Page 6 - Moravian Messenger August 2019

James Montgomery’s Following a long campaign by The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the unstinting efforts of William Wilberforce, the Member of Parliament for Yorkshire, an Act prohibiting the slave trade within the
British Empire was passed into law in 1807. Note that this Act did not prohibit slavery within the British Empire, but solely the trading in slaves. Prohibition did not come until 1833. It was the cruelty of removing Africans from their homeland and subjecting them to the dreadful Atlantic crossing that caught the conscience of these early reformers.
Following the 1807 Bill's enactment Robert Bowyer, a London printer specialising in the reproduction of prints, set out to produce a commemorative volume containing a series of prints and poems to celebrate this first stage of abolition. It seems unlikely that the publishing venture was inspired purely by commercial interests as Bowyer was a member of the Baptist Missionary Society and a founder of the French Evangelical Society.
One of the poets he approached was the Moravian James Montgomery (1771-1854). He is mainly remembered for some fine hymns of continuing popularity (Angels from the Realms of Glory, Songs of Praise the Angels sang, and many others) but his verse has been out of print since the 1880s. Today much of it seems stilted and forced although it does contain many pleasing lines and his religious and philanthropic thought invites admiration.
Montgomery was twice qualified for writing a contribution for Bowyer's volume. First, he already had some success with an earlier poem with a political message, The Wanderer in Switzerland, which told of Napoleonic intrigues against Switzerland. Secondly, he was an active abolitionist. Indeed, his feelings on the matter had given rise to strongly worded articles and editorials in the Sheffield newspaper of which he was editor. In respect of an article published on the Slave Trade in 1805 he wrote: The blood that cries for vengeance has not lost its voice! It boils around the heart, it burns through the veins, while the reader alternately trembles with anger and melts with compassion at the crimes and woes of his fellow creatures. Fellow creatures! The sufferer [i.e. the slave] is our brother; his lordly oppressor [i.e. the slave trader] denies consanguinity with the slave; be it so, for thereby he bastardises himself; the negro is surely related to all the rest of the human race.
The poem he produced for Bowyer's venture, The West Indies, runs to just over 1,000 lines in four parts telling the history of the West African slave trade and rehearsing the arguments which led to the 1807 Act.
The first part tells the story of the 'discovery' of the Antilles by Columbus and of the Spaniards, of whom he is relentlessly critical, who followed in his wake:
A rabid race, fanatically bold
And steel'd to cruelty by lust for gold.
Columbus finds the islands a place of great natural beauty inhabited by an indigenous people (the Caribs) living simply off the land:
A feeble race these beauteous isles possess'd; Untamed, untaught, in arts and arms unskilled
who were rapidly destroyed by the Spaniards:
They came, they saw, they conquer'd, they enslaved And they destroy'd; - the generous heart they broke, They crushed the timid neck beneath the yoke
The native Carib people thus became the first slaves in the West Indies:
Condemn'd in pestilential cells to pine, Delving for gold amidst the gloomy mine ... Down to the dust the Charib people pass'd, Like autumn foliage withering in the blast
The second part tells first of the sugar cane, also introduced by the Spaniards:
When the fierce spoiler from remorseless Spain Tasted the balmy spirit of the cane,
Dark through the thoughts the miser purpose roll'd To turn its hidden treasures into gold.
and the introduction of African slaves (also brought in by the Spaniards) as labour:
Thus on the Charib shore the tyrant stood, Thus cast his eyes with fury o'er the tide, And, far beyond the gloomy gulph, descried Devoted Africa: he burst away,
And with a yell of transport grasped his prey.
[Atlantic]
Now follows a panegyric of Africa and the African. Montgomery now makes his position clear that the Negro (nature's outcast child, scorn'd by his brethren) is as much part of the human family as anyone in Europe or Asia This reflects the message of the abolitionist movement whose watchword was the supplicant slave's cry: 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?':
Is he not man, though knowledge never shed Her quickening beams on his neglected head? Is he not man, though sweet religion's voice Ne'er made the mourner in his God rejoice? Is he not man, by sin and suffering tried?
Is he not man, for whom the Saviour died?
It is not just the Spaniard who now comes in for criticism for grasping the spoils of Africa but also Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, France and Britain herself:
- Britannia shared the glory and the guilt, -
By her were Slavery's island-altars built,
And fed with human victims; - while the cries Of blood demanding vengeance from the skies, Assailed her traders' grovelling hearts in vain,
- Hearts dead to sympathy, alive to gain, Hard from impunity, with avarice cold, Solid as earth, insensible as gold.
Part 3 deals in detail with the ideas behind 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?' First, the African is as fond of his own native place as a European. The poet paints a picture of a loving home, husband, wife and children who in turn will look after their own parents as they grow old, but all set in an African village:
And is the Negro outlaw'd from his birth?
Is he alone a stranger on the earth?
Is there no shed, whose peeping roof appears So lovely that it fills his eyes with tears?
No land, whose name in exile heard, will dart
....90
The abolitionists' emblem and motto