How Slavery Ended and Railways Started

Some of you may remember an article I wrote in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd in the US by the police, on the structural causes of racism in the US and Britain's contribution to it through the industrialisation of Atlantic slavery. At the time the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was submerged in Bristol Docks. I also looked at the relationships between that huge, under-discussed subject (little mention of it in the current wave of Jubilee celebrations despite the strong links between the slave trade, Empire and the royal family over the centuries) and our own beloved industry, railways. I was making the case that history is difficult, and the links are unexpected and often dark, but to make today's world better we must try to understand them - and assimilate their lessons with honesty and determination.

My interest piqued, I decided to look further as part of my studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and ended up writing a dissertation on the topic. In my original article I wrote about the London & Greenwich Railway, London's first, which was part financed by slave compensation paid to Abel Rous Dottin, its first chairman. I found a better and more obvious example to focus on: the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, which owes its origins to a group of seething Liverpool businessmen exactly 200 years ago. They were seething because canal owners had sewn up a transport monopoly between Liverpool and Manchester and were charging usurious rates for an unreliable service. There was a need for these businessmen to get their cotton from Liverpool, by this time easily the largest cotton importing port in the world, to the burgeoning steam-powered mills in Manchester and the rest of Lancashire, and then return the finished thread, cloth and clothes to Liverpool for re-export. This logistics chain was the engine room of British imperial wealth, and of course the cotton was largely sourced from the labour of slaves in the southern states of the US. A railway was just the thing to break the canal monopoly and sharpen up the slave-originated supply chain.

That was as much as I knew when I began my research, which I thought would demonstrate conclusively that the LM&R, and thus our entire industry, was founded on the blood and sweat of slaves. Although partially true, the reality turned out to be much more interesting and nuanced than that. History has a way of defying simplicity. It turns out that that the Liverpool men were seething for another reason as well: they were at each other's throats over the morality and economics of slavery.

The idea for the L&MR had been around for years but it was a group of radical religious dissenters (Quakers, Unitarians and Evangelicals) who gave it legs. They differed from the Anglican, traditional majority in Liverpool on many points, particularly slavery, but they agreed on much as well. They were ruthless and successful merchants and traders, and they also evinced a strong civic pride, building Liverpool cultural institutions to compete with Manchester and even London. This group had historically kept a low profile. Because of the law at the time, the Test & Corporation Acts, they were legally debarred from many professions and civic offices, but by the 1820s they were growing in confidence, and wealth, having used Quaker cotton networks in America and elsewhere to build vast and profitable trading empires. The real 'Father' of the LM&R was dissenter Joseph Sandars whose wealth came not from cotton but corn. He soon made a series of star signings - George Stephenson (and therefore his son Robert, both also Quakers) as well as a pivotal, driven Quaker cotton and sugar merchant, James Cropper. Another key figure, like Sanders a corn merchant and Quaker, was Henry Booth. He became arguably the world's first full-time professional railway manager and took to his new profession with great enthusiasm. Amongst many other contributions he invented screw couplings, championed standard gauge with George Stephenson; and even shared the prize for Rocket, winner of the Rainhill trials.

Me being first and above all a railway person rather than a historian, this is a good point to take a railway detour. Stephenson and Cropper ironically, despite their devotion to the railway cause and common religious background, became mortal enemies and they were to fight with each other, and through their sons, for the next twenty years as Liverpool railways reached down to London. Cropper comes out poorly in all railway histories and we laugh at his views now, but we have the benefit of hindsight. Railway technology was new and nobody knew what would work at scale and what wouldn't. There was a personality clash of strong wills between the fiercely proud engineering genius Stephenson and hardened, calculating and fervently religious Cropper. Cropper argued vehemently for fixed cable steam engines as motive power for the L&MR, but George (and Robert), abetted by Booth, destroyed this idea forever at Rainhill in 1829 with the locomotive Rocket. Cropper was a sore loser and he and George battled on every subsequent point. Many years later Cropper's son was instrumental in the London & Birmingham Railway's failed 'small engines' policy, which was designed to prevent Robert supplying his better, bigger and more powerful locomotives to it.

Back to 1822, and Sandars and Cropper began to assemble a 'dream team' of Liverpool luminaries to raise the money and fight the Parliamentary battles that would be necessary to thwart the canal owners and get the railway built. They co-opted Scot John Gladstone (from my part of the world, Leith in Edinburgh) who, while not a dissenter, was nonetheless also a religious outsider. He worshipped in the same place as them, the Renshaw Street Unitarian Chapel, and they were all neighbours in and around Rodney Street, Liverpool. Gladstone pulled in his friend John Moss, and by 1825 avuncular Liverpool mayor Charles Lawrence had joined the team as a traditional Tory, Anglican figurehead. Gladstone, Moss and Lawrence seem to have been chosen not just for their vast wealth but also because they represented the mainstream Liverpool establishment: they were slave owners, members of the 'West India Interest'. In time this whole mixed-up group, which dominated early British railway development, became known as the 'Liverpool Party' or sometimes, because of their pushy approach to building railways, the 'Liverpool Gang'.

In 1823, in parallel with the struggle to finance the railway and get parliamentary approval, things began to heat up. On Gladstone's sugar plantations in Demerara, in the West Indies, a slave rebellion took place which was quickly and cruelly put down (pictured). Moss, who also had plantations on Demerara which had been unaffected by the rebellion, blithely wrote to his friend hoping the gibbets in which executed slaves were exhibited would be removed since they

increased the bad spirit . . . when we consider that the Negroes were not much to blame.

Meanwhile Cropper was in London and travelling frenetically around Britain and Ireland reviving the dormant anti-slavery campaign. This had been sleeping since 1807 when the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire, but after the Demerara Rebellion Cropper was aiming for a bigger prize, the abolition of slavery itself.

In the Winter of 1823-4 Cropper and Gladstone, at first using pseudonyms, fought an epic battle of letters on the ethics of slavery in the Liverpool press. Gladstone was widely thought to have won this, charging (correctly) that Cropper was a hypocrite: slaves produced his cotton, even if he didn't own the slaves himself:

In the Mercury of last Friday there is a long tirade against West India Slavery, well mixed up with East India Sugar. I am told, that Mr. Cropper is the author of it, and I am inclined to believe he is, from the mistatements and exaggeration with which it abounds . . . whilst he leniently lets off . . . his slave-owning connexions in the United States, who consign their cotton, the produce of the labour of slaves, to his house in Liverpool for sale.

Cropper, however, won the war, and slavery was abolished ('emancipation') in 1833, not long after the L&MR opened its doors on 15 September 1830, less triumphantly than Crossrail because of the mowing down of MP William Huskisson by Rocket on that fateful day. Nowadays we think of the slave owners as having the last laugh, since they were paid handsome compensation by the British Government, ￡20m (now ￡2bn), and Gladstone was the country's largest single beneficiary. Much of this money was ploughed into railways, not least by Gladstone himself. At the time, however, it was seen as a defeat of the West India Interest and Cropper, Booth and several other L&MR Quaker stalwarts campaigned to the end to have the compensation amount reduced or not paid at all.

As far as I can tell, of the ten or twenty key people at the heart of the L&MR and its subsequent follow-on railways, such as the Grand Junction Railway and the London & Birmingham Railway (which became together the world's first inter-city railway, and we know today as the WCML), only the Stephensons didn't have a public position on slavery. The abolitionist dissenting faction were certainly the instigators of the great enterprise, and were possibly dominant, but the main public roles such as chairman were invariably held by members of the slave-owning West India Interest. Maybe the Quakers were complicit in this for reasons of 'optics'? (The Test & Corporations Act was abolished in 1828.) The factions profoundly disagreed with each other on the biggest moral and economic issue of the day, slavery abolition, Brexit with bells on. But they always worked together to further the railway cause. On either side of the abolition argument, the protagonists do genuinely seem to have believed in railways as not just a means to enrich themselves (though they did), but to make the world better. Cropper thought that railways were a way to break the vested interest of slave owners.

It's worth noting that the L&MR was destined not to become an important part in the slave system supply chain after all. From the start, against the predictions of its founders, it made its money from passengers rather than freight, and although it did carry cotton traffic, much of that continued by canal, at much reduced rates.

In researching my dissertation, I was privileged to spend many hours poring through the records of the L&MR, which are kept in the wonderful National Archives in Kew (anyone can do this, for free, but you must go through a process). Having spent my lifetime around railway administration documents it was fascinating to see how many of the themes faced by these pioneers were the same as the ones we face today: monitoring revenues; fuel consumption; staff discipline; a constant eye on all costs, no matter how trivial; rail wear; improving performance; dealing with the weather, and drunk passengers; safety; renewal or repair of this or that asset. In these board minutes, probably hand-written by Booth and signed off each week by Lawrence, all the key characters appear, Gladstone represented by his son Robertson, also a slave owner. What the railway records don't show, or even hint at, is the monumental battle they were fighting with each other outside the railway boardroom, on whether to enslave people. Or not.

If anyone's interested the dissertation is here. In it you will find references to these points and many more. It's a fascinating railway story. I plan to develop it further, so if anyone spots any errors or has new angles, please let me know!