Christian Slavery - Bad News About Christianity

On November 29th, 1781 the crew of the slave ship Zong threw 133 - 142 African slaves overboard (because of a
shortage of water). The owners subsequently made an insurance claim for the loss of their "cargo". The claim was
disputed and gave rise to a legal case (Gregson v Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug. KB 232). The (Christian) English court held
that in certain circumstances, the deliberate killing of slaves was legal and that insurers could be required to pay for
the slaves' deaths, though in this case the slave owners lost, due to evidence being introduced suggesting fault on
behalf of the captain and crew.
Image from French, A. M. (Austa Malinda), Slavery in South Carolina and the ex-slaves; or, The Port Royal Mission.,
New York, W.M. French, 1862
William Wilberforce is usually accredited with abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire,
although he came many years after the first abolitionist campaigners. He too was an unbeliever
when he espoused abolition. Later as an evangelical he was able to sit in Parliament (which
unbelievers were not). There he stood out amongst his fellow Christians as an exception. He
noted that those who opposed slavery were nonconformists and godless reformers, and that
Church people were indifferent to the cause of abolition, or else actively obstructed it. His support
came from Quakers, Utilitarians and assorted freethinkers. Like the freethinkers who had started
the movement, he was condemned by the mainstream Churches as presuming to know better
than the Bible. His successor, Sir Thomas Buxton, was another maverick, an evangelical with
Quaker sympathies.
The Church had enjoyed 1,500 years during
which it had had the power to ban slavery
but had failed to do so, or even to have
expressed any desire to do so. (The
Anglican Church's missionary organisation,
the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts, had been branding
its slaves on the chest with the word
SOCIETY to show who owned them.
Bishops of London and archbishops of York
were involved in the management of the
Society, while its governing body included
archbishops of Canterbury. One Archbishop
of Canterbury, the Most Rev Thomas
Secker, wrote to a fellow bishop in 1760
about slave deaths, his concern apparently
being for the financial implications: "I have
long wondered and lamented that the
Negroes in our plantation decrease and new
supplies become necessary continually...
Surely this proceeds from some defect, both
of humanity and even of good policy. But we
must take things as they are at present."