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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2019
William Wilberforce and his coterie of evangelical activists have regularly attracted research. Attention, however, has focused almost exclusively on the group's efforts in Britain, with little scholarly work to date on its connections and trajectories overseas. This article examines the influence of Clapham thought and activity in the early American republic. By tracing transatlantic correspondence and reconstructing international relationships, it unveils the direct influence of Clapham theological understandings, notably in their challenge to received interpretations of racial inequality and competing national virtues. Less directly, as Clapham principles shaped Britain's policing of the seas and became enacted in diplomatic decisions, British moralism created friction and resentment with the U.S. government. Although the threads of overt ideological influence by the Clapham Sect appear thin with respect to antislavery, more nuanced influences in terms of race, theology, and empire reveal profound contextual challenges. Yet, the factors limiting the Clapham Sect's impact are as instructive as the influences because they illuminate the contrasts across the Atlantic, which turn out in this case to be more important than the continuities. Transnational approaches to history have often erred by overlooking the transformation of religious and moral ideas across borders, leaving our understanding of transatlantic abolitionism theologically impoverished. By situating Britain's most famous abolitionist group in a wider context, this article exposes the neglected role of race and competing moralities in nineteenth-century international religious history, confounding notions of simple transference of ideas and intellectual continuity across the Atlantic.
While this article bears the name of one author, it is deeply indebted to the comments and criticisms of many, including James Bradley, Christopher Brown, Matthew Wyman-McCarthy, Samuel Bray, the warm community of the Baylor History Department faculty and graduate students, and the anonymous reviewer for this journal. I am grateful to each of them.
1 Harriet Beecher Stowe to Macaulay, T. B., 20 March 1852, quoted in the introduction to Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, new ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1878), xxiGoogle Scholar.
2 Sir James Stephen originally placed the Clapham members together in a single study in 1844: “The Clapham Sect,” Edinburgh Review 161 (1844): 251–307. Subsequent investigations, though, did not emphasize the collective dimension of the Clapham party until Ernest Howse, Marshall, Saints in Politics: The “Clapham Sect” and the Growth of Freedom (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953)Google Scholar.
3 Howse appreciatively contended that, despite factors such as the French Revolution and industrialization, which produced fierce support for established laws and institutions among Britain's upper/governing classes, the Claphamites—believing much of the former way of life itself to be in question—advocated for wholesale social reform: Saints in Politics, 4. From a more critical perspective, Ford Brown argued that amid these uncertain times, evangelicals led by Wilberforce sought to seize control of the government to ensure their values would be enforced on the nation: Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 1–11. Meanwhile, Boyd Hilton suggested that the moderate evangelicalism of the Clapham Sect, with its emphasis on the atonement, profoundly shaped ideas of social redemption and economic conduct in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 218–236. For other older treatments, see Spring, David, “The Clapham Sect: Some Social and Political Aspects,” Victorian Studies 5, no. 1 (September 1961): 35–48Google Scholar; Hennell, Michael M., John Venn and the Clapham Sect (London: Lutterworth, 1958)Google Scholar; M. G. James, “The Clapham Sect: Its History and Influence” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1950); and Warren Bryan Martin, “The ‘Saints’ of Clapham: Their Motivation and Their Work” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1954).
4 Beginning with Hilton, a prominent approach has been to examine the Clapham group in the context of economics and business. In a recent PhD thesis, Gareth Atkins utilizes prosopographical techniques to show that while ideas played an important role in the evangelical activity of the early nineteenth century, political and commercial adroitness provided the sinew for the Clapham movement, which drew its strength from a well-organized system of officialdom and patronage: “Wilberforce and His Milieux: The Worlds of Anglican Evangelicalism, c. 1780–1830” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2009). In another recent dissertation, Roshan Allpress employs the Clapham Sect as an extended case study to demonstrate the growth of philanthropy, principally owing to shifts in mercantile and religious networks—as distinct from changes in British imperial identity or political culture: “Making Philanthropists: Entrepreneurs, Evangelicals and the Growth of Philanthropy in the British World, 1756–1840” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2015). An equally significant trend is attention to family biography and kinship networks: Tolley, Christopher, Domestic Biography: The Legacy of Evangelicalism in Four Nineteenth-Century Families (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stott, Anne, Wilberforce: Family and Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kuper, Adam, Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Regarding the impact of Clapham writings, see John Wolffe, “William Wilberforce's Practical View (1797) and Its Reception,” in “Revival and Resurgence in Christian History,” ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, Studies in Church History 44 (2008): 175–184. Clapham figures have also been a common subject of biography, significantly: Hague, William, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London: Harper, 2007)Google Scholar; Stott, Anne, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Meacham, Standish, Henry Thornton of Clapham, 1760–1815 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Two short accounts that consider transatlantic links serve as the exceptions that prove the rule: Klein, Milton M., An Amazing Grace: John Thornton and the Clapham Sect (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2004)Google Scholar; and Weiss, Harry B., Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts in America (New York: New York Public Library, 1946)Google Scholar. Klein describes how John Thornton's philanthropy stretched across the Atlantic with the funding of Eleazar Wheelock's school for American Indian youths, which later became Dartmouth College. Thornton also developed a longstanding relationship with the Mohegan Rev. Samson Occom. And yet, Thornton's activities antedate the Clapham Sect, which formed around John Thornton's son Henry when Wilberforce and others began moving to Clapham in 1792.
6 The corpus is now vast, but some of the most significant are: Fladeland, Betty, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Cunliffe, Marcus, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Drescher, Seymour, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDaniel, W. Caleb, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Oldfield, J. R., Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-slavery, c.1787–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, 2014)Google Scholar; Gosse, Van, “‘As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends’: The Emergence of African American Politics in the British Atlantic World, 1772–1861,” American Historical Review 113, no. 4 (October 2008): 1003–1028CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Furstenberg, François, “Atlantic Slavery, Atlantic Freedom: George Washington, Slavery, and Transatlantic Abolitionist Networks,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (April 2011): 247–286CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 While abolition used to be the preserve of white humanitarians or the deterministic result of economic forces, Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause caps a historiographic school from C. L. R. James to Robin Blackburn and Ira Berlin that overturns this orthodoxy by revealing black agency in the fight to end slavery: Sinha, Manisha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; James, C. L. R., The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1963)Google Scholar; Blackburn, Robin, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988)Google Scholar; and Berlin, Ira, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Sinha, Slave's Cause, 104; and Oldfield, Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution, 197. No less significant—though beyond the purview of this essay—are the transnational networks that Wilberforce and company cultivated with European, especially French, activists: see Oldfield, Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution, 217.
9 John Wolffe commenced his contribution to InterVarsity Press's five-volume series on the history of evangelicalism by discussing the Claphamites’ social reform ventures: Wolffe, John, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2007)Google Scholar. David Bebbington locates the Clapham group in the context of the humanitarian impact of evangelicalism, contending that Wilberforce and his circle owed their theoretical outlook to enlightenment philosophic ideals—“benevolence, happiness, liberty”—but that their evangelical faith imparted the will to act: Bebbington, David, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989), 47Google Scholar. For other relevant accounts of transatlantic evangelicalism, see Carwardine, Richard J., Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978)Google Scholar; O'Brien, Susan, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (October 1986): 811–832CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yoon, Young Hwi, “The Spread of Antislavery Sentiment through Proslavery Tracts in the Transatlantic Evangelical Community, 1740s–1770s,” Church History 81, no. 2 (June 2012): 348–377CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wolffe, John, “Transatlantic Visitors and Evangelical Networks, 1829–61,” in “International Religious Networks,” ed. Gregory, Jeremy and McLeod, Hugh, Studies in Church History: Subsidia 14 (2012), 183–193CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the role of black actors in shaping Christianity in the Atlantic world, see Saillant, John, “Antiguan Methodism and Antislavery Activity: Anne and Elizabeth Hart in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic,” Church History 69, no. 1 (March 2000): 86–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sensbach, Jon F., Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
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11 Studies of the British Empire turn their gaze predominantly to India after the loss of the North American colonies—the heart of Britain's Atlantic empire—in the 1780s; foreign relations with the United States receive comparatively less, though not insignificant, attention. Notable exceptions to this “swing to the east” include Perkins, Bradford, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1795–1805 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perkins, Bradford, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Perkins, Bradford, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Ritcheson, Charles R., Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy toward the United States, 1783–1795 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; and Marshall, P. J., Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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17 Most prominently, Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 257–261, 271–294, 317–319; Rugemer, Edward Bartlett, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Oldfield, Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution, 2–3; Sinha, Slave's Cause, 103–105; Fladeland, Men and Brothers; Turley, David, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 190–217Google Scholar; and Mason, Matthew, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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19 James Monroe to Henry Brougham, 26 June 1804, listed in Preston, Daniel, A Comprehensive Catalogue of the Correspondence and Papers of James Monroe (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001), 1:159Google Scholar.
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34 Whipper, Eulogy on William Wilberforce, Esq., 11.
35 While scholars debate Clarkson's religious identity, his insistence on his unrighteousness and stockpiling all hope in the atonement place him squarely in the evangelical camp of the Claphamites. Against the charges of American slaveholders, Clarkson affirmed “more than ever … the doctrine of the Atonement or that the Death, or the Blood, or the Sacrifice of Christ does … procure us Salvation after Death, and that nothing else can procure it. It is clear that man of himself can do nothing to please God and if so what can he do to merit Heaven when his best efforts come through a corrupt medium”: Thomas Clarkson to “Richard,” 9 September 1846, Thomas Clarkson Papers, Box 4, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. Similarly, in Clarkson's deathbed confession: “All my works and righteousness are as filthy rags. I trust only in the Atonement, the sacrifice, the blood shed on the cross for washing away my sins and entrance into Heaven”: Lewis, Donald M., The Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography: 1730–1860 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 1:228–229Google Scholar.
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