Abolition Movement

I

Introduction

Abolition Movement, popular political agitation aimed at ending the slave trade and slavery. Emerging in the late 18th century, it was the first large-scale attempt in modern times to mobilize public opinion in support of a humanitarian cause, leading to Britain’s withdrawal from the Atlantic slave trade in 1808 and the abolition of slavery throughout its empire in 1834. The movement also had a significant impact elsewhere, most notably in the United States where it contributed to the sectional tensions leading up to the American Civil War. The eradication of the slave trade and slavery in Africa and Asia subsequently became one of the declared aims of the European colonizing powers. Although no longer seen as pressing political issues in the West, debt bondage, the sale of children, and other practices analogous to slavery are still matters of public concern.

II

Background

Prior to the 1780s, the slave trade and slavery were generally accepted as facts of life. Britain had by that time become the world’s principal supplier of slaves and a major slave power in its own right. Moreover, the entire Atlantic trading system depended on human trafficking in slaves and slave-grown products. Nevertheless, from the early 18th century onwards, individual voices were raised in protest. Among the earliest were those of Quakers, Methodists, and the followers of similar religions who looked to their consciences rather than traditional authorities for moral guidance. Enlightenment thinkers also expressed their unease, their theories of the rights of man exposing the flimsiness of the arguments used to justify slavery and contrasting the behaviour required of citizens at home with what was permitted abroad.

It was over this latter issue that the first serious challenge to the institution of slavery arose. In Britain, unlike the colonies, slavery had never acquired a legal basis, most slaves being merely the personal servants of returning colonists. That was the case with James Somerset, an American slave, who had been brought to England by his owner and was now threatened with being sent back to Jamaica to be sold. Granville Sharp, a government clerk, having read in the Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) by the celebrated jurist William Blackstone the opinion that the moment that a slave set foot on English soil he became free, brought the case before the Court of King’s Bench with the result that Lord Chief Justice Mansfield ruled that Somerset should be set at liberty. The 1772 Mansfield ruling, although technically applicable only to the case in hand, effectively signalled the end of servitude in England.

III

The Attack on the Slave Trade

Nevertheless, it was another decade before a British abolitionist movement emerged. Meanwhile, the American War of Independence had removed one major obstacle to abolition by severing Britain’s connections with its North American colonies. The Revolutionary War also drew attention to the incompatibility of slavery with popular notions of liberty. This was a contradiction of which the Americans themselves were increasingly aware. Pennsylvania Quakers had already expressed their views by expelling slave owners from membership, and now a number of northern states had begun adopting laws providing for the gradual elimination of slavery.

It was in these circumstances that, in 1782, the Quakers of Philadelphia wrote to their London counterparts urging that they too should take a stand against slavery. The response was to establish a committee that, although small and entirely Quaker in membership, was effectively Britain’s first antislavery society. Quakers already knew a good deal about political lobbying from years of experience in protecting their own members from persecution. By the 1780s, however, the pressure for religious conformity had lessened, leaving them free to use their nationwide network of local and regional organizations for the benefit of others. Even so, it is unlikely that they would have achieved as much as they did had they not, in 1787, broadened their efforts by transforming their committee into the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787-1806) and recruited a number of talented non-Quakers, among them Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, who became the movement’s parliamentary spokesman, and Thomas Clarkson, who became its principal regional organizer and information gatherer.

Up to that time no clear distinction had been made between slavery and the slave trade. The new society, however, resolved to concentrate on the trade on the grounds that attacking both at the same time would have meant demanding more than Parliament and the public would have been willing to accept. Of the two, the trade was patently the more vulnerable. Whatever the horrors of slavery they hardly compared with those of the trade. Opinion, moreover, was readily alarmed by anything involving the confiscation of property, whereas the regulation of commerce had long been an accepted parliamentary responsibility.

The structure and methods adopted by the new society were destined to remain largely unchanged up to the 1830s and beyond. At the movement’s centre stood the London committee, made up of influential laymen, clerics, and Members of Parliament, whose responsibility it was to formulate policy, introduce Parliamentary motions, publish pamphlets, and speak for the movement as a whole. Much of its influence, however, derived from the support it received from the network of provincial auxiliaries to whom it delegated the task of collecting subscriptions, circulating petitions, organizing meetings and buttonholing political candidates. Some auxiliaries were little more than local church groups, mostly dormant but ready to be called on when needed, but others, especially those in the larger cities, were large and active bodies in their own right.

The response to the Society’s initial campaign in 1787 and 1788 astonished the abolitionists themselves. Manchester alone produced a parliamentary petition against the slave trade containing almost 11,000 signatures. In Sheffield, York, and other smaller towns the response was no less impressive. In all, some hundred petitions were collected containing about 60,000 signatures. Yet formidable though this was as a first attempt it was dwarfed by subsequent efforts, culminating in the great emancipation campaign of 1833 in the course of which 5,000 petitions containing some 1,500,000 signatures were presented to Parliament.

But for the French Revolution and the outbreak of war the campaign against the slave trade would in all probability have succeeded sooner than it did. As it was, fear of disturbing the political equilibrium forced the Society into hibernation for a decade. The trade was eventually ended without the need for large-scale public mobilization, largely as a result of the London Committee’s exploitation of planters’ fear of competition. During the course of the war Britain had acquired Trinidad, Guiana, and other former French possessions. The prospect of their being stocked with slaves so alarmed Britain’s own planters that when the abolitionists proposed banning further imports they did not demur. When it subsequently turned out that those were the only colonies where there was a significant demand for slaves, the traders were left with little to fight for, the result being that when, in 1807, the abolitionists proposed a comprehensive measure ending the trade to all colonies it was triumphantly passed by both Houses.

Hopes that, with the trade cut off, slavery would wither and die proved illusory. Meanwhile, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade having achieved its aim was replaced by the African Institution (1807-1827), the dual purpose of which was to persuade African slavers to mend their ways and other nations to withdraw from the trade. Once again, however, the results were disappointing. The French created a bad precedent by arguing that, having been denied the trade for the better part of two decades, they would require several years in which to recoup. Attempts to persuade Africans to engage in legitimate commerce proved equally unavailing. In spite of Britain’s continuing efforts the trade, carried on mostly in vessels of indeterminate nationality using flags of convenience, continued largely unabated.

IV

The Abolition of Slavery

What was most aggravating to Britain’s abolitionists was the West Indian planters’ obstinate refusal to reform. Like Britain’s North American colonists before them, they denied Parliament’s right to override the authority of their own assemblies. The abolitionists’ response was to launch the Society for the Amelioration and Gradual Abolition of Slavery (1823-1839), more generally known as the Anti-Slavery Society. Under the leadership of Thomas Fowell Buxton, who now took over from Wilberforce the role of leader and parliamentary spokesman, its policy was, as its full title indicates, essentially gradualist, the assumption being that by demanding too much all at once it would alienate Parliament. Otherwise, however, the campaign against slavery was largely a replay of the campaign against the trade, the indefatigable Thomas Clarkson once again taking to the road. Only in its final stages did the movement diverge from what had by that time become a well-established pattern. This was when a group led by George Stephen and Joseph Sturge, impatient at the lack of progress, broke away to form the Agency Anti-Slavery Society (1831-1834), hiring agitators to tour the country on its behalf and declaring that it would settle for nothing less than immediate and unconditional emancipation. Thus there were now two antislavery societies in Britain, one seeking to influence Parliament mainly from within by introducing motions and by lobbying members, the other rejecting gradualism and seeking to bring pressure to bear on it from without by appealing directly to the public conscience.

The early 1830s was a time of liberal fervour arising out of the campaign for parliamentary reform. Exploiting the mood of the moment, the Agency Society used every means at its disposal to drum up popular support, putting up posters, organizing public meetings, demanding pledges from parliamentary candidates, and circulating petitions. When the reformed Parliament met in January 1833 it was plain from the temper of the Commons that these efforts had succeeded and that the government would have to give way. Nevertheless, it soon became clear that there was no chance of getting a bill through both Houses unless it provided for the payment of compensation to slaveholders and a lengthy transitional period of so-called apprenticeship. The actual sum of compensation agreed, £20 million, was enormous, being not far short of the annual cost of running the country. But what most angered the Agency Society was the period of apprenticeship, originally supposed to last until 1840 although in the event terminated, largely on the planters’ own initiative, in 1838.