'My Voice is sold, & I must be a Slave': Abolition Rhetoric, British Liberty and the Yorkshire Elections of 1806 and 1807

Fig. 1.

'The Cloth Dresser', from George Walker, The Costume of Yorkshire: illustrated by a series of forty engravings, being facsimiles of original drawings, London, 1814.

Fig. 2.

Harewood House from the South West by J. M. W. Turner, 1797. Watercolour.

The white Man's Lamentation Or The Horror of the Middle Passage.

Supposed to be written by Mr. Lascelles on the 8^th Day of the Election

How oft the Sons of Africa intomb'dIn the deep Vessel without Light, or AirHave for three long & dreary Months been doom'dTo taste the bitter cup of fell Despair.

Alas! that bitter cup is now my Lot,My Fathers Sins now visited on me:From fear & Scorn & Taunts our Wealth ill gotI'd freely give to be again set free.

The Wish is vain – for should I win the day –In Wilberforce's Wake ride thro' the Wave –Still my hard Father's Treasures to repay      My Voice is sold, & I must be a Slave.¹

This hand-written poem lies in a collection of election pamphlets, handbills and squibs² held until recently at Harewood House, Yorkshire, the one-time home of Henry Lascelles (1767–1841), whose 'lamentation' on the moral and political costs of his father's West Indian fortune it purports to be. No doubt penned by Lascelles's opponents,³ it is but one example of the massive output of (often scurrilous) print produced during one of the most dramatic election races run in Britain before the Reform Act of 1832.⁴ Both geographically and numerically, Yorkshire was the largest English constituency of its day; a county with a strong tradition of political independence and an unusually wide franchise which included many small-scale freeholders. The prestige of securing one of the two seats which represented 'proud Yorkshire'⁵ in the House of Commons was widely acknowledged.⁶ In 1807 these two seats were being contested by three candidates: the Pittite Henry Lascelles,⁷ the Whig Charles Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Lord Milton, and William Wilberforce, who stood as an Independent.

The timing of the 1807 election (some two months after the bill abolishing the slave-trade had finally become law), Wilberforce's canonical identification with the cause of abolition, and the fact that Henry Lascelles was financed by his father's West Indian fortune all ensured that abolition would play a prominent part in the campaign. The question of Catholic emancipation was also widely canvassed. It was deeply implicated in the vexed relations between George III and his ministers, relations that were in part responsible for the election of 1807. Yet the most pertinent issue in deciding the result of the contests in Yorkshire was arguably a local one; the mechanization and industrialization of the wool industry. The debates over the wool industry were framed in the language of British liberty and, as such, they could be hitched to the rhetorical wagon of the campaign against the slave-trade with devastating political effect. The Yorkshire elections of 1806 and 1807, then, are a powerful example of how antislavery sentiment could be mobilized as a political tool beyond the issue of slave-trade abolition itself.

Images of slavery, and the broad-based antislavery sentiment amongst the Yorkshire electorate, could operate in complicated, ambiguous, and sometimes unexpected ways. In 'The white man's Lamentation' the iconic image of the middle passage is marshalled to convey the enslavement of one whose political voice has been bought with morally-tainted money. In a campaign so obsessed with definitions of liberty, it is Lascelles himself who has become a slave. His social status within the (Yorkshire) community is undermined by 'Scorn & Taunts' about his family's West Indian origins and 'ill got' wealth. Lascelles's links to the West Indian slave-economies, when coupled with his views on the wool industry and his treatment of Yorkshire working men, could be used by his opponents to...