Hochschild and historians generally treat his book as a reliable source for the factual details.
Clarkson’s book and the historiographical tradition it spawned are highly controversial among historians.
Anita Rupprecht puts it like this: “Clarkson’s History established a heroic British narrative of humanitarian action that remained largely intact until the period of decolonisation in the middle of the last century. As is well known, Eric Williams’s dismissal of that version of events set terms for a vigorous historiographical debate that still rages today.”[1]
The story about the Zong Rupprecht analyzed in her article is particularly interesting, because Clarkson himself claims it was pivotal for mobilizing. She traces how this story is used for dramatic effect by later authors, among them your second source for this post, Hochschild (“David Hochschild’s recent populist abolition history, Bury the Chains, also refers to the event to help set a dramatic scene.”) and also how Clarkson himself changed the story later on in other publications, where “he rewrites it to fit his purpose and the moment.”
She analyzes him as a propagandist: “Given the moral, political and aesthetic issues at stake, one of the significant rhetorical strategies deployed by propagandists, as many critics have noted, was to write endlessly about how it was, in fact, impossible to represent the Middle Passage at all. [...] Perhaps the most famous illustration of the replacement of description by ‘unspeakability’ occurs in the introduction to Thomas Clarkson’s History. Clarkson had no personal experience of slavery but excelled in imaginatively evoking its barbarity in print. After celebrating the moral benefits that the abolition of the slave trade has delivered to the nation (rather than to the Africans) he takes his readers on a fictionalised ‘ethnographic tour’ to the coast of Africa.”
Her verdict is quite strong: “Clarkson’s sentimental appropriation of the Zong as both a true instance and an exemplary moment of generalised horror illustrates, of course, the power of propaganda as a form of mythologisation.”
Christopher Leslie Brown has similar things to say in Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (which can be considered a modern definitive work): “Clarkson’s History would provide the framework in which, for more than a century, the origins of the British antislavery movement would be understood. [...] This interpretive framework, what might be thought of as the Clarkson thesis, with its reliance on narration rather than explanation, with its emphasis on providential mission rather than human calculation, comported nicely with how most in Britain, deep into the twentieth century, preferred to reflect on the nation’s slave trading and slaveholding past.”[2]
Others, like Michael E. Jirik are merely unhappy about the central role in the story that historiographic tradition gave Clarkson: “The foundational role of Peckard and black abolitionism in Cambridge antislavery reveals how the university played a pivotal role in the fight against the slave trade and shifts focus from the singular figure of Clarkson to the evolution of antislavery at Cambridge. A sole focus on Clarkson overshadows the radicalism of black abolitionism and Peckard at the university. The story of antislavery at Cambridge begins not with Clarkson but instead with Peckard and the writings of Wheatley and Afro-British abolitionists such as Sancho and later Equiano.”[3]
J. R. Oldfield has corrected a bunch of Clarkson’s exaggerations and self-serving misrepresentations, namely his claim the Wedgwood cameos made cameos a general fashion in Britain or his claim to have organized a committe in Exeter, when actually someone else did that.[4]
Historians generally treat his book as a source and a source and its author need to be contextualized and corroborated. This is source criticism.
>>> Of all the examples you could pick, this is one area where I feel very confident in the reliability of Clarkson’s account. <<<
What is the reason for this confidence? The more heroic side-tales are not part of the parliament records afaik, Clarkson himself has written his account twenty years after the events, he is in most cases the only known source for them happening and he burned almost all of his personal documents.
>>> Just as The Media Very Rarely Lies, a respectable and highly scrutinized figure like Clarkson is rarely going to just fabricate specific factual details <<<
That’s not my experience. Like all others, the early modern period is chock full of people (even respectable and highly scrutinized figures) making all sorts of false and sometimes outrageous claims. A certain tendency to exaggeration and embellishment was not unusual in earlier times and not all of that even has to be intentional. Some tales grow over decades of retelling and false memories exist.
One example I like to give to students when familiarizing them with source criticism and how to evaluate witnesses is Ronald Reagan. On numerous occasions he talked about a specific incident that happened during World War II, even claimed he rewarded a Medal of Honor to someone for this, but it never actually happened.[5][6][7] It was a scene from the 1944 war movie Wing and a Prayer.
During my time at university senior citizens were allowed to fill up free spots in history lectures. When we talked about the bombings of Dresden, we also talked about how Nazi propaganda invented low-level strafing runs aimed at civilians by Allied airplanes. One of the senior citizens spoke up. He survived those very bombings as a child and he told us through tears that those strafing runs really happened and that we weren’t even there, but he was; it was heartbreaking to listen to. But we know for a fact that those strafing runs did not happen and that furthermore they would have been impossible.[8]
Do I believe that Clarkson is a notorious liar and invented his account out of whole cloth? No, I don’t think that. But I think it is possible, even likely, that some of it is embellished. Some of the historians I cited here have shown examples of him putting the narrative and its effect over the facts.
I think that he should be treated as the propagandist (a well-intentioned propagandist, with whose broader goal I very much sympathize) he was and that we should take his account with a much bigger grain of salt than this post does.
I think this post would have been better if it’s framing wouldn’t have simply taken his whole heroic narrative at face value and presented pretty much everything as a fact, starting with the title.
A framing more along the lines of “Clarkson was a pretty interesting historical figure who has carried out a successful campaign against one of the greatest evils of his time. Let’s take a look at his account of how he did that, what he has to say for himself and what we maybe can learn from that” would have been much better in my opinion.
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Anita Rupprecht (2007) ‘A Very Uncommon Case’: Representations of the Zong and the British Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade, The Journal of Legal History, 28:3, pp. 329-346.
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Christopher Leslie Brown (2006). Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. University of North Carolina Press, pp. 4-5.
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Michael E. Jirik (2020) Beyond Clarkson: Cambridge, Black Abolitionists, and the British anti-slave trade campaign, Slavery & Abolition, 41:4, pp. 748-771.
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J. R. Oldfield (1992) The London Committee and Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, The Historical Journal, 35, 2, pp. 331 −343.
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>>> However I think your comment implies that this undermines his specific claims more than it actually does. <<<
I assure you this is not the case. I don’t intend to convey an amount of underminding. I rather intend to convey the existence of conflicting evidence and scholarly opinions.
>>> I can’t access the whole of your source but this paragraph itself seems like a substantial exaggeration to me. I don’t think Oldfield is offering a whole litany of Clarkson’s mistakes and exaggerations, only a very small set of critiques. [...] Moreover the whole thesis of Oldfield’s article is that “the Committee’s activities [...] were central to the success of the early abolitionist movement”, which tends to supports the heroic-Clarkson narrative. <<<
That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. I haven’t only cited historians that are detractors of Clarkson. Oldfield is (as you say) quite sympathetic to Clarkson, but he still does his due diligence.
>>> What’s the source for him burning his papers? <<<
He himself. He merrily informs his executor about it in a letter.[1] He did it too save his executor the trouble to read through it all. His biographer Wilson complains about only some letters and religious essays remaining.[2]
>>> I still kinda think that he probably is representing himself fairly accurately. The claims that can be checked usually check out pretty well. Even under great scrutiny there are very few clear, glaring errors to point to. <<<
I think that’s a defensible judgment. But we don’t know. Some people only lie about stuff that can’t be easily checked.
T. Clarkson to A. Haldane, n.d. [1845], Thomas Clarkson Papers, St John’s College Library, Cambridge University
Ellen Gibson Wilson (1989), Thomas Clarkson: A Biography, p. 4