What was Belfast’s Role in Slavery?

That Belfast, and other Irish ports, such as Cork, Derry, Drogheda, Dublin, Galway, Newry and Waterford, did not establish slave-trafficking, in emulation of Liverpool or Bristol, is due to the existence of the Navigation Acts of 1663, 1670, 1685 and 1696 which were designed to create an English monopoly in the commerce of slavery and the transhipment of slaves.

Irish merchants, however, used a loophole in the act to profit from supplying the slave plantations in the Caribbean and America with exports in beef, pork, butter, wheat, flour, salted fish and linen.

Belfast enterprises hugely benefited from this trade. During the years 1773–1775, one quarter of all ships entering Bridgetown harbour, Barbados, laden with Irish produce, were from Belfast – or Belfast and Cork.

The slave plantations produced cane sugar which laid the foundation of a sugar-refining industry in Ireland. Exports to the slave plantations in the West Indies promoted industries such as rope-making, flour-milling, meat-packing and beef and fish-salting.

In 1783 there were 224 shoemakers in Belfast and by 1791 the number had increased by almost 40% - to 312. This very significant increase is largely explained by Belfast shoemakers targeting the West Indian market through the production of especially wide-fitting shoes to suit the feet of slaves.  Belfast also profited from the manufacture of low-priced linen products - in demand by a stabilising Caribbean population of white plantation owners and managers.

Ref: Rolston, B and Shannon, M (2002) Encounters – How Racism Came To Ireland. Colour Books Ltd. Dublin.

Belfast Traders and Slavery

Merchants in Ireland, Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic, particularly in the large towns and cities of Belfast, Derry, Newry, Drogheda, Waterford, Galway and Dublin profited from provisioning of the slave plantations and refining and selling cane sugar or tobacco produced on the plantations.  Some Irish merchants even owned slave plantations.

Belfast merchants, who were mainly Presbyterian, did business with plantations from the late 1600s onwards. In the 1670s a Scottish merchant, George MacCartney - a sovereign (Lord Mayor) of Belfast - was exporting beef to slave plantations in the Caribbean. In the same period the Black family, Belfast merchants, owned plantations in Grenada and Trinidad.  The Valentine Jones dynasty bought and sold to planters in Barbados.  William Sinclair, a founder member of the United Irishmen, was a linen producer who benefited directly from the slave trade. Later in the 1800s merchants like Waddell Cunningham and Thomas Greg were amongst those who also profited.

Ref: Rolston, B and Shannon, M (2002) Encounters – How Racism Came To Ireland. Colour Books Ltd. Dublin.

Waddell Cunningham

Waddell Cunningham (born in 1730 - in Killead, Co Antrim) engaged in legitimate business activities such as the exporting of wood from Honduras and the illegitimate business of smuggling. In 1763 Cunningham purchased a slave plantation in Dominica – naming it ‘Belfast’.

After his return to Belfast, in 1765, in partnership with his brother-in-law, Thomas Greg, he was commercially extremely successful across a wide range of endeavours. Cunningham was the founding president of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce and the first president of the Harbour Board.

In 1786, following the repeal, six years earlier, of the Navigation Acts (which had acted as a barrier to the foundation of an official slave industry in Ireland), Cunningham is reported to have convened a meeting with the intention of forming a slave-trading company in Belfast.  His plans were frustrated by Thomas McCabe (the owner of a jeweller’s shop in North Street) who attended the meeting in the Assembly Rooms and wrote in the proposal book, “May God eternally damn the soul of the man who subscribes the first guinea”.

A slave – trading company was not formed in Belfast and the port did not become a centre for slave trafficking. Linking the issues of Irish reform and slavery, McCabe later place a sign in his shop window: ‘Thomas, McCabe, an Irish Slave, Licensed to Sell Silver and Gold’.

Ref: Rolston, B and Shannon, M (2002) Encounters – How Racism Came To Ireland. Colour Books Ltd. Dublin.

Belfast’s Role in Anti-Slavery

Opposition to the brutality of the slave trade and the utter despair and misery afflicting the lives of its millions of victims was given expression by radical Belfast citizens – many of them Presbyterians, Evangelicals, Catholics, democrats or women - during the latter half of the 18th century.

These ‘radicalised’ citizens were influenced by Enlightenment thinking such as the idea that there were certain ‘rights’ which could be diffused to all – black people, Catholics and perhaps even women!  Events in revolutionary France, the values of “liberty, equality, fraternity” and the sentiments embodied in the United States Declaration of Independence affected people’s thinking.  Many Presbyterian and Catholic Irish abolitionists were also influenced by their own experiences as ‘second class citizens’ under the Crown.

Catholic Irish in Belfast and beyond also signed up to the ideals of abolition.  O’Connell, who promoted Catholic emancipation, was a committed abolitionist who convinced many people to petition the Government to end Slavery.

Women of the time, regardless of religious denomination, had less rights and freedoms than men. Women were very active in the anti-slavery movement in both England and Ireland. Mary Ann Mc Cracken (sister of Henry Joy Mc Cracken) founded the Belfast Women’s Anti-Slavery Society.  Belfast women were amongst those who abstained from sugar and signed petitions to fight for the abolition of slavery.

Nini Rodgers (2000) Equiano and Anti- Slavery in 18th Century Belfast. Ulster Historical Foundation.

Blood Drops on the Sugar

Thomas Russell, the second librarian of Belfast’s Linenhall Library and a United Irishman, was a vociferous opponent of slavery.  In eighteenth century Belfast, the evidence of slavery was to be found at middle class social gatherings in the form of sugar-based titbits – the raw material having been imported from slave plantations in, for example, Barbados.

Slaves cutting sugar cane in Antigua (Leeward Islands, West Indies, north of Barbados).

Russell showed his angry and vehement attitude to the toleration of the slave trade when attending society dinners and soirées in Belfast.  When presented with ‘sweetmeats’ and cakes coated with sugar icing Russell would conspicuously decline the proffered delicacies.  Knowing that the sugar had come from the West Indies, he refused to consume it, stating that every time he looked at a morsel of sugar, all he could see on that tempting white surface was a scarlet drop of Negro’s blood

From: http://www.newirelandgroup.com/

“The Question of the Slave Trade”

Those who were ‘for’ and ‘against’ the abolition of slavery battled, in government debate, in religious writings, in business circles, in public meetings and in society gatherings.

Thomas Russell’s ‘Letter to the People of Ireland’, published in 1796 was a call for justice, democracy and freedom in Ireland - and also a clarion call for the same qualities of life to be bestowed on the world at large.  He sympathised with the anti-slavery movement of which the English evangelical William Wilberforce was the most vocal proponent.  He talked about,

‘the question of the slave trade, the one now of the greatest consequence on the face of the earth…” and asked if Irish people knew that “that horrid traffic….creates and perpetuates barbarism and misery, and prevents the spreading of the civilisation and religion in which we profess to believe?”

He asked did Irish men and women know that,

“hundreds of thousands of miserable Africans are dragged from their innocent families, transported to various places and there treated with such a system of cruelty, torment, wickedness and infamy that it is impossible for language to express its horror and guilt?”

From: http://www.newirelandgroup.com/

William Drennan and Sugar Abstinence

Many radical citizens of Belfast practised sugar abstinence along with abolitionists across Ireland and England. Belfast Presbyterian William Drennan noted in 1792 that there were many Quakers in Britain and Ireland who were in the forefront of the campaign against sugar, because of the unethical mode of its production. He wrote to his sister, the politically-minded Martha McTier,

“I should like to see family resolutions on the subject drawn up and subscribed by some of the matrons of Belfast most famous for conserves and preserves”.

Later in the same month Drennan wrote again to his sister,

“we have drawn up a subscription paper (petition) about absence from sugar, and shall soon get many thousand signatures.  It is in this form
We the undersigned do engage that we will abstain from the use of sugar and rum until the West Indies planters, themselves, have prohibited the importation of additional slaves, and commenced as a speedy and effectual a subversion of slavery in their islands as the circumstances and situation of the slaves will admit or till we can obtain the produce of sugar cane in some other mode, unconnected with slavery and unpolluted with blood”

Significantly, Drennan then added the following note,

– “ this (subscription paper) would be a touchstone to the Belfast traders in rum. Let them cast round the world an equal eye and feel for all that suffer…”

From: http://www.newirelandgroup.com/

Toast to Abolition

Typical of the toasts offered at Belfast dinners in that year was the one suggested by Henry Joy, the owner of the Belfast News Letter –

“ to Mr Wilberforce and a speedy repeal of the infamous traffic in the flesh and bone of man…”

From: http://www.newirelandgroup.com/

Presbyterian Church Supports Abolition, 1792

Presbyterian authorities rallied round in their opposition to slavery and at the meeting of the General Synod of Ulster in 1792, the Presbyterian Church called for support of William Wilberforce in his attempt to “rescue from a state of slavery and wretchedness an oppressed race of our fellow creatures…”.

The Presbyterian leaders of that year called out –

“we should think ourselves shamefully defective in our duty to God, to the world and our own consciences did we not come forward to bear our public testimony against the unnatural traffic in human flesh…”

From: http://www.newirelandgroup.com/

Sugar Abstinence and the Northern Star Campaign

The radical Belfast newspaper, the Northern Star, stated in its columns during April 1792,

“…. every individual, as far as he consumes (sugar products) becomes accessory to the guilt…”

In so far as the Northern Star was concerned, it was not just local traders who possessed responsibility for ethical consumption, it was also the Ulster people themselves, especially those who were well enough off to afford sugar based luxuries.

The Northern Star also kept up the pressure on its readership by recounting stories of alleged industrial injuries and fatalities in the sugar industry including incidents where men were accidentally boiled alive in the sugar vats they were tending.

From: http://www.newirelandgroup.com/

Bastille Day in Belfast, 1792

When celebrating Bastille Day in the streets of Belfast, in July 1792, radical Belfast citizens raised a large flag, as part of the procession, bearing the picture of chained slaves and followed it by another banner declaring,

‘Can the African Slave trade though morally wrong be politically right?’