The Cost of Discipleship 16: Wesley: Social Classes and Slavery.

Nineteenth Century England was organized around social classes. Distinctions between people and the privileges of class were at their peak. For example, the oppression of Ireland, particularly the dispossession of the Irish from the land to create estates for the nobility contributed to the migration of the Irish to the colonies and the United States. The Great Famine of 1845-1852 increased that misery. 

 Even in England, the lower classes were abused. The enclosure of the commons (public land where small farmers had pastured their sheep and cattle) and the dispossession of small landowners and tenant farmers from their land had been going on for several centuries. A survey in 1873 showed that “80 per cent of the land was in the hands of fewer than 7000 proprietors” (“The Decline of the Small Landowner in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England: Some Regional Considerations,” J. V. Beckett, The Agricultural History Review, https://www.bahs.org.uk › AGHR › ARTICLES). Those landowners were the gentry, nobles with estates and attached tenant farmers as well as a manor full of servants and slaves.

 The result was that small landowners and tenant farmers were flocking to the cities to find work. Life was still miserable as laborers eked out a life working, not ‘9 to 5’ with weekends off but rather 12 or more hours per day for 6 days of the week. Laborers included children. Here is a short quote from the investigation of the Sadler Commission in Parliament concerning working conditions in 1832.

–”You say you would prefer moderate labour and lower wages; are you pretty comfortable upon your present wages?” 

–”I have no wages, but two days a week at present; but when I am working at some jobs we can make a little, and at others we do very poorly.”

–”When a child gets a week, does that go much towards its subsistence?”

 --No, it will not keep it as it should do.”

–”When they got 6s. or 7s. when they were pieceners, if they reduced the hours of labor, would they not get less?”

–”They would get a halfpenny a day less, but I would rather have less wages and less work.”

–”Do you receive any parish assistance?” 

–”No.”

–”Why do you allow your children to go to work at those places where they are ill-treated or overworked?”

–”Necessity compels a man that has children to let them work.”

–”Then you would not allow your children to go to those factories under the present system, if it was not from necessity?”

–”No.”                             (“The Life of the Industrial Worker in Nineteenth-Century England,” https://webs.wofford.edu › racinepn › Sadler.pdf).

 Read the rest of it, it gets worse. This is just a hint of the conditions of the miners and laborers that Wesley encountered in his field preaching. He gathered the converts together in small groups for discipleship. In his own discipleship journey, he felt compelled to find ways to provide food, shelter, health care, and education for people trapped in the lower classes of English society. Notice in the interview that the man said he received no parish help. That is probably because he could not attend church since he did not own a pew, and the church felt no obligation to help those outside the congregation. 

 Meanwhile, overseas, the British Empire sought every way to turn a profit from their mastery of the seas to their violent confiscation of other people’s land. In addition, they sought the cheapest labor they could find. Perhaps you have heard of the Triangular Trade or the Transatlantic Trade Route of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries? 

 England was manufacturing products, particular cloth, in volumes beyond the needs of the English people. At the same time, England was trying to make the colonies more profitable by confiscating land for great plantations to grow sugar cane to meet the newly acquired sweet tooth of the English upper class. In addition, there were tobacco plantations and cotton plantations.

 It was quite profitable, then, to send English ships bearing cotton cloth and rum to West Africa to pick up African slaves for the Atlantic crossing, often called ‘the Middle Passage’. Those slaves were off-loaded in the West Indies or the United States, then the ships picked up the raw materials of cotton, molasses, and tobacco. There were many off-shoots to this trade. 

 In England, most church-going Christians thought nothing was wrong with the trade in human cargoes. However, evangelicals like John Newton, William Wilberforce, and John Wesley campaigned to bring the slave trade down. Newton had been a slave ship captain, but later became an Anglican priest. Newton wrote “Amazing Grace” which begins: “Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!” Newton knew precisely what he was talking about given his former occupation.

 William Wilberforce used his seat in Parliament to advocate for an end to the trade. The work consumed his whole lifetime, even though he was in ill health John Newton had been Wilberforce’s pastor and John Wesley was his spiritual counsellor.

 The last letter that John Wesley ever sent was written to William Wilberforce. Here is the text of the letter: 

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February 4, 1791

Dear Sir: 

 Unless the divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum (against the world), I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be fore you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it. 

 Reading this morning a tract wrote by a poor African, I was particularly struck by that circumstance that a man who has a black skin, being wronged or outraged by a white man, can have no redress; it being a "law" in our colonies that the oath of a black against a white goes for nothing. What villainy is this? 

 That he who has guided you from youth up may continue to strengthen you in this and all things, is the prayer of, dear sir, 

Your affectionate servant, 

John Wesley

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John Wesley died a month later on March 2nd, 1791.

 Wilberforce, Newton, and others continued the fight. Then, Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act on March 25th, 1807. John Newton died the same year, on December 21st, 1807.

 That act prohibited the slave trade in British ships, but it did not abolish slavery in the British Empire. Then, finally, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act. That act cleared Parliament on July 22nd, 1833. William Wilberforce died one week later on July 29th, 1833. I tear up every time I think of it. 

 These disciples of Christ spent a lifetime advocating for the poor and the oppressed. They believed what Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4: 18-19). 

 The blind who could not see were the so-called Christians in the English upper class, as well as the majority of Parliament and the traders and plantation owners in the British Empire. A few recovered their sight. 

 Former slave ship captain John Newton noted in his old age that although now he was actually blind, he was able to see what God had revealed to him. Are we blind to the evils of our society, or can we see?