The Mysterious Disappearance of Morgan Godwyn: Rethinking Press Censorship and the Debates over Slavery in the Early British Empire

Abstract

In the spring of 1685, Morgan Godwyn, a minister who had served in Virginia and Barbados for more than 15 years, disappeared after publishing a book condemning the slave trade, and in 1687, he died. This paper is an attempt both to explain the mystery surrounding his death by providing a context for it, and to explore the limits of our vision as historians by examining how censorship worked in late seventeenth century England and its empire and how those very restraints limit what we can see and hear as historians. I will argue that Godwyn probably died for criticizing slavery in a world where the name of the King of England, James II, was synonymous with the slave trade. James II was personally responsible, as director of the Royal African Company which had a legal monopoly on the slave trade, for the importation of literally 100,000 souls (that we can count via the slave trade database) from Africa to the new world in the decade of the 1680s alone. That same King believed he was God’s anointed servant, responsible to no-one, ruling by divine right. Godwyn’s public condemnation of the slave trade (at Westminster Abbey, in London in 1685), a sermon he then had published-- essentially accused James II of making a Faustian bargain with the Devil. This paper is a meditation on how power shaped what could be published, rendering many people "dumb" or mute, at least to our ears, which are attuned to the published past, from whence we tell our histories. Consequently we have failed to see how extensively slavery was debated before 1775, partly because we have not been looking in the right places, but mostly because we have not been reading underneath and behind censorship's veil.

Keywords: slavery, censorship, Morgan Godwyn, divine right of kings, absolutism, dumb, history of the book, slave trade, royal African company, religion, debates over slavery, king, publishing, minister, death

JEL Classification: J00, J24, J41, J47, G00, G14, K00, K11, K13