Reactions to the problem
of the slave trade41conscience'. We know that the Negroes' resistance to slavery came out in a
number of different ways: suicide on board the slaveships or on the plantations,
attempts to murder slave-owners, abortions. The history of the 'system' is
a long sequence of escape and rebellion, and in some places the number of
maroons reached alarming proportions. It happened in Jamaica in 1720 and
in 1734-35; then in Guiana, where the 'colonies' of maroons grew to such a
size that the authorities were forced to negotiate with them and grant them
their autonomy.^43 There are records in the official Correspondence of the con-
cern of administrators and settlers; although for the most part the phenom-
enon was endemic, the slave population outnumbered the whites to such an
extent that the worst could be feared.
'Slavery is a violent and unnatural condition.... Those who are sub-
jected to it are constantly possessed with the desire to break free, and are
always ready to revolt', observed Jean Dubuq, head of the Colonial Office.^44
This gave rise to a policy of reform and efforts to persuade settlers to make the
slaves' lives 'bearable' and make them lose 'the desire to be free, by dint of
good treatment'. Humanitarianism was a necessity, before it ever developed
into the 'active compassion' advocated by Christians and philosophers.
The slaves' refusal to accept their condition, their assertion of their
right to be free, which was manifest in their propensity to run away, in itself
the negation of slavery, inspired a whole new set of writings, from Mrs Behn's
famous Oroonoko to Victor Hugo's Bug Jargal, and including Saint-Lambert's
Ziméo. Others are less well known : the speech by Moses Boom Sam (in Abbé
Prévost's Pour et Contre),*^5 who is shown as the Moses of the black people and,
in the Histoire des Deux Indes, the appeal for a 'new Spartacus' to lead his
brethren on to 'vengeance and slaughter', the advent of a new leader being a
certainty now that the fugitive black slaves had succeeded in gaining their
independence.^46
Two distinct trends thus emerged from within the anti-slavery movement :
'humanitarianism' (a term first used by a Physiocrat, Abbé Baudeau)^47 and
militant humanism. The first, inspired by Christian compassion, sought to
find a cure for an inescapable evil in the charity of the slave-owners and the
submission of the slaves. The second condemned the master-slave relationship
as an unnatural violence, and saw a possible issue in revolt : ' Your slaves need
neither your generosity nor your advice to throw off the sacrilegious yoke that
oppresses them. Nature speaks louder than philosophy and self-interest.'^48
But the world then entered upon the 'revolutionary' era; in 1776, the
thirteen American colonies shook off British domination, in 1781 they drew
up a constitution for themselves. In 1789 there was the French Revolution and
in 1794 the abolition of slavery by the National Convention, shortly after the
revolt in Santo Domingo led by Toussaint Louverture. But none of these
revolutions, although embarked upon in the name of liberty, really brought