How antislavery outrage finally found a voice

In his day, Edward Colston was a model of English philanthropy. A hugely wealthy man, he gave a large proportion of his income to the needy. In the 18th century, schools, churches, poorhouses, community groups, and hospitals all benefited from his generosity. "Every helpless widow is my wife and her distressed orphans my children," he liked to boast. The relief he gave to some groups, however, was earned at the expense of others. Colston was a slave trader.

Dig into the history of slavery and one finds a mother lode of hypocrisy. The Church of England owned a huge sugar plantation in the West Indies, on which hundreds of slaves were worked to their death. John Locke, whose ideas on liberty inspired the 18th-century revolutions, owned sizable shares in a slave company. After the French Revolution, traders re-named their slave ships Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. Below deck, blacks were packed like sardines.

Hypocrisy is easy if profits are high. A more perfect arrangement could hardly be imagined: Manufactured goods were taken to Africa, slaves were then taken to the West Indies, and sugar or rum was then transported back to England.

The world's most barbaric industry was embedded into the culture of the most civilized nation on earth. Those who did not benefit directly from the trade were still deeply involved in it. The great majority of slaves ended up on sugar plantations, and the British had an insatiable sweet tooth. A cup of coffee, a bar of chocolate, a tot of rum, all bolstered the slave trade. Reinforcing the edifice was the assumption that blacks were not actually humans, or that they benefited when whites meddled in their lives.

Attacking the industry was like trying to move Mount Everest with a pickax. But in 1787, unease jelled into the first organized antislavery movement. Twelve men met in a print shop in London. They included Thomas Clarkson, a brilliant young classics scholar; Olaudah Equiano, an entrepreneurial former slave who had managed to buy his freedom; Granville Sharp, an eccentric musician; and James Stephen, a London dandy who first went to the West Indies to escape an entangled love life, but was converted to the cause because of the horrors he witnessed. The only thing these men had in common was their opposition to the slave trade, yet that was enough to cement a formidable union.

In the process, they developed many of the techniques of activism familiar today. They organized a boycott, long before the word itself had been invented. They printed leaflets, distributed lapel badges, perfected the art of lobbying, designed eye-catching posters, and engaged in what we now call direct marketing.

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