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Transatlantic Discontinuity? The Clapham Sect's Influence in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2019

Ryan J. Butler
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Abstract

William Wilberforce and his coterie of evangelical activists have regularly attracted research. Attention, however, has focused almost exclusively on the group's efforts in Britain, with little scholarly work to date on its connections and trajectories overseas. This article examines the influence of Clapham thought and activity in the early American republic. By tracing transatlantic correspondence and reconstructing international relationships, it unveils the direct influence of Clapham theological understandings, notably in their challenge to received interpretations of racial inequality and competing national virtues. Less directly, as Clapham principles shaped Britain's policing of the seas and became enacted in diplomatic decisions, British moralism created friction and resentment with the U.S. government. Although the threads of overt ideological influence by the Clapham Sect appear thin with respect to antislavery, more nuanced influences in terms of race, theology, and empire reveal profound contextual challenges. Yet, the factors limiting the Clapham Sect's impact are as instructive as the influences because they illuminate the contrasts across the Atlantic, which turn out in this case to be more important than the continuities. Transnational approaches to history have often erred by overlooking the transformation of religious and moral ideas across borders, leaving our understanding of transatlantic abolitionism theologically impoverished. By situating Britain's most famous abolitionist group in a wider context, this article exposes the neglected role of race and competing moralities in nineteenth-century international religious history, confounding notions of simple transference of ideas and intellectual continuity across the Atlantic.

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Articles
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Church History , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 672 - 695
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2019 

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Footnotes

While this article bears the name of one author, it is deeply indebted to the comments and criticisms of many, including James Bradley, Christopher Brown, Matthew Wyman-McCarthy, Samuel Bray, the warm community of the Baylor History Department faculty and graduate students, and the anonymous reviewer for this journal. I am grateful to each of them.

References

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2 Sir James Stephen originally placed the Clapham members together in a single study in 1844: “The Clapham Sect,” Edinburgh Review 161 (1844): 251–307. Subsequent investigations, though, did not emphasize the collective dimension of the Clapham party until Ernest Howse, Marshall, Saints in Politics: The “Clapham Sect” and the Growth of Freedom (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953)Google Scholar.

3 Howse appreciatively contended that, despite factors such as the French Revolution and industrialization, which produced fierce support for established laws and institutions among Britain's upper/governing classes, the Claphamites—believing much of the former way of life itself to be in question—advocated for wholesale social reform: Saints in Politics, 4. From a more critical perspective, Ford Brown argued that amid these uncertain times, evangelicals led by Wilberforce sought to seize control of the government to ensure their values would be enforced on the nation: Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 1–11. Meanwhile, Boyd Hilton suggested that the moderate evangelicalism of the Clapham Sect, with its emphasis on the atonement, profoundly shaped ideas of social redemption and economic conduct in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 218–236. For other older treatments, see Spring, David, “The Clapham Sect: Some Social and Political Aspects,” Victorian Studies 5, no. 1 (September 1961): 35–48Google Scholar; Hennell, Michael M., John Venn and the Clapham Sect (London: Lutterworth, 1958)Google Scholar; M. G. James, “The Clapham Sect: Its History and Influence” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1950); and Warren Bryan Martin, “The ‘Saints’ of Clapham: Their Motivation and Their Work” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1954).

4 Beginning with Hilton, a prominent approach has been to examine the Clapham group in the context of economics and business. In a recent PhD thesis, Gareth Atkins utilizes prosopographical techniques to show that while ideas played an important role in the evangelical activity of the early nineteenth century, political and commercial adroitness provided the sinew for the Clapham movement, which drew its strength from a well-organized system of officialdom and patronage: “Wilberforce and His Milieux: The Worlds of Anglican Evangelicalism, c. 1780–1830” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2009). In another recent dissertation, Roshan Allpress employs the Clapham Sect as an extended case study to demonstrate the growth of philanthropy, principally owing to shifts in mercantile and religious networks—as distinct from changes in British imperial identity or political culture: “Making Philanthropists: Entrepreneurs, Evangelicals and the Growth of Philanthropy in the British World, 1756–1840” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2015). An equally significant trend is attention to family biography and kinship networks: Tolley, Christopher, Domestic Biography: The Legacy of Evangelicalism in Four Nineteenth-Century Families (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stott, Anne, Wilberforce: Family and Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kuper, Adam, Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Regarding the impact of Clapham writings, see John Wolffe, “William Wilberforce's Practical View (1797) and Its Reception,” in “Revival and Resurgence in Christian History,” ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, Studies in Church History 44 (2008): 175–184. Clapham figures have also been a common subject of biography, significantly: Hague, William, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London: Harper, 2007)Google Scholar; Stott, Anne, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Meacham, Standish, Henry Thornton of Clapham, 1760–1815 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 John Wolffe commenced his contribution to InterVarsity Press's five-volume series on the history of evangelicalism by discussing the Claphamites’ social reform ventures: Wolffe, John, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2007)Google Scholar. David Bebbington locates the Clapham group in the context of the humanitarian impact of evangelicalism, contending that Wilberforce and his circle owed their theoretical outlook to enlightenment philosophic ideals—“benevolence, happiness, liberty”—but that their evangelical faith imparted the will to act: Bebbington, David, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989), 47Google Scholar. For other relevant accounts of transatlantic evangelicalism, see Carwardine, Richard J., Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978)Google Scholar; O'Brien, Susan, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (October 1986): 811–832CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yoon, Young Hwi, “The Spread of Antislavery Sentiment through Proslavery Tracts in the Transatlantic Evangelical Community, 1740s–1770s,” Church History 81, no. 2 (June 2012): 348–377CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wolffe, John, “Transatlantic Visitors and Evangelical Networks, 1829–61,” in “International Religious Networks,” ed. Gregory, Jeremy and McLeod, Hugh, Studies in Church History: Subsidia 14 (2012), 183–193CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the role of black actors in shaping Christianity in the Atlantic world, see Saillant, John, “Antiguan Methodism and Antislavery Activity: Anne and Elizabeth Hart in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic,” Church History 69, no. 1 (March 2000): 86–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sensbach, Jon F., Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

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35 While scholars debate Clarkson's religious identity, his insistence on his unrighteousness and stockpiling all hope in the atonement place him squarely in the evangelical camp of the Claphamites. Against the charges of American slaveholders, Clarkson affirmed “more than ever … the doctrine of the Atonement or that the Death, or the Blood, or the Sacrifice of Christ does … procure us Salvation after Death, and that nothing else can procure it. It is clear that man of himself can do nothing to please God and if so what can he do to merit Heaven when his best efforts come through a corrupt medium”: Thomas Clarkson to “Richard,” 9 September 1846, Thomas Clarkson Papers, Box 4, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. Similarly, in Clarkson's deathbed confession: “All my works and righteousness are as filthy rags. I trust only in the Atonement, the sacrifice, the blood shed on the cross for washing away my sins and entrance into Heaven”: Lewis, Donald M., The Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography: 1730–1860 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 1:228–229Google Scholar.

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