Thomas Clarkson: A Prize Essay, a Chest of Shackles and 35,000 Miles

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Thomas Clarkson was born in 1760 in Wisbech, England, the son of a Church of England clergyman, and was ordained a deacon in 1783 after Cambridge. In 1785 he entered a Latin essay contest asking whether it is lawful to make slaves of others against their will, researched it through Quaker pamphlets, accounts of Africa and interviews with people in the trade, and won. Riding home, he dismounted at Wades Mill and resolved to act. In May 1787 he helped form the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, nine Quakers and three Anglicans, and recruited William Wilberforce as its voice in Parliament, since the Test Act barred Quakers from sitting there. Clarkson became the field investigator, riding about 35,000 miles and interviewing some 20,000 sailors in ports such as Bristol and Liverpool.

In Liverpool in 1787 a paid gang nearly threw him off a pier to drown. He gathered shackles, branding irons and thumbscrews in a wooden chest, added ivory, textiles and spices from the African trading ship Lively to show a humane trade was possible, and in 1791 helped publish the Brooks slave ship diagram. Wilberforce's first abolition bill failed 163 to 88 in 1791, and war with France stalled the cause. Clarkson collapsed in 1794 and spent a decade in the Lake District, marrying Catherine Buck and befriending William and Dorothy Wordsworth. He returned in 1804; the Slave Trade Act passed in 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. He died in September 1846.

• He persuaded ship surgeons Alexander Falconbridge and James Arnold to publish what they had seen on the Middle Passage.
• The Brooks diagram showed captives packed at 2.3 people per ton of the ship's burden.
• He helped Olaudah Equiano promote his memoir and arrange speaking tours.
• He lobbied in Paris in 1814 and at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818 for an international ban.
• In 2025 Harvard researchers found that his supposed replica of the Magna Carta was a genuine original manuscript.