The Guardian confronts and apologizes for its role in the slave trade

[David Lockmiller]

New York Times – July 8, 2023

It is the kind of historical artifact that would be easy to miss: an old and fragile little book unearthed in the archives of the Derbyshire Record Office, in the East Midlands of England. The book, a commercial ledger from 1822, holds the names of enslavers who ran cotton plantations on islands along the coast of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

And on one of the browning pages, in elegant, handwritten script, someone has inked the name of the company buying that cotton: Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co. The Taylor in question was none other than John Edward Taylor, founder of The Manchester Guardian, now known simply as The Guardian, the most prominent progressive newspaper in Britain for more than two centuries.

For decades, Britons have focused with understandable pride on the pioneering role the country played in stamping out slavery, most notably when Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Almost entirely missing from conversations and curriculums, however, are the spectacular sums that poured into Britain through slavery for roughly 200 years.

[David Lockmiller]

There’s a house in St. Ann’s Square in the city, which is where Frederick Douglass lived in the 1840s and his freedom was bought by Northern England people, mainly Greater Manchester.

[D]uring the U.S. Civil War, a group of mill laborers gathered at a place called Free Trade Hall to draft a letter to President Abraham Lincoln, saying, in essence, we stand with you, even though the blockade imposed on goods from the Confederacy had caused mills in the city to shut down, inducing what became known here as the cotton famine.

The president was touched enough to write back:

“Under the circumstances,” he said, “I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.”

There is a statue of Lincoln in the middle of Manchester today, with words of the letter on a plaque on the pedestal.

Contrast this with the story of the Quarry Bank Mill owner, which opened in 1784 by an Irish immigrant, Samuel Greg. It was staffed largely by children who worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week, and were not paid, unless they put in overtime. Among the many disturbing displays here is a one-page inventory from Mr. Greg’s plantation in the West Indies, which itemizes 146 “Negroes” above a list of livestock, including mules, cows and oxen.

There appears to me to have been more than one kind of slavery at the time.