When freedom was the "peculiar institution"

Adam Hochschild talks about how the abolitionist movement caught fire -- from the high seas to the kitchen pantry -- and changed the world forever.

By Priya Jain

Jan 19, 2005 | One of the great pleasures of reading history is being introduced to a new date, a day in the life of the past that helped shape who we are today. Adam Hochschild's new book, "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves," begins on May 22, 1787, when a dozen men met in a printing shop in London. They were trying to figure out how to persuade the rest of the country that slavery, a system that had been the norm for hundreds of years, was morally wrong. The meeting marked the beginning of British abolitionism, the first real human rights campaign and what would become the template for the activist movements that followed it. There was no precedent for what they set out to do, and yet, within 51 years, this group managed to eradicate slavery from the largest colonial empire in the world.

Hochschild chronicles the movement over that half-century, from the printing shop meeting to the eve of emancipation, when a group of slaves in Jamaica threw their shackles into a coffin and, quite literally, buried the chains. Between these events were spirited fights in Parliament and pamphleteering campaigns and lectures to edify the public. There was the first real mass boycott (excluding the Boston Tea Party), in which women employed in the domestic realm refused to buy slave-grown sugar, and fringe religious movements challenged the authority of the (slave-owning) Church of England. Add to this the waves of bloody slave revolts in the West Indies, and you begin to have a series of events of which Alexis de Tocqueville pronounced: "If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt you will find anything more extraordinary."

"Bury the Chains" starts by marveling at that extraordinariness and then setting to the task of uncovering the hows and whys of it, focusing the story on the key activists involved. But the process of abolition, Hochschild writes, was "a ragged and untidy epic," and his book reflects that untidiness. Teeming with anecdotes and incidents in several countries, filled with characters who pop up for a few paragraphs only to disappear from the story until years later, "Bury the Chains" isn't the smoothest read, but it is amazingly thorough. Rather than simply inform, Hochschild makes it his duty to impress upon the reader just how many people, ideas and tactics the abolition movement needed to be successful. It's a worthy reminder of the effort it takes to change the world.

Thankfully, the book is also entertaining. The characters are wonderfully weird, for abolitionists, almost by definition, were oddballs. Granville Sharp, for instance, who spent much of his activist life trying to create a Utopian society of ex-slaves in Sierra Leone, was a musician whose family played on a barge, serenading the country as they floated by. And there are enough tales of high seas adventures, dramatic courtroom arguments, and heart-rending descriptions of slave conditions to fill several novels.

Hochschild, a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine and a commentator for NPR, is no stranger to the history of race relations, or to liberal activism. He has written five previous books, including "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa." And in his memoir, "Half the Way Home," he recalls his troubled relationship with his father, the head of a multinational firm that owned mines in southern Africa. The importance of remembering is one of the strongest themes running through his books, and he makes a point in his work of restoring to us what has been forgotten. Hochschild talked to Salon by phone about some of those lost bits of our collective past.

Your previous books have been about apartheid, Stalin and colonial Africa. How did you come to write about the first abolition movement?

I got into it indirectly, because I first thought I was going to do a biography of John Newton. I've always been interested by people who change sides, and there's something so fascinating about the idea of this guy who had been a slave ship captain, who later became an abolitionist, who wrote this hymn ["Amazing Grace"] that's everybody's favorite hymn, and so forth. So, I started reading up on his life, and then I quickly discovered that Newton's life didn't fit the pattern I'd wanted it to have, so to speak, in that he didn't leave the slave trade out of conviction. He left it for medical reasons, and he never said a word about slavery for more than 30 years after that. And all this time he was becoming a minister and starting to write hymns, he had his savings invested with his former employer, a guy who owned all these slave ships. He never actually said a word about slavery until this great movement began, when someone I'd never heard of named Thomas Clarkson came to see him and said, You know, Reverend Newton, you have to say something. So then I began to wonder, who was this guy Thomas Clarkson? Maybe the movement was the story. So that's how I came into it backwards.

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