1 The effect on Sterne himself of his writing such a tale was comparable with those on Sancho of reading previous words by Sterne, along with those by the author of The History of Sir George Ellison (Sarah Scott); “they have drawn a tear in favour of my black brethren.” There were familial and other social connections between Sterne and Scott, whom he had seen in Bath in 1765; doubtless he recalled them and may well have at least of known Sir George Ellison.2 Sterne immediately questions what he has just written: “–but why her brethren? or yours, Sancho any more than mine?” Sterne and, he implies, all whites should feel kinship for blacks. His rhetorical question also extends Sancho’s “brethren” to enslaved black women. Non-blood kinship—brotherhood and, less often, sisterhood—had powerful connotations in the period of the Enlightenment and burgeoning individualism,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3_3

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alongside that exhorted by religious sects, notably Quakers and revivalists, linking people by sympathy. Adam Smith had opened his influential The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by suggesting that people naturally felt sympathy for what “our brother” suffers “upon the rack.” Corporal Trim referred in his sermon to that passage of Smith’s. Of course, such nonkin brotherhood was rooted in the Christian gospels (which inferred other non-blood kinship ties), Mark, 7:33–34; Matthew, 12:48–50; and Luke, 8:19–21.3 Sterne developed this connection: “It is by the finest tints, and most insensible gradations that nature descends from the fairest face about St. James’s to the sootiest complexion in Africa,” the horizontal meaning of sibling kinship juxtaposed with the vertical hierarchy of “descends,” the fair above the sooty.4 Charles Dunster’s lines on fashionable Londoner’s parading on St. James Street later in the century similarly present a black person serving an aristocratic “train”: …Sometimes at their head, Index of Rank or Opulence supreme, A sable Youth from Aethiopia’s climes, In milk white turban dight, precedes the Train.5

In the sermon Sancho quoted to him, Sterne had preached that generic “man” was “the fairest and noblest part of God’s works,” and we can imagine Sterne either did not have colour in mind or that, if he did, the term “fairest” perhaps conflated colour along with beauty and morality, and man was made “after the image of his Creator.” In his letter to Sancho, Sterne continued his hierarchalizing of colour, asking, after the word “Africa,” “at which tint of these, is it that ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, ‘ere Mercy is to vanish with them?” Acts 17:26 stated, “He [God] has made all nations of one blood to dwell on all the face of the earth,” a text to which critics of the enslavement of Africans appealed from George Fox in the mid-seventeenth century through the Rev. Peter Peckard in the latter eighteenth. Sterne’s question is rhetorical: white and black are Christian kin, both recipients of God’s mercy.6 Sterne then spoke directly to Sancho with a breathtaking psychosociological vision: “–but ‘tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other of it like brutes, & then endeavour to make ‘em so.” He refers to Europeans’ enslavement of Africans, more

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specifically, British enslavement, replying to Sancho’s “slavery…in our West Indies.” For “my own part I never look Westward (when I am in a pensive mood at least),” surely in this mood, Sterne’s knowledge of his soldier-father’s death in that attempt to put down a slave insurrection in Jamaica would come to mind. Nearly all of Sterne’s brief Memoir of the Life and Family of Mr. Sterne, Written in Himself , published posthumously by his daughter with her selection of his letters, was devoted to his father’s military career, which dragged his wife and children from one imperial posting to another.7 When in that mood, Sterne continued, he always thought “of the burdens which our Brothers and Sisters are there carrying - & could I ease their shoulders from one ounce of em,”— Sancho had asked Sterne to “ease the yoke” of his brother in the West Indies—“I declare I would set out this hour on a pilgrimage to Mecca for their sakes,” presumably referring to one connotation of Sancho’s Othello, The Moor of Venice (whose eponymous hero Sancho once offered to play), stands for the fact that Britons had long associated “moor” with being black, being African. (The word was derived from the Roman province, Mauretania, in North Africa.) There were Muslims among the millions of Africans shipped across the Atlantic, some identified as “Moors” or “Moorish.” One of them was Ayub Suleiman Diallo, mentioned my last chapter. Britons were also long familiar with the ongoing enslavement of Muslims and Christians, which touched Britain’s own south coast.8 Sancho had told Sterne that as a measure of his indebtedness, among that of “millions..for the character of your amiable Uncle Toby! – I declare, I would walk ten miles in the dog days to shake hands with the honest corporal—” So Sterne remarks that his own proposed “pilgrimage to Mecca for their sakes – w[hi]ch by the way Sancho, exceeds your Walk of ten miles, in about the same proportion,” that is, between one fictional corporal and millions of our enslaved brothers and sisters, “that a Visit of Humanity, should one, or mere form—” But whether “you meant [the Corporal or my Uncle Toby]…he is yr. Debter[.]” Then, Sterne addresses the actual implementation of his answer to Sancho’s request in that “tender tale of a friendless, poor negro-girl” he has mentioned in his first sentence. “If I can weave the Tale I have wrote into the Work I’m abt – tis at the service of the afflicted – and a much greater matter; for in serious truth, it casts a [melancholy, scratched out] sad Shade upon the World, that so great a part of it, are and have been so long bound in chains of darkness & in Chains of Misery”; here, Sterne continues with his felicitations to Sancho for freeing himself and

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being freed from them, quoted earlier. The “greater matter” than whatever Sterne will write, even in attempting to help the afflicted, is what the actual enslavement of so large a part of the world says of the whole, of humanity, an echo of his earlier observation that one half of the world brutalizes the other. Sterne concluded, “and so, good hearted Sancho! adieu! & believe me [I have always, scratched out] I will not forget y Letter. Yrs. L. Sterne.”9 Two weeks later, Sterne did weave the tale of the negro girl into chapter VI of the last volume of Tristram Shandy, published in 1767. There were no such individualized black characters in the sentimental The History of Sir George Ellison, published the same year Sancho praised it in his letter to Sterne.10 A “little Negro boy” had appeared in Richardson’s Pamela. In one phase of his rakish past, when he was a student, long preceding his reformation by Pamela, Mr. B had impregnated Sally Godfrey and seen her off to Jamaica, where the man she married accepted her as a widow, whose daughter was being raised in England, and given the surname “Goodwin, that her Shame be the less known.” Sally Godfrey’s Jamaican “Spouse, sent a little Negro Boy of about ten years old, as a Present to wait upon her. But he was taken ill of the smallpox, and died in a month after he was landed.”11 One can see him as a prose equivalent (had he lived), of exotically dressed African children, accompanying fashionably dressed portraits often of ladies, or accompanying them in outdoor activities (visiting the poor, for example), a subject of Catherine Molineux’s Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain. “Yet the portraits reveal nothing of the interior mental world of these enslaved children, of [their] dislocation and trauma. Whether born in Africa or the Americas, these boys and girls had been ripped from parents and community and taken to live and work in the overwhelmingly white and alien British Isles.”12 Dido Elizabeth Belle was depicted in a unique joint portrait with her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, probably by painter David Martin. Both of them were illegitimate but the nieces of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who raised them into respectability. Belle was the daughter of Mansfield’s nephew, Sir John Lindsay and Maria Belle, an enslaved West Indian, born to her in London. Mansfield confirmed her freedom and left her a moderate heiress. But Belle was exceptional. Peter Fryer writes of the “10,000 or so black people who lived in Britain were households servants,” the women maids, cooks, “seamstresses, and children’s nurses,” men occupying positions like Sancho’s, of the status Molineux describes,

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as well as outside labourers in town and country, workers on the docks, and seamen.13 The appearance of “the poor negro girl” in Tristram Shandy is the occasion for a telling exchange about race between uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. Arthur H. Cash concludes that Sterne “never found a way to work this pathetic gentle black girl into his narrative,” although “Trim’s recollection of her…sets off a dialogue which must have pleased Ignatius Sancho.” It expressed the “Enlightenment ideals” Sterne shared with intellectual leaders, including d’Holbach and Diderot—an adamant opponent of slavery—whom he would meet in Paris, reflected, too, in his subsequent novel’s words on the Bastille.14 It is a digression Corporal Trim took from telling uncle Toby the story of his twin brother Tom’s courtship of a Jewish widow in Portugal. Trim, in his sermon, had apprehended that Tom, captured by the Inquisition, was stretched on the rack, the literalization of Smith’s illustration of “our” instinctive sympathy for others. Thinking about his brother’s misfortunes was the psychological frame for the ensuing story of “the Negro maid.” When Tom got to the widow’s shop, “there was nobody in it, but a poor negro girl, with a bunch of white feathers tied to the end of a long cane flapping away flies – not killing them.” She shared this expression of sensibility with uncle Toby, who would not kill a fly. “Tis a pretty picture! said my uncle Toby – she has suffered persecution, Trim, and had learned mercy–” This was a quality Sterne preached in the sermon Sancho quoted to him, linking it to sensibility.15 Trim replies with one assertion made in the debate over African/black psychology, extending the tender tale, to that dimension, already implicit in her having common ground with Toby: “–She was good, an’ please your honour, from nature as well as from hardship, and there are circumstances in the story of that poor friendless slut, that would melt a heart of stone, said Trim.” “Slut” had a range of meanings, the OED tells us, from simply a kitchen-maid, via a woman of dirty habits, to a hussy and crafty jade. It could also be a playful and affectionate term; its invidiousness partly defanged. If Richardson’s Mr. B wrote of Pamela, a maid he loved, “Well did the dear Slut describe the Passions I struggled with,” Sterne wrote his mistress, Catherine Fourmantel, of “the Hole in my Heart which you have made, like a dear enchanting Slut as you are–.” Perhaps, too, the “dirty” connotations made young women with dark skin susceptible to that characterization by white men, a long-standing association in English. One of Sterne’s immediate (and racist) imitators Henry

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Mackenzie included an African woman character, “a poor friendless slut” in The Man of Feeling (1771).16 Apparently in response to Toby’s saying “the negro-girl” had learnt mercy, Trim asks Toby: “A Negro has a soul? an please your honour, said the Corporal (doubtingly).” The question bore on Sancho’s asking the Rev. Sterne to give one half hour’s attention to slavery, to hear the prayers of thousands of his “brother Moors.”17 One of the earliest and continuing rationalizations for Christians’ enslavement of Africans was that they were heathens, lacking souls. Richard Ligon, who had lived in Barbados as the sugar revolution took off on the backs of enslaved Africans, and who believed in their enslavement, doubted the conventional view of slaveholders there that Africans lacked souls. And George Fox asked of the Anglican ministers in Barbados entirely neglecting enslaved Africans there, “have they not Souls for you to watch over and care?” This was also a “contemporary debate” in metropolitan Britain in 1766. Sterne probably had Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (praised by Adam Smith and David Hume) in mind when he had Trim ask uncle Toby that question. Representing those who defended Africans’ enslavement, Montesquieu wrote: “One cannot get into one’s mind that god, who is a very wise being, should have put a soul, above all, a good soul, in a body that was entirely black.” Bishop Warburton had expressed outrage in his 1766 sermon to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel over treating of Africans as mere property, “Creatures endowed with all our Faculties, possessing all our qualities but that of colour; our BRETHREN both by Nature and Grace, shocks all the feelings of humanity.” He urged the SPG to strengthen their efforts to Christianize Africans and their descendants on the plantations they owned in Barbados.18 Another association stimulated by Sancho’s referring to himself and his enslaved brothers as Moors seems to have played a part in Sterne’s broadening the subject here to women. For centuries, men had placed women “near the animal state.” Theologians “had debated, …whether or not the female sex had souls, a debate which closely paralleled the debate about animals, and…sometimes echoed at a popular level.” No. 53 of The Spectator (May 1, 1711) included a letter (purportedly from “R.B.”) praising the journal’s authors for the pleasure they brought in “a little circle” of women, for “considering them as reasonable creatures, and endeavouring to banish the Mahometan custom, which had too much prevailed even in this island, of treating women as if they had no souls.” The writer went on to criticize the view that women are raised as if “their only business is

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to please the men.” Pope wrote, “On Lady Wortley Montagu’s Portrait” (1719), wishing he could draw and, With Just Description shew the Soul Divine And the whole Princess in my work should shine.19

Sterne’s kinswoman, Elizabeth Montagu, a feminist who asserted women’s intellectual equality, wrote in 1737 that a “Mahometan error crept even into the Christian Church that Woman have no Souls & it is thought very absurd of us to pretend or think like Reasonable Creatures.” She was perpetuating one view expressed during that intellectual ferment of the English Civil War and its aftermath, recorded by satirical poet, Samuel Butler, evidently part of the debate over the nature of women: The souls of women are so small, That some believe th’ have none at all[.]

Perhaps Sterne’s inclusion of it here was triggered by Sancho’s referring to his brother moors.20 Mary Wollstonecraft perpetuated and amplified Bluestocking feminism in new contexts, including the extension of antislavery into parliamentary politics. She wrote about the same, traditional derogation articulated by Sterne and Mrs. Montagu, expressed in the invidious identification of women entirely with sensibility, with their nervous systems. Quoting Dr. Johnson’s definition of it, “Quickness sensation; quickness of perception; delicacy,” Wollstonecraft commented, “I discern not a trace of the image of God in either sensation or matter. Refined seventy times seven, they are still material; intellect dwells not there; nor will fire ever make gold.” As in the case of Pamela’s arguments against Mr. B’s material blandishments to obtain her “virtue.” Wollstonecraft repeatedly declared, “if woman is to be allowed to have an immortal soul,” her degradation by men must cease, so she could “improve her understanding” as her “employment of life.” And repeatedly, too, she insisted that this was “not to be treated like slaves or like the brutes who are [made] dependent on the reason of man.”21 That sensibility denoted the human nervous system, construable as entirely physiological, material, had posed a problem for philosophers and theologians, since the era of Hobbes, Descartes and Locke: hence Shaftesbury’s challenge, to culminate in Hutcheson’s insistence of the existence

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of a moral sense. Wollstonecraft had been preceded by Sterne’s autobiographical Yorick, a “weak libertine,” who in A Sentimental Journey, asserted, “I am positive, I have a soul.” The question meant kinship between Sterne and the negro girl, associated with Sancho’s letter. Sterne would develop that association more fully in A Sentimental Journey.22 In Tristram Shandy, uncle Toby answered Trim’s question (or one could say, Don Quijote answered Sancho’s): “I suppose God would not have left him without one, any more than you or me–.” The male pronoun, in a sequence where Trim has moved from a negro girl to the question about “A Negro,” as well as identifying his and Trim’s own white, male selves, with black people of both genders, reflects the sequence in Sterne’s letter to Sancho, from “a friendless, poor negro girl” to his correction of Sancho’s request “on behalf of so many of her brethren and sisters,” identifying Trim’s “poor negro girl” with all those “thousands” (implicitly all enslaved Africans), on whose behalf Sancho was writing to him. Corporal Trim’s response, “–It would be putting one sadly over the head of another,” can be seen as a simple or condensed version of Sterne’s statement in his letter after declaring that black people should not be denied God’s mercy (i.e. that they had worthy souls, too); “but ‘tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, & then endeavour to make ‘em so.”23 Uncle Toby agrees with Trim’s criticism of any arbitrary elevation of one person over another. Trim then applies that to racism, sustaining the particular focus on women: “Why then, an please your honour, is a black wench to be used worse than a white one?” Trim hypothesizes it was because “she has no-one to stand up for her–” and in agreeing wholeheartedly, uncle Toby takes the opportunity to declare the same was true for both genders of black people—as he had in his reply to Sancho, again marking the close relationship between that reply and “the tender tale” he tells Sancho he was writing. “— ‘Tis that very thing Trim, quotes my uncle uncle Toby, — which recommends her to protection – and her brethren, with her,” surely an allusion to Sancho’s term. Consistently, what he adds here could refer to the violent subjection of white wives (marriage tantamount to slavery) and to both genders of black people: “‘tis the fortune of war which has put the whip into our hands now – where it may be hereafter, heaven knows! – but be it where it will, the brave, Trim will not use it unkindly. God forbid, said

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the Corporal. Amen responded my uncle Toby, laying his hand upon his heart.”24 Sterne’s tenth sermon, on Job, had referred to the Romans’ enslavement of thousands of people; Britons, as well as Africans, were enslaved by war. Linda Colley has found that the publication of “Indian captivity narratives,” accounts of English in the hands of North American indigenes, increased in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Enslavement, the arbitrary result of force, could be as arbitrarily reversed. In Defoe’s Colonel Jacque (1722), a Quaker character reminded another, irate at “mutinous black devils, if they were in the negroes’ condition, they would do it if they could.” A 1737 poem by Richard Savage, “Of Public Spirit,” asked, Why must I Afric’s sable Children see Vended for Slaves, though form’d by Nature free, … Yes, empires may revolve, give them the day, And yoke may yoke and blood may blood repay.

Savage’s champion, and fellow Tory, Dr. Johnson, made the toast, “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.”25 Jefferson reflected in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), having echoed his beloved Sterne in characterizing slavery as when “one half of the citizens…trample on the rights of the other,” that, “God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation among us is among possible events, that it may become probable by supernatural interference!”26 A hundred years before Jefferson, in a version inflected by the Christian injunction behind Sterne, and Adam Smith for that matter (“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” Mark 12:31) the Rev. Morgan Godwyn in urging white Barbarians to Christianize “Negros and Indians,” had written, “To make the Negro’s case our own, as being the best way, to judge what is fit for others.” And further: “That Injunction of our Blessed Lord, a dealing so with all Men, as we should upon a like change of our Fortunes, expect from them, being a Principle highly Moral and Natural; and sufficient to make us wave those proud distinctions, which only avarice, and a too worthy concert of our selves, have taught us.”27

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Perhaps Sterne’s making the “negro” a young figure and a female one was to intensify her pitiability. His picture can be compared to the speech Quaker Benjamin Lay made to the Philadelphia Meeting in 1738, when he asked the parents of a child they thought missing, “you may,…conceive of the sorrow you inflict on the parents of the negro girlhood you hold in slavery for she was torn from them in avarice.” (His words were not published until 1813.) Enslavement’s tearing apart of families especially, perhaps, daughters from mothers, was a continuous theme in antislavery writings. Such an emphasis, and on slave-traders’ and slaveowners’ abuse of women, corresponded to the increasing salience of the language of sensibility in the antislavery movement.28 The two other letters Sterne wrote to Sancho which are extant are evidence that they remained in touch during the gestation of A Sentimental Journey. The first, dated May 16, 1767, began with Sterne’s apology: “I am very sorry my good Sancho, that I was not at home to return my compliments to you for the great courtesy of the Duke of M[onta]g[u]’s family to me in honouring my list of subscribers with their names – for which I bear them all thanks.” Sancho had brought this news to Sterne’s London lodging in Bond Street, from where Sterne sent his letter.29 Evidently, they had been in personal contact between July 1766 and this May. Sancho may have been given permission by his employers to leave their house in Privy Gardens, Westminster, “bordering Whitehall Street,” to walk round to Sterne’s lodgings in the same fashionable part of London, although Bond Street was associated with “macaroni and fops,” perhaps congruent with the libertine reputation Sterne’s London activities had earned him.30 Sterne continued: “–But you have something to add, Sancho to what I owe your good will also on this account”—Sancho had told his employers of his acquaintance with the famous author and presumably at Sterne’s request, persuaded them to subscribe to the forthcoming A Sentimental Journey, hence their permitting him to bring Sterne the good news. Sancho’s letters illustrate his willingness to be such an intermediary for artists and other friends. Publication of A Sentimental Journey depended on subscription. Because his health was failing, Sterne enrolled many of the book’s 334 subscribers “largely through the good offices of friends.”31 What Sterne said Sancho had to add, “to what I owe your good will on this account…is to send me the subscription money, which I

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find a necessity of dun[n]ing my best friends for before I leave town– ” for Coxwold, his parish in Yorkshire, “to avoid the perplexities of both keeping pecuniary accounts (for which I have very slender talents)and collecting them (for which I have neither strength of body or mind), and so, good Sancho, dun the Duke of M[ontagu] Duchess of M[ontagu] and Lord M[onthermer, their son], for their subscriptions, and lay sin, and money with it too, at my door,” that is bring it round in person. (All three would subscribe to the publication of Sancho’s Letters.)32 Sterne added a postscript letting Sancho know he would be in town until the Friday next. Sterne had concluded this letter, “I wish so good a family” the Montagus, “every blessing they merit, along with my humblest compliments. You know Sancho that I am your friend and well-wisher.” The third letter we have from Sterne to Sancho he sent from Coxwold, June 30, 1767, six weeks later. He acknowledged the letter Sancho had sent him, thanking him “for the many expressions of good Will and good Opinion–.” He takes Sancho’s praise as the opportunity for this reflection: “— ‘Tis all affectation to say a man is not gratified with being praised – we only want it to be sincere – and then it will be taken as kindly as yours.” Sincerity was of fundamental value to people claiming to share “feeling,” in contrast to merely polite and fashionable manners, but it was easily feigned, to be parodied, its cultivators and advocated charged with insincerity. Sterne’s expression of his trust in Sancho’s sincerity was followed by the directly personal: “I left Town very poorly - & with the idea I was taking leave of it for ever – but with good air, a quiet retreat; & quiet reflections along with it, with an ass to milk, and another to ride out upon (if I chuse it) all together do wonders. I shall live this year at least, I hope, be it but to give the world before I quit it as good impression of me as you have Sancho.” Perhaps that last sentence referred to A Sentimental Journey’s expression of direct opposition to slavery, for which Sancho had appealed to Sterne in his first letter. Next in this June 30 letter, Sterne told Sancho “I would only covenant for just so much health & spirits as are sufficient to carry my pen thro’ the Task I have set it this summer–” that is, writing A Sentimental Journey for which he had been dunning his friends to get subscriptions before he had written a word. “–But I am a resign’d Being, Sancho, and take health & Sickness – just as I do light and darkness…just as it pleases God to send them,” perhaps another allusion for Sancho, referring to his previous letter’s words on colour. He paraphrased the conclusion to his other published sermon on Job (“his expostulation with his wife”),

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“taking care, whatever befalls me in this silly world – not to lose my temper at it. – This I believe, Friend Sancho to be the truest philosophy; for this we must be indebted to ourselves, but not to our fortunes.—” He expressed the hope that Sancho will not forget his “Custome of giving me a Call at my Lodgings next Winter: in the mean time, I am very cordially my honest friend, Sancho, Yrs L. Sterne.”33 It was in conclusion to a chapter on the “Bastile” in A Sentimental Journey that Sterne quoted part of the passage from his sermon on Job which Sancho had quoted to him in that initial letter, and was Sterne’s most direct response to it. Yorick imagines himself first saying or doing something in order to “get clapp’d up in the Bastile,” where “I shall live…a couple of months entirely at the king of France’s expence,” to save money, one of Yorick’s preoccupations. He pooh-poohs the “terror” invoked by “the Bastile”—this was a British convention; it is merely “in the word.” The “Bastile is but another word for a tower…The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself and blackened: reduce them to the proper size and line she overlooks them–.” We have seen Sterne both criticize and perpetuate the colour’s invidious use in responding to Sancho’s “Negur” and “black brethren.” His subject here is imprisonment but about to be expanded to perpetual enslavement; the mental process he describes resembles the one he ascribes to enslavers in that letter: “one half of the world to sue the other half of it like brutes, & then endeavors to make ‘em so.”34 Still attempting to escape the terror provoked by imprisonment in the Bastile, Yorick hears “a voice which I took to be that of a child, which complained ‘it could not get out–.’ He looked up and down the passage but saw neither man, woman, or child,” the human being he thought had spoken those words. But hearing them again, he looked up and “saw it was a starling living in a little cage. ‘I can’t get out – I can’t get out,’ said the starling.” Wilbur Cross’s biography of Sterne quotes a genealogy to the effect that the “more learned of the family evidently associated the name “Sterne,” with the old English word stearn…signifying starling , for as soon as they rose to rank and wealth, their arms appeared …as ‘gold, a chevron engrailed between three crosses with a starling in proper colours for a crest.” The Latin name is “Sturnus vulgaris.” Sterne himself reproduced that crest in connection with his “pathetic discourse on the bitterness of slavery,” the passage which follows his discovery of the imprisoned starling.35

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Sterne’s closest friend, John Hall-Stevenson (“Eugenius” in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey), knew of Sterne’s identification with this black bird. That year he had privately printed Mackarony Fables: For Grown Gentlemen: Fable IV was a poem, “The Black Bird”: A Black Bird, famous in that age; From a bow window in the hall, Hung dangling in a wicker cage; Instead of psalmody and pray’rs Like those good children of St. Francis, He secularized all his airs And took delight in Wanton Fancies.

St. Frances referred to Sir Francis Dashwood, leader of the Hellfire Club, of which Sterne was a member. Unawed by this imposing scene, Our Black Bird the enchantment broke; Flourished a sprightly air between, And whistled the Black Joke, … Even here there are some holy men, Would fair head people by the nose; Did not a Black Bird now and then Benevolently interpose My good Lord Bishop, Mr. Dean You shall get nothing by your spite; Tristram shall whistle in your spleen, And put Hypocrisy to flight.

The last eight lines refer to a satirical allegory or burlesque of a local “squabble…at York” between those church officers, with which Sterne followed A Sentimental Journey.36 So this was Hall-Stevenson’s characterization of Sterne, and it seems likely that Sterne talked to Hall-Stevenson about Sancho, and his blackbird-appeal in A Sentimental Journey. One can add that Sterne, highly knowledgeable about music, may well have enjoyed discussing it with Sancho, a black songbird, who had called out to Sterne for help. This episode both resonated with Sancho’s appeal to Sterne and represented it at the same time, explaining Sterne’s identification with Sancho and his enslaved black brethren in their deep urge for freedom.

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Yorick “stood, looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach’d it, with the same lamentation of its captivity ‘I can’t get out,’ said the starling –” Yorick’s response was of that “benevolent nature” that Sterne described in his sermon on philanthropy, whose “impulse to pity is so sudden,” the so “instantaneous an effect…you woul’d think the will was scarce concerned …in the sympathy which his own goodness has created.” He replied to the starling, “God help thee! Said I but I’ll let thee out cost what it will”; but the door was so “twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces.” Given where this passage is headed, to make explicit that the starling’s being trapped is a symbol of slavery, Sterne is presenting the system’s apparent intractability as Scott presented it in Sir George Ellison (although her hero responded to it as sympathetically as Sterne), a very widely held view, perhaps even in its intertwining with an empire so recently augmented by the Seven Years’ War. The Treaty of Utrecht ending the earlier war that had traumatized uncle Toby ensured Britain’s domination of the slave trade by way of the “Asiento” clause, guaranteeing Britain the right of importing African slaves into the Americas for thirty years.37 More apparently, perhaps, Sterne’s “motif” referred to contemporary Londoners, poor blacks, slave and free, living in the parish of St. Giles: “The numerous Negro beggars in London, mostly cast-off slaves, were called St. Giles blackbirds.” One 1757 newspaper advertisement for the recapture of a runaway said his name was “Starling,” and that he “blows the French horn very well.”38 Yorick continued, still specifying the bird was a starling: The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, press’d his breast against it, as if impatient – I fear, poor creature! said I, I cannot set thee at liberty – “No,” said the starling – ‘I can’t get out – I can’t get out,’ said the starling. I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened.

Yorick then details the psychophysiology of this extreme response: “nor do I remember an incident in my life where the dissipated spirits to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly called home.” That process, the caging of imaginative freedom, suggests the seriousness of this literally personal image. And following Elena Passarello, we

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must recognize the musical expression, to which Hall-Stevenson referred. She suggests that a caged starling’s playful G-sharp persuaded the twentyeight-year-old Mozart to buy it from a shop in Vienna, as the little songbird responded to his whistle by “unslurring the quarter notes and adding a dramatic fermata at the end of the first, full measure.” “Of all the things…Mozart brought to human sound, the most important might be his sense of surprise.” He bought the starling, “the only live animal purchase in Mozart’s expense book.” In recording it, “he drew a little treble staff in his expense book and scored the starling’s tweaks under the note of purchase,” writing above the cleff, “Vogel Staar, 34 Kruetzer.” He added “under the last measure an acclamation scribbled in the maestro’s quick hand: Das war schön!”39 “Mechanical as the notes were,” said Yorick, a.k.a. the musical Sterne, “yet so true in tune with nature were they chanted, that in once moment they overthrew all my systematic reasoning upon the Bastile,” that one can simply “suppose ‘tis some tyrant of distemper – and not of a man who holds you in.” And so Yorick unsaid every word of his rationalization. The truth in nature was the meaning of “let me out” to real, human slaves. Yorick’s response illustrates Hutcheson’s argument that the judgement of slavery should be made on “feeling.”40 Having rejected his rationalizations in discussing the terror induced by the notion of captivity, Yorick introduces a version of the quotation from the sermon which Sancho had sent Sterne the year before: “Disguise thy self as than wilt, still slavery! Said I – still thou art a bitter draught; and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee than art no less bitter on that account.–” Yorick turns away from the bitterness of slavery to sweet liberty, personified as a goddess; “– ‘tis thou thrice sweet and gracious goddess, addressing myself to LIBERTY, whom all in public or in private worship whose taste is grateful, and ever will be till herself shall change–” he has just said that the cry for Liberty, “let me out” is “true to nature.” The image and values were the same as those of Thomson’s Liberty, which also criticized the slave trade and opposed slavery; “no tint of words can spot thy snowy mantle, or chymic power turn thy sceptre into iron–” Yorick has said that because the mind is terrified by its own exaggeration of evils, of the imprisonment represented by the Bastile, it blackens them. His reflections on slavery, stimulated by and associated with Sancho by way of that tenth sermon he quoted again, inevitably connoted colour.41

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Sterne begins the next chapter (entitled, “The Captive, Paris”): “The bird in his cage, pursued me into my room.” The pursuit means the sound and the train of thought the caged bird had stimulated. “I sat down close to my table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I began to figure to myself the miseries of confinement. I was in the right frame for it,” the pun signifying his continuing identification with the starling in the cage, “and so I gave full scope to my imagination,” stimulated to such freedom by its contrast with confinement. He continues to refer directly to Sancho’s terms, which are worth repeating. Sancho had said he was among the “millions indebted to Sterne’s Uncle Toby,” asking Sterne to behold in his, “the uplifted hands of thousands of my brother Moors,” quoting Sterne’s sermon, saying there were millions forced to drink from the cup of slavery and praising Sterne for his sympathy for his “miserable black brethren.” Yorick then writes, “I was going to begin with the millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery”; the starling was a symbol of Sterne’s inheritance, his text here illustrated by the Sterne family emblem, crested by a starling. However affecting this picture was of the millions of his enslaved fellow creatures, “that I could not bring it near me and that the multitudes and groups in it did but distract me – I took a single captive and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then look’d through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture.” Sancho had asked Sterne; “think in me you behold the uplifted hands of thousands of my brother Moors.” Sentimental writing invoked feeling in readers by epitomizing one of many sufferers.42 Sterne then describes a prisoner with “chains upon his legs,” his “body half wasted away with long expectation and confinement”—an echo of Trim’s sermon referring to Smith’s opening of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, presenting our brother on the rack. This can also be seen as a precedent for Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon” (which also invoked Sterne’s bird) and Dickens’s Dr. Manette, describing the terrible psychological and physical effects of captivity, for both the isolated figure and those millions of enslaved West Indians Sancho represented. Yorick described, too, the effects on the writer, the same he wished to prompt in his readers. “I burst into tears – I could not sustain this picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn.”43 Yorick adds yet another chapter on “The Starling,” giving its history. “It is impossible but many of my readers must have heard of him; and if any by mere chance have ever seen him – I beg to inform them,

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that bird was my bird – or same vile copy set up to represent him.” Sterne concludes by turning the story of “this poor starling,” into the explanation for making it “the crest to my arms” and depicts it on the page.44

Notes 1. This first version of Sterne’s “initial response to Sancho, date 27 July 1766 and written as Sterne was working on the ninth…volume of Tristram Shandy exists in two versions,” writes Vincent Carretta in his Appendix B, The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, ed. Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1998), then printing both of them, along with the version of Sancho’s letter to Sterne and the modified version of Sterne’s reply, published together in the collection of Sterne’s letters edited by his daughter, Lydia Medalle Sterne, in 1775. The editors of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 8, The Letters Part II 1765– 1768, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009) take the version of Sancho’s letter from Francis Crewe’s 1782 collection of Sterne’s letters reprinted by Carretta, and a copy of Sterne’s reply from “the facsimile copy inserted just after Sancho’s letter in the 5th edition of Letters of Ignatius Sancho (1803)…that first appeared in the undesignated 4th edition of 1802,” 504–05. Madeleine Descargues, “Ignatius Sancho’s Letters ,” The Shandean, Vol. 3 (November 1991), 145–66, reproduces a facsimile of Sterne’s letter, fig. 41. 2. Sarah Robinson Scott was the sister of Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, cousins of Sterne’s wife, Elizabeth. Mrs. Montagu was “Queen of the Bluestockings,” and she and Sterne were on friendly terms, sometimes. She and other bluestockings disliked Tristram Shandy “on moral grounds,” but she helped take care of his family after Sterne’s death. Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (New York: Methuen, 1986), 24, 115–16, 172, 206–07, 209, 327–28. 3. Sterne to Sancho, July 27, 1766, Sancho, Letters, 332; Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 26; Barker-Benfield, “‘Sentiment Has Struggled with Selfishness’: Selfishness, Sensibility and Gender in Late-Eighteenth Century British Antislavery,” Selfishness and Selflessness, ed. Linda L. Layne (Oxford: Berghahn Press, 2020); Sterne, The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, ed. James Aiken Work (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940 [1759–1766]), 139. See, too, Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

(Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008), 1389–40, 178–80. Sterne to Sancho, July 27, 1766, Sancho, Letters, 332; compare Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65. Quoted in Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 3. George Fox, “To friends beyond the Sea that have Blacks and Indian Slaves,” (1651) quoted in Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery 1657–1761 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 41; Peter Peckard, Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge, 1784, quoted by his disciple, Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London: Richard Taylor, 1808 [Filiquarian Reproduction, Lexington, KY, 2013]), 1:69. Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 7, The Letters, Part I 1739–1764, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009), xlix; it was immediately published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 45 (November 1775), 520–22; Cash, Laurence Sterne, The Early and Middle Years (London: Mettimen, 1975), 37–39. Sterne to Sancho, July 27, 1776, Sancho, Letters, 332. Linda Colley, Captives (New York: Pantheon, 2002). Markman Ellis also supplies useful context for this letter, Politics of Sensibility, 66–69. See note 1 above. See Sterne, Letters, Part II , 507 n. 3; Sterne Tristram Shandy, ed. James Aikin Work (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940), 606; Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison, ed. Betty Rizzo (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996). See note 2, above. Samuel Richardson, Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (New York: Norton, 1958), 510–17. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); John Raphael Smith (1752–1712), “A Lady and Her Children Relieving a Cottage,” 1782. Mezzotint (after a painting by W.R. Bigg) from the Collection of David Alexander, reproduced in Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 230. See, too, Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 191–217; Stephen Mullen, Nelson Mundell and Simon P. Newman, “Black Runaways in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” British: Black Past, ed. Gretchen H. Guerzim (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 81–98; 87.

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13. Paula Byrne, Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice (London: William Collins, 2014), for important corrections to Byrne’s biography see Guerzina, “The Georgia Life and Modern Afterlife of Dido Elizabeth Belle,” Britain’s Black Past, 161–78; Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2010 [1984]), 72, 75. Ryan Hanley agrees with the 10,000 figure, pointing out the “figure was prone to significant fluctuation over time” Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 7. 14. Cash, Sterne: Later Years, 255, 141–42; Work’s footnote to this passage in his edition of Tristram Shandy, links it to Sancho’s July 21, 1766 letter to Sterne, quoting it in full, 607 n.; compare Ellis, Politics of Slavery, 71. See, too, Helena Woodard, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne: The Measure of Benevolence and ‘the Cult of Sensibility,’” African British Writings in the Eighteenth Century: The Politics of Race, and Reason (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991), 67–98; 81, and Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 58. 15. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 138–39, 605, 606. 16. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 606; Mr. B quoted in the OED; Sterne to Catherine Fourmantel [Sunday, 1759], Letters Part I , 102; MacKenzie quoted in Ellis, Politics of Feeling, 69. 17. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 606. 18. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett 2011[1657]), 97; George Fox, “Letter to the Minister and Priests…in Barbados” (London: n.p. 1671), 5; Ellis, Politics of Feeling, 70; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia, C. Miller, Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 250; William, Lord Bishop of Glocester, A Sermon Preached Before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Feb. 21, 1766 (London: E. Owen and T. Harrison, 1766), 25–26. 19. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 43. The Poems of Alexander Pope, A Reduced Version of the Tweckenhan Text, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 465–66; 466. 20. Sylvia Harcstark Myers suggests Montagu derived this from that issue of the Spectator, The Bluestocking Circle: Women Friendship and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 124; Butler quoted in Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate:

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21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

English Satires on Women, 1660–1750 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 48. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975), 79, 161, 133, 102. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, chs. 1, 3; Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, with The Journal to Eliza, and A Political Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 114. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 606; Sterne to Sancho, July 27, 1766, Sancho, Letters , 332. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 606. For the paragraph’s first point, see Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chs. 1–4; and R. Emerson Dobash and Russell Dobash, Violence Against the Patriarchy (New York: Free Press, 1979), chs. 2, 3. Sterne, “Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life, considered,” Sermon X, Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne vol. IV The Sermons , ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), 91–102; 99; Linda Colley, Captives (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 174; Defoe and Johnson, all quoted in Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive King’: British Anti-slavery Literature of the XVIII Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 260–61; 58; 165. Savage quoted by Nicholas Hudson, “‘Britons Never Will Be Slaves’: National Myth, Conversation, and the Beginnings of British Antislavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer 2001), 559–76; 565. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Harper Torchback, 1964 [1785]), 156. Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate Suing for their Admission into the Church: Or a Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing of the Negroes and Indians on Our Plantation (n.p.: Kessinger Legacy Reprints, n.d. [London: the Author, 1680]), 160. Benjamin Lay quoted in Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 50. For context, see Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaign, 1780–1870 (New York: Routledge, 1992), Part I. Sterne to Sancho, [16 May, 1767], Sancho, Letters, 334–35. Sancho, Letters, 255–56 n. 5; Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (New York: Walker, 2006), 54.42. Sterne to Sancho [16 May, 1767], Sancho, Letters, 335; Cash, Sterne; Later Years, 267. For the list of subscribers, see Sancho, Letters, 10–24.

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33. Sterne to Sancho, (June 30 [1767]), Sancho, Letters, 335–36. 34. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 70–71. For the horror invoked by the Bastille among Frenchmen for the arbitrariness of imprisonment there, in contrast to the liberty enjoyed by Englishmen, see Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (Oxford: Oxford World Classes, 1981 [1718]), 251, 262–3. 35. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 71; Wilbur L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1929), 2–3. 36. [John Hall Stevenson] Cosmo Mythogelastick, Makerony Fables, with the New Fable of the Bees (London: J. Alman, 1768), 16–18; Ian Jack, Introduction, A Political Romance (see note 20 above), 92–96. 37. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 71. 38. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2010 [1984]) 75. Fryer is the source for the “Starling” runaway, op. cit. 62. Gatrell writes that the “very poorest” Londoners “were concentrated in the slums of Saffron Hill or of St. Giles, worth of Covent Garden.” City of Laughter, 25. At one point, Roderick Random decided he had to “suit my expense to my calamitous circumstances, and with that view lured an apartment in a garret near St. Giles, at the rate of nine pence per week,” the passage footnoted by Paul-Gabriel Rouce, “the area around the church of St. Giles runthe-fields had become notorious for its thieving prostitution, drunkenness and general wretchedness, Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 [1748]), 115, 448. Kathleen Chator argues that there was a “black community” in St. Giles is a myth, and doubts the validity of the term, “St. Giles Blackbirds.” Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales During the period of the British Slave Trade, c. 1660–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 40–50. But black people did live there along with very poor whites. 39. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 71–72; Elena Passarello, “Vogel Staar (Sturnus vulgaris) 1784,” Animals Strike Curious Poses (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017), 65–81. 40. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 72. 41. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 72; Sterne, “Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life, Considered,” Sermon X, The Sermons, 92–102; 99. 42. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 72. 43. Walter Scott wrote in his review of Byron, “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “The object of the poem, like that of Sterne’s celebrated sketch of the prisoner, is to consider captivity in the abstract and to mark its effects in gradually chilling the mental powers as it benumbs and freezes the animal frame until the unfortunate victim becomes, as it were, a part of his dungeon, and identified with his chains.” Scott also refers to Othello

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in connection with such suffering. Scott, The Quarterly Review, Vol. xxxi (October 1816), in Chillon, A Literary Guide, ed. Patrick Vincent (Chillon, Switzerland: Foundation du Chateau de Chillon, n.d.), 77–79; 78. 44. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 75. It is feasible that in the popular, literary imagination, the image of Sterne and his starling was conflated to some extent with that of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s painting, “Young Girl Weeping over Her Dead Bird” 1765, one Sterne was likely to have seen. A recent writer compares that sentimental figure to that of Sterne’s Maria, accompanied “by a little dog, itself a substitute for a pet goat that had been as faithless as her lover,” whom Yorick meets later, Emma Barker, “Reading the Greuze Girl; The Daughter’s Seduction,” Representations, Vol. 117 (2012), 86–119; 102; Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 114. It was a meeting fraught with the sexual ambiguities of the intimacy of sensibility with which Sterne enjoyed playing, connected with the frequent trope of ladies and lapdogs, which I discuss elsewhere (Barker-Benfield, “Marriage as Slavery” unpublished ms). But the caged starling is very much alive, its relation with the autobiographical Yorick related to Sancho’s 1766 letter. One could trace the trope of women’s caged bird, yearning to be free, from Elizabeth Carter in 1744 (see Myers, Bluestocking Circle, 111) through Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. For other interpretations, see Jim Owen, “Laurence Sterne and the Caged Starling of “A Sentimental Journey,” CEA Critic, Vol. 64, No. 213 (Winter, Spring, Summer 2002), 22–34, as well as the works by Markman Ellis and Christine Levecq quoted in my Introduction.

CHAPTER 4

“The Black Must Be Discharged” Mansfield’s Decision and Its Aftermath

The case of runaway Virginia slave James Somerset, decided by Lord Justice Mansfield in 1772, has been described by many historians.1 Seymour Drescher writes “it was the most widely publicized and discussed court drama over slavery in English history,” and he traces its continuing influence through the American Civil War.2 Christopher Leslie Brown writes that fugitive slaves in Britain, including Somerset, “effectively ended slaveholding in Britain one decade after the Seven Years’ War.”3 The case made slavery a central issue in British and Anglo-American law, dramatizing an essential difference between Britain and the American colonies, and can be seen as a cause of the American Revolution, formally declared four years later. It galvanized a prolonged debate among whites about Africans and their descendants, bound up with their enslavement and, of course, their colour. This extended to the supposed threat of black sexuality, especially that of males, because of the freedom that Somerset potentiated to change the colour of Britain’s wished-for white population. This was a debate into which Sancho was drawn, so this chapter supplies a necessary context for my account of his participation, the subject of the next chapter. Charles Steuart (his name variously spelled) was a British customs official “whose responsibilities covered the Atlantic coast, from Quebec to Virginia,” had bought Somerset to England in 1769. Somerset escaped,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3_4

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Steuart hired some “persons” to recapture him, and he was “confined in irons on board…the Ann and Mary, lying in the Thames and bound for Jamaica.” A writ of habeus corpus was applied for by “the negro’s friends,” Thomas Walkin, Elizabeth Cade and John Marlow, and Granville Sharp worked with them. Sharp’s previous attempts to aid runaways, attempting the same course of action with Jonathan Strong and Thomas Lewis, made him known as “the protector of Negroes.” The writ on behalf of Somerset required the ship’s commander, John Knowles, to produce “the body of James Somerset before Lord Mansfield.” Originally, captured in Africa in 1749, he was brought to Virginia, where he was sold to Steuart. So he had been Steuart’s property for twenty years, when at last he was able to escape because he was in England. Steuart had planned to stay in London on business, then return with his enslaved African to the American mainland but, because of Somerset’s escape, he decided to sell him in Jamaica.4 Five antislavery lawyers faced two representing West India planter interests. The trial “provided forum for a wide-ranging debate over the legitimacy of the slave trade and colonial slavery,” and Mansfield’s decision cannot be “separated from the larger crises besetting the British Empire.” The debate incorporated the language of sensibility.5 Francis Hargrave’s May speech before the court was widely reported. According to David Olusoga, Hargrave was “perhaps most ideologically anti-slavery” of Somerset’s team: his “carefully drawn lawyer’s brief” made his reputation. He emphasized that if Steuart’s right to re-enslave Somerset was recognized, “domestick slavery, with its horrid trains of evils, may be lawfully introduced into this country, at the direction of every individual foreign and native.” British adherents of republicanism had warned since the seventeenth century of the dangers of “enslavement” by corruption and the demoralization of the national character, surrendering Britons to tyranny. Opponents of Cromwell across the political spectrum, from religiously inspired radical to Catholics and other defeated Royalists, experienced him and his agents as enslavers, selling them and shipping them to the American colonies, where they met people captured, sold and shipped from Africa. The restored monarchy would continue such policies, Charles II chartering the Royal African Company in 1672, and George I signing the Transportation Act in 1717. Millions of indigenous inhabitants in America were enslaved, too.6 Granville Sharp worked closely with Somerset’s defence. In 1769 he had published A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency

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of Tolerating Slavery or of Admitting the Least Claim of Property in the Persons of Men, in England, that metropolitan focus very important to the defence, and to Mansfield’s decision.7 It would not apply to the colonies, although would be influential from 1772 until the Civil War.8 Hargrave warned that this new form of slavery “will be transmitted to us Britons, in all the gradation of inventive cruelty.” Slavery contravened “humanity,” to which Hargrave frequently appealed. It “generally gives to the master an arbitrary power of administering every sort of correction however inhuman,” and even where same slighter punishments are available, they cannot “restrain the master’s inhumanity.” The “cruel means necessary to enforce its continuance” show slavery’s injustice and “evince the humanity and policy of those states,” which no longer tolerate it. The “no longer” reflects an historical vision of progress towards the civility and the reformation of manners, absorbed and propagated by cultivators of sensibility. Slavery began, Hargrave wrote, “in the barbarous state of society, and was retained even when men were far advanced in civilization.” Much of Europe had “only a remnant of ancient slavery…but qualified and moderated in favor of the slave by the humane provision of modern times.”9 Hargrave develops his account of the slavemaster’s lack of restraint, in which he assumes the psychophysiological model characteristic of sentimental literature. Slavery “corrupts the morals of the master,” by “freeing him from those restraints with respect to the slave, necessary for the control of human passions, so beneficial in promoting the practice and confirming the habit of virtue.” For Montesquieu and especially Hume, slavery’s corruption of the master was a major reason for opposing it. Moreover, Hargrave continued, “it is dangerous to the master because his oppression excites implacable resentment and hatred” in the slave, the view J. Hector St. John de Cr`evecoeur world express in 1782. “The extreme misery of his condition continually prompts him to risqué gratification of them, that is, the passion of resentment and hatred, and his situation daily furnished the opportunity.”10 What did Hargrave mean by “situation”? Surely, in the fields, a heavy tool in hand, the slave’s being forced to work by a master or an overseer with a whip, and Hargrave notes, in perpetuity, parents’ knowing their children inherited the inevitability of enslavement. Further, “To the slave it communicates all the afflictions of life, without leaving him scarce any of its pleasures; slavery depresses the excellence of his nature, by denying

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the ordinary means and motives of improvement,” excellence, therefore, meaning intellectual ability, and its habitual exercise, “ordinary” simply assuming the same as in the case of the free. African’s negative characteristics were the result of the master’s enslavement of them.11 The effects of slavery on both masters and slaves were dangerous to the state, the former because of “the corruption of those citizens on whom its prosperity depends,” the latter because of the state’s “admitting within it a multitude of persons” whose inevitable resentment and hatred can culminate in revolution; “excluded from [the state’s] benefits,” most obviously, liberty, they “are interested in scheming its destruction.” Slavery is pernicious to the enslaved suffering person, “to the master who triumphs in it, and to the state, which allows it.” Hargrave has metropolitan Britain in mind, as well as the more obvious consequences in the British West Indies, especially Jamaica, experiencing constant slave revolts and the threat of them.12 Hargrave devotes the longest section on English law to his account of the “extinction” of villenage in English history. Villenage could have supplied a precedent to justify the continuation of slavery in Britain but instead, the legal and historical record of its extinction provided grounds for the opposite, illustrating human progress: “villenage – sprung up amongst our ancestors in the early and barbarous state of society; …afterward more humane customs and wiser opinions prevailed, and by their influence, rules were established for checking the progress of slavery.” Similarly, slavery died out elsewhere in Europe, only to be revived by Iberians in the Americas. The stage is set, then for Hargrave’s repeated assertion that the recognition of Steuart’s ownership of Somerset would be not only a “revival of domestic slavery” but an “attempt to obtrude a new slavery into England.” The groundwork for such a threat had long been laid by the republican traditions described by Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, J.G.A. Pocock and Marilyn Butler and inflected with values represented by “sensibility.”13 The re-introduction of slavery would contravene the reputation of England, “a country, so famous for liberty, will become a chief seat of private tyranny.” In Barbados, from 1661, slaves had been officially placed “entirely outside the laws of England, without any protections due to English subjects and governed by a legal system constructed entirely in the colony.” Critics of slavery, from then through the official abolition of slavery in 1833 in the British Empire, in 1865 in the USA, would point out that it was based on violence, both formalized but even more

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strikingly on personal whim, including sadism and murder.14 Hargrave addressed his subject from the outset as “that species of slavery adopted in our American colonies.” The “law of England to not applicable to the slavery of our American colonies,” in fact, the reverse. “I insist that the unlawfulness of introducing a new slavery into England, from our American colonies or any other country, is deducible from…English law.”15 Hargrave’s opposition to the legal validity of their disgraceful, inhumane and archaic system, put white Americans who defended slavery in a very poor moral position, with no prospects of getting out. In contrast to Scotland, the Netherlands and France, for example, as well as England, “domestic slavery,” fed by “this disgraceful commerce in the human species,” “has taken root in our American colonies, as well as in those of other nations, that there is little probability of our ever seeing it generally suppressed.” It was by “an unhappy concurrence of circumstances, the slavery of Negroes is thought to have become necessary in America; and therefore in America our Legislature has permitted the slavery of Negroes. But the slavery of Negroes is unnecessary in England, and therefore, the Legislature has not extended the permission of it to England.”16 One implication was that white Americans had regressed to barbarism, an implication consistent with the widespread characterization of Americans in metropolitan Britain. For Britons, “the term ‘American’ often conjured up images of unrefined, if not barbarous persons, degenerate, and racially debased,” living among the criminals that metropolitan Britain dumped there, all associated with “African slaves and Indian savages thousands of miles away.” Slave owners were extreme versions. Americans in general were seen as “coarse, rowdy, and prone to breaking the law.”17 Mansfield wished to avoid a “comprehensive judgement” on slavery. He decided, however, that “English law did not allow a master residing in England to deport someone on the grounds that he was legally a slave in some other region.” Slavery was in his words (different versions were reported), “so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.” That is, “it had to be specifically sanctioned within the law of each jurisdiction.” Therefore, “the black must be discharged,” in some reports, “the man must be discharged” so the pronoun emphasized colour or gender.18

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The statement was preceded and accompanied by what historians have called “dark forebodings” and “fear” on the part of Mansfield, a “specter,” that “the ruling in Somerset’s favor would have the effect of releasing 14,000 to 15,000 slaves throughout the kingdom.” In Mansfield’s own words: “The setting 14,000 to 15,000 men at once free loose by a solemn opinion is much disagreeable in the effects that it threatens.” (James Oldham’s quotation omits the double adverb, “free, loose.”) Jerome Nadelhaft has said that the disagreeable effects that this freeing of blacks (always said to be men), threatened, was “the loss of property which, with slaves worth at least 50 [pounds] each would amount to ‘above 200,000 [pounds],’” a figure he derived from the opponents of freeing Somerset. But William H. Wiecek wrote (in 1974) of the disagreeable effects: “Not only would this racially alien mass of humanity be set free of their master’s discipline and support, the masters’ property rights would be shaken.”19 Mansfield said to one of the lawyers who had defended Steuart, “I don’t know what the consequences may be, if the masters were to lose their property by accidentally bringing their slaves to England. I hope it will never be finally discussed; for I would have all masters think them free, and all Negroes think they were not because then they would behave better.” In his mind were the stereotypes of black men’s intrinsically behaving badly, loosely even, when free, in contrast to whites, an argument made by lawyers opposing Somerset’s being freed.20 At the time of his decision, Mansfield had three young nieces living in his household, one of them the daughter of his nephew by an enslaved West Indian in London. Her name was Belle Dido. Her biographer suggests this influenced his judgement in freeing Somerset, as does David Olusoga. In 1779, the ejected governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, visited Mansfield when Dido was nineteen and remarked “he has been approached for showing a fondness for her – I dare not say criminal,” inferring the possibility that Mansfield himself was having sex with Dido. Mansfield’s apprehensions over letting loose all those black men perhaps included apprehensions over the vulnerability of his nieces, given the stereotyping freighting them, as well as the stereotyping of black females.21 Despite Mansfield’s very explicit narrowing of this decision, it was quickly misinterpreted in accordance with the view of slavery Somerset’s defence had propounded, wanting to prove that “slavery could not exist in England.” One newspaper declared that “England’s 14,000 Negro slaves had been freed.” The misinterpretation held not only that any

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enslaved person brought into England would be free, but that slavery no longer existed there.22 When Mansfield ordered “the black must be discharged,” the “Negroes”—all men—“in court to hear the event of the cause so interesting to their tribe” still thus denigrated and distinguished from the white men arguing and adjudicating their “cause,” although now accorded humanity, “bowed with profound respect to the Judges; and shaking each other by the hand, congratulated themselves upon their recovery of the rights of human nature, and their happy lot that permitted them to breathe the freedom of England,” that phrase taken from Somerset’s defence. (The Morning Chronicle’s report of black responses was reiterated in the New York Times in September, characterizing them as “symptoms of the most extravagant joy.”)23 The London report immediately turned to the effect of this scene on whites with sensibility, of seeing these black people’s response to the court’s conferral of this happy lot: “No sight could be more pleasingly affecting to the feeling mind, than the joy which shone at that instant in these poor men’s sable countenances.” “Feeling” connoted sympathetic responsiveness, taking pleasure in others’ joy, appreciating the contrast between the representative white witness (presumably the reporter), and the men whose colour he saw enhanced the shine on their faces. It may have been merely an aesthetic pleasure, comparable to others evidently widely enjoyed, merely the selfindulgence of which person of feeling were widely accused, solipsistic, not arousing active sympathy, or even merely fashionable, displayed to others for approval. But it could also be the kind of feeling antislavery writers (and other reformers) wished to arouse, as Thomas Clarkson to explain in 1808, the beginning of a process that should lead to action.24 The Public Advertizer reported three days after the judgement, “A Subscription is now raising among the great Number of Negroes, in and about his Metropolis, for the purpose of presenting Somerset with a handsome Gratuity, for having so nobly stood up in Defense of the natural rights of the sable Part of the human Creation.” And two days after that, “near two hundred blacks with their ladies had an entertainment at a public-house in Westminister, to celebrate, the triumph which their brother Somerset had obtained over Mr. Stuart his master. Lord Mansfield’s health was echoed round the room; and the evening was concluded with a ball.” Sancho must have read or heard of the decision. He and his family were not yet living their own house in Westminister but we can imagine the Montagus’ giving him the time to go with Anne to the

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celebration. Oldham discovered “Somerset’s own interpretation of Mansfield’s decision” in a letter written to his former owner, Charles Steuart, dated July 10, 1772, reporting an enslaved black man ran away, after telling “the servants that he had rec’d a letter from his Uncle Somerset acquainting him that Lord Mansfield had given them their freedom,” that is, enslaved “servants” in general. The decision was having the effect on enslaved blacks in Britain that Mansfield feared.25 Newspapers reported that Mansfield had “struck down slavery,” and the public interpretation was that “English law guaranteed liberty, that English soil was and would remain free soil.” It was extended to Scotland by the 1778 decision in the case of Joseph Knight, reaffirming Manfield’s three fundamental points: no legal support for slavery in Britain; no deportation; and no residual service obligations. As that letter to the Public Ledger illustrates, African Britons “wrote as axiomatically of the absence of slavery as did the most self-congratulatory white correspondent in the popular press.” In fact, black people in Britain continued to run the risk “of being kidnapped and sold into, or back into slavery.”26 Mansfield’s wish to narrow the effects of his decision reflected his awareness of its potential. Drescher writes, it “produced a level of public discussion not again equaled until the emergence of abolitionism, fifteen years later,” the formal phase, that is the period during which Sancho’s letters were published. Ben Franklin, in London at the time (with the slaves he owned, except one, named Othello, whom he left in Philadelphia to help his wife), emphasized the limitations in a piece published in the June 20, 1772, issue of the London Chronicle. “It is said that some generous humane persons subscribed to the expense of obtaining liberty by law for Somerset the Negro. – It is to be wished that the same humanity may extend itself among numbers; if not by the procuring of liberty for those that remain in our Colonies, at least to obtain a law for abolishing the African commerce in slaves, and declaring the children of present slaves free after they become of age.” Franklin spells out the same tally Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet had made in a letter published during the case, to which Mansfield referred. “By a last computation made in America, it appears there are now eight hundred and fifty thousand Negroes in the English Islands and Colonies, and the yearly importation is about hundred thousand, of which…about a third perish by the goal distemper on the passage, and in the seasoning before they are set to labor.” Of course, the extension of “humanity” to enslaved Africans in

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general was central to Benezet; following him, John Wesley did so in his “Thoughts Upon Slavery,” in 1774.27 To present the deaths of Africans as the result of “goal distemper” recalls that Somerset had been manacled on the “Ann and Mary.” Enslaved Africans were manacled and chained throughout their transportation across the Atlantic: James Walvin described slave ships as prisons, the crews “jailers.” Ex-slave Ottabah Cuguano recalled, “the rattling of chains” during the middle passage of all the millions’ “enduring month of incarceration.” Henry Smeathman, a passenger in 1773, exclaimed, “What a scene of misery and distress is a full slave ship in the rains. The clanking of chains, the groans of the sick, and the stench of the whole….” Sterne’s 1768 representation of slavery in A Sentimental Education went from “thousands in all ages” to the single “captive” in a dungeon, reversing Franklin’s order but imparting the same relation. Goldsmith set climactic chapters of The Vicar of Wakefield in a noisome jail and the entry of his son with “chains upon his legs” seems conscious imitation of Sterne, who anticipated “vile copies,” including his “picture of confinement” would follow his work. John Howard’s The State of the Prisons, embodying a combination of sentimental values and statistics one sees in publications from Benezet to Clarkson, as well as in this little piece by Franklin, was published in 1777. Howard’s tireless work to reform prisons coincided with the antislavery campaign. Franklin was aware of the integral relations between such reform efforts in Philadelphia and antislavery, represented by Benjamin Rush.28 Franklin points out the relationship between the high death rate of Africans who survived the middle passage and the imperative to continue the trade. The survivors, the “remnants makes up the deficiencies continually occurring among the main body of those unhappy people, through the distempers occasioned by excessive labour, bad nourishment, uncomfortable accommodations, and broken spirits.” This Franklin drew from Benezet. The huge numbers of dead are the price paid for the pleasures of sugar. “Can sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste, compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential traffic in the bodies and souls of men?” This contrast between the immense suffering of Africans and the material pleasures of Europeans, epitomizing the engines of the consumer revolution, was a central theme of the antislavery campaign. Cr`evecoeur contrasted the lives of white and

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black South Carolinians in those terms. The contrast drew on the criticism (especially by those propounding heart values) of the selfish luxury touted by economists as in the national interest from the late seventeenth century. Goldsmith wrote in his dedication to “The Deserted Village” (1770), that his inveighing against “the increase of our luxuries” would provoke “the shout of modern politicians against me. For twenty or thirty years past, it has been the fashion to consider luxury as one of the greatest national advantages; and all the wisdom of antiquity in that particular as erroneous.”29 One justification Mansfield gave for his decision was that Britain was a nation that “piqued itself on its Virtue.” Anticipating the contrast with its colonies this decision might nourish, Franklin exclaimed in: “The Somerset Case,” “Pharisaical Britain to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity.” Britain could not claim moral superiority over her American colonies in this regard, the context the looming Revolution. Britain’s national character, its boasted liberty and morality, was at stake in the slave trade as a whole. Commenting on the newspaper reports of the Mansfield decision, Brycchan Carey writes that “the dry rhetoric of the courtroom became in the hands of journalists and pamphleteers a form of sentimental oratory,” addressed a great popular interest in trials. Christopher Leslie Brown notes that in addition to the intensive public discussion of the rights of slave and slaveholders, the Mansfield decision stimulated “[p]oets and playwrights [to take] advantage of the increasingly fashionable sympathy for the African by provoking tears among their audiences on behalf of wounded innocence.” His phrasing points to the far wider, deeper, longer existence of such an audience among reading and listening publics.30 Mansfield’s decision to free James Somerset was “a major test case for the West Indian financial interests in London.” Planters and merchants paid Steuart’s legal expenses. The decision “vastly curtailed their power there.” It provoked proslavery writers to elaborate their rationalizations for the enslavement of Africans. One of the first to challenge the decision was Edward Long a Jamaican planter: while he was born in Cornwall in 1734, his family was part of Jamaica’s “governing elite,” descended from an officer in the British army which had conquered the island in

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1655. His sister had married a Governor of Jamaica. After studying law at Gray’s Inn, in London, Long lived in Jamaica from 1757 to 1769, marrying into the powerful Beckford family in 1758. A wealthy “planter and slave owner,” he became Lieutenant Governor and a judge in the Vice-Admiralty Court. He returned to England in 1769, because of poor health, joining other, rich West Indians there, including William Beckford, “uncrowned king of Jamaica” because of his vast holdings of land and slaves.31 Long’s seventy-six page, “Candid Reflections upon the Judgement lately awarded by the Court of King’s Bench, in Westminister Hall, on what is commonly called the Negro Cause” was published in London, in 1772. An advertisement further set the tone, comparing lawyer Mansfield’s “art of washing a Black-a-moor-white” to a soldier’s invention of printing, and a priest of gunpowder. “Already has the fame of this stupendous transfiguration occasioned some…Caboceroes here to jump out of their skins for joy. The name of L[ord] M[ansfield] shall henceforth become more popular among all the Quacoes and Quashebas of America, than that of patriot Wilkes was once, among the porter-swilling swains of St. Giles.”32 Long pursued his metaphor of Mansfield’s “white wash, this new specific lotion,” asking whether or not, “it may be safely administered at this time without impairing the health’s of our dear mother country and her children, whom I profess myself to be one,” this was despite the derogation he felt planters—colonials—suffered in the matter of “maternal favor,” a running sore into which Hargrave’s case and Mansfield’s decision had rubbed corrosive.33 The first section of Long’s booklet describes how shocked “West India Planters residing in this kingdom” were at the decision, but confident that history and law were on their side in excluding their “negroe” property from the operation of habeus corpus . “Lord M-ns-d seemed to owe such a liberal discussion, not more to the character of his predecessors on the Bench, than to the expectations of the public, who were deeply interested in the event of the cause.” Here and in his conclusion, Long confidently invoked Parliamentary power, demonstrating “the necessity…for the interposition of Parliament, to regulate this law dictum [Habeus Corpus] and render it more conformable to the principles of British commerce.” The “commerce” was that to which he held slavery was essential. He warned and would reiterate, a “nation supported wholly by its trade, cannot long continue to flourish if the laws of commerce

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are set at variance with her municipal laws,” that was to say, laws in the slave colonies. Mansfield had “accepted and endorsed the widely assumed importance of the slave trade” even as he “doubted the validity of the theoretical justification of slavery.”34 In fact, Long pointed out, the English government, Parliament and monarchy consistently had sponsored, sustained and praised the slave trade, “as a very beneficial branch of trade to the kingdom.” Hence the British government’s continuing to uphold the slave trade bore on national honour: “the legislative or national faith is pledged to defend and support the purchasers of slaves in Africa, “who have paid a valuable consideration to this kingdom for what they bought from her merchants.” He registered the impact of recent expos`es of the trade but even “[a]dmitting] the African trade to be so ever diabolical, or the means by which the Negroe’s body was first obtained, no blame can rest on the planter, who is ignorant of the means, and innocent of the guilt.” The trade may be diabolical, traders guilty, but morality was irrelevant. That “trade had been carried on by this nation from time immemorial.” It had been sanctioned and sustained by Parliament. Long describes the sums it granted annually to maintain forts and garrisons, “making alliances with the native slave merchants in Africa,” to advance the trade and keep planters “constantly and cheaply supplied.” Reciprocally, “vast emoluments are also drawn, as well as by the mercantile and manufacturing subjects resident in Great Britain, and their dependents, as by the national treasury, from the profits gained on the sale of the Negroes to the West India planter, and from the produce of their labour.”35 Long asserted that slavery was an “inevitable necessity,” and our “Negroe labourers merely a commodity…so the Parliament of Great Britain uniformly adhered to the same idea.” Colonial planters framed their laws accordingly. The inevitability of enslaving Africans lay in “the nature of the West India climate, and the impossibility of clearing and cultivating the soil there by any other than Negroe labourers.” Long tells stories of failed attempts to employ white labourers, including their terrible death rates. Intriguingly, given his (and others’) preoccupation with black sexual powers, Long points out that whites cannot propagate in tropical climates. “Negroes’ constitutions being by nature and the Divine Will appropriated to these climates, they are evidently fitted for such employment there” and can reproduce. In fact, as Franklin pointed out it was the massive, ongoing death toll of the transported Africans,

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to the West Indies especially, that created the demand for their being imported from Africa.36 In spite of his apparent admission that the slave trade was “diabolical,” Long was stung by Hargrave’s accusation that the enslavement of Africans was “barbarous.” “A barbarity might perhaps the more immediate consequence of such a prohibition; and of such a nature to excite horror in the mind of every humane Briton; I mean, the practice which must then be fallen upon, of employing white labourers, when Negroes could no longer be procured, to keep up the number answerable to our cultivation.” The “our” if that activity was identified in the next sentence with “our countrymen,” Long including himself and colonial whites with “humane Britons,” in “an employment in which thousands and tens of thousands of our countryman might perish miserably, without producing any benefit to the mother country.” Long’s appeal to his metropolitan readers is for sympathy for whites: he drew on the same psychophysiological model (signified by the word “excite”) as antislavery writers did. He assumed they would sympathize with those like themselves, all humane Britons.37 In his booklet’s penultimate section, Long took up the issue of the effect of the Mansfield decision on the future colour of the population of metropolitan Briton, one he had anticipated in his “Advertisement.” He agreed with others that, “the public good of this kingdom requires that some restraint be laid on the unnatural increase of blacks imported into the kingdom.” In his 1769 book opposing the existence of slavery in England, Sharp had suggested what its damaging effects would be on British farmers, as well as on the prospects of white apprentices. He wrote that “healthy and comely British boys and girls, children of our own free fellow-subjects may be procured out of any county in this or the neighboring kingdoms, to serve as Apprentice or servants for six or seven years or more, without any wages.” They looked different from his hypothesized “posterity” of enslaved black people brought to England, “the mixed people or Mulattoes produced by unavoidable intercourse with their white neighbours, will also be subject to the like bondage of their unhappy parents.”38 Sharp had written William Beckford in 1769 that “the public good seems to require some restraints on unnatural increase of black subjects,” later claiming that the Somerset case had prevented West Indian slaveholders from “bringing with them swarms of Negro attendants into this island.” Hargrave had included the argument that Africans, perverted

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by slavery, and then coming to Britain, might “scheme for its destruction.” Brown notes that the probable increase in number of black sailors and servants, “coming to England as a result of the Seven Years’ War, contributed to the sense of slaveholding as a problem before the Mansfield decision.”39 The “principal reason” Long gave for this increase was that, when brought here by the needs of their masters, these “servants” refused to serve, and when masters tried to send them back, they were frequently defeated by “Negroe solicitors,” and the extra-judicial opinions of some lawyers, using “a Habeus Corpus ” to set the slaves at liberty. Runaways “repose themselves here in ease and indolence, and endeavour to strengthen their party, by seducing as many of these strangers.” Then sex: “Not infrequently they fall into the company of vicious white servants, and abandoned prostitutes; and thus are quickly debauched in their morals, instructed in the influence of domestic [that is, metropolitan] knavery;” fleeced, driven to theft and therefore “ashamed to return to their master.” It was metropolitan British conditions, not slavery (as Hargrave had said), that corrupted Africans. “Some slaves who have not been corrupted by too long a stay, particularly those who have left wives and children behind, return very willingly: the major part of those who remain…care not what becomes of their foreign wife and child, but very soon intermarry here…; but when the prospect of an easy subsistence fails, they…abandon their new wife and mulatto progeny to the care of the parish, and betake themselves to the colony, where they are sure, at least, of not starving.” Metropolitan do-gooders destroyed slave families, not slave owners.40 This, then, was how African men were unnaturally increasing the black population in Britain, aided and abetted by “Negro lawyers” meaning white lawyers working for black people. What of the bearers of those mulatto children? “The lower class of women in England,” again, in contrast to white women in the colonies, “are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to mention, they would connect themselves with horses and asses, if the laws permitted them.” Long meant that such women are crazy for black men because they had larger penes than whites. He was propagating an old belief. Fryer remarks that “some English people took it for granted that every male African had an enormous penis; the tiny naked figures of Africans on one fifteenth-century map attest to the antiquity of that belief.” Slave traders examined African genitals, as whites’ were not examined. In 1720s West Africa, a naval

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surgeon had reported that the people being sold were “examined by us…as our Brother Traders do Beasts in Smithfield; the Countenance and Stature, a good Set of Teeth, Pliancy in their Limbs, and Joints, and being free of Venereal Taint, are the things inspected, and governs our choice in buying.” Another observer recorded “they are all view’d stark naked, and the strongest and handsomest bear the best Prices.” Jordan writes, “the notion that Negro men were particularly virile promiscuous and lusty was not new in the eighteenth century.” He is writing of metropolitan English culture. “English colonists…suggested that Negro men lusted after white woman.” Jordan explains: “white men projected their own desires…for Negro women onto Negroes.” More obviously, white men feared that, in sexual competition with African men, they would come up short. We can also apply the notion of projection to Long’s and other whites’ characterization of black men as irresponsible fathers, leaving aside the vulnerability of any family member to sale, rape and the incessant threat of such actions. White slave owners generally enslaved and/or sold the children they sired with slave women. In his “Candid Reflection” Long ignored sexual relations between white men and black women.41 But in his three-volume History of Jamaica, published in London, two years later, Long blamed enslaved women. He did first write of the white Jamaican males he called “Creoles” with “a strong natural propensity to the other sex, they are not always the most chaste and faithful of husbands.” They are naturally lusty, so the second part of that sentence (excused by the first), was an understatement. In the section entitled “Free Blacks and Mulattos,” Long explains the existence of the latter, a significant demographic category for Jamaica, the result of the continual rape of enslaved women, not Long’s term but the reality is clear. Viewing the “vicious brutal, and degenerate breed of mongrels. South American minions produced,” by way of the sexual relations between “Spaniards, Blacks, Indians, and their mixed progeny,” Long opined it would be much better for Britain and Jamaica, too, if the white men in that colony would abate of their infatuated attachments to black women and, instead of being ‘grac’d with a yellow offspring not their own,’ this was a quotation from Christopher Pitt’s 1740 translation of Virgil’s Aneid, “perform the duty incumbent on every good citizen, by raising in honourable wedlock a race of unadulterated beings.” That would be socially responsible.42 The evidence of their selfishness in this regard “is the profusion and misery into which their disorderly connexions often insensibly plunge them.” Long’s concern was the waste of white inheritances because he

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observed “them lavishing their fortunes with unbounded liberality on the common prostitute,” he meant an enslaved woman, seeing “one of these votaries of celibacy,” presumably in their relations with white women, “grow the abject passive slave to all her insults, thefts and infidelities”; enslavement is reversed, the reversal published to a metropolitan audience itself facing the challenges of women to traditional, patriarchal authority. Long focused his outrage on this infatuated male’s dispersal “of his estate between her and her brats, whom he blindly acknowledges for his children, when in truth they are entitled to claims of twenty other fathers.” This was one reason he calls their mother a prostitute.43 Jamaica, then, is left with more “white spinsters” because “so little restraint is laid on [white male] passions, the Europeans, who at home have always been used to greater strictness and purity of manners, are too easily led aside to give loose to every kind of sensual delight.” Long is endorsing the view of West Indian white males given by Somerset’s lawyer. It was consistent with the view of unreformed Englishmen, especially husbands’ portrayed in sentimental literature. More obviously, it is what Long has said black men will do in England, once they are unenslaved and have left Jamaica where he has said, they are content with their black families; the same with the result of interracial fornication he and other opponents of Mansfield forecast of the “contamination” of the English population: white men’s appetite for sensual delight “on this account some black or yellow quasheba the name commonly given to a black female child (it means Sunday) we saw that Bickerstaff knew it – is sought for by whom a tawny breed is produced.” Many White, Jamaican men of any rank, “would much rather riot in their [black women’s] goatish embraces than share the pure and lawful bliss derived from matrimonial, mutual love.” They prefer “simple fornication.” Thereby they “usher into the world a tarnished race of beings,” some of whom they send to England for education. When they return, “Miss faints at the sight of her own relations, especially when papa tells her that black Quasheba is her mother.” The young gentleman, having been educated at Westminister or Eton, “is soon left to herd among his black kindred, and converse with Quasheba and Mingo,” both becoming part of the Mulatto population Long quantified, not mentioning the father’s sale of their kin.44 He gives his solution to “allure” men “from these illicit connexions,” by making “women of their own complexion more agreeable companions, more frugal, trusty and faithful friends, than can be met with among the

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African ladies.” He is unable to restrain himself from describing how black mistresses, “far more perfectly versed than any adept of the hundreds of Drury,” prostitutes in London, the “chief leech” often with “her very paramours,” black males, and all her black kindred, “fastened upon her keeper like so many leeches.” Long writes he has witnessed such a woman, and one might guess it had been his own experience of being deceived by his purported lover.45 This dimension Long saved for his History. In his 1772 booklet, he continued by describing the attractions of black men to lower-class white women, who fornicate with them because of their genital superiority: “By these ladies they generally have a numerous brood. Thus, in the course of a few generations more, the English blood will be so contaminated with these mixture, and from the chances, the ups and downs of life, this alloy may spread so extensively, as even to reach the middle, and then the higher orders of people, till the whole nation resembles the Portuguese and Moriscos in complexion of skin and baseness of mind.” We can contrast this with the Biblical notion of “one blood” posed by critics of slavery. Long varied his metaphor, expressing his visual horror. “This is a venomous and dangerous ulcer, that threatens to disperse its malignancy far and wide until every family catches infection from it.” By contrast, Franklin had called the slave trade this “pestilential traffic,” describing the diseases it caused in Africans. According to Long, the actions of sympathetic lawyers coupled with good fortune, could lead to black men’s gaining political power. “If these runaway gentry in England, invested with English rights in that absolute sense which most of their advocates assert, it will be no surprising thing, if some among them should, by a fortunate ticket in that lottery, or other means, be able to purchase the legal qualification, and obtain seats in the British parliament.” They would then sit alongside that group of absentee planter MPs and their allies. “It is certain their complexion will be no disqualification” because the lottery prize money would “overcome those scruples which some of our rotten boroughs might otherwise pretend against a Negroe representative. The possibility of this event, or of their becoming landholders in the kingdom, is not to be denied.” Two years later, in early 1774, Sancho’s purchase of a property paying taxes in Westminister entitled him to vote for Parliament, which he did in that year, and in 1780.46 Then Long gets down to “Negroes’” deficiencies, aside from the physical ones of skin colour and penis size, he made clear should bar them

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from being in England at all, except while securely enslaved to transient masters. First, “they are incapable of adding anything to the general support and improvement of the kingdom, for few, if any, of them have the requisite knowledge for gaining a livelihood by industrious courses.” Implicitly, they must be forced to work: the knowledge or habits denoted by “industrious courses” are those of “husbandmen, manufacturers, [and] artificers.” “They have neither strength of constitution, inclination, or skill, to perform the common drudgeries of husbandry in this climate and country.” Fryer notes that in 1731, London’s Lord Mayor had formally prohibited black people from any apprenticeship, “a colour bar [that] seems to have been effective.”47 Long argued that blacks were particularly fitted for plantation fieldwork (he ignores the complexities of the industrial tasks required, for example, by sugar manufacture) in a tropical climate. While they can endure what white labourers cannot, they “are neither so hardy, intelligent, or useful in menial employment as our white servants.” Long calculates what his fantasy of black people there costs Britain, willing as they were to be domestic servants for “less wages [and] a belly full,” “a life of sloth being their summum bonum” the cost including that of an equivalent number of whites this forced out of work. Moreover, the “off-spring of these Negroes, a linsey-woolsey race…by the inability of their father to maintain and bring them up at their own cost, they must needs grow burthensome to the public.” Long developed his point, the economic effects of multiplying numbers of supposedly incapable and immoral blacks. Because of the number of black domestics, those laws binding over white beggars and vagabonds to service are ineffective: “we are over burthened with an enormous number of very poor, distressed, white subjects…who are thrown on the industrious class of our people…the swarms of needy dependents continually pouring in, from the foreign states around us, together with the renegade blacks from our plantations, debar our own poor from access into families for their livelihood.” He calculated what a slave lost to a plantation cost the Britain workforce (each “gave employment for one industrious subject in England”), as well as the loss to the colonial workforce, therefore “to the commerce and manufacture of the mother country.” The blame lay with “the Negroe advocates, whose scurrilous writings are sent abroad with no other design than to vilify the planters, and turn a worthless rabble of their clients

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loose in this kingdom, to its manifest hurt and disgrace, and the discouragement of its colonies…. It is evidently not the planter’s fault, that the nation already begins to be embronzed with the African tint.”48 Long declared that the Mansfield decision will operate as “a direct invitation to these hundred thousand blacks, now scattered over our different colonies, to mutiny, and transport themselves by every means into this land of Canaan, where…they may enter upon the rights of free-born Britons.” He acknowledged the assertiveness among enslaved in the West Indies resulting from these “glad tidings.” They take the opportunity of “stealing across the Atlantic” each having somehow mustered up five or six pounds to pay an unscrupulous captain for passage. Long’s focus here, in a pamphlet aimed at a metropolitan audience, was the threat posed to them by such self-stealing blacks, so he left aside the potential “mutiny” of enslaved blacks in Jamaica.49 In his History of Jamaica, Long wrote of Tacky’s 1760 rebellion in Jamaica, “whether we consider the extent and secrecy of the plan, the multitude of the conspirators and the difficulty of opposing its eruptions in such a variety of places at once,” this revolt “was more formidable than any hitherto known in the West Indies.” His booklet’s response to freeing of Somerset, its title, we recall, referring to what in Britain, “is commonly called the Negroe-Cause, by a Planter,” was fraught with the fear that the friendship, expressed by Sharp, Hargrave, Mansfield and others for the liberation of “Negroes” (even just one), would ignite another such revolt. His near contemporary white revolutionaries in America would foster such fears on a way of making “common cause” against metropolitan Britain, whose commanders were willing to arm black men against them. It would be in Jamaica in 1831, that thirty thousand enslaved people began the series of events, that would put an end to formal slavery in the British Empire.50 Like other proslavery writers, Long said he “can fervently wish with the advocates, that all mankind were free, if they might be the happier, and that none might abuse the blessing.” The qualifications referred to black people, to their inevitable abuse of freedom he has described. “But, since things are otherwise ordained, it would be best to remain content…and not disturb the public peace and right order with such visionary projects of equal, universal liberty, as may in the end be productive of universal licentiousness.” Antislavery campaigners shared the invidious characterization of being “visionary” with other eighteenth-century reformers, a term more or less identical with the “fantastic idea,” the phrase Long used

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earlier in the paragraph; the view that such a lack of sense led to a loss of control, pointed to the sexual freedom implicit in “licentiousness.” It was a sequence warned against repeatedly by critics of sentimental literature that language was also seen to provoke feelings in its audience, common ground with antislavery appeals. Hannah More went out of her way in her influential antislavery poem to distinguish the freedom she called for from the “licentiousness,” epitomized by Sterne.51 Long followed “universal licentiousness” by his repeating his vision of the views of the Mansfield decision being spread to the “sable host” in the colonies resistance “a spirit of mutiny,” and bloodshed. Africans only make sugar because they were enslaved. Otherwise, naturally “lazy and lawless,” they would return to a Hobbesian “state of nature.” “The plantation blacks, consisting of various tribes, or their descendants, envenomed against each other by those bitter and hereditary feuds which mark their character, would…indulge this innate rancor by every species of outrage and hostility in a perpetual state of warfare.” But in metropolitan Britain, too, the end of slavery would destroy the English economy and therefore its civility—Long is Hobbesian here, too. “It is the cultivation of arts and industrious pursuits, the embellishments of life that make man mild and sociable to man; without these, we find him a licentious and intractable savage.” Critics of slavery saw the effects of slavery (originated and sustained by violence) as Hobbesian on whites and the enslaved, and subsequent opponents, including More, James Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson, would add their voices to that theme. One of the origins of the culture of sensibility, the unselfish consideration of other people’s feelings—in fact, taking pleasure in sympathy—lay in the opposition to Hobbes and his numerous and influential followers extending to those simply motivated by self-interest in promoting commerce.52 To conclude, Long repeated his chief concern was that Britain’s national independence and power depended on slavery. He declared, “I hope, while I am pleading the cause of his injured planters, I shall not be misunderstood to stand forth a champion for slavery.” And here he found it necessary to repudiate the argument made on the basis of black people’s capacity to feel, that is, on their sensibility, intrinsic expression of their equal humanity. “I am satisfied in my own mind that our colony Negroes do not feel those hardships under these servitude, which have here [in Britain] been usually and undistinguishingly attributed to that vague term.” They do not feel those hardships, whatever they are, for the same reason they can endure the labour. “As a friend to mankind,”

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Long declares himself, the conventional phrase denoting the practice of sympathy towards all human beings, synonymous with “humanity” and soon to be claimed by American and French revolutionaries. He adds patriotism as a second kind of friendship, parallel to the nationalism inevitably coupled with the claim of love for humanity: “as a friend to my country, I cannot wish them [“Negroes”] set loose into that latitude of emancipation which threaten injury to both.” That means mankind and country. He excludes black people from each category.53 Long added a “Postcript,” explaining that when his pamphlet went to press, he had not seen “a late publication,” Considerations on the Negroe Cause Commonly So Called, Addressed to the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield by Samuel Estwick, also dated 1772. His was among “several pamphlets” presumably including Long’s, of which “the West India Interest secured publication…defending the legitimacy of slavery in England.” Long noted that this pamphlet made similar arguments to his own: both writers assumed that to call the case part of “the Negroe Cause” was to demean it. He guessed the author was “among the audience at the Court of King’s Bench when the case of Somerset was argued.” Estwick, a planter “of vast possessions in the West India islands” and at that time, assistant agent for Barbados (he was promoted to agent in 1778), may have witnessed the joyful reactions of black people. Long substituted Estwick’s estimate of their being “fifteen thousand Negroes in England” for his own of three thousand, pleased to say that, if Estwick was right, “it would add a very considerable strength and weight to the conclusions I have drawn from the great and increasing number of these people in the kingdom.” Historians estimates differ widely, from a high of 20,000 to a low of 1200. The most recent is 10,000. Kathleen Chater suggests that two in ten were women.54 Estwick was born in Barbados around 1736, possibly sent to Eton, and then to Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1753. Like Long, he was trained in the law, in his case, at Temple Bar. Like Long, he solidified his status by marriage, in his case to the daughter of the governor of Barbados in 1766. “Political agents resident in London made up the third element of the West India lobby. These representatives of the island planters and merchants were paid by the various colonial legislatures.” They lobbied for Parliamentary action on behalf of sugar and other colonial interests. Another agent, like Estwick, as well as Long, an MP, George Hibbert, also wrote a pamphlet opposing the abolition of the slave trade. Estwick’s pamphleteering won patronage from Lord Abingdon, who brought him

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into Parliament for Westbury in 1779, where he looked out for West Indian interests, at the same time holding the places of deputy paymaster general, registrar of Chelsea Hospital, and “searcher of the customs of Barbados.” Estwick’s Consideration of the Negro Cause was written he said, “with haste, and published in a hurry.” (He published a corrected edition the following year.) He concluded its introduction by claiming to share the values of the culture of sensibility, saying he spoke “to the Reader; relying, from my own consciousness, upon his candor,” the latter a word then connoting “doing one’s very best to think well of others,” the same meaning conveyed by Long’s use of “Candid” in his pamphlet’s title, “that whatever errors of the head he may discover, he will impute nothing wrong to the dictates of my heart.” The latter, then, were of more fundamental value, signifying Estwick’s essential morality.55 By the same token, Estwick took issue with Hargrave’s imputation that defenders of slavery were inhumane. “It is not the want of humanity, it is not the want of feeling, but possession of both, with the love of truth, that has given birth to these considerations.” A third proslavery pamphlet published in 1772 in reaction to the Mansfield decision was entitled The African trade for Negroe slaves, shown to be consistent with principles of humanity and with the laws of revealed religion, this insistence also testifying to the threat that slave owners believed humanitarianism and sensibility posed. Hargrave’s very clear implication that American slave owners were barbaric had stung Estwick as well as Long, in a context where metropolitans generally depicted white American colonials as, at best less civilized than Britons, at worst, as savages. “My motives have been to show that America does not afford that scene of barbarity, which misrepresentation would paint upon it: that cruelties and distress are to be found in much greater excess even in this elysium of liberty,” the latter irony an adaptation of “the monstrous inconsistency” by this defender of slavery.56 Estwick returned to Hargrave’s “imputation” in order to “wipe it off.” He had drawn “a horrible and a frightful picture of the barbarity and cruelties, that were exercised on these beings in the colonies.” Tellingly, Estwick responds not by denying the truth of the picture but by explaining that one cannot presume “ten or fifteen thousand owners can hold in obedience, a hundred thousand Negroes (for this may be near the average), without some means or methods, which from their accidental application might so generally operate on their fears as to produce

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the end required.” We might call this to terrorize: Estwick says it was the same method used in the navy—and in every army in the world. Estwick addressed Mansfield directly: “my Lord, the design of this gentleman’s group of figures, was to induce a belief in the Court that English feelings were to revolt at American punishments.” It was a “mere argumenta ad passiones, which however admissible to the ears of a jury, to the distinguishing eye of the court, never fail to carry with them their own propriety.”57 In fact, Estwick has witnessed “hundreds of stripes”—given to soldiers on parade in St. James, “where the fashionable strolled.” He has seen two sailors, “impressed men, too,” receiving five hundred lashes, “flogged on their naked backs along the sides of thirty four men of war, lying at Spithead.” Tied to gratings set on small boat, the convicted sailor was rowed from ship to ship, his flogging intended pour encourages les autres. Estwick asks, “was such a punishment ever known to have been inflicted on any Negro in the American plantation?” and exclaims, “No, my Lord,” because colonial laws and self-interest prevent it. Hargrave challenged such a view but Estwick retorts that planters would be mad to abuse their slaves in the way Hargrave described: leaving aside colonial laws (as any planter could), “self-interest” remained at issue in the debate over slavery as it did amidst the rise of commercial capitalism generally. How could it be checked by a shared morality? Other planters made the same case as Estwick, to be refuted by critics. Clarkson following Hargrave, for example. Other critics of slavery (Sarah Scott and James Ramsay, for example) argued if slavery could not be abolished, which they preferred, that the more humane treatment of slaves—“amelioration”— would make them healthier, happier, more willing and able to work and therefore more productive, more profitable to their owners’ investment, and susceptible to Christianization, an argument that had been made since the seventeenth century.58 So Estwick spells out the contrast he has made in his introduction: “the state of Negroes,..in America is.. infinitely more desirable than the poorer sort of people residing in this boasted happy isle,” happy that is, in its liberty. Franklin had said as much and it would be a frequent, intentionally ironic contrast by proslavery writers (including James Tobin) who presented the plight of English country labourers and their families in extended, sentimental terms.59 Estwick concedes there are “madmen” everywhere, who “act diametrically to their interest,” including in America. One can refer to studies of slave owners Thomas Thistlewood, William Byrd and James Hammond

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to demonstrate extreme degrees of pathology, but Montesquieu and Jefferson, for example as well as Hargrave and Scott, illustrate the widely recognized fact that slavemasters’ power grew by what was intrinsic to their relation to their slaves. The 1675 “Act for Regulating Negroes and Other Slaves” in Barbados, updating the first, 1661 slave code, was passed in the year a plot by the enslaved was uncovered, allowed slaveowners “out of wantonness, or only of Bloody – mindedness, or Cruel Intentions willfully kill a Negro, if his own, he shall pay into the Public Treasury Fifteen Pounds Sterling.” Other slave codes registered the existence of the same psychology. Extreme pathology was on a spectrum of a system dependent on violence.60 In any case, Estwick pointed out (as did Franklin and Long) that it was Parliament that had chartered the Royal Africa Company for slaving purposes, and recognized the slave trade’s legality by statute thereafter, “a trade very advantageous to Great Britain and necessary for supplying plantations and colonies.” He asserts that Negroes are property in England. The “acts of Parliament, are the foundation where upon all the laws of the colonies are built.” “If property…in Negroes were repugnant to the law of England, it could not be the law of America.”61 Estwick refers to actions taking place “in some of the late ceded islands in the West Indies,” ceded, that is, by the Treaty of Paris, “where English troops, trampling on the laws of God and man, are slaughtering even to extirpation a guiltless race of Caribs, the aborigines of the country. I mean the island of St. Vincent.” His words further illustrate that the context for the Mansfield decision and its decisive opening of a rift between metropolis and colony over the issue of slavery, was the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. Brown writes that the attempt “to oust Caribs from the newly conquered isle of St. Vincent stirred protest in Parliament and derisive commentary in the press. It generated in Britain one of the earliest sustained critiques of empire on humanitarian grounds.”62 Having presented Britain ironically as an “elysium of liberty,” Estwick asks Mansfield to imagine, “a fleet of merchant ships, belonging to the African company, constraining twenty-thousand on board, bound from Africa to America should…be driven and wrecked upon the coast of England…the Negroes landed in safety on this shore of freedom.” He asks, would they be re-shipped or, “would the pure air of liberty of this country…set them, with the cap of liberty on their heads, free at large.” Long had compared Mansfield’s decision to the appeal of John Wilkes to liberty, this at the onset of the American Revolution, whose leaders also

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applied Britain’s identification with liberty to their cause. Wilkes’s liberty famously extended to licentiousness: his “Essay on Woman,” dedicated to a courtesan, Fanny Murray, was read aloud to the House of Lords, which declared it obscene and blasphemous. It presented women’s sexual power over men as tyranny, as enslavement, as Long described the power their female slaves exercised over white Jamaican men; We wretched subjects to the female sway, The tyrant, Woman one and all, obey; … Proud of her easy conquest all along, She still allays our passions, weak or strong.63

In refuting what Hargrave had said of France’s freeing slaves, Estwick asserted he had seen only “two noirs” there because it had been explained to him the French king had prohibited their “importation…that otherwise the race of Frenchmen would, in time to come, be changed.”64 Referring to Mansfield’s apprehension, he said, there are “already fifteenthousand Negroes in England; and scarce is there a street in London that does not give many examples of that, which, with much less, had alarmed the fears of France.” Estwick meant interracial sexual relations. This was part of his concluding peroration. Mansfield, he says, using the word “propriety” in this sexuo-racial context, is “the man qualified to draw the line of propriety between them.” This must refer to the presence of Dido in the Mansfield household. Estwick then proposed a bill whereby “property in Negroes be held in America,” but their importations “prohibited to this country. By this act you will preserve the race of Britons from stain and contamination; and you will rightly confine property to those colonies upon whose prosperity and welfare, the independent being of this country rests.” British liberty depends on American slavery. So, too, did its whiteness. Long had used the terms “malignancy” and “ulcer,” as well as “contamination,” for the colouring effects of interracial sex and reproduction.65 Hargrave had referred to Africans as part of the “human species” throughout. Estwick paraphrases his argument to hold, “that Negroes are human creatures, and it should seemingly follow that they should be allowed the privileges of nature, which in this country particularly, are in part the enjoyment of person and property.” But, say Estwick, with a pun, “that has not the least colour of existence in law.” In fact,

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“a Negroe…is looked upon [as] the servant of his master, and by what authority is the relation of servant and master created?” In fact, he continued, “law the relation is, at Negroe and Owner,” that is, not simply “servant and master.” Hence, he “is made a matter of trade; he is an article of commerce, he is said to be property; he is goods, chattels, and effects, ventable and vested in his owner. This, my Lord, is the law of England, however contradictory to the law of reason.” Long called the slave trade one in “the Negroe body.”66 Then degrading Africans further from the status of “a species of a human being,” Estwick writes it was also “the effect of the wisdom of Parliament, that Negroes, under the law not be considered as human beings.” He surmises this arose from two other motives or considerations, “the one physical, the other political.” He refers to the perplexity of “naturalists”—Hargrave had alluded to Buffon and, perhaps, Montesquieu— over “the origins of Negroes, the cause of that remarkable difference in complexion from the rest of mankind, and the woolly covering of their heads, so similar to the fleece of sheep.” Estwick asserts “the very incomprehensibleness of these phenomena,” adds weight to other aspects of Africanness, the “political ” to which he then turns. Estwick intends to challenge “an opinion universally received, that human nature is universally the same.” In contrast to naturalists’ “nice, accurate, and comprehensive” “scrutiny” of “the animal and vegetable kingdom,” human nature has been “exempt from this disquisition and arrangement.” Each “kind of animal has its proper species subordinate thereto,” man is an animal, so Estwick hypothesizes, “human nature is a class, comprehending an order of beings, of which man is the genus, divided into distinct and separate species of men.” It is this view that his introductory phrase, “Negroes, or any other species of men,” assumed. David Grimsted writes that Estwick was the first tract that used “scientific racism” to defend slavery. It anticipated Long’s by two years.67 Estwick paraphrases Locke to assert that in man’s degree of reason, his power of asserting it, lies his “superiority over beasts,” then he takes on Francis Hutcheson, misspelling the name: “If ‘Dr. Hutchinson’ had demonstrated” that “the moral sense” is “a faculty of the human mind common to all men, the capacity of perceiving moral relations, the power of exercising that faculty, and the compound ratio of its exercise, is that which makes the grand difference and distinction between man and man”—then, giving himself credit for thinking of this prior to reading Hume’s, “Of National Characters,” Estwick quotes that essay at length,

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adding his own emphases: “There is some reason to think that all nations which lie beyond the polar circles, or between the tropics, are inferior to the rest of the species, and are utterly incapable of all the attainments of the human mind.” Specifically, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and as general all the other species of men (there are four or five different kinds ) to be naturally inferior to whites.” Estwick added this in a footnote and quoted a great deal more of Hume’s essay, including: “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation.”68 Estwick quotes Hume on black people’s putative lack of reasoning ability. In the same footnote, he challenged the existence of Africans’ moral sense, pursuing his disagreement with Hutcheson. “I distinguish man from an by the moral sense or moral powers; and though a Negroe is found in Jamaica or elsewhere, ever so sensible and acute; yet he is incapable of moral sensations or perceives them only as beasts do simple ideas, without the power of combinations…it is a mark that distinguishes him from the man who feels, as incapable of these moral sensations,” of which Estwick declares himself capable, “and knows their application and the purposes of them, as sufficiently as he himself is distinguished from the highest species of brutes.” This directly challenged the assertion on the existence of the moral sense in black people by the critics and opponents of slavery, and dramatized by Sterne in his sensationally popular Tristram Shandy because of the appeal made to him by Sancho on behalf of his enslaved black brethren in the West Indies. So much for the Hume footnote and Estwick’s commentary on it.69 Moreover, Estwick continues, “nor have I been able to find one author by whom I have been able to discover that there is any system of morality conceived by these tribes of Africa, or practiced among them.” He asserted that “their cruelty to their children debases their nature even below that of brutes. Their cruelty to their aged parents is of kin to this.” They may have “a religion but it is one merely of outward impressions, and in which neither the head nor the heart have any concern.” Africans’ law, too, was proof of the defective use of this moral sense and he presents that law as mere murder, to conclude that he has shown that Africans differ “from other men, not in kind, but in species.” It was because Parliament, “perceiving the corporeal as well as intellectual differences of Negroes from other people, knowing the irreclaimable savageness of their manners, and of course supposing they were an inferior race of people,” had concluded, “to follow the commercial genius of this country” and

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that “‘Negroes’, should be considered and distinguished ..as articles of trade and commerce only.”70 Fryer writes that “the specter of racial intermarriage and ‘contamination’ incessantly invoked by the West Indian propagandists was haunting England,” especially after the Mansfield decision, but he shows that pamphleteers for West Indian planters had published similar arguments in the previous decade. When black men came to England, one said, blacks took jobs away from whites, and mixed their “breed” with “our native people.” This writer, an agent for colonial Georgia, presented himself as experienced in slavery; he praised slaveowners’ continuously forcing labour from enslaved people with the use of torture “No wonder that they are treated like brute beasts…. If they are incapable of feeling mentally, they will the more frequently be made to feel in their flesh.” They lacked sensibility. The same writer explained that slaveowners refused to have enslaved Africans instructed in Christianity became such instruction would lead them to read for themselves, there would be “a general insurrection of the Negroes and the massacre of the owners.” Seventeenth-century missionaries had faced the same objection. From their inception slave codes, reflecting the fears whites had of Africans held down by violence and continuously resisting to one degree or another, forbade it, too.71 These arguments flourished as a result of Mansfield’s freeing Somerset, now coupled with warnings about abolitionists’ wishing to free all enslaved people. One warned that “Negroes will…steal away to come to this land of liberty…in vain hopes of washing the Blackamour white” and of not that, the “enthusiastic lovers of liberty…may instill such notions of liberty as may occasion revolutions in our colonies.” Long further amplified his 1772 response in another section of his Historical Jamaica “containing by doctrine of innate black inferiority,” in what Fryer calls, “the classic exposition of English racism.” Writing that black people are dissimilar from the rest of mankind, Long decided they are close to “orang-utans.” “The amourous intercourse between them may be frequent…and it is certain that both races agree well in licentiousness of temperament.” Fryer notes Long’s influence on writer, Charles Johnstone, in 1775. In 1778, Philip Thicknesse included a chapter in his A Year’s Journey Through France and Part of Spain, in which he declared blacks “men of a lower order,” who have “much the resemblance of the Orang Outang.” He decried the “frequent marriages of these men with white women, and the succession of black, brown, and

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whity people produced by these very unnatural…alliances.” A law should be passed compelling them “to marry only among themselves, and to have no criminal intercourse whatever with people of other complexions.” Thicknesse may have been the “Lover of Blacks,” who predicted in The World, “three days before Wilberforce was due to move his first Common motion against the slave trade,” that freed blacks would replace white plantation owners, then, as white slaveowners did, come to Britain to marry daughters of the nobility. “The breed of the inhabitants would be improved by the cross.” The fashionable tails they would attach to their heads, an “ostensible method of shewing their parts …will attract the attention of the Fair Sex, who are ever partial to parts and abilities.”72 In 1785, James Tobin, writing as “A Friend to the West India Colonies and their Inhabitants,” quoted Long at length in his rebuttal of Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Sugar Colonies, published the previous year. “The great number of negroes at present in England, the strange partiality shewn for them by the lower orders of women, and the rapid increase of a dark and contaminated breed, are evils which have long been complained of.” Tobin, born in 1736/7 in London, was the son of a rich planter on Nevis, inheriting and frequently living on his plantation there, which had 213 enslaved people working it when he died in 1808. (Reportedly, he had “a mixed-race, illegitimate half-sister,” born in Nevis.) To illustrate his contention that “negroes” refuse or are incapable of “any laborious task,” Tobin wrote “the sentimental Ignatius Sancho, humble friend and imitator of Sterne, continued to prefer the station of a menial servant, till the infirmities of corpulence disqualified him.” He had read Jekyll’s “Life of Ignatius Sancho,” but demoted him from butler to menial, to suit his case.73 Kathleen Wilson suggests that “Sancho’s life story” published in 1782, reflected “the danger that former slaves arriving in England since he progressed from being a servant without wages to a man who competed with English domestic servants for paid employment.” Tobin’s book illustrated that “the sufferings of the British poor became a recurring theme in proslavery literature.”74 The advertisement for Long’s pamphlet “on what is commonly called the Negroe Cause” had linked it to one of Aesop’s fables by comparing Mansfield to the white who tried to wash the colour from an “Ethiopian.”75 We saw that Long developed this application in the pamphlet itself. A 1773 article in the Morning Chronicle also repeated the connection in expressing two concerns, a revolution and mixed marriages,

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caused by British antislavery advocates. They “may inspire our Colony Negroes…go come, to this land of liberty…in vain hopes of washing the Blackamoor white. If not that effect, they may instill such enthusiastic notions of liberty, as may occasion liberties in our colonies.” This was reprinted as the preface to an Essay upon Plantership by Samuel Martin, an agent for Antigua. We can juxtapose the writer’s signing himself “Britannicus” with Sancho’s subsequent use of “Africanus.”76 In 1776 Henry Bate (Dudley) wrote “The Blackamoor Wash’d White,” referring to Long’s pamphlet, and including the line, “O I should see the day when Englishmen must give way to foreign Blacks,” and the refrain, Let your honest hearts be merry; British boys will still be right, Till they prove that black is white!

Bate was a close friend of Garrick’s, on whose advice Bate turned the drama into a comic opera by omitting “a character of extraordinary length.” Before that omission on Garrick’s advice, it had been “repeatedly hissed of stage,” Carretta notes in his edition of Sancho’s Letters . Thereafter, Garrick, who acted in the play, was repeatedly recalled by the audience.77 If Garrick did not tell Sancho about it, he must have heard of it anyway. In a private letter he wrote to Crewe, Sancho wished her “the good of this life without the evil – is the true Black-a-moor wish of I. Sancho.” He had recently submitted a letter pleading for clemency for the Rev. William Dood, condemned to death for forgery, to the Morning Post , of which Bate was the editor. Bate refused to print it, the only letter which identified Sancho with his initials Sancho told Wingrave that “the learned editor,” who must have recognized Sancho was the writer, “thought it too insignificant for the laudable service it was meant to help.” This was sarcastic: Sancho’s PS added “I prefer Mr. Parker’s paper for many reasons.” William Parker was the editor of the General Adverizer, which printed Sancho’s piece, ironically praising, “the spirit of the British nobility” for following his recommendation that they melt down their silver plate to help improve the lives of British seamen. Parker published it under “Africanus.” Sancho’s many reasons for preferring Parker to Bate must have included Bate’s public racism.78 The black character in Bate’s “The Blackamoor Wash’d White” was a white actor in blackface, like all the others “sexualized stereotype,”

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in Felicity A. Nussbaum’s phrase. The only black actor who appeared on the stage around 1770, “was a woman, described retrospectively in John Jackson’s 1793 History of the Scottish Stage.” She was introduced by her agent to the manager of the theatre in the North where she was to perform, telling him, “Sir, I had forgot to mention, and which you may possibly object to THE LADY IS A BLACK’ ‘Oh, no matter,’ replied the humourist; we will introduce her in the Roman fashion: the lady shall wear A ‘MASK.’” Jackson thought that a black person appearing on the stage might appear “ridiculous to the reader,” but he assured “him,” that he “had before accidentally seen the identical lady as I was passing through Lancashire, in the part of Polly,” that is, in John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” or else in the sequel, just called “Polly.” He had told a friend that MacHeath should have called her “Sooty Polly” rather than “Pretty Polly.” Jackson called her “a Wooly Blackamoor,” and evidently, she endured the same racism as black males. She was seen as an anomaly but she was able to appear on stage (she also played Juliet), so less of a threat than Nussbaum suggests black male actors would have been.79 Other characters played by white men in blackface included Mungo in Dibdin’s “The Padlock,” still speaking with that purported black Jamaican accent, albeit with his elicitation of sympathy Oldham suggests. But in 1787, registering its changed context, the rise of antislavery (including Sancho’s Letters ), Gentleman’s Magazine was presented with an alternative “Epilogue to the Padlock. Mungo Speaks,” after its first time dropping the accent meant to be laughable, and alluding to the Mansfield decision: “TANK you, my massas! have you laugh your fill”− Then let me speak, nor take that freedom ill. E’en from my tongue some heartfelt truths may fall And outrag’d nature claims the care of all. My tale, in any place, would force a tear, But calls for stronger, deeper feelings here. For whilst I tread the free-born British land; Whilst now before me crouded Britons stand; Vain, vain that glorious privilege to me, I am a slave, where all things else are free. … A man by Britons snar’d and seiz’d, and sold, And yet no British statute damns the deed, Nor do the more than murderous villains bleed.

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O sons of freedom! equalise your laws, Be all consistent – plead the Negro’s cause; That all the nations in your code may see The British Negro, like the Briton, free. But, should he supplicate your laws in vain, To break forever this disgraceful chain, At least, let gentle usage so abate The galling terrors of its passing state, That he may share the great Creator’s social plan; For though no Briton, Mungo is a man!

Clarkson reprinted this in his History of…the Abolition of the Slave Trade, calling its author one of his “coadjutors.”80 William Cowper’s “The Task” (1784) also illustrates the continuing currency of Mansfield’s decision. We have no slaves at home – then why abroad? And they themselves, once ferried o’er the wave That parts us, are emancipate and loosed. Slaves cannot breathe the air in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free They touch our country and their shackles fall

That is the cause for national pride— That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud And jealous of the blessing.

According to racists, it was keeping Britain white that was the cause for national pride. There are signs in “The Task” that Cowper had read Sancho’s Letters , at least the most anti-imperialization of them, Sancho’s Letters to Wingrave which opened each volume.81 These expressions of antislavery coincided with other kinds of responses to Mansfield’s freeing of Somerset. In the pantomime, “Harlequin Mungo” (1789), the runaway, enslaved Mungo, comes to England to Jamaica, following his beloved, the white daughter of his master, literally to be replaced by the traditional English comic figure of Harlequin, wearing a black mask, to consummate the marriage.82 “The Benevolent Planters” of the same year also reflected the coincidence of racist stereotyping with the intensifying antislavery movement.

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It demonstrated the supposedly good effects of a policy of amelioration which had long been advocated by critics of slavery, but as long, rejected by slaveowners’ preferring to work their slaves to death. Facing the growing strength of the antislavery movement, same slaveowners ostensibly adopted amelioration as a tactic to placate critics and thereby perpetuate slavery—the play even contemplated freeing the slaves in the future. This was the year after passage of the Dolben Act (a result of a Parliamentary investigation of the slave trade), limiting the number of Africans with which a ship could be loaded. The “benevolent planters” are named “Heart free,” “Goodwin,” and “Steady,” represented as Long, Estwick and Tobin had represented themselves. Its slaves, too, were white actors in blackface.83 William Cobbett can be placed in this sequence, illustrating the perpetuation of the proslavery arguments of Long, Estwick, probably by way of Tobin, and referring what he said to theatrical figures. He attacked proponents of antislavery because their sympathies lay with black people at the expense of the exploited working class in England. “Who, that had any sense or decency, can help being shocked at the familiar intercourse, which has gradually been gaining ground, and which has at last, got a complete footing between the Negroes and the woman of England? No black swain and in this loving country hang himself in despair,” associating his point with romantic stereotype. His irony meant frustration over locating a wife, but there were real sources of despair: historians Mullen, Mundell and Newman write, “when one ‘Negroe Servant’ in England was threatened by his Master, for some Misconduct, to be sent to the Plantations’ the threat was sufficiently testifying for the man to hang himself in his owner’s coal cellar.” Sancho’s father had killed himself when facing the same prospect.84 Cobbett developed his point, the attractiveness to white women of black men: whether he was a Pagan, a Christian, or “a downright cripple” was of us concern, “he will if he be so disposed, always find a woman, not merely to yield to his filthy embraces, that amongst the notoriously polluted and abandoned part of her sex, would be less shocking, but to accompany him to the altar, to become his wife, to breed English mulattoes, to stamp the mark of Cain upon her family and her country!…their own conduct is foul, unnatural and detestable.” In an 1805 production of his 1787 comic opera, Inkle and Yarico, George Colman addressed “Mr. Wilberforce” in prefatorial “Remarks.”

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Wilberforce was known for his evangelical campaign for the reformation of manners, as well as his leadership in Parliament of the effort to abolish the slave trade. Colman writes that this “drama…might remove from Mr. Wilberforce his aversion to theatrical productions,” and show that they, too, can teach “moral duty” to “the pay, the idle, the dissipated.” At his play’s conclusion, the avaricious Inkle, about to betray and sell his “black” or “tawny” lover into slavery, is converted by the appeal of “Christian” Barbadians to his “sensibility” and will marry her after all: his work, Colman said, was “the bright forerunner of alleviation to the hardships of slavery.”85 Isaac Jackman played the tiny part of Sambo in blackface in his The Divorce: A Farce of 1780, (“Yes, Massa – want to marry a pretty white woman”), and then in 1782 played Oroonoko in blackface. There had been revisions to Southerne’s play, in 1759 and 1760, making it still more directly antislavery, in general terms, not confined to the wrongful enslavement of a prince. In the 1760 version a new English character, Maria tells Imoinda, that the Act authorizing the slave trade, passed in a nation, “distinguish’d, by the Ties/ of soft Humanity,” she had to confess “has much alarm’d/and shock’d my feeling Soul.” So in both this, and in Bickerstaffe’s Live in a City, white women characters showed feeling for black.86 Of course, Oroonoko and Othello were played by white actors in blackface. In Nussbaum’s view, all of these “tragedies, comedies, and pantomimes deal with two cultural fears that intensified in the later eighteenth century,” accompanied or they were by the rise of antislavery: “that miscegenation brought contamination to a nation seeking a purified identity…different from its imperial peoples and that the burgeoning numbers of blacks arriving in the country would take the jobs of English domestic workers.” It was the same “specter” of miscegenation we have seen Fryer described, “haunting England” because it was “incessantly invoked by West Indian propagandists.” Walvin points out that demography meant black men married white women, and both Gretchen H. Guerzina and Kathleen Chater write marriages between black men and white women were “common,” adding fuel to the fire.87 According to Nussbaum, “The Blackamoor Wash’d White” parodies Othello, to express the fears she and Fryer describe; “the play comically shows that the blackamoor is only a British soldier masked and painted after all, and that white womanhood will not be sexually threatened by black butlers, footmen, or valets,” although blacks as well as whites

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“have easy access to women in the boudoir,” and it offers “reassurance that white, British men will not be contaminated by the threat of black servants, by miscegenous offspring, or for that matter, by the working class.” The play mocks its chief male protagonist’s “naiveté about the reputed sexuality of black men.” It “rests on black face” – that a white man pretending to be black, not an actual African expresses desire “for that protagonist’s daughter.” Or as she writes earlier, the “impersonation of black men is more fluid than creolization or miscegenation. Blackface establishes a border between cultures which encourages an irreverence about complicitous consequences that makes blackness appears to be decorative and alien.”88 Sancho’s calling that musical piece “Mungo’s Delight,” was published in 1779, in the context described by Nussbaum. We recall Jekyll’s writing that Sancho loved the theatre, spending his last shilling at Drury Lane, and then “induced to consider the stage in the hour of adversity, and his complexion suggested an offer to the manager of attempting Othello and Oroonoko.” Nussbaum describes this as “of monumental significance” because “the first African black male did not appear on the British stage until Ira Aldridge’s London debut” nearly half a century later, “attracting vituperative press reaction” and “racist commentary,” this during the revival of antislavery aimed at the continuing enslavement of black people in the British Empire, after the abolition of the slave trade.89 So Sancho’s appearance on the stage “in the 1760s or 1770’s would have been an unprecedented event in theatre history.” Jekyll explained Sancho’s offer was “rendered abortive by a defective and incorrigible articulation.” André Dommergues writes that Sancho’s “mother tongue was English…cut off from his African roots.” Oldfield judges that Oroonoko “spoke in the manner of an educated Englishman.” Sandhu suggests that Sancho spoke on he wrote, “so plummily so polysyllabically.” Did his difficulties in speaking express his awareness of the hostility English audiences would have had to a real African playing Oroonoko, especially with an upper-class English accent? He frequently showed comparable self-consciousness as a black writing to a white. He could have put on white make up, then blackface, to play Oronooko as Othello. Aldridge later found respect mostly in “white roles,”—he was particularly successful as “the Jew,” Shylock, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Julius Soubise may have had the same difficulty in mind in practising Othello. It resembled the difficulties abolitionists had to overcome in getting metropolitan publics to sympathize with enslaved Africans, and

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endorses the significance of the culture of sensibility, persuading them that Africans, black people, at least had feelings, too.90 Nussbaum’s writing that Britons, as a nation, sought purification from contamination by miscegenation, along with William Cobbett’s vehemence on the issue, recalls anthropologist Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger. There she examines the meanings of the dietary rules of Leviticus and gives them more general application. They advocate, “Be ye separate,” in defining selves as “holy,” that is, perfect and complete as individuals, an adjuration extended to “species and categories. Hybrids and confusions are abominated.” “Individuals shall conforms to the class to which they belong.” “Holiness,” according to these Biblical precepts, “means keeping distinct the categories of creation. It therefore involves correct definition, discrimination and order.” Edward Long was obsessive in grading beings from the “oran-outang” to mankind, to conclude “the Negro” was a species between them.91 Opposed to purity (or holiness) was disorder, “destructive to existing patterns,” but with “potentiality. It symbolizes both danger and power.” (Long describes sex between white, Jamaican males and enslaved black women as “disorderly connexions.”) And we can think of the obsession with the children of such miscegenation in reading, “Danger his, in transitional states, simply because transition in neither, one state nor the next it is undefinable.” Such offspring would be “marginal,” in Douglas’s terms, initially “to have no place in society.” To be “in the margins is to have been in contact with danger,” which could include, “dirt, obscenity, and lawlessness.”92 From the first, writes Jordan, white colonists on the mainland “lumped mulattoes with Negroes in their slave codes and in statutes governing” their conduct. His explanation resembles Nussbaum’s in describing metropolitan attempts to maintain or restore national purity in the face of inevitable human contact between peoples of a burgeoning empire. Her terms are close to Douglas’s, too, who would say the white colonists Jordan describes attempting to deny the sexual unions producing “mulattoes,” was an avoidance of the danger they represented. That danger’s association with dirt coincides with Jordan’s observation of Briton’s archaic associations of “blackness;” their “instinctual repulsion” from it may have derived from some deep levels in the personality, perhaps age-old “fear of the night,” perhaps even excretion. Such whites, settling in colonial then revolutionary America, from the early sixteenth century through the early nineteenth. Jordan’s vision has been extended by successor historians of the subsequent periods, showing

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white Americans determined to maintain the dominance of White over Black, and now, on the twenty-first century millions still at it, symbolized by the public lynching of black George Floyd by white policemen, which inspired further resistance by a movement millions strong, their motto “Black Lives Matter,” asserting the accompanying tradition.

Notes 1. The most ample, recent account is in David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan Books, 2016), 127–45. Peter Fryer provides an excellent brief account in Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2010 [1984]), 120–26. Christopher Leslie Brown gives the historical bibliography, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 97 n. 74. 2. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 99, 100–02, and passim. See, too, David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1975]), ch. 10. 3. Brown, Moral Capital, 283. 4. Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 120, “The Case of James Sommersett A Negro” including the affidavit of John Knowles, in Southern Slaves in the Free State Courts, Slavery, Race, and the American Legal System, 16 vols., ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Garland, 1988), 1:3–9; 3–4; [James] Hargrave, “An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett, A Negro,” Southern Slaves, 10–82; 10; “Granville Sharp,” Wikipedia; “Case of James Somersett,” 5, 6. For context see, too, Stephen Mullen, Nelson Mundell and Simon P. Newman, “Black Runaways in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Britain’s Black Past, ed. Gretchen H. Gerzina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 81–98. 5. Michael Meranze, “Hargrave’s Nightmare and Taney’s Dream,” University of California, Irvine, Law Review, Vol. 1 (March 2014), 219–37; 223; Kathleen Chater, Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales During the Period of the British Slave Trade, 1660–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 90–92. 6. Olusaga, Black and British, 135, 136; William M. Wiecek, “Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-American World,” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Autumn 1974), 86–146; 103, 102; Nicholas Hudson, “‘Britons Never Will Be Slaves’: National Myth, Conservation, and the Beginning of British Antislavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2001), 559–76; John

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Donoghue, “‘Out of the Land of Bondage’: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” American Historical Review, Vol. 115, No. 4 (October 2010), 943–74; William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 25; A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Mariner Books), 2016), 5, App. 1. 7. (Forgotten Books, 2012 [London: Benjamin White, 1769]); Hudson, “Britons Never Shall Be Slaves,” 568–69. 8. Forty-three reports of the Mansfield decision were carried in twentyone newspapers; to some it could be applied to slavery in the American colonies, and it “posed basic constitutional problems for the British imperial system,” and while that perspective was rendered moot by the Revolution which had in part been provoked by it, the decision was influential in the conflict between pro and antislavery cases from then until the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Olusoga, Black and British; Jerome Nadelhaft, “The Somerset Case and Slavery: Myth, Reality, and Repercussions,” Journal of Negro History, Vol. 51, No. 3 (July 1966), 193–208; 202–08; Wiecek, “Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery,” 112–46. In David Waldstreicher’s view, the decision demonstrated it had become impossible “to deal with key constitutional questions without engaging in the politics of slavery.” He describes the ensuing spiraling of events, including the actions of thousands of black people, making “the largest slave rebellion in American history.” Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 40–41, 39, 52–53, 48, 56. See, too Michael Meranze, “Hargrave’s Nightmare and Taney’s Dream,” 219, and passim. For another account of the impact of the Mansfield’s decision on black people in America, see Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 147–48. Jackson quotes a conversation between Benezet and Franklin on Mansfield’s ruling, the latter writing later that “Britain piqued itself on its virtue, lived of liberty, and equity of the courts in setting free a single negro.” Ibid., 147. 9. “Case of James Somersett,” 11, 12, 15, 16, for eighteenth-century meanings of “humanity,” see G.J. Barker-Benfield, Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 115–26; Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

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11. 12.

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2018), 162–63. For the larger context, see Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). For a subtler definition of “humanity” in the context of post-Emancipation, African-American history, Sadiya V. Harding, Clues of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4–6, and passim. “Case of James Somersett,” 16; Montesquieu, The Spirt of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anna M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 246; David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1986), 385–86; J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957 [1782]), 159–60; “Case of James Somersett,” 16. “Case of James Somersett,” 20, 15. “Case of James Somersett,” 16–17; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1972]), 256–62; Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 158–75; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); (not emphasized) Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 37–38, 281–85, 337–42. “Case of James Somersett,” 26–28, 29, 33, 23–24; see Dana Robin, “’In a Country of Liberty?’: Slavery, Villenage and the Making of Whiteness in the Somerset Case (1772);” History Workshop Journal, Vol. 72 (Autumn 2011), 5–29; Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmissions Development, and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II Until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004 [1959]); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1967); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Marilyn Butler, Mapping Mythologies: Crosscurrents in EighteenthCentury British Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); for the very last point, see Barker-Benfield, Abigail and John Adams, 363, 235–36, 393–99, 413–14; and Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008), passim.

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14. “Case of James Somersett,” 25, 17; Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 139; Barbados was Britain’s first colony identifiable as a slave society, organized to generate profits from sugar on the backs of a constant flow of enslaved Africans to be murdered on the island, Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 320, 321, 322–25; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; part I. 15. “Case of James Somersett,” 15, 47. 16. “Case of James Somersett,” 70–75, 23–25. Paula Byrne writes that Hargrave’s “brilliant, forceful presentation” “stole the show” Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), 141. 17. Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2005), 113–14; Timothy Breen writes of American sensitivities in reaction to such derogation in the 1760 (prior to the Mansfield decision), reflecting the “shifting construction of identities” in the empire and anticipating the adaptation of British republican rhetoric to revolution in the refusal to be enslaved. He quotes John Adams, writing in 1765 as “Ploughjogger” declaring, “we won’t be their Negroes.” T.H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once in Need of Revisions,” Journal of American History, Vol. 84, No. 1 (June 1997), 13–39; 31–31. 18. Drescher, Abolition, 101; Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 121; Brown, Moral Capital, 100–01. For variant reports of the case, see Wiecek, “Lord Mansfield and the Somerset Case,” 141–46 and James Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield and Slavery,” Journal of British Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan. 1988), 45–68; 55–60, and Nadelhaft, “Somerset Case,” in note 8. 19. Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield,” 46, 47, 64, 65, 47; Nadelhaft, “Somerset Case,” 197–98; Wiecek, “Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery,” 105. 20. Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield,” 48. 21. Byrne, Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice, 148; Reyahn King, “Belle, Dido Elizabeth (1761?–1806?),” Oxford Dictionary and National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online ed. Oct. 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/73352, access 19 Sept. 2013]; King, “Ignatius Sancho and Portraits of the Black Elite,” Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, Reyahn King, Sukhder Sandhu, James Walvin, and Jane Girdham (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997), 15–42; 32, 33; Olusoga, Black and British, 134. For Hutchinson, see Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield,” 66, 67 n. 74. 22. Brown, Moral Capital, 92; Drescher, Abolitionism, 103, 102. 23. Drescher, Abolitionism, 99; Benjamin Franklin, “The Sommersett Case and the Slave Trade,” London Chronicle, June 18–20, 1772, Founders Online, PERMALINK http://founders.archives.gov/docume nts/Franklin/01-19-02-0128; Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard, 112–13.

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24. James Walvin, Slavery to Freedom: Britain’s Slave Trade and Abolition: The Pitkin Guide (Andover, Hampshire: Pitkin Publishing, 2007), Quobua Cuguano, Thoughts on the Evils of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2007 [1787]), 15; Henry Smeathman quoted in Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 27; Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, with the Journal of Eliza and A Political Romance, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968 [1767]), 72, 73; Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1767]), 142; Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 225. Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760– 1835 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1996), 296, and ch. 8 passim. 25. Drescher, Abolition, 102; Oldham “New Light on Mansfield,” 65. 26. Drescher, Abolition, 102–103. 27. Drescher, Abolition, 99. 28. Drescher, Abolition, 99; Franklin, “The Somersett Case and the Slave Trade,” London Chronicle, June 18–20, 1772, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 19, January 1 through December 31, 1772, ed. William B. Wilcox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 187–88. 29. Franklin, “The Somersett Case;” Crévecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter IX; Goldsmith: Everyman’s Poetry, ed. Robert L. Mack (London: J.M. Dent, 1997), 50. 30. Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 174; Brown, Moral Capital, 98–99. 31. Drescher, Abolition, 99; for brief sketches of Long and Beckford, see Wikipedia. 32. Long’s pamphlet and its accompanying advertisement were published in London by T. Lowndes, in 1772; I have used the Eighteenth-Century Collection Online, Print Edition, a reproduction of the original. “Wilkes and Liberty,” the cause whereby Beckford had successfully elevated himself in London politics. 33. Long, Candid Reflections, “Advertisement,” IV. 34. Long, Candid Reflections, 2, 3; Oldham, “New Light or Mansfield,” 42. 35. Long, Candid Reflections, 32, 33, 39–40. Large “numbers of Acts of Parliament [were] passed to facilitate and help the growth of the slave trade. Parliament played an active role in shaping American slavery long before it outlawed the trade in 1807.” Walvin, The Trader, the Owner, and the Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery (London: Vintage, 2007), xvii. 36. Long, Candid Reflections, 4, 21.

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37. Long, Candid Reflections, 20. Long rejected “the barbarity” of West Indian slaveholders at some length in this History of Jamaica, saying it was “a few of the British overseers [who] have given proof of their savage disposition.” He was still responding angrily to the accusation of Somerset’s lawyers, quoting Sharp in this passage. Long, The History of Jamaica, etc. 4 volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010) [London: T. Loundes,1774]), 2:367–68, 369. 38. Long, Candid Reflection, 44; Sharp, Injustice of Tolerating Slavery in England, 75–76, 77–78, 109. 39. Sharp quoted in Brown, Moral Capital, 94–95, 97, 284. 40. Long, Candid Reflections, 47–48. 41. Long, Candid Reflections, 48–49; Fryer, Staying Power, 7, 53; Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1969), 151–52. Jordan discusses whether or not black males have larger penes than whites, 159–60. 42. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:327; Johnson included Pill in his Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols. (London: J.M. Dent, 1925 [1779–81]), 2:279–81. 43. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:327; Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 2. 44. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:328–29. 45. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:331–32. 46. Long, Candid Reflections, 49–50; Letters of Sancho, xii–xiv. 47. Long, Candid Reflections, 50; Fryer, Staying Power, 74–75. 48. Long, Candid Reflections, 50–51, 12–13, 53–54. 49. Long, Candid Reflections, 59. 50. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:462, and see Craton, Testing the Chains, ch. 11; Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), passim. Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 5. 51. Long, Candid Reflections, 60–61; Hannah More, Slavery: A Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1788), discussed in ch. 7. 52. Long, Candid Reflections, 61–62, 66, 67–68. 53. Long, Candid Reflections, 73–74; A.R. Humphreys, “’The Friend of Mankind’ (1700–60)—An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility,” Review of English Studies, Vol. 24, No. 95 (July 1948), 203–18. 54. Wiecek, “Lord Mansfield and the Somerset Case,” 103–04; Long, Candid Reflections, 75–76; J.A. Cannon, “Estwick, Samuel (1736– 95), of Berkeley St. London and Barbados,” The History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1754–1790, ed. L. Namier,

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56. 57.

58.

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J. Brooke (1964), http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/ 1754-90/member/estwick-samuel. This is the source for the biographical details in the next paragraph. For estimates of the black population, most people concentrated in London, see Fryer for an eighteenth-century estimate of 20,000 and he cites Mansfield’s of 14,000–15,000 (Staying Power, 60); Kathleen Wilson suggests there were between 15,000 and 20,000 “black” people, “including a small contingent of South and East Asian by the 1770s” (“Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c.1720–1790,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 [Fall 1995], 69–96, 81); Olusaga estimates 10,000 in Black and British, 134; Brown writes “Black people were scattered all over England in the second half of the century.” The majority lived in London, the population there increasing to at least 10,000 in the 1760s and 1770s. (Moral Foundations, 289), whereas Chater agrees with Long that “there were only a few thousand Black people in London in the early 1770s,” then “a minimum of 1,200” in the mid-1780s, estimating up to 78.8% men, 18.45% women, the rest unknown, Untold Stories, 26, 31, 30. Samuel Estwick, “Consideration of the Negroe Cause Commonly So Called, Addressed to the Right Honorable Lord Mansfield…by a West Indian” (London: J. Dodsley, 1772), xvi; for “candor,” see BarkerBenfield, Abigail and John Adams, 368. Compare, ibid., 64–65, 85–86, 237, and 280. Of course, writers from Estwick to Jane Austen held that “sensibility” should be tempered with sense, the heart checked appropriately by the head. Estwick, “Considerations on the Negroe Cause,” xvi. Estwick, “Considerations on the Negroe Cause,” 61; that lawyer did so argue to juries is illustrated by John Adams, two years later, quoting the Rousseau-listic deccaria: Dr. Johnson charged a set of documents written by Adams on behalf of the Constitutional Congress, with playing on the sensibility of his audience. Barker-Benfield, Abigail and John Adams, 258, 397. Estwick, “Considerations on the Negroe Cause,” 59–60; Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2010 [1786]), 113–14; James Ramsay, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Islands (London: James Phillips, 1784), 99–100; for the seventeenth century, see Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church [etc.], ([London: F.D., 1680], Kessinger Legacy Reprint), 83, 143; Thomas Tryon, “Letter XXXII To a Planter of Sugar,” Letters Domestick and Foreign, to Several Persons of Quality (London: Forgotten Books, 2017 [1686]), 183–87; 186–87.

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59. Estwick, “Consideration on the Negroe Cause,” 60; [James Tobin], Cursory Remarks on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Islands by A Friend to the West India Colonies and Their Inhabitants (London: G and T Wilkie, 1785), to be refuted at length by Clarkson, Essay on Slavery, 144 ff. 60. Estwick, “Considerations on the Negroe Cause,” 60–61; Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson, and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth-Century (New York: New York University Press, 1992); see, too, Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1982); Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1750]), 246; Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 168–9. 61. Estwick, “Considerations on the Negroe Cause,” 32, 41, 54. 62. Estwick, “Considerations of the Negroe Cause,” 51–52; Brown, Moral Capital, 156. See, too, Wilson, “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity,” 86. 63. Estwick, “Considerations of the Negroe Cause,” 43–44; John Wilkes and Thomas Potter, An Essay on Woman in Three Epistles (https://en.wik isource.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_Woman_in_Three_Epsitles [London: the Author, 1763]), 5. The notion was that women then enslaved men by way of male desire, the enslavement often then reversed by marriage. A successor was James Boswell who published No Abolition of Slavery, or the Universal Empire of Love, a Poem (London: R. Faulder, 1791), effectively in opposition to the growing political success of antislavery. He favoured the enslavement of black people. By contrast, Rochester had recognized the real irony in a 1672 poem, writing, “treacherous man” misguides woman. “And calls her Conqueror when she’s most his Slave,” Quoted in Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39. 64. Estwick, “Considerations of the Negroe Cause,” 93–94; Long makes the same point, Candid Reflections, 49. 65. Estwick, “Considerations of the Negroe Cause,” 94–95. 66. Estwick, “Considerations of the Negroe Cause,” 64–65. 67. Estwick, “Considerations of the Negroe Cause,” 71–74; David Grimsted, “Anglo-American Racism and Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Soble Veil,’ ‘Lengthen’d Chain,’ and ‘Knotted Heart,’” Women in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville,

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68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

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VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 338–444; 408–09. See, too, Bouloukos, The Grateful Slave, ch. 3; Brown, Moral Capital, 97–98. Estwick, “Considerations of the Negroe Cause,” 76–75, 75–76, 77, for Hutcheson, see Barker-Benfield, Abigail and John Adams, 117, 199; Estwick does not refer to the fact that Hume (along with Adam Smith), “sometimes described the slave system as cruel, wasteful and emblematic of the unwise principles guiding the Atlantic enterprise.” Brown, Moral Capital, 159. But in the text on the same page, Estwick still finds it necessary to argue against Hutcheson’s view that the moral sense is common to all humanity. He quotes another authority, geographer William Guthrie’s “account of Africa from the topic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope,” who connected the fact of the continent’s being little known to that it “affords no materials which deserve to render it so.” Instead, Guthrie cites “the ancients” to declare that “the inhabitants were in the same rude situation near 2000 years ago in which they are at present, that is they had nothing of humanity about them but the form.” This, too, was to disagree with other Scots’ notion of the stages of history, which held that peoples apparently inferior to civilized Europeans were at an earlier stage, and in time would develop in the same direction. The inhabitants of Africa, “being so long accustomed to a savage manner of life, and degenerating from one age to another, at length become incapable of making any progress in civility or science. Estwick, “Considerations of the Negroe Cause,” 79; compare J.A. Leo Lemay, “The Frontiersman from Lout to Hero: Notes on the Significance of the Comparative Method and the Stage Theory in Early American Literature and Culture,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. 82, No. 2 (1978), 187–213; Rosemarie Zagarri, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2 (June 1992), 192–215. Estwick, “Considerations of the Negroe Cause,” 80. Fryer, Staying Power, 161, 154. Fryer, Staying Power, 158, 159, 162. James Tobin, Cursory Remarks upon the Reverend Mr. Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (Cornell University Digital Collection [London: G. and T. Wilkie, 1785]), 118 n., 117–18. Biographical information from Wikipedia. Wilson, “The Theatre of Empire: Racial Counterfeit, Racial Realism,” A New Imperial History: Culture Identity and Modernity in Britain, 1660– 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71–90; 77; Brown, Moral Foundations, 370. Aesop’s Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 171. This edition refers to Jeremiah 13:23; “Can the Ethiopian

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78.

79.

80.

81.

82. 83.

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change his skin, or the leopard has spots.” Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), shows that the “whitewashed Ethiopian” was ubiquitous in Renaissance Literature. Morning Chronicle and An Essay on Plantations quoted in Fryer, Staying Power, 156. H. Dudley Bate, Airs, ballads, etc. in the blackamoor wash’d white. A new comic opera (London: Cox and Bigg, 1776). For the author’s name and his friendship with Garrick see, “Obituary: Sir Henry Bate Dudley, Bart,” Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 136 (1824), 273–76, 638–39. For the audience responses, Felicity A. Nussbaum, “The Theatre of Empire: Racial Counterfeit, Racial Realism,” New Imperial History, 71–90; 79; Letters of Ignatius Sancho, An African, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1998 [1782], 290). Sancho to Frances Crewe, May 9, 1778, Sancho, Letters , 118; Sancho Letters, 289–90; Sancho to Jack Wingrave, March 12, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 112–13. Nussbaum, “Theatre of Empire,” 73; Paul Edwards and James Walvin included the extracts from Jackson’s History of the Scottish Stage in their authority, Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade (London: Macmillan, 1983), 148–49. They suggest the audiences “on the tough northern theatrical circuit” may have been less racist than Jackson. J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Oxford: Routledge, 1998), 30–31; “Epilogue to The Padlock’” from the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1787, www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/padlock1.htn; Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing c. 1770– 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 14; Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 2. 81 Cowper, The Task Other Poems, ed. Henry Morley Project Gutenberg eBook, #3698, March 29, 2015; Sancho, Letters, 25–28, 129–33; For Cowper’s poetic contributions to the antislavery campaign, see Casey, British Abolitionism, 96–106. D. Worrall, The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1757–1832 (London: Palgrave, 2007), ch. 3. Hilary Mac D. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (London: Zell Books, 1989), 20, 90–91; Thomas Bellamy, The Benevolent Planters, a Dramatic Piece (London: J. Debrett, 1789); Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1:178–83. Cobbett’s Political Register, 16 June 1804, quoted in Fryer, Staying Power, 234–35; for context, see Ryan Hanley, “Slavery and the Birth of Working-Class Racism in England, 1814–1833,” The Alexander Prize Essay, Transactions of the Royal Historian Society, Vol. 26 (December

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87.

88. 89.

90.

91.

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2016), 103–23; 112–14; Stephen Mullen, Nelson Mundell, and Simon P. Newman, “Black Runaways in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Britain’s Black Past, ed. Gretchen H. Gerzina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 81–98; 83. See, too Brown, Moral Capital, 10. George Colman, Inkle and Yarico (Great Britain: Amazon [London, 1805]), 5. [Isaac Jackman], The Divorce: a farce. In Two acts…Written by the author of All the world’s a stage (ECCO Print Editions [Dublin: George Perrin, 1790 [1780]), 30; Nussbaum, “Theatre of Empire,” 73; Oldfield, Popular Politics, 26, 27. Nussbaum, “Theatre of Empire,” 73–74; Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 52; Guerzina, Black England: Life Before Emancipation (London: Allison and Burby, 1999), 26–27; Chater, Untold Histories, 203, see, too 149–52, 203–04, 207–09. Jordan writes that because there were fewer white males in New England in the eighteenth-century “white women there were occasionally willing actually to marry Negroes,” White over Black, 175. Nussbaum, “Theatre of Empire,” 80, 82, 83, 81, 75. Sancho, Letters, 7; Nussbaum, “Theatre of Empire,” 72; Theresa Saxon, “Ira Aldridge in the North of England: Provincial Theatre and the Politics of Abolition,” Britain’s Black Past, 275–93; 279. Nussbaum, “Theatre of Empire,” 72; Sancho Letters , 7; André Dommergues, “Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), the White-Masked African,” The History and Historiography of Commonwealth Literature, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1983), 189–97; 190; Oldfield, Popular Politics, 71; S.S. Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne,” Research in African Literatures, Special Issue, “The African Diaspora and its Origins,” Vol. 29, No. 4 (1998), 88–106; 89, Nussbaum interprets his “defective articulation” as “an inflection or dialect that reflected his origins and his very early years in New Granada,” “Theatre of Empire,” 78; Bernith Lindfors, “‘Mislike Me Not for My Complexion…’ Ira Aldridge in White face,” African American Review so, No. 4 (Winter 2017) 1005–1012, Soubise’s riding instructor, Henry Angelo, witnessed Soubise practising Othello at the Jacob’s Well tavern in the Barbican, Worrall, Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 78. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 53; Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, etc. 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [London: T. Loundes, 1774), 2:362–64. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 94; Long, History of Jamaica, 2:327; Jordan, White over Black, 168, 256–57.

CHAPTER 5

“The Poor Fellow Foams Again.” Castration for the Public Good

Aroused by the reactions to Mansfield’s freeing of Somerset and its aftermath. Sancho addressed the spectres of black manhood as an African; he did so anonymously because he also risked being associated with Sterne’s licentiousness. It had been in 1775 that Sancho was first brought to the attention of the reading public. His 1766 letter to Sterne—and Sterne’s replies—was published in that year in the Letters of the Rev. Mr. Lawrence Sterne, to his most intimate friends. With a fragment: in the Manner of Rabelais, To which are prefixed, Memoirs of his Life and Family, written by himself and published by his daughter, Mrs. Medalle. Small 8 vo. (Shandy, size). So Sancho was linked to Sterne from the outset, as he had privately linked himself in the first of his letters.1 The linkage was reinforced in the reviews of Sterne’s letters. The first of Ralph Griffiths’ two-part review was published “but a few days” after Medalle’s book so he promised a second article on them. In the first, he quoted Sterne’s Memoir (included in the Letters ), which concentrated on Sterne’s father’s soldiering in Ireland and Gibraltar, where he was wounded in a duel, and “with an impaired constitution, unable to withstand the hardships it was put to; for being sent to Jamaica, he soon fell by a country fever, which took away his senses first, and made a child of him in this condition he remained a month or two, walking about continually without complaining till the moment he sat down in an arm chair, and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3_5

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breathed his last.” This was, Griffiths notes, March 1731. He concluded by quoting Garrick’s epitaph on Sterne, which was “prefixed…to the literary correspondence”: Shall pride a heap of sculptur’d marble raise, Some worthless, un-mourn’d titled fool to praise; And shall we not by one poor grave-stone learn Where genius, wit, and humour, sleep with STERNE.”2

Griffiths published six of Sterne’s letters in the second part of his review (the month after the first); Sancho’s was the only one paired with Sterne’s reply. Griffiths said that “in almost every Letter” Sterne “seems to have written from the heart.” He quotes Bishop Warburton’s reply to Sterne’s gift of his Sermons , defending him from charges of impiety and lewdness (Warburton later changed his mind); but he quoted another in which Sterne referred repeatedly to “Dr. Kunastrokius,” his bawdy satire in Tristram Shandy of Dr. Richard Mead; a third to HallStevenson, written, Griffiths says “in the rattling strain of Shandyism,” which mentions “going to Ranelagh” and the Demoniacs Club (the rakes’ “Hell-fire” group convened by Sir Francis Dashwood, which met at Skelton Castle near York), and his letter from his deathbed to Mrs. Anna. Goddard James, (“do not weep, my dear Lady – your tears are too precious to shed for me – bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn), asking her and her husband to be parents to Lydia,” before concluding with a poetic eulogy to Sterne, emphasizing his jesting and sentimental writing: ….no more Shall thy mirth and thy jests “Set the table on a roar;” No more thy sad tale, with simplicity told, O’er each feeling breast its strong influence hold, From the wise and the brave call forth sympathy’s sigh, Or swell with sweet anguish humanity’s eye[.]3

Griffiths writes that the third volume of Sterne’s letters “presents us with a curiosity. It is a Letter to Mr. Sterne from a very sensible Black in the service of the duke of Montague.” Colour was a noun standing for the whole person; “sensible” denotes both its familiar, modern meaning, reasonable and balanced but within its other, conventional, eighteenthcentury meaning, having sensibility. The letter’s authenticity was at issue, presumably, because its writer was a “Black.” “The Letter itself, of the

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authenticity of which we have unquestionable proof will explain the occasion.” In a footnote, Griffiths says, “we have seen the original Letter,” perhaps having asked Lydia Sterne Medalle to show it to him. This was not the case for the other letters she included.4 After quoting “From Ignatius Sancho, to Mr. STERNE,” in full, Griffiths identified his own with his reader’s anticipated response: “Our Readers, few of whom, we apprehended, are unacquainted with Sterne’s philanthropy (that God of Sancho’s idolatry!) will readily anticipate the answer which was given to the foregoing Letter: but here it is.” Griffiths reprints Sterne’s July 27, 1766, letter in full, then tells the readers of his Monthly Review, “This honest African genius, we are informed, is at this time by the permission of Heaven, earning a living by keeping a little shop in Westminister!” The exclamation is over the fact that a black person should reside at the heart of Britain’s government. To call Sancho “honest” was to pick up on Sterne’s addressing him as “honest Sancho.” James Boswell frequently called Francis Barber, Dr. Johnson’s “negro” servant, “honest.” It was a conventional and condescending usage applied to lower ranks, although it may also have contradicted a stereotyping of black people, as did “genius,” connoting exceptionalism. Phillis Wheatley was called an African genius for the same reason.5 Another review (published two months after Griffiths’ second piece), in the popular Gentleman’s Magazine, also quoted Sancho’s letter to Sterne in full: “The following will show that the writer, though black as Othello,” emphasizing Sancho’s colour and associating this novelty with the most familiar of black figures to Britons, married to the white Desdemona and so sexually possessive that he murdered her (like Behn’s Oroonoko and then Southerne’s, modifying the spelling of his hero’s name—and making Oronooko’s wife white), “but”—unlike Othello, “with a heart as humanized as any of the fairest about St. James.” The reviewer here draws on Sterne’s reply without acknowledgement, or else the simile records a convention. He also draws on Griffiths to say “he was then in the service of the Duke of Montagu, and now keeps a little shop, we hear, in Westminister.” He concludes, “Such a letter must certainly increase his custom,” more specifically its publication in the Sterne collection could. Quoting Sancho’s letter but not Sterne’s reply, the reviewer adds, “Sterne’s answer is, as might be expected, equally sensible and humane.” These were the qualities for which Sancho had approached Sterne and we have seen Sterne’s translating and propounding them on behalf of

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enslaved blacks in response: “and the connection between him and his sooty correspondent was afterwards continued, as appears by subsequent letters, and by honest Sancho’s visiting his friend in London”; the reviewer then undermines Sterne’s sensibility and humanity, and Sancho’s too, with irony, adding “though we cannot help thinking that the sensibility or delicacy at least, of this, “good-hearted” negro was so real and unaffected as to be hurt by being desired to “dun the Duke and Duchess of M[ontagu] and Lord N[otherner] for their subscriptions.” The reviewer extended the objections to Sterne’s “blemishes,” the Gentleman Magazine’s more explicitly than Griffiths’, for example remarking that Sterne’s daughter should have suppressed some “indelicacies, not to say gross indecencies,” revealing that Sterne and his wife were “not on the best terms,” quoting Sterne’s letter to Hall-Stevenson, saying he “was more sick and tired of her than ever.”6 Three years after the publication of Medalle’s collection the association was reinforced by the inclusion of Sancho’s letter to Sterne and all three of Sterne’s letters to Sancho in The Complete Letter-Writer; or Polite English Secretary, in the section, “Elegant Letters on Various Subjects, to improve the Style and Entertain the Mind, from eminent authors.” Sancho’s had occasioned those of the eminent Sterne, but perhaps the edition believed Sancho’s was a model, too, unless he did so simply because Medalle had included it.7 Two letters of 1772 showed Sancho’s private reactions to the characterization of black men by proslavery critics of Mansfield’s action. The first, dated 18 July, was to the younger Charles Browne (son of Sir Charles Bunbury’s steward) in which Sancho spoke as a mentor, expressing his admiration for Sir William Bunbury and David Garrick. Having noted that Browne’s parents’ eyes “overflowed at the goodness of your noble patrons,” Sancho turned to the subject of black people who could believe in the same way. “I thank you for your kindness to my poor black brethren.” The same kinship he had claimed in his first letter to Sterne: “you will find them not ungrateful they act commonly from their feelings: I have observed a dog will love those who use him kindly – and surely, if so negroes—” whom those indicating the continued enslavement of Somerset had called “bestial,” “in their state of ignorance and bondage,” kept ignorant by their owners, Hargrave has said, “will not act less generously if I may judge them by myself.” Sancho writes as an individual, and he speaks on behalf of black people’s nature, which he has suggested by his opening reference to the tears of Browne’s parents, is the

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same as whites. Estwick and others had said black people were incapable of feeling. “I should suppose kindness would do anything with them – my soul melts at kindness.” He had feeling, just like Garrick, and Browne’s parents: “— but the contrary – I own with shame – makes me almost a savage.” It is unkind treatment that makes a black man “savage,” nothing innate, as defenders of enslavement (like Estwick) asserted. Then with a corresponding joke, he tells Browne to act kindly to him by sending “half a dozen cocoa-nuts.” Throughout the letter Sancho expresses his authority (despite his being black) to advise young Browne how to behave morally and with sensibility, on the basis of their shared humanity and moral sense: “it is in your own breast to be good – therefore, my dear child, make the only right election – be good, and trust the rest to God; and remember he is about your bed, and about your path, and spieth out all your ways. – I am with pride and delight, your true friend, IGN SANCHO.”8 The second letter which Sancho wrote in the aftermath of the Mansfield decision was to Julius Soubise, a cut above the other servants in the household of the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry.9 According to the Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, who knew him, Soubise was “the son of a female slave at St. Kitts, was brought from Jamaica by Captain Stair Douglas, RN,” much the same story as Sancho’s and of other enslaved youngsters, brought by their owners to serve them in England. The Duchess named him and “gave him a good education.” Angelo writes of his subsequent life at some length, when he “gained something of the reputation as a womanizer and man-about-town.” Angelo depicted Soubise as a man of great sexual interest to women of all degrees, ladies, sex workers and maidservants, which Soubise was happy to enjoy.10 A March 1767 journal entry (five years before Sancho’s letter, and prior to Soubise’s flamboyant entry onto the sexno-social scene), from the journal of Lady Mary Coke, gives more direct evidence. “Made a visit to the Duchess of Queensbury, and found her half-dressed and halfundressed. She was talking to her Black Boy, who indeed seemed to have a very extraordinary capacity, something very uncommon.” That “capacity,” and its uncommonness apparently referring to his being “black,” was explained as his ability to learn, conventionally a source of surprise to many whites because it contravened stereotype. “She told me she had taught him everything he had a mind to learn. She thought better than keeping him to serve at the house, in that I think Her Grace judged right but when she told me he learnt to ride and fence,” Angelo specified

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the instructors, “I could not help thinking these exercises too much above his condition to be useful, and would only serve to give him expectations that could not be answered.”11 Soubise became the assistant of riding master Angelo, and “taught fencing to aristocratic and royal pupils,” and a friend of Henry, the son of the Prince of Wales. Henry recorded, “so far from what my father had feared, that his colour and humble birth might have made him repulsive to his high-born pupils…these circumstances seemed to excite a greater interest in his favour.” This was the same response as the Duchess of Queensbury’s. “His manners were engaging, and his good nature gained him the affection of every one who came to the house.” He was wellknown, calling himself the “Black Prince.”12 A 1772 print shows the Duchess of Queensbury fencing with Soubise. Another print by Matthew Darly, of September 1772, was called “A Mungo Macaroni,” a “joint caricature of Soubise and…Jeremiah Dyson,” the latter nicknamed “Mungo” because of his subservience by a political opponent, but the print was “assumed to be a likeness of Soubise.”13 Another likeness appeared in Nocturnal Revels, or the History of King’s Place, and other Modern Nunneries…with Portrait of the Most Celebrated Demireps and Courtezans of this Period, by “a Monk of the Order of St. Francis,” published in two volumes in London in 1779.14 St. Francis was Sir Francis Dashwood, and his order was the Hell-Fire Club, its motto, “Fais ce que tu voudreas.” “Do what you will,” a Rabelaisian philosophy of life to be enjoyed by upper-class males.15 One member was Sterne’s closest friend, John Hall-Stevenson, another his “intimate friend,” John Wilkes Nocturnal Revels included the more explicit pornography with which Sterne flirted. James Walvin and Paul Edward’s reprint passages from Nocturnal Revels because they are ostensibly about Julius Soubise, and certainly, they are clear expressions of white male fantasies about race and sex with which Soubise was associated.16 He was introduced as “a very extraordinary personage,” part of “the Ton for the last seven years,” the period following Mansfield’s discharge of Somerset. Soubise paraded “the streets of this Town, in an elegant equipage, servants in superb liveries, and drawn by five dun horses.” He was not the Prince of Anamaboe, “come here to make peace or was with the Premier,…for not having properly protected his father’s Forts and Settlements” a figure who, under Garrick’s auspices, had made a splash in London before being sent back to Anamaboe to work in the slave

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trade. The writer (in the guise of “Mrs. Gad,” a gossip) gives a biography of Soubise, including the origins of his name, then reinforcing the accuracy of Lady Coke’s observation by writing of his good fortune in a certain Duchess’s taking “a particular fancy to him,” elevating him above his menial capacity, and having him taught dancing, fencing and riding. Soubise began to think “he was superior to the common run of Macaronies” and describes his becoming well-known in “in the flesh market at the Play-houses,” frequenting “the Masquerades At the Pantheon,” where he “naturally played the part of Mungo by which name he was afterward called.” He enjoyed the brothels described in Nocturnal Revels: “he was soon initiated at all the Nunneries at King’s Place and the New Buildings.” There, Soubise exhibited the sexuality of which Long and Estwick warned, “not merely of the Platonic kind — No his soul was too much made of fire…his constitution was as warm as his complexion, and the annals of King’s Place say that he revelled at large amidst the charms of variegated beauty; “his color could have been an obstacle, but notwithstanding his complexion there was scarce a Nun…who did not think it an honour” to have sex with him, and the writer gives the initials of five of them, as well as, “Miss EMILY C-LTH-ST herself, thought it no dishonour to have yielded to the intreaties of his Highness,” the Prince of Soubise. They described “his manly parts and abilities,” recommending him “powerfully, especially to those filles-de-joye” who previously had focused only on money, neither “the size, complexion, age, or infirmities of their admirers.” The writer, the “monk,” speaking through Mrs. Gad, reiterates her admiration for this black male’s genital prowess, in contrast to Long’s fearfulness; “besides, Mungo, if he had not beauty, had at least youth and vigour on his side, and was very genteely constructed.” This was a quality attributed to Othello “Is it then surprising that, in imitation of DESDEMONA, they should give the preference to another OTHELLO, before many other insipid, debilitated to Lovers?”. This chapter, introducing Soubise but then referring to him with the condescending “Mungo,” concludes with an account of a young lady’s gratifying “her curiosity and inclination about one of MUNGO’s complexion,” meeting him with her “Abigail,” near Blackheath. Soubise/ Mungo and his companion presented themselves as “sea-officers…just returned from a long and advantageous voyage, with their pockets well filled with cash, and their power of virility, as they painters say, in fine keeping.” They had several “warm entertainment,” the young

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ladies offended when Mungo and his companions offered to pay them, mistaking them for prostitutes.17 This success led Soubise/Mungo “to think he had sufficient merit and accomplishment to entitle him to a woman of fortune and fashion in an honourable way.” The issue would be his colour, that attraction, along with its associated virility to the two ladies only out for a “frolic.” Soubise thought his “complexion was a few things too dark” and believed he could improve “his charms” by art, seconem artem to wash a Blackamour white,” showing Aesop’s fable’s penetration into pornography soon after Long’s use of it and Bate’s version in his comic opera. Soubise set about his “washing” with cosmetics and beautifying medicines, thinking their corrosive effects on his skin were the first stage on the road to beauty. So he wrote “Miss G” a letter, describing himself as a “man of sentiment” and, “I dare tell you I am your Negro Slave.” Although he was of “that swarthy race of ADAM, whom some despise in account of their complexion,” an introduction like the one with which Sancho presented himself to Sterne. Soubise’s love letter told Miss G he was bringing to bear medical knowledge to remedy “this evil,” and hoped, “in a few weeks to throw myself at your feet, in as agreeable form as you can desire.” Miss G showed the letter to a friend, prompting convulsions of laughter, giving way to planning, “how they could sufficiently ridicule so impertinent, so vain, so presumptuous a Black, in every sense of the word.” Her friend wrote a letter in Miss G’s voice, addressing Soubise as “your Highness,” a “Moorish Prince.” She hoped “this will find your complexion entirely reconciled to your wish.” For her part though, “I acknowledge a Black man was always the favourite of my affections; and that I never yet saw either OROONOKO OR OTHELLO without rapture.” Still, respecting his efforts to lighten his complexion, she “inclosed a little packet (some of which I use myself when I go to a Masquerade), which will have the desired effect, in case your nostrums should fail.” She beseeched him to apply it immediately, “languishing for the happiness of telling you by word of mouth, how much I adore you.” The two, white lady plotters referred to him as Mungo. He “was stung to the soul by this satire.” The friend to whom he confided was also “tickled with Soubise’s folly and impertinence…and the sarcastic reply,” that he, too, was convulsed with laughter. Soubise despaired but his friend advised him to meet them at a masquerade the next evening.

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Just by chance Soubise chose the outfit of a Sultan, and Miss G, a Sultana, the perfect set-up for the latter to display her “raillery” at the former’s expense, in front of the Pantheon’s central Rotunda everyone looking on. When Soubise, masked as the Sultan, said “some civil things to her and that he dropped his handkerchief to her, she bid him stand off” and called him “an impostor – she could perceive he was only a black Eunuch in disguise”; so his “parts” were a subject of importance, implicitly without them she rejected him, saying, “she should acquaint the Grand Signior of his Sublime Highness by such a wretch and have him flayed,” referring in Nocturnal Revels to sexual flagellation, but connoting, too, the appropriate punishment of the “Negro Slave” he had first told her he was. But relenting, she said, “in another tone of voice, ‘that may be an attempt you have already made upon yourself, in order to promote a further disguise;’ was he in fact, white?” “in which case, I would send you some of my own cosmetics, that you may not make to horrid on appearance in the Seraglio for human eyes to behold!”. The chapter concluded: “S[oubi]se could bear no more – there were daggers in every word; they pierced to the soul; he retired precipitously, and never since has had the least relish for a masquerade.”18 Nocturnal Revels set its account of Soubise seven years in the past, in 1772, the year Sancho replied to his request for help. He was associated with the licentiousness Sterne enjoyed; Sancho well may have known, too, of Soubise’s reputed acquaintance, friendship even, with Garrick, his own friend and Sterne’s, perhaps because of Soubise’s aspirations for the stage. It was just before describing Soubise’s declaiming Othello’s speeches “at the sporting clubs,” that Angelo wrote, “Soubise was a great friend of Garrick’s.” Historian Ashley Cohen writes that Soubise brushed shoulders with other playwrights and artists, including Gainsborough. Behind his back and among a group of white men, Richard Brinsley Sheridan said to Samuel Foote that “Soubise was one of the best behaved, unassuming minions of the great that he had ever known,” and someone added “and so modest withal,” Foote replied, “Yes, but damme, for all his modesty, I never said him blush.” The racism is telling, but the depiction of Soubise’s behaviour is very different from the ostentatious exuberance in the pornographic Nocturnal Revels. The contrasts speak to the demanding self-representations of black people, an issue of which Sancho was deeply conscious.19 Debts and scandal began to tell against Soubise. In 1772, he wrote to Sancho, who replied from the Montagus’ house in Richmond: “Your

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letter gave me more pleasure than in truth I ever expected from your hands – but thou art a flatterer; why dost thou demand advice of me?” There must have been a degree of friction before, but Soubise assumed they had common ground as high-ranking, black servants of ducal families. Sancho seemed to refuse at first, suggesting that instead, Soubise look to the Queensberrys. “Young man thou canst not discern wood from trees; - with awe and reverence look, up to thy more than parents, the Queensburys.” It was the same advice he had just given Browne; “search into the motive of every glorious action – retrace thine own history,” and by implication, contrast yourself with your patrons, “and when you are convinced that they go about in mercy doing good.” Soubise can still be glorious and godlike, too, but morally: “humbling beg the Almighty to inspire and give you strength to imitate them. Happy, happy lad!” Soubise was then eighteen: “what a fortune is thine? – Look around upon the miserable fate of almost all of our unfortunate colour – superadded to ignorance – see slavery, and the contempt of those very wretches who roll in affluence from our labours superadded to this woeful catalogue – hear the ill-bred and heart-racking abuse of the foolish vulgar.” The possessive “our” identified ex-slaves Sancho’s and Soubise’s work with that of their miserable fellow blacks, still enslaved. His advice reflects the reverberation from the Mansfield decision, as black people continued to be captured, re-enslaved and denigrated.20 “You S[oubise] tred as cautiously as the strictest rectitude can guide ye – yet must you suffer from this” that is, behaving morally while facing abuse, “— but armed with truth – honesty – and conscious integrity you will be sure of the plaudit and countenance of the good; - if therefore your repentance is sincere—” a change of which Soubise’s letter must have told him, “I congratulate you sincerely upon it – it is thy birth-day to real happiness,” repentance, reformation and rebirth connoting Christian conversion. Jekyll told the readers of Sancho’s Letters that Sancho had reformed after a period of rakery and gambling. Sancho reiterated his criticism of Soubise and, probably with racist abuse in mind, advised him to be above “revenge – if any have taken advantage either of your guilt or distress, punish them with forgiveness,” as Soubise has “experienced mercy and long sufferance in your own person.” Sancho will be happy to correspond with him, “if your conversion is real.” But he had to pay for the receipt of this letter, so with some asperity, Sancho explained what the five pence was, adding, “it would keep my girls in potatoes two days. — The time may come, when it

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may be necessary for you to study calculations”; according to Angelo, the Duchess lavished money on her favourite but Sancho seems to be hinting at Soubise’s eventually having a wife and family, signs of Sancho’s own reformation; “in the mean while, if you cannot get a frank direct to me under cover to his Grace the Duke of M[ontagu].” Sancho’s conclusion reiterated his suspicion of the genuineness of Soubise’s conversion: “You have the best wishes of your sincere friend (as long as you are your own friend.” He added personal note; “You must excuse blots and blunders – for I am under the of minion of a cruel head-ach – and a cough, which seems so fond of me.”21 The friend with whom Sancho was to collaborate on responding to the direct racism exemplified by Long and Estwick was John Meheux. Twenty-nine of Sancho’s letters were written to him. Their relationship is illustrated by a November 8, 1772, letter, written that is, within a month after his stern advice to Soubise, a mutual acquaintance. It begins: “Bravo! my ingenious friend! to say you exceed my hopes would be to lye.—” Meheux, born about 1749, so twenty-three when this was written, was a printmaker for whom Sancho sometimes submitted prints for publication.22 “At my first knowledge of you — I was convinced that Providence had been partial in the talents entrusted to you — therefore I expected exertion on your side — and I am not disappointed; go on, my honest heart, go on!” He refers to the subject of the print Meheux has just published: “hold up the mirror to an effeminate gallimaufry [mixture] – insipid, weak, ignorant, dissipated set of wretches – and scourge them into shame – the pen – the pencil – the pulpit – oh! may they all unite their endeavours – and rescue this once manly and martial people from the silken slavery of foreign luxury and debauchery.” Sancho joins himself to Meheux in their view of manhood against a “slavery” very different from that endured by “those of our unfortunate colour,” which he had written to Soubise. The manhood and artistry shared by Sancho and Meheux transcends colour. The reformed man of sensibility was still manly, as I have suggested, even if he was charged with effeminacy, largely because of his sympathy for women. This was the issue Sterne addressed in his characterization of Uncle Toby, discussed in Chapter 2. Sancho next told Meheux “When you see S[oubise], note his behaviour – he writes one word that he intends a thorough and speech reformation: I rather doubt him, but should be glad to know if you perceive any marks of it.” He ends by telling Meheux how he misses his wife—he was still serving the Montagus at their villa in Richmond: “I am

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heartily tired of the country; — the truth is – Mrs. Sancho and the girls are in town; - I am not ashamed to own that I love my wife – I hope to see you married and as foolish.” The masculine values he assumed they shared included being married, along with this conventional self-deprecation.23 Sancho’s participation in the debate, galvanized by Mansfield’s discharge of Somerset, was most evident in his letter of August 7, 1777 (Crewe misdated it 1768 and placed it second in volume I of the Letters.) It was in relation to an article published in the Morning Chronicle of June, that year, Sancho opened by exclaiming, “Lord! what is Man?” a question asked of God in Job (7:17) and Psalms (8:4). Sterne quoted the former in his consideration of slavery, to which we saw Sancho had responded in his first letter to Sterne. Sancho assumed throughout that the definition included himself. He can give an answer as authoritatively as any other writer (the most famous was Sancho’s admired Pope). One category can illustrate his perspective. “Deep politicians with palsied heads and relaxed nerves – zealous for the great cause of national welfare and public virtue – but touch not – oh! touch not the pocket – friendship – religion – love of country – excellent topics for declamation! – but most ridiculous chimera to suffer either in money or ease–” Sancho follows this by telling his friend, “for trust me, my Meheux, I am resolved upon a reform — Truth, fair Truth. I give thee to the wind! — Affection get thee hence! Friendship, be it the idol of silly chaps, with aching heads, strong passions, warm hearts, and happy talents, as of old used to visit Charles Street” in the City of Westminister—this referred to Meheux, for whose “aching head” Sancho supplied “a recipe” in his next paragraph. Sancho’s “reform,” then, is irony, a way by which he can list those qualities in “Man” he upholds against selfishness, and hypocrisy—truth, affection, friendship, strong passions, warm hearts and happy talents. Sancho’s recipe for Meheux’s headache “(the only thing that will relieve you), is the cutting off of your hair – I know it is not the ton, but when ease and fashion stand in the right – ornament and fashion on the Left”—the irresistible punning like Sterne’s. Sancho notes “the young part of the faculty were formerly obliged to submit to amputation, in order to look wise,” a significant hyperbole, given where Sancho is headed in this letter. He gives other literary references illustrating the negative and positive uses made of long hair in the past. In any case, wigs are in style: “Art imitates Nature so well in both sexes, that in truth our own growth is but of little consequences,” that “growth” a double

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entendre in the light of his reference to sex, with implications for “amputation.” Sancho he goes on, “Therefore, my dear M[eheux], part with your hair and head-ache together – and let us see you spruce, well shorn, easy, gay, debonair, as of old.” So far, Sancho has touched on castration ambiguously (the “amputation” of men’s “own growth”). His next paragraph is indirect, too, but unmistakably connecting Sancho to the publicly expressed concern over black male sexuality in the aftermath of the Mansfield decision. He writes, “I have made enquiry after L[inco]’s letter,” published in the Morning Chronicle, June 13, 1777, and signed “Linco,” the name of a character in Garrick’s “Dramatick Romance,” Cymon, performed in 1770, to music by Thomas Arne.24 Sancho knows the inside story of Meheux’s letter’s submission, as he tells him that “my friend R[ush] went to demand the reason for its not being published, and to reclaim the copy. The publisher smiled at him, and bid him examine the M[orning] C[hronicle] of J[une] 13, where he would find L. and the same paper of the 28th instant, where he would also find P[ro] B[ono]’s very angry reply.” Sancho tells Meheux he “went to the coffee house to examine the whole file, and was greatly pleased with your work”—that is, the letter Meheux had written and published under “LINCO,” a reply to the June 3, 1777, letter in the Chronicle, published under Pro Bono Publico, and addressed to Lord North, the prime minister, along with the epigraphs, “In seria discunt.” “Neglected trifles to importance turn.” It is apparent that the writer had read Long’s “Candid Reflections…on the Negro Cause.”25 Pro Bono Publico recommended “a measure which will do you present honor, and will make your name dear to succeeding generations, more dear to your country from time, which will evince this great advantage, honour, and service, done by reducing the number of Blacks among us, and, as far as possible, extirpating their disgraceful growth in a fair and beauteous land.” Following Mansfield’s own estimate, Long and Estwick had asserted that the freeing of Somerset could result in a huge growth in the number of black men in England, but to use “their” rather than “its,” makes clear it was a pun. It was this use of “growth” that Sancho had referred. Colour—fairness—pertained to the whole country, people and landscape. Pro Bono Publico first addressed the female part of “the ton” (to which Sancho referred), turning this trifle to importance. “To make the justice and propriety of this act more apparent, I would ask our Ladies of quality (from who the ton is derived) what peculiar pleasure they receive

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from the sight of a young negro attending their tea-table or their toilet,” the latter meaning the array of bodily preparations centred on a lady’s dressing table, a place and circumstances where close friends and lovers adjust themselves for intimate conversations. At some level, Pro Bono Publico’s picture of Negro boy and a lady in this intimate setting epitomized by Lady Mary Coke’s picture of Soubise with the Duchess of Queensberry, invoked consensual sex: “for from the familiarity with which they are admitted to the former, the conclusion is just, that they are occasionally present at the latter.” He expanded his focus, and the implication in “what peculiar pleasure,” by asking: “Is it that they [young male negroes] are more cleanly, more innocent, more faithful to their Lady’s honour or secrets, or that they are more beauteous and pleasing to the eye than youths of our own species?” His last point is a stark distinction, in contrast to Sancho’s reference to “our species” in his letter to Sterne, and his assumption in asking and answering, “What is Man?” in his letter referring to Pro Bono Publico’s public correspondence. Sancho wrote a second letter to Meheux a week later, declaring “I know full well thy silence must proceed from ill-health” and elaborating the meaning of the amputation of hair. “Why wilt thou not part with thy hair? I do believe it would relieve the past measure-” perhaps a pun on “growth,” but then referring to the most famous historical precedent. “Thou dost not fancy thy strength (like Samson the Israelite) hith in thy hair. Remember he was shorn thro’ folly – he lost his wits previous to his losing his locks” (Judges: 13–16). He was treacherously “shorn” by her servants at Delilah’s direction, but got his strength back after hiding out as his hair regrew. Her action has been seen by interpreters, including Sancho, as “figurative castration.”26 In his first letter, Pro Bono Publico had answered his own question, declaring just how “peculiar” that fashionable lady’s pleasure is. “Nature and common sense forbid that such ideas should so disgrace the quality of any Lady in this kingdom!” The pleasure is the same Long described lower-class, white women’s seeking in the characteristically large penes of black males in his outraged response to the Mansfield decision. “What account then can reason urge for this partiality to them? Are English features and English beauty of so little value? Or rather, are they grown so killingly handsome and bewitching, as to require an alloy of their charms by ingrafting on an English stock the negro’s full eye so that our Ladies may be stiled after Juno, [illegible], or their huge broad nose, their prominent lips, their smooth sleek skin of ebony, or their pretty curly pates?”

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Pro Bono Publico assumes ladies’ appearances are aimed at men, at the marriage market. “Have our Englishmen complained that beauty will be irresistible, if it makes further strides to perfection, and therefore the complaisant sex wish to throw a shade upon their charms, that the poor dear creatures, the men, may be able to live for their sakes.” Pro Bono Publico is sarcastic: women, whose lives are shaped to please men are copulating with black males (a different species), to modify their irresistibility of sexual attraction—and thereby not kill white men. Pro Bono Publico’s apprehensions of white females’ sexual power are evident, most dramatically, perhaps in their choosing to have sex with black males at the expense of whites. Pro Bono Publico imagines women’s response to his views, expressed by two conventional types: “The rigid prude, nay the virtuous coquette, may laugh at my doctrine and think my fears and my arguments futile, from being no danger being likely to arise from the attendance of their innocent, humble Blacks upon them; but allowing their virtue saintlike and unspotted, the power of fancy, at certain seasons, operates most forcibly on the female mind.” The natural power of menstruation overcomes women’s will. In addition he repeats Herodotus’ tale of “a black Queen of Africa, who looking on a white picture,” was delivered of a fair child.” Perhaps the reverse has not yet happened “with us.” Still, “from just reasoning we are to apprehend and guard against the like.” His admitted fears and apprehensions help explain his aggression. If “Ladies of quality and fashion will run these hazards, ‘tis fit they should pay largely for their follies; and which of them will refuse, when ‘tis to gratify a favourite passion and for the good of their country.” They should give up having black males around their tea tables and toilets, instead patriotically only have sex and reproduce with white ones. In 1781, an officer in the First Pennsylvania Regiment wrote in his journal about the Negro boys waiting on Virginia dinner tables: “I am surprised this does not hurt the feelings of this fair Sex to see these young boys of about Fourteen and Fifteen years Old to Attend them, their whole nakedness Expos’d and I can Assure you It would Surprise a person to see these d-d black boys how well they are hung.” His euphemized “d-d” seems to express his envy of the size of their penis.27 There was a genre of pictures depicting ladies with black boy servants, one influential example, William Hogarth’s “Taste in High Life,” (1742) a forerunner of “Marriage-a-la Mode,” which included a black page boy attending an overdressed fashionable, white lady. Many comparable prints

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and pictures have been described by Catherine Molineux. Not coincidentally, perhaps, a manuscript note in the book identifying the lady in Hogarth’s “Taste in High Life” as the Duchess of Montagu published in the wake of Sancho’s Letters may have conflated Sancho with Soubise, illustrating the danger Sancho ran.28 As I have mentioned, white women did marry black men, one of them the same year Pro Bono Publico wrote his first letter on the subject. She was the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Ball, the daughter of Londoners, probably working class, and respectably baptized in the church where she may have met Francis Barber, Dr. Johnson’s BritishJamaican servant. Of him Hester Thrale wrote in her journal that year, “Francis Barber was very well looking for a Black a moor.” His biographer, Michael Bundock, quoted Dr. Johnson’s response to this: “Oh Madam says he Francis has carried the empire of Cupid farther than many men. When he was in Lincolnshire seven years ago, he made hay as I was informed, with so much Dexterity that a female Hay Maker followed him to London for Love.” The portrait by Joshua Reynolds, “A Young Black” painted in the 1770s, may be of Barber, or perhaps of Reynold’s own black servant, showing a very handsome man. Bundock writes that attracting “women was an area of life in which he was very successful,” like his contemporary, Soubise. Thrale was always “hostile to Elizabeth Barber, too, refusing to write her name but calling her “his white wife.” Bundock’s account of the marriage shows the great interest taken by Johnson, Thrale, and Johnson’s friend, John Hawkins, in the colour of their second child (the first, named after Johnson, died at fourteen months). He quotes Johnson’s letter to Thrale of November 24, 1781: “Frank’s wife brought him a wench; but I cannot yet get intelligence of her colour, and therefore have never told him how much depends on it.” The immediate reason was the suspicion (expressed by Hawkins and Thrale, too) that Elizabeth Ball had had an adulterous relation with a white man. Thrale referred to “Black Barber and his White Wife’s Bastard,” and to a subsequent child born five years later as “Frank’s soidisant daughter,” “rather a remarkably fair Girl, & remarkably pretty,” although Frank was away when she was conceived, Thrale shared the view of white women who would marry a black man that Long and Pro Bono Publico expressed.29 Equiano got married in 1792, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported; “At Sohan [co]unty, Cambridge, Gustavus Vassa, the African, well known in England as the champion and advocate for procuring a suppression of

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the slave trade, to Miss [Susan] Cullen, daughter of Mr. C. of Ely in the same country.” As he was identified as “African” so, on their subsequent trip to Scotland, a newspaper reported, “GUSTAVUS VASSA, with his white wife is at Edinburgh, where he has published a letter of thanks to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, for their just and humane interference on the question of the SLAVE TRADE.” This interracial marriage was linked to antislavery, the combination which provoked the fear defined by Nussbaum, which might explain why Equiano’s reference to his marriage “scarcely registered” in the post-marital, fifth edition of his autobiography, published in 1792.30 Pro Bono Publico’s view of intermarriage and of black male sexuality is also brought to mind by reactions to the marriage of Julius Soubise, in India in 1794. Soubise had decided to try his fortunes there “after charges concerning one of the Duchess [of Queensberry’s] maid servants,” in 1777, sailing with his fellow St. Kitts native, Charles Lincoln, Soubise’s business partner there was Richard Blechynden, who recorded his shock, “when a friend told me that Soubise the Coffree was to marry Miss Pawson. I stared at this but only said that I had seen so much of human nature that I was surprised at nothing – and that this Country is famous for extraordinary marriages ” (emphasis on original). The bride’s father writes Cohen, speculated to “someone who was expressing his surprise at his daughter marrying Soubise,” that “he supposed the Coffree screwed her uptight – and that was the reason she preferred him – from which we must understand that he tried if matters would fit before marriage” (emphasis in original). The emphasized phrase refers to the size of Soubise’s penis or else, of course, of Miss Pawson’s vagina; the former seems more likely.31 To return to Pro Bono Publico’s first letter to the Chronicle in 1777. What he writes of sex between white ladies and black men could be construed as hypothetical. It was not so among the lower orders: “When my thoughts unwillingly descend to the intercourse of the Blacks with the females of the lower class, even allowing with the lowest and most contemptible wretches, the disgrace of their sex and their very species.” That species is “human,” we see from the next line; conversely, blacks are not human. “I am shocked at the depravity a human nature, and tremble with apprehensions”—an expression of his own sensibility—“for the rising generation [illegible] number of Mulatto children in [illegible] parts of this city [i.e. London] and suburbs and parts [illegible] to our country,

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and [indelible] shame to our Policy that has not prevented the contagion before it spread this far.” His puns and metaphors here sustained the theme of the damage to England’s white population Estwick and Long had predicted. Pro Bono Publico continued: “The instances of avowed marriages between some of our handsomest girls with these black rams, (as Shakespeare emphatically expresses it [referring to Othello]) are too numerous and even recited,” that is, repeated out loud—“I have myself known some, that would grace a higher sphere with their beauty,” he may feel at a social distance from lady leaders of the ton, but Pro Bono Publico knows girls of the lower class. They “debase themselves to wretches whose hearts appeared after as vicious begrim’d and black, as their visage.” These were the connotations of blackness in Anglo-American culture, further evidence for Mary Douglas’s account of the dangers posed by those deemed as impure. Pro Bono Publico drew from more of his experience: “I have known several stoop lower yet, and from cursed fancy, or some more cursed passion,” comparable to his ladies’ “peculiar pleasure,” “admit the sooty embraces of these corruptors of our species, not only without the plea of marriage, but without the possibility of it, the men being avowedly married to others.” So interracial sex between married couples was a degree better, although Pro Bono Publico’s point is the depth of debasement to which wretched white women can further sink. “Is this evil to be suffered to increase? No; Heaven forbid it; and as law only can forbid it,” the corollary of the Mansfield decision, “this is the time for law to interpose: I would therefore submit to your Lordship, (and am sure every lover of beauty of the fair sex, and of their country, in both Houses [of Parliament] must support the measure) that, in remedy of this growing evil and disgrace, it may be snuffed.” His first focus is white women, as he puts his proposal for Parliamentary action into statutory language. They are to be marginalized, too. “That every female debasing herself in the arms if any black whatever, shall be, and hereby is, for the first offence, declared INFAMOUS, and exposed to public view three market days as the outcast and shame of her sex and country; and that she be rendered incapable of receiving any public charity: and that for the second offence, she shall be transported, with her offspring, to some of the wilds, where a fair face never yet was once seen – beyond Otaheite, or elsewhere to enjoy her taste

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with her favourites, unmolested,”32 Otaheite was Tahiti. European travellers’ representation of Tahitian women’s freely given sexual intercourse was popularized for the British reading public, above all by Dr. John Hawkesworth’s 1772 Account of the Voyages Undertaken by Order of his Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, including those of Captain Cook. “It went into eighteen editions within sixteen years.” One writer declared it had a particular effect on women readers: Our page of Hawkesworth in the cool retreat, Fires the bright maid with more than mortal heat, She sinks at once into her lover’s arms.

Pro Bono Publico repeats his view of such a woman’s peculiar sexual appetite, rejecting white men but indiscriminately enjoying any man of colour.33 He turns to her black, male sexual partner: “and that, on conviction of the father’s villainous act of subverting our species, there can be no murmurings of complaint or injustice, if he be Tenducci’d in the first instance.” Giusto Fernando Tenducci was a famous castrato (1736–1790) living and performing in London, 1758 to 1765, and 1768 to 1790. In the interval, he sang in Scotland and Ireland, where he married the fifteen-year-old Dorothea Maunselle. The marriage was annulled in 1772 on grounds of “non-consummation or impotence.” (Like Sancho, Tenducci was painted by Gainsborough.) Pro Bono Publico assumed Lord North, MPs and the Morning Chronicles readers would know what his verb “tenducc’d” meant. Tenducci’s testicles had been removed prior to puberty to maintain his high-pitched voice, the word “castrato” conventionally euphemized as “musico,” or in the way Pro Bono Publico euphemized it.34 Meheux and Sancho knew that Pro Bono Publico proposed that black men in England who had sex with white women be castrated. Perhaps in reading this, Sancho recalled that the occasion of his decisive conflict with his white lady owners in Greenwich was “an amour infinitely criminal in [their] eyes.”35 Pro Bono Publico probably knew that castration of slaves had been legally sanctioned in Britain’s American colonies from this seventeenth century, as well as practised arbitrarily by slave masters, who may have originated in “outburst of sadism,” that same “bloody mindedness” recognized by slave codes. Jordan quotes an account from the Boston Newsletter of 1718, of a spontaneous castration of a “Negro Man” who

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had “accosted” “an English Woman, to lye with his, stooping down fearing none behind him, a Man observing his Design took out his knife, before the Negro was aware, cut off his unruly parts smack and smooth, the Negro jump up roaring and ran for his Life; the black now a Eunuch is alive and like to recover of his Wounds and doubtless cured of any more Wicked Attempts.” The report meant the white cut off the black man’s penis and his testicles. I did not use the words “castration” or “dismemberment,” which Jordan assumed can be used synonymously, obscuring whether they meant “all…unruly parts”; testicles alone; the penis alone; or both. Pro Bono Publico’s using “Tenducc’d” meant he would have been satisfied by the removal of the offending black man’s testicles, despite the provocation by the length of his penis. The Boston writer’s purpose was “a caveat for all Negroes wedding with the future with any white women least they fare with the like Treatment.” The concern was not so much the rape of a woman as interracial sex that would result in production of mixed—“breed” children. It would have reassured whites whether true or a symbolic truth.36 Jordan writes that “far more significant” than such “outbursts of sadism” was the “castration dignified by specific legislative sanction.” In 1697, the South Carolina, “Assembly ordered the castration of three Negroes who had attempted to abscond to the Spanish in St. Augustine”; in 1722, that Assembly ordered the castration of three Negroes who had attempted to abscond to the Spanish in St. Augustine”; in 1722, that Assembly required slavemasters to castrate slaves after they attempted to run away for the fourth time. To this can be added Hans Sloane recorded in the first volume of his Voyages to the Islands of Madera, Barbados , Nievies, S. Christopher and Jamaica in 1687–1688 (1707), that in Jamaica, “Punishment for Crimes of Slaves, are formally for Rebellious burning them, by nailing them down on the ground…and then applying the fire by degrees…gradually up to the Head, whereby their pains are extractant. For Crimes of a lesser nature Gelding or chopping off half the Foot with an Ax.” “Gelding” a word also used to describe the prevention of horses and farm animals from breeding, meant the cutting off the testicles, not the penis.37 Douglas included in her account of the general meaning of maintaining purity is that it was “the farmer’s duty to preserve the order of creation. So no hybrids…in the fields or in the herds….”38 North Carolina “authorized the use” of castration until 1758, paying jailers to do it, “and reimbursing masters whose slaves failed to survive.”

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Jordan suggests its repeal here in 1764 represented “the rising standards of humane treatment for all human beings,” following Georgia’s prohibiting slaveowners from “emasculating their slaves in 1755.” Virginia “almost entirely abandoned castration as a lawful punishment in 1769.”39 Such castrations spanned Pro Bono Publico’s call of 1777 and the one recorded in Equiano’s abolitionist autobiography of 1789. That was punishment for a black man’s having sex with a white woman, part of a protracted torture resembling Sloane’s description of the official punishment of resistant Africans a century before. It “was almost a constant practice of…whites to commit violent depreciation on the chastity of the female slaves.” He knew of “mates” on the ships where he served as a seaman, transporting cargoes of enslaved Africans, “to gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old…one of them practiced to such a scandalous excess, that one of our captains discharged the mate and others on that account.” White males had gang-raped (at least), an African child. One of Equiano’s points was the double standard: he referred to the castration “of a negro-man staked to the ground and cut most shockingly, and then his ears cut off bit by bit, because he had been connected with a white woman who was a common prostitute,” by contrast with the treatment of white men’s rape of an African: “as if it were no crime in the whites to rob an innocent African girl of her virtue but most heinous in a black man only to gratify a passion of nature, where the temptation was offered by one of a different colour, though the most abandoned women of her species.”40 In Jordan’s history, the explanation for white men’s castration of black men had included “the notion that Negro men were peculiarly virile, promiscuous and lusty,” that “they lusted after white women,” and that, “the Negro’s penis was larger than the white man’s,” in the words of a contemporary, in “the extraordinary greatness” of black man’s “members.” While Jordan does address whether this distinction is a scientific fact, he writes that “the specifically sexual aspect of castration was so obvious as to underline the white man’s insecurity vis-à-vis the Negro was fundamentally sexual,” and he explains it was projection of whites rape of black women. Its scale was registered by Long’s making mulattoes a demographic category.41 That greater “humanity” in the abandoning or forbidding castration expressed the official stance of lawmakers, but the psychology Jordan describes continued to exist, implemented privately or not. Enslavement

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was officially ended by the Civil War, and black males were given the power to vote, but such emancipation was followed by the official and unofficial systemization of Jim Crow. The “central argument the Klan put forward to oppose the modification of Jim Crow was that any replication of its barriers would lead to racial ‘amalgusation.’” It would lead “to sex between black men and white women.” Ida B. Wells documented white men’s preoccupation in her antilynching campaign of 1892–1900. Castration was one part of the rites of the lynching of black men, usually following accusation of raping a threatening to rape a white woman, even when the sex had been consensual, as Wells showed; the 1916 movie, “The Birth of a Nation” celebrated the rescue or by KKK men of a young white and the castrating and lynching of “her would-be assailant.” The film was given national recognition by Democratic segregationist Woodrow Wilson’s showing it at the White House.42 White populist castration coincided with a medicated version; Melissa Stern shows that “emasculation was central to scientific and popular discourse on lynching as well as its practice.” She documents that for “three decades from the 1890s through the 1920s, “prominent U.S. physicians recommended surgical castration as an alternative to lynch violence,” lending “scientific support for the ‘black rapist’ trope, but positioned themselves in progressive reformers offering a medical solution.”43 They had been preceded by other post-Civil War, Southern gynecological surgeons practising “female castration” to control or obliterate sexual desire in women experimenting on a black woman first.44 And that has been revived under the Trump administration, his doctor deceiving women whose reproductive organs they have been removing (they are poor, “illegal,” brown immigrants), with the excuse it was medically necessary.45 In America, lynchings and castration of men, too, occurred well into the twentieth century; the fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was castrated before being lynched in 1955, accused of sexually approaching a white woman. Three civil rights workers were lynched in 1964 by Klan members: James Earl Chaney, the black of the three, was castrated before being lynched. Southern Democrat Johnson was able to capitalize on enough public outrage at these killings to gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of that year. Republicans took over racist ideology, to be given powerful charge by the election of the African-American, Barack Obama, dramatizing the rise of black people against their subordination in an

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effort to maintain the apartheid that has characterized what became the United States. In his 1979 novel Just Above My Head, James Baldwin’s black protagonist wants to say to a white man “May be the difference between us is that I’ve never been afraid of the prick like you, like all men, carry between their legs and I never arranged picnics so I could cut it off you before large cheering crowds. By the way, what did you do with my prick once you’d cut the black thing off and held it in your hands? You couldn’t have cut yours off and sewn mine on? Is it standing on your mantel piece now, in a glass jar, or did you nail it to the wall?”.46 Jordan writes of the “gulf between Americans and Englishmen created by America’s racial slavery that such laws” requiring the castration of enslaved African men and their descendants, “should be passed in America,” from the latter seventeenth century through the 1760s, but vehemently disallowed in England.47 This ignores the castration included in the public dismembering of those condemned as traitors, preceding and following American laws. Moreover, we have seen that some white metropolitan Britons had the same apprehensions over freeing black males whose sexuality and sex between them and white women, beyond the reaction published by West Indians Long and Estwick. They included Nocturnal Revels’ stories of Soubise, and the belief that white women had a particular desire for black men’s “parts.” Pro Bono Publico called for the passage of the same laws requiring the castration of black men who had sexual intercourse with white women, siring contaminated offspring. He threatened civilized Britain with the barbarity of American slavery against which Somerset’s lawyers had argued. The West India interest had taken up Mansfield’s suggestion, then Long’s, to attempt to make slavery unequivocally legal by sponsoring Parliamentary legislation. Historian Kathleen Wilson has suggested that one challenge faced by Britons in “forging” a white nation was the presence of enslaved and free black people, visible signs of Britan’s troubled imperial identity. They include Sancho’s and the other published voices of James Albert Ukawsaw Groniosaw, Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cuguano and the American visitor, Phillis Wheatley, amidst what Wilson estimates of the ten to fifteen thousand black people living in London. They proved their humanity and indicted “European civilization,” pluralizing “the universal.” Wilson describes the argument by some whites that reducing the number of black men, “would stave off the inevitable emasculation of English men that Africans’ alleged sexual powers and lasciviousness effected.” (Wheatley,

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one reviewer said, was a “lusty black wench,” sharing Africans’ alleged lasciviousness.) Nussbaum writes that national “fears about the loss of territory” during the earlier phase of “the Seven Years’ War seemed to fuel British [white, male] anxieties about metaphorical emasculation in the later eighteenth century.” Can one see Sterne’s Uncle Toby, emasculated at the siege of Namur, as an early expression of such psychology?48 But Britons managed to keep their millions of enslaved and otherwise subordinate, dark imperial subjects by and large away from metropolitan shores for another two hundred and seventy years. But some white Britons were able to implement such deep-seated wishes away from the homeland; their “horrific crimes” of “systematized violence” in defence of British rule in Kenya in the 1950s, included the castration of Kikuyu men, deemed Mau Mau rebels by “specially designed instruments or by beating a suspect’s testicles ‘till the scrotum burst.’” They were also able to treat women suspects comparably, thrusting broken bottles, gun barrels, knives, sticks and vermin into their vaginas.49 Pro Bono Publico’s 1777 argument had continued, “as these punishments,” public humiliation and transportation for white women, castration for black men, “will be but the just reward of their voluntary transgressions, there can be no murmuring or complaint of injustice: and as ‘tis presumed none but the shameless prostitute could descend to such infamy, all her sex must applaud the sentence and hold the author of the punishment in the highest veneration.” The author means the black man’s female accuser, giving her the kind of power of which Pro Bono Publico is so apprehensive. He expresses his obsessive concern with effects of interracial sex on white women in his final paragraph, forecasting that, as things were going, it would be “in the destruction and decay of that beauty, which at present is the greatest honour and ornament of these kingdoms.” It was a “most sincere respect for beauty and the fair sex, chiefly persuades one to touch upon this subject” and his argument propounded by others, he hoped that from Lord North’s agreement and action, “all may be loud in your praise for this most essential service.” He added: “N.B. It is hoped that for the encouragement of our own youths, proper indulgence will be made for apprentices, particularly those that are obliged to take from the parish under a penalty.” He would explain this in his reply to Linco.50 Linco’s June 13 answer was headed, “To PRO BONO PUBLICO,” and like the latter’s letter, was headed with a Latin epigraph: “Scribimus

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indocti doctique”—Each dangerous blockhead dares to write—along with, “Those who cannot write and those who can, All rhyme and scrawl, and scribble to a man.”

Linco first tells “Mr. PUBLICO” that his intention had been to reply immediately he read his letter on Tuesday last; then he addressed the delay Sancho mentions. He raises questions of honesty and self-interest from the outset: “How far you have treated your subject with candour, I leave to the judicious readers; every line tells me that you are a party concerned, and perhaps an injured one. You as an husband are honoured with antlers, as a brother with fears, or as a lover, with suspicions, by some, one whose colour is in opposition to your own.” The animus of Pro Bono Publico’s letter and its focus points to his own wife’s having rejected him in favour of sex with a black man, or that his sister or lover are attracted by a black man. To turn the knife, Linco adds that this threatening man has a heart not vicious, begrimed and black, “but perhaps whose heart is much more worthy of every heavenly blessing than thine is,” distinguishing the conventionally negative denotation of black from its application to “Ethiopians” and their descendants. Linco suggests Pro Bono Publico is confused by or ignorant of mythology and takes the opportunity to suggest he has attributed divine descent to black people: “I hardly know what you would make out, by giving our ladies a name similar to Juno, who was possessed of all the irresistible charms of grace, beauty and good nature; and understanding was deluded by her brother Jupiter, in the form of a crow. You by this, I suppose, mean to infer, that the Ethiopians are descendants from the line of Jupiter, or that grace and beauty from that time, have had a peculiar attachment to that colour: but you forget that she was the protector of the fair sex, and that her most notorious fault was jealousy, of which I now suspect you to be a sharer; for you must be exceedingly suspicious, and have a mean opinion of that beautiful part of the Creation, which you would feign persuade the world you admired. Indeed they ought to be very much obliged to you.” Linco asks: “But pray, where’s your delicacy, to suppose one weak enough to yield their charms to them, or any one, without resistance?”

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This was to accuse Pro Bono of a lack of sensibility, embodying respect for women’s self-assertion under such circumstances: “My good Mr. Publico we [men] are apt to misinterpret female civilities, and to suppose everything sensual that is kind and friendly, which I hope is now the case with you.” Pro Bono Publico had brought to bear the self-interested reductionism of a male against which women had long contended, incapable of the mutual respect sensibility promised. “But why so exceedingly rigid against the young black boy?” The double entendre suggests Pro Bono Publico is as aroused by such a figure as those ladies of their toilet. Perhaps Linco is suggesting Pro Bono Publico is homosexual, illustrating the English “hostility to sodomy,” an “hostility that exceeded perhaps anywhere else in Europe.”51 But why see this relation as sexual at all? “Is it not an act of humanity to protect the stranger from ruin and insult, particularly in the early part of life as they in general are brought into this fair and beautiful land when children?” (Sancho had been a child when “placed in a family.”) Linco’s irony and sensibility are clear. And “shall they after many years labour and study to serve their protectors with every return in the power of a dependent, grateful heart to do – shall they then be forsaken, because they are at maturity?—” implying sexual maturity, it seems, and Meheux again could have had his friend Sancho’s story in mind: “it is an opinion generally received, that they are sincere friends, and faithful servants, and particularly to where there is an attachment; and where there is not, I suppose they are like other people.” That is, not a different species. Sancho had recently told Charles Browne the same thing. “That they are admitted to the toilet, is an assertion I cannot credit, and suppose that thought to be but the child of an ill-natured imagination.” Pro Bono Publico’s view was a sexual fantasy. Still, Linco does share his fundamental objection to miscegenation. “A mixture of breed is a thing I do not recommend,” there in agreement with Pro Bono Publico, less adamant terms; of course, Sancho had married a black woman, after having had sex with whites, “but that they will mix with and stand before many of us [whites] in a future state [i.e. in heaven] is what I firmly hold as part of my faith and that we shall not be distinguished there for the colour of our skin, but the quality of our actions.” Sancho asserted this several times in his own words, including to Meheux. “But as I think you are a man, I’ll only suppose you in a country where there was no other women than black, that you should be so continually with them, and that your first advances, or offers of love, you should be

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treated in the manner prescribed by yourself, and if you would not run the hazard of such a detection, I here declare you no man.” Pro Bono Publico had omitted mention of black women entirely—Linco is saying, “man up.” Either Pro Bono Publico has had sexual relations with black woman, or he is unmanly, a eunuch, like Tenducci. Appropriately, Linco moves here to the black men whom Pro Bono Publico would have castrated. “You must allow that they have every sensation equal, if not superior to yourself, and would now debar them of women? If you think as a man, you must know it to be a happiness, and the principal one a man wishes to live for.” Linco expands his notion to a relation with a woman—a wife—that subsumes sex; Sancho was extremely happy in his marriage, as he recently told Mehuex, and implied that Soubise should marry, too, a measure of reform Jekyll included in his account of Sancho’s life. “As you seem so well acquainted with the number of Ethiopians in this metropolis, it cannot be strange for you, that for one woman, there are at least fifty men, (who act as servants, while those men who would fill their places, are employed in our soldiery or navy) and she cannot be wife to more than one of those men, if she is, she will be tired and suffer by our laws, - tho’ you will not allow a single privilege except slavery.” Inter-racial sexual relations—whether engaged in by whites or blacks—can be explained by wartime’s demographic pressure. There are already laws against bigamy on the books, equally applicable, whatever the colour of the skin of offenders. The permanent transportation to the Americas of white women and their “mulatto” children is enslavement. “The great evil you seem so much to complain of,” that is, miscegenation, “must consist in there not being a sufficient number of women of their own colour, or I cannot suppose that they [black men] would give them [white women] preference.” Still addressing Pro Bono Publico’s preoccupation, Linco adds: “And as to a white woman yielding to such a man [a black man] wantonly, or from the forceable operating power of whim or fancy (as you are pleas’d to term it,) is what I disallow.” He refines it: “If you mean a desire of such an intercourse for variety sake, I must declare you to have a mean opinion of the sex in general, and deserve only their censure, as you reflect on all for the behavior of some thoughtless, indiscreet, with whom you are acquainted.” This was consistent with what Meheux had said earlier on Pro Bono’s lack of respect for women, but it seems to repeat his disapproval of interracial sex.

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“That a woman may be overcome, I’ll allow, by flattery and sophism, they are made to listen.” He quotes a warning. No danger but in flight, who stays to hear The well-told tale may date her ruin year.

The chief pathogen is not inter-racial sex, but self-interested, sexist seduction—this was the typical warning conveyed by sentimental novels, Richardson’s at the head of them. “So that when the poison begins to operate, and indiscretion gets the start of prudence, then lose their reason, and with that their honour, not considering at that moment, with what our whom they are, for which, on reflection, they are not less blamable than though the man were white.” On the other hand, how can the men be blamed, that is, for interracial sex, “when there are so few of their own colour among them; and I must say, I think the women less faulty for the evil ” whoever the man is, “than for the suffering a familiarity to grow to such a pitch, for them to suppose they might request or ravish from her the last favour.” Implicitly, he means whether the man be black or white. “Numberless are the white men in the West Indies who have wives of their own colour, not withstanding which they have three or four, black mistresses; so that the depravity is not in their side, but on ours.” This was a dimension that Pro Bono Publico ignored, as had as Long and Estwick in their booklets, although Long admitted as much in his History of Jamaica. Linco went on: “one instance clears to me the barbarity of your soul, that you are inclined to throw the shameless and abandoned [poor white women] in their way, to seduce them to ‘a voluntary transgression,’ for which they shall suffer as your wisdom has suggested,” i.e. castration. And then, “the Author of their punishment shall be held in the highest veneration by her own sex in general. Oh! Humanity, where is thy mask.” Then Linco quotes Sterne’s reply to Sancho: “I shall now conclude with what Sterne says when writing to one of the colour which thoroughly corresponds with my own heart.” This was to quote Sterne’s first reply to Sancho, implying that Linco was white: “But why her brethren! or yours! any more than mine? It is by the finest tints, and more insensible gradations that nature descends from the fairest face about St. James’s, to the sootiest complexion in Africa. At which tint of these is it, that the ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, where mercy is to vanish with them? But ‘tis no uncommon

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thing for one half of the world to use the other half like brutes, and then endeavour to make them so.” Linco added as an “NB,” “Your alluding to Mr. T”—i.e. the castrato, Tenducci, “is an unmanly reflection, for which you deserve manly contempt; it shows the rancour of a mean soul, the product of a weak head and a heart ‘begrim’d’ with inhumanity, to sport at another man’s misfortunes.” Tenducci’s misfortunes were the annulment of his marriage as well as his being castrated as child. Linco asks Pro Bono Publico “to make clear to the world what you mean when you say, ‘Debase themselves to wretches, whose hearts appeared after as vicious, begrim’d and black as their visage.’” If Pro Bono Publico still has his testicles he is unmanly; he may have a white skin, but his heart is dirty. He adds “Your N.B. seems too abstruse for me to form a proper idea of what you would be at.”52 Meheux’s quotation of Sterne’s letter to Sancho and Sancho’s references to Meheux’s reply to Pro Bono Publico is more evidence that Sancho had discussed with Meheux how to answer Pro Bono Publico’s proposals to Lord North. We can read this now with the post-Mansfield reaction in mind, and see its republication in that context as a further placing of Sterne’s voice, stimulated by Sancho, onto the side of antislavery and of sympathy for black people. Sancho wrote Meheux that “P[ro] B[ono]’s answer of June 20th was very angry-indeed the poor fellow foams again, and appears as indecently dull as malice could wish him.” They had fun choosing the name Linco from the play by Sancho’s much admired Garrick for the rebuttal of Pro Bono Publico; Linco represented real public good, rejoicing when “Justice has taken up the sword and the scales.” Being “above temptation, or below it,” Linco was impervious to evil does, to the devil’s efforts to inflict sorrow and pains on people: I laugh, and I sing, I am blithsom and free The rogue’s little sting, It can never reach me.

A loyal friend, “I will stand your friend, tho’ I lose my place for it” he successfully defended women’s “honour.” Pleased by the heroine’s “modesty,” Linco declares, “a woman may trust me with her innocence.” He is essentially playful: the audience first hears Linco “singing without,” offstage:

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Care flies from the lad that is merry, and with evil defeated and right restored, urges, Sing high derry derry, The day is our own, Be wise and be merry Let sorrow alone.53

Pro Bono Publico then addressed this answer “To Mungo’s fair and learned Cousin German, LINCO,” implying that Linco was the child of a marriage between a white and a black, his being “learned” in contrast to the pidgin-speaking Mungo. He identified the author—Virgil—of his own Latin epigraph and adapted Linco’s: “Or Blockheads may praise each other’s strain.” It is feasible he knew Meheux’s identity and of his friendship with the composer, Sancho, although Sancho did not publish “Mungo’s delight” until 1779. “Nothing but my apprehensions, lest silence might gratify your vanity with a victory, whereas the futility and fatuity of your arguments might seem to triumph over truth and reason, could prevail on me to mispend my time in answering your frivolous and absurd attack on Pro Bono Publico.” What or who a writer is doesn’t matter; “to the public: the service he may propose, or the injury he is like to commit is all they are to consider”; still, he cannot resist refuting Linco’s suggestion that Pro Bono Publico has been injured or threatened by his white womenfolks’ contact with black male sexuality: “tis therefore almost useless to add, that you are as erroneous as ridiculous in your ideas of him.” His only object is “the public good in wishing to diminish the number of Blacks which disgrace our City and Police [i.e. policy], and in labouring to prevent the further admission of them into this kingdom, a view widely shared. Neither “can the writer furnish brains for every reader; therefore not to LINCO, (Who seems to fond of his sooty tribe), but to the public” he submits his “design.” He further displays his classicism in explaining his reference to Juno, giving and translating Homer’s epithet, “full eyed” to her. “That …it is more applicable to BLACKS than to us, without any connection to Juno” and so forth, and can “properly be applied to his [Linco’s] fraternity, the BLACKS”; it is Linco who has made a “strange jumble” in applying such mythology to Pro Bono Publico’s case. Pro Bono Publico writes: “MUNGO’s Cousin asks. – ‘Why so rigid against the young Black boy, &c. &c.” He ignores or misses the possible implicated that he has homosexual desires. “His own words will answer it [the question] – boys will be men; and ‘you must allow that they (the

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Blacks) have every sensation equal, if not superior to yourself; and would you debar them of women?’ Could I suppose any of our Mungos capable of writing that, I would assert our Linco not to have a drop of European blood in his veins, be he whom he may.” Pro Bono Publico goes on: “I trust every Briton, male and female, will answer with me – exclude these absolutely from all commerce with our females, whose beauty (whether the ladies are obliged to me or not, as LINCO elegantly doubts) I would preserve from the slightest contamination.” This was Long’s metaphor but it was a common one, as we have men illustrating the psychology Douglas describes. “For as to ‘my delicacy in supposing a woman weak enough to yield her charms to them, or any one, without resistance,’ it matters not whether the debasement of our species proceeds from the arts or violence of the Blacks”; he was horrified over the reproductive, demographic outcome, although his metaphors and juxtaposition expressed his horror of the preceding copulation between a black man and a white woman as well; “but from the number of tawny children seen daily in our streets the intercourse is shamefully manifest, nor does it signify how wretchedly the woman may be, the stain is fixt and, I fear, spite of my efforts, will rest indelible on our species.” Linco’s pointing out that the sex ratio among black people is fifty men to one woman only supports Pro Publico Bono’s argument. He adds that he would lay “such a heavy tax on those who might be brought over, as would prohibit the introducing more of them into the Kingdom.” This was Sharp’s concern, too. As to what Linco says “of the punishment of the woman who could debase herself to the sooty arms of a Black, I am satisfied she must be the most shameless of her sex, the rest must applaud the sentence; and the author of the punishment, that is, ‘the Minister who has had the law enacted for that wise and salutary purpose,’ be held by them and all mankind, (except LINCO and his tribe) is the highest veneration.” “This is logic Linco is a stranger to, therefore exclaims on it; - ‘O Humanity!’ – I hope he is well paid for his sigh by his Black fraternity, as well as for the extraordinary pains he has taken with this curious production.” Linco’s exclamation on behalf of humanity is entirely false, his motives mercenary. Pro Bono Publico is not done with humanity, the central appeal of the case against racism as well as slavery. “In fine, his arguments convict each other, therefore to his humanity, and the thanks of the fair sex, for the happy and beautiful union he would encourage among them. I shall, for

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ever, leave him, having said a few words to his N.B.” “I know no impropriety, in the word Tenduccied, ‘tis no unmanly reflection, nor meant to any particular person, but a proverbial saying among us, more delicate than any I recollect on the same subject; as such, and such early, I did and will again, use it.” Finally, Pro Bono Publico explains the note that Linco found “abstruse.” “Every person acquainted with our laws must know, that in several parts of the country, the gentleman are obliged to take (in rotation) parish apprentices, under a penalty, therefore as the law for servants was not then sufficiently known, my N.B. was meant that these apprentices should be excluded from paying fees, so to encourage our own youth in preference to all Blacks whatsoever.” This had been another issue discussed by Long. He concludes: “So is the learned LINCO and his tribe answered, if not refuted, by PRO BONO PUBLICO June 16.”54

Having told Meheux of his great pleasure “upon the second reading of your work,” against the rest of the file in the coffee house, Sancho returned to his recommendation that Meheux cut his hair to cure his headache. “All fine geniuses” he mentions Pope and Spenser—“suffer from the head-ach,” and he calls Meheux’s “work” (the published letter under the name Linco), a blend of “the Gentleman and a Scholar.” Sancho writes on a number of occasions about Meheux’s interest in women, in his next letter, for example, “my dear M[eheux], I know you have a persuasive elegance among women…you have many women—” So in this one referring to Pro Bono Publico’s recommendation, Sancho concludes by telling “Mungo’s cousin,” “Your cure in four words, is CUT-OFF-YOUR-HAIR!”.55 A month later, Sancho again wrote Meheux about this public correspondence over the proposed castration of black men. Its chief subject was Sancho’s misplacing of a letter, a “bloody letter,” which had accompanied Meheux’s gift to Sancho’s family of a pig—other correspondents also sent them food, knowing how welcome it was to a family scraping by. Sancho describes the scene of his family’s joyful reception of the pig, “the group of heads…assembled at the opening of the fardel – the exclamation – oh! the finest – fattest – cleanest – why, sir, it was a pig of pigs,” and Sancho

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lists the meals they made of it over the weekend, which leads him to: “On Saturday-night the news man brought me the two papers of J[une] 13th and 20th ” the published correspondence between Linco and Pro Bono Publico—“right joyful did I receive them – I ran to Mrs. Sancho – with I beg you will read my friend’s sensible and spirited defense of – of, &c. – She read – though it broke in upon her work – she approved.” But then, continued Sancho, those papers “—disappeared – without hands – or legs – eyes − ” perhaps an allusion to the loss of testicles, as had been his writing to Meheux about a cutting of hair, analogous to the papers’ subject. He quickly changes from their loss of “eyes” to the eyes of those his family, looking for them. And there would seem to be same association Sancho intimated to Meheux, between the blood-splattered letter (the form with which Sancho so deeply identifies) and the subject contained in this one, including the gelding of black men.56 Sancho’s last paragraph asks Meheux, “Where is the Jack ass business? – do not be lazy,” which refers to his last-letter-but-one to Meheux, headed “JACK-ASSES.”57 In it, Sancho painted a scene of “barbarity” (its subject and point of view comparable to one of Hogarth’s58 ), wherein “a tall, lazy villain was bestriding his poor beast (although loaded with two panniers of potatoes at the same time), and another of his companions, was good-naturedly employed in whipping the poor sinking animal – that the gentleman-rider might enjoy the two fold pleasure of blasphemy and cruelty —” This is irony, expressing the values of sensibility and the reformation of manners. Sancho proposed either “impressing vagrants,” a pun, or heavily taxing “the poor jack-asses” to redress this barbarism. He preferred the former (“both for thy sake and mine,” identifying himself and Meheux as jack-asses); “I am convinced we feel instinctively the injuries of our fellow creatures.” And Sancho insisted on Meheux’s writing a piece “on behalf of the honest sufferers,” the kind of collaboration in the case of Pro Bono Publico’s cruelty that same year. And again, Sancho linked this humanity to Sterne’s, as Meheux had in his reply to Pro Bono Publico: “if I ever had a kind of sympathetic (call it what you will) for that animal-and do I not love you (i.e. Meheux]? –Before Sterne wrote them into respect—” This refers to one chapter in Tristram Shandy, and another in A Sentimental Journey, which had particular meaning for Sancho and Sterne.59 Sancho then explains, again humorously, conflating human asses with the animal kind: “what has ever (with me) stamped a kind of uncommon value and dignity upon the long ear’d kind of the species, is, that our Blessed Saviour, in his day of worldly

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triumph, chose to use that in preference to the rest of his own blessed creation,” he quotes the biblical passage, and said he was convinced “that general inhumanity of mankind proceeded first from the cursed false principles of common education and secondly from a total indifference…to the Christian faith.” Conversely, “a heart and mind impressed with a firm belief of the Christian tenets, must of course exercise itself in a common uniform general philanthropy – such a being carries his heaven in his breast.” Such “be thou!” he tells Meheux, “therefore write me a Philippick against the misusers of Jack-asses — it shall honour a column in the Morning Post – bray my thanks to you – thou shalt figure away the champion of poor friendless asses here – and hereafter shalt not be ashamed in the great day of retribution.” He repeats Meheux was to write another piece on his behalf, which he could publish the paper, whose editor, we recall was the racist Henry Bate.60 After familial news and exchanges, again referring to Dame Sancho, Sancho returns at his conclusion to the great day of retribution, coupled with his assertion that the Christian faith must exercise itself in general humanity: he described reading a pamphlet challenging the idea of eternal Damnation, a thought Sancho believes is derogatory to the “benefit of the blessed expiation of the Son of God – who died for the sins of all – all – Jew, Turk, Infidel, and Heretic; - fair – sallow – brown—tawney—black – and you – and I – and every son and daughter of Adam,” repeating the vision in the response to Pro Bono Publico. In 1777 and 1778, Sancho published three letters signed “AFRICANUS.” His letters under that name demonstrated learning, humanity, benevolence and patriotism in the run-up to the war with France and Britain’s American colonies, contradicting the stereotypes of black men (in particular), advanced in the wake of Mansfield’s, freeing of Somerset. Sancho’s purpose anticipated Crewe’s of four years later, “shewing that an untutored African may possess abilities equal to a European.” Reviews of Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral told “the Publick,” that she was “brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave.”61 Her book had been preceded in 1772 by A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, his Christian name preceding his African, then calling him An African Prince, that exceptional rank, like Oroonoko’s

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rather than a mere African; and also As Related by Himself , because he had dictated it to a young follower of Lady Huntingdon (Wheatley’s sponsor), not literate in English himself. The title of the narrative by Ottobah Cuguano, published in 1787, made its abolitionist purpose explicit: Thoughts and Sentiments on the Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great Britain by Ottobah Cuguano, A Native of Africa, emphasizing his literal origin. He had been baptized with the name John Stewart and freed in 1772 as a result of the Somerset decision. He tells his readers, after writing that some of his, “fellow-servants” were “turned away” for helping him get baptized, “that I might not be carried away and sold again” into slavery, were themselves. “turned away for it,” all living with that threat over their heads. And “I have put my African name to the title of this book,” that is, to serve antislavery.62 Equiano’s autobiography was published two years later, and two years after the establishment of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. He put his African name in capitals, THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO, then in smaller type, the name by which he had long been known, or Gustavus Vassa followed by The African, that origins created for abolitionist purpose, comparable to Crewe’s An African. In all likelihood he was born in South Carolina.63 Equiano’s definite article was more assertive than Crewe’s, An African. This was the kind of “intentional visibility” Wilson observes. The first of the Letter by AFRICANUS, published in the General Advertizer, was headed “The outline of a plan for establishing a most respectable body of Seamen, to the number of 20,000, to be ever ready for the manning of a fleet upon twelve days notice.” Seamen on merchant ships negotiated their wages at the end of each voyage by an “Article of Agreement,” written often on a pre-made form. (Adam Smith had taken up the subject of seamen’s wages in The Wealth of Nations, published the year before Sancho’s letter.) There were no such articles for seamen working for the Royal Navy, and their wages were “remarkable low,” set first in 1653, and not adjusted for inflation since. Charles R. Foy shows that a large proportion of sailors, both on naval ships and merchantmen, were black, playing a central role in Britain’s empire. Some were run away’s from slavery. Sharp singled out seamen as the largest proportion of London’s black poor in a letter soliciting support from the Archbishop of Canterbury for Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, in 1786.

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It took the Spithead Mutiny of 1797 to raise their wages. Sancho’s words can also be seen in part as a response to Estwick on impressment and his comparison of the flogging of sailors to that of slaves.64 AFRICANUS “humbly” opined his plan would be a profanity study, “even to the Lords of the Admiralty.” He proposed that each seaman be “inrolled upon his Majesty’s books at the rate of 5 [pounds] per annum for life,” paid quarterly or half-yearly, on demand. Let these “books be opened for them in all his Majesty’s different [naval] yards and sea parts,” where their addresses, ages, time served were “fairly entered, each man to bring a certificate from his ship signed by the captain,” or someone else deputed by the seaman himself. AFRICANUS wished seamen’s families to be cared for by an institution in each port of “a kind of asylum, or house of refuge, for those sons of these honest tars,” at received there at six years old, “to be taught navigation; or after common school learning, to be bound, to such parts of ship-building as they by nature are most inclined to; such as chuse sea service,” here emphasizing free will, as in the case of seamen’s collecting wages, but by youngsters, then “to be disposed on board his Majesty’s ships at fifteen years old, and to be enrolled upon the pension books after ten years faithful service, unless better provided for.” The Navy, then, was responsible for their seamen’s children’s lives after six. AFRICANUS includes girls and women in his scheme, and again we think of the Sancho’s working all together in their shop. “Might their be some plan hit upon to employ the daughters, as well as the sons of poor sailors: Does not our Fisheries (if they ever happen to be attended to) open many doors of useful employment for both sexes.”65 AFRICANUS shows his republicanism in his advice on paying for all this: “The pension of five [pounds] per man for 20,000, amounts only to 100,000 [pounds]; let this be taken from the Irish list, it will surely be better employed, than in the present mode for pensioners of noble blood.” The “Irish pensions list was one of more notorious abuses of the power England had over Ireland, using income from Ireland to fund dependents of the Crown,” their qualification one of blood. AFRICANUS extends his practical proposals to include the aged, too: the books should be kept by “under officers who have served with reputation…a decent retreat for them in the evening of life.” Finally, he prays that an “able hand, guided by a benevolent heart” strongly recommend such a plan so that “the honoured name of England

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be rescued from the scandalous censure of man-stealing” that is, impressment, on which recruitment for the Royal Navy depended because of the low wages and harsh conditions. Estwick had shown his concern for the treatment of men impressed by the navy, declaring it could be much worse than the treatment of slaves. In 1777, the much reprinted The Sailors Advocate asked of a man imprisoned as a seaman “on board a Man of War,” how can it be expected “[he] should fight for the Liberty of others, whilst he himself feels the pango of Slavery.” The term “man stealers” written by AFRICANUS had to bring to mind the enslavement endured by Somerset and others enslaved or re-enslaved. Long had said that Britain’s national honour was at stake in maintaining the slave trade. If AFRICANUS advocated a system of lifetime wages, for both sexes, to replace one of forced labour. The reader can infer a parallel replacement for slave labour.66 The second letter Sancho published under the name AFRICANUS was also printed in The General Advertizer, “Palace Yard,” in Westminister close to Sancho’s shop, March 12, 1778. It was “a plan for greatly diminishing the national debt,…in case a war with the House of Bourbon should be inevitable.” He began by vindicating their representative African, origin from post-Mansfieldian denigration: “The Romans were wont to decree public honors on the man who was so fortunate as to save the life of a citizen – a noble act of policy founded on true humanity, to stimulate the endeavours of every individual towards acts of benevolence and brotherly regard for each other.” The writer is equally an individual, not at odds with other citizens but related to them by “brotherly regard,” an ideal transcending difference which Sancho upheld throughout his private correspondence, along with freely and wittily referring to being black. AFRICANUS, then, illustrates this generalization about feelings (benevolence) characteristic of the language of sensibility. “Activated by a zeal to my prince, and love to my country,” in private, Sancho expressed ambiguity about that relationship—“I mean to deserve well of both,” that is, as an African,—“by publishing this plan for three or four years supplies, without oppressing the merchant, mechanic or labouring husbandman…or laying any fellow-subject under the least selfdenying restraint.” This piece has the same republican orientation as AFRICANUS’ previous letter, which proposed funding Naval seamen and their families from the Irish list.

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“Mr. Editor, we all know that in noble families plate is merely ideal wealth-and in very many houses of your first connection and overgrown fortunes, there are vast quantities of it old and useless, kept merely for the antiquity of its fashion and the ostentatious proof of ancestry.” One might compare this family kinship and the “noble blood” entitling Irish pensions, to the decisive significance of colour to enslavement, and its obliteration of family ties which defenders of enslavement asserted: Africans did not have family feelings, an assertion also refuted by AFRICANUS’ concern for the children and womenfolk of seamen. The French contributed plate to their mint in the last war, and the Catholic clergy showed the laity, “the glorious example of aiding the state.” Britons conventionally declared the French inferior, enslaved as they were by the Catholic church and absolute monarchy. “We, to one immortal honour have never yielded them the palm in courage, wisdom, or gallantry. Let every gentleman, whose landed property exceeds 500 [pounds] per annum giving up “without reserve his useless family plate, all except the knives, forks, and spoons, which might be deemed useful and necessary.” As butler to the Dukes of Montagu, Sancho must have been familiar with these display items, and the ceaseless labour of detarnishing them. We can imagine the zestful irony with which Sancho hypothesized this surrender. “I trust, such is the exalted spirit of the British nobility and gentry, that they will resign with cheerfulness what they can do very well do without.” He added the proposal that “the quantities so nobly given be printed against the names of the patriotic donors” of plate, etc., which he has said is useless, kept for fashion and ostentation, “as a lasting testimony of their zeal for the public good,” another republican value which he upholds throughout his correspondence, “and a glorious proof of the eternal values of this queen of isles!” The would be publicly shamed into public good.67 The following month (April 29, 1778) Sancho wrote a third letter signed AFRICANUS to the editor of the same paper, again nominally in support of the British war effort, and apparently tongue-in-cheek Africans could display wit, too. While the war was “a present crisis of national jeopardy” in which the “vast bounties offered for able-bodied men showeth the zeal and liberality of our wise law givers and indicateth a scarcity of men,” they have overlooked one resource, “powder proof,” he writes with a pun, “light active young fellows”: his scheme was “to form ten companies at least out of the very numerous body of hair-dressers — they are for the most part, clean, clever, young men—” Linked to his

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letter to Meheux’s rebuttal of Pro Bono Publico by his concluding CUT OFF YOUR HAIR (rather that cutting off genitalia), the vision was a further comment on Pro Bono Publico’s outrage over young black men’s attending white ladies at their toilet, as well as his demographic concerns.68 Sancho’s tongue may have probed his cheek in several other ways. Diana Donald notes that frequently hair-dressers were caricatured as “effeminate friseurs ” who, with valets, “climb ladders to dress the grotesque coiffures of their mistresses.” (The annual directory of Covent Garden prostitutes, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, refers to a black hairdresser serving them in 1788.) In 1768, Olaudah Equiano had worked as a hairdresser in Coventry Court, Haymarket. AFRICANUS’ proposal would be of “immense” “utility”—“the ladies, by once more getting the management of their heads into their own hands, might possibly regain their native reason and economy,” a criticism made by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (following Pope), and by Bluestocking feminists, from Sarah Scott and Mary Wollstonecraft, advancing their assertions of women’s intellectual powers, comparable perhaps, to Meheux’s criticism of the misogyny of Pro Bono Publico.69 AFRICANUS added, “and the gentlemen might be induced to comb and care for their own heads – those who have heads to care for —” a recommendation inflected by his own social subordination, and implicitly asserting the intellectual ability his letter demonstrates. It would be “a prodigious saving in …time, —people of the ton of both sexes..usually losing between two and three hours daily in that important business.” He declares it would “serve my king and country,” as in the case of his previously published Letter. It was coupled with the punning sentence that his proposal would “cleanse, settle, and emancipate from the cruel bondage of French, as well as native frizeurs, the heads of my fellowsubjects.” Because this metaphorical “bondage” is immediately followed by “AFRICANUS” again it seems Sancho meant to bring the real kind to mind, and to further insist on a common identity with his white audience and those having their hair dressed. The notion of “cleansing” by sending the friseurs abroad (supposing some black boys at ladies’ toilets) may be a further allusion to Pro Bono Publico’s proposals, already associated by Sancho with relieving aching heads.70 Sancho also published that letter in the Morning Post in 1777, the serious, personal appeal, and in contrast with his others, signed “I S,” dramatizing the significance of signing then AFRICANUS. It was an

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appeal for clemency for the Rev. William Dodd, condemned to death for forgery, having forged a bond for 4,200 pounds in the name of the Earl of Chesterfield, “a former pupil. While a popular preacher in London (Sancho said he was “one of the many who have been often edified by the graceful eloquence and truly Christian doctrine of the unfortunate Dr. Dodd: - as a Divine, he had and still has my love and reverence”), and appointed chaplain to George III, Dodd married a working-class woman and lived beyond his means, dressing extravagantly, so known as “The Macaroni Parson.” His attempted bribery to gain the lucrative rectorship of a church in Hanover Square was uncovered, Samuel Foote satirizing Dodd as “Dr. Simony.” He fled abroad and on his return fatally forged the bond. Despite 23,000, people, including Dr. Johnson, signing a petition for a pardon, he was executed, June 27, 1777.71 Sancho regretted “his faults, but, alas! I feel myself too guilty to cast a stone. Justice has her claims —but — Mercy, the anchor of my hope,” that is, his own hope to be forgiven in the end by God, “inclines me to wish he might meet the Royal Clemency.” Dodd had already been punished pretty severely in “the loss of Royal favor – the cowardly attacks of malicious buffoonery – and the over-strained zeal for rigid justice in the prosecution—” Dodd published a sermon, “The frequency of Capital Punishment inconsistent with Justice, sound policy, and religion,” in January 1777. Sancho prayed: “Oh! would to God the reverend bishops, clergy, &c. would join in petitioning the throne for his life!” He mildly criticized them, adding, “it would save the holy order from indignity and even the land itself from the reproach of making too unequal distinctions in punishment.” Sancho argued that the exertion of Dodd’s “matchless powers”—plus his future rectitude, could be “of infinite service — as chaplain to the poor convicts on the river.” He referred to the “zeal he has often manifested (in the pulpit) for the service of true Religion.” And in terms similar to those with which he had appealed to Sterne, Sancho said, “if this hint should stimulate a pen, or heart, like the good B[isho]p of Chester’s” that was, the recently elevated Beilby Porteus’s, “to exert itself in the behalf of a man who has formerly been alive to every act of Heaven-born charity — the writer of this will joy, even in his last moment, in the reflection that he paid a mite of the vast debt he owes Dr. Dodd on a preacher.” Beilby Porteus was soon a member of the Teston Circle around Lady Middleton, including Ramsay, More, Wilberforce and

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Clarkson and was also an abolitionist. He was a subscriber to the publication of Sancho’s letters in 1782. This reference suggests Sancho knew him.72 He may also have known a pair of poems on behalf of Africans that Dodd had published nearly thirty years before, but still in print, which the preacher could have described to his African-British congregant. They had capitalized on the story of William Ansah Sessarakoo, who had been a celebrity in fashionable London, as in the case of Sterne, that celebrity advanced by Garrick. (Nocturnal Revels linked Soubise to Garrick, too.) The son of an African “King” engaged with British merchants in the slave trade, Sessarakoo had been sent to London to learn English and assist in the trade. Instead, the captain entrusted with him sold the lad into slavery on Barbados—such deceitful captains were emblems of villainy in exculpatory contrast to good slave traders. When Sessarakoo’s identity as a royal was discovered, he was brought to London, feted and then returned to his father under the auspices of the Royal Africa Company, where he became a translator for them under the name William Ansah. His story up to his appearance in London was given in the Gentleman’s Magazine and in an anonymous, fifty-page booklet.73 Dodd’s poems were entitled, “The African Prince, when in England,” and “Zara at the Court of Annamaboe, to the African Prince when in England.” She was entirely Dodd’s invention, enabling him to write of a separated pair of distressed lovers full of sensibility with the occasional African prop. Their purpose was to invoke sympathy in their British audience for the plight of wrongly enslaved royalty, another expression of the literary phenomenon of “Guinea’s Captive Kings,” along with performances of Thomas Southerne’s popular dramatization of Aphra Behn’s 1685 novel.74 The stories of enslaved kings continued to be published and republished, overlapping with the now large volume of antislavery publications calling for the ending of the enslavement of Africans in general, and appealing to readers’ feelings, too, Dodd’s poems became “set pieces in Dodsley’s, Bell’s, and other poetical collections.”75 Bell was to publish Wheatley’s Poems in 1773, which Sancho read.76 Sancho showed his extreme caution and his purposefulness in publishing these letters; the one jointly written with Meheux and signed Linco and the others under the name, AFRICANUS, in his reaction to the only published letter that did identify Sancho as the writer (aside from his first letter to Sterne), written to Charles Browne on behalf of the very old and sick de Groote which I quoted earlier to illustrate

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Sancho’s admiration for Garrick. It was published in The Public Advertizer of May 13, 1778, noting. “Inserted unknown to Mr. Sancho,” in all probability by Browne. That note reflected Sancho’s visit to the editor in an attempt to prevent the letter’s publication. Sancho wrote to Roger Rush, with Browne, a high-ranking servant of Sir Charles Bunbury, his valet, as Sancho was to the Duke of Montagu. Rush must have written to Sancho right after seeing the letters. “My good friend, take my thanks for your kind attention and believe me, I am exceedingly mortified at being thus thrust forward in the public prints. – You may observe, by what has happened to me, how very difficult it is to do even a right thing – so as to escape uneasiness – Trust me, this same letter about de Groote, though wrote, I dare say, with the kindest intention imaginable, will do me harm in the opinion of many.” Perhaps it was because the letter had said, “if the prayer of an indigent gentlemen have as much efficacy as a fat bishop,” and suggested that in England, “good actions are held in lower estimation than stars-ribbons-or crowns.” His published references to the Irish list and ostentatious ancestry had been under the names AFRICANUS. Sancho had depended on aristocratic patronage and did not want his name in the papers at all. He reported to Rush, “I like it not – and dare own to my friend Rush that it hurts very pride. – You may laugh – but it’s truth − ” The submitted letter had been accompanied by a picture of Sancho: “The drawing was gone to my friend S[tevenson],” William Stevenson, a printer, “but I recovered it in time,” going to Stevenson’s shop, as well as to the newspaper. He said he hoped it would amuse the ladies. Sancho concluded the “young man who invented the design is no artist – but I think he has genius.” It was probably Meheux.77

Notes 1. 1Laurence Sterne, The Letters, Part I: 1739–1764 and Part II: 1765– 68, vols. VII and VIII, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd, Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009), xlix, 504–07; and 696–701 (these volumes are paginated continuously). 2. [Ralph Griffiths], ART X. “Letters of the Rev. Mr. Lawrence Sterne, to his most Intimate Friends. With a fragment in the Manner of Rabelais. To which are prefixed, Memoirs of his Life and Family, written by himself, and published by his daughter, Mrs. Medalle, 8 vol. (Shandy-size) 3 vols. 7 s 6 d. Becket, 1775,” Monthly Review (October 1775), 340–44.

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3. [Ralph Griffiths], ART, VI, “Account of Sterne’s Letters, concluded.” See our last, p. 340, Monthly Review (November 1775), 403–13. 4. Griffiths, “Account of Sterne’s Letters Concluded,” 409. 5. Griffiths, “Account of Sterne’s Letters Concluded,” 410–11; Michael Bundock, “The Slave and the Lawyers: Frnacis Barber, James Boswell and John Hawkins,” Britain’s Black Past, ed. Gretchen H. Guerzina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), Barker-Benfield, Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom: History, Poetry, and the Ideals of the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press 2018), 71, 72, 80, 104–05. 6. Anon, “Review of the Letters of the late Rev. Mr. Lawrence Sterne and His Most Intimate Friends. With a Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais,” etc., Gentleman’s Magazine (Jan. 1776), 27–29. 7. Markman Ellis, “Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Politics of Form,” Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 199–217, 205–06. 8. Sancho to Charles Browne, July 18, 1772, Letters of the Late, Ignatius Sancho, An African, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1998 [1782], 44–45; see Carretta’s note, 266–67 for the very probable identification of these Brownes; Felicity A. Nussbaum comments on this letter, “Being A Man: Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho,” in Genius in Bondage, 54–71; 66. Charles Michael Pawluk explicates Sancho’s phrase, “almost a savage” as an illustration of “the confluence of violence and laughter in the English comic tradition,” ‘Almost A Savage’: The Rhetoric of Comic Violence in Ignatius Sancho’s Letters , Eighteenth Century Studiesi, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2021), 1–19. 9. Sancho to Julius Soubise, Oct. 11, 1772, Sancho, Letters, 46–47. 10. Henry Angelo, Reminiscences of the Late Henry Angelo etc. (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley 1830), 1: 446–52, quoted in “Julius Soubise, A Duchess’s Favorite,” Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade, ed. Paul Edwards and James Walvin (London: MacMillan, 1983), 226–29. 11. Quoted in Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities, 223. 12. Ashley L. Cohen, “Julius Soubise in India,” Britain’s Black Past, 215–33; 219; Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Being a Man: Olandah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho,” Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 54–71; 63, 65. 13. Cohen, “Julius Soubise in India,” 217. Carretta identifies it differently, Sancho, Letters, 258 n. 11. 14. Published by M. Goadey. 15. Wikipedia.

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16. Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London: Routledge, 1992), 45, 182. For pornography, see Margaret C. Jacob, “The Materialist World of Pornography,” The Invention of Pornography, 1500–1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, ed. Lynn Hunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 17. Quoted in Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities, 230–33. 18. Quoted in Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities, 233–37. 19. Nocturnal Revels quoted in Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities, 230; Angelo Reminiscences, quoted in Edward and Walvin, Black Personalities, 228. 20. Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities, 223; Sancho to Soubise, Oct. 11, 1772, Sancho Letters, 46; Madge Dresser, “Pero’s Afterlife: Remembering an Enslaved African in Bristol,” Britain’s Black Past, 119–39; 121, 124, and David Olusaga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan Books, 2017), 141. 21. Sancho to Soubise, Oct. 11, 1772, Sancho, Letters, 47. Ryan Hanley also analyzes this correspondence, in Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 33–35. 22. Sancho to Meheux, Nov. 8, 1772, Sancho, Letters, 47–48 see Carretta’s note, 282. 23. Sancho to Meheux, Nov. 8, 1772, Sancho, Letters , 47–8. Nussbaum sees Sancho “distancing himself from the English in this letter, “Being a Man,” 68. 24. Sancho to John Meheux, August 7, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 28–30, 29. John Saillant interprets “cutting” in this letter to mean circumcision, “The Invisible Man of Indecency: Profanity and the Letters of Ignatius Sancho, An African,” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2020), 231–37. It expresses “rollicking” sexual humor, helping to create a community, “mostly male” among a “cohort of patrons.” If intentionally funny, it has a more specific purpose, as I suggest in what follows. I am indebted to Carretta for the identification of Linco, more certain when reading how Garrick presents him, quoted below. Carretta does so in his summary of the Pro Bono episode, see next note and the rest of this part of this chapter. Sancho, Letters , 259–60, n. 12. 25. Sancho to Meheux, Aug. 7, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 29; Pro Bono Publico, “To Lord North, Letter III,” Morning Chronicle and London Advertizer (June 3, 1777), 1–2. The following quotations are from this piece. 26. Sancho to Meheux, Aug. 14, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 89; for “figurative castration” see Leigh Andersen, “Drunk in Love: Bodies and Consumption in Samson and Delilah,” Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities (Winter, 2019), 11:1, Frontispiece. The article shows Rubens” painting “Samson and Delilah” (1610), Samson naked,

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31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

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fast asleep on Delilah’s semi-naked body, evidently post-coital, as her servant cuts off his hair. For quotations of Pro Bono Publico, see n. 25; Pennsylvania officer quoted in Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Pelican, 1969), 159. Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 184–87; 200, 233–34. Prints reproduced in Molineux, Faces of Ebony, 235, 234. Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 145, 150. Walvin, An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745– 1797 (London: Cassell, 1998), 187, 188. See Hanley, “Olaudah Equiano, Celebrity Abolitionist,” ch. 2 of Beyond Slavery and Abolition. Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities, 223; Cohen, “Julius Soubise in India,” 220, 222, where Brychenden is quoted. See n. 25. Pamela Cheek, Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Place of Sex (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 141– 42; satire quoted ibid., 143. See, too, Alan Bewell, “‘On the Banks of the South Sea’: Botany and Sexual Controversy on the Late Eighteenth Century,” Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Phillip Miller and Peter Hans Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 173–93; 180–81. Earlier in his literary career, Hawkesworth had adapted Thomas Southerne’s stage version of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, for a 1759 audience, removing “scenes of the lowest buffoonery and the grossest indecency.” Cheek, Sexual Antipodes, 141–42. For the wide dissemination of relevant passages in Hawkesworth’s book and its influence, see Gillian Russel, “An ‘entertainment of oddities’; fashionable sociability and the Pacific in the 1770’s,” A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840, ed. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48–70; 65–66. Sancho’s acquaintance, John Hamilton Mortimer, painted Captain Cook, Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, and John Hawkesworth, posed against Otaheite. Pro Bono Publico, “To Lord North,” 2; Helen Berry, The Castrato and His Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Castratos were placed in a “category of fashion” subject to satire, Molineux. Faces of Ebony, 196; Wikipedia, entry on “Castrato.”. John Jekyll, “The Life of Ignatius Sancho,” Sancho, Letters , 5–9; 6. Jordan, White over Black, 154, 157, 158; “If any Man shall out of Wantonness, or only of Bloody-mindedness or Cruel Intention, willfully kill a

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39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

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Negro or other Slave of his own he shall pay into the Public Treasury fifteen Pounds Sterling; An Act for the Governing of Negroes,” The Law of Barbados, 1688. This was an updated version of the original slave code, published in Barbados in 1661, the template for subsequent slave codes passed in eighteenth-century British colonies. Jordan, White over Black, 154, 156; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 108–09. Jordan, White over Black, 154–55; Sloane, op. cit. 2 vols. (Book Renaissance reprint [London: B.M. 1707]), I: vii; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 54. Jordan, White over Black, 155. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1995 [1789]), 104. Jordan, White over Black, 151, 158, 159–60, 156, 151–52. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 [1955]); Jerrold M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002); Lawrence Friedman, The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 142, 34, 12; Robyn Weigman, “The Anatomy of Lynching,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Jan. 1993), 445–67; Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacquelina Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997); Philip Daly’s history of lynching documents the lynchers and their cheering supporters’ preoccupation with black penes, and the threat to “white womanhood,” At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 30, 82, 94, 144–45, 268–69, 349–50, 410. Melissa N. Stein, “Unsexing the Race: Lynching, Castration, and Racial Science,” in Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934 (Minnesota Scholarship Online, May 2016; DOJ: 10.5749/ Minnesota/9780816673025001.0001). “Female castration” meant removal of the ovaries but the same doctors prescribed iridectomy, too, their “patients” white women, Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Routledge, 2000 [1967]), ch. 11 (see too, Stein, “Unsexing the Race,” n. 22). Eesha Pandit, “A History of Abuse: Alleged Sterilization in Georgia are Only the Latest in a Pattern of Reproductive Violence in America,” The Nation (Nov. 16–23, 2020). A New York Times columnist cites such

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49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

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history in explaining why black people will be “the group most leery about a vaccine” for the coronavirus in 2021. Charles M. Blow, “How Black People Learned Not to Trust,” New York Times International Edition (Dec. 10, 2020), 11. James Baldwin, Just Above My Head (New York: Penguin, 1994 [1979]), 422. Jordan, White Over Black, 156. Kathleen Wilson, “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c.1720–1790,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall, 1995), 69–96; 83; Barker-Benfield, Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom: History, Poetry, and the Ideals of the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 123 (and see Jordan, White Over Black, 150–52); Nussbaum, “Being A Man,” 58. Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (London: Badley Head, 2022), 556. Pro Bono Publico, “To Lord North,” 2. Linco, TO PRO BONO PUBLICO,” The Morning Chronicle and London Advertizer (June 13, 1777), 1; Wilson, “Thinking Back: Gender Misrecognition and Polynesian Subversions Abroad the Cook Voyages,” New Imperial History, 344–73; 355. Linco, “TO PRO BONO PUBLICO,” The Morning Chronicle and London Advertizer (June 13, 1777), 1. Sancho to Meheux, August 7, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 28–30; 29–30 (for its date, see 259 n. 2); Cymon A Dramatic Romance, Etc. [by David Garrick] (Historical Collection of the British Library [London: T. Becket and P.A. de Houdt, 1770], first performed in 1767), 55, 19, 84, 21, 43, 51, 45, 19, 55. Pro Bono Publico to Linco, June 20, 1777, 1. Sancho to Meheux [1777], Sancho, Letters, 30. Sancho to Meheux, September 1777, Sancho, Letters , 96–98. There is a typo in the text here, where the date is printed J[uly] 13th and 20th. Carretta repeats it in his note, p. 284, but he refers to the accurate one he supplies to the August 7, 17[77] letter about the articles in the Morning Chronicle of June 13th and 20th, p. 259 n. 12. Sancho to Meheux, August 25, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 91–93. See Hogarth’s “The Four Stages of Cruelty” (1751), their context, Diana Donald, Picturing Animal in Britain, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 14–15. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. James Aikin Work (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940), vol. vii, ch. 32; Sterne, A Sentimental Journey; with The Journal to Eliza; and A Political Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 39–40. Sancho to

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61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

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Meheux, August 25, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 91–93; see Sancho’s remark appended to his letter to Wingrave, March 12, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 113. Example Kathleen Charter, Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales during the Period of the British Slave Trade, c. 1660–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 230, 231, and Barker-Benfield, Phillis Wheatley, 114. The Collection Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1773]), vi, vii. Op. cit., ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1787]), 7. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (New York: Penguin, 2006), xiv–xvi; Carretta, “Revisiting Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,” Britain’s Black Past, 45–62. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 15–37. Sancho, Letters , 82–83; “Seaman’s Wages in the Revolution,” British Tars, 1740–1790, https://www.britishtars.com/2017/073. Charles R. Foy, “Britain’s Black Tars,” Britain’s Black Past, ed. Gretchen H. Gerzina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 63–79, 65; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Andrew Skinner (New York: Penguin, 1970 [1776]), 212; Prince Hoare, “African Institutions,” Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Esq. Composed from her own Manuscripts (Forgotten Books [London: Henry Colburn, 1820]), 263. Sancho, Letters, 81–82, The Sailor Advocate quoted in Carretta, Equiano, the African, 250. Sancho, Letters, 113–14. Sancho, Letters, 214–15. Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 86; Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People on Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2010 [1984]), 75; James Walvin, An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olandah Equiano, 1747–1797 (London: Cassell, 1998), 92. See, too, Dresser, “Pero’s After Life,” 120. Sancho, Letters , 214–15. Sancho, Letters, 114–15; “The excesses of a clergyman—Revd. William Dodd,” Lincolnshire Life (Feb. 2014), www.lincolnshirelife.co.uk; “Reverend William Dodd—‘The Macaroni Parson’” All Things Georgian (https://georgianera.wordpress.com/2013/07/19); Gerald Howson, The Macaroni Parson: A Life of the Unfortunate Dr. Dodd (London: Hutchinson, 1973); Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970 [1904]), 811–12. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon attempted to get Dodd’s sentence commuted, Edwin Welch, Spiritual Pilgrim: A Reassessment of the Life of The Countess of Huntingdon (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 78.

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72. Sancho, Letters, 114–15; Porteus was to be a leading, Anglican critic of slavery, in the 1780s moving from ameliorism to abolitionism. He was a member of the Teston Circle, and a friend of the Rev. Peter Peckard, subject of ch. 7 below. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 352–53. Porteus is identified as “Right Rev. Lord Bishop of Chester” in “Subscribers Names” included in the first edition of Sancho, Letters, 10, 253 n. 1. 73. Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 146–47; Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. XIX (1749), 89, 372; Margaret Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 13; Randy J. Sparks, “Gold Coast Families and the Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 2 (April, 2013): 317–40; 39. I give a brief summary of this story in Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom, 8. 74. “The African prince, now in England, to Zara at his father’s court,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 19 (July 1749): 323–25 and “ZARA, at the Court of Annamaboe, to the African Prince, now in England,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 19 (Aug. 1749): 372–73. Rpt. In The African Prince, now in England, to Zara at His Father’s Court (London: Printed for J. Payne and J. Bouquet, 1749) and Zara, at the court of Annamaboe, to the African Prince, Now in England (London: Printed for J. Payne and J. Bouquet, 1749), Rpt. (for the first time under Dodd’s name) in William Dodd, The African Prince, when in England to Zara, at His Father’s Court; and Zara’s Answer, The Second Edition (London: Printed for Mr. Waller and Mr. Ward, 1755). Quoted from a hypertext created November 1, 1999, by Suzanne Bolos. 75. Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIII th Century (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 167. 76. Barker-Benfield, Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom, 103–04; Sancho to Jabez Fisher, January 27, 1778, Letters of Sancho, 112. 77. Sancho, Letters, 119; Sancho to Rush, n.d., Sancho, Letters, 120, 294 n. 3.

CHAPTER 6

“A Son of Afric,” Amid Riots and Imperial War

That “crisis of national jeopardy” to which AFRICANUS’ April 29, 1780 letter to the General Advertizer had referred, was the war with America and France. The government offered “vast bounties…for able-bodied men” showing “the zeal and liberality of our wise lawgivers.” His suggestion that ten companies of hair dressers be formed reflected the debate between Pro Bono Publico and Linco, over inter-racial sexual relations, and of which Sancho’s signing the letter AFRICANUS was a reminder.1 It reminds us, too, of the particular meaning or meanings of the American Revolution for Africans, enslaved ones in particular, those Sancho’s much-admired Phillis Wheatley articulated: she supported the Revolution while he opposed it, but they both opposed slavery. Sancho’s views of the Revolution, or rather, of Britain’s war with the Americans and their French allies, were intertwined with his account of the Gordon riots in London in 1780, riots fuelled in part by the tension over the empire, east and west.2 The next letter of Sancho’s we have was written three weeks after that public one, to “Mrs. H—,” possibly “one of Sancho’s fellow servants in the Montagu family,” even Montagu’s housekeeper, instrumental in planning and setting up Sancho’s post-servant, grocery business, nearly four years earlier. He first thanked her profusely and apologized for not telling her that her son, whom he entitles “Sir Jacob,” would have forgiven

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3_6

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Sancho for not reporting his recent visit because “he is a Christian, which means in my idea, a gentleman of the modern sort.”3 This phrase leads Sancho to the impact of the war on all classes: “Trade is at a low an ebb the greatest are glad to see ready money – in truth we are ruined people — let hirelings affect to write and talk us big as they please – and what is worse religion and morality are vanished with our prosperity—” in an earlier letter he praised Mrs. H— for her “Christian philanthropy”—“every good principle seems to be leaving us – as our means lessen, luxury and every sort of expensive pleasure increases — The blessed Sabbath day is used by the trader for country excursions – taverndinners – rural walks – and their whipping and galloping through dust and over turnpikes drunk home.” Nor do “the poorer sort” go to church, “they take their dust in the field, and conclude the sacred evening with riots, drunkenness and empty pockets.”4 Sancho adds to this account of wasteful immoral, superficial, consumer habits that replace religious observance on Sundays: “the beau in upper life hires his whiskey and beast for twelve shillings; his girl dressed en militaire for half a guinea and spends his whole week’s earnings to look and be thought quite the thing — And for the tiptop high life cards and music are called in to dissipate the chagrin of tiresome, tedious Sunday’s evening — the example spreads downwards from them to their domestics,” down the hierarchy Sancho shared with Mrs. H and Sir Jacob; “the laced velvet and the livery beau either debauch the maids, or keep their girls – thus profusion and cursed dissipation fill the prisons, and feed the gallows.” Hinting that “the clergy” was generally no better, Sancho does “affirm,” however, that where a preacher does his duty, “and can preach, he will not want for crowded congregations.” “As to our politics – now don’t laugh at me – for everyone has a right to be a politician; so have I:” in his letter to the General Advertizer, AFRICANUS had said, “it seemeth to me befitting for every honest man to offer his mite of advice, towards public benefit and edification.” Here Sancho continues, “and though only a poor, thick-lipped son of Afric! May be as notable a Negro state-botcher as *****,” a botcher a person who mends things, or messes up as “makes a botch of it,” the asterisks standing for “Dyson,” Carretta suggests, that MP, “renowned for his knowledge of parliamentary procedures,” satirized as “Mungo” because of his political subservience, to which Sancho’s self-characterization may have referred.5 Sancho follows these asterisks with, “and so on for five hundred,” roughly the number of MPs, implying that his own political

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wisdom was as great “as any of them, even though he is a “son of Afric.” The apparent self-deprecation “though only a poor, thick-lipped son of Afric” was the same category as “Negur,” which he had told Sterne from the beginning he was called by the “vulgar and illiberal.” He places how the latter white English see and call him between his assertions of his right to give them advice, and his own wisdom, as great as any MP, a reminder that he had voted in one election and is about to do so again. Then he qualifies what he has just said: “—I do not mean B—e, S—lle, B—e, nor D—n—g,” identified by Carretta as Edmund Burke, perhaps Sir George Savile, Isaac Barré and Dunning, all opponents of the current ministry of Lord North. “Mind that—no, nor N—th, G—m—a, J—k—n, nor W— dd—n,” Lord North, George Sackville, Charles Jenkinson and Alexander Wedderburn, ministers under North. Sancho groups the leaders of both parties together, suggesting he did not claim to be their equals; theirs are, “names that will shine in history when the marble monuments of their earthly flatterers will be mouldering into dust.”6 Death was on Sancho’s mind, so after telling Mrs. H. of the “lethargy” he has been under the last two months, feeling “intolerably heavy,” and that he feels “ten years older this year (he was about 51),” and expressing the hope that “through God’s mercy the waters will have the wished effect on Mr. H,” who Sancho hears, “is so poorly,” he writes his fellow servant and Christian, “Time tries us all–but blessed be God! In the end we shall be an over match for Time, and leave him, scythe and all, in the lurch – when we shall enjoy a blessed Eternity. – In this view and under the same hope, we are as great and consequential as Statesmen! Bishops! Chancellors! Popes! Heroes! Kings! Actors of every denomination – who must all drop the mask – when the fated minute arrives – and, alas! Some of the very high he obliged to give place to Mr. and Mrs. H-.” Death was the great equalizer, as he has exclaimed before he sent his wishes for the H’s felicity and blessing hereafter, and signing it THE SANCHOs, echoing that address to the H’s. Rioting broke out two weeks later.7 In 1778, Parliament had passed the “Act of the Relief of His Majesty’s Subjects Professing the Popish Religion,” called by opponents “the Papist Act,” allowing Catholics to join the army by freeing them from taking an anti-Catholic oath. As Sancho’s General Advertizer letter indicated, the British army had been stretched thin by the worldwide war, and needed Irish recruits. But the Act provoked severe reaction, led by Lord George Gordon, President of the “Protestant Association of London,” formed to oppose it, stoking and partly channelling paranoid fears of

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a return to the absolutist monarchy of the Stuarts and the Pope. On June 2, 1780, Gordon led his followers in a march on Parliament, which evolved into riots, drawing on other aggrieved Londoners who faced the economic effects of the protracted war. Historian George Rudé analysed the class inflection of the rioters, their “victims…on the whole, persons of substance,” not Catholics in general.8 Sancho described the riots in a series of letter to John Spink, whom Sancho addressed as “Esq.” “a draper and banker, who lived in Bury. He was at that time also a local government official, Receiver General for the Eastern Division of the Country, Country Treasurer…and in 1771, elected Common Councillor of the Bury Corporation.” That he was a founder of the Bury Sunday School indicates he was an Anglican reformer, leaving “hundreds of pounds to religious and medical charities.” He subscribed to the publication of Sancho’s Letters in 1782. Significantly, Sancho invariably addressed him as “Esq.”9 The first volume of Sancho’s Letters included only one to Spink, dated December 26, 1777, in which Sancho thanked him for a letter and Christmas parcel, praising him extravagantly for his benevolence: “I have been well-informed there is a Mr. Spink at Bury – and I think I have seen this gentleman – who lives in a constant course of doing beneficent actions – and upon these occasions – the pleasure he feels – constitutes to him the obliged party. – You, good Sir, ought of course to thank me – for adding one to be kind.” This was the self-approving joy, the motive preaches by Latitudinarians and other cultivators of sensibility. Sancho went on to tell Spink that “henceforth you will look upon the Sancho’s – as a family that has a rightful call upon your notice” and “Give me credit for having a heart which feels your kindness as it ought.”10 By contrast, of the ninety-two letters Frances Crewe published in the second volume of Sancho’s Letters , twenty-three were to Spink. Seventeen of those were among the last twenty-six, in which Sancho described the Gordon riots, the overlapping subject of the progress of the American War, the Parliamentary election of 1780, along with Sancho’s declining health—the last one written shortly before his death.11 In his first one describing the riots, June 6, 1780, Sancho addressed Spink, “DEAR AND MOST RESPECTED SIR,” opening, “In the midst of the most cruel and ridiculous confusion—” Sancho’s shop and home was in Charles Street, close to the House of Commons—“I am now set down to give you a very imperfect sketch of the maddest people – that the maddest times were ever plagued with. – The public prints have

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informed you (without doubt) of last Friday’s transactions; - the insanity of Ld. G[eorge] G[ordon], and the worse than Negro barbarity of the populace”; this self-conscious irony was in keeping with antislavery writers’ turning it that stereotype upon the barbarity of slave traders and slave owners, as Somerset’s lawyers had. It was consistent with the civility expressed by the whole of Sancho’s published correspondence: “the burnings and devastations of each night – you will also see in the prints:— the day, by consent [of members of Parliament], was set aside for farther consideration of the wished for repeal [of the Catholic Relief Act] – the people (who had their proper cue from his lordship) assembled by ten o’clock in the morning – Lord N[orth], who had been up in council till four in the morning, got to the house before eleven, just a quarter of an hour before the associators reached the Palace yard,” that is, Westminster Palace yard where stood the Houses of Parliament. Then Sancho tells Spink that, “in council,” headed by North, “there was a deputation from all parties: - the S[helburne] party were for prosecuting Ld G and leaving him at large,” a proposal scorned by the Attorney General, Alexander Wedderburn. Both Shelburne and North were among the members of the British political and social elite; with North, Shelburne subscribed to the publication of Sancho’s Letters two years later. Sancho reported that North’s ministry was for Gordon’s “expulsion dropping him gently into insignificancy,” but that would leave him free for more “mischief.” Sancho imagined Spink would prefer another faction’s (Rockingham’s) advice, to expel Gordon from the House, “commit him to the Tower—and then prosecute him at leisure,” thus preventing his “getting a seat in the next Parliament.” Sancho takes Spink from these inner workings to the streets. “There is at this present moment at least a hundred thousand poor, miserable, ragged rabble, from twelve to sixty years of age, with blue cockades in their hats” marking them as Protestants, “besides half as many women and children, all parading in the streets – the bridge – the park – ready for any and every mischief.”12 Then an immediate interruption: “—Gracious God! What’s the matter now? I was obliged to leave off – the shouts of the mob – the horrid clashing of swords – and the clutter of a multitude in swiftest motion – drew me to the door – when everyone in the street was employed in shutting up shop.—” We might assume that included Sancho. “–It is now just five o’clock – the ballad-singers are exhausting their musical talent – with the downfall of Popery, S[andwic]h, and

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N[orth]” this was heavy irony from sophisticated musician Sancho. “– Lord S[andwic]h narrowly escaped with his life about an hour since; –the mob seized his chariot going to the house, broke his glasses, and in struggling to get his lordship out, somehow have cut his face – the guards flew to his assistance – the light-horse scowered the road, got his chariot, escorted him from the coffee-house, where he had fled for protection, to his carriage, and guarded him bleeding very fast home.” Sancho exclaims, “This—this—is liberty! Genuine British liberty! — This instant about two thousand liberty boys are swearing and swaggering by with large sticks – thus armed in hopes of meeting with the Irish chairmen and labourers—” His irony implies his own adherence to British liberty, when properly expressed. At the same time Sancho apparently shows the rioters a degree of sympathy, calling them “a poor miserable rabble,” a large proportion, “women and children.” Similarly, he writes of “all the guards,” sent to control them, as “poor fellows…just worn out for want of rest – having been on duty ever since Friday—.” He wishes the poor rabble would adhere to the same domestic values he shares with his correspondent: “Thank heaven it rains; may it increase, so as to send these deluded wretches back to their families, and wives!” Their pursuit of liberty was in fact “anarchy.” “I cannot but felicitate you, my good friend, upon the happy distance you are placed from our scene of confusion,” the “our” referring to Mrs. Sancho. “—May foul Discord and her cursed train never nearer approach your blessed abode! Tell Mrs. S[pin]k, her good heart would ach, did she see the anxiety, the Woe in the face of mothers, wives and sweethearts, each equally anxious for the object of their wishes, the beloved of their hearts.” Despite his report of an estimated half of the hundred thousand demonstrators being women and children, he seems not to have considered that they may have wanted British liberty in the same way men did. He concluded, “Mrs. Sancho and self both cordially join in love and gratitude, and every good wish – crowned with the peace of God, which passeth all understanding &c. I am dear Sir, Yours ever by inclination, IGN. SANCHO.” In his lengthy postscript, Sancho regains the momentum of the letter’s public subject. “The Sardinian ambassador offered 500 guineas to the rabble to save a painting of our Saviour from the flames, and 1000 guineas not to destroy an exceeding fine organ: the gentry”—Sancho now entirely sarcastic, “told him they would burn him if they could get at him,” and destroyed the picture and organ directly. In a variation of ironically describing the “worse than Negro barbarity of the populace,” Sancho

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again challenges racism, in distancing himself from these Britons, at least, declaring, “I am not sorry I was born in Afric–.” Sancho realized he is running on, even repeating himself, telling Spink. “I shall tire you, I fear.” But he adds “there is about a thousand mad men, armed with clubs, bludgeons, and arrows, just now set out for Newgate, to liberate, they say, their honest comrades—” this, then is when those identifying themselves with liberty burned Newgate and painted that selfassertion as the wall. But then Sancho expresses his characteristic sympathy even for those he has seemed, to scorn: “—I wish they do not come to them lose their lives of liberty before morning” either by being jailed or killed. He notes, “It is thought by many who discern deeply, that there is more at the bottom of this business than merely the repeal of the act—which has produced no consequences, and perhaps never might”—he recently described the profound economic effects of the war to Ms. H; but whatever the alternative explanation for the petitioning, demonstrating and rioting might have been, Sancho continues by declaring he was “forced to own that I am for an universal toleration. Let us convert by our example, and conquer by our meekness and brotherly love.” He has the Protestant assault on Catholics in mind, and referred to the subject of the Sardinian embassy’s painting as “Our Saviour.” “Brotherly love,” to which AFRICANUS also appealed, all social boundaries, including between those born in Britain and those “born in Afric.” Sancho adds to this postscript his report of a dramatic turn of events, apparently contradicting one of his expectations: “Eight o’clock. Lord G[eorge] G[ordon] has this moment announced to my Lords the mob – that the act shall be repealed this evening – upon this they gave a hundred cheers – took the horses from his hackney-coach and rolled him full jollily away – they are huzzaing now ready to crack their-throats. Huzzah”13 His last sentence: “I am forced to conclude for want of room – the remainder in my next.” The next he dated three days later, and is even more explicit in his political judgement. “Government”—North’s—“is sunk in lethargic stupor – anarchy reigns – when I look back to the glorious time of a George II, and a Pitt’s administration – my heart sinks at the bitter contrast.” This was Pitt the Elder, first Earl of Chatham (his first son, the second Earl of Chatham, “the Great Commoner”). Under Pitt, Catholic

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France had been defeated and Britain succeeded it as the leading European imperialist power, extending it into India, Africa and North America, posing questions of national purpose and identity for Britons’ claiming theirs was the land of the free and not only because of its fresh acquisition of Catholic subjects. Pitt, a rival of Mansfield’s, said privately, that he’s the freeing of Somerset “amounted to the subjection of the colonists”; he shared white American rhetoric, asking, “when were they made slaves?” He died in 1778. His son, William Pitt the younger, subscribed to Sancho’s Letters four years later, and would be a Parliamentary leader against the slave trade.14 But for Sancho, the Gordon riots made tangible the decline he had felt prior to June 1780. “We,” Sancho including his Afric self in that pronoun, “may now say of England as was heretofore said of Great Babylon – ‘the beauty of the excellency of the Chaldees – is no more’” (Isaiah 13:19). He lists nine London prisons which “are all flung open; Newgate partly burned and 300 felons…let loose upon the world. – Lord M[ansfield’]’s house in town suffered martyrdom, and his sweet box in Caen Wood escaped almost miraculously, for the mob had just arrived…when a strong detachment from the guard and light-horse came most critically to the rescue—” killing six of the rioters there. The rioters believed Mansfield sympathized with Catholics, even that he was not only a Jacobite but a Baptist.15 Sancho was affected by the reaction to the Mansfield 1772 occasion but here it was not uppermost in his mind. He found it remarkable that, “a daring chap escaped from Newgate, condemned to die this day, was the most active in mischief at Ld. M[ansfield]’s” (they burned his library, books and papers), “was the first person shot by this soldiers…a few hours sooner than if he had not been released.” Sancho reported that “the insurgents” planned to destroy “The Bank, the Treasury, and thirty of the chief noblemen’s homes” the disorder of Sancho’s subjects expressed his agitation: “martial law is to be declared – if anybody of people above ten…refuse to disperse, they are to be fired at – so we may expect terrible work before morning.” The insurgents seized “500 stand of arms” “in the Artillery ground,” Sancho commenting this was the result of “a great error in city politics, not to have seized them first.” He told Spink of “the execrable nonsense… circulated amongst the credulous mob” that the King regularly attended mass, that “he pays out of his privy purse Peter Pence to Rome.” Sancho saw all this as the effect of “too relaxed a government,” and although the “King and Queen…possess every virtue,” he saw the riots

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as a “scourge” sent by God to motivate “our repentance and amendment and in the end make us a wise, virtuous people,” Sancho again including himself in the British collective. To convey immediacy, Sancho added, “Half past nine o’clock. King’s – Bench prison is now in flames, and the prisoners at large, two fires in Holborn.”16 Sancho wrote a second letter to Spink dated June 9, reporting that after the “early part of the evening when about fourscore or a hundred of the reformers got decently knocked on the head”; this was heavy irony referring to those who would reform Parliament. They “were half-killed by Mr. Langdale’s spirits so fell an easy conquest to the bayonet and but-end. There are about fifty taken prisoners…the streets once more wear the face of peace-” The “greatest losses have fallen upon the great distiller,” Thomas Langdale, a Catholic, and Lord Mansfield, who lost “the greatest and best collections of manuscript writings, with one of the finest libraries in the kingdom.” In short, Sancho wrote, the “vengeance” of “the reformers…has fallen upon gin and the law - the two most inflammatory things in the Christian world.” Again we see the wryness that can be added to the irony of his humour interspersed, with his general sympathy and other expressions of sensibility as well as loyalty to the establishment, with his distinction of being from “Afric,” not Britain.17 Describing military encampments established in the parks, Sancho wrote that they and “our West end of the town exhibit the features of French government,” another irony; the rioters had forecast the lifting of some repressive measures from British Catholics would invite a takeover by French absolutism. Sancho exclaims, “Bravo!” to Lord Gordon’s being taken to the Tower, and he quotes a line from Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III: “Off with his head….” More sympathetic to Gordon’s followers, although still identifying with law and order, Sancho adds, “We have taken this day number of the poor wretches, in so much we know not where to place them. Blessed be the Lord we trust this affair is pretty well concluded –” promising to tell Spink if anything further transpired. Hence his postscript, hoping “Best regards attend Mrs. Spink; his lordship was taken at five o’clock this evening – bets run fifteen to five Lord G G is hanged in eight days.”18 Sancho’s next letter to Spink, four days later, opens with the language of sensibility, after addressing, “MY DEAR SIR.” “That my poor endeavours have given you information or amusement, gratifies the warm wish of my heart: - for I know not a man to whose kindness I am completely indebted”—Spink must have sent the Sancho family more parcels of

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supplies. “I may safely say, I know not the man whose esteem I more ardently covet and honour –” Then, appropriate to this mode, he incorporates references to both of their wives, “We are exceeding sorry to hear of Mrs. Spink’s indisposition,” wishing her well soon. “This spring with us has been very sickly – and the summer has brought with it sick times – sickness, cruel sickness! triumphs through every part of our constitution,” his vision here pretty much the same he had expressed in both his letter to the General Advertizer and the following one to Ms. H: “the state is sick – the church (God preserve it) is sick – the law, navy, army all sick – the people at large are sick with taxes – the Ministry with Opposition, and Opposition with disappointment.-” All this in context for his returning to the riots: “Since my last, the temerity of the mob has gradually subsided; numbers of the unfortunate rogues have been taken – yesterday about thirty were killed in and about Smithfield, and two soldiers…killed in the affray.” The number of houses destroyed “is proof how industrious they were in their short reign,” that is of King Mob, a reference leading Sancho to note one of the benefits has been the reconciliation of the two royal brothers, accepted by the King, “God bless him!” The anti-establishment actions of the rioters were being linked to America’s ally in the war with Britain, in this case by a report that the mob in York had freed 3000 French prisoners-of-war. This was, Sancho writes, one of an hourly “cargo of lies.” But London was now more heavily occupied by troops, the king, “walking the line…he looks exceeding grave. Crowns alas! Have more thorns than roses.” Sancho’s sympathy extends from top to bottom. Sancho praises his correspondent’s perspective on all this, one he shares; “You see things, my dear Sir, with the faithful eye which looks through nature – up to nature’s God – the sacred page is your support – the word of God you shield and support,” and consequently Spink prospers. Spink had written Sancho to ask him how they were in the midst of the riots because Sancho thanked him for his “kind anxiety.” “I own, at first I felt uneasy sensations – but a little reflection brought me to myself.—” This was the self-control that persons of sensibility should implement, “Put thy trust in God, quoth I–” presumably telling his family as well as himself. “Mrs. Sancho, whose virtues outnumber my vices (and I have enough for any one mortal) feared for me and for her children more than for herself– …her prayers were heard.”

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Sancho turns to the subject that will supersede the riots in his remaining letters to Spink, the war. “America seems to be quite…forgot amongst us – the fleet is but a secondary affair. – Pray God send us some good news, to clear our drooping apprehensions, and enable me to send you pleasanter accounts.” Is the good news victory and peace? His last sentence seems to refer to both the riots and the war: “for trust me, my worthy friend, grief, sorrow, devastation, blood, and slaughter are totally foreign to the taste and affection of Your faithful friend And obliged servant I.Sancho. Our best wishes to Mrs. S. self, and family.”19 Sancho wants Britain to defeat the American revolutionaries and their French allies. He begins his next letter to Spink, two days later, “exceedingly happy” to inform him, “that, on the 12th of April, Charles Town with its dependencies capitulated to His Majesty’s arms, with the loss of only 200 men on our side.” This was necessary “blood and slaughter,” but after enumerating the enemies’ losses (including the capture of a thousand seamen and the garrison of seven thousand), he writes, “You will have pleasure, I am sure, in finding so little blood shed – and in the hope of accelerating peace.—” He continues by telling Spink more of the riots in London, literally connected to the war abroad. This time Sancho seems to give the connection credence. The planners, the French and the Americans, “expected universal bankruptcy would be the consequence with despair – and every said concomitant in its train.— By God’s goodness we have escaped. – May we deserve so great a mercy!” So he maintains an identity shared with other Britons opposed to the Gordon rioters and the American and French enemy. Sancho’s postscript further illustrates this connection, again as long as the letter itself, one in which he promises to send the Gazette’s report of what he describes: “As soon as this news,” of Britain’s victory in Charles Town, “was announced -the Tower and Park guns confirmed it – the guards encamped in the parks” to keep the rioters down, “fired each a grand feu de joye – tonight we blaze in illuminations” then Sancho’s characteristic expression of painful, mundane reality “—and to-morrow we get up as poor and discontented as ever,” transitioning from public celebration to his writing his benefactor in the personal terms of sensibility. “I wish, dear Sir, very much to hear Mrs. S is quite recovered – it would indicate more than a common want of feeling, were not my wife and self-anxious for the health and repose of such very rare friends, –indulge us, do dear Sir, with a single line, that we may joy in your joy upon her

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amendment; or join our wishes with yours to the God of mercy and love, for her speedy recovery.–” But he can “inclose you an evening paper-” calling to mind his report of the co-ordination between Britain’s enemies abroad and the rioters at home: “Upon consideration I have my doubts concerning the French and Americans being so deep in the plan of our late riots;-” He explains why: “there requires, I think, a kind of supernatural knowledge to adjust their motions so critically-” He defers, however, to Spink: “but you can judge far better than my weak intellects; therefore, I will not pretend to affirm anything for truth, except my sincere desire to approve myself most gratefully Your obliged servant IGN. Sancho”.20 Sancho had other sources of political, international news by way of his customers and the connections we shall see Frances Crewe represented, and/or their servants in households like the one he had served. He wrote his next letter to Spink, June 16, 1780, “As a supplement to my last – this to tell you a piece of private news – which gives the ministry high hopes in the future.” It seems as if Sancho had heard from a minister or an MP, perhaps stopping by his shop. The news was of George Washington’s move from Charles Town to New York, and Clinton’s counter move, sailing to New York before the Americans could march there. If “Clinton can possibly bring Washington to battle, it is thought the fate of America would be decided. – Thank God!” That sky was clearing he said, but “we have rather lowering at home—” The Gordon riots are still on his mind, still linked to the war. “Ministry wish now too plainly to disarm the subjects.-” The noun pertains, it seems, not merely to the insurgents, but all Britons, an ominous move for the nation characteristically liberty-loving, of which Sancho sees himself as part. Here was psychologically common ground with the anti-Catholic demonstrators. “Last year, under dread of a French invasion, the good people were thanked for their military valour – Master tradesmen armed their journey–men and apprentices –” He describes how they were exercised, armed, put in uniform and taught to march. “But now it seems they are not only useless, but offensive—” a pun, “I do not like its complexion. – Government has ordered them to give up their arms – if they do where is British liberty?” As his June 6 letter made clear, the rioters, the “liberty boys,” had laid claim to this national characteristic, too. Sancho continued, pointing to the bind Britons were in, and “if they refuse” to give up their arms, “what is administration?” i.e. government. “Many are gentlemen of large property—Inns of Court Members,

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Lawyers, &c, dangerous people”—an ironical phrase, written to banker Spink, reflecting Sancho’s patronage, employment and customers; “time will unveil the whole – May its lenient powers,” that is, not those of the military force, crushing rioters, whom Sancho had called our miserable poor, “pour the balm of healing councils on this once glorious spot! And make it as heretofore the nurse of freedom! Europe’s fairest examplethe land of truth, bravery, loyalty, and of every heart-gladdening virtue.” During his journey through France, Sterne’s Yorick had exclaimed “O England! England! Thou land of liberty, and climate of good sense, thou tenderest of mothers – and gentlest of nurses.” This had reiterated James Thomson’s apostrophe to Briton’s liberty as “Great nurse of men!” Sancho’s phrases, “once glorious” and “as heretofore,” convey the same retrospective, even nostalgic view he had expressed in looking “back to the glorious time of George II and…Pitt,” there coupled with the ominous “present time of jeopardy,” akin to the apocalyptism of his interpretation of the riots as “a scourge” to motivate repentance, and “make in a virtuous people.” This note links what Sancho values as British liberty, in his case, combined with antislavery, to Thomson’s vision in, “Liberty,” warning that corruption could lead to “slavery” as it had in ancient Rome. His use of “complexion” and “fairest” may have manifested qualifications of his identity as a Briton he has expressed repeatedly elsewhere. Following his phrase, “heart-gladdening virtue,” Sancho ended this letter, “That you and Mrs. S[pink] may, surrounded with friends, and in the enjoyment of every good thing, live to see the completion of my wishes – is the concluding prayer of…I. Sancho.”21 Mrs. Sancho’s brother, John Osborne, brings the Sancho’s news that “Mrs. S[pink] yet continues but poorly” reminding us of that their circle included black and white members, although Sancho sometimes shows his concern over Spink’s judging him, as he falls back on the common ground of the heart—of sensibility—which whites and blacks (and the opponents of slavery) hoped could overcome differences. Sancho had written his view that the King’s speech to the House in the aftermath of the crushing of the rioters, “was the very best speech, in my opinion, of his whole life; I have the pleasure to inclose it. — If I err in judgement, I know you more the true candid friend, than the severe critic – and that you will smile at the mistake of the head – and do justice to the heart of Your ever obliged.” I Sancho. He adds a reference to a report that the British Quebec fleet has been captured by a French squadron, “I hope this will prove premature.”22

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Crewe interrupts this series of letters to Spink in her collection with her inclusion of a letter to Jack Wingrave, dated June 23, 1780, eighteen months to two years after Sancho’s long, 1778 letter to him with which Crewe chose to open this second volume of his Letters. We saw that was a warning to the young, potential nabob to behave well amidst the temptations of British imperialism in India, wherein Sancho had told him “your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom)…your country’s conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East – West-Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea,” from where Sancho’s enslaved mother, pregnant with him, had been shipped. This June, 1780, letter again admonishes Wingrave in a sequence in which the definition of national identity – the meanings of British liberty – are at issue because an imperial war and the use of troops outside Sancho’s shop and in Parliament itself.23 In this, Sancho admonishes him with the indirection of rhetorical questions: “is the blessing of health upon you do you eat moderately? Drink temperately and laugh heartily?” the last question taking the edge off the others. He asks, too, does Wingrave “converse carefully with one eye to pleasure, the other fixed upon improvement.” The indirection and moderation of Sancho’s advice mark his deference to the Wingraves’ social superiority. “The above is the hope and wish of thy friend, friend to thy house, and respector of its character” of which he tells, “You happy young man, by as happy a coincidence are like to be head of the W[ingrave] family”: this was to leave aside the more specific origins of that wealth in imperial exploitation, but he goes on to warn him with the prayer, “may riches visit you coupled with honour and honesty!” The resulting “peace of mind shall yield you dignity,” inferring that dishonourable and dishonest behaviour will leave him conflicted and undignified. If young Wingrave follows Sancho’s advice, the paragraph concludes, “then will you truly feel those beautiful lines of Pope”: One self-approving hour whole years outweighs Of idle starers, or of loud huzza’s; What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or concords? Alas! Not all the blood of all the Howards.

These are two widely separated couplets from Pope’s “Essay on Man,” their order reversed and “idle” replacing “stupid,” so far less critical of Wingrave’s immoral irresponsibility. The first line embodied the motive for behaving morally—self-approving joy—articulated in many

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texts, derived in part from Latitudinarian Anglicanism. Sancho had said in conjunction with these lines, “the self-ennobled are the only true noble” and one could imagine he saw himself as an exemplary, ennobled slave. In the “Essay on Man,” the line preceding, What can ennoble sets, or slaves, or cowards? made the distinction Sancho had made in his letter to Spink immediately preceding this one. Fame, Plays around the head but comes not to the heart

It was a fundamental value he shared with Pope, and many others, as we have seen. In short, Sancho was employing the celebrated Pope in attempting to moderate imperialist exploitation. He had opened the first letter to Wingrave (and the first Crewe included in her edition) with another line from Pope, warning Wingrave to stick to Christian principles amidst the temptations of empire.24 Wingrave’s father had told Sancho he was sending his son “some public prints” depicting the Gordon riots, and Sancho takes the opportunity to reiterate what he was writing to Spink at this time. He further illustrates his identification with Britain, in this case unreserved as it had not been in that 1778 letter to Wingrave. In the prints, Sancho told Wingrave, “you will see the blessed temper of the times: we are (but do not be frightened) all, at least two thirds of us, run mad – through too much religion; our religion has swallowed up our charity – and the fell demon Persecution is become the sacred idol of the once free, enlightened Britons –” He assumes Wingrave will share his response: “You read with wonder and horror the sad history of eight such days – as I wish from my soul could be annihilated out of Times’ records for ever.” Sancho took the opportunity at the conclusion of this letter to tell Wingrave “That wretched young man I once warned you of is I find (from under his own hand) now resident at Calcutta”: This was Julius Soubise, a subject of that long letter to Wingrave with which Crewe opened the whole collection. In that letter, Sancho told Wingrave that Soubise planned to settle in Madras or Bengal, “to teach riding or fencing.” Evidently, Soubise had taken up Sancho’s offer to be ever “happy in your correspondence” with Sancho, if Soubise’s moral “conversion was real.” He took enough interest in his young, black admirer to tell Wingrave “I

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wish you not to know him – but whatever particulars you can collaterally glean I shall esteem it a favour if you “would transmit them to Your sincere friend Ignatius Sancho.” He added Mrs. Sancho’s authority: “Mrs. Sancho joins me cordially in every wish for your good.”25

Sancho’s correspondence with Spink was resumed four days after this letter, referring to the West Indies as the letter to Wingrave referred to the East. Sancho gave Spink the good news that Rodney had defeated the French fleet, preventing it from getting into Martinique. Spink was one of his customers, so after again sending his hopes that Mrs. Spink was getting better, Sancho wrote, “Your order, good Sir, is compleated, and, please God, will be delivered in to-morrow’s wagon.” He told Spink, too, of his failing health, his writing “a scrawl” because of his eyes. He had seven months to live. “I feel myself since last winter an old man all at once–” his eyes, the loss of his teeth, his thickening of hearing “are all messengers sent in mercy and love, to turn our thoughts to the important journey which kings and great men seldom think about:—” it is not clear whether he did or did not include Spink in the latter category because he continued, “it is for such as you to meditate on time and eternity with true pleasure,” looking back, and forward with hope. “As I have reason to respect you in this life, may I and mine be humble witnesses in the next of the exceeding weight of bliss and glory poured out without measure upon thee and thine.” His enlightened Anglicanism embraced a blissful afterlife in which virtue earned humanity a place from a merciful God.26 Sancho addressed John Osborne, “DEAR BROTHER,” in his next letter, in which he personified the gout as a visitor. The “father of mischief” had sent this new acquaintance “to some richer neighbor at a greater house,” the Bishop of Winchester’s, Carretta suggests, then reversing convention in favour of his wife’s brother, Sancho explains, “but as Johnny O[sborne] was a character better known, and much more esteemed, the gout thought he might as well take a peep at F—” the village of Farnham, near Bury, where Spink and Sancho’s network of friends lived, “liked the place, and the man of the place” and so nestling into your shoe, “quite forgot his real errand.” More witty sympathy illustrates the quality of the relationship between these brothers-in-law, as Sancho admits he was “unfortunately an adept at the gout.” Sancho had news of Osborne from friends in common, including Spink, and he tells him he “supped last night with Dr. R[ush],” as we saw, another servant in

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the Bunbury circle, “where your health was drunk, and your gout pretty freely canvased.”27 His next two letters were to Spink, both combining personal wishes in the language of the heart with news of the war in the Americas.28 The second makes explicit that Sancho gets his news from at least “one gentleman in the administration with whom I am upon good terms,” probably someone who dropped into Sancho’s shop. Having detailed a battle between British and French ships in the Channel with apparent patriotic pride, Sancho also steps back, appalled: “the two ships exhibited a scene more like a slaughter-house…. These oh Christians! are the features of war – and thus Most Christian K[in]gs and Defenders of the faith shew their zeal and love for the dying commands of their Divine Master.” Sancho has criticized such ostentatious hypocrisy before, and it bears comparison with his indignation over the slave owners’ vouching for Wheatley. Here he continues by his wish to Spink, “–Oh! friend, may every felicity be thine, and those beloved by thee! may the heart-felt sigh arise only at the tale of foreign woes!” that is, distant ones, “—may the sacred tear of pity bedew the cheek for misfortune only such as humanity may soften!” Wishing Spink be spared such woes, in effect Sancho illustrates how sensibility could lead to the kind of sympathy for unknown others denoted by the word “humanity.” This invokes the process he had described in his 1766 letter to Sterne, or rather the one Sterne described in his sermon to Job quoted in Sancho’s letter, asking it to be applied to “my miserable black brethren,” enslaved “in the West Indies.” Sancho’s postscript includes a playful reference to race, as he asks Spink to give Sancho’s “love to Sir J[ohnny] O[sborne] and all who enquire after Blackamoors,” a reminder that black people should be the objects of sympathy and humanity by racist whites, another echo of the process the body of the letter described.29 Of the volume’s last eleven letters, seven were to Spink. He planned on visiting the Spink’s in Bury, in part for his health, “the week after next,” in early October. He declined Spink’s offer to put him up, deciding instead to stay with “brother O[sborne]” because he had “the right of priority.” While his health was a serious concern (another letter was to thank a doctor, an acquaintance of Spink, who had sent him a prescription), he hoped Mrs. Spink was better: “Tell my good Mrs. Spink I shall live to see her,” and thanked Spink again for his liberality. This letter made clear that Sancho had visited Bury earlier in his life, when he had met his Bury

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correspondents—bankers, artists, servants—petit bourgeoisie associated with the arts, and the Bunbury household at nearby Barton Hall.30 His remaining letters described his illnesses, above all, gout. One was to Charles Lincoln, to whom Sancho had written a bon voyage letter the previous year, so he must have returned from India, then sailing from England to St. Kitts, to rejoin “his worthy and respectable family.” In that earlier letter, Sancho had given advice to someone he addressed as “young man” as he addressed Wingrave, but without the note of deference—this was to a West Indian black with whom Sancho could identify himself. Lincoln may have been an intimate of Sancho’s family: he told him the only news he had was “but what you know as well as myself – such as the regard and best wishes of Mrs. Sancho – the girls and myself-” He warned him, “Let not the levity of frothy wit – nor the absurdity of fools break in upon your happy principles”—this must have referred to Soubise; instead carry the Almighty’s “laws in your heart.” “I mean mere fatherly advice but I have wrote a sermon.”31 Sancho’s October 25, 1780 letter, addressed Lincoln as “MY DEAR BOY,” was an answer to Lincoln’s from St. Kitts. “You happily reached the haven of your repose – found you friends well – and rejoiced – their hearts by – presenting not a prodigal, but a duteous, worthy, and obedient child.” Sancho’s letters referred to naval engagements in the West Indies, part of the war with France and America. Sancho writes (evidently in response to Lincoln’s news): “Of course you are in the militia – that will do you no harm; spirit and true coverage in defence of our country is naturally and nobly employed.” Sancho may have been thinking of Sterne’s brief memoir, describing his father’s soldiering in Ireland, the Mediterranean and Jamaica. He goes on, “We are in the upper world,” that is metropolitan Britain, “playing the same old foolish game – in the same foolish way – and with the same foolish set that trod the ministerial boards when you left us,” not so bitter as his response to the slaughter caused by the zealotry of the French and British kings in his August 18 letter to Spink, but representing minister as mere actors, causing war.32 Sancho mentions two acquaintances, expresses his belief in the golden rule (“never will I consent to do that unto others, I would not they should do unto me,” and tells Lincoln “to be proud of nothing but an honest heart,” to let the “sacred oracles” be his daily “counsellors, –so shall you truly enjoy life, and smile at the approach of death.” His own was on his mind: “I have been exceedingly ill since you left us” but he hoped his “fair fit of the good” would “cleanse me from my whole budget of

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complaints.” Lincoln had told Sancho of a gift he had sent: “I shall live, I hope till your good present arrives…Send the girls some cherry nuts, if easy to be procured.” Reinforcing the sense of Lincoln’s closeness to Sancho’s family, he concluded, “Mrs. S[ancho] joins me in love, good will, and good wishes for thy, peace, health, and prosperity. Adieu, Yours affectionably I.Sancho.”33 A week later he told Spink, “I am in the way of being well – the gout in both feet and legs – I go upon all fours – the conflict has been sharp, I hope the end is near –” punning to the last. His condition was the second of two subjects about which he wrote to his wife’s sister, Mrs. Osborne, the only black woman correspondent in Crewe’s edition. He had declined Spink’s offer of hospitality in favour of the Osborne’s, an arduous journey he then undertook either in hopes of an improvement in health, or to say his goodbyes. Back in London, everybody “tells me I am better” but he described his symptoms’ persistence, his “body weak as water…a smart gout in both legs and feet.” He told Mrs. Osborne, “Your sister joins me in love and repeated thanks for all favours shown to her poor, worn out, old man.”34 Spink sent him “plenty of some of the best wine,” delaying his thanks “to be enabled to send a tolerable account of myself – the gout has used me like a tyrant – and my asthma, if possible, worse – I have swelled gradually all over – What a sight.” He was now being attended by Dr. Jebb, “one of the most expensive” London practitioners. That he was from 1780 “physician to the Prince of Wales, might indicate a further connection with Fox, certainly Sancho’s connection with the London elite.35 Sancho’s last letters to Spink are still more extreme in their gratitude and affection, calling him and his wife “my best friends,” and omitting any reference to public events. Evidently, they had come to London on an errand of mercy to Sancho, who was unable to come to them. He begins his November 27 letter: “My friend, patron, preserver were the mind alone sick – God never created – since the blessed Apostles days – a better physician than thy self – either singly, or in happy partnership with the best of women –” he compared Spink’s to “the blessed zeal of the Samaritan’s, forgetful of self-wants –” referring to that parable held up by Sterne, emblematic of the virtue of ignoring social barriers, including that of colour. Spink made sure an “interested host” took care of Sancho when he reluctantly, had to leave, telling his friend to spare no expense and promising to repay him as his return. “Indulge me, my noble friend, I

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have seen the priest, and the Levite, after many years knowledge – snatch a hasty look – then with averted face, pursue their different routes, and these good folks pray, turn up their eyes to that Heaven they daily insult, and take more pains to preserve the appearance of virtue, than would suffice to make, them good in earnest—” This is bitter. Then turning back to his illness, “You see, my good Sir, by the galloping of my pen, that I am much mended. – I have been intolerably plagued with a bilious colic, which, after three days excruciating torments, gave way to mutton-fat-broth clysters.” He wrote more than usual about Mrs. Sancho, “who reads, weeps, and wonders as the various passions impel,” moved, she must have been, by sympathy for her husband’s distress, relief, and what she was reading. Talking about his letter, she “says she is sure the merits of your house would save B[ury], were the rest of the inhabitants ever so bad; - she joins me in every grateful thought. – In good truth, I have not the language to express my feelings.” This expressed inexpressibility. “Blessed couple, adieu!”36 Sancho’s penultimate letter was also of great sensibility, linked to that first and most public letter to Sterne. Spink’s reply to his previous letter had been full of feeling, expressed in words and with another parcel of food and drink, stimulating further extremes on Sancho’s part: Spink realized the toll on his income that Sancho’s illness was taking. In describing his response, Sancho wrote, “Why joy in the extreme should end painfully I cannot find out – but that it does so, I will ever seriously maintain.” He detailed this sequence, registering his consciousness of the comparable process in Spink’s feelings for Sancho’s distress. “When I read my effusions of goodness, my head turned – but when I came to consider the extensive and expensive weight and scope of the contents, my reason reeled and idiotism took possession of me–” but he, like other persons of sensibility had a built-in relief mechanism, again operated by the nerves. “– till the friendly tears, washing away the mists of doubts,” leaving his mind free for a religious vision, “presented you to me as beings of a purer, happier order – which god in his mercy perhaps suffers to be scattered here and there – thinly – that the lucky few who know them may, at the same time, know what man in his original state was intended to be –” Sancho may have recalled Sterne’s declaration in his sermon in the Prodigal Son (to which Sancho refers explicitly in his letter to Lincoln, written a few weeks before): “When the affections break loose, Joy is another name for Religion.” The passage in this letter to Spink suggests Mr. and Mrs. Spink resemble Adam and Eve in their unfallen state, and it

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included Sancho among the lucky few capable of recognizing them, very noticeable self-assertion on the part of a self-consciously black person, thus elevated to more than equality among whites, although maintaining a degree of deference towards the Spinks.37 Among Spink’s “effusions of goodness” was his “request” that Sancho come and stay with him. Sancho told him, “I gave your generous request a fair hearing – the two first proposed places would kill me, except (and that is impossible) Mrs. Sancho was with me.” She was taking care of the children and the shop. Another was Bury: “Inclination strongly points to the land of friendship where goodness ever blossoms – and where N[or] f[or]d heals.” His next letter makes clear that Norford was a doctor. Turning this down required more in explanation: “At present I take nothing, but am trying for a few days what honest nature unperplexed by art will do for me – I am pretty much swelled still, but I take short airings in near stages, such as Greenwich, Clapham, Newington, &c, &c. Walking kills me –” Moreover, the “mind,” he emphasizes, “this mind, my ever dear and honoured friends – the mind requires her lullaby; she must have rest – ere the body can be in a state of comfort, and that must be found in still repose of family and home.” Bury, then, was too far, but Sancho re-emphasizes his gratitude by way of Mrs. Sancho’s unspeakable feelings. “Mrs. Sancho, who speaks by her tears, says what I will not pretend to decypher;–” He guesses: “I believe she most fervently recommends you to that Being who best knows you – for he gave you your talents –” another Biblical allusion, leading to more inexpressibility. “My most grateful and affectionate respects, joined with Mrs. Sancho’s attend the good Mrs. S[pink], thyself and all thy connexions. I cannot say how much we are obliged to you; but certainly we were never so much nor so undeservingly obliged to any before. God keep you in all your doings – prays thine – SANCHO.”38 Sancho aggrandizes the Spinkses still more in the first line of his last letter, written December 7, a week before he died. “I am doubly and trebly happy, that I can in some measure remove the anxiety of the best couple in the universe.” Then an occupazio of sensibility: “I set aside all thanks – were I to enter into the feelings of my heart, for the past and present, I should fill the sheet.” Instead he tells Spink, in “good truth, I have been exceeding ill – my breath grew worse – and the dropsy made large strides, –I left off medicine by consent for four or five days, swelled immoderately – the good Dr. N[or]f[or]d eighty miles distant [in Bury] – and Dr. J[e]bb

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heartily puzzled through the darkness of his patient,” Sancho isstill able to pun about his colour, wryly observing the value put on his skin by a white expert. Therefore, “I began to feel alarm – when looking into your letter, I found a Dr. S –th, recommended by yourself. I enquired – his character is great – but for lungs and dropsy, Sir John E–t, physician extraordinary, and ordinary to his Majesty, is reckoned the first.” Carretta has identified the former as the author of a book as “Pulmonary Consumption,” and the latter as physician to the Prince of Wales, so perhaps another connection made by Crewe through Fox. Sancho went to see him the day he wrote this letter to Spink, telling him, Sir John “received me like Dr. N[or]f[or]d,” Spink’s friend. “My poor belly is so distended that I write with pain – I hope next week to write with more ease. My dutiful respects await Mrs. S and self to which Mrs. Sancho begs to be joined by her loving husband, and Your most grateful friend, Sancho.”39

Notes 1. AFRICANUS, “To the General Advertizer,” April 29, 1780, in Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1998), 214–15. 2. For the Gordon riots and their causes, see http://members.pcug.org. au/~ppmay/acts/relief_act_1778.htm; The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth Century Great Britain, ed. Ian Haywood and John Seed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); see, too, George Rudé, “The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Rioters and their Victims,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, No. 6 (1956), 152–75, 167; and for the empire, an essential beginning is Vincent Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 2 vols. (London: Longmans Green, 1952). In addition, Harlow identifies all the British politicians to whom Sancho refers. For more recent beginnings on the subject, see Cultures of Empire: A Reader: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Catherine Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2003); Padraic X. Scanlan, Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain I (London: Robinson, Little Brown, 2020); Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperial Has Shaped Modern Britain (London: Viking, 2020); Caroline

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

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Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (London: Bodley Head, 2022); Amaryta Sen, Home in the World (New York: Liveright, 2022). Sancho to Mrs. H—, May 20, 1780, Sancho, Letters , 215–17, 266 n. 1. Sancho to Mrs. H—, Nov. 1, 1773, Sancho, Letters, 49; Sancho to Mrs. H.—, May 20, 1780, Sancho Letters, 215–16. Sancho to Mrs. H—, May 20, 1780, Sancho, Letters , 216, 315 n; 257 n. Sancho, Letters, 316 n. 4; [Ralph Griffiths], ART X. Letters of the Rev. Mr. Lawrence Sterne….” Monthly Review (October, 1775): 340–66; 344. Sancho to Mrs. H–, May 20, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 217. See n. 2. Spink, identified by Carretta, Sancho, Letters, 272 n. 2. Sancho to Spink, December 26, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 110–11; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 66–71. Four of these letters on the riots are the subject of Brycchan Carey, “‘The Worse than Negro barbarity of the Populace’: Ignatius Sancho witnesses the Gordon Riots,” ch. 6 of The Gordon Riots, 144–61. Sancho to Spink, June 6, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 217–18. “Postscript,” Sancho to Spink, June 6, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 218–20; the wish, “Mary foul discord and her cursed train never nearer approach your blessed abode,” is from “Dialogue between Damon and Phileman concerning the preference of riches to poverty,” probably by Aaron Hill (1753). Sancho to Spink, June 9, 1780, Sancho, Letters , 220–21; Harlow, British Empire II, 166, 197; Dana Rabin, “Imperial Disruption: City, Nation and Empire in the Gordon Riots,” The Gordon Riots, ch. 4. Paula Byrne, Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), 162. Sancho to Spink, June 9, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 220–21. Sancho to Spink, June 9, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 222–23; 319–20 n.l. Sancho to Spink, June 9, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 222–23. Sancho to Spink, June 13, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 223–24. Sancho to Spink, June 15, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 225–26. Sancho to Spink, June 16, 1780, Sancho, Letters , 226–27; Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinion of Tristran Shandy, Gentleman, ed. James Aiken Work (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940), 526–27. Sancho to Spink, June 19, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 227–29. Sancho to Jack Wingrave, June 23, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 228–29. Pope, “Essay on Man,” Epistle 4: 255–56; 215–16; 254; Sancho to John Wingrave, June 23, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 228–29. Sancho to Jack Wingrave, June 23, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 229; Sancho to Jack Wingrave, February 14, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 25–28; 27–28; Sancho to Julius Soubise, October 11, 1772(?),Sancho, Letters , 46–43.

194 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

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Sancho to Spink, June 27, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 229–30. Sancho to Mr. Osborne, July 1, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 230–31; 321 n. 1. Sancho to Spink, July 5, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 231–32. Sancho to Spink, August 18, Sancho, Letters, 232–34. Sancho to Spink, September 23, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 237; Sancho to Spink, October 13, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 238–39. Sancho to Lincoln, May 4, 1779, Sancho, Letters, 158–59; 303 n. 1. Sancho to Lincoln, October 25, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 240–41; Sterne. Sancho to Lincoln, October 25, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 240–41. Sancho to Spink, Nov. 1, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 241; Sancho to Mrs. Osborne, Nov. 5, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 242. Sancho to Spink, Nov. 18, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 242–43; 323 n. 1. Sancho to Spink, Dec. 1, 1780, Sancho, Letters , 243–44. Sancho to Spink, Dec. 1, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 244–45; Sterne, “The Prodigal Son,” Sermon V, The Sermons of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), 186–94; 190. Sancho to Spink, Dec. 1, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 244–45. Sancho to Spink, Dec. 7, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 245–46.

CHAPTER 7

“To Produce Remorse in Every Enlightened Reader.” Frances Crewe’s Publication of Sancho’s Letters

Soon after Sancho’s death on December 14, 1780, Framces Crewe, or an intermediary, contacted the editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine, J. Nichols, who was to be the publisher of Sancho’s Letters , with a reminder and an announcement: “Dear Mr. Urban, April 5, 1781. From the opinion you expressed of delicacy and sensibility of Ignatius Sancho, whose letters to Mr. Sterne in your Magazine for 1776, p. 29” the two facts (Sancho’s sensibility and his connection with Sterne emphasized), “I doubt not of your readiness to make room for an unpublished letter of the same ‘good-hearted’ Negro.” The italicized phrase was contrary to the view that “Negroes” were often, or usually, bad-hearted, as well as dishonest. “‘Though black as Othello,’ as you have very judiciously have observed, ‘his heart was as humanized as any of the fairest about St. Thomas.’” Because of these reminders, the writer concludes, “it will not be unpleasing to your readers to be informed that a collection of his Letters is preparing for the public.” The unpublished letter was from Sancho, “To Mr. S[tevenson], August 31, 1779” and was quoted in full: “You have made ample amends – for your stoical silence – in so much that like Balaam,” Sancho comparing himself to the Biblical prophet (Numbers 22–28; 2 Peter 2:15; Jude 1:11; Revelation, 2:14), forever associated with the speaking ass who inspires him, surely an allusion to Sterne.1 The letter goes on, “I am constrained to bless – where peradventure I intended the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3_7

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reverse,” that was to say, to curse, introducing a very fulsome blessing. “For hadst thou taken the wings of the morning – and searched North, East, South, and West – or dived into the sea, exploring the treasures of the old Ocean, thou could’st neither in art or nature have found aught that could have made me happier – gift wise – than the sweet and highly finished portrait of my dear Sterne.” He asks Stevenson how he had first come by it, apprehending he had not painted it himself. The drawing of Sterne made by Meheux and submitted to The Public Advertizer but retrieved by Sancho before it could be published, had, he told Roger Rush, “gone to Stevenson.” Stevenson was a professional painter, trained by Reynolds, who had painted Sterne in 1760, when Sterne was at the height of his fame. He exhibited at the Royal Academy (of which Reynolds had been a founder in 1768), in 1777 and 1778. He was also a bookseller and banker, who lived in Bury, and knew Sancho’s friends there.2 Sancho’s letter to Stevenson published in The Gentleman’s Magazine continued: “I fear it is not by thy own manufacture. Perhaps thou had gratified thy finer feelings at an expense – which friendship would blush for.” Modestly he suggests it might be “impertinent” to say, as he does, that “could ought add to the value of the affair – it would be – its having you – for its father.” “I must add to a conclusion – I mean this – not as an epistle of cold thanks but the warm ebullitions of African sensibility.” While he has demonstrated his capacity for sophisticated, Sternean, literary sensibility, the word “ebullitions,” used by others to characterize African/black emotionalism, was perhaps inflected with a further degree of modesty. But then, characteristically, Sancho reverses his deference, and re-reverses it, even as he further aggrandizes Stevenson’s generosity. “– Your gift would add to the pride of Caesar – were he living, and knew the merits of the original” as Sancho did, “– it has half turned the head of a Sancho as this scrawl will certify. Adieu!” This letter, then, and its introduction, again publicized Sancho’s connection with Sterne, prepared the way for Crewe’s forthcoming collection. Evidently Stevenson was in contact with her, able to find this letter, and well may have encouraged her to send it to The Gentleman’s Magazine, to which “he was a frequent contributor,” or sent it there himself on her behalf. Stevenson may have helped her gather the letters she published; he was to make an index of them.3 He recorded that Crewe, on March 5, 1782, married John Philips, “a surgeon in the household of the Prince of Wales,” and probably the John Philips listed as a subscriber

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to Sancho’s Letters. She was very young when she corresponded with Sancho in 1778 and 1779, her letters often connected with her “lady’s companion,” Mrs. Cocksedge, and vice versa.4 Margaret Cocksedge was “probably the poor relation of [a] prosperous wealthy family in Bury.” She was to marry Sir Charles Bunbury in 1805. His first marriage in 1762 was to the sixteen-year-old beauty, Lady Sarah Lennox; her sister, Caroline, seventeen years older, had nursed her; Caroline was the mother of Charles James Fox (1749–1806), a close friend of Bunbury’s; both were men about town, and were addicted to the turf. Bunbury was an M.P.; Sarah wrote a friend during their courtship that he had “free access to this house by coming to see Ste[phentox] and talking politics to Mr. Fox. He is more than Lord Shelbourne,” They had “an immensely expensive divorce” in 1776 by an Act of Parliament on grounds of her adultery with Sir William Gordon. (Later Bunbury expressed the wish to marry her again but she saw him then “as a blissful bachelor”). He was also a member of Dr. Johnson’s literary circle, including Garrick and must have met Francis Barber there.5 Together with making her gender explicit, Crewe’s editorial note stated, “The Editor of these Letters thinks proper to obviate an objection, which she finds has already been suggested, that they were originally written with a view to publication. She declares therefore, that no such idea was ever expressed by Mr. Sancho”; as evidence, she continues, “not a single letter is here printed from any duplicate preserved by himself, but all have been collected from the various friends to whom they were addressed.” Crewe knew Sancho’s feelings about publishing his letters, having in hand the outraged one to Rush about the letter to Browne, published without his consent. She said she took responsibility for “laying them before the publick.” As we shall see, it is quite feasible Sancho raised the issue of publishing such a collection with Crewe, or was on the verge of doing so before he died. But her arrangement of his letters addressed her present, political circumstances, as well as the consequences of Mansfield’s decision to free Somerset. Her brief editorial note was followed by “The Life of Sancho,” its author named as John Jekyll in the fifth edition of 1805. His title was accompanied by an epigraph from Virgil’s Eclogues, “Quamvis ille niger, Quamvistu candidus effes.” Dryden translated the line,

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Tho’ he was black and thou art heavenly fair, the verse continuing, Trust not too much to that enchanting face Beauty’s a charm but soon the charm will pass White lilac lies neglected on the plain, While dusky hyacinths for use remain.

Carretta points out that by 1782 the Latin line, “Quamvis ille niger,” etc. (of course invidious about colour), “had become associated with the British antislavery movement,” because in the Scots decision freeing Joseph Knight, the 1778 equivalent of the famous Mansfield decision, one of Knight’s lawyers had used it as an epigraph, so it was a deliberate echo of that case, in keeping with Crewe’s purpose, aligning his “Life” with the letters of “An African.” That purpose was evidently poet Thomas Chatterton’s hope, too, in adapting Virgil’s form to three “African Eclogues,” published in London in 1770. Carey suggests the same in comparing Jekyll’s presentation of Sancho to John Bicknell and Thomas Day’s portrait of “The Dying Negro” in 1773, also in the aftermath of Mansfield’s freeing Somerset. Jekyll was born in 1753, matriculated from Queens College, Oxford, and was called to the bar in 1773. Jekyll wrote comic pieces for Whig newspapers, and satirized Pitt the Younger. Elected MP for Calne in Wiltshire, he may have been a follower of Charles James Fox, and shared Crewe’s Foxite purpose. Fox’s old friend, the Prince of Wales, was behind Jekyll’s appointment as Solicitor General in 1805 the year of Fox’s brief prime ministership, and the date his name was given as the author of “The Life of Sancho.” (He became Master of Chancery in 1815.)6 Jekyll “Life of Sancho” opened: “This extraordinary Negro was born AD 1729, on board a ship in the Slave-trade, a few days after it had quitted the coast of Guinea, for the Spanish West Indies, and at Cartagena, he received from the hand of the Bishop, Baptism and the name of Ignatius.” The simple specificity might be thought extraordinary, but leaving aside how Jekyll knew these things (Sancho’s first owner might have told them to the sisters in Greenwich, who later told their young slave), one can see its value in an appeal to English readers concerned with the slave trade, asking them to put a “Negro” in their familiar framework, getting them to think of an African’s life originating in the year of “our Lord.” Similarly, Jekyll next tells us of Sancho’s Christianization before in his second paragraph he mentioned his African parents, victims

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of the horrific effects of enslavement. “A disease of the new climate put an early period to his mother’s existence; and his father defeated the miseries of slavery by suicide.” If the baby was born as the transatlantic voyage began, he would have been at least a month, probably two months old, presumably given an African name by his parents.7 Jekyll implied that it was baby Ignatius’s first purchaser who, when he was two, brought him to England and gave him to those three sisters in Greenwich, whose naming and treatment of Sancho I have mentioned. The “Life” allows the reader to imagine the donor was a relative, a naval officer or a merchant, and the sisters raising the toddler as other “little Blackies” were raised to be servants, their exotic colour a fashionable symbol of status and of Britain’s imperial reach. Jekyll told the reader of the sisters’ attempts to keep Sancho subordinate by keeping him ignorant. “But a patron was at hand, whom Sancho had merit enough to conciliate at a very early age.” This was the “late Duke of Montagu,” the first of that name and rank in Sancho’s life. One of the Duke’s residences was “on Blackheath” near Greenwich: Montagu “accidentally saw the little Negro, and admired in him a native frankness of manner as yet unbroken by servitude and unrefined by education,” that is, with a kind of Rousseauestic potential. Jekyll says that servitude eventually breaks a person. Montagu “brought him frequently home to the Duchess,” presumably for her educative influence. She was the youngest daughter of the Duke of Marlborough, who had a black page named Charles; a portrait of her including him had been painted in the 1720s.8 The Duke “indulged [Sancho’s] turn for reading with presents of books, and strongly recommended to his mistresses”—those Greenwich sisters—“the duty of cultivating a genius of such apparent fertility.”9 But Sancho’s owners “were inflexible and even threatened on angry occasions to return Ignatius Sancho to his African slavery.” Historians Mullen, Mandell and Newman write that “enslaved people who were brought to Britain were never more than one sale away from a return to colonial plantation slavery,” therefore existing “in a liminal state between the harsh racial slavery of the colonies” endured by those Sancho called his “miserable black brethrens,” “and the more benign working conditions” of the British Isles. They tell of the suicide of a man threatened by that fate.10 According to Jekyll, Sancho grew up living with the sisters but in contact with the Montagus, where he learned an alternative view of himself, his abilities and therefore prospects. “The love of freedom had increased with years, and begun to beat high in his bosom.” Jekyll

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describes Sancho’s maturing sexually, asserting his freedom in a way particularly galling to the ladies who claimed entire control over their young black male. “Indignation, – and the dread of constant reproach arising from the detection of an amour infinitely criminal in the eyes of these three Maiden Ladies, finally determined him to abandon the family.” This second time, the “Maiden” is capitalized; Jekyll makes clear Sancho’s amour was consummated: “infinitely criminal” suggests his partner was white, given the sister’s racism, and even married. The reader can imagine the nature of their reproaches, accompanied by threats. Sancho escaped to the household which had long made him welcome.11 But the Duke had died: in fleeing “to the Duchess for protection,” Sancho had misjudged what her response would be; evidently he told her of the behaviour for which the maiden sisters persecuted him. At first she shared their views, and “dismissed him with reproof – He retired from her presence in a state of despondency and stupefaction.” Nonetheless, “Enamored still of that liberty, the scope of whose enjoyment was now limited to five shillings, and resolute to maintain it with his life, he procured an old pistol for purposes which his father’s example had suggested as familiar, and had sanctified as hereditary.” The difference in Sancho’s case was the existence of some choices in England, not plantation Colombia. In Pope’s 1713 words, Addison’s Cato had called “forth Roman drops from British eyes” in posing, “chains or conquest, liberty or death,” to be echoed in Sancho’s era by American revolutionary Patrick Henry. We saw Sancho, in the guise of AFRICANUS, identified himself with Roman zeal.12 In the end, the Duchess recognized what she faced. “In this frame of mind, the futility of remonstrance was obvious. The Duchess secretly admired his character.” She “consented to admit him into her household where he remained a butler until her death” in 1751, “when he found himself by her Grace’s bequest and his own economy, possessed of seventy pounds in money and an annuity of thirty.” This was apparently paid to Sancho for his remaining thirty years.13 In his letter to Sterne, Sancho described his life, after gaining a “little reading and writing…by unwearied application” spent in “one of the best families in the kingdom.” But Jekyll added that once Sancho found himself with that regular income (he was about twenty-two), “freedom, riches, and leisure, naturally led a disposition of African texture into indulgences; and that which dissipated the mind of Ignatius completely drained

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the purse.” Africans were innately self-indulgent. This was a racist characterization with which we have seen Sancho played in his correspondence. Just why Jekyll included it a “Life” intended to contribute to the elevation of African character at list may not be obvious but his story is one of self-improvement—Ben Franklin told of transcending a similar phase in his Autobiography.14 Jekyll continued: “In his attachment to women, he displayed a profuseness which not unusually characterizes an excess of the passion,” this seems race neutral. But Jekyll went on to interpret another of Sancho’s self-indulgences racially, his propensity to gamble (on cards), “appeared to be innate among his countrymen.” Jekyll added an authority—“A French writer relates that in the kingdom of Ardrah, Whydah, and Benin, a Negro will stake at play his fortune, his children and his liberty.” In Jekyll’s London, men (including Fox and the Prince of Wales) and women, gambled to excess: it was a target of reformers of manners, too. But his “extraordinary Negro” “determined to abjure the propensity” after losing his clothes “at cribbage with a Jew.”15 Jekyll adds to his story of Sancho’s youthful unleashing, that he “loved the theatre to such a point of enthusiasm that his last shilling went to Dury-lane, on Mr. Garrick’s representation of Richard.” Thus reduced, Sancho fell back on his complexion’s suggesting “an offer to the manager of attempting Othello and Oroonoko, but a defective and incorrigible articulation rendered it abortive.” (I discussed this episode earlier.) Sancho’s letters show his continuing interest in the theatre, for example, in his taking his daughters to see Falstaff, and comparing that 1777 performance to one he had seen in 1752.16 In Jekyll’s account, Sancho returned to serve in the latter Duke of Montagu’s household (apparently a source for Jekyll), at first in that of its chaplain. The “present Duke,” i.e. George Brudenell, “soon placed him about his person, where habitual regularity of life led him to think of a matrimonial connexion, and he formed one with a very deserving young woman of West Indian origin.” This paragraph, following the one describing Sancho’s indulgences including excess of sexual passion, further demonstrated Sancho’s reformation of manners and his specifying her origin in that way ensured that Sancho could not be charged with an inter-racial marriage. Her name was Anne J. Osborne.17 Jekyll’s account of Sancho’s reformation after that youthful “amour,” as well as his indulgent and profuse attachment to women, which Jekyll believed were natural to Africans, must be read as highly germane to his

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and Crewe’s purpose, to show that Africans, “negroes,” were capable of reformation, contrary to that irrepressible danger of which Long and Pro Bono Publico warned. It was an insistent theme in what other whites wrote of them, whether they wished to ameliorate or to end slavery. Jekyll records that the Duchess of Queensbury “entrusted to his [Sancho’s] reformation a very unfortunate favorite of his own complexion” that is, Julius Soubise.18 Late in 1773, when Sancho was forty-four, “repeated attacks of the gout and a constitutional corpulence rendered him incapable of further attendance in the Duke’s family.” This was a “crisis” but the Montagu’s “munificence,” referring at least to that earlier thirty pounds annuity, along with his wages, from which Sancho’s “frugality” had saved, “enabled him and his wife to settle themselves in a shop of grocery, where mutual and rigid industry decently maintained a numerous family of children and where domestic virtue engaged private patronage, and merited public imitation.” This paragraph of Jekyll’s must be placed in the same category as the other references to Sancho’s adherence to English middle-class manners and virtues.19 It is the context for Jekyll’s apologetic reflection: “Of a Negro, a Butler, and a Grocer, these are but slender anecdotes to animate the page of the biographer but it has been necessary to give some sketch of the very singular man, whose letters, with all the imperfection on their head are now offered to the public.” Nonetheless, Sancho’s writings “exhibit an epistolary talent, of rapid and just conception, of wild patriotism, and of universal philanthropy,” which he suggests “may well apologize for the protection of the great and the friendship of the literary.” The last two categories he illustrates by mentioning that the “late Duchesses of Queensberry and Northumberland pressed forward to serve the author of them,” having their husbands publicly subscribe to Crewe’s edition. The former was a friend of Sancho’s, discussing Soubise with her. Jekyll illustrates Sancho’s “friendship with the literary” by noting “Garrick and Sterne were well acquainted with him.”20 That was followed by a paragraph notably in the passive voice, referring to one of Sancho’s publications. “A commerce with the Muses was supported amid the trivial and momentary interruptions of shop; the Poets were studied, and even imitated with some success; – two pieces were constructed for the stage;” “– the Theory of Music was discussed, published and dedicated to the Princess Royal; and Painting was so much in the circle of Ignatius Sancho’s judgement and criticism, that Mortimer

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came often to consult him.” Jekyll assumed his readers would know “Mortimer,” i.e. John Hamilton Mortimer, in 1773 “vice president of the Incorporated Society of Arts.” Like Stevenson, Mortimer was a pupil of Reynolds.21 Jekyll follows this summary of Sancho’s artistic achievements and his writings’ exhibition “of epistolary talent,” with a clear statement of his general purpose, in addition to his earlier presentation of Sancho’s capacity for reformed, British manners. “Such was the man whose species philosophers and anatomists have endeavored to degrade as a deterioration of the human; and such was the man whom Fuller, with a benevolence and quaintness of phrase…accounteth ‘God’s Image, though cut in Ebony.’” This was in a passage from Thomas Fuller’s The Holy State (1642): while Jekyll evidently sees it contradicting the degradation summarized in his previous sentence, it reiterated the invidiousness of Jekyll’s epigraph from Virgil.22 Jekyll continues by referring to the “oppressions” compounding the “harsh definition of the naturalist” (supplied by Estwick and Hume, for example), implemented by the “political and legislative,” and further, “hourly aggravated towards this unhappy race of men by vulgar prejudice and popular insult.” Degradation ran the social gamut. “To combat these on commercial principles, has been the labour of Labat, Ferman, and Benezet – such an effort here would be an impertinent digression.” These were authorities to support his opposition to racism. Jean Baptiste Labat had armed slaves to fight the British in Guadaloupe in 1703. Anthony Benezet was by 1782 the leading, American, Quaker abolitionist, whose positive picture of Africans was part of his sustained arguments against slavery and the slave trade, for example his “Some Historical Account of Guinea” (1771). He had decisively influenced Granville Sharp, Somerset’s English defender. Referring to Benezet reinforced Jekyll’s and Crewe’s argument and purpose, to use the publication of Sancho’s Letters to challenge the stereotype of black people, continuing Sancho’s published effort.23 Jekyll adds that some Europeans have visited “the slave coast,” and they “extol the mental abilities of the natives,” citing three more writers who “speak highly of their mechanical powers and indefatigable industry,” and another who perused “their ingenuity.” If these capacities seem limited, Jekyll speculates that he, “who could penetrate the interior of Africa, might not improbably discover negro arts and polity which could bear little analogy to the ignorance and grossness of slaves in the sugar

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plantations, expatriated in infancy, and brutalized under the whip and the task-master.” Finally, there are the rest of Sancho’s own, previously unpublished, English words to refute stereotype and illustrates the capacities an African can attain, with no apparent reservations. “And he who surveys the extent of intellect to which Ignatius Sancho had attained by self-education, will perhaps conclude that the perfection of the reasoning faculties does not depend on a peculiar conformation of the soul or the colour of a common integument,” this “in defiance of the wild opinion,” which, and here Jekyll quotes “a learned writer of these times,” in fact, Dr. Johnson, on the “wild opinion” which “restrains the operation of the mind to particular regions, and supposes that a luckless mortal may be born in a degree of latitude too high or too low for wisdom or wit.” This was from Johnson’s life of Milton. It was to refute that view of Hume’s, quoted by Estwick, that nations beyond the polar regions or between the tropics, were inferior to the rest of the species.24 Crewe’s arrangement of the letters, those with which she chose to open each volume, points to an additional motive. Her first selection was an unusually lengthy letter Sancho had written to Jack Wingrave in India. Like other young, middle-class Englishmen (Thomas Thistlewood, for example, or Robert Clive, or Warren Hastings, Daniel Draper—Sterne’s Eliza’s husband—or those “black sheep” trading at West African forts, or the fictional George Ellison in Jamaica in the novel to which Sancho referred), Wingrave had gone to the colonies to make his fortune. (I quoted Sancho’s July 23, 1780 letter to him in Chapter 5.) Crewe also opened volume II of Sancho’s Letters (published simultaneously), with a letter to Wingrave. She misdated the first letter 1768, when it must have been written in 1778. She dated the second (opening vol. II), 1778.25 Sancho’s own purpose in both letters was to remind Wingrave of his moral values despite his financial success in India: “Your friendly letter convinced me that you are still the same…you carried out [to India] (through God’s good grace) an honest friendly heart, and a soul impressed with every humane feeling. That you are still the same – I repeat it – gives me more joy – than the certainty of your being worth ten Jaghires”: This was an adjuration that Jack not let his sensibility be corrupted by money—in a moment Sancho writes, “I am preaching.” “I dare say you will ever remember, that the truest worth is that of the mind – the blest rectitude of the heart – the conscience unsullied by guilt – the undaunted noble eye, enriched with innocence…May these

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ever be thy companions! – and for riches, you will never be vulgarly rich.” Britons returning with riches from India were called “Nabobs,” their reputation for vulgar ostentation preceded and accompanied by “West Indians” (like the Beckfords, one of whom Long married), enriched by Britain’s transatlantic colonies. The anonymous poem, The Nabob, asked in a prose footnote: “What Religion…is seen in Madras and particularly in Bengal , or in the West Indian Islands? Such is the fruit of commerce everywhere.”26 The question of Crewe’s misdating the letter can be linked to a second question: why Crewe chose to open her two-volume collection of Sancho’s letter with those to Wingrave rather, say, than with his actual first one extant, the one to Sterne in 1766? Readers had already been reminded that identifying relationship by the publication of the August, 1779, letter to Stevenson in The Gentleman’s Magazine, April 5, 1781. That first letter to Wingrave refers to Crewe, as it tells Wingrave his “B friends,” that is, either “Bury” or “Bunbury” friends, are all well excepting the good Mrs. [Cocksedge], who is at this time but so Miss C[rewe] still as agreeable as when you knew her, if not more so.” The names of the subscribers to the Letters, published with them, included a number of Crewe’s friends and acquaintances, make it evident they would know she was “Miss C” because they had given Sancho’s letters to her, and would recognize their referents.27 Crewe’s collection of Sancho’s letters, dated from 1766 to 1780, coincided with the American War for Independence, as those published in the newspapers illustrate. The context for Crewe’s arrangement and publication of his letters in 1782 was the political debate over empire after Britain’s surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, and the culmination of criticism of the East India Company. Britain’s gradually taking formal control of India, central to “the founding of the second British Empire” after the defeat of the first by Americans, had begun thirty years earlier. British victories in India (led by Robert Clive in the employ of the Company) had been decisive during and after the Seven Years’ War.28 The further acquisition of territories, particularly more slave colonies, initiated a broader, deeper questioning of empire than previously, including British participation in the slave trade and the exploitation of African slaves in the West Indies, marked by Sancho’s 1766 letter to Sterne, as well as Benezet’s Caution and Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies, and Bishop William Warburton’s sermon to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, both published that same year. In the long

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prose “Dedication” to Rousseau which he added to “The Dying Negro” (1773), and inspired by the Mansfield/Somerset decision, Thomas Day said that he wished to use his pen to confirm “the insolence of successful avarice, …which under the mask of commerce has already ravaged the two extremities of the globe,” India and Africa, “in one quarter of the world a band of miserable wretches, spreading unprovoked desolation over its most beautiful regions, massacring the Brahmin in the midst of his uncontaminated feasts,” and in the other, “a race of merchants, daily trafficking…exhausting Africa to supply with slaves the countries they have depopulated in America, and annually reducing millions to a state of misery still more awful than death itself.” British nabobs brought African slaves in India.29 Christopher Leslie Brown writes of the 1780s, “the emerging concern with how the British conducted themselves overseas would first center on the East India Company, not on the Atlantic slave trade…the treatment of native populations on the subcontinent became the object of sustained official questioning.” (Nearly “a quarter of the Members of Parliament…owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey. The commercial benefits from Britain’s Indian empire thus reached deep into the British establishment.”) The letters of Sancho as they were arranged for publication expressed this chronology and Sancho’s conception in 1778 and 1779, of the connection between these geographical spheres of imperial exploitation, although in this he was preceded by others, including Granville Sharp as well as Day.30 According to Vincent Harlow, the debate over the East India Company’s role in India reached a crisis in 1780 when Lord North, the Prime Minister, was “called upon to break the autonomy of a powerful corporation which had developed a novel form of empire in the East.” Its charter was renewed in Parliament that year, but with an entering wedge of governmental authority. The Company was to contribute to the cost of troops and naval vessels sent to India at its request. The struggle led to the recognition that the state would have to assume still more responsibility. “Public opinion was disturbed and angry,” informed by “the great volume of evidence produced by two Parliamentary committees” established in1781, the “Commons Select Committee on East India Affairs,” chaired by Burke, who also chaired the second, “secret” committee to investigate “miscarriage of justice in Bengal,” including “peculation and extortion,” “broadened a year later into an examination of how British possessions in India may be governed,” and “by what means the

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Happiness of the Natives may best be promoted.” Burke’s “impassioned crusade” aroused “genuine indignation and a dawning sense of responsibility.” The combination of claims for humanity and national self-interest demanded “decisive remedies”; that is more state intervention.31 This was the same combination of arguments AFRICANUS had expressed. It fuelled the contemporary antislavery campaign as it entered a decisive phase, articulated by the Rev. James Ramsay’s two publications of 1784, calling for Parliamentary action to end the slave trade, and ameliorate slave conditions in the West Indies, leading to the conversion of Africans and their emancipation. In 1783, Fox, by then with North leading a governing coalition, brought a bill to Parliament, to “remedy abuses in India,” reflecting Burke’s revelations. They, too, subscribed to Sancho’s Letters. Fox had opposed slavery throughout his life but he became more intensely active in the 1780s. In 1780, with Burke, Fox seconded Pitt’s motion to end the slave trade into Parliament (Pitt was standing in for the ill Wilberforce). Previously Fox said he would have introduced the motion if Wilberforce had not. In 1791 he joined Wilberforce, Pitt, and Burke in noting to abolish the slave trade, a bill that lost.32 John Crewe, MP for Cheshire, was very close to Fox, whom he is said to have made his “idol,” (he named his son and heir Charles James Fox Bunbury) and subsidizing Fox’s extravagance to the tune of thousands of pounds every year (Fox was able to ennoble Crewe in 1806, when he was briefly Prime Minister). Crewe’s wife, also named Frances, was “at the center of Fox’s circle,” a prominent political Whig hostess, close to the Duchess of Devonshire, the most prominent among them and a close friend of Fox, with her husband two more subscribers to Sancho’s Letters. This Mrs. Crewe was also connected to the Teston Circle by way of her friendship with Elizabeth Bouverie; both Reynolds and Kauffman painted a joint portrait of these ladies. (Gainsborough painted Lady Crewe, as well as Sancho.)33 Miss Crewe, unmarried during her 1778–80 correspondence with Sancho, seems to have been either John Crewe’s youngest sister or another relative. Her name was usually coupled with that of Mrs. Cocksedge in Sancho’s correspondence, and they visited him together. Crewe would marry John Phillips, “Surgeon Extraordinary to the Prince of Wales and his Household,” later in the year that she published Sancho’s Letters . He was in all probability the John Phillips, Esq., listed as one of her book’s subscribers. Of course the Prince was Fox’s royal ally. His

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aunt, Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Gloucester, was a subscriber to Sancho’s Letters.34 Sancho must have gotten to know Miss Crewe through Cocksedge and the latter’s connections with the household of Sir Charles Bunbury, where Crewe may well have lived as a young, unmarried relation: Bunbury’s first wife, Sarah Lennox, was Fox’s aunt. (His nephew, Edward Henry, who inherited the title, would marry a Fox.) The Montagu and Bunbury London households were both in Privy Gardens in Westminster. Sancho had several significant friends in Bury, near the Bunbury’s country house, Barton Hall, in Suffolk. The Bunburys seems to have had a house in Bury, too. Sancho visited his correspondents who lived in Bury. As we have seen, after he left the Montagu service in 1774, and with their help, he established himself as a householder in Westminster, qualified to vote there (doing so for Fox).35 Bunbury shared Fox’s horse-racing obsession—he was a steward of the Jockey Club and the owner of three Derby winners. Sancho noted that Roger Rush was “clerk at Newmarket,” the racecourse quite close to Bury and Barton Hall. He frequently referred to Rush in his letters to Mrs. Cocksedge.36 She became godmother to Sancho’s daughter, Kitty, to whom the Sancho’s gave Margaret as her middle name. Crewe and Cocksedge knew John Osborne, Sancho’s African-British brother-in-law and his wife. Sancho reported to them the Osborne family’s visit to him in London. Mrs. Cocksedge visited Osborne at the military camp in Cavenham, near “the Bunbury home in Bury,” where he was “either a member of the militia or an agent,” for its supplies. Sancho wrote Crewe in 1778 of Osborne’s economic success there, and a month later that he was “sorry both for O[sborne] and my friend’s sake that the camp breaks up so soon.” Carretta suggests that would “diminish business and/or military opportunities for Osborne and romantic ones for Miss Crewe.”37 Crewe was young and perhaps small in stature. Sancho wrote Rush in 1778 that he had “a very kind and good letter from the little wren,” meaning Crewe, and concluded, “The best respects to Mrs. [Cocksedge], and the amiable little C[rewe].” He wrote Mrs. Cocksedge of “your little friend.” At the same time, he said he feared her “as a critic – and envy [her] a writer.” He wrote Cocksedge when she “left off tea,” that is, gave it up, and referring to what he sold in his shop, “I hope you find cocoa agree with you – it should be made always overnight, and boiled for about fifteen minutes – but you must caution Miss C[rewe] not to drink it – for there is nothing so fattening to little folk—” Crewe was of an age to be

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courted, in her late teens or early twenties (she would marry four years after this letter), and Sancho added a postscript, referring to the camp at Cavenham, “Our best respects to Miss C[rewe], hope she is intent upon camp fashions; but caution her in my name to be on her guard. Cupid resides in camp by choice. Oh, Miss C[rewe]! beware of the little God!”38 Sancho signed his letter to the two ladies “your humble servant,” but there are other, less ambiguous expressions of his consciousness of their different social positions. At the time of his letters to Cocksedge and Crewe, he was a hard-up grocer, reporting to them of London, “the town is literally empty, saving a few sharks of both sexes, who created poor to emigrate to the camps or watering places, and so are forced to prey upon one another in town.” Class, gender and colour consciousness particularly inflected his style when writing to them (although they run through all of his letters). “I protest, it is to me the most difficult of things to write to one of your female geniuses – there is a certain degree of cleverality (if I may so call it), an easy kind of derangement of periods, a gentleman-like – fashionable – careless of dialogue – which I know no more of than you do of cruelty.” He followed this with, “I write as I think – foolishly – and you write well – why? – because you think well. – So much for praise – compliment - flattery, &c.” His letters to both ladies included paragraphs of flattering, sentimental–pastoral courtliness, which he called “gallant,” so overblown as to signify his tongue was in his cheek.39 In November, 1777, he questioned whether he should address Mrs. Cocksedge “according to the distant, reserved, cold mechanical forms of high-breeding – where polished manners, like a horse from the manger, prances fantastic – and shackled with the rules of art – proudly despises simple nature; or shall I, like the patient, sober, honest, long-ear’d animal I am,” that is an ass, probably an allusion to Sterne’s writing—“take plain nature’s path, and address according to my feelings.” One notes the classdissolving potential in resting relations on feelings, if only temporarily; Schaw’s journal illustrated this, too.40 Sancho sent them and others news of the goings-on of the elite and of national politics, located as he was in the neighbourhood of the great. His remarks to Cocksedge in 1777 on the American war accompanied his news of the Queen’s giving birth to another princess (her thirteenth child): “we courtiers are all alive upon the great good news – the Queen. God bless her – safe;- another Princess – oh the cake and cawdle – then the defeat of Washintub’s army – and the capture of Arnold and Sullivan with seven thousand prisoners – thirteen count[r]ies returned to their

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allegiance – all this news is believed – the delivery of her Majesty is certain – pray God the rest may be as certain.” But in the same letter Sancho wrote Cocksedge of his wishes for humane and economic relief, “that this cursed carnage of the human species may end – commerce revive –” Sancho himself depended on it – “sweet social peace be extended throughout the globe-” the hypothesized effect of good commerce, “— and the British empire be strongly knit in the never-ending bands of sacred friendship and brotherly love!” a vision James Thomson had expressed in “Liberty,” and it would animate many in the antislavery campaign, as they insisted that those “bands” should be extended to Africans, the antislavery movement taking for its motto “Am I Not A Man And A Brother?” underpinned, of course, by the Christian notion of brotherhood. Sancho’s Letters became emblematic of this possible kinship, including in the link he established with Sterne.41 Sancho voted first in the 1774 election for the Parliamentary seats representing Westminster. In 1774, he voted for Hugh Percy and Lord Thomas Pelham Clinton, “candidate of the North administration.” Sancho was connected to the North family by way of his music, and the Montagus. He voted again in 1780, shortly before his death. That election was pivotal to Fox’s career, his first to Parliament when he “moved centre-stage,” as “a man for the people.” Six days after the 1780 election, Sancho wrote to Mrs. Cocksedge, and, as usual, he addressed Crewe, too, as he conveyed a lengthy apology to both of them. “My friend, Mr. R[ush] says I stand condemned in the opinions of two ladies for an omittance in writing; believe me, my sorrow for incurring this censure is much more real than the crime”; and he tells them that his “heart is overcharged with worldly care,” affecting his mind, and he reminds them of his age, “so the fire of fancy is quite extinguished.” He hopes “the jury of your noble and equitable hearts” will bring in “not guilty.” Crewe especially may have been likely to do so, because Sancho had been busy voting for Fox, in whom she had a personal interest. Sancho followed his hope for her verdict of not guilty with this: “The shew of hands was greatly in favor of Mr. C[harles] F[o]x and Sir G[eorge] R[odne]y; they will carry it all to nothing, is the opinion of the knowing-” Sancho then described the displeasure of Lord Lincoln, one of the other candidates, at his “coarse reception,” and the weak speech of the other, “like the pupil of eloquence: – but the glorious F[o]x was the father and school of oratory himself – the Friend! The Patron! the Example!” Sancho was an eyewitness: “I attended the hustings from ten to half past two – gave

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my free vote to the Honourable C[harles] J[ames] F[o]x and to Sir G R[odne]y; hobbled home full of pain and hunger – What followed after, you shall know in my next. At present I have only to declare myself,” i.e. as he would, were he asking for their exculpatory vote, signing off, “Your and Miss C[rewe]’s most humble servant.” The interest and connection of the Crewes and Fox is evident. “Mrs. Crewe put on a great public ceremony…expressly to celebrate [Fox’s] election.”42 Two days later, Sancho wrote to John Spink, one of Sir Charles Bunbury’s Suffolk constituents, and a mutual acquaintance of Cocksedge and Crewe, hoping Sir Charles “met with no opposition–” in fact he ran unopposed. “We are all election bewitched here…I…inclose you this evening’s paper, by which you will see how the F[o]x is like to lead the Ad[ministration]n. He and Sir G[eorge] B[rydges] R[odney] had my hearty vote, and I had the honour of his thanks personally.”43 That same day, September 9, 1780, eight days after the election, Sancho wrote Crewe, presumably about “what followed” as he had promised. He opened, “I have the honour to address you upon a very interesting, serious, critical subject. – Do not be alarmed! It is an affair which I have had at heart for some days past – it has employed my mediation more than my prayers. –Now I protest I feel myself in the most awkward of situations – but it must out - and so let it.–” With another “But” he leaves this subject in favour of a series of questions about mutual acquaintances, beginning with “how does my good, my half-adored Mrs. C[ocksedge]?” He asks Crewe, “Pray give my best affection to Mrs. C[ocksedge], and acquaint her with the state of the poll for the ancient city and liberty of Westminster, which I enclose.– I would not wish you to mention [presumably to Mrs. Cocksedge, or anyone] what I so boldly advanced in the beginning of this letter.— No, let it die away like a miser’s hope. Your most obedient, Most humble servants, I remain, dear Miss C[rewe], I. SANCHO

The remainder in our next.” But Sancho died on December 14.44 The “subject” (or the broaching of it to Crewe) which made Sancho feel most awkward, yet “must out,” followed the election of Fox, whom Sancho believed was likely to head the new Administration, and with

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whom Crewe’s uncle had very close political ties. Sancho had voted for Fox and had been personally thanked by the great man for doing so. It is possible that he wanted Crewe’s advice or help in approaching Fox, to ask him for an official post of some kind. He called him “the Patron!” A year earlier he had written Daniel Braithwaite, asking “to have a Generalpost office settled on my house.” Braithwaite was “clerk to the Postmaster General, and eventually comptroller of the Foreign Post-Office.” Braithwaite would subscribe to Sancho’s Letters. Sancho’s friend, John Meheux, likely a voter for Sir Charles Bunbury and from whom Crewe obtained the largest number of Sancho’s letters, was appointed to first Secretary to the India Board in 1784.45 It is also possible that the “subject” Sancho mentioned to Crewe was her help in publishing more of his Letters connecting Fox’s political interests with his own in asserting the equality of black people. After all, this was what she subsequently did, having ready to hand that letter to Stevenson published in The Gentleman’s Magazine soon after his death. He had already published letters identifying himself as AFRICANUS, advising the government. On December 26, 1777, Sancho had replied to Jabez Fisher, a Philadelphia Quaker (another subscriber to the Letters ), who had sent Sancho some books, one evidently by Benezet, the other Phillis Wheatley’s Poems. The gift provoked one of Sancho’s most extensive attacks on slavery and the slave trade, and he expressed his wish that the books be sent to every MP (In 1788, Olaudah Equiano would head “a committee of free blacks”—the sons of Africa—“in sending public letters of praise to…avowed sympathizers in Parliament, such as Fox, Pitt, and Dolben.”) The books, Sancho wrote Fisher, “upon the unchristian and most diabolical usage of my brother Negroes – the illegality – the horrid wickedness of the traffic – the cruel carnage and depopulation of the human species – is painted in such strong colours” as “to produce remorse in every enlightened reader.” The language of sensibility, employed by Benezet was intended to produce that effect. Sancho described the books’ effects on himself: “The perusal affected me more than I can express-indeed I felt a double or mixt sensation…my heart…torn for the sufferings – which for ought I to know – some of my nearest kin might have undergone – my bosom…glowed with gratitude” for Benezet’s book. “Blest be your sect,” the Quakers, for publishing such a book. He expressed the wish “that every member of each house of parliament had one of those books” and that the King look at one to use his power “to facilitate the great work.”

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Sancho praised Wheatley’s poems as “a credit to nature,” putting “artmerely as art – to the blush.” His comment on “To the Publick” (an introductory address published with Wheatley’s Poems and signed by eighteen Massachusetts gentlemen, headed by the Governor), anticipated the questions of authenticity that Crewe would feel she had to address in Sancho’s own case: “the list of splendid – titled – learned names, in confirmation of her being the real authoress – alas! Shows how very poor the acquisition of wealth and power are – without generosity – feeling – and humanity. These great folks – all know nay praised Genius in bondage – and then like the Priests and the Levites on sacred writ, passed by – not one Good Samaritan among them.” Sancho, then, applied the parable to race slavery, as implicitly he had reminded Sterne of its applicability in his 1766 letter. That their writings were published enabled Wheatley and Sancho to be held up by antislavery campaigners as emblems of African/ Black intellectual and moral potential, contradicting racist characterizations, in the terms valued by their audiences. Nathaniel Wheatley, the son of Phillis Wheatley’s owner, had accompanied Phillis to England; he was a loyalist, finally immigrating to London during the Revolution, and was a subscriber to Sancho’s Letters . Sancho’s conclusion here suggests that Fisher expressed the wish to meet him, presumably in London.46 The second letter, combined with the one just discussed, could bear on Sancho’s mysterious proposal to Crewe: she also headed it in its published version, “To Mr. F[isher],” although Carretta points out in fact it was to British Quaker, Edmund Rack. (Rack may have given both his and Fisher’s to Crewe, hence her mistake.) Subsequent editors of the 1802 and 1805 editions of Sancho’s Letters retitled Sancho’s letter to Fisher, “THE ANSWER,” preceding it with one from Rack to Sancho dated April 20, 1779. Rack’s chief reason for contacting Sancho, he said, was “the letters of thy writings, the one to a gentleman in the East Indies, the other to my friend Jabez Fisher from Philadelphia.” The gentleman from the East Indies was Jack Wingrave, to whom Sancho had expressed his outrage over the treatment of native peoples in India and on the coast of Guinea, as he also did in his letter to Fisher. Rack wrote to ask Sancho for his consent to publish them, with the same purpose Crewe (and Jekyll) would have in 1782. “If published [they] may convince some proud Europeans, that the noblest gifts of God, those of mind are not confined to any nation or people.” He assured Sancho, “I feel the regard I profess, and should rejoice were it in my power to put an end to slavery, or lessen the misery

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of one of my poor countrymen.” His emphases as “feel” and “profess” indicates the running preoccupation over the genuineness of sensibility.47 Sancho’s reply told Rack that, if he got the permission of the addressees, “and think the simple effusions of a poor Negro’s heart are worth mixing with better things,” identifying race with the pitiability of sensibility, and alluding to Rack’s wish to include them in “a collection of Letters of Friendship,” “you have my consent to do as you want with them – though in truth there wants no increase of books in the epistolary way – except we could add to the truly valuable names of Robertson – Beattie – and Mickle – now Youngs – Richardson’s – and Sternes–” a list of Scots and sentimental writers, demonstrating this not-so-simple Negro’s literary range. His letters could be classed with theirs. Rack’s proposal may have helped motivate Crewe’s contributing them to the antislavery movement. Those letters to Wingrave with which Crewe opened each volume, further suggest what her reason was for publishing the book, as well as illustrate her relations with Sancho. A very significant technique in Sancho’s letter to Wingrave (to which Rack had referred) was to remind him of the values taught to him by his father. Sancho was close to Wingrave’s parents and siblings. John Wingrave was a bookbinder and bookseller connected to the artistic circle that included Sancho. In his letter, he reported to Jack, “Your brother and sister C–d” (probably Elizabeth Collingwood, whose husband also subscribed to the publication of Sancho’s Letters ), “sometimes look in upon us,” i.e. Sancho and his family; “her boys are fine, well, and thriving and my honest cousin Joe,” that is Jack’s young brother, “brought me your first letter: the little man came from Red-Lion-Court to Charles Street by himself.” That letter “gratifies a better principle than vanity to know that you remember your dark-faced friend at such a distance”; such self- characterization frequent, remembrance connoting feeling because Sancho continues, “but what would have been your feelings – could you have beheld your worthy, thrice worthy father – joy sitting triumphant in his honest face – speeding from house to house amongst his numerous friends, with the pleasing testimonials of his son’s love and duty in his hands – everyone congratulating him…-while the starting tear plainly proved that over-joy and grief give the same livery?” Jack’s being presented with this picture of his father’s feelings for his son was the setting for Sancho’s further advice to him that he not “fall into bad company,” and keep a diary wherein he becomes his “own Monitor,”

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affording him “a rich fund.” Sancho declares, “I say nothing on the score of Religion – every good affection, every sweet sensibility, every heartfelt joy – humanity, politeness, charity – all, all are streams from that sacred spring,” and tells Wingrave to “live according to your DIVINE MASTER’S rules and are a Christian.”48 Having described little Joe Wingrave’s delivering Jack’s letter to his house, Sancho tells Wingrave that “a little Black” is being sent to India on the “Besborough,” an East India ship, “to settle in Madras or Bengal to teach fencing or riding.” This was Soubise. Sancho told Wingrave that Soubise “goes out upon a rational, well-digested plan, to settle either at Madras or Bengal, to teach fencing and riding – he is an expert at both.” He tells Wingrave to treat Soubise as he has done. “If he should chance to fall in your way, do not fail to give the rattle pate what wholesome advice you can; but remember, I do caution you against lending him money upon any account,” he probably had in mind having had to pay Soubise’s postage, and his gambling, “for he has everything but – principle; he will never pay you; I am sorry to say so much of one whom I have had a friendship for, but it is needful; serve him if you can – but do not trust him.—” And Soubise failed to repay the debts he ran up in Calcutta, at one point, he was “imprisoned for shortchanging a customer.”49 Sancho had a different view of Charles Lincoln, who had gone out in the same ship, a man “belonging to the Captain’s band of music…whom I think you have seen [playing] in the Privy Gardens: he is honest, trusty, good-natured, and civil; if you see him, take notice of him, and I will regard it as a kindness to me.” He concluded, telling Wingrave “Continue in right thinking, you will of course act well, in well doing, you will insure the favor of God, and the love of your friends, amongst whom pray reckon Yours faithfully, IGNATIUS SANCHO.”50 In a letter Crewe dated July 23, 1777, Sancho wrote Meheux with the news of the Duchess of Queensbury’s death. Sancho’s first sentence mourned that many needy and sick “now may have no helper,” including “the child of folly poor S[oubise], and even thy worthless friend Sancho.” The day the duchess died, he told Meheux he had received “a very penitential letter from S[oubise], dated from St. Helena,” presumably en route to India, which he had enclosed with a letter of his own to the Queensbury family. She had visited Sancho the week before, “the day after I had the honour of a long audience in her drawing room.” He had lost “a friend.” He “wished Soubise knew this heavy news, for many reason – I am inclined to believe her Grace’s death is the only thing that will most

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conduce to his reform – I fear neither his gratitude nor sensibility will be much hurt by hearing the news – it will act upon his fears and make him do right upon a base principle. – Hang him! He teases me whenever I think of him.” He went on to advise Meheux in terms very similar to those in his letters to Wingrave. As he had opened with the sentiment that death is no respecter of persons, he closed with a vision of heaven, “life without death, world without end – peace bliss and harmony.” “We will mix, my boy with all countries, colours, faiths…the myriads descended from the Ark…we will mingle with them, and try to untwist the vast chain of blessed Providence.” The lines of prejudice between people contravened God’s will. Sancho looked back to the mutual coexistence of people and creatures on the Ark at the time of the Biblical flood.51 Another letter from Sancho to Wingrave further indicates that one of Crewe’s purposes in 1782 was to publicize British maltreatment of Indians and to create sympathy for them. Sancho tells Jack (again in1778) that his “success…is the best comment upon your conduct…with such noble natures as you went out happily connected with” that is to say his family’s, “– you are happily sewing the good seeds of your future fortune,” referring to his “return – the comfort and honour of your good father and family”; Sancho then told Wingrave; “but observe – I do not wish you half a million [pounds] – dogged with the tears and blood of the poor natives, – no – a decent competence got with honesty.” In this same letter describing Miss Crewe as “still divinely fair”—evidently Wingrave met her in person, at least on several occasions, Sancho added, “she’s a good girl but no match for Nabobs; –” this was to suggest that a returnee from India with a decent competence that was not wrung from exploited natives would stand a better chance with her. It is feasible that Wingrave had expressed his aspirations for Crewe’s hand, a match with a young woman who had powerful political connections, a source of respectability and status for such a self-made returnee. Sancho reminded Jack, “what a rich luxury is it to be able to contribute by well-doing, to a father’s – nay a whole family of kindred love and heartfelt affection!” So Sancho prayed: “May this pleasure be thine! and may the God of truth and fountain of all good enrich thy heart and head…any guard you from avarice – ambition – and every Asiatic evil,” implicitly from becoming a nabob, “– so that your native land may receive you with riches and honour.” The pleasure brought to the heart by doing good, and in response to the poor, in this case, poor natives, had been elevated

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by the cultivation of sensibility, here encouraged in a British imperialist by an ex-slave, Sancho, its exponent throughout.52 Crewe chose to follow this selection with one Sancho wrote to her, dated five days later. Again, it was largely the expression of gendered sensibility and of pastoralism, as Sancho thinks of Mrs. Cocksedge and Miss Crewe, both subjects of his letter to Wingrave. They were now back in Suffolk, “thrice happy nymphs, and the cheerful respondent carolings of artless joy in the happy husbandmen.” He had told Wingrave Crewe was “divinely fair” and he now courts her playfully: “Should you perchance rise early in pursuit of May dew – I earnestly make it my request – you will save – and bring to town a little bottle of it for my particular use –.” The “thrice happy nymphs” he urges next still seem to mean Mrs. Cocksedge as well as Crewe, diluting his sexual playfulness somewhat: “be merciful to the poor happy swains – the powerful little god of mischief and delight – now at this blest season – prunes his beauteous wings – new feathers – and sharpens his arrows – tight strings his bow – and takes too sure his aim. – Oh lads, beware the month of May”; he tells “you blest girls –” are being courted by nature, “the gross and wanton flowers fondly kiss thy feet,” and bow their heads, “to the gentle sweepings of your under-petticoats” the sexual playfulness of foot kissing, just below the nymphs’ underwear, intensified by “the soft and amorous southern breezes – they toy through your curls – and uncontroul’d steal numberless kisses –” birds stop singing, “and eye beauty and humanity with pleasure.” One way Crewe and Cocksedge have shown their humanity is to feed the birds in the winter. A climax is the cuckoo’s song, from every tree, which Sancho tells, is of “the joys of married life” inescapably copulation, given his foreplay. If his risqué language does not bring Sterne to Crewe’s mind Sancho points more directly to him with his next sentence: the “shrubery throws out all its sweets to charm you – tho’, alas! an unlucky parciplepiviamontis seizes my imagination – my brains are on the ferment.” He declares, however, “Miss C[rewe] will excuse me –” making it clear he knows what he has said to her needs to be excused.53 He concludes by asking her to make his best wishes to Mrs. Cocksedge, including his hopes for her worldly physical pleasures (that she “eats heartily, and laughs much”) and “that she – you – my R[ush] and your connexions – may enjoy the good of this life without its evil – is the true Black-a-moor wish of I. SANCHO.” Was his characterizing himself in the way of further “excuse” for his sexual wordplay? Could he get

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away with it because of the wider gulf between Crewe’s divine fairness and his colour? His postscript was further explanation. “Now mark, this is not meant as a letter – no it is an address to the ladies.-” While he does address both “nymphs” he sent it to Crewe and it was her he asks to excuse him. He sandwiches the respectful “Pray our best respects to Mr. and Mrs. B[unbury]”54 between that assurance what he has written is a literary form, an address, rather than a more personal letter “it is an address to Spring-birds and flowers–” then another prosaic message, “and when you see Johnny [Rush’s son] our loves”—then still more exculpatory explanation of his sexual wordplay, “– it is a caution to swains against the popery of Love– another, interrupting statement. “The K[ing] and Q[ueen] are just now returned from Portsmouth–” before further defensiveness “I said nothing in regard to the month – by way of advice to the ladies–” he had told “lads,” to “beware this month of May,” although he had asked Crewe (or the ladies) to bring him some May dew after getting out of bed. After that month/ladies sentence, Sancho began, “The Spectator – has blessings on his memory” which Carretta notes refers to that journal’s “warnings of the amorous effect of the month of May on women,” citing numbers 365, 395 and 495. Continuously reprinted throughout the century, Sancho could assume Crewe knew it. Sancho aligned his “address” with this epitome of literary respectability. That it published the kind of wordplay Sancho emulated amplifies our sense of what eighteenth-century readers and writers could properly embrace, even as they reformed their manners. Perhaps Crewe included this letter because it further demonstrated Sancho’s literary abilities, and mentioned it was written by a “Black-a-moor.”55 That letter to Jack Wingrave with which Crewe opened the second volume was written in 1778, at least a year before the first of volume I, December 26, 1779, although Crewe had dated it February 14, 1768. In it, Sancho reminded Wingrave it was only the second he had written him, so the first one Crewe chose to publish was actually the third, making it still clearer that Jack had become wealthy by then. Sancho’s words, however, were even more germane to the ongoing Parliamentary inquiry beginning in 1781, the context for Crewe’s publication of the letters of an African. This letter is the longest of all, a dramatic expression of Crewe’s purpose, coupled as it is with her editorial footnotes.56 Immediately Sancho tells Jack his letter is to convey his father’s feelings. “Your father insists on my scribbling a sheet of absurdities,” irony because they will be of very high value, “and gives me a notable reason

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for it, that is, ‘Jack will be pleased with it.’” Sancho tells Jack he knows Sancho has respect for “father and son – yea for the whole family…who are every soul…Leavened with all the goodness of old times.” The old-time goodness stands in contrast to the new dangers of avaricious exploitation of empire. A man, i.e. like himself, “runs some hazard in being seen in W[ingrave]’s society of being biassed to Christianity,” expressed by the signs of sensibility: “–I never see your poor father – but his eyes betray his feelings – for the hopeful youth in India –” he is “poor,” Sancho shows Jack, because he is missing his son and is made happy thinking this letter will bring him pleasure, “– a tear of joy dancing upon the lids – is a plaudit not to be equaled this side death!” Sancho intended this vision, expressed in extreme terms, to move Jack to moral behaviour. “See the effects of right-doing, my worthy friend – continue in the trac[k] of rectitude – and despise poor paltry Europeans – titled – Nabobs!” Paltry because they are not real Indian royalty, and their self-elevation is the result of the greedy exploitation of oppressed natives, to return ostentatiously enriched, to Britain, where they are labelled nabobs. It was an identity Jack will be tempted to take on. Sancho follows this with “– Read your Bible – as day follows night, God’s blessing follows virtue – honour – and riches bring up the rear.– ” So while Jack should adhere to these priorities, he will still get what he wants, perhaps even more certainly. Franklin preached a very similar message. Cultivators of sensibility had opposed mere money-getting all along, defining themselves that way in the face of the commercial revolution, extending their moral urgency to the slave trade and slavery, always with the Christianization of black people, “and the end is peace.” Sancho claims to end his sermon there, with characteristic humour and self-deprecation. “Courage my boy – I have done preaching – Old folks love to seem wise – and if you are silly enough to correspond with grey hairs – take the consequences-.” We learn that Sancho has “had the pleasure of reading most of your letters, through the kindness of your father.” The elder Wingrave probably asked Sancho to write his son because he was known for his letter writing, through mutual friends and because he had had some letters published, including his letter to Sterne. Then, with an expression of old folks’ wisdom, Sancho writes, “Youth is naturally prone to vanity – such is the weakness of Human Nature, that pride has a fortress in the best of hearts,” and declares “I know no person that possesses a better [heart] than Johnny W[ingrave]” with the

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disclaimer, “but although flattery is poison to youth, yet truth obliges me to confess that your correspondence betrays no symptoms of vanity – but teems with the truth of an honest affection – which merits praise – and commands esteem.” As in the case of his presentation of Jack’s father’s expression of feeling, this was preparation for a tough message of evident significance to the contemporary examination of East India Company officials by Parliament when Crewe published the Letters, four years after its writing. Sancho wrote, “In some of your letters…you speak (with honest indignation) of the treachery and chicanery of the Natives –” and here Crewe inserted extracts from the letters Jack had sent to his father, dated Bombay, 1776 and 1777. In the first, Wingrave said: “I have introduced myself to Mr. G –, who behaved very friendly in giving me some advice, which has been very necessary, as the inhabitants, who are chiefly Blacks, are a set of canting, deceitful people, and of whom one must have great caution.” Sancho may have suggested this letter but in any case, that Crewe inserted this extract from it underscored her purpose. Crewe’s second extract was likewise an asterisked footnote to what Sancho wrote to Wingrave about his characterization of “the Natives”: “I am now thoroughly convinced, that the account which Mr. G – gave me of the natives of this country is just and true, that they are a set of deceitful people, and have not such a word as Gratitude in their language, neither do they know what it is – and as to their dealings in trade, they are like unto Jews.”57 Sancho tells Wingrave “you should remember from whom they [‘the Natives’] learnt those vices – the Christian visitors found them a simple, harmless people – but the cursed avidity for wealth” against which Sancho is warning Jack, “urged these first visitors (and all the succeeding ones) to such acts of deception – and even wanton cruelty – that the poor ignorant Natives soon learnt to turn the knavish – and diabolical arts which they soon too imbibed – upon their teachers.” Sancho’s pronouns here reminded Wingrave that his “dark-faced friend”—Sancho—was not born in England: “I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom –” a quality of particular meaning to a person conscious of his miserable black brethren enslaved in the West Indies, “and for the many blessings I enjoy in it – shall ever have my warmest wishes, prayers – and blessings)”; Sancho here is backing into his point, his version of the inconsistency between vaunted British liberty and its practice of slavery. “I say it with reluctance that I must observe your country’s conduct” in this

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respect (still not Sancho’s country), “has been uniformly worked in the East – West-Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea.” So Crewe’s editing here along with Sancho’s own words makes clear the connections they and others were making between imperial abuse of Indian “natives,” and the enslavement of Africans. The 1780s saw the concurrent development of the criticism of the East India Company, culminating in the impeachment of Warren Hastings in Parliament, managed by Burke and Fox, and Wilberforce’s introduction of his antislave trade bill, also supported by Fox.58 Sancho followed his observation that Britain’s conduct in the East and West Indies and on the Guinea coast had been uniformly wicked, with this: “The grand object of English navigators – indeed of all Christian navigators – is money – money – money – for which I do not pretend to blame them –” and here Sancho showed his kinship with Adam Smith but more specifically anticipating that orientation Christian, antislavery campaigners (like James Ramsay) I have mentioned. He had assured Jack that if he follows Christian virtue, riches will follow. “Commerce was meant by the goodness of the Duty to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part – to invite mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love –” the opposite of the enslavement of one’s brother in pursuit of money. Again, Sancho anticipated antislavery, in Clarkson’s motto’s question, posed with the figure of an enchained African, “Am I Not A Man And A Brother.” One Biblical expression was Hebrews, 13 v. 1. “Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers…for there by some have entertained angels unawares.” Commerce was to be ascetized by religion: “The enlightened Christian should diffuse the riches of the Gospel of peace – with the commodities of his respective land – Commerce attended with strict honesty – and with Religion for its companion – would be a blessing to everything it touched.” Implicitly this was in contrast to irreligious, godless commerce (the worst kind was the slave trade), against which the culture of sensibility had posed itself all along, even as it depended on it. Presumably, Sancho tried to practise it in his shop, albeit selling sugar, tobacco, cocoa and tea.59 Sancho broadened his focus from the coast of Guinea, showing the influence of Benezet. “In Africa, the poor wretched natives – blessed with the most fertile and luxuriant soil – are rendered so much the more miserable for what Providence meant as a blessing–” that is, Christians’ arriving in West Africa but, instead, “– the Christians’ abominable traffic

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for slaves – and the horrid treachery and cruelty of the petty Kings,” like the natives of Bombay taught “diabolical arts” by purported Christians, “encouraged by their Christian customers – who carry them strong liquors – to inflame their national madness – and powder – and firearms–to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and kidnapping-.” Sancho tells Jack that writing about this affected him physiologically: “But enough – it is a subject that sours my blood – and I am sure with not please the friendly bent of your social affections–” Sancho attributing to his correspondent a comparable effect, a reaction to the exploitation of the natives, or to his feelings towards the preaching of his dark-faced friend. Sancho had warned Soubise to “tread…cautiously” in facing prejudice against “all of our unfortunate colour,” although characteristically, Sancho has already risked bruising Wingrave’s affection. He explains, “I mentioned these [cases] only to guard my friend against being too hasty in condemning the knavery of a people who bad as they may be – possibly – were made worse by their Christian visitors.” So in excusing himself, Sancho has backed away from saying the natives were “simple harmless people.” He concludes this section of his letter: “Make human nature thy study – study their hearts – Simplicity, kindness, and charity be thy guide – with these even Savages will respect you – and God will bless you.” All—natives in India and Africa, as well as Sancho, Jack and his father— share a common human nature. Sancho’s use of “Savages” reflected Wingrave’s labelling with irony. He reinforced his advice by again telling Jack his father is behind him. “Your father – who sees every improvement of his boy with delight – observes that your hand-writing is much for the better” but also in urging the improvement of Jack’s treatment of the natives. Ambiguously, humorously, he seems to acknowledge the advice (although he could be referring to his own, handwritten letters): “if my long epistle do not frighten you – and I live till the return of next spring – perhaps I shall be enabled to judge how much you have improved since your last favour.” To improve, Jack must address the natives anthropologically, as it were: “write me a deal about the natives – the soil and produce – the domestic and social manners of the people – customs – prejudices – fashions – and follies. –Alas we have plenty of the two last here –” This told Jack to replace prejudice with humanity, equating Indian natives—“Savages”—with Britons. In fact, he continued, “what is worse we have politics – and a detestable Brother’s war – where the right hand is hacking and hewing the left

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–” the war with the American colonists contradicted Sancho’s idea of brotherhood. Referring briefly to Rush and “the ladies”—Mrs. Cocksedge and Miss Crewe—Sancho’s next paragraph paraphrased a letter from Rush’s son, Johnny, who was a participant in that internecine war, “the whistling of bullets – the cries and groans of the human species” and wishes secretly, “for the sweet blessed security – of peace – and friendship.” Sancho added a brief paragraph of self-criticism. “This, young man, is my second letter – I have wrote till I am stupid – I ought to have found it out two pages back.” Of course, he sends the whole letter anyway. “Mrs. Sancho joins me in good wishes – I join her in the same – in which double sense believe me. Yours &c. I. Sancho.” Entitling it a “Very short Postscript,” Sancho added a very long one, expanding his advice. “It is with sincere pleasure that I hear you have a lucrative establishment – which will enable you to appear and act with decency–” preaching implicitly against Jack’s acting indecently. As earlier, Sancho attributes qualities to Jack that will motivate him in this: “your good sense will lead you to proper economy as distant from frigid parsimony, as from a needless extravagance.” He still has nabobs in mind. He tells Jack he has heard it more than once observed of fortunate adventurers, “they have come home enriched in purse – but wretchedly barren in intellect–”. Jack will find he has time on his hands, necessitating “recreation.” The “mind wants food – as well as the stomach – why then should one not one wish to increase in knowledge as well as money?” The former can make one better, the latter, heedlessly spent, worse. He quotes Edward Young’s Night Thoughts: “Books are Virtue’s advocates and friends” and recommends that Jack put aside 20 pounds a year to make “a useful elegant little library.” He had told Sterne of the importance of reading to himself, and all his letters testify to it. To reinforce Jack’s implementation of his advice, Sancho suggests he engages his father: “suppose now the first year you send the [book] order — and the money to your father.” Sancho recommended four multi-volume books on history, “nothing more useful, or pleasant,” Robertson’s Charles the Fifth, and Goldsmith’s Histories of Greece, Rome, and England and “small volumes of Sermons” by a dissenting minister. Sancho’s Christianity was the “heart religion” cognate with the rise of sensibility. “I love not a multiplicity of doctrines – a few plain tenets — easy – simple – and directed to the heart – are better than volumes of controversial nonsense.–” He recommended “Spectators, Guardians and Tatlers,” and assumed that Jack already possessed editions

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of all three. Three long poems, “Young’s Night-Thoughts – Milton – and Thomson’s Seasons were my summer companion – for near twenty years,” their effect comparable to those of the dissenting sermons, “they mended my heart – they improved my veneration for the Deity – and increased my love to my neighbors.” The 1740 edition of The Seasons added the lines, that cruel trade Which spoils Guinea of her sons.

Later, Sancho said that Jack’s father and “other of your friends” would improve upon this list in the course of time.60 Sancho praised Jack most fulsomely in his concluding paragraph for his “natural parts” for which Jack can thank God, including “– a feeling, humane heart–.” Then he tells him, “you write with sense and judicious discernment,” nudging him seriously to modify his prejudiced view of the natives. If he follows Sancho’s advice, implicitly that of his father, by improving himself, “my dear Jack, that if it should please God to return you to your friends with the fortune of a man in upper rank” the result of successful imperial venture, “the embellishment of your mind may be ever considered as greatly superior to your riches – and only inferior to your heart.” His natural, humane heart would be raised to that level by his reading but still more, by his more accurate view of the natives, and the sympathetic treatment which would follow. All this from Crewe’s “untutored African.”

Notes 1. Vincent Carretta names the editor as “probably Francis Crewe,” in his edition of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (New York: Penguin, 1998 [1782], 247. The edition of The Letters of Ignatius Sancho, ed. Paul Edwards and Polly Rewt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994) identifies “Miss C” as Frances Crewe throughout. I have referred to Carretta’s edition as Sancho, Letters. 2. Letter, The Gentleman’s Magazine (April 1781), 162; Sancho to Roger Rush (n.d.) Sancho, Letters, 120. See, too, Sancho to Stevenson, August 31, 1779, in Sancho, Letters, 170. Reynolds painted his now famous portrait of Sterne in 1760, when they became friends, Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London: Routledge, 1986), 30–33. The biographical information about Stevenson is from Sancho, Letters , 269; n.

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1, Sancho had expressed great admiration for Stevenson in an earlier letter, November 16, 1776, Sancho, Letters, 51–52. Carretta suggests it “was out of gratitude” for Stevenson’s gift to Sancho of the portrait of Sterne that in 1820 Sancho’s daughter, “Elizabeth gave Stevenson the Gainsborough portrait of her father,” Sancho, Letters, 305 n. 1. Sancho, Letters, 269 n. 1. Here Carretta reprints “an important letter from Stevenson about Sancho.” For Stevenson’s index of Sancho’s letters, see J.R. Willis, “New Light on the Life of Ignatius Sancho: Some Unpublished Letters,” Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1980), 345–54; 345. See, too, Appendix VI in the Edwards and Rewt edition of Sancho’s Letters. Sancho, Letters , 269 n. 1. For Crewe’s relation with Cocksedge, see below. Priscilla Napier, The Sword Dancer: Lady Sarah Lennox and the Napiers (London: Michael Joseph, 1971), 36, 36–39, 31, 66–67, 81, 86. Sancho, Letters, 248 n. 1; Brycchan Carey, “Joseph Jekyll – Ignatius Sancho’s Biographer,” http://www.brychancarey.com/sancho/jekyll.htm; “Sancho, William [Leach], Bookseller,” Execter Working Papers in British Book Trade History; The London Book trades 1775–1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members Names (11 January 2007), http://bookhi story.blogspot.co:uk/2007/01/London-1775-1780-s.html; Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 4, 248 n. 2; for the Knight case, Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 102–03; Carey, “The Extraordinary Negro’: Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Jekyll, and the Problem of Biography,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26 (2003), 1–14; 8–9. Jekyll, “The Life of Ignatius Sancho,” Sancho Letters, 5–9; 5. Carey throws doubt on these and all the other statements in Jekyll’s “Life of Sancho,” Carey “’The Extraordinary Life,’” passim. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 5; Sancho, Letters, 249 n. 6 and n. 9. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 6. For contemporary connotations of “genius,” including its application to Black people, see Barker-Benfield, Phillis Wheatley, 71, 104–05. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 6; Carey, “’Extraordinary Negro,’” 3; Stephen Mullen, Nelson Mundell and Simon P. Newman, “Black Runaways in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Britain’s Black Past, ed. Gretchen H. Guerina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 81–98; 82. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 6. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 6; Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004 [1713]), II; v; 80. Suicide, albeit avoided, was another point of comparison with Bicknell and Day’s “Dying Negro,” see Carey, “Extraordinary Negro,” 8. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 6; Sancho, Letters, 249 n. 9.

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14. Sancho to Sterne, July 1766, Sancho, Letters , 73; Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 6. 15. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 7; Sancho to Meheux, August 25, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 91–93; 93. See, too, Carretta, “Sancho, (Charles) Ignatius (1729?–1780)” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (http://www. oxfordnb.com/view/printable/24609). 16. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 7; Sancho to Meheux, August 25, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 91–93; 93. 17. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 7; Sancho, Letters, 25. 18. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 8. 19. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 7. 20. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 8. 21. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 8; Sancho, Letters, 251 n. 22. 22. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 8. 23. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 8; Drescher, Abolition, 107. See, Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 139– 53. 24. Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 9, 10; Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols. Everyman’s Library ed. (London: J.M. Dent, 1925 [1777]), 1, 82–83. Carey quotes a sentence written on the flyleaf of Jekyll’s copy of Sancho’s Letters: “Dr. Johnson had promised to write the Life of Ignatius Sancho, which…he neglected to do,” it was accordingly written by Mr. Jekyll in limitation of Dr. Johnson’s Style, Jekyll, “Life of Sancho,” 10. Jekyll’s title, “The Life of Ignatius Sancho” shows this connection and Carey suggests Jekyll’s form imitated Johnson’s, too, “The Extraordinary Negro,” 10–11. For Johnson’s early opposition to the slave trade, see, Nicholas Hudson, “’Britons Never Will Be Slaves: National Myth, Conservation, and the Beginning of British Antislavery,” Eighteenth Century Studies (Summer 2001), 34, no. 4; 559–576, 566–67. 25. Sancho to Jack Wingrave, Feb. 14, 1778, Sancho Letters, 25–28. Carretta supplies the names (in the original, just initials), and correct dates, throughout; Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (New York: MacMillan, 1999); Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years, 270, 271–73 and n. 48; William St. Clair, The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade (London: Profile Books, 2006), 149. For Clive and Hastings, see William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), chs. 3 and 6. 26. Sancho to Wingrave, February 14, 1778, Sancho Letters, 25; “The Nabob,” quoted in Wylie Sypher Guinea’s Captive Kings: British AntiSlavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 90.

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27. Sancho, Letters , 247. 28. Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793, 2 vols. (London: Longman’s Green, 1962–64), 1:3. 29. Anthony Benezet, A Caution To Great Britain And Her Colonies In a Short Representation Of The Calamitous State of The Enslaved Negroes In The British Dominions (London: James Phillips, 1785 [1766]); William Warburton, A Sermon Preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (London: E. Owen and T. Harrison, 1766); Thomas Day and John Bicknell, “The Dying Negro, A Poem,” 3rd edition enlarged (London: W. Flexney, J. Wilkie, and J. Robson: 1775 [1773]); Fryer, Staying Power, 177–79. 30. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 203; for Sharp, ibid., 161–62; Amartya Sen, Home in the World (New York: Liverwright, 2022), 165. 31. Harlow, Second British Empire, 1: 104–06, 111, 124; Brown, Moral Capital, 203. 32. Rev. James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Islands (London: James Phillips, 1784); Ramsay, An Inquiry into the Effects of Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade and of Granting Liberty to the Slaves in the British Sugar Islands (London: James Phillips, 1784); Harlow, Second British Empire, 125; Stanley Ayling, Fox: The Life of Charles James Fox (London: John Murray, 1991), 150–51; Drescher, Abolition, 216; Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson A Biography (York: William Sessions), 43, 45, 51, 63, 110. 33. R.W. Davis, “Crewe, John, first Baron Crewe (1742–1829),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), see http://www.oxforddub.com/view/article/6691, accessed 16 July, 2013; Brown, Moral Capital, 342–43. It was Elizabeth Bouverie who presented Ramsay with his Teston living, Brown Moral Capital, 347. For Bluestocking Kauffman’s and Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portraits of Mrs. Bouverie and Mrs. Crewe, see “Angelica Kauffman,” in Wikipedia. 34. Carretta, “Editor’s Note,” Sancho, Letters, 247; Ayling, Fox, ch. 11. 35. Sancho, Letters, 254–55 n. 5; Ayling, Fox, 132; Carretta, “Introduction,” Sancho, Letters, xii. 36. Ayling, Fox, 36, 32, 59; Sancho to Mrs. Cocksedge, Aug. 25, 1779, Sancho, Letters, 169. 37. Sancho, Letters , 258; Sancho to Mrs. Cocksedge, July 4, 1775, Sancho, Letters, 53; Sancho to Mrs. Cocksedge, July 23, 1778, Sancho Letters, 135 and 296 n. 5; Sancho to Miss Crewe, Sept. 4, 1778, Sancho Letters, 139– 40; Sancho to Miss Crewe, October 1, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 141–42, 297 n. 2.

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38. Sancho to Richard Rush, July 13, 1778, Sancho Letters, 137–38; 138; Sancho to Mrs. Cocksedge„ Nov. 5, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 105; Sancho to Mrs. Cocksedge, July 23, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 135–36. 39. Sancho to Miss Crewe, May 14, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 121; Sancho to Miss Crewe, August 15, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 90–91. A descendant was the “hyperbolic gallantry” with which Lydgate addressed Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch (1871–72): “a mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolic gallantry, as the guise of deeper feeling; …she felt that agreeable titillation of vanity and a sense of romantic drama….” George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin), 810. 40. Sancho to Mrs. Cocksedge, Nov. 5, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 105. For his explicit association of “ass” and Sterne, see Sancho to Meheux, August 25, 1777, Sancho Letters, 91–92. This illustrates the distinction in letter-writing Markman Ellis describes in “Ignatius Sancho’s, Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Politics of Form,” Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001), 199–217; 204. For Sancho’s ability to dissolve differences of this kind, see Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (Hanover, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008), 80–81. 41. Sterne to Mrs. Cocksedge, August 25, 1779, Sancho, Letters, 168–70; Sancho to Mrs. Cocksedge, Nov. 5, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 105–106; 106. 42. Aylmer, Fox, 77, 84; Sancho to Mrs. Cocksedge, Sept. 7, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 234. 43. Sancho to Miss Crewe, August 15, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 91; Sancho to John Spink, Sept. 9, 1780, Sancho, Letters, 235. 44. Sancho to Miss Crewe, Sept. 9, 1780, Sancho Letters, 236. 45. Fox joined the political reformers in this election; his patron, Crewe, MP for Cheshire, introduced his own effort to clean up Parliament with a bill barring certain government officials from being MPs in 1780, to succeed with the Parliament Act of 1784. Davis, “Crewe,” DNB (see n. 37 above); Sancho to Daniel Braithwaite, December 1779, Sancho, Letters, 194, 311 n. 1. For Meheux, see Sancho, Letters, 258 n. 1. 46. Sancho to Jabez Fisher, January 27, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 111–12; compare Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 61. For the Letters praising Fox, Pitt and Dolben, see Carretta, Equiano, the Africans: Biography of a Self-Made Man (New York: Penguin, 2006), 267. 47. Sancho to Jabez Fisher, Jan. 1779, Sancho, Letters, 151–52; Edmund Rack to Ignatius Sancho, April 20, 1779, Sancho, Letters, 300–01.

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48. Sancho to Wingrave, Charles Street, Feb. 14, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 23– 28; 28. 49. Sancho to Wingrave, Feb. 14, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 28; Ashley L. Cohen, “Julius Soubise in India,” Britain’s Black Post, ed. Gretchen H. Guerzina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 215–233; 231. 50. Sancho to Wingrave, Feb. 14, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 23–28; 28. 51. Sancho to John Meheux, July 23, 1777, Sancho, Letters, 84–86; Cohen, “Soubise in India,” 231. 52. Sancho to Wingrave, May 4, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 116–17. 53. Sancho to Crewe, May 9, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 117–19, 291 n. 4. Sancho lists “parciplepiviamontis” with “bumphiddled” and “phizpoo” as comic neologisms in which Sancho imitates Sterne. One can see sexual or schatalogical syllables in each of them, amplifying and replenishing “the language: reserves” in a way his “vocal difficulties could not do upon the stage. S.S. Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne,” Research in African Literature, Special Issue, “The African Diaspora and its Origins,” Vol. 29, No. 4 (1998), 88–106; 96. 54. Sancho to Crewe, May 9, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 117–19; 118. If “Mr. and Mrs. B” were the Bunburys; he seems not to have known that Parliament had granted their petition for divorce in 1776; see above, p. 55. Sancho to Crewe, May 9, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 117–19; 118–19. 56. Sancho to Wingrave, 1778, Sancho, Letters , 129–33. 57. “Extracts of Two Letters from Mr. Wingrave to His Father, Dated Bombay, 1776 and 1777,” Sancho, Letters, 130. 58. Sancho to Wingrave, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 129–33; 130; Connor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 503–09; Aylmer, Fox, 147–49, 151. 59. Sancho to Wingrave, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 129–33; 130–31. 60. Sancho to Wingrave, 1778, Sancho, Letters , 119–33; 131–33. For Thomson’s Seasons, see Hudson, “’Britons Never Will be Slaves,” 566.

CHAPTER 8

“Too Well Known to Make Any Mention Necessary.” Sancho’s Impact

The only review of Sancho’s Letters which did not link him to Sterne was the brief note in A New Review (August 1782), giving the title, with “Sancho was a black of the Duke of Montagus,” race and ownership the priorities; then, audience: “those who love whatever comes from a warm heart, however trifling or affected it may be, will receive pleasure from these two volumes, which are not ill-written.” That redemptive concession of Sancho’s having a warm heart was one other reviewer would make more positive, associating him with the sensibility he had linked to Sterne, and illustrating its significance in the history of antislavery. It was a cultural mode reaching an apogee in Sterne, with whom Sancho had brilliantly associated himself.1 The author of the review in the European Magazine, the following month, identified himself with the humanitarianism Sancho’s Letters were intended to further: he predicts the two volumes “will be read with avidity and pleasure by those who desire to promote the common elevation of human race.” This referred also implicit in the next sentence: “To those who wish to degrade the species; to set limits to the kindness of the Deity, these letters will be no welcome repast, for they will show them the error of that wild ‘opinion’,” quoting from Jekyll’s Life (acknowledging the words of Johnson’s), “which…restrains the operations of the mind to particular regions.” The review explains that these “Letters were written

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3_8

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by a negro, self-tutored published without any correction…by author or editor.” And it quotes Crewe’s (anonymous) editorial note, that “they were not…intended for publication, they were collected from the various friends to whom they were addressed.” The reviewer adds, agreeing with Jekyll that this origin, “confers a value on the book; for it hereby presents us the naked effusions of a negro’s heart, and shows it glowing with the finest philanthropy, and the purest affections.” We can juxtapose this with Sancho’s own characterization of his words as “the warm ebullitions of African sensibility,” in that sample letter to Stevenson, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine the April of the previous year. This reviewer continued to list the qualities that enabled this African’s letters to be proof against “severe criticism.” “They have the ease of epistles written in the openness of nature, and in the playful familiarity of friendship. They breathe unaffected piety – and have the ardour of genuine patriotism.” Those qualities were all identifiable with the heart, with nature; the letters are deficient in head. They “are not to be taken as models of this species of writing. They have more warmth than elegance of diction, and more feeling than correctness.” It was a version of the long-running attack on sensibility unmediated by intellectual power, by reason. Such warmth could be seen to correspond to race, as well as gender, leaving self-control (elegance, accuracy and correctness) to white males. That can be contrasted with Richardson’s judging sentimental writing to be superior to learned men’s, praising women’s “natural ease and freedom” of style in writing. To illustrate Sancho’s “manner,” this reviewer quoted his long, October 24, 1777 letter to Stevenson. The reviewer chooses this one, “as it contains a memorial of his newly departed friend, the benevolent Mr. Sterne.” So this letter perpetuated that association. “ – Alas poor Yorick! oh! that thou hadst by divine permission, been suffered a little – little longer, amongst the moonstruck children of this namby-pamby world.” Sancho contrasts Sterne’s writing and values with the loony, and with the “weakly sentimental…affectedly, childishly simple ones,” connoted by “namby pamby” in 1749, from the name, Ambrose Phillips, a writer satirized by Pope in the Dunciad. Sancho’s letter continued, “surely – half the wit – half the good sense – of this present age – were interred in Sterne’s grave – his broad philanthropy – like the cheering rays of the blessed Sun, invested his happy spirit, and soared into Heaven with it – where in progressive rise from bliss to bliss, he drinks-in large draughts of rapture, love, and knowledge, and

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chants the praises of redeeming love, with joy – unbounded and unceasing vigour.–” The letter referred to Stevenson’s unfortunate circumstances, Sancho hoping he found his “venerable parents well,” celebrating filial love, describing Sancho’s own, fatherly attachment to his son “the hold little Billy gets of me…and by his good-will would be ever in the shop with me – the monkey! He clings round my legs – and if I chide him or look sour – he holds up his little mouth to kiss me; - I know I am the fool – for parents weakness is child’s strength”: he turns to his wife and his daughters: “Mrs. Sancho and her virgins are so, so – [as] well as youth and innocence…can be. Dame Sancho would be better if she cared less. – I am her barometer – if a sigh escapes me; it is answered by a tear in her eye”; this degree of mutuality was the essence of sensibility. “- I oft assume gaiety to illume her dear sensibility with a smile” – so consciousness of other could moderate spontaneity in favour of affectation, “– which twenty years ago almost bewitched me; - and mark! – after twenty years enjoyment constitutes my highest pleasure!” The last point was of concern to reformers of marriage (going back to Mary Astell, at least), how to make it endure after reversing the husband’s courting supplication, having slaked their pleasure. One source of its perpetuation could be the extension of his feelings to resulting children.2 Sancho wishes his happiness with his wife be the unmarried Meheux’s lot, with a competency to make economy pleasure, “with the virtue of benevolence your daily employment,” an ideal Sarah Scott laid on at great length in her History of Sir George Ellison, “to glide down the stream of time – best with a partner of congenial principles and fine feelings,” a salient combination in the literature of sensibility, contrary to solely selfindulgent expression, and “time feminine eloquence – whose very looks speak tenderness and sentiment.” Evidently this is what Sancho enjoyed in his marriage, a pleasure wished-for and idealized by, for example, the women and men described by Irene Q. Brown, for the period 1660–1760, who generated a culture of “feminism and friendship.” She describes it as “aristocratic” but its origins coincided with the radical questioning by working-class women and men of conventional marriage and sex roles in the period of English Civil War, the questioning continuing through the eighteenth century, nourished by increasing literacy, notably among women.3 Sancho amplifies his picture, still wishing Stevenson experience what Sancho does, daily: “ – your infants growing – with the roseate bloom

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of health – minds cultured by their father – expanding daily in every improvement – blest little souls! – and happy – happy parents!” The thought brings sexual pleasure to mind again, “marriage, but take a virgin – or a maiden to thy arms.” The reviewer, then, chooses to present Sancho as an ideal man of feeling in his own words, including his husbandly, paternal pleasures, presumably of appeal to women readers and their sympathizers. He called his letter, “the effusion of a warm though foolish heart,” which could be used as evidence for the reviewer’s criticism. After mentioning Sancho’s letters on the Gordon riots of 1780, the reviewer concluded that when Sancho left “expressions light and frivolous” in which he “usually indulged himself,” he “had a strength of reasoning and a facility of expression, which a man with the best education might covet.” Sancho’s writing could cross that conventionally gendered line. The reviewer copied a passage of Jekyll’s biography in also writing that Sancho contradicts “the philosophers and anatomists” whose “species” they “have endeavoured to degrade,” and concludes by quoting the whole of Jekyll’s in “The Life of Sancho” except the last four paragraphs, which he has already excerpted at length.4 The reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine (September, 1782), opened: “The amiable Negro whose posthumous Letters are here collected, was first known to the publick by an humane and sensible epistle (here reprinted), which he wrote to the late Mr. Sterne, of facetious memory, and which was published with some of his pieces.” It then paraphrased Jekyll’s “Memoir” at length, incorporating some criticism of it, for example, on Sancho’s contemplating suicide; “This…and some other ignominious blots in his escutcheon…need not have been ‘remembered in his epitaph.’” And over Sancho’s “subsequent dissipation we throw a veil.” The reviewer added the editor need not have bothered to deny the letters were written for publication, “as with all their philanthropy…few of them are little more than common-place effusions,” the same word used by the European Magazine reviewer, those unchecked expressions of emotion which the writer links to race, “such as many other Negroes, we suppose, could with the same advantages, have written, and which we needed no ‘ghost to have come from the grave’ or a black from Guinea to have told us.” But Sancho’s published letters had no precedents. One could say this reviewer grants comparable abilities to Africans in general (albeit inflected with racism), justifying Crewe’s achievement.

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With Jekyll, the writer describes Sancho’s eventually achieving respectability by way of “service…with the present duke, where he married a deserving young woman of West Indian origins,” implicitly black, but showing the middle-class habits (like the honesty other reviewers emphasized), in the shop obtained by “his own frugality,” as well as “the munificence of his friends” and “by his industry, he decently maintained a numerous family of children.” The reviewer illustrates Sancho’s patrons from the aristocracy, the Duchesses of Queensbury and Northumberland, and his acquaintances Garrick and Sterne, then lists “his literary pursuits, two theatrical pieces,…the Theory of Music dedicated to the princess royal, and such a taste for painting as made him frequently consulted by Mortimer,” all taken from Jekyll but ignored by other reviewers. This reviewer refers to Sterne a third time, emphasizing Sancho’s identification with him by describing a flaw they shared: “Among other imitators of Sterne, who seems to have been his idol, we wish that had honest Sancho had not followed him in his blanks or dashes – or, if he could not have stopped his letters himself,” a pun, to go with effusions of “a Negro,” suggesting Sancho lacked self-control, “he would have employed” an “experienced pointer” to do it for him, another nasty pun, and we recall Sancho’s critics of those who held that “Negroes” did not have feelings, writing, “even a dog will love those who use him kindly.5 He noted that a “head of this ingenious but corpulent African, from a picture by Gainsborough, engraved by Bartolozzi, is not the least valuable part of this publication,” a gratuitous repetition of “corpulent.” This lengthy review quoted several letters in full including the one to Meheux, July 23, 1777, telling him of the Duchess of Queensbury’s death. Its chief theme is that all must die. It referred to Meheux’s ongoing susceptibility to headache and to a remedy that had done Mrs. Sancho good, “and does poor Billy great good,” plagued as he was with a cough. It ended with the hope that in heaven, “we will mix my boy with all countries, colours, faiths.” The reviewer mentioned Sancho’s support for the disgraced and executed Dr. Dodd; and “among his many benevolent plans, are one for manning the navy, another for sending plate to the mint, a third in favour of jack-asses, &c.” It concluded with the literally condescending, “Well done thou good and faithful servant !” the reviewer in God’s shoes quoting the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:21).6 Ralph Griffiths reviewed Sancho’s Letters in his Monthly Review but not until 1783, explaining he had to cite the second edition because the

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first “which came out about a year ago, was sold with such rapidity that we could not procure a copy.” The sale of the book was in large part connected to the extraordinary number of subscribers. Griffiths reminded his readers that he first brought their attention “to this very honest and very ingenious African” the phrase he had then used, because of “his correspondence with the celebrated Sterne whose Letters were the subject of a review in vol. 53 (1775).” Griffith continued: the “genius and good character of this amiable Black procured him the acquaintance and esteem of several person of eminence in the literary world,” among others David Garrick, of “whose good nature and benevolence he makes honourable and grateful mention in these letters.” He repeats what he (and the review in the European Magazine) had said, that Sancho was “very honest,” along with having a “good character.” This countered stereotype, in a way not seen in reviews of white writers. Griffiths reiterated the paragraph from Jekyll’s “Life” summarizing his “commerce with the arts.” He quoted Jekyll’s quotation of Dr. Johnson, as well as Crewe’s explanation for the publication of the Letters, to raise money for Sancho’s family, adding he believed “Mrs. Sancho still keeps the same shop in Charles street.” Griffiths writes that Sancho’s “epistolary style” in general bore, “some resemblance to that of his admired Sterne – with his breaks – and dashes –” taking the opportunity to declare, “in this wild indiscriminate use of them, an abomination to all accurate writers and friends to sober punctuation.” Reiterating the European Review in this regard, Griffiths amplified it in the case of Sterne, who could not be bothered with grammar: “that volatile spirit adroitly supplied the want by replacing punctuation with the dash throughout Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey, and his Letters.” Griffith pronounced this “a most vicious practice, equally injurious to all good writing and good reading, too.” Readers of Sancho’s Letters might have been susceptible to the same straying for which Sterne was blamed, particularly by evangelical reformers, but Griffiths and Jekyll presented Sancho as safely tamed, as well as a man of feeling. Because he had quoted Sancho’s letter to Sterne in his review of Sterne’s letters as “one specimen of his epistolary manner,” Griffiths gives only “a short extract” here. It was “copied from the first letter” addressed to a friend in the East Indies.” Griffiths’ choice registered the same, immediate circumstances Crewe had. Notably it posed the vulgarity of wealth, being “worth ten jaghires,” against valuing “your fellow creatures,” and expressed Sancho’s gratification that its recipient

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(Jack Wingrave), remembered “your dark-faced friends,” and reminded him that “every good affection, every sweet sensibility, every heart-felt joy – humanity, politeness, charity,” “streams” from sacred stream of religion. The other letter Griffiths quoted was the one to Meheux dated September 16, 1777, in which Sancho wrote of receiving the newspapers containing the correspondence between Pro Bono Publico and Linco, with his long account of his misplacement of that bloody Letter accompanying the pig carcass. Griffiths introduced it with the observation that “honest Sancho indulges, as he often does, his merry vein, and we shall take from it a sample of his pleasantry; in the first paragraph of which he appears, if we mistake him not, to be humourously severe on himself.” Then follows most of the letter.7 Together, then, the reviews of Sancho’s Letters illustrated the significance of Sancho’s decision to write to Sterne, reinforcing his identification with him, although he shared in Sterne’s grammatical discredit, but very largely escaping Sterne’s obscenity and looseness. He had persuaded those readers that a black man could be literate, a self-disciplined, petit-bourgeois businessman, husband and father. And the reviews, inevitably presenting his colour first, illustrated the racism to which he endured. Jekyll’s biography, so frequently reprinted with them, emphasizes Sancho’s having been domesticated, after a wild phase. Because of Crewe’s editorial work, sustained by the network described by Hanley, readers of Sancho’s published Letters could, and can, discover for themselves the imaginatively liberated, multifaceted and essentially witty person in this writer, transcending the narrower definitions with which Crewe and Jekyll introduced him, posthumously committed to abolitionism. A significant number of the Teston Circle subscribed to Sancho’s Letters, but not Hannah More, even though her idealized friend, Mrs. Frances Boscawen, did so: More dedicated her Sensibility: A Poetical Epistle to the Hon. Mrs. Boscawen, like Sancho’s Letters , published in 1782. Of their sensibility, in this “unpolished lays,” she claims, The fine-wrought spirit feels acuter pains; Where glo exalted sense, and taste refin’d. There keener anguish rankles in the mind: There feeling is difur’d tro’ ev’ry part,

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Thrills in each nerve, and lives in all the heart. And those, whose gen’rous souls each tear wou’d keep. From others eyes, are born themselves to weep.

Among the anguished few who could relish those qualities, she listed fellow Bluestockings Carter, Montagu, Chapone and Barbauld and male writers George Lyttleton, Dr. Johnson, Young and Beattie, the latter also praised by Sancho. The figure More singled out for her most extended praise was David Garrick (author of Cymon), a mutual friend of Boscawen and More, as well as of Sancho and Sterne. Ne’er shall my heart his lov’d remembrance lose, Guide, critic, guardian, glory of my muse!

We might recall the ambiguities of praising “feeling difus’d thought every nerve,” and the physiological operation on which such “sense” depended. But of Garrick, More writes, His wit so keen, it never miss’d its end; So blameless, too, it never lost a friend; So chaste, that Modesty ne’er learn’d to fear; So pure, Religion might unwounded hear.

We might also recall, given what she is to write of Sterne, that Garrick was Sterne’s champion before he set foot in London, once he read the first volumes of Tristram Shandy. More opens the section of her encomium on refined sensibility which will reach one climax in an attack on Sterne, Let not the vulgar read this pensive strain, Their bests the tender anguish wou’d profane; Yet these some deem the happiest of their kind, Whose low enjoyments never reach’d the mind; … Ah! Wherefore happy? Where’s the kindred mind? Where the large soul that takes in human kind Where the best passions of the human breast?

Denigrating the false sensibility of those who assume sensibility merely as a fashion, she refers to that Greuze painting with which Sterne seems to have played in his account of his starling:

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She does not feel thy pow’r who boasts thy flame, And rounds her every period with thy name; Nor she who vents her disproportionate sigh With Lesbia, when her sparrow dies; … There are, who fill with brilliant plaints the page, If a poor linnet meets she gunner’s rage: There are, who for a dying fawn display The tend’rest anguish in the sweetest lay;

Who for a wounded animal deplore As if a friend, parent country were no more; Who boast, quick rapture trembling in their eye, From a spider’s share they snatch a fly;

This line refers to Sterne’s “Negro maid” in Tristram Shandy. More pauses to praise Henry Mackenzie, who had capitalized on A Sentimental Journey A Man of Feeling, omitting any passage of sexual ambiguity. For More, he is “a man indeed,” in contrast to Sterne: O LOVE DIVINE! sole source of Charity! More dear one genuine deed performed for thee, Than all the periods Feeling e’er can turn Than all they soothing pages, polish’d STERNE!

In her Slavery, published in 1788, the year after the establishment of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, More made her contribution to the movement the Teston Circle was nourishing. She improved on Behn’s/Southerne’s focus on in a single, wrongly enslaved, African aristocrat: No individual griefs my bosom melt For millions feel what Oronoko felt Fir’d by no single wrong, the countless host I mourn, by rapine dragg’d from Afric’s coast.

The expansion of focus represented the growth of the antislavery movement. More continued,

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…they have heads to think, and hearts to feel, And souls to act, with firm, though erring zeal;

“erring” because they are not yet Christians. For they have keen affections, kind desires,

but those emotions are contained, as reviewers said of Sancho’s: All the rude energy, the fervid flame, Of high-soul’d passion and ingenious shame Strong but luxuriant virtues boldly shoot From the wild vigor of a savage root,

this was how those reviewers had characterized Sancho’s sensibility. Had it been Sancho’s identification with Sterne that had prevented More from joining with Boscawen in subscribing to the publication of his Letters ?8 Five editions of Sancho’s Letters were reprinted between 1782 and 1803, the latter published by his son, William Leach Osborne Sancho. The “Prose Compositions of Ignatius Sancho” specifying his letters, “are too well known to make any extract, or indeed any farther mention of him necessary,” wrote Thomas Clarkson, four years after first their publication, in his influential Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species Particularly the African.”9 He had first heard and read Sancho’s words quoted in a sermon preached in 1784 by the Rev. Peter Peckard, whom Clarkson described in his History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808). Peckard “had distinguished himself in the earlier part of his life by certain publications” advocating “civil and religious liberty, to which cause he seldom omitted any opportunity of declaring his sentiments in its favour.” One was his appointment in 1784 to the mastership of Magdalen College, Cambridge when “it devolved upon him to preach a sermon before the University.” He began by speaking of most egregious contradiction of liberty, “the slave trade.”10 Peckard’s text for this sermon was I Peter, 2:17, “Honour All Men; Love the Brotherhood; Fear God; Honour the King,” preached on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, January 30th, 1649. Peckard opened by reminding his listeners of “the Constitution,” and “the natural, and civil rights of mankind.” By “mankind” and “men” Peckard usually

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meant humanity, subsuming, in Sancho’s notable phrase, (speaking as AFRICANUS), “both sexes,” although of course, women were deprived of the same civil rights as men, and it was not self-evident that they had natural rights, either; some denied they had souls. Then Peckard reminded his listeners that “Moral Integrity in the impregnable rock for the Edifice of Public Virtue,” referring to the meaning of “Peter,” and that its first principle in that we are to Honour

Peter Peckard by C. Ralph, by permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge

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“All Men…of every degree and denomination” but “the treatment which in general man experiences from man is to the last degree ungenerous, oppressive, cruel.” His subject is imperialism: “Witness those horrid instances of uncontrouled despotism exhibited in the overgrown empires of the world.” His context is identical to Crewe’s. Many empires are not Christian but though they are “free from the Christian Law, they are not free from the obligation of Humanity.” Even in Christian countries, “the same species of barbarity is practiced,” though Peckard concedes not in the same degree, but “the same imperious spirit of unjust domination prevails,” and he introduces the kinship term of his sermon’s title, having the same connotation as Smith’s brother upon the rack, “and a Christian scruples not to keep his brother Christian in a state of slavery.” In defining “honour,” Peckard makes the same distinction as More’s, between true and false sensibility, referring to its operation by the same psychophysiological model she assumed. It is not “the external polish of …smooth behaviour,” which “is perfectly consistent with every deformity of the heart, … subversive of every important obligation.” The problem in this account of the operation of Lockean consciousness was that it could be put to self-serving as well as moral ends. The “honour” meant by Peter, “flows from an impression arising from the consciousness of the Natural Equality of the human race: from a sense that we are all formed of the same materials, that we are all endowed with the same faculties, and subject to the same imperfections.” This was common ground with Crewe’s observation about the untutored African, distinct from More’s racist characterization ending in “the wild vigor” of the millions of enslaved Africans. It leads to Peckard’s statement of the golden rule, long fundamental to criticism of slavery and the slave trade, “that we mutually stand in need of each other’s assistance, and that whatsoever we would that others should do unto us, we ought also do unto them,” an exercise expressing not only Christian Law, but “all the virtues of Humanity.”11 And here, in the opening of his sermon, Peckard turns to the subject to which Mansfield’s freeing of Somerset had pointed, “a practice, which though authorized by our Legislative is the disgrace of our Country,” practised by “fierce, unfeeling, inexorable” men. “There is a great part of the human race…whose external complexion indeed is different from our

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own but who are formed of the same blood as with ourselves”; a reference to that New Testament verse George Fox had quoted over a century before. They share “all the faculties, and all the distinguishing excellencies of our nature.” But we deprive them “of their natural liberty”; and here, Peckard can quote the voice of an African, as Sancho had represented himself, and as Crewe has published it, in a very lengthy extract from Sancho’s letter to Jack Wingrave with which Crewe opened volume II of his Letters, and which Griffiths had quoted in his review, from, “I say it with reluctance, that your country’s conduct has been uniformly wicked on the coast of Guinea,” to “the subject sours my blood.” Peckard comments: “The lives of these poor creatures destroyed in this way, are, doubtless, so many acts of Murther.” We are guilty. He asks his listeners to imagine “the power reversed,” in Africans’ hands, to carry on their Slave Trade, forcing “us our wives and children away from our native soil and home, to work Sugar Grounds…in perpetual slavery.” This alluded to the perversion of the golden rule Sterne invoked in his reply to Sancho. “What should we say then? And indeed what reason can we give now? Power; and the Men are black. – Power; and the Men are white, would be on their part as good a reasons.” Then Peckard elaborates on what his quotation of Sancho says: “we craftily sow the seeds of dissension among them,” the people in Africa, “that they may work their own destruction by delivering each other into our hands; we steal them, we buy them; we sell them; we consign them to perpetual slavery; tearing them away forever from their domestic connexious, and from every endearment of Life: for they too have endearments of Life, founded in nature and accompanied with innocence”; Wheatley had said as much in her poem to the Earl of Dartmouth: Steel’d was ‘that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe beloved:

Published in the collection praised by Sancho.12 Peckard contrasted the sensibility of Africans with those unfeeling, white, slave traders supported by Parliament, MPs sharing the same psychology. Africans suffer the loss of those endearments of life, “with a more poignant affliction than ever touched the corrupted heart of a mercenary trader, or worldly minded politicians”: his subsequent pronoun

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links him to these guilty Britons: “with conscious deliberation, and unexampled tyranny, we doom them to daily misery, and drive them by inexpressible cruelty to increasing torments, and an untimely death.” To introduce his sermon’s next, even longer extract from Letters of Sancho, Peckard asks his audience, “Shall, then, the form of features, think ye, or the tincture of the skin be considered as circumstances that can invest the nature of moral actions? Or shall the possession of riches or power justify that Tyranny by which men make their brethren slaves.” Enslavement contradicted Peter: “If this be to honour all men, there is no longer any meaning in words, nor any iniquity in actions.” Peckard paraphrases and quotes Jekyll’s “The Life of Sancho” reading it as an antislavery text. “In the year 1729, an unfortunate Negro, and his wife, then great with child, were forced from their country on board a ship in the Slave Trade. A few days after it had quitted the coast of Guinea, the poor woman was delivered” and Peckard quotes a lengthy extract, interpolating a Latin phrase of Juvenal’s: Sancho “was a man of great powers of mind and equal virtues.” Hand facile emergent quorum virtutibus obstat Re angusta domi —

[It is not easy for people to rise out of obscurity when they have to face straitened circumstances at home.] Peckard adds, “he had wonderful penetration and sagacity,” this judgement in sharp contrast to that of the reviewers; Peckard amplified these remarks after quoting Jekyll’s account of Sancho’s “commerce with the Muses.” “He possessed a noble elevation of mind, and great depth of thought: a bright imagination and a rich vein of wit, tempered with an accurate solidity of Judgement. His sentiments were just and delicate; his sensibility exquisite;” there is no ambiguity, no scorn here at all, “his benevolence unbounded; his heart was the seat of true Christian Charity; his Piety was perfect; his Devotion fervent; his zeal for Religion animated by the warmest, yet most temperate and rational Enthusiasm.” And he quotes Plautus, Ut summa ingenia saepe in occult latent!

[How often the greatest talents are shrouded in obscurity.] Quoting the Thomas Fuller line Jekyll had quoted, “God’s image though cut in ebony,” Peckard adds, “Such was One of those (and many thousands

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more might have been) whom in unnumbered instances are with perfidious and unexampled cruelty drive to horror, to despair, to madness, to suicide.” Peckard shoulders the responsibility and guilt of whites in general. He tells his readers, “see the Life of Ignatius, and his Letters, Lately Published by J.Nicols,” so the suicide refers to Sancho’s father.13 In his History, Clarkson tells us that Peckard “did not consider this delivery of his testimony, though it was given before a learned and religious body, as a sufficient discharge of his duty.” Another opportunity to do so was the following year, when he became vice-chancellor of Cambridge, to give out two subjects for Latin dissertations. “This circumstance of giving out the subjects for the prizes, though only an ordinary measure, because the occasion of my own labours, or of the real honour which I feel in being able to consider myself as the next coadjutor [after Peckard] in this class in the cause of the injured Africans.” Clarkson categorized those contributing to the growing stream of antislavery into “forerunners” and “coadjutors”; the first of these in his chapter VII was Peckard.14 Looking back after twenty-three years, Clarkson perceived the significance of this turning point, the discovery of “his life’s vocation,” in Ronald Hyam’s phrase. “For it happened in this year that being of the order of senior bachelors I qualified to write, I had gained a prize for the best Latin dissertation in the former year, and therefore it was expected that I should gain one in the present.” Anything less than first prize would have been considered a falling off, or as a loss of former fame. The subject Peckard set was, “Anne liceat invitos in Servitutem dare?” or “Is it right to make slaves of other against their will?” He realized that this pointed directly “to the African Slave-trade…as I knew that Dr. Peckard, in the sermon…I mentioned, had pronounced so warmly against it.” Central to that pronouncement was the voice of Sancho.15 Peckard’s reading before and after submitting his essay was traumatic, as he came to grasp both the enormity of the slave trade and what it would take to end it. There follow several passages where Clarkson describes himself, dismounted, sitting by the side of the road form Cambridge to London, where he walked alone for hours in the woods, a romantic figure.16 The title page of An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, tells the reader it was Translated From a Latin Dissertation, Which Was Honoured With the First Prize In The University of Cambridge For The Years, 1785, With Additions (1786).

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Clarkson dedicated the translation of his “Essay” to Peckard, always acknowledging him “as the man who had inspired him, the original promoter of the British campaign.”17 Therein he describes African psychology as impedimented, for example, “their poetry,” that is, composed by the enslaved; “Every occurrence if their spirits are not too depressed, is turned into song.” These songs are said to be incoherent and nonsensical,” proceeding from two causes, “an ignorance of the language in which they compose,” meaning English, and secondly, “a wildness of thought arising from the different manner, in which the organs of rude and civilized people will be struck by the same object.” Probably More had read Clarkson’s Essay when she characterized Africans the same way. Dr. Johnson by contrast, had said the “wildness” lay with Hume’s opinion that restrained the operation of the mind to particular regions, in the passage quoted by Jekyll’s “Life of Sancho.”18 Here Clarkson turns to Wheatley’s poetry, “But where these impediments have been removed, where they have received an education, and have known and pronounced the language with propriety, these defects have vanished, and their productions have been less objectionable.” He adds, “For proof on this we appeal to the writings of the African girl, who made no contemptible appearance in this species of composition.” He paraphrased the biographical information published with Wheatley’s Poems in 1773, and quoted two short ones and an extract from her “Thoughts, on Imagination,” commenting that if she was “designed for slavery,” then “the greater part of the inhabitants of Britain must lose their claim to freedom.” Her poems are proof of Africans’ abilities, Clarkson has described the removal of “impediments,” and the transformation of the African girl from rude to civilized.19 Clarkson added, “as a farther proof of their abilities, the Prose compositions of Ignatius Sancho, who received some little education.” His assessment is in contrast to Peckard’s enthusiastic praise and his assertion of human equality. (It was here Clarkson wrote Sancho’s “letters are too well known to make any extract, or indeed any farther mention of him, necessary.”) He then answered the hypothesized objection that Wheatley and Sancho were “prodigies, and that were we to live for many years, we should scarcely meet with two other Africans of the same description.” If they are prodigies, “they are only such prodigies as every day would produce if they had the same opportunities of acquiring knowledge as other people, and the same expectations in life to excite their genius.”

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He went on to cite Benezet, “who had a better opportunity of knowing them than any person whatever,” and “that he could never find a difference between their capacities and these of other people…that they were as capable of the highest intellectual attainments; in short that their abilities were equal, and that they only wanted to be equally cultivated, to afford specimens of as fine productions.”20 In the opening of chapter 1 of Part III of his Essay, “The Slavery of Africans in the European Colonies,” Clarkson wrote that, with his readers, “we shall suppose ourselves on the continent of Africa, and relate a scene, which, with its agreement with unquestionable facts, might not unreasonably be presumed to have been presented to our view, had we really been there.” He then imagines a conversation with a “melancholy,” “agitated” African, who explains the coming into view of “a train of wretched slaves…going to the ships behind you, destined for the English colonies.” Clarkson’s supposed African left an opening for genuine African voices.21 In 1787, following the publication of the English translation of his Essay on Slavery, Clarkson was “the driving spirit behind founding of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” “Paralleling the Abolition Committee was a group of black men who called themselves the Sons of Africa.” They told Granville Sharp nominal head of the Society and better known to Britain’s black people, in December, 1787, that they were “a part or descendants of the much wronged people of Africa,” a definition that could include both Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, among the dozen black, male members. They expressed their gratitude to Sharp in the language of sensibility, “with the most feeling sense of our hearts.” They published letters and went on speaking campaigns, as did the white Abolition Society members, but, in addition, they presented “themselves to the British public as living proof of black humanity,” in those terms countering “the propaganda of the growing slavery lobby.”22 John Stewart reverted to his African name as Quobua Ottobah Cugoano, as he explained in Thoughts and Sentiments in the Evils of Slavery (1787); his title, “clearly alluded to Clarkson’s Essay.”23 Cugoano drew attention to his colour by acknowledging “it cannot but be very discouraging to a man of my complexion in such an attempt as this, to meet with the evil aspersions of some men who say, ‘That an African is not entitled to any competent degree of knowledge, or capable of imbibing any sentiments of probity,” illustrating the emphases on the word “honest” attached to Sancho and Barber’s names; “and that nature designed

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him for some inferior link in the chain, fitted only to be a slave.” But his book, by a person born in Africa, gave that belief the lie. He described his birth and childhood in less than a page, before his capture, imprisonment in a fort, being shipped and reshipped from Cape Coast, when he and his fellows planned to blow them all up, “but we were betrayed by one of our own countrywomen, who slept with some of the head men of the ship for it was common for some of the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies; but the men were chained and pent up in holes.” It had been the women and boys who were to burn the ship. Cugoano declared it was unnecessary to describe the “horrible scenes” of the transatlantic voyage, “as the similar cases of thousands who suffer by this infernal traffic, are well known.”24 Equiano was associated with Sancho in an 1788 attack on both of them by “Civis” (shades of “Pro Bono Publico”), a writer defending slavery and the slave trade in the Morning Chronicle of 19 August, which had the previous month given the origin of “Gustavus Vassa” as African, “an Ethiopian now resident in the metropolis.” “Civis” refuted the idea that blacks were equal to whites: “If I were even to allow some share of merit to Gustavus Vasa [sic], Ignatius Sancho, &c, it would not prove equality more, than a pig having been taught to fetch a card, letter &c, would shew it not to be a pig but some other animal.”25 In 1789, Equiano published a more detailed account of his birth and youth in Africa, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself , devoting the first chapter to “Eboe” customs, and concluding it with several pages on the Middle Passage. The value of such apparently eye-witness testimony to the antislavery campaign is clear.26 In 1788, Peckard addressed Parliament with Am I Not a Man? And A Brother? taken as the motto of Clarkson’s Society, in which he cited his student’s “Essay” at several places. Again he praised Sancho’s Letters “that are already published” in which Sancho “had done honour to himself and to Human Nature.” He knew of “others in Manuscript, yet unpublished, which author of these pages has seen, that also have great merit.” He praised Sancho’s published letters at some length, expressing his indignation over the racism Sancho faced, that such a man, “this rational and moral writer…this exalted Being must be thrust down from the ranks of Men because the tincture of his skin is black. Oh shame, shame!”27 Peckard praised and quoted Phillis Wheatley’s poems at the same place, deriving them from Clarkson’s “Essay,” where Clarkson, referring to

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the author as “an African girl,” in a footnote gave her name “Phyllis Wheatley,” but Peckard spells it “Phillis Wheatley.” This followed Thomas Jefferson’s Notes in the State of Virginia (1787), excerpted in the Monthly Review, May 1, 1788. Provoked by Clarkson’s praise for Wheatley and Sancho, Jefferson wrote that Wheatley’s poems were “beyond the dignity of criticism,” and referred to her admiration for Pope by stating, “the heroes of the Dunciad are to her as Hercules to the author of that poem.” Pope was crippled by tuberculosis of the spine.28 Sancho, Jefferson continued, was more meritorious than “Wheatley,” “yet his letters do more honour to the heart than the head. They breathe the pure effusions, of friendship and general philanthropy…compounded with strong religious zeal…this stile is easy and familiar, except when he affects a Shandean fabrication of words.” In fact, Jefferson himself had “a love affair with Sterne,” reading his works, and appropriating his words. According to Jefferson, “Sancho’s imagination is wild and extravagant – it escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky.” The pejoration was the same as More’s. Jefferson continued: Sancho was incapable of “sober reasoning.” He grants him “first place to writers of his own colour” who have published, but “when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived…particularly with the epistolary class in which he has taken his own stand” more fantasy, “we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column.” In fact, Jefferson suggests that someone else, white perhaps, was the real author; he had continued, “such criticism supposes the letters published under his name to be genuine, and to have received amendment from no other hand; points which would not be easy to investigation.” The context for both of these assessments was his book’s argument of the inferiority of blacks to whites, and the related fact of his slaveholding.29 In addition to the direct impact of Sancho’s Letters , there were Sterne’s incorporation of his responses to them in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Education. J. C. T. Oates and Alan B. Howes have listed the editions, including Sterne’s collected works, published between the 1760s and 1800.30 In 1782, coinciding with the publications of Sancho’s Letters , “W.H[awkes worth?]” published The Beauties of Sterne Including the Pathetic Tales and Most Distinguished Observation on Life, Selected for the Heart of Sensibility. He explained in the Preface, it was “highly necessary” to make this selection, otherwise “the chaste lovers of literature”

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and “their offspring, whose minds it would polish to the highest perfection” would be denied it. “The chaste part of the world complained so loudly of the obscenity which taints the writings of Sterne,” although “his Sentimental Journey, in some degree escaped the general censure.” It had become “as much of a fact as Tristram Shandy had ever been,” and by some was deemed freer of the sexual disreputability of the earlier book. Certainly it was more sentimental. Griffiths said it was “written in a strain so pure so refined from the dross of sensuality.” The publications illustrate the issue that had provoked More, Jekyll’s account of Sancho’s reformation, and Sancho’s wisdom in significantly avoiding it.31 W.H. told his dedicatee that these pages “breathe the spirit of humanity,” and that the sermon included had “the effusions of humanity throughout,” a characteristic claimed by Sancho, but one given a racist meaning by a reviewer. W. H. told his readers in arranging the extracts “he hoped they would not wound the bosom of sensibility too deeply.” If he had intended his selection to appeal to women in particular, that particular orientation was adjusted in the tenth edition of 1787. “A.F.” the editor of this edition explained that the “dread of offending the ear of Chastity though laudable in itself had been carried to an excess, thereby depriving us of many most laughable scenes.” In this edition, the reader, “whether of grave or gay complexion, will find equal attention paid him,” still pleasing “the heart of Sensibility” and “the mind, in search of those duties we owe to God and Man.”32 The passage from A Sentimental Journey taken by W.H. (and kept by A.F.) for the title page’s epigraph, was quoted in full in the text: “Dear Sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly to our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw – and ‘tis thou who lifts him up to HEAVEN – eternal fountain of our feelings.” This archetypal figure, significantly imprisoned (even enslaved), seems helpless, but then reaches out to the ether, beyond self-indulgence: “’tis here I trace thee – and this is thy ‘divinity which fires within me’ – not that in some sad and sickening moment, ‘my soul shrinks back upon herself, and startles at destruction’” that is, the temptation of self-martyrdom, “mere pomp of words! – but that I feel some generous joys and generous cares beyond myself – all comes from the great – great SENSORIUM of the world!” Thus Sterne anticipated and refuted that he preached mere narcissism.33 The Beauties of Sterne included the parts of A Sentimental Journey Sancho had inspired, headed “The Captive,” “The Starling” and under

8

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251

the heading, “Slavery,” the sermons of Sterne’s Sancho had quoted to him, beginning “Consider Slavery – what it is, - how bitter a draught, and how many millions have been made to drink of it.” Sancho told Sterne it was with this that he had “drawn a tear in favour of my miserable black brethren,” which the readers of the Tenth edition were enabled to read because Sancho’s 1766 letter to Sterne and Sterne’s reply, coupled in order, were two of the nine “most admired Letters,” added to that 1787 edition of The Beauties of Sterne. Sancho’s letter, the only entry in that selection not by Sterne, was accompanied by a footnote identifying him by way of Jekyll’s biography. It was published as the antislavery movement was first “crystallized” in the Antislavery Society. Howes suggests it was in the Beauties of Sterne that “the tale of the poor negro girl” was most frequently read. In Chapter III of his History, entitled “Forerunners,” Clarkson recorded: “Sterne! in his account of the Negro girl in his Life of Tristram Shandy, took decidedly the part of the oppressed Africans. The pathetic, witty, and sentimental manner, in which he handled this subject, occasioned many to remember it, and procured a certain amount of feeling in their favour.” As we saw in the Introduction, that increase in feeling was Clarkson’s fundamental explanation for the rise of antislavery and its first Parliamentary success.34

Notes 1. Review of Letters of the late Ignatius Sancho, An African, A New Review with Literary Curiosities and Literary Intelligence (August 1782), 168. 2. Review of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, European Magazine and London Review (September 1782), 199–202; 198–200. 3. Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison, ed. Betty Rizzo (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996 [1766]), BK IV. Ch. V–x; Irene Q. Brown, “Domesticity, Feminism, and Friendship: Female Aristocratic Culture and Marriage in England, 1660–1760,” Journal of Family History (Winter 1982), 406–24; Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Past and Present, 13 (April 1958), 42–62; G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 161–73; chs. 5 and 6. 4. Review of Sancho’s Letters, European Magazine, 200–202. 5. Review of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, Gentleman’s Magazine (September, 1782): 437–39; Sancho to Charles Browne, July 18, 1772, Sancho, Letters , 44–5; 45. For the literary value of Sanho’s dashes, “to introduce and keep in balance the variety of character he assumes in his writing,” see Soven C. Hammerschmidt, “Character,

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

Cultural Agency, an Abolition: Ignatius Sancho’s Published Letters,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vols. 31, No. 2 (2008), 265; see 263–67. Review of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, Gentleman’s Magazine (September 1782), 437–39. Review of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, Monthly Review or Literary Journal 69 (1783); 492–97; 492, 494, 496, 97. More, “Slavery A Poem” (London: T. Cadell, 1788), li 55–58, 67–74. (Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2010 [1785]), 121. Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808), 2 vols. (Lexington, KY: High Quality Paperbacks, 2013 [London: Richard Taylor, 1808]), 1:69. Rev. Peter Peckard, “Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge, January 30, 1784” (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1784), 1– 4. Sancho’s words were extensive footnotes to the printed version of this sermon. Peckard, “Sermon, 1784,” 4–5; “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” etc. Collected Poems of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1773]), 73–75; 74; Sancho to Jabez Fisher, Jan. 17, 1778, Sancho, Letters, 112. Peckard, “Sermon, 1784,” 5–8. Clarkson, History of Abolition, 1: 69–70. Clarkson, History of Abolition, 1: 70; “Ronald Hyam, “Peter Peckard: Anti-Slavery Trade Campaigner,” in John Walsh and Ronald Hyam, Peter Peckard, Liberal Churchman and Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner, Magdalen College Oscarwood Papers (February 1998): 15–20; 17. Clarkson, History of Abolition, 1:69. Hyam, “Peter Peckard,” 17. Clarkson, Essay on Slavery, 121. Clarkson, Essay on Slavery, 121–23. Clarkson, Essay on Slavery, 124. Clarkson, Essay on Slavery, 93. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundation of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 328; Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: Life Before Emancipation (London: Allen and Bush, 1999), 172–73; David Olusaga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan Books, 2010), 212–13, where the letter to Sharp is quoted. Cugoano, Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. with an introduction by Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1999, [1781]), 7, xx. Cugoano, Thoughts on Slavery, 11–13, 15.

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25. Quotation by “Civis,” and in The Morning Chronicle are from Carretta, “Introduction,” to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olandah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2003 [1789]), ix-xxx; xv. Like Sancho’s Letters, it was frequently reprinted and updated, with mine editions in Equiano’s lifetime (1745–97). Carretta uses the last edition, 1794; see his Note on the Text, xxi. 26. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, ch. II. 27. Peckard, Am I Not A Man? And a Brother? With All Humanity Addresses to the British Legislature (Cambridge: J. Acchdeacon, 1788), 19–20. Peckard, Am I Not A Man?, 18–19, Clarkson, Essay on Slavery, 121–23. Recent accounts of Sancho’s unpublished letters (purposely omitted by Crewe), include Ryan Hanley Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 43–46; and John Saillant, “The Invisible Man of Indecency: Profanity and the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782),” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 43, No. 2 (2020), 221–232. 28. Peckard, Am I Not A Man?, 8 n., 18; Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1785]), 147. 29. Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 148; Andrew Burstein and Catherine Mowbray, “Jefferson and Sterne,” Early American Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1994), 19–34; M. Andrew Holowchak and Amy J. Barbee, “Why Have Overlooked His Love Affair with the Work of Laurence Sterne?” History News Network (8:14, 16), article 160587. 30. J.C.T. Oates, Shandyism and Sentiment, 1760–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1968); Alan B. Howes, Yorick and the Critics: Sterne’s Reputation in England, 1760–1868 (Hamden, CT: Acchon Books, 1971), 1 n. 31. (London: T. Davies, J. Ridley, J. Sewel, and G. Kearsley, 1782), vii; Howes, Yorick and the Critics, 42–43. 32. Beauties of Sterne, viii; Howes, Yorick and the Critics, 63; [A.F.], The Beauties of Sterne; Including Several of his Letters, all his Pathetic Tales, Humorous Descriptions, and Most Distinguished Observations on Life Selected for the Heart of Sensibility (Gale: Eighteenth Century Collection on Line, Print version reproduction of The Tenth Edition [London: G. Kearsley, 1787]), vii. 33. Beauties of Sterne (1782), 100. See Sterne, A Sentimental Journey with The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968 [1768]), 117. 34. Beauties of Sterne (1782), 147, 144, 163–64; Howes, Yorick and the Critics, 62; Brown, Moral Capital, 436; Clarkson, History of Abolition, 1:22.

Index

A Abolitionism petitions, 9 Adultery, 197 Aldridge, Ira, 107 America, 10, 47, 74, 77, 91, 94–96, 171, 181, 182 American Civil War, 73 American Revolution, 73, 96, 112, 171 American War of Independence, 205 Angelo, Henry, 119, 125, 163 Anglicanism. See Church of England Animals, 39, 56, 65, 71, 98, 140, 153, 209, 239, 248 Ansah Sessarakoo, William, 161 Anti-Catholicism, 22, 173, 182 Antigua, 102 Archbishop of Canterbury, 21, 155 Asiento, 64 Atlantic, 2, 11, 40, 53, 73, 81, 91, 206 Austen, Jane, 9, 15, 115

B Bailyn, Bernard, 12, 48, 76, 111 Baldwin, James, 143, 167 Ball, Elizabeth, 136 Barbados, 56, 69, 76, 93, 94, 96, 112, 140, 161, 166 Barber, Francis, 32, 123, 136, 163, 197 Barré, Isaac, 173 Barrow, Rev. Isaac, 21, 22, 43 Bastille, 8, 43, 55, 71 Bate, Henry, 102, 118, 154 Beckford, William, 83, 85, 113, 205 Behn, Aphra, 123, 161, 165, 239 Belle, Dido Elizabeth, 54, 69 Belle, Maria, 54 Benezet, Anthony, 80, 81, 110, 203, 205, 212, 221, 227, 247 Bengal, 185, 205, 206, 215 Ben Solomon, Job. See Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman Bible, 219 Bickerstaffe, Isaac, 30, 46, 106 Bicknell, John, 198, 225, 227

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ignatius Sancho and the British Abolitionist Movement, 1729–1786, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37420-3

255

256

INDEX

Blechynden, Richard, 137 Bond Street, 60 Boscawen, Frances, 237, 238, 240 Boswell, James, 47, 116, 123, 163, 168 Boulokos, George, 41, 49 Bouverie, Lady Elizabeth, 10, 207, 227 Braithwaite, Daniel, 212, 228 British army, 82, 173 Irish recruits in, 173 British Empire, 1, 74, 76, 91, 107, 205, 210 Brown, Christopher Leslie, 1, 10, 12, 73, 82, 109, 169, 206, 227, 252 Browne, Charles, 18, 19, 42, 124, 125, 130, 146, 161–163, 197, 251 Brown, Irene Q., 233, 251 Brudenell, George, 4th Earl of Cardigan, Duke of Montagu (of the second creation), 27 Buffon, Comte de, 98 Bunbury, Sir Charles, 124, 162, 197, 208, 211, 212 Bunbury, Sir William, 19, 124 Burke, Edmund, 173, 206, 207, 221 Bury, 174, 186, 187, 191, 196, 197, 208 Butler, Marilyn, 48, 76, 111 Butler, Samuel, 57 Byrd, William, 95 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 66, 71

C Cade, Elizabeth, 74 Calcutta, 185, 215 Calvinism, 22 Cambridge, 10, 240, 245 Cambridge Platonists, 20, 34 Capitalism, 22, 23, 95

Carey, Brycchan, 9, 14–16, 42, 68, 69, 82, 113, 193, 198, 225, 226, 228 Carretta, Vincent, 12–15, 42–45, 47, 67, 102, 109, 112, 113, 118, 163, 164, 166, 168, 172, 173, 186, 192, 198, 208, 213, 218, 224–228, 253 Cash, Arthur H., 42, 55, 67, 164, 224 Castration, 8, 11, 38, 133, 134, 139–144, 152, 166 female, 142, 166 Catholicism, 25, 74, 158, 173, 177–179 Catholic Relief Act, 175 Cervantes, Miguel de, 26, 27, 30, 38, 45 Don Quixote, 26 Chaney, James Earl, 142 Charles II, 74 Charles Town, 181, 182 Charlotte Augusta-Matilda, Princess Royal, 32 Chater, Kathleen, 93, 106, 109, 115, 119 Chatterton, Thomas, 198 Christianity, 10, 100, 219, 223 Church of England, 21 Church of Scotland, 137 Civil Rights Act, 142 Clarkson, Thomas, 7, 10–12, 14, 16, 33, 41, 49, 79, 81, 92, 95, 104, 115, 116, 118, 161, 221, 240, 245–249, 251–253 Class, 24, 86, 90, 98, 105, 107, 108, 137, 138, 174, 245, 249 Climate, 2, 25, 32, 84, 90, 183, 199 Clinton, Lord Thomas Pelham, 182, 210 Clive, Robert, 204, 205, 226 Cobbett, William, 105, 108, 118

INDEX

Cocksedge, Mrs, 12, 197, 205, 207–211, 217, 223, 227, 228 Cocoa, 208, 221 Cohen, Ashley L., 129, 137, 163, 165, 229 Coke, Lady Mary, 125, 127, 134 Colley, Linda, 59, 68, 70, 179 Collingwood, Elizabeth, 214 Colman, George, 106, 119 Colombia, 2, 200 Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, 155 Cook, Captain James, 139, 165 Court of King’s Bench, 83, 93 Cowper, William, 104, 118 Crane, R.H., 21, 22, 43 Crewe, Frances, 2, 6, 15, 67, 118, 174, 182, 195, 224 Crewe, John, 207 Cromwell, Oliver, 74 Cross, Wilbur, 62 Cuguano, Ottobah, 81, 113, 143, 155, 247, 248, 252 Cullen, Susan, 137

D Darly, Matthew, 126 Dashwood, Sir Francis, 63, 122, 126 Davis, David Brown, 1 Day, Thomas, 198, 206, 227 Declaration of Independence. See American War of Independence De Cr`evecoeur, J. Hector St. John, 75 Defoe, Daniel, 59, 70 De Groote, 19, 161, 162 Descartes, René, 34, 47, 57 D’Holbach, 55 Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman. See Ben Solomon, Job Dibdin, Charles, 30, 103 Dickens, Charles, 66

257

Diderot, Denis, 55 Divorce, 197, 229 Dodd, Rev. William, 160, 161, 168, 169, 235 Dolben Act, 105 Domestic service, 90 Dommergues, André, 107, 119 Donald, Diana, 159, 167, 168 Douglas, Mary, 108, 119, 138, 166 Draper, Daniel, 204 Drescher, Seymour, 73, 80, 109, 112, 113, 226, 227 Drury Lane, 18, 107 Dryden, John, 197 Duchess of Buccleuch, 29 Duchess of Devonshire, 207 Duchess of Gloucester, 32, 208 Duchess of Montagu, 136 Duchess of Queensbury, 125, 126, 202, 215, 235 Duke of Buccleuch, 29 Duke of Marlborough, 199 Duke of Montagu, 2, 3, 17, 27, 123, 162, 199, 201 Dyson, Jeremiah, 126, 172

E East India Company, 205, 206, 220, 221 East Indies, 213, 236 Edwards, Paul, 13, 14, 29, 42, 118, 163–165, 224, 225 Elections, 3, 125, 142, 173, 174, 210, 211, 228 Ellis, Markman, 8, 14, 20, 43, 68, 163, 228 English Civil War, 57, 233 Enlightenment, 34, 51, 55 Equiano, Olaudah, 15, 31, 136, 137, 141, 143, 155, 159, 166, 168, 212, 247, 248, 253

258

INDEX

Estwick, Samuel, 11, 93–99, 105, 115–117, 125, 127, 133, 143, 156, 203, 204 Eton, 88, 93 European Magazine, 231, 234, 236, 251 Evangelicalism, 10, 106, 236 F Feminism. See Women Fiering, Norman, 33, 47 Finance, 82, 204 Fisher, Jabez, 169, 212, 213, 228, 252 Floyd, George, 2, 109 Foote, Samuel, 129, 160 Fops, 60 Fourmantel, Catherine, 18, 55, 69 Fox, Charles James, 3, 12, 32, 197, 198, 207 Foy, Charles R., 155, 168 France, 25, 35, 37, 44, 154, 178, 188 Franklin, Benjamin, 80–82, 84, 89, 95, 96, 201, 219 Friendship, 91, 93, 118, 129, 132, 150, 191, 196, 202, 207, 210, 214, 215, 223, 232, 233, 249 Fryer, Peter, 7, 14, 54, 71, 86, 90, 100, 106, 109, 114, 117, 118, 168, 227 Fuller, Thomas, 203, 244 G Gainsborough, Thomas, 27, 28, 129, 139, 207, 225, 235 Garrick, David, 11, 18, 19, 27, 31, 42, 102, 124, 126, 129, 149, 161, 164, 197, 202, 236, 238 Gay, John, 103 General Advertizer, 155, 157, 171–173, 180, 192

Gentleman’s Magazine, 68, 103, 118, 123, 136, 161, 169, 195, 196, 205, 212, 232, 234 George I, 74 George II, 177, 183 George III, 27, 31, 32, 160 George IV. See Prince of Wales Georgia, 100, 109, 141, 166 Gibraltar, 121 Godwyn, Rev. Morgan, 59, 70, 115 Good Samaritan, 213 Gordon, Lord George, 173 Gordon Riots, 11, 171, 174, 178, 182, 185, 192, 234 Gordon, Sir William, 197 Gray’s Inn, 83 Greenwich, 26, 139, 191, 198, 199 Griffiths, Ralph, 40, 41, 48, 121–124, 162, 163, 193, 236, 237, 250 Grimsted, David, 98, 116 Groniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw, 143 Guadeloupe, 203 Guerzina, Gretchen H., 69, 106, 119, 163, 229 Guinea, 2, 161, 172, 176, 184, 203, 213, 221, 224, 243, 244 Guyatt, Mary, 7, 14 Gynaecology, 142

H Habeus corpus , 74, 83, 86 Hairdressing, 28, 159 Hall-Stevenson, John, 24, 63, 65, 126 Hammond, James, 95 Hanley, Ryan, 6, 14, 15, 69, 118, 164, 165, 237, 253 Hanover Square, 160 Hargrave, Francis, 74–77, 83, 85, 86, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 109, 112, 124

INDEX

Hastings, Warren, 204, 221 Hawkesworth, John, 139 Hawkins, John, 136, 163 Hellfire Club, 63 Herodotus, 135 High Church, 21 Hobbes, Thomas, 21, 22, 34, 43, 44, 92 Hogarth, William, 135, 136, 153, 167 Homer, 150 Horse racing, 208 Howard, John, 81, 184 Howes, Alan B., 24, 35, 42–44, 47, 48, 249, 251, 253 Hume, David, 56, 75, 98, 99, 111, 117, 203, 204, 246 Hutcheson, Rev. Francis, 20, 34, 57, 65, 98, 99, 117 Hutchinson, Thomas, 47, 78, 98, 112 Hyam, Ronald, 245, 252 I Illness, 188, 190 India, 11, 137, 178, 184, 188, 204–207, 212, 213, 215, 216, 219, 222 Indigenous people, 2 Inns of Court, 182 Ireland, 121, 139, 156, 188 J Jackman, Isaac, 106, 119 Jacobitism, 178 Jacob, Margaret C., 23, 44, 119, 164, 171, 172 Jamaica, 27, 39, 45, 53, 54, 74, 76, 83, 87, 88, 91, 99, 104, 121, 125, 140, 188, 204 Jefferson, Thomas, 33, 34, 47, 59, 70, 96, 249, 253

259

Jekyll, John, 2, 12, 18, 26, 165, 197 Jenkinson, Charles, 173 Jews, 107, 154, 201, 220 Jim Crow, 142 Jockey Club, 208 Johnson, Samuel, 226 K Kauffman, 207 Kenya, 11, 144 Kikuyu, 144 Knight, Joseph, 80, 198 Knowles, John, 74, 109 Ku Klux Klan, 142 L Labat, Jean Baptiste, 203 Langdale, Thomas, 179 Latitudinarianism, 10, 20 Law, 29, 76, 77, 80, 83, 96, 98, 99, 151, 152, 166, 178, 179 Legge, Ann, 29 Lennox, Lady Caroline, 197 Lennox, Lady Sarah, 197, 208 Levecq, Christine, 10, 14, 31, 44, 46, 47, 72, 228 Lewis, Thomas, 74 Ligon, Richard, 56, 69 Linco, 11, 133, 144–153, 164, 167, 171, 237 Lincoln, Charles, 137, 188–190, 194, 215 Lindsay, Sir John, 54 Literacy, 9, 10, 233 Locke, John, 57, 98 London, 11, 17, 18, 29, 54, 60, 74, 79, 83, 87, 93, 101, 113–115, 124, 126, 136, 139, 155, 161, 171, 178, 181, 189, 201, 208, 213, 238, 245 Long, Edward, 11, 13, 82, 108, 119

260

INDEX

History of Jamaica, 13, 87, 114, 119, 148 Lord Mayor of London, 90 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 66 Lyttleton, George, 238 M Macaroni, 60, 126 Mackenzie, Henry, 56, 69, 239 Mansfield decision, 82, 85, 86, 91, 92, 94, 96, 100, 103, 110, 112, 130, 133, 134, 138, 198 Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice, 11, 54. See also Mansfield decision and Belle Dido, 54 Marlow, John, 74 Marriage, 38, 58, 100, 101, 106, 116, 135–138, 147, 150, 201, 233, 234, 251 Martin, David, 54 Masculinity, 132 Maunselle, Dorothea, 139 Mediterranean, 188 Meheux, John, 11, 19, 131–134, 139, 146, 149, 150, 152–154, 159, 162, 164, 167, 212, 215, 226, 228, 229, 233, 235, 237 Middle passage, 81, 248 Middleton, Lady Margaret, 10, 11, 160 Midgley, Clare, 7, 9, 14, 70 Milton, John, 204, 224 Molineux, Catherine, 13, 46, 54, 136, 165 Monarchy, 74, 84, 158, 174 Montagu, Lady Elizabeth, 20, 57 Montesquieu, 56, 69, 75, 96, 98, 111, 116 Monthly Review, 123, 235, 249, 252 Moors, 41, 56, 57, 66 Moral capital, 1 More, Hannah, 12, 92, 114

Morning Chronicle, 79, 101, 118, 132, 133, 164, 167, 248, 253 Morning Post , 102, 154, 159 Mortimer, John Hamilton, 27, 165, 202, 203, 235 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 65 Mulattoes, 85, 105, 108, 141 Murray, Lady Elizabeth, 54 Music, 3, 28, 29, 33, 46, 63, 133, 172, 202, 210, 215, 235

N Nabobs, 184, 205, 206, 216, 219, 223 Nadelhaft, Jerome, 78 National character, 74, 82, 98 New Review, A, 231, 251 New York, 182 North, Catherine Anne, 29 North, Frederick, 29 Nussbaum, Felicity A., 15, 31, 46, 48, 69, 103, 106–108, 118, 119, 137, 144, 163, 164, 167

O Obama, Barack, 142 Oldfield, J.R., 7, 9, 14, 15, 30, 46, 107, 118, 119 Oldham, James, 78, 80, 103, 112, 113 Olusoga, David, 74, 78, 109, 110, 112 Osborne, Anne, 3, 29, 201 Osborne, John, 183, 186, 208

P Parker, William, 102 Parliament, 1, 9, 27, 84, 89, 94, 96, 98, 106, 113, 138, 175, 179,

INDEX

197, 206, 207, 210, 212, 220, 228, 229, 243, 248 Passarello, Elena, 64, 71 Peckard, Rev. Peter, 7, 11, 68, 169, 240–246, 248, 249, 252, 253 Percy, Hugh, 210 Philips, John, 196 Pitt the Elder, William, 177 Pitt the Younger, William, 178, 198 Planters, 74, 82–84, 90, 91, 93, 95, 101, 105, 115 Pocock, J.G.A., 48, 76, 111 Politeness, 25, 215, 237 Pope, Alexander, 57, 152, 184, 185, 193, 200, 232, 249 Pornography, 23, 24, 126, 128, 164 Porteus, Bishop Beilby, 160, 169 Portraiture, 27, 28, 32, 54, 112, 136, 198, 207, 225, 227 Prince of Wales, 31, 32, 126, 189, 192, 196, 198, 201, 207 ‘Pro Bono Publico’, 11, 133–141, 143–147, 149–154, 159, 164, 165, 167, 202, 248 Protestant Association of London, 173 Protestantism, 10 Puritanism, 21 Q Quakerism, 29, 52, 59, 60, 80, 203, 212, 213 Quebec, 73, 183 R Rabelais, 162 Race, 25, 33, 55, 88, 96, 97, 100, 126, 187, 203, 213, 231, 232, 242, 249 Racism, 2, 8, 11, 58, 100, 103, 116, 129, 151, 200, 234, 248

261

‘scientific racism’, 98 Ramsay, Rev. James, 11, 92, 95, 101, 115, 160, 207, 221, 227 Religion, 8, 32, 43, 99, 160, 172, 173, 185, 190, 215, 221, 237, 244 Republicanism, 39, 74, 156 Rewt, Polly, 14, 29, 42, 224, 225 Reynolds, Joshua, 136, 196, 203, 207, 224, 227 Richardson, Samuel, 68 Pamela, 18, 54, 68 Robbins, Caroline, 48, 76, 111 Rodney, Sir George, 186 Ross, Ian Campbell, 40, 42, 43, 49 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 31, 115, 206 Rowlandson, Thomas, 23, 44 Royal Academy, 196 Royal Africa Company, 3, 96, 161 Royal Navy, 155, 157 Rudé, George, 174, 192 Rush, Benjamin, 81 Rush, Roger, 162, 196, 208, 224

S Sackville, George, 173 Sancho, Anne. See Osborne, Anne Sancho, Ignatius Africanus, 8, 11, 102, 154, 157, 159, 162, 171, 192, 200, 212, 241 and Mansfield decision, 2, 125 and money, 61 and Sterne, 3, 8, 10, 153, 228, 238, 251 birth, 248 brought to London, 2 butler to Duchess of Montagu, 158 children, 29, 232 death, 3, 18, 195 decline, 11, 178

262

INDEX

grocer, 45, 202 Letters , 1, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 18, 26, 29, 32, 33, 40, 42, 45, 48, 67, 70, 102–104, 118, 119, 130, 136, 163–165, 167–169, 174, 175, 178, 193–195, 203, 207, 210, 213, 214, 224–227, 229, 231, 235–237, 240, 244, 249, 251 love of theatre, 107, 201 marriage to Anne Osborne, 3 music, 28, 29, 202, 210 on stage, 103 sexuality of, 8 valet to Duke of Montagu, 3, 162 voice, 245 voter, 40, 212 Sancho, Kitty, 208 Sandhu, S.S., 8, 15, 43, 107, 119, 229 Savile, Sir George, 173 Schaw, Janet, 24, 44, 209 Science, 117, 166 Scott, Sarah, 39, 48, 51, 64, 67, 68, 95, 96, 159, 233, 251 History of Sir George Ellison, 51, 68, 233, 251 Senegal, 3 Sensibility, 1, 8–10, 12, 16, 19, 22, 23, 25, 33, 34, 40, 55, 60, 75, 79, 92, 94, 100, 108, 115, 124, 125, 137, 146, 153, 161, 179, 180, 183, 190, 191, 195, 196, 212, 214, 216, 219, 223, 232, 233, 237, 238, 242, 244, 250 culture of, 1, 8, 9, 19, 38, 92, 94, 108, 221 literature of, 22, 25, 33, 233 Seven Years’ War, 38, 59, 64, 73, 86 Sexuality, 8, 35, 73, 107, 127, 133, 137, 143, 150 and race, 8

Shaftesbury, Earl of, 20, 34, 57 Shakespeare, William, 18, 19, 27, 107, 138 Othello, 18, 27, 107, 138 Sharp, Granville, 74, 85, 91, 109, 155, 203, 206, 247, 252 Shelburne, Earl of, 175 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 129 Sincerity, 61 Slavery and violence, 92 escape from, 74 in England, 77, 78, 85 inhumanity of, 75 Slave trade, 1, 2, 9, 10, 33, 64, 65, 74, 82, 84, 85, 89, 96, 101, 105, 106, 113, 127, 137, 157, 161, 178, 198, 205, 207, 219, 221, 226, 240, 243, 244, 247, 248 Slave Trade Act 1807, 1 Sloane, Hans, 140, 141, 166 Smeathman, Henry, 81, 113 Smith, Adam, 21, 43, 52, 56, 59, 117, 155, 168, 221 on sympathy, 22, 52, 55 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 56, 205 Somerset, James, 11, 73, 74, 76, 78–80, 82, 85, 91, 100, 111, 112, 121, 126, 133, 154, 157, 178, 198, 206, 242 Soubise, Julius, 107, 119, 125–131, 134, 136, 137, 147, 164, 185, 188, 193, 202, 215, 222 Southerne, Thomas, 18, 106, 123, 161, 165, 239 Spain, 25, 26 Spectator,The, 14, 56, 69, 218 Spink, John, 19, 174, 211, 228 Spithead Mutiny, 156 Starlings, 8, 62, 64–67, 71, 72, 250 Sterne, Lawrence

INDEX

and Sancho, 20 Memoir, 53, 162, 188, 234 on race, 8 Sentimental Journey, A, 23, 25, 26, 34, 35, 37, 43–45, 47, 49, 51, 58, 60–63, 71, 72, 113, 153, 236, 239, 250, 253 Sermons , 20, 32, 39, 42, 43, 46, 70, 122, 194 sexuality of, 35 Tristram Shandy, 9, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 34, 40, 42–45, 47–49, 51, 55, 63, 67, 69, 70, 153, 238, 249, 251 writings, 17, 250 Sterne Medalle, Lydia, 8, 123 Stern, Melissa, 142 Steuart, Charles, 73, 74, 76, 80, 82 Stevenson, William, 162 St. Giles, 64, 71, 83 St. Kitts, 125, 137, 188 Strong, Jonathan, 74 St. Vincent, 96 Sugar, 2, 56, 81, 90, 92, 93, 112, 115, 203, 221, 243 Suicide, 2, 199, 225, 234, 245 Sypher, Wylie, 9, 15, 68, 70, 169, 226 T Tacky’s Rebellion, 91 Tahiti, 139 Tea, 3, 135 Temple Bar, 93 Tenducci, Giusto Fernando, 139, 147, 149 Teston Circle, 10, 12, 160, 169, 207, 237, 239 Thicknesse, Phillip, 100, 101 Thistlewood, Thomas, 95, 204 Thomson, James, 25, 26, 65, 183, 210, 224

263

Thrale, Hester, 136 Till, Emmett, 142 Tillotson, John, 21, 23, 33 Tobacco, 2, 13, 221 Tobin, James, 95, 101, 105, 116, 117 Transportation Act 1717, 74 Treaty of Utrecht, 64 Trump, Donald J., 142

V Virgil, 87, 150, 197, 198, 203 Virginia, 73, 74, 117, 135, 141

W Walkin, Thomas, 74 Walpole, Sir Robert, 24 Walvin, James, 3, 9, 13, 81, 106, 113, 118, 126, 163–165, 168 Warburton, Bishop William, 40, 48, 56, 122, 205, 227 Washington, George, 182 Wedderburn, Alexander, 173, 175 Wedgwood, Josiah, 7 Wells, Ida B., 142, 166 Wesley, John, 43, 81 West Indies, 39, 40, 53, 59, 76, 85, 91, 96, 99, 148, 186–188, 198, 205, 207, 220, 221 Westminister, 79, 83, 88, 89, 123, 132, 157 Westminster, 3, 13, 31, 40, 60, 208, 210, 211 Wheatley, Nathaniel, 213 Wheatley, Phillis, 116, 123, 143, 171, 212, 213, 248 Whigs, 198, 207 Whitehall, 60 Wiecek, William H., 78 Wilberforce, William, 10, 101, 106, 160, 207, 221

264

INDEX

Wilkes, John, 83, 96, 97, 113, 116, 126 Williams, Francis, 3, 13, 27, 45 Wilson, Kathleen, 14, 15, 38, 46, 101, 115, 143, 167 Wilson, Woodrow, 142 Wingrave, Jack, 11, 118, 168, 184, 193, 204, 213, 218, 226, 237, 243 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 9, 15, 57, 58, 70, 159

Women, 1, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 21, 35, 36, 38, 55–57, 60, 87, 88, 97, 106, 107, 115, 116, 119, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141–144, 146–149, 151, 152, 156, 166, 175, 189, 201, 232, 233, 248, 250. See also Feminism Wordsworth, William, 66 Work, James, 20, 49 Wright, Josephine R.B., 13, 29, 42, 45, 46