Biography

John Wesley, the son of the rector of Epworth, Lincolnshire, was born in 1703. After being educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, Wesley was ordained in 1725. After finishing his studies Wesley remained Oxford where he taught Greek.

At Oxford University John became a member of a small group which had gathered round his brother Charles Wesley. The group of Christians, which included George Whitefield and James Hervey, became known as the Holy Club or the Oxford Methodists.

In 1735 John Wesley and his brother Charles became missionaries in America. After three years with the English settlers in Georgia, Wesley returned to England and joined George Whitefield in Bristol. Wesley's passionate sermons upset the local clergy and he found their pulpits closed to him. To overcome this problem in 1739 Wesley built a Methodist Chapel in Bristol. Wesley and Whitefield also gave sermons in the open-air.

John Wesley continued to travel the country where he mainly visited poor neighbourhoods, and most of the people who attended his meetings were industrial workers or agricultural labourers. Wesley's main message was of God's love. He told the people who attended his meetings that if they loved God in return, they would "be saved from sin and made holy". Wesley also had a lot to say about personal morality. In his sermons he encouraged people to work hard and to save for the future. Wesley also warned against the dangers of gambling and drinking.

Although there were Methodist ministers, John Wesley encouraged people who had full-time jobs to become lay preachers. This gave working people valuable experience of speaking in public. Later, some of these went on to become leaders of trade unions and reform groups such as the Chartists.

Wesley found time to write a large number of books during his life-time. This included collections of psalms, hymns and sermons. He also founded and edited the Methodist Magazine. Wesley received over £30,000 in royalties from his writings. This was used for charitable work including the foundation of Kingswood School in Bristol. Wesley and his followers became known as Methodists. By the time John Wesley died in 1791, the Methodist movement had over 76,000 members.

These experiences fostered in Wesley an abhorrence of slavery, but it was not an abhorrence he felt able to act upon. In his journal, Wesley records meeting with people involved in the slave trade - including the slave-ship captain John Newton, now more famous as the author of the hymn "Amazing Grace". Newton's conversion to Christianity was later followed by a conversion to anti-slavery, but it is not recorded if he and Wesley discussed the issue. In 1772, the Somerset case, brought before the courts by Granville Sharp, put slavery in the news. Wesley, putting aside Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey (a book he described as marked by: "oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world") took up instead Some historical account of Guinea, a work of anti-slavery by the Philadelphia Quaker, Anthony Benezet. Wesley recorded his thoughts in his journal:

Wed. 12.-In returning I read a very different book, published by an honest Quaker, on that execrable sum of all villanies, commonly called the Slave-trade. I read of nothing like it in the heathen world, whether ancient or modern; and it infinitely exceeds, in every instance of barbarity, whatever Christian slaves suffer in Mahometan countries.

Clearly Benezet's work, and Lord Mansfield's deliberations in the case of James Somerset, gave Wesley some disquiet for, two years later, in 1774, he issued a short pamphlet called Thoughts Upon Slavery which went into four editions in two years. The pamphlet follows Benezet's work in many respects, discussing African topology and society, the method of procuring and transporting slaves, and the brutality of plantation life before advancing legal and moral arguments against both slavery and the slave trade. Wesley shows "that all slavery is as irreconcileable to Justice as to Mercy" before concluding, first with a direct address to the slave-trader and slave-owner, and finally with a prayer. The direct address is worth reproducing at length, as Wesley attacks the slave-trader with considerable passion:

Are you a man? Then you should have an human heart. But have you indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as Compassion there? Do you never feel another's pain? Have you no Sympathy? No sense of human woe? No pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow-creatures, was you a stone, or a brute? Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonizing creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Did not one tear drop from your eye, one sigh escape from your breast? Do you feel no relenting now? If you do not, you must go on, till the measure of your iniquities is full. Then will the Great GOD deal with You, as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands.

Wesley remained actively opposed to slavery until his death. In August 1787, he wrote to the Abolition Committee to express his support, and he pledged to reprint Thoughts Upon Slavery in "a new large edition". For some reason this fifth edition did not appear until 1792, a year after Wesley's death. In 1788, when the abolition campaign was at its height, he preached a sermon in Bristol, one of the foremost slave trading ports. In such a location, at such a time, an anti-slavery sermon could not have been preached without considerable personal risk to the preacher. Indeed, during the sermon a disturbance took place which Wesley recorded in his journal:

About the middle of the discourse, while there was on every side attention still as night, a vehement noise arose, none could tell why, and shot like lightening through the whole congregation. The terror and confusion were inexpressible. You might have imagined it was a city taken by storm. The people rushed upon each other with the utmost violence; the benches were broke in pieces, and nine-tenths of the congregation appeared to be struck with the same panic.

Wesley ascribed the confusion to "some preternatural influence. Satan fought, lest his kingdom should be delivered up." A more likely cause, perhaps, was a plot by slave-traders, anxious to disrupt a piece of abolitionist rhetoric being sounded deep in their territory. How strong this rhetoric was is impossible to tell as the 1788 sermon has not survived. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to assume that it was based in some measure on his pamphlet Thoughts Upon Slavery which was strongly argued. Wesley maintained an interest in the abolition movement until the end: on his death-bed, he was reading the Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, a text which Wesley discussed in his last letter - to William Wilberforce - written six days before he died, on 2 March 1791.

Bibliography

Selected Works

• Thoughts Upon Slavery (London: R. Hawes, 1774)
• Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., Bicentenary Issue, 8 vols, ed Nehemiah Curnock (London: The Epworth Press, 1938)
• Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., 8 vols, ed John Telford (London: The Epworth Press, 1931)
• Kitson, Peter, et al, eds, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 8 vols. (Contains Thoughts Upon Slavery)
• The Political Writings of John Wesley, ed. Graham Maddox (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998). (Contains Thoughts Upon Slavery)

Secondary Works: Biography and Special Studies

• Carey, Brycchan, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment,and Slavery, 1760-1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). I discuss Wesley at pages 145-51. Click here for more information
• Carey, Brycchan, 'John Wesley's "Thoughts Upon Slavery" and the Language of the Heart', The Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 86:3 (Autumn 2004), 269-84. [Bulletin Home Page]
• Green, V.H.H., John Wesley (London and New York: University Press of America, 1987). Useful, academic biography.
• Pollock, John, Wesley the Preacher (London: Lion, 1989). Readable, popular biography.