Abstract
This chapter shows how Sharp’s letter to the Admiralty came to be lost in the British Library by tracing its path through the libraries of two private collectors, the British Museum, and finally the British Library. It also advances several possible explanations for why the manuscript letter was inappropriately bound in a compiled volume of printed pamphlets and ends with a discussion of the other way in which the Zong case has remained hidden in text: historians have often misreported the facts of the case. The chapter then moves to consider the ramifications of the argument that Sharp’s interest in publishing on slavery did not end in 1777, as scholars have assumed. It also explores an alternative history for the Zong case and abolition by considering what would have happened if Sharp had been successful in publishing the British Library letter, and it advances possible reasons for why Sharp never followed through with his plans to publish the letter to the Admiralty.
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Notes
- 1.
Sandra Tuppen , e-mails to the author from the British Library, June 18, 29, July 1, 2015.
- 2.
Sylvanus Urban , “Dr. John Coakley Lettsom, M.D.,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, vol. 85, pt. 2, issue 114 (London: Nichols, Son, and Bentley, 1815), 469–73, 471, Google eBooks, accessed July 17, 2015, https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Gentleman_s_Magazine.html?id=oiM3AAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y.
- 3.
Seymour Drescher, “The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism,” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 4 (2012): 571–93, 575.
- 4.
Anon., “Help for Researchers,” British Library, accessed June 23, 2015, http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/catblhold/all/major/majorcats.html.
- 5.
Ian Baucom , Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 123.
- 6.
Charles Stuart , A Memoir of Granville Sharp (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836), 30–1, Google eBooks, accessed June 17, 2015, https://books.google.ca/books?id=eNxeks9xld4C.
- 7.
James Oldham , “Insurance Litigation Involving the Zong and Other British Slave Ships, 1780–1807,” Journal of Legal History 28, no. 3 (2007): 299–318, 318n; see also Dave Gunning , Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 46.
- 8.
Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley , Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1518–1865 (New York: Penguin, 1962), 126–7. See Shyllon and Weisbord on Mannix’s erroneous reportage of the Zong history (F. O. Shyllon , Black Slaves in Britain (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 192; Robert Weisbord , “The Case of the Slave-Ship Zong, 1783,” History Today 19, no. 8 (1969): 561–7, 564). Notably, Mannix does not appear to have obtained his incorrect information on the Zong case from Stuart’s early text, as he does not cite it in his work.
- 9.
Jane Webster , “The Zong in the Context of the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade,” Journal of Legal History 28, no. 3 (2007): 285–98, 298.
- 10.
E.g. James Walvin , The Zong: A Massacre, the Law & the End of Slavery (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 201–2. See page 22 for more on other slave-ship massacres.
- 11.
Lars Eckstein , Re-membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2006), 122.
- 12.
Shyllon , Black Slaves, 186.
- 13.
Weisbord , “Case,” 564.
- 14.
Please see the discussion of Mansfield’s abolitionist legacy beginning on page 32.
- 15.
Christopher Leslie Brown , Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 155.
- 16.
James Thomson , “Rule, Brittania!” The Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. W. M. Rossetti (London: Ward, Lock, & Co., 1880), 498–9, lines 7–11.
- 17.
Henry Home (Lord Kames) , Sketches of the History of Man Considerably Enlarged by the Last Additions and Corrections of the Author (1774, 1778), 3 vols., ed. and intro. James A. Harris (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), vol. 1, 344n, accessed August 30, 2017, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kames-sketches-of-the-history-of-man-vol-1.
- 18.
Quoted in James Oldham , The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), vol. 2, 1233; Oldham quotes William Blackstone ’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (William Blackstone , Commentaries on the Laws of England , 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1765–1769), vol. 1, 123). Oldham notes that it is uncertain who added the final phrase (1233).
- 19.
Anon., “British Transatlantic Slave Trade Records,” The National Archives , accessed August 4, 2017, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/researchguides/british-transatlantic-slave-trade-records/.
- 20.
Thomas Clarkson , The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament , 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), vol. 1, 423, Online Library of Liberty, accessed August 28, 2017, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/clarkson-the-history-of-the-abolition-of-the-african-slave-trade-vol-1.
- 21.
Webster , “Context,” 295.
- 22.
Drescher, “Shocking,” 576, 591.
- 23.
Webster , “Context,” 295.
- 24.
Granville Sharp, [BL document, Copy of a Letter to Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty ] “Paper by Glanville [sic] Sharp on the Case of 132 Murdered Negroes,” in Tracts 35 (Old Jewry, London, MS: n.p., July 2, 1783), 1.
- 25.
Srividhya Swaminathan , “Reporting Atrocities: A Comparison of the Zong and the Trial of Captain John Kimber ,” Slavery & Abolition 31, no. 4 (2010): 483–99, 484, 483.
- 26.
Swaminathan , “Atrocities,” 483.
- 27.
Swaminathan , “Atrocities,” 491.
- 28.
Brycchan Carey , British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 112–13.
- 29.
Carey , Sensibility, 98.
- 30.
Prince Hoare , Memoirs of Granville Sharp , Esq. Composed from His Own Manuscripts, and Other Authentic Documents in the Possession of His Family Authentic Documents in the Possession of His Family and of the African Institution (London: Henry Colburn, 1820), 100, Google eBooks, accessed June 25, 2015–August 30, 2017, https://books.google.ca/books?id=PrUEAAAAIAAJ; also in Shyllon , Black Slaves, 120.
- 31.
James Ramsay , An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London: James Phillips, 1784), 105.
- 32.
“Scrutator,” Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser , London, December 11, 1788 [links to letter from 6 March 1792], issue 6113, unpag., 17th–18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, accessed July 11, 2017. Brissot (the “de Warville” is commonly dropped) would become a leader of the Girondins in Revolutionary France and was guillotined.
- 33.
Anon., Diary or Woodfall’s Register, London, August 13, 1789, issue 118, unpag., Gale: 17th–18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, accessed June 16, 2017; Anon., Morning Chronicle, unpag.
- 34.
Hoare , Memoirs , 100; also in Shyllon, Black Slaves, 120.
- 35.
Brown , Moral, 1.
- 36.
W. O. Blake , The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade, Ancient and Modern (Columbus, OH: H. Miller, 1861), 169, 170.
- 37.
Brown , Moral, 426.
- 38.
Hoare , Memoirs , 118.
- 39.
J. Watt, “Ramsay , James (1733–1789),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), unpag., accessed August 28, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23086.
- 40.
Sharp, BL document, 15.
- 41.
Brown , Moral, 426.
- 42.
Brown , Moral, 160.
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Faubert, M. (2018). The Historical Significance of the British Library Document. In: Granville Sharp's Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92786-2_5
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