The European Slave Trade Abolished

This series has three easy 5-minute installments. This first installment: First British Opposition to Slavery.

Introduction
Slavery has, alas, had been part of world civilization from the beginning. The saddest part is that it has been so universal among the many cultures of the world. The English-speaking peoples just went along with this evil.

From its introduction in Virginia in 1619, slavery spread throughout the English colonies in North America. During the late years of the seventeenth century and throughout the greater part of the eighteenth, negro slaves were held in England. In 1764 there were more than twenty thousand in London alone, and there they were openly bought and sold.

In the British West Indies traffic in negro slaves early attained greater proportions than on the American Continent. From the days of John Hawkins (1562) dates the beginning of English enterprise in the New World, and his slave-trading voyages, in which he carried human cargoes to the Spanish colonists in the West Indies, were followed by a great increase in the traffic among those islands. During the first quarter of the eighteenth century the English slave-trade there reached its height, and tens of thousands of slaves were imported each year, not only into the Spanish colonies, but into the British as well, no fewer than seventy thousand being taken to Jamaica alone between 1752 and 1762.

By the passage of the Act of 1833 abolishing slavery throughout the British colonies, marked a turning point in world history.

This selection is from A History of Slavery and Serfdom by John Kells Ingram published in 1895. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

John Kells Ingram (1823-1907) was an Irish economist and poet who connected his economics to the study of slavery.

Time: 1833

It may be truly said that from the latter part of the seventeenth century, when the nature of the slave-trade began to be understood by the public, all that was best in England was adverse to it. Among those who denounced it — besides some whose names are now little known but are recorded in the pages of Clarkson –were Baxter, Sir Richard Steele, Southerne (in Oroonoko), Pope, Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Savage, and, above all, Cowper (in Charity and The Task), Thomas Day (author of Sandford and Merton), Sterne, Warburton, Hutcheson, Beattie, John Wesley, Whitefield, Adam Smith, Millar, Robertson, Doctor Johnson, Mrs. Barbauld, Paley, Gregory, Gilbert Wakefield, Bishop Porteus, and Dean Tucker.

The question of the legal existence of slavery in Great Britain and Ireland was raised in consequence of an opinion given in 1729 by York and Talbot, Attorney-and Solicitor-General at the time, to the effect that a slave by coming into these countries from the West Indies did not become free and might be compelled by his master to return to the plantations. Chief Justice Holt had expressed a contrary opinion; the matter was brought to a final issue by Mr. Granville Sharpe in the case of the negro Somerset. It was decided by Lord Mansfield, in the name of the whole bench, on June 22, 1772, that as soon as a slave set his foot on the soil of the British Isles he became free. In 1776 it was moved in the House of Commons by David Hartley, son of the author of Observations on Man, that “the slave-trade was contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men” but this motion —- the first which was made on the subject — failed: public opinion on the question was far from being yet fully ripe.

The first persons in England who took united practical action against the trade were the Quakers, inspired by the humane sentiments which had been expressed so early as 1671 by their founder, George Fox. In 1727 they declared it to be “not a commend able or allowed” practice; in 1761 they excluded from their society all who should be found concerned in it and issued appeals to their members and the public against the system. In 1783 there was formed among them an association “for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West Indies, and for the discouragement of the slave-trade on the coast of Africa.” This was the first society established in England for the purpose.

The Quakers in America had taken action on the subject still earlier than those in England. The Pennsylvania Quakers advised their members against the trade in 1696; in 1754 they issued to their brethren a strong dissuasive against encouraging it in any manner; in 1774 all persons concerned in the traffic, and in 1776 all slaveholders who would not emancipate their slaves, were excluded from membership. The Quakers in the other American provinces followed the lead of their brethren in Pennsylvania. The persons among the American Quakers who labored most earnestly and indefatigably on behalf of the Africans were John Woolman (1720-1773) and Anthony Benezet (1713-1784), the latter a son of a French Huguenot driven from France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The former confined his efforts chiefly to America and indeed to his coreligionists there; the latter sought, and not without a large measure of success, to found a universal propaganda in favor of abolition. A Pennsylvanian society was formed in 1774 by James Pemberton and Doctor Benjamin Rush, and in 1787 (after the war) was reconstructed on an enlarged basis under the presidency of Benjamin Franklin. Other similar associations were founded about the same time in different parts of the United States.

The next important movement took place in England. Doc tor Packard, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who entertained strong convictions against the slave-trade, proposed in 1785, as subject for a Latin prize dissertation, the question, “An liceat invitos in servitutem dare.” Thomas Clarkson resolved to compete for the prize. Reading Anthony Benezet’s Historical Account of Guinea, and other works in the course of his study of the subject, he became so powerfully impressed with a sense of the vile and atrocious nature of the traffic that he ere long determined to devote his life to the work of its abolition — a resolution which he nobly kept. His essay, which obtained the first prize, was translated into English in an expanded form by its author and published in 1786 with the title Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. In the process of its publication, he was brought into contact with several persons already deeply interested in the question; among these were Granville Sharp, William Dillwyn (an American by birth, who had known Benezet), and the Reverend James Ramsay, who had lived nineteen years in St. Christopher, and had published an Essay on Treatment and Conversion of the African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies.

The distribution of Clarkson’s book led to his forming connections with many persons of influence, and especially with William Wilberforce, who, having already occupied himself with the subject, went fully into the evidence bearing on it which Clarkson laid before him, and, as the result of his inquiries, under took the Parliamentary conduct of the movement which was now decisively inaugurated. A committee was formed on May 22, 1787, for the abolition of the slave-trade, under the presidency of Granville Sharp, which after twenty years of labor succeeded, with the help of eminent men, in effecting the object of its foundation, thus removing a great blot on the character of the British nation and mitigating one of the greatest evils that ever afflicted humanity. It is unquestionable that the principal motive power which originated and sustained their efforts was a Christian principle and feeling. The most earnest and unremitting exertions were made by the persons so associated in investigating facts and collecting evidence, in forming branch committees and procuring petitions, in the instruction of the public and in the information and support of those who pleaded the cause in Parliament. To the original members were afterward added several per sons, among whom were Josiah Wedgwood, Bennet Langton (Doctor Johnson’s friend), and, later, Zachary Macaulay, Henry Brougham, and James Stephen.

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