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Banastre Tarleton's most evil act, in my mind, is his consistent support of the Slave Trade once he was Member of Parliament for Liverpool. Liverpool depended on the Trade, and it can be said that Tarleton was only doing his job representing his constituents: but it was a very dirty job.

The man he most opposed was William Wilberforce, who fought a forty-year battle to abolish slavery. Once he'd won a victory in 1806-7 when the Slave Trade was made illegal by the British parliament, he kept on fighting until slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire: he died in 1833, a few days after hearing that the Bill making slavery illegal had just succeeded in the House of Commons. Definitely a Good Guy.

The following information about the opposition between Tarleton and Wilberforce -- on slavery and on one other matter which might make us think awhile before pinning labels on people -- comes from Wilberforce by John Pollock, Lion Publishing, Tring, UK, 1977.

In April 1791, Wilberforce, Independent MP for Yorkshire, tried to get through a Bill "To prevent the farther importation of African Negroes into the British Colonies and Plantations," which went before a Select Committee chaired by Sir William Dolben, who wrote a long report of the discussion. After Wilberforce's impassioned speech, Tarleton, newly elected MP for Liverpool, spoke next. This is how Dolben reports him:

"He begins with saying the ingenuity, the amplification, the pathetic eloquence of the Hon Gentleman had worked no conviction on his mind.... His arguments are only, that the Trade had been sanctioned by Parliament and they could not give it up without break of faith; the value of the Trade; and then digressed into a downright scold of the Ministers... that the men who would destroy the Trade are fanatic dreamers."

Dolben dismisses Tarleton's argument as saying nothing more than that the Trade was profitable to Liverpool.

Tarleton's words, recorded by someone other than Dolben, were: "A religious inspiration seemed to have got possession of the other side of the House, and a revelation of it was partly communicated to some of those amongst whom he had the honour to sit."

(Tarleton was a Whig, and the Tories under Pitt were in power: Tarleton was going against many of his Whig colleagues, including their leader Charles James Fox, in defending the Trade. Fox was one of Wilberforce's strongest allies on Abolition, despite the immense difference in morality otherwise between the rakehell Fox and the Christian Wilberforce.)

No question: on this issue, Wilberforce was a Good Guy and Tarleton was a Bad Guy. But that wasn't the only issue where they crossed political swords. Again, this information comes from Pollock's biography of Wilberforce.

In 1795, when the country was seething with discontent, the Tory government under Pitt introduced Bills to prevent what they called "Seditious Meetings": in other words, banning public demonstrations and restricting freedom of speech: they were rapidly nicknamed the Gagging Bills. Wilberforce supported the Tories: the liberty-loving Whigs under Fox launched into them, and this time Tarleton was with his colleagues.

Wilberforce, speaking in support of the Gagging Bills, incautiously used some military metaphors, and this gave the war hero Tarleton his chance. He ripped into Wilberforce, saying that he had, "stumbled over the parapet of prerogative into the ditch of despotism. It was necessary to strip him of that pomp of language, that solemnity of manner which he had affected, those sophisticated sentiments with which he attempted to colour his support of the present measure."

On this issue, Tarleton was the Good Guy, and Wilberforce, I regret to say, was the Bad Guy.

Copyright Linden Salter, 2002