Can They Be True? – The Liberating Pen of Thomas Clarkson – Part One

By the end of the 18th century, hundreds of thousands of Africans had been forcibly sold into slavery to North America and European nations. During this same period, God was raising up a remnant in England that would be mightily used to liberate their fellowmen. Of this band, several fought the battle with their pens, recording history, crafting poetry, scripting stories, and penning calls of repentance to an empire grown calloused to the suffering of others. One of them was a young Cambridge student named Thomas Clarkson. This is his story.

Elation – rather than turmoil – should have filled his soul, but as he made the horseback ride home, Thomas Clarkson’s mind churned within him. Brilliant, tenacious and twenty-four, the honor student in the prestigious Cambridge University had spent weeks laboring over a Latin essay competition. After tireless research and exhaustive interviews, the young scholar had settled the question, and won the competition, first in his class. But the honor was nearly lost on him, for the topic of his essay still seethed in his mind like the red-hot iron-brands come to life from the books he’d researched. The question: is it right to make slaves of others against their will?

Thomas’ eyes lifted upward as Wades Mill came into view; he was in Hertfordshire. Thomas’ fingers pulled the reins taut. As he dismounted, the iron-brand in his mind dropped burning coals into his heart. Seating himself on the heather, images from his research flashed like lightning across his mind. Chains. Crowded ships. Charcoal faces, toned like the sugarcane fires responsible for many a death. Lashes, rods, thumbscrews. Wails of agony of mothers torn from their children and men from their villages. In every corner, every bloodstained ship board, every wave across the Atlantic, was the oppressive gloom of this monster, this leviathan that was devouring an entire continent: the British Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Could it all be true? The question rang like the funeral toll of the church bell back home in London. What possessed men to capture other men and subject them to the horrors of slavery? What government – especially one as civilized as his great England – not only permitted, but profited from such a cruel traffic in human flesh?

Surely, it wasn’t true. Surely, the facts were exaggerated or at least not as severe as the authors he read depicted it. For the thousandth time, Thomas reviewed the facts, willing that some shade, some vice, be found in them that would discount their credibility as witnesses and ease his conscience that they were not true.

Kenzi Knapp is a follower of Christ, homeschool graduate and student of history. A fourth generation Missourian she enjoys writing about daily life enrolled in Gods great course of faith and His story throughout the ages at her blog, Honey Rock Hills.