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Thomas Clarkson's Heterodox Anglican Christianity and Anti-Slavery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2024
Abstract
This article argues that Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), the founder of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade, was a heterodox Anglican. Suspected of ‘Unitarian opinions’ in his youth, his religious writings in old age, including neglected notes on his copy of the New Testament, display a deep commitment to critical study of the Bible and a broadly Arian view of Christ. Knowing that Clarkson was a life-long but heterodox member of the Church of England challenges the conventional focus on Quakers and Evangelicals in the study of religion and abolitionism.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2024
Footnotes
The author is very thankful for the helpful comments provided by Martin Fitzpatrick and this Journal’s peer reviewers, and also to the staff at the Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, where Clarkson's annotated New Testament is archived.
References
1 The scholarship on the relative roles of religion, social change, colonial revolts and economic interests in causing the abolition of the British slave trade is vast. For an introduction to the subject see Davis, David Brion, Inhuman bondage: the rise and fall of slavery in the new world, Oxford 2006, 231–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Palmer, William, ‘How ideology works: historians and the case of British abolitionism’, HJ lii (2009), 1039–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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11 Donald M. Lewis, The Blackwell dictionary of Evangelical biography: 1730–1860, Oxford 1995, i. 228–9. This work of reference notes that ‘it is difficult to identify him with certainty as an evangelical’, although his deathbed confession clearly fit the evangelical stereotype: ‘All my works and righteousness are as filthy as rags, I trust only in the Atonement, the sacrifice, the blood shed on the cross for washing away my sins and entrance to Heaven.’ This is possibly a mistake: I have not been able to locate the original source of this quotation, and the author of the article is now deceased.
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35 Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Latitudinarianism at the parting of the ways: a suggestion’, in Walsh, Haydon and Taylor, Church of England, 209–27.
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47 Michael Jirik claims that Clarkson attended the sermon, but the only evidence for this is ambiguous: ‘I knew that Dr. Peckard, in a sermon which I have mentioned, had pronounced warmly against’ slavery: Clarkson, History of abolition, i. 204–7; Jirik, ‘Beyond Clarkson’, 749.
48 Thomas Clarkson, Essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, 2nd edn, London 1788, pp. v–vi.
49 Idem, Essay on the doctrines and practice of the early Christians as they relate to war, London 1817, 4, 10, 20.
50 Idem, Essay on baptism, with some remarks on the doctrines of the Nicene Church, on which Puseyism is built, London 1843, pp. vi, 51.
51 Cited in Wilson, Clarkson, 94.
52 Clarkson, History of abolition, i. 228.
53 Ibid. i. 229–30.
54 Ibid. i. 207.
55 Katherine Plymley diary, entry for 23 July 1805, fos 11–12.
56 Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses: a biographical list of all known students, graduates and holders of office at the University of Cambridge, from the earliest times to 1900, Cambridge 1922–54Google Scholar, ii/2, 58.
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59 G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Antitrinitarianism and toleration in late eighteenth century British politics: the Unitarian petition of 1792’, this Journal xlii (1991), 46–8.
60 Unitarian Society (1791), 1–2.
61 Ditchfield, ‘Antitrinitarianism and toleration’, 48.
62 Theophilus Lindsey to John Rowe, 6 Mar. 1792, in The letters of Theophilus Lindsey (1723–1808), ed. G. M. Ditchfield, Woodbridge 2012, ii. 172.
63 Clark, English society, 1660–1832. Clark's causal connection between heterodoxy and political radicalism applies best to Anglicans, while both heterodox and orthodox Dissenters tended to support reform: Bradley, James E., Religion, Revolution and English radicalism: Nonconformity in eighteenth-century politics and society, Cambridge 1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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66 Cited in Wilson, Clarkson, 55.
67 Catherine Buck had a profound influence on Crabb Robinson, in part by introducing him to William Godwin's radical Enquiry concerning political justice and its influence on morals and happiness, London 1793. Godwin was a Rational Dissenter turned atheist, and future husband of Mary Wollstonecraft: Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, Boston 1869, i. 19–20.
68 Wilson, Clarkson, 95.
69 Ordained a priest in 1776, after long study of the Bible Garnham decided never again to subscribe to the orthodox articles of the Church, and resigned his curacies in 1789: John Disney, A short memoir of the Rev. Robert Edward Garnham, London 1814, 4.
70 Cited in Knight, Frida, University rebel: the life of William Frend, 1757–1841, London 1971, 98–101Google Scholar.
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72 Near the end of his life, Clarkson wrote that ‘I was introduced myself into the church by Baptism, and have continued in it to this hour’: Essay on baptism, p. viii.
73 Wilson, Clarkson, 97.
74 As a young man Coleridge for some time espoused Unitarianism, but returned to orthodoxy in later life: Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: the radical years, Oxford 1988, 85.
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78 Katherine Plymley diary, entry for 23 July 1805, fos 5–6.
79 Clarkson was probably participating in the Apostles’ Creed, which was less problematic for anti-Trinitarians than the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds. While Clarkson ‘appeared’ to participate in the parts of a service to which a Unitarian would have objected, it is possible that he participated as an Arian voicing some hardly noticeable modifications. In their modified liturgies, the Unitarian Theophilus Lindsey followed the influential early eighteenth-century Arian, Samuel Clarke, in placing a comma after ‘God’, to read ‘I believe in God, the Father almighty’ in the Apostles’ Creed. Similarly, Arians modified the orthodox Gloria Patri, ‘To the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’, to read ‘by/through the Son’ with reference to 1 Corinthians viii.6: Bryan D. Spinks, Liturgy in the age of reason: worship and sacraments in England and Scotland, 1662–c.1800, Farnham 2008; James Yates, A vindication of Unitarianism, 4th edn, London 1850, 379. The early eighteenth-century defender of orthodoxy, Charles Leslie, observed that anti-Trinitarians could be ‘the most subtle and hardest to be detected, of any of the Christian heretics’: cited in Roald N. Stromberg, Religious liberalism in eighteenth-century England, Oxford 1952, 36.
80 The quotations are the Evangelical Emma Corsbie Hardcastle's paraphrase of a letter by Catherine Clarkson in Memoir of Joseph Hardcastle, 49.
81 Clarkson, Essay on baptism, p. v.
82 Note dated 10 Oct. 1839 on page facing the first page of the Gospel of Matthew: Clarkson's New Testament.
83 Comments on John i.15, and Philippians ii.6–11: ibid.
84 Comment on Luke xviii.18–19: ibid.
85 Comment on Hebrews i: ibid.
86 Clarkson, Essay on baptism, 50.
87 Clarkson's New Testament, 211. He made a similar statement in Essay on baptism at p. 50.
88 Wiles, Archetypal heresy, 143–6, with John Taylor's A paraphrase with notes on the Epistle to the Romans cited at 143. See also Alan P. F. Sell, Christ and controversy: the person of Christ in nonconformist thought and ecclesial experience, 1600–2000, Eugene, Or 2011, 30, and Smith, Rational Dissenters in late eighteenth-century England, 88.
89 Arius himself had declared that Jesus was ‘God, but not true God’; the original controversy centred on whether Christ and God were of the same ‘essence’ or ‘substance’: Rubenstein, Richard E., When Jesus became God: the struggle to define Christianity during the last days of Rome, New York 1999, 79Google Scholar.
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91 See, for example, George Horne, Christ the object of religious adoration: and therefore, very God: a sermon preached before the University of Oxford, at St. Mary's, on Sunday, May 14, 1775, Oxford 1775. On the ‘High Church’ Horne, and the broader promotion of orthodox clergy under George iii, see Aston, Nigel, ‘Horne and hetrodoxy: the defence of Anglican beliefs in the late Enlightenment’, EHR cviii (1993), 895–919CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
92 David James, A short view of the tenets of Tritheists, Sabellians, Trinitarians, Arians, and Socinians; intended to assist plain Christians in forming a general idea of the principal opinions held on the Trinity, and of the difficulties attending them, and to promote candour and charity among those who differ in their apprehensions on that subject: the second edition, with improvements, and an appendix on the worship of Jesus Christ, London 1780, 86.
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95 Comment facing p. 94 (near the start of the Gospel of Luke), ibid.
96 Clarkson, Quakerism, ii.148.
97 Comment on the blank page facing p. 429: Clarkson's New Testament.
98 Clarkson, Portraiture of Quakerism, ii. 49–50.
99 Comment on John i.5 facing p. 153: Clarkson's New Testament.
100 Mulligan, Lotte, ‘Robert Boyle, “right reason”, and the meaning of metaphor’, Journal of the History of Ideas lv (1994), 235–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 243 for Boyle.
101 Robinson, Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence, ii. 119.
102 Thomas Clarkson, Researches antediluvian patriarchal and historical: concerning the way in which men first acquired their knowledge of God and religion, London 1836, 103–5, p. xiii.
103 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny memories of foreign lands, Boston 1854, i. 80.
104 Henry Crabb Robinson to William Wordsworth, 22 Apr. 1842 in Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence, ii. 230.
105 Wilson, Clarkson, 190.
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107 Clarkson, History of abolition, i. 216.
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109 R. K. Webb, ‘Rational piety’, in Haakonssen, Enlightenment and religion, 287–311; John R. Oldfield, ‘Chords of freedom’: commemoration, ritual and British transatlantic slavery, Manchester 2007, 33–55.
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