John Candler and Thomas Clarkson: An Enduring Antislavery Friendship

Abstract

Notes and Documents JOHN CANDLER AND THOMAS CLARKSON: AN ENDURING ANTISLAVERY FRIENDSHIP By Joseph A. Borome* Among the abolitionists of Great Britain who labored for the emancipation of slaves and the advancement of freedmen, there were both major and minor figures. Foremost in the cast of major characters was Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846). From the time of his decision as a student at Cambridge in 1785 to abandon a clerical career and devote his Ufe to the antislavery cause, Clarkson gave it his utmost energy. Having been introduced to the Hterature of the field when he read the works of Anthony Benezet and others while preparing an undergraduate essay in Latin on the subject, "Is it right to make slaves of others against their wiU?", he went on to become, for his day, the greatest European authority on the subject. Only in his very last years did he share that honor with Victor Schoelcher (1804-1893), the great French abolitionist. Clarkson's essay, which won the Cambridge prize of 1785, was translated into English the following year. It feU into the hands of Granville Sharp and others, stirring them to coUective action that brought the end of the British slave trade in 1808, of slavery in 1834, and of the apprenticeship of the ex-slaves in 1838. Clarkson's constant, unrelenting endeavors were faithfully supported by other equally concerned individuals whose work was no less vital to the eventual success of the crusade against human bondage. Most of them earned far less publicity—George Thompson was a notable exception—and were, indeed, content to press forward in quiet. Owing partly to their unobstrusive personalities (no reflection is here intended on Clarkson) and also to the failure to preserve their private papers intact that may be in part ascribed to their own modest estimates of their endeavors, they have, until recently, been almost entirely forgotten, no matter what note they may have enjoyed in their Hfetime. Present-day reconsiderations of the antislavery movement by historians like Christine Bolt, A. Duncan Rice, and Howard Temperley will doubtless stir interest in the influence *Professor of History, City College, New Yoik. 35 36QUAKER HISTORY of the minor souls, among whom there were many Quakers.1 High on that Quaker roster is John Candler. Bom in Great Bardfield, Essex, on 10 April 1787, Candler was apprenticed at the age of thirteen to a Quaker Unen draper of Ipswich , which ended his formal education. Once he had acquired sufficient working experience and progressed through self-study, he removed to Chelmsford, where he opened a drapery shop with a partner. In time Candler accumulated sufficient money to guarantee a comfortable income. He retired from business and devoted himself to reform movements of which none absorbed more attention than that for the aboHtion of slavery everywhere in the Western Hemisphere and for the betterment of the freed Negro. His first efforts put him in contact with Thomas Clarkson, who, in 1823, asked Candler to gather signatures for the Chelmsford petition against slavery, one of some six hundred petitions with which the Antislavery Society (founded in 1823) deluged ParUament in February, 1824.2 In 1839, with his wife Maria, Candler sailed on the first of four voyages to the Americas. He visited Jamaica, considered the touchstone of the freedmen's situation, to examine the effects of the emancipation act of 1838. Arriving on 16 December 1839, after 1.Some studies, for the American side, deserve mention. Otelia Cromwell has set the record straight in her Lucretia Mott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), while James A Rawley, "Joseph John Gurney's Mission to America, 1837-1840," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49 (March 1963), 653-674, admirably supplements the long overdue attention paid to Gurney in David E Swift's Joseph John Gurney: Banker, Reformer, and Quaker (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962). A Sidelight on Anglo-American Relations, 1839-1858, Furnished by the Correspondence of Lewis Tappan and Others with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, ed. A. H. Abel and F. J. Klingberg (Lancaster, Pa. : Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1927), p. 48, points up the neglect of several important British characters in...