It’s perfectly legitimate for Cambridge University to seek to understand its history, warts and all. But the University’s final report of its ‘Legacies of Enslavement Advisory Group’, established in 2019 to investigate the university’s historic links with slavery, is short on facts and long on opinions. It also fails to consider Cambridge’s links with the noble cause of anti-slavery.

It is hardly surprising that Cambridge should have been associated with slavery. The Atlantic slave trade and West Indian slavery were integral to the British empire between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet the report tells us that no ‘Cambridge institutions directly owned any plantations that exploited enslaved people’.

Instead, the Advisory Group focus in their report on ‘individuals closely associated with Cambridge and its colleges’. No one today would hold a university responsible for the subsequent actions and opinions of the students it educated. Yet this report proceeds on this basis, relying on ‘guilt by association’. Much of the evidence is not about Cambridge but individuals linked to it in tenuous ways.

Cambridge is held to be complicit in slavery because a number of those who established the Virginia Company in the early seventeenth century were educated there. The university is apparently shamed by ‘the parents of Cambridge students’ who invested in the Royal African Company which traded in slaves.

Individuals who did nothing to further slavery are also shamed, such as Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology and teacher of Charles Darwin. Sedgwick received a legacy, after the emancipation of slaves in the British empire in 1833, from a woman whose family had previously owned a plantation. Or take Henry Coulthurst, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician, the vicar of Halifax, and a prominent abolitionist. Coulthurst’s father and brothers owned plantations in the West Indies, and the report condemns him for their sins. He might more appropriately be praised for his opposition to the slave trade.

Even Thomas Clarkson, second only to William Wilberforce in the campaign to abolish the slave trade, is fair game because of his ‘gradualism and elitism’ and his realism in accepting that slavery could only be ended by compensating slaveholders. Clarkson and other Cambridge abolitionists should be ‘interrogated’, we are told, because they followed different strategies from those advocated by the Cambridge Advisory Group two centuries later. Clarkson was the very hero of the movement. He rode through Englandfor years, stopping to convene meetings to raise awareness of the hated trade while holding aloft his famous image of the innards of a slave ship.

The report is intolerant of different views and ignorant of context. The authors are appalled that during the American Civil War many Cambridge students supported the Confederacy, the southern slaveholding states that seceded from the Union, and that Charles Kingsley, then Regius professor of history, gave lectures endorsing the Confederacy’s right to secede. The authors seem not to know that these views were commonplace in Britain, especially among the governing class. The Union’s imposition of import tariffs to pay for the war; the struggles with Britain over ‘rights of search’ on the high seas; the blockade of Southern ports, depriving Lancashire of cotton; and traditional British support for national self-determination led many Britons to favour the Confederacy. Cambridge students merely reflected a section of national opinion.

There is little sensitivity and respect for literature either, as in the case of the poet John Donne. Donne was educated in Oxford, receiving an honorary degree from Cambridge. Geographical references, images drawn from the age of exploration, and metaphors based on voyaging were frequently used by him in poems that many consider among the greatest literary works of the Renaissance. Yet in a few words Donne, who had nothing to do with slavery, is set down as a colonialist and white elitist. There is no mitigation in literary genius.

Worst of all is to write about ‘legacies of enslavement’ in Cambridge with only the most cursory treatment of the university’s many associations with antislavery.

Cambridge University was one of the communities, alongside whole cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds, which had its own list of subscribers to the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in 1787. Everyone has heard of William Wilberforce, the society’s leading spirit, and many will know the name of Clarkson: both were educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge in the early 1780s. But fewer will know of the Clapham Sect, evangelical Christian families, gathered around Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common in the 1780s and 1790s, who led the abolition campaign. And no one will be able to appreciate the links between Clapham and Cambridge from reading this report. Yet Cambridge men were prominent in the Sect. They included Wilberforce himself; Henry and John Venn, father and son, successive pastors at Holy Trinity; Charles Simeon, of King’s College, Cambridge and the minister at Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge; and Isaac Milner, president of Queen’s College.

Leading figures in the Anti-Slavery Society, which campaigned for emancipation after 1823, included two men educated in Cambridge, George Stephen and Thomas Babington Macaulay, the famous historian, who spoke brilliantly at the Society’s first mass meeting. Both were sons of leaders of the Clapham Sect. A portrait by Reynolds of the Anti-Slavery Society’s president, Prince William Frederick, second duke of Gloucester, hangs to this day in the Hall in Trinity College, Cambridge. The second earl Grey, prime minister when slavery was abolished, was educated at Trinity.

The name of Peter Peckard, Master of Magdalene College, deserves more than just a single passing reference in the report. In a sermon in 1784, he denounced the slave trade as a ‘sin against the light of nature, and the accumulated evidence of divine Revelation’. The following year, as Vice-Chancellor, Peckard set the question: ‘Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?’ for the annual Latin essay prize. It was won by Clarkson for an essay on the Atlantic slave trade which was declaimed in the university’s Senate House. Three years later, Peckard published his famous pamphlet Am I not a Man and a Brother?, a criticism of concepts of African inferiority. Its title became the slogan of the antislavery movement. Peckard was also a supporter of Olaudah Equiano, the African-born abolitionist.

There is no statue of Peter Peckard in Cambridge and it is unlikely one will be erected on the evidence of this report, which does all it can to ignore him, and others like him. In any case, Cambridge is more concerned to pull statues down than to commemorate its true heroes.