Cease From America’s Chain: The Liberating Pen of Hannah More – Part Two

While her poem, “Slavery,” would serve as an alarm clock to the national conscience of a people who felt that slavery had been justified in the name of commerce, stability and even necessity, it would only prove to be one of many. Like most of the abolitionists in 1792, Hannah was naively giddy about the promising prospects of a speedy death-blow to this institution of bondage. Rather than the inflated months that they had hoped for, it would be over 10 years before the trade was abolished. It would be another 20 years before slavery itself would follow the same demise – just months before Hannah’s death. But even delay could not stop Hannah’s pen. After “Slavery,” fictitious works – that in many ways foreshadowed our fiction novels – would be written, including, “The Sorrows of Yamba,” a work based on a shorter poem, where an African mother is the narrator. After being captured, and the death of her infant, who had been stolen with her, a line gives a human voice to Yamba’s experience on the notorious Middle Passage:

Then for love of filthy Gold,
Strait they bore me to the sea;
Cramm’d me down a Slave Ship’s hold,
Where were Hundreds stow’d like me.
Naked on the Platform lying,
Now we cross the tumbling wave;
Shrieking, sickening, fainting, dying,
Deed of shame for Britons brave.

After her forced voyage, Yamba is sold, escapes and eventually falls in the way of a missionary, who shares the gospel with her. But while her soul finds rest, her body, worn and ground away with toil, nears its end. The poem’s closing bursts with the zealous hope that drove abolitionists like Hannah to never, never, never give in:

Cease, ye British Sons of murder!
Cease from forging Afric’s Chain;
Mock your Saviour’s name no further,
Cease your savage lust for gain….
Where ye gave to war it’s birth,
Where your traders fix’d their den,
There go publish “Peace on Earth,”
Go proclaim “good-will to men.”
Where ye once have carried slaughter,
Vice, and Slavery, and Sin;
Seiz’d on Husband, Wife, and Daughter,
Let the Gospel enter in.

Stories, pamphlets, poems, all genres, were fair game to the pen of Hannah More. So powerful was her inkwell and parchment that even Wilberforce would someday say, “Individuals who are not in parliament seldom have an opportunity of doing good to considerable numbers. Even while I was writing the sentence, I become conscious of the falsehood of the position; witness Mrs. Hannah More, and all those who labour with the pen.”

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.

Source: Fierce Convictions by Karen Swallow Prior