Brian Davies

The killing of yet another black man – George Floyd – by United States police on the 25th of May 2020 has brought a much greater reaction worldwide than anyone could have expected. In this country the most notable incident so far in the Black Lives Matter protests has been the tipping of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol dock on June 7th. Two days later a statue of Robert Milligan was removed from its plinth outside the museum of London Docklands, one of Robert Baden Powell at Poole Quay has been taken into storage and it is intended that the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford will soon follow. Local councils and the Welsh government are reviewing the monuments in their care and already the statue of slaveowner Sir Thomas Picton has been removed from the ‘Heroes of Wales’ gallery at Cardiff City Hall.

 

One problem is that there was hardly a wealthy family in Wales in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century who did not benefit financially to some extent from slavery even if it was not a major source of their wealth. An assiduous researcher would find the most unlikely tangential connections. For instance, Henry Austin Bruce (the first Lord Aberdare) was the son of the daughter of the rector of Barbados, so there was inevitably some plantation money in his mother's family. However, the family's real wealth derived from the coal industry in the Cynon valley, and Bruce played an important part in the history of educational provision in Wales. Should we take down his statue? I think not.

 

I would like to suggest that the focus on the removal of monuments is one-sided, and that there is a better way of heightening public awareness of the importance of slavery in our history. There have always been people in Wales opposed to slavery, and it is surely time to rescue them from historical oblivion. These notes are intended to identify some examples of the most obvious nineteenth century opponents of slavery, deserving our attention.

 

Morgan John Rhys (1760 - 1804)

Morgan was born at Graddfa, Llanbradach. He joined the Baptists at Hen Dy Cwrdd, Hengoed, prepared for the ministry and ministered at Pen-y-garn near Pontypool from 1787 to 1791. He was enthused by the French Revolution, went to Paris to distribute Bibles but returned to Wales on the outbreak of war. In February 1793 he started the first Welsh political magazine – Y Cylchgrawn Cymraeg – which supported the French Revolution, opposed the slave trade, and argued for the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales.

 

He emigrated to the USA in 1794, with the intention of establishing a Welsh colony. Early the following year he was in Savannah, Georgia. He found the city beautiful, but he was beginning to feel uncomfortable. George Whitfield, English Methodist leader, had established an orphanage there, but had also used charitable funds to buy a slave plantation. Morgan John Rhys observed that ‘The Lord’ had very properly destroyed the place with lightning. Morgan preached at the black meeting house in Savannah, very moved by their singing which he thought far superior to anything he had heard by white congregations. He was visited by the black preacher, Andrew Bryan, who had been flogged in public in an attempt to put down his church. Morgan John preached around the town, saying ‘Here then, where slavery abounds, I will make a stand’, and raised money for a new black church.

 

He did found a Welsh colony, but it ultimately failed, and he died at the early age of 44. His story is inimitably told by Gwyn A. Williams in The Search for Beulah Land (Croom Helm, London, 1980).

 

Tomos Glyn Cothi. (1764 - 1833)

Thomas Evans, better known as Tomos Glyn Cothi, was Unitarian minister at Hen Ddy Cwrdd, Trecynon, Aberdare from 1811 until 1833. He had been imprisoned in Carmarthen gaol for two years because of his support for the French Revolution, and in 1795 produced only the second Welsh political magazine, The Miscellaneous Repository: Neu, Y Drysorfa Gymmysgedig, a quarterly which was much sharper than its title suggests. He wrote at length about African slaves, political dissenters and anti-war protestors, and denounced oppressors with Biblical determination. Unfortunately, there is not yet a biography or a collection of his writings.

 

Edward Williams – 'Iolo Morganwg' (1747 - 1826).

Iolo is best-known for his role in establishing the Gorsedd of Bards of the National Eisteddfod, and for his prolific literary output which has provoked howls of indignation from scholars unable to understand the Romantic imagination. During his lifetime he was probably just as well-known for his opposition to slavery.

 

In his first published collection of poems (Poems Lyric and Pastoral, vol. 2, 1794) he included an Ode on the Mythology of the Ancient British Bards, which he had recited at a meeting on Primrose Hill, London, at the summer solstice of 1792. This included the following lines –

 

Join here thy Bards, with mournful note,

They weep for Afric's injured race;

Long has thy Muse in worlds remote,

 

Oh! Hear, in chains, yon captiv'd soul distressed!

His groans, that call to thee, resound from pole to pole.

 

In another verse he sang the praises of William Wilberforce, who had begun his Parliamentary campaign against the slave trade in 1789.

 

Iolo's first biographer, Elijah Waring (Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams, 1850) tells three stories to illustrate his opposition to slavery.

 

The first relates to a visit by Iolo to Bristol. Just arrived in the city, he enquired why church bells were ringing and was told that ‘it was in token of gratulation at news just received of Mr. Wilberforce's Anti-Slavery Bill having been thrown out’. (Wilberforce failed to get legislation through Parliament several times in the 1790s.) Horrified and disgusted and ‘pronouncing a fervent anathema against slavery and all its abettors’, Iolo quickly left for home.

 

In 1797 Iolo opened a shop in Cowbridge, where he sold books, stationery and groceries. In the window he advertised ‘East India Sweets, uncontaminated with human gore’, in other words ‘free-labour sugar’ instead of sugar from the slave plantations of the West Indies. Waring comments that by 1850 most shops in the country advertised East Indies sugar in this way, but in the 1790s Iolo had been probably ‘the first and only vendor of free-labour sugar in Wales’ or in modern parlance our first ‘fair trade’ shopkeeper.

 

Slavery was not an abstract issue for Iolo. His three brothers had settled in Jamaica and made good money. They offered him a sum annually, but he declined because he saw that their money came from slaveowners. When his brothers died, they left significant estates, including slaves. Eventually, but only after the abolition of the slave trade, Iolo accepted a small fraction of their legacy sufficient to set up his son Taliesin as a school master in Merthyr and his two daughters as shopkeepers.

 

The recent publication of three volumes of Iolo's correspondence and of the first full-scale political biography - Bard of Liberty, the political radicalism of Iolo Morgannwg by Geraint H. Jenkins - has shed much more light on his opposition to slavery than hitherto. Iolo regarded the slave rebellion in Haiti in 1802 as ‘glorious news’; and to mark the passage of Wilberforce's Slave Trade Abolition Act in 1807 he composed Can Rhydian y Caethion (Song on the Liberation of the Slaves) -

 

Did i agor drws pob carchar,

Driller gadwyn, torri'r iau,

Did i sychu dagrau gala,

Did ein Duw sy'n Myesha.

 

A day to open all prison doors,

Shatter chains, and break the yoke,

A day to dry the tears of sorrow,

 The day of our God is drawing near.

 

Evan James (1809 - 1878).

 

Evan James, author of the words of ‘Hen Wald Fy Nhadau’ was not quite the mild-mannered chapel-goer that some hagiographers have tried to make him. He was an intelligent and well-read man, in both Welsh and English, with a sharp sense of humour, and his poems range from intensely local subject matter to many of the major issues and political figures of the day - tithe reform, Garibaldi, and slavery.

 

Evan's cultural life was centred on the pub eisteddfod, the Ivorite lodge and the Gorsedd at the Rocking Stone on Pontypridd Common. His poems were read at these gatherings and were not published until Gwyn Griffiths' book Cerda Evan James: Awdur Hen Wlad fy Nhadau – (Poems by Evan James: The Author of Our Anthem) was published in 2009. Each poem is given in the original Welsh, with an English prose translation. These are two verses out of seven on Slavery -

 

 Y gaethwasanaeth dra syn – pwy a geir,

 Pa gall a'i hamddiffyn?

 Garthawn tost yw a gwrthun,

 Gwyrthiau diawl yw gwerthu dyn....

 

 Rheswm yn ymddyrysu, - anwylwych

 Ddynoliaeth yn gwaedu;

 A dyn gwyn gaedyn gwenu,

 Lewpard diawl, wrth larpio'r du!

 

 Slavery's aberration – who will,

 What sensible person defends it?

 A violent and repugnant camp,

 The sale of man, the Devil's work.....

 

Reason all deranged, - beloved

 Humanity bleeding;

 And the white man grinning,

 Devilish leopard, tearing the black!

 

Evan James deserves to be rescued from respectable obscurity, and Gwyn Griffiths’ book deserves to be read by anyone trying to understand Welsh popular culture in the middle of the nineteenth century.

 

Henry Vincent (1813 – 1878)

 

In the early 1860s there was a revival of political and trade union activity in South Wales. One of the most visible figures during these years was Henry Vincent, the imprisoned Chartist hero back in 1839 but now a very popular liberal speaker at educational meetings and even on what we would call ‘the after-dinner circuit’.

 

In the summer of 1862 Vincent began addressing meetings on the situation in America. In mid-June that year he spoke at the Temperance Hall in Merthyr Tydfil on The Present American Crisis. Henry Austin Bruce, the local MP, sent a letter of apology for not being present because of important parliamentary business. The ‘intelligent and respectable’ audience listened as Vincent traced the cause of the conflict to ‘the great slave question’, and they applauded loudly.

 

On the last Wednesday of August, he expanded his theme to The American rebellion, its causes and probable consequences, again in the Temperance Hall at Merthyr Tydfil. The meeting was chaired by the High Constable, F. James, and the audience listened appreciatively for two hours.

 

In the same week he repeated his talk to the Pontypridd Reading Room. On the first Monday of September he gave his lecture to ‘a very numerous and respectable audience’ in Crane Street Baptist chapel, Pontypool. The main cause of the conflict had been slavery, ‘the gigantic evil’, which would have to be ‘entirely abolished'. He spoke with his ‘accustomed eloquence and concluded a very able discourse amid loud cheers’.

 

Vincent rounded off the year by speaking on the same subject in the Music Hall, St. Mary Street, Cardiff on Monday the 29th of December.

 

Vincent began 1863 by accepting an invitation from the directors of Newport Athenaeum, who included a number of the town's established figures who would have been opponents of his in Chartist days, to lecture on the American crisis at the Town Hall Assembly Room. He traced the cause of the conflict to the growth of slavery and described the need to overthrow it as ‘the great moral question’. He would have wished a gradual and peaceful solution, but as this was not possible ‘my sympathies are with liberty on the American continent – with the coloured man as he is oppressed!... I pray… that America may be purged from this great evil…'

 

For the next eighteen months Vincent was preoccupied with other matters – the Polish insurrection and the campaigns of Garibaldi - but he spoke at a meeting of the Emancipation Society in London in January 1864 along with Victor Schoelcher, ‘the liberator of the slaves of France’ and the American consul.

 

He returned to campaigning in South Wales in 1865, speaking on the War in America at the Temperance Hall, Tredegar, on Friday the 26th of May. He gave a detailed account of the course of the war, explained the central issue of slavery, and paid a high tribute to Abraham Lincoln. Vincent repeated his talk three days later at the Temperance Hall in Aberdare. A long and favourable report in the Aberdare Times described him as ‘the great champion of liberalism’, and concluded that ‘We should like to see Mr. Vincent amongst us oftener, for there is something about his good humour and good sense – not to say anything of his matchless eloquence – which cannot fail to instruct and improve us’.

 

Merthyr's old Chartists rally to the cause.

The most important public meetings held in South Wales during the American Civil War were held in Merthyr and Aberdare in early 1863. On the first Monday of February a large crowd gathered in Tabernacle Chapel Merthyr to hear Andrew Jackson, ex-butler or coachman to Jefferson Davies, President of the Confederacy. The chairman was C.H. James, who opened by declaring that the purpose of the meeting was ‘to express their hatred of slavery; to sympathise with Abraham Lincoln, and to congratulate him on the proclamation he had issued, containing the grand law – the emancipation of slaves’, and spoke at some length on the atrocities of the Southern slave owners. The Rev. Gwesyn Jones then moved the resolution of support for Lincoln, to be sent to him and a copy to be sent to the Southern President ‘to show that, at heart, he had not the sympathy of the British people’. This was seconded by Henry Thomas, a Chartist since the early 1840s.

 

Andrew Jackson then addressed the meeting. The Cardiff Times report described him as ‘a young, rather slender-built man of the best African type’ and went on to discuss his appearance in a manner that would now be highly offensive. Nevertheless, the paper described him as speaking ‘with humour… fluency and self-possession’ and repeatedly winning cheers from the audience. The lengthy meeting duly passed the resolutions proposed.

 

On the following day Andrew Jackson repeated his address in the Temperance Hall Aberdare. He spoke for an hour and a half, and ‘was listened to with marked attention... frequently interrupted by bursts of hearty applause from his hearers’. He ended his speech ‘amidst loud and reiterated applause’. A resolution in favour of negro emancipation was carried unanimously, and Jackson received ‘a hearty vote of thanks’.

 

Abraham Lincoln's re-election in November 1864 was welcomed in Merthyr, and in the second week of December ‘the friends and admirers of President Lincoln’ held a supper and public meeting to adopt a congratulatory address. About eighty people attended, and the meeting was run by men whose names are familiar from the Chartist movement of twenty years previously – J.W. James (chairman), William Gould, Henry Ellis, Henry Thomas and Matthew John. Others spoke who were ‘intensely Federal in spirit’ and their contributions drew loud cheers from the audience. Remarkably the chairman also invited several supporters of the South to address the audience.

 

The same stalwarts of Merthyr Chartism were active in the campaign for the Second Reform Bill and in support of the election of Henry Richard in 1868, after which they went into well-earned political retirement.

 

The younger generation of activists now rightly concerned with the legacy of slavery need to know that the story is not just about those who ran and profited from the system. Opposition to slavery was part of the political culture, democratic and internationalist, of generations of radicals and Chartists from the 1790s, running on through the American Civil War. The same is true in the twentieth century when support for Civil Rights in the United States was personified in the close relations between Paul Robeson and the South Wales miners, and later when a very broad coalition in Wales supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

 

This story needs to be better known, and some of these people surely deserve monuments.

 

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My references in the last two sections concerning Henry Vincent, and the pro-Lincoln meetings, are drawn from local papers – the Cardiff & Merthyr Guardian, Monmouthshire Merlin, Aberdare Times and Cardiff Times – which can now be easily consulted on the National Library of Wales website.