Abolition City 

The contradictions of growth 

You don’t see many tourists this time of year in Kingston upon Hull; Hull for short. It’s a port city of about 275,000 in Yorkshire, Northern England, and the birthplace of William Wilberforce, father of British Abolitionism.  His house in picturesque Old Town, has been made into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery and its abolition, and my wife Harriet and I lingered an hour and a half or so among its fine exhibits – prints, paintings, documents, models, medals and medallions. There were one or two other visitors – no more.

Old Town is a conservation district with brick or cobbled streets dating to the late Middle Ages, and buildings mostly from the Georgian and Victorian periods. When Harriet and I were there last week, it felt throttled, the former hue and cry of seamen, dockworkers, peddlers, peelers, mountebanks, fishwives and urchins long silent. The only sound that afternoon was the hum of distant traffic and the click-clack of Harriet’s boots on the uneven brick-blocks.  In addition to its museums and historic houses, the district boasts many pubs, bars and nightclubs, but they were closed or empty. The publican at Ye Olde Black Boy (est. 1729; opening time 6 pm) told me he makes all his money on weekends. It’s the same, he said, with the other drinking establishments. The origin of the pub’s name is obscure, but all sorts of benign suggestions have been offered.

Leave the historic district and riverfront, and it soon becomes apparent that Hull is among the most impoverished cities in England. There are struggling or shuttered shopping centers, empty storefronts on pedestrianized streets, run-down row houses and apartment blocks, and an over-abundance of re-sale shops, hair salons and convenience stores.  Though the number of homeless (“rough sleepers”) in Hull is low by U.S. standards, it’s higher than the national average. Statistics shows that Hull has high unemployment and low wealth, and that its residents suffer from poor health.  Decades of de-industrialization and government austerity have taken their toll, here as elsewhere in the North.

There are, however, three industries in Hull that are thriving. The first is the so-called “hospitality” sector – the above-mentioned pubs, bars, and nightclubs; the second is hospitals; and the third is prisons. Each exists in symbiosis. Because Hull has one of the highest ratios of bars and pubs per capita in England, it also has one of the highest rates of alcohol related hospital admissions. Patients are treated at either Hull Royal Infirmary or Castle Hill Hospital. Unsurprisingly, there are also a lot of alcohol linked crimes, and no less than five nearby prisons to house offenders.

If you are nicked after getting into a barroom brawl, you’ll probably be taken to His Majesty’s Prison Hull, where you may be kept on remand until trial. If you are convicted of “common assault,” you’ll go to HMP Humber, a minimum security, or C-level facility. If you’re guilty of assault resulting in “grievous bodily harm,” you’ll go to HMP Millsike, or one of the two B-level prisons at HMP Full Sutton.  Unfortunately, these three economic sectors don’t raise productivity or increase aggregate demand for goods or services or make people happier and healthier. They aren’t the “engines of growth” – to cite a cliché beloved of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves – required to spur the sluggish British economy.

For sustained growth, Parliament and Whitehall would need to make large, new investments in green industries, affordable housing, improved healthcare, sustainable agriculture, education, transportation, and culture. Instead, it was announced recently that in a bid to boost growth and support the hospitality sector, U.K. restaurants, pubs, clubs, gas stations, and other business selling alcohol, will be allowed to remain open later. It’s almost enough to encourage the revival of Wilberforce’s Society for the Suppression of Vice (est. 1787), dedicated to the reduction of “excessive drinking, blasphemy, profane swearing and cursing, lewdness, [and] profanation of the Lord’s Day”. In practice, the Society was mostly concerned with suppressing speech critical of the government and resisting calls for democratic reform of parliament. It would be superfluous in the current U.K.

Abolition vs Reform

The reason I was in Hull last week was to give a lecture about prison abolition to a group of community activists and scholars at the University of Hull.  For about six years, from 2008-13, I was one of the leaders of a successful effort to reform Tamms Supermax prison in Southern Illinois. The head of the campaign was Laurie Jo Reynolds, a Chicago artist and activist of remarkable energy and imagination. We worked closely for five years — drafting legislation, organizing hearings and protests, lobbying, and devising art projects – to end the use of long-term solitary confinement at Tamms.  Such incarceration is widely understood to be a form of torture. In the end, we succeeded beyond our wildest expectations: In January 2013, the prison was closed for good by Governor Pat Quinn, and long-term solitary confinement in Illinois ended. What started as an effort to improve conditions at Tamms, turned into a successful project of abolition.

I use the term “abolition” guardedly, however. While we abolished solitary confinement in Illinois, we had only a minor impact on the carceral apparatus as a whole. What we achieved is therefore better called reform. Abolitionism is an example of what the philosopher André Gorz called “non-reformist reform,” the idea that movements for social change should not be limited by existing definitions of the possible but instead aim to create new realities. Though Laurie Jo, me, and the rest of our group hoped the reform (and ultimate closure) of Tamms would spur change elsewhere, our aims never extended beyond the single prison. We were simply too small and weak to effect a broader transformation of the statewide, much less national system of mass incarceration.

Abolitionism in its broad sense of “non-reformist reform,” has a long history in the U.K. In the mid 17^th Century, the Ranters and True Levelers, aka Diggers, sought to abolish private property: “The blessings of Earth shall be common to all,” said Gerrard Winstanley. “There shall be no buying nor selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man.” In 1649 and 1650, during the English Civil War, the Diggers established outposts on seized land and sought to live collectively and democratically, a form of agrarian socialism. The experiment was quickly ended by Oliver Cromwell in league with local lords and landowners.

Abolition of private ownership re-emerged as a goal in late 18th Century England as a retort to the reformism of Thomas Paine, John Thelwall, and the London Corresponding Society. They demanded political rights for working men but upheld the sanctity of property. Rejecting free trade, laissez-faire and the commodity form, the poet and artist William Blake claimed, (like Winstanley), that “everything that lives is holy and without price.” Four decades later, Karl Marx proposed the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and even designated its agents of dismantlement – the working class or proletariat. Marxism in its many varieties is fundamentally a theory and practice of abolition.

Slave Abolitionism

The best-known abolition movement, however, is the one established in England in the late 18^th and associated with Hull native, William Wilberforce. Its goal was to end the trade in human beings, a murderous business that financed the Industrial Revolution and made Britain economically and politically hegemonic for some 200 years.  Its formal origin was the founding in London in 1787 of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Save Trade, also known as the Abolition Society. It had a dozen members at its start, including Thomas Clarkson, who wrote, published and campaigned prodigiously in support of abolition, and Granville Sharp, a lawyer who in 1772, defended the enslaved African, James Somerset in the famous trial of Somerset v Stewart. The judgment in that case established that English law does not permit slavery in the British Isles or the forcible return of freed slaves to colonial servitude. The decision did not, however, forbid the slave trade itself or the use of slaves in British colonies.

The abolition movement spread rapidly in the years immediately following the formation of the Abolition Society. Clarkson was an especially skilled writer and speaker, and his pamphlets and books were read widely. Soon, abolitionist groups arose across the country. In Manchester, fully half the adult male population, some 10,000 people, signed a petition for abolition in 1787 and submitted it to Parliament. The following year, a hundred more petitions from other constituencies were submitted. Even in Liverpool, heart of the slave trade, an abolitionist circle was formed.

Novel forms of abolitionist propaganda were devised. The artist William Hackwood’s 1787 design for Josiah Wedgewood’s medallion, “Am I not a Man and Brother” for the Abolition Society, became a fashion accessory, and was reproduced a few years later by Blake for an illustration in Erasmus Darwin’s epic poem, The Botanic Garden.

An acquaintance of Blake’s, the former slave, Ottobah Cugoano, issued a pamphlet against the slave trade in 1787, while another freed slave, Olaudah Equiano published in 1789 a much-lauded autobiography describing the horrors of servitude and his own path to emancipation.

Thus, by the time William Wilberforce in 1791 introduced a bill in Parliament to end the slave trade, abolitionism had become a major movement across Britain and beyond. In its breadth and methods – national and international, popular and elite, insurgent and institutional, oral and written, poetic and artistic – it was perhaps the first modern, multi-media, broad-based campaign for institutional change. But its collision with another movement – just as fundamental – doomed its near-term chance for success.

Delay in the introduction of Wilberforce’s abolition bill allowed time for opposition to grow. By 1791, King George and the Duke of Clarence (the future King William IV) had come out in opposition, and so did several plantation-owning MPs. Nevertheless, a weaker bill, promising “gradual” abolition of the slave trade passed in the House of Commons in 1792, but was held up by the House of Lords.  A year later, Britain’s declaration of war against revolutionary France doomed the legislation. Even though Wilberforce supported the war and condemned slave rebellions in the Caribbean, abolitionism was now tainted with radicalism. The regicide of French King Louis XIV in January 1793 and the emancipation of slaves in Saint Domingue (Haiti) the following year – along with growing calls for democracy in Britain — were anathema to the English ruling classes. It would be another 13 years before Wilberforce’s bill to abolish the trade in humans would pass Parliament (1807), and 40 before slavery itself was banned in the British colonies (1833).

The story of British abolitionism, its many failures and long overdue success, is a lesson in the limits of reform. Lacking a wider context of change, reform in one sector is likely to fail or be indefinitely delayed. British radicalism in the 1790s was confined to a small number of groups with just a few hundred (or at most a few thousand) supporters in a population of nearly 10 million. It could not marshal anything close to the strength necessary to effect radical goals of general slave emancipation, much less parliamentary reform, land redistribution or an end to the monarchy.

The French Revolution on the other hand, was just such a wide-based and deeply rooted movement. It abolished the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the entire apparatus of feudalism. It took land and power from the clergy and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies. Faced however, with the collective might of Europe, a persistent aristocracy, and many internal divisions, the revolutionary regime soon faltered. The dictatorship of Napoleon in 1799 quickly led to the restoration of slavery in Saint Domingue. Five years later however, the Haitian revolution ended slavery on the island for good and created the first modern, independent Black nation — which is why the country has been subject to embargo, foreign occupation, invasion, coups, and malign neglect for the 200+ years since. Abolitionism can be costly.

Prison Abolitionism

In recent decades, recognition of the limits of reformism has grown, and self-declared abolitionist movements have proliferated. Inspired by WEB DuBois ideas about “abolition democracy,” (the cooperation between working-class whites and freed Blacks during Reconstruction), noted feminists and prison abolitionists Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others have decried the existing prison system in the U.S. as hopelessly racist, exploitative, ineffective, unjust and cruel.  To them, calls for prison reform are akin to calls by some English abolitionists for “a more human slavery.” Davis writes:

Safety and security require education, housing, jobs, art, music, and recreation. If the funds currently directed toward these institutions — police departments, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), jails, prisons, and immigrant detention facilities — were rerouted toward the public good, the need and justification for steadily expanding institutions of state violence would certainly decline.

Abolitionism for her means focusing not only on the injustice and cruelty of the prison system but a radical examination of the contradictions of capitalism:  its emphasis upon private profit above all other values, exploitation of racial and gender difference for the purpose of undermining worker solidarity, and commoditization of nature, including soil, water, and air at the cost of human health and well-being.

Davis’s ideas have found fertile soil in Hull. Wilberforce himself was active in prison reform, alongside others like Elizabeth Fry.  He wanted to reduce the use of capital punishment, improve prison conditions and offer more education as well as religious counseling to prisoners. But he never proposed to abolish prisons. Contemporary abolitionists in Hull do. Their group, OUT, has published a sort-of poetic manifesto that reads in part:

Prison is the best example of how messed up things got, an example of disconnection — to each other, self and land. We exist to create the opposite of that….

We don’t want people to be locked up, physically or mentally. We want people to be fulfilled. Basic needs met and more. How bad have things got that people feel safer behind bars, how disempowered? We exist to encourage the potential in people and each other, through love.

Their work consists of bringing education to local prisons, helping former offenders find friendship and work, and connecting them to art, poetry, music, nature and healthy foods.  The broad-based character of the work is expressive of the abolitionist ethos. For wider success, they will need to expand their membership and tackle head-on some of the political and economic challenges faced by working people in Hull and across the U.K.

Animal Abolitionism

In addition to his work in slave abolitionism and prison reform, William Wilberforce was a key figure in the rise of the English movement for animal welfare and protection. He was founder in 1824, of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), later the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). Its goal was to improve the welfare of domesticated animals and ensure enforcement of the recent “Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act” (1822), championed by Richard Martin, also known as “Humanity Dick.”

In this, as in his other crusades, Wilberforce was decidedly reformist rather than radical. He likely had no truck, for example with animal abolitionists like the antiquarian and philologist Joseph Ritson. (There is no evidence the two men ever met.) Ritson was author in 1802 of An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty, which argued in favor of a vegan diet (the word did not yet exist) and an end to all blood sports. Two decades earlier, he wrote to his sister:

You will certainly find yourself healthier, and if you have either conscience or humanity happier in abstaining from animal food, than you could possibly be in depriving, by the indulgence of an unnatural appetite and the adherence to a barbarous custom, hundreds if not thousands, of innocent creature of their lives, to the enjoyment of which they have as good a right as yourself.

William Blake, who engraved illustrations for one of Ritson’s books, apparently agreed with his patron. He writes in his “Auguries of Innocence:”

A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear….

The late 18^th and early 19^th centuries were when the modern animal rights movement was born. Its principles are manifest in radical enlightenments figures like Ritson, John Oswald, and Thomas Taylor, and later among Romantic poets, including Blake, Shelley, and Byron. Indeed, a direct line can be drawn between them and modern animal abolitionists like the British-born American artist Sue Coe (see illustration below) and the U.S. legal theorist Gary Francione, who argues that it’s wrong to kill or torment animals simply because we derive pleasure from it or out of habit. Nor he says, should we own them.

A vegetarian restaurant

With Wilberforce’s efforts to legislate kindness toward animals on our minds, Harriet and I (we are both vegans) strolled Old Town Hull in the hope of finding someplace to eat dinner. Resigned to another night of Middle Eastern food (hummus, tabouli, and baba ghanoush), we approached the corner of Bishop’s Lane, looked up and saw a battered sign, “Hitchcock’s Vegetarian Restaurant.” We found their number and called to reserve a table. They told us that while some dishes were vegetarian (containing dairy) many were vegan, and that the special dinner tonight would consist of British dishes popular in wartime. (Hull suffered badly in the Blitz.) The restaurant could welcome us at 7:30.

We arrived that evening and saw a large party of diners in 1940s attire: men with double breasted jackets and women with shirtwaist dresses or in the costume of “Landgirls” — overalls and headscarves.  Vera Lynn could be heard on the music system, followed by Ella Fitzgerald. We were quickly served hors d’oeuvres of mushrooms on toast. Then we got up to select from a buffet table with vegan versions of toad-in-a-hole, Shepherd’s Pie, boiled cabbage, bubble ‘n squeak, pickled beets, braised carrots with cheese sauce, roast potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding. For dessert there was banoffee pie, cheesecake, chocolate cake and tiramisu (not sure if that last was very British). We ate too much of course.

That night, we lay in bed, uncomfortably. Nevertheless, we imagined the freedom and delight of a future, abolitionist world.

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