Thomas Fowell Buxton

English social reformer

• Born: April 1, 1786
• Birthplace: Castle Hedingham, Essex, England
• Died: February 19, 1845
• Place of death: Northrepps Hall, Norfolk, England

Buxton was long active in a variety of humanitarian causes, including prison reform and charitable relief, but he is best known for his sustained efforts to bring about the abolition of slavery.

Early Life

Thomas Fowell Buxton was the eldest son of Thomas Fowell Buxton of Earl’s Colne, Essex, and Anna, daughter of Osgood Hanbury of Holfield Grange, Essex. The Hanburys and their relations, the Gurneys, as well as many within their circle, were Quakers. Although the young Thomas was brought up in the Church of England, an affiliation he retained throughout his life, evangelical and Quaker influences upon him were strong. Because he was only six years old when his father died, his mother’s role was accentuated.

Buxton was sent to school in Kingston when only four and a half years old, but sickness caused his removal to the school of Charles Burney of Greenwich. He left school at the age of fifteen without having distinguished himself academically. In 1801 he first visited the home of the Gurneys at Earlham Hall on the outskirts of Norwich. The eleven youngsters, children of John Gurney, were his distant cousins, owing to the marriage of his aunt, Rachel Hanbury, to Richard Gurney, their uncle. With one of them, Hannah, the young “Fowell,” as he was now called, fell instantly in love.

Through the association with the Gurneys the Quaker influence upon Buxton was strengthened, and he also acquired a desire to give up what he now saw as idleness and to apply himself studiously to continuing his education. In 1802 he prepared himself for college, and in October, 1803, he entered Trinity College, Dublin. Upon passing his examinations, mostly with distinction, he received the university gold medal. On May 7, 1807, Buxton married Hannah Gurney.

At the age of twenty-one, Buxton cut an imposing figure. He was six feet, four inches tall and broad-chested, with the physique of an outdoor sportsman. His fondness for hunting and shooting remained with him longer than his splendid build. His first child, Priscilla, was born in February, 1808, and shortly after, through the good offices of his uncles, Sampson and Osgood Hanbury, he joined the brewery firm of Truman, Hanbury, and Company. In 1811 he became a partner and worked long hours to reform the company’s methods and bookkeeping. These improvements ensured that he would throughout the rest of his life have a comfortable income, affording him the leisure to pursue those philanthropic causes that had already begun to interest him.

Life’s Work

From the early years of his employment with the brewery firm, Buxton took an active part in charitable enterprises in the district of Spitalfields, where the brewery was. This district was a center for silk-weaving, a trade that suffered numerous vicissitudes, as during the depression of 1816, when starvation was widespread. Buxton’s first important public speech, at the Mansion House in 1816, raised more than forty-three thousand pounds for the relief of the poor of the area. This speech first brought Buxton to the attention of the famous reformer William Wilberforce, who had been largely instrumental in outlawing the slave trade in Great Britain in 1807.

Although this connection would later be of the utmost importance in Buxton’s career, for the time being a far greater influence upon him was his sister-in-law, Elizabeth (née Gurney) Fry and her circle, whose chief interest lay in prison reform. After his Mansion House speech, Buxton went through Newton jail, and this as well as other visitations resulted in his publication in 1818 of a volume titled An Inquiry Whether Crime and Misery Are Produced or Prevented by Our Present System of Prison Discipline . This work went through five editions within a year and led to the founding of the Society for the Reformation of Prison Discipline. Buxton’s zeal for prison reform also seems to have brought him to political awareness. He decided that his best chance for effecting changes would be as a member of Parliament.

Buxton stood for election in 1818 as candidate for Weymouth. Against all odds, despite the fact that he would not stoop to the electioneering methods then in vogue, he won. Thus he began his long parliamentary career, representing Weymouth for almost two decades, until he lost the election of 1837. Early in this career he served on two parliamentary select committees inquiring into capital punishment, a penalty he opposed, except for murder. In 1820 he supported Sir James Mackintosh’s motion to abolish the death penalty for forgery, which was then but one of the many offenses so punished.

That same year brought great personal tragedy, when Buxton’s eldest son died, followed by three of his daughters. After this loss he moved from his Hampstead house to Cromer Hall in Norfolk, in the district of his wife’s family. He soon returned to Parliament, however, and participated in bills concerning prisons and education, and inquiries into the Hindu practice of suttee and the slave trade. Increasingly, Wilberforce noticed Buxton with approval. Finally, on May 24, 1821, that great abolitionist wrote Buxton to ask for his help in the struggle to end slavery and, in the event that he himself should become unable to pursue the cause, to ask that Buxton would carry on the effort. Wilberforce’s request for help was reinforced by the dying prayer of Buxton’s sister-in-law, Priscilla Gurney, on behalf of the slaves.

So began a reorientation of Buxton’s parliamentary efforts. He was an active member of the African Institution. Besides Wilberforce, he worked with figures such as Zachary Macaulay, Stephen Lushington, and the Third Baron Suffield. The Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1823, with the purpose of collecting evidence and spreading information. On May 15, 1823, Buxton brought before the House of Commons a resolution for the gradual abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, on the grounds that that institution violated the principles contained in the British constitution and the Christian faith. The foreign secretary, George Canning, moved amendments that vitiated the real thrust of Buxton’s resolution by adopting a process of “amelioration” of the condition of slaves. Accordingly, the British government issued a circular to its colonial governors recommending certain reforms with regard to slaves. In essence, the West Indian planters denounced the advice to the governors as an attack upon their rights.

While Buxton thus did not meet with success in the House of Commons, it was clear that extraparliamentary opposition to slavery was growing, and that the popular if unenfranchised voice was becoming increasingly a factor in parliamentary politics. Reform was in the air. Although evangelicist and Quaker sections of the public may not have been beloved by members of Parliament, they usually were not disbelieved. Their petitions carried weight. One of them, said to have seventy-two thousand signatures, Buxton presented to Parliament in 1826, with a demand for better treatment for West Indian slaves. Parliament, he said, would have to enact reform measures, because the colonial governments would not. Furthermore, the petitioners wanted to end the system by which sugar produced by slave labor was subsidized by the British government. In other words, they raised the issue of free trade. Increasingly, the aims of the reformers were finding endorsement in the attitudes of the rank and file as well as the educated mind. Slavery was becoming abhorrent to the British conscience.

In 1829, Parliament voted to allow Catholic emancipation; in other words, Catholics could now hold civil and military office on equal terms with Anglicans. The death of King George IV in the following year required a general election, which in the existing climate of affairs almost ensured a movement in the general direction of reform. In April of 1831, Buxton, impatient with the government’s failure to act on the slavery issue, brought forward in Parliament a resolution for the abolition of slavery. His initiative failed because the reforming efforts of Parliament were then devoted to the House of Commons itself. When the Reform Act of 1832 finally became law, he and his supporters could hope that abolition would become reality.

So as to forestall the motion Buxton intended, the government promised in 1833 that it would introduce a bill to abolish slavery. The legislation the government proposed was a compromise, allowing compensation to slave owners and an apprenticeship period before slaves would receive complete freedom. The bill passed Parliament just after the death of Wilberforce and received the king’s assent on August 28, 1833. It would go into effect on August 1, 1834.

After his triumph on abolition of slavery, Buxton hoped to use that momentum to gain protection for the native Africans of the Cape Colony against “vagrancy” laws and other discriminatory acts. In 1835 he pressed for and obtained a select committee of the House of Commons to consider the state of the aborigines in the British Empire. His report on the aborigines, frequently referred to as the Buxton Report, became public in 1837. It called for sweeping protections for aboriginal rights, particularly with regard to native lands and customs. The spirit of this report animated the Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori of New Zealand in 1840, and there is little question that compliance with the treaty would have prevented the Maori Wars. In South Africa the report contributed to the Great Trek of the Afrikaners, or Boers (farmers), and the terrible divisiveness that ensued. The report was a high-flown idealistic statement that could not be made operational.

Buxton’s attention was now riveted upon the slave issue. In 1839 and 1840 he published two volumes, The African Slave Trade and its sequel, The Remedy . He recommended a larger naval patrol in West African waters, treaties with native chiefs to stop the slave trade, the purchase of Fernando Po as a headquarters, an expedition up the Niger River to make more treaties with native chiefs and to establish a model farm, and the forming of a company for introducing agriculture and commerce into Africa. For these purposes the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilisation of Africa was established. Buxton’s influence induced the British government to dispatch a Niger expedition that proved a failure and cost many lives.

In 1839 Buxton was suffering from ill health, so he toured abroad as a change of pace. He could not resist, however, turning his journey to valuable advantage by investigating the crimes of banditti and the state of Roman jails.

Buxton had lost his parliamentary seat in 1837. After his return to England he resumed private life, broken only by the queen’s granting him a baronetcy in 1840. He devoted himself to the cultivation of his estates and to land improvement. His essay on the management of his estates won the gold medal of the Royal Agricultural Society in 1845. Meanwhile, by the spring of 1843, his health was failing, and he died on February 19, 1845, at Northrepps Hall, Norfolk. Admirers raised a monument to him in Westminster Abbey.

Significance

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton’s life was one of almost constant toil for humanitarian goals. He wanted to save life and improve conditions of life. To an unusual degree his idealistic efforts were crowned with success, for he saw in his lifetime penal and judicial reform and, above all, the abolition of slavery throughout the British dominions. His account of how to end the African slave trade was vague and unrealistic in its optimistic vision, and the Niger expedition to end the slave trade that those writings inspired ended in fiasco. Nevertheless, Buxton was in large measure responsible for bringing to an end an institution that had tyrannized an entire race. That his health was gravely affected by his emotional response to the failed expedition attests his identification with and fervent support of a lifelong cause.

Bibliography

Barclay, Oliver. Thomas Fowell Buxton and the Liberation of Slaves. York, England: Sessions, 2001. Recent biography of Buxton. Contains illustrations and bibliography.

Buxton, Sir Thomas Fowell. The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy. London: J. Murray, 1840. Reprint. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968. This volume contains the two books that Buxton first published in 1839 and 1840. The first part contains many statistics on the extent of the slave trade, and the second part demonstrates Buxton’s vision of a civilized and Christianized Africa.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. Edited by Charles Buxton. London: John Murray, 1848. The principal source for knowledge of Buxton’s private life as well as much of his public life.

Gallagher, John. “Fowell Buxton and the New African Policy.” Cambridge Historical Journal 10 (1950): 36-58. Discusses the plans for the Niger expedition.

Great Britain, Parliament. Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements) with Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index. 2 vols. Facsimile reprint. Cape Town, South Africa: G. Struik, 1966. This important document shows what Buxton considered the best ways to protect aboriginal rights.

Harlow, Vincent, and Frederick Madden, eds. British Colonial Developments, 1774-1834. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1967. A series of important colonial documents, including a letter from Buxton.

Mottram, Ralph H. Buxton the Liberator. New York: Hutchinson, 1946. Dated and slim, but draws heavily from the published memoirs.

Pugh, Patricia M. Calendar of the Papers of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1786-1845. London: Swift, 1980. An important reference tool.

Walls, Andrew F. “The Legacy of Thomas Fowell Buxton.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 15, no. 2 (April, 1991): 74. Examination of Buxton’s campaign against slavery in Sierra Leone, featuring information about his background and other missionary work.