EXETER AND SLAVERY, 1846.

It is, of course, altogether ridiculous to apologise for events that happened and circumstances that pertained two centuries ago at a time when the world was chock-full of primitive cruelties.  The overwhelming impression made on me by a reading of Frazer's Golden Bough  {1900}  is how incredibly cruel all human societies were only one hundred and twenty years ago and we should never forget the cruelty of events in Russia, say, or in Germanys' Third Reich in the lifetime of us 'seniors'.  Nor, I have noticed, have cruelties and enslavements yet disappeared from the world.  Even if such apologies were not wholly ridiculous the citizens of Exeter would have no reason today to apologise for the slave trade.   Since the early nineteenth century Exeter has consistently carried a torch for the abolition of slavery.  First to support  the Acts of 1807  and 1833,  then to protest at the loopholes in the Acts exploited by British planters in the colonies and then to protest against the evil of slave-owning in the antebellum United States.    

Successive crowded public meetings were held in Exeter, often chaired  by one or anothert of our Mayors, to address the subject of slavery and to lobby Parliament for action.   Notably, in 1846  William Lloyd Garrison came across the ocean to  Exeter to speak and with him came Frederick Douglass.   Their names ought to be known to every American schoolchild, though I doubt if many of the history-starved, Black Lives Matter, young people who recently marched for they-knew-not-what, had ever heard of them.  The  next day after the 1846 meeting The Western Times  reported it in its leading article.  The meeting was, the editor wrote,  "one of the most important, unanimous and decided public meetings that this city ever witnessed".  It was held on Friday September 4th 1846 and Garrison and Douglass and others spoke to good effect to a crowded hall.

Rather quaintly, the writer of the Western Times article adds:  "We hope any Americans into whose hands this paper may fall....will not think that the people of Exeter are intermeddling improperly in their affairs but that they are animated by a spirit of pure benevolence and enlightened philanthropy."

And so I'm sure they were - purely benevolent and enlightendly philanthropic; and so they are still.    Good!  No need for apologies!  No need to take the knee!  Not that my rheumatism would allow it!