All on Fire

A Praying People The abolitionist''s forebears came to America as bound laborers. On a squally day at the end of March 1770, stewards for Captain William Owen of the Royal Navy mustered a company of thirty-eight indentured servants, including William Lloyd Garrison''s maternal grandparents, aboard a two-hundred-ton Liverpool square-rigger berthed in the Mersey River. The ship, which Owen had recently purchased and rechristened with his own name, stood ready to depart for Canada, where the naval officer turned "lord of the soil" by a land grant from the Crown planned to employ his gang of seafarers, craftsmen, and farmers in founding a proprietary colony on an island at the entrance to the Bay of Fundy. The laborers, most of whom were unemployed Merseyside linenworkers and weavers, had temporarily bargained away their freedom in exchange for passage to Britain''s latest North American frontier and the promise of eventual leaseholds on fresh and bountiful land. When the servants, who had endured the humiliation of a forced march from Owen''s estate fifteen miles upriver, found themselves herded into a cargo hold with barely five feet of headspace and tiers of wooden slabs jammed in as sleeping pallets, their spirits sank, for they had not signed away their liberty to be stabled like livestock. While the ship heaved and groaned, straining at its ropes in the stiff wind, the bondsmen became "riotous and disorderly," and Captain Owen--a fierce-looking officer who had lost an eye in a brawl and had his right arm shot off while capturing a French warship off Pondicherry--had to be summoned from a farewell dinner with his business partners to quell the disturbance personally. The gale blew itself out a few days later, and the Owen weighed anchor and dropped down past the great South Dock, where one hundred vessels a year readied for the "African trade" that supplied a different form of labor--slave labor--to the New World. Thousands of yards of English calicos and linens, tons of wrought iron and brass, and thousands of pounds of gunpowder sailed off to West African trading depots, where they were exchanged for shackled human cargoes to be crammed ''tween-decks and transported to British plantations in the West Indies and on the North American mainland. There enslaved laborers--bound not for a term of years but for a lifetime and, with their progeny, beyond as legal chattel--cleared the land and grew the cash crops whose transport back to England completed the vicious triangle. The business had grown so large that a wholly new dock that would enclose five acres of water was under construction at the Mersey shoreline just for Guinea-bound ships. Their cargoes brought such lavish profits--as much as thirty percent on each voyage, people said--to Liverpool''s carriers and merchant brokers that most had cast a cold eye upon Owen''s little farming scheme. They would leave Nova Scotia to small-time proprietors like Owen and the distressed English laborers who, as one editor scoffed, sailed off dreaming of "mountains of roast beef and rivers of rum." Yet, in the course of colonial development, the small shiploads of indentured servants in quest of land had peopled North America as surely as the slave traders and planters in search of profits. In the fifteen-year period between the end of the Seven Years War on the American continent and the outbreak of the Revolution, the transatlantic movement westward reached new heights, as a quarter million people--half from the British Isles and almost that many from West Africa--found themselves uprooted from one world and transplanted into another. People shaken out of the Hebrides or the Hausa villages along the Niger became part of vast labor systems that, within another century, would contend for supremacy on the battlefields of Virginia. For the first three weeks of their voyage, those in steerage endured mountainous waves from "a high cross and confused sea" that poured into the hatchway of their gMayer, Henry is the author of 'All on Fire' with ISBN 9780312253677 and ISBN 0312253672.