The British Antislavery Movement and the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807

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Introduction

In 1807 the British Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade within the British Empire, having already voted to use the country’s naval supremacy to abolish the trade in persons between other states. Policing the abolition of the slave trade and convincing other countries to assist Britain in this pursuit would be a goal of British foreign policy throughout the nineteenth century. By the late 1830s, slaves within the British Empire had been emancipated.

Although the notion that chattel slavery is utterly unjustifiable is ubiquitous today, in the mid-eighteenth century the institution appeared triumphant in colonial America. In particular, the trade in slave-cultivated sugar from the West Indies generated huge fortunes and intercontinental trade. This accounts for the belief, commonly held at the time, that the West Indies built Britain’s Atlantic economy. The vast wealth generated by West Indian sugar helped create a powerful lobby in Parliament, which supported the planting and thus the institution of slavery.

This report will attempt to explain how the institution of slavery, which seemed so strong within the British Empire in the mid eighteenth century, was under a sustained attack by the time of Parliament’s vote to abolish the slave trade in 1807. It examines the emergence of an organized abolitionist movement in Britain by 1787 and assesses how important this social movement was in achieving the passage of abolitionist legislation in 1807. Finally, it uses the findings of these observations to try to inform the contemporary movement of advocates for non-human animals.

Length limitations prevent this report from looking at many important and interesting questions. For example, this report is about abolitionism (the abolishment of the slave trade) within the British Empire in 1807, and as such does not look at abolitionism within other polities, other European Empires, or the United States of America—except where directly relevant to the British abolition. Importantly, this report has the explicit purpose of trying to causally explain the success of British abolition, and therefore is not an attempt to bear witness to one of history’s most appalling crimes against humanity. As such, it will not attempt to paint a picture of the horror and extreme brutality of colonial chattel slavery, but rather take this as given. Finally, this report has little to say about the many acts of resistance to slavery that the enslaved peoples themselves engaged in. This is because the historical consensus is that the threat of slave uprisings did not play a major role in the specific case of securing abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Indeed, the threat of slave uprisings was invoked far more by opponents of abolition than by supporters.¹ A full history of colonial anti-slavery would show that in many instances the actions of the enslaved themselves were integral to achieving liberation. For example, the uprisings through force of arms in St. Domingue in 1804 led to the founding of Haiti, which was the first black republic in history. Additionally, though unsuccessful at the time, the 1824 Demerara uprising would ultimately make attitudes in Britain more favourably disposed towards emancipation.²^,³ In the British abolitionist movement up until 1807, the role of the enslaved themselves was limited to those few former slaves who had the opportunity to shape British public opinion through their writings and speeches—such as Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano.⁴

One might wonder whether salient lessons can be learned from an eighteenth century social movement given the radical difference in social context compared with the present. It is worth emphasizing that at the very beginning of the time period this report covers, epoch-making events (such as the American and French Revolutions) had yet to occur—and Britain’s political culture and society were very different than today. However, out of all societies in this time period, Britain and its American colonies were most like Western liberal democracies. Each had strong civil societies, relative freedom of the press and association, a concept of limited government, and were partially democratic (even if democratic rights were severely restricted and limited by contemporary standards).

There are striking parallels between the early abolitionist movement and the animal advocacy movement. In both instances, activists were challenging institutions and practices that had been present for the entire history of humanity until that point, and which—even when viewed as regrettable—were seen as a necessary feature of human society. Just as with modern factory farming, the horrors of plantation slavery and the slave trade took place out of sight of most of British society, with the exception of those who most benefitted from it. In both cases this may explain why such institutions were tolerated. Unlike many other social movements (including abolitionist movements in other time periods), the victims of slavery were not able to play a leading role in the British abolitionist movement up to 1807. For the most part it was left to white activists to convince individuals who had never met an enslaved person—or witnessed slavery firsthand—that they needed to take political action against this practice. In a similar fashion, the animal advocacy movement today attempts to draw attention to the suffering of individuals who are not able to advocate for themselves, and convince those who have little or no personal connection to the victims of institutionalised abuse to take action. Finally, Britain’s stake in slavery at the end of the eighteenth century seems in some ways analogous to contemporary society’s stake in animal agriculture. In both cases numerous individuals greatly benefitted from the existence of a particular institution, yet in neither case is the reformation and abolition of that institution widely perceived to have potentially catastrophic effects for society as a whole. This would not be true of the circumstances of other social movements such as abolitionism in the United States where many southerners felt that slavery was essential to prosperity and social order in the south, and where attempts to reform or abolish slavery threatened civil war and the end of the United States as a political entity.

The structure of this report is as follows:

Section 1 assesses the economic utility of chattel slavery and engages with arguments that the most important cause of abolition in 1807 was the declining economic value of slavery. This section argues that although conventional wisdom was less convinced of the economic value of slavery by 1807 than it had been fifty years before, slavery was widely regarded to be an economically productive institution. Those who supported abolition did not expect the economy to be seriously damaged by their efforts, especially in the long-run. Many perceived abolition as having the potential to negatively impact certain sectors of the economy, but saw it as worth doing for moral reasons. Although perceptions that the economic value of slavery had declined certainly helped facilitate abolition, abolition would not have occurred in 1807 without a well-organized social movement. What is more, even if West Indian slavery had been perceived as more important to British prosperity, as it was during the peak of sugar prices in the 1790s, there is good reason to suppose that the abolitionist movement would still have achieved its ends over a comparable time period.

Having established the importance of abolitionism as a social movement in Section 1, Section 2 charts the development of the organized abolitionist movement, its strategy, tactics and successes. Following the historian Christopher Leslie Brown, it divides the process leading to abolition into several steps. First, slavery had to be considered morally problematic. Second, slavery had to be seen as a problem amenable to political solutions. Third, individuals needed ways of acting to address this problem, and fourth, individuals needed to become sufficiently invested in this movement to become full-time activists. This section takes a particularly close look at what drove Evangelical Anglicans and Quakers to become deeply invested in the abolitionist cause as these movements taken together supplied many prominent leaders and grassroots anti-slavery activists. This section concludes with a discussion of the overarching strategy and specific tactics of the British abolitionist movement up to 1807.

Section 3 outlines the lessons that can be learned from the abolitionist movement by contemporary advocates for non-human animals.

Section 1

Economics, Abolition and the “Decline Thesis”

This section assesses the importance of economic factors in contributing to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. It rejects the “decline thesis,” which claims that plantation slavery was an unviable institution in a process of long-term economic decline that was ended by elites when they no longer perceived it as serving their economic interests. Instead, this section argues that the abolition of the slave trade should be attributed to the success of a mass movement prepared to accept an economic cost to achieve a moral end.

The strongest case for the importance of economic factors over the long-term is that changes in views regarding political economy may have caused a downward revision of the perceived cost of abolishing the slave trade. The strongest case for the importance of economic factors over the short-term is the negative effect on perceptions of the economic benefits of plantation slavery after a short-term overproduction crisis following the St. Domingue uprising. This may have been an important factor in causing the House of Lords to finally cave to popular pressure and pass legislation abolishing the slave trade in 1807. Nevertheless, it is probably not the case that either changes of attitudes towards questions of political economy or the overproduction crisis at the end of the eighteenth century were necessary preconditions for the abolition of the slave trade in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Abolition was the result of a moralizing social movement that was able to convince people to act in ways that did not necessarily advance the economic interests of the British Empire.

Contrasting Perspectives on the Decline Thesis

The most notable proponent of the “decline thesis” is Eric Williams, whose book Capitalism and Slavery argued that profits derived through the exploitation of slaves were an important cause of the industrial revolution in England. Williams further posits that the abolition of the slave trade and later emancipation of slaves is attributable primarily to a long-term decline in the economic value of West Indian slavery.⁵ Williams’ arguments have attracted a great deal of criticism. His thesis that abolition and emancipation are primarily explained by the declining economic viability of plantation slavery was systematically attacked by Seymour Drescher in Econocide, published in 1977. In this work Drescher argues that popular mass mobilization resulted in the abolition of the slave trade.⁶

Debates on the relative importance of economic factors to the abolition of slavery continue into more recent scholarship, where David Beck Ryden reasserts elements of the decline thesis in his recent work.⁷ Ryden gives the most plausible articulation of the decline thesis, and this section will engage primarily with his work.

The conclusions of this section are closer to those of Drescher than Williams or Ryden. West Indian plantation slavery was not economically unviable and abolition is primarily attributable to a popular mass mobilization grounded in moral rather than economic concerns. However, economic criticism of slavery may have lessened resistance to abolition over the long-term. Furthermore, the short-term economic crises of overproduction following the St. Domingue uprising may indeed be a factor as to why legislation abolishing the slave trade was successfully passed by the House of Lords in 1807 after failing to do so on earlier attempts. Nevertheless, there are alternative explanations for why it took until 1807 for the Lords to pass abolition which are also plausible. It might have been the case that the Lords would eventually pass abolition in the early decades of the nineteenth century in the face of continued public pressure, regardless of the economic situation.

A Short Economic History of Plantation Slavery in the West Indies

The historic debate concerning the economic viability of slavery focuses on economic and political developments after the American Revolution. Prior to the American Revolution, West Indian sugar plantations were in a protectionist trading block with the rest of the British Empire, including both the thirteen colonies on the American mainland and the United Kingdom.⁸ The West Indian economy was overwhelmingly dominated by the cultivation of sugar, which was exported for refinement and consumption to the United Kingdom.⁹^,¹⁰ The West Indian economy was heavily dependent on goods imported from the thirteen colonies.¹¹

Tariffs on foreign imports ensured that West Indian planters had protected access to markets in the rest of the empire. An analysis by Coelho carried out in the 1970s using historical data found that protectionism for West Indian planters prior to the American Revolution cost Britons £1 million per year, and 80% of this cost to Britons was in the form of higher sugar prices compared to continental Europe.¹² Protectionism benefitted a variety of interest groups. The West Indies remained a lucrative market for British exporters throughout the eighteenth century, and the Navigation Acts meant that British shipwrights and merchants were protected from foreign competition in the carrying of freight between the colonies and the United Kingdom.¹³^,¹⁴ British ships carried slaves to the West Indies, and tariffs against all refined sugar—even from the West Indies—ensured that sugar refineries were located in the mainland United Kingdom.¹⁵^,¹⁶Protectionism for West Indian sugar was unremarkable in this time period, and indeed would have been recommended by the dominant mercantilist school of economic thought—which would begin to be seriously challenged by the free trade ideas of Adam Smith and others in the last decades of the eighteenth century.¹⁷

The American revolution had negative effects on the West Indian planting interest in both the short and the long-term. The West Indian colonies were dependent on the American mainland for supplies, and disruption caused by the revolutionary war, as well as tariffs on American goods following American independence, hit the plantation system hard.¹⁸^,¹⁹ The dispersal of British forces across the American continent in the revolutionary wars was one cause of the loss of Grenada, St. Vincent, and Dominica to the French.²⁰ Between 1778 and 1781, the volume of the British slave trade fell to its lowest point since the seventeenth century. By the time of British surrender at Yorktown, plantation profits had dropped to the lowest point in the eighteenth century.²¹

Although the plantation system would recover, the American revolution put lobbyists for the planter cause in a difficult position for the remainder of the existence of plantation slavery. Whilst the thirteen colonies, Britain, and the West Indies remained part of the same trading bloc, the planter interest was served through adherence to the economic theory of mercantilism. But with the thirteen colonies now independent from the rest of the British empire, mercantilist theory dictated that American shipping and imports should be subject to tariffs.²² West Indian planters argued in favor of removing restrictions on American ships carrying imports and allowing American merchants to carry their sugar, which put them at odds with mercantilist economic theory.²³^,²⁴ Yet planters also consistently lobbied for the continuation of state aid to the sugar industry and protectionist policies for West Indian sugar, which put them at odds with proponents of free trade.²⁵ After American independence, planters were less able to veil their self-interested lobbying efforts with the cloak of economic theory. Additionally, prior to the American revolution, planters had common cause with shipwrights and merchants in arguing for the maintenance of mercantilist policies. After the American revolution, the planters’ calls for the ability to use American shipping and to access American imports resulted in planters positioning themselves at odds with shipwrights and merchants who benefitted from the very same protectionist measures that the planters opposed.

The St. Domingue slave uprising had a profound effect on the fortunes of the British planters. The French colony of St. Domingue was the single largest producer of sugar for the European market.²⁶ The slave uprising, which began in 1791 and would lead to the founding of an independent state of Haiti in 1804, resulted in a dramatic fall in the production of sugar and a corresponding increase in the price British planters were able to command for their sugar.²⁷^,²⁸^,²⁹ By 1795, the market’s peak, the inflation adjusted price of sugar was nearly 30% higher than it had been in the season preceding the uprising.³⁰ This increase in prices took place even as British planters dramatically increased production to meet demand in the European market; between 1790 and 1800 the supply of British sugar increased by 100%.³¹ The increased price of sugar prompted a somewhat more critical focus on the protectionist policies that benefitted the planters. Articles in the London Times claimed that increases in the price of sugar were in large part attributable to a planter monopoly rather than to genuine scarcity, and they demanded a parliamentary investigation.³² In April 1792 the House of Commons responded by forming a committee, and eventually a bill was passed legislating that protectionist measures for sugar would drop if the price of sugar went too high.³³

The economic effects of the St. Domingue uprising would ultimately harm the planter interest. As British West Indian colonies increased sugar production, so too did the colonies of rival imperial powers such as the Spanish colony of Cuba.³⁴ Although these colonies did not have access to the British home market, they would eventually outcompete British sugar in the continental European market.³⁵ By the end of the eighteenth century, only a small fraction of sugar was exported to the continent as it was reckoned that the French could undercut British sugar prices by one third.³⁶ This proved disastrous for many planters who, in expectation of being able to sell their product in Europe, had gone into debt in order to increase production.³⁷^,³⁸ By 1799, 100 of the 830 estates in Jamaica—the greatest of the British sugar producing colonies—had been sold for debt, and a further 115 had legal proceedings issued against them by creditors.³⁹ The planters were further harmed by Napoleon’s efforts between 1803 and 1807 to limit the flow of British goods into Europe.⁴⁰ West Indian publications and lobbyists publicly bemoaned the dire situation that the planters found themselves in and demanded further government action to support the industry.⁴¹^,⁴² One such publication was authored by Sir William Young, a member of Parliament and agent for St. Vincent. It stated that “The west indian interest is in decline” and claimed net income had fallen by 50% between 1796 and 1805.⁴³^,⁴⁴

On the cusp of abolition in 1807, West Indian publications actually made little mention of efforts to abolish the slave trade. When they did, they tended to argue that discussion of abolition made slave insurrections more likely, and constituted the beginning of a path to emancipation—rather than claiming that the continued importation of Africans was vital for the continuation of the plantation system.⁴⁵ West Indian publications were focused on securing further government aid for the planters, arguing that the fact that the government had relaxed protectionist measures when the price of sugar was high meant that the government was obliged to step in now that the price was low. The common set of policies the West Indian interest lobbied for were as follows: forcing distillers and brewers to use sugar rather than wheat, increasing the bounty on sugar exports, discouraging American merchants from carrying competitor sugar, and allowing American shipping to supply the West Indies.⁴⁶ To assist the planters, Parliament put a tax holiday on sugar-based spirits and temporarily banned the distilling of wheat-based spirits.⁴⁷ Parliament also increased taxes on brandy, provided further subsidies to the sugar industry and restricted the ability of American ships to carry freight from rival Caribbean colonies.⁴⁸

Economic Critiques of Slavery

Although abolitionists attacked slavery on moral grounds for the most part, several leading abolitionists made economic critiques of the institution, the most notable of these being James Ramsay.⁴⁹^,⁵⁰ Ramsay argued that the monopoly West Indian planters enjoyed over sugar in Britain encouraged economically inefficient as well as immoral business practices.⁵¹ He also argued that planters faced with negative profits had a tendency to borrow money to increase production, which had the effect of getting themselves further into debt without making their businesses any more profitable.⁵² Ramsay said that the ability to easily import more labor led plantation owners to brutalize their slaves, and that ending the slave trade would encourage more gentle treatment—which would in turn make the labor of slaves more productive.⁵³ He even went as far as to argue that free labor would be more effective than slave labor at cultivating sugar, and that a transition to free labor was in the interests of all parties, even though the planter’s addiction to slave labor blinded them to this reality.⁵⁴

Thomas Clarkson was another prominent abolitionist who advanced economic critiques of the institution of slavery. Like Ramsay, Clarkson claimed that the availability of African labor for import encouraged extreme brutality towards slaves.⁵⁵ Clarkson argued that the abolition of the slave trade would force slave owners to treat slaves more humanely, to invest in human capital by training and educating slaves, and to make more efficient use of labor and technology. Clarkson argued that this would lead to an equally productive but less brutal form of slavery.⁵⁶ Unlike Ramsay, Clarkson did not claim that free labor could produce sugar as effectively as slave labor.⁵⁷ He did however argue that it was in the long-term economic interest of the United Kingdom to abolish slavery and the slave trade.⁵⁸ Clarkson claimed that the slave trade was damaging to the economic development of West Africa, and proposed that Britain should purchase land in West Africa in order to found colonies of free blacks.⁵⁹^,⁶⁰ Clarkson believed that Africans would flock to these colonies and that this would accelerate economic development.⁶¹ Over the long-term this policy would benefit Britain, the West Indies, and Africans more than the continuation of the slave trade.⁶² This scheme was not as far fetched as it might seem. In 1787 abolitionists did attempt to purchase land (in what would come to be Sierra Leone) for the purpose of resettling free blacks, and they received government assistance in this project.⁶³^,⁶⁴^,⁶⁵ In 1808 this became a Crown Colony. Sierra Leone would function as a base for the Royal Navy to police the slave trade, and a colony in which slaves freed from slave traders would be resettled.

Materials produced by the planter lobby in response to the overproduction crisis echoed the economic criticisms advanced by Ramsay, in that they argued that planters were stuck in a vicious cycle of debt and overproduction that required government assistance to break. In 1804 the Jamaica House of Assembly produced a report which assessed the state of the sugar industry in Jamaica and called for further government protection. This report was eventually presented to Parliament and was heavily used by both opponents and proponents of slavery, as it contained a great deal of detailed information about the state of slavery in Jamaica.⁶⁶ In the House of Assembly report, the planter class echoed Ramsay’s earlier argument that plantation slavery tended towards overproduction. They claimed that sunk costs in capital and property combined with falling prices and high duties caused planters to expand production out of desperation. This in turn caused prices to fall, causing further expansion of production and a vicious cycle of overproduction.⁶⁷

Bills to abolish the slave trade had been passed several times by the House of Commons only to be blocked by the Lords, before legislation to abolish the trade was finally passed by the Lords in 1807.⁶⁸^,⁶⁹ Ramsay’s economic arguments featured prominently in the Lord’s debate on the successful bill.⁷⁰ Prime minister Lord Grenville opened the debate by making the argument that abolition of the slave trade would be economically beneficial to the United Kingdom and the British Empire, and would even benefit West Indian planters through helping them overcome their damaging addiction to slave labor.⁷¹ The claim that abolition of the slave trade would not be a significant economic blow to the interests of planters was a common refrain in the debate.⁷² Grenville noted that the U.S. would soon abolish the slave trade, and that since the Battle of Trafalgar the French had been unable to expand their slave trade. He also pointed out that the other war torn European countries wouldn’t be able to finance their own slave trades. Grenville went on to claim that this meant that unilateral abolition would not undermine British sugar production.⁷³

Economic Factors and Abolition

Economic factors could cause the abolition of the slave trade only insofar as they created political action that led to abolition. Although there is some evidence that economic factors might have affected elite opinion on slavery, it is implausible that economic factors were a significant factor in creating a mass movement that was opposed to plantation slavery. The vast majority of petitions submitted to Parliament on the subject of abolishing the slave trade made no mention of the economic effects of abolition but instead focused almost exclusively on humanitarian concerns.⁷⁴ Humanitarian arguments were also dominant in the speeches of abolitionist MPs and in abolitionist literature.⁷⁵ Although the increasing popularity of Smithian ideas about free trade and the superiority of free labor to slave labor doubtless had some effect on eroding support for the institution of slavery, it seems that their role in fermenting abolitionist sentiment was minor. If there was a dramatic shift in public and elite opinion on the efficacy of mercantilist policies powerful enough to result in abolition, we might expect it to have resulted in the repeal of other more damaging mercantilist policies. However, the United Kingdom continued to engage in mercantilist trade policies—including particularly damaging ones that massively increased prices for staples like bread, or placed tariffs on corn imports—until the mid-nineteenth century.⁷⁶^,⁷⁷

The claim that the institution of plantation slavery was not economically viable by the end of the eighteenth century is clearly false. The overproduction crisis led to bankruptcy for some plantations, but over the long-term production would have decreased back to profitable levels. Protectionism against foreign sugar saw no sign of abating and guaranteed planters in British colonies a large market in which they would be able to make a profit. It is worth noting that the colonies that were outcompeting British West Indian plantations such as Cuba also practiced slave labor, and that on the eve of abolition the British Empire had taken control over many territories that could have been profitably cultivated with imported slaves.⁷⁸ The continuation of slavery also suited many interest groups beyond the planters themselves. Merchants, shipwrights, and British industrialists benefited from exports to planters in the West Indies who remained an important export market for British goods at the end of the eighteenth century.⁷⁹ The slave trade itself was lucrative for Britain. By the end of the eighteenth century, British slavers were landing 50,000 slaves per year in the Americas and moving nearly 60% of the total number of captives shipped across the ocean.⁸⁰ Finally, it is clear that slaves were widely perceived as economically productive assets at the end of the eighteenth century. This attitude is evidenced by the fact that in 1805 Parliament used the navy to stop slaves being imported to the colonies of rival imperial powers, as a means to hobble their economic productivity.⁸¹

The element of the decline thesis that is most plausible is that asserted by Ryden in his recent work. This is the claim that the short-term overproduction crisis at the end of the eighteenth century lowered the perceived cost of abolishing the slave trade, and was therefore essential to ensuring that abolition passed the House of Lords—which had consistently voted down previous proposals for abolition on the grounds that the abolition threatened the economic well-being and political power of the British empire.⁸²^,⁸³^,⁸⁴ However, it is unclear whether this analysis is accurate. The debate to which Ryden refers focused on humanitarian concerns rather than the economic effects of abolition, and this is evidence against Ryden’s claim that assuaging economic concerns was what caused the Lords to vote in favor of the proposal on this occasion. One alternative explanation is that the Lords simply caved into the renewed popular campaign for abolition.

The evidence for the importance of overproduction in causing abolition in 1807 is that little obvious progress towards abolishing the British slave trade was made for the abolitionist cause during the period of high prices, and that abolition was passed soon after the overproduction crisis. Yet the correlation of high sugar prices and the stalling of the abolitionist movement may not be a case of the former causing the latter, but instead be attributable to both being independently caused by the French Revolution. High sugar prices were caused by the St. Domingue uprising, which was in turn caused in part by the political fallout of the French Revolution.⁸⁵ The stalling of the abolitionist movement is partially attributable to a desire by abolitionists to hold back on popular protest given the political context following the French Revolution.⁸⁶^,⁸⁷ If the passage of legislation to abolish the slave trade in 1806 is attributable to renewed popular pressure, then the fact that abolitionists chose to hold back their popular agitation following the French revolution explains the correlation of abolitionist success with the changing fortunes of West Indian planters.

In conclusion, the “decline thesis” concerning British abolitionism is not supported by the evidence. British plantation slavery was economically viable in the long-term, particularly as long as protectionist policies were maintained. More importantly, plantation slavery and the slave trade were widely perceived as economically viable at the time of abolition. The short-term overproduction crisis certainly lessened the perceived cost of abolishing the slave trade, and it may even have been a proximate cause of abolition in 1807. However, contra Ryden, there is little evidence to suggest that abolition of the slave trade by the British Empire would not have occurred at this time without the overproduction crisis.

Section 2

This section identifies the factors that led to the development of an organized abolitionist movement in Britain by 1787 and identifies the strategies used by abolitionists that resulted in the abolition of the slave trade. The historian Christopher Leslie Brown identifies four necessary steps in the development of a social movement. In the context of slavery, he lists these as follows: First, people had to consider slavery morally wrong. Second, this moral wrong had to attain political significance and be considered a cause for concern. Third, individuals needed to develop concrete means of taking action against slavery, and fourth, individuals needed to become highly invested in the movement against slavery.⁸⁸ This section will address how each of these four steps occurred in the context of the abolitionist movement before 1807. It concludes with a fifth section detailing the methods, organization, and development of the abolitionist movement.

Perceiving the Wrongness of Slavery

Slavery in the New World preceded the founding of English speaking colonies. The Portuguese and Spanish engaged in slavery and even in the mid-1500s this had attracted criticism from individual Catholic clergymen, some of whom had even declared a natural right to liberty for Africans.⁸⁹ Although some anti-slavery advocates were aware of these writings, most English speaking seventeenth century anti-slavery advocates opposed slavery on the basis of their personal contact with the institution.⁹⁰ Prior to 1760, all antislavery pamphlets written in English that focused on the immorality of slavery were written by those who had witnessed slavery firsthand.⁹¹

Even as chattel slavery was developing in British colonies, the institution did not sit well with the norms prevalent in mainland Britain. Villeinage, the only form of lifelong legal bondage, had fallen into disuse in England during the sixteenth century.⁹² By the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the perception that the English were a distinctively free people had begun to emerge.⁹³ This was based on the notion that the English were the leading protestant nation in a Europe dominated by Catholic monarchies, that the Common Law was distinct from other legal systems in that it applied to all equally (regardless of rank). There was also a sense that the English system of having a monarch who was responsive to a parliament ensured liberty for all.⁹⁴ The notion of the English as a disinctively free people fed into a perception amongst English speaking peoples that the British Empire differed from those before it in virtue of being maritime, commercial, Protestant, and free.⁹⁵ There were some institutions that were partially analogous to slavery: the poor and orphans were increasingly forced to work in parish workhouses, day labourers and apprentices had their freedoms legally curtailed, press-ganging into the navy existed in times of war, individuals could be transported to engage in bonded labour in the New World, and a male householder held his wife, children and servants as his property.⁹⁶ Nevertheless, these institutions differed from chattel slavery in several important respects: these institutions did not involve as extreme levels of control and brutality as chattel slavery, nor were these forms of legal bondage indefinite and inherited by the children of those so bound.⁹⁷

For the most part, whatever scruples British colonists in the New World may have had against the institution of slavery seem to have been silenced by the economic benefits that slavery brought to those who were involved in the trade.⁹⁸ The slave trade and colonial slavery would come to be seen by British governments as important institutions of the British Empire in light of their economic worth.⁹⁹ In the colonies, opposition to the institution of slavery was most commonly found amongst religious dissenters who had moved to the New World to practice their religion and live in communities of like-minded people, as contrasted to those who had come to the New World in search of economic opportunities.¹⁰⁰

Brown argues that even in the early eighteenth century, antislavery sentiment was common.¹⁰¹ However, even amongst individuals holding these sentiments, slavery was not viewed as a political problem that could be solved by the action of the British government.¹⁰² In the time period in which the slave trade and plantation slavery were first developing in British colonies, the colonies were viewed as being internally self-governing and beyond effective control by London.¹⁰³ This allowed those who viewed slavery as immoral in Britain to lay the blame for slavery at the feet of colonists and claim that they were not complicit in the institution. Although chattel slavery was alien to the norms of mainland Britain, it was known to be a common institution in other societies—including all other overseas empires.¹⁰⁴ The fact that the enslaved were for the most part not Christian, and in all cases African rather than European, was enough for some to conclude that chattel slavery of Africans was permissible (or at least less objectionable) than the enslavement of white Christians.¹⁰⁵ Despite this, there was no close equivalent to the pseudoscientific theories developed in the nineteenth century that were used to justify notions of a natural racial hierarchy.¹⁰⁶^,¹⁰⁷ Furthermore, the fact that the transportation and driving of slaves took place far away from the British Isles made it easy to ignore the brutality of the institution.¹⁰⁸ Indeed, Brown argues that slavery was conceived of as just another institution of the New World which was alien to and different from the Old World.¹⁰⁹ Insofar as positive arguments were given for slavery, these tended to be of the form that slavery was essential for the British Empire and that this consideration meant that its cruelties could be justified.¹¹⁰ In addition to appealing to the economic utility of slavery, proponents claimed that the conditions of Africans purchased from slavers in West Africa were even worse than those suffered in transportation and on plantations—and that slavery was a positive institution because it involved the exposure of “heathen” Africans to Christianity.¹¹¹^,¹¹² When met with political abolitionism, those who supported the slave trade would often claim that discussion of abolition would increase the likelihood of slave revolts, rather than attempting to directly defend the status quo.¹¹³

The contradiction inherent in a British perception of their society as distinctly free whilst they simultaneously enslaved huge numbers of people was most apparent in the legal status of slavery in the British Isles. Although legislation pertaining to slavery existed in the colonies, it did not exist in the British Isles.¹¹⁴ Slaves were brought into the U.K. by their masters, but if slaves attempted to escape, masters were unable to appeal to the law in order to imprison or transport slaves. They would rather pay private retainers to imprison and abduct escaped slaves.¹¹⁵ This changed following the Somerset decision of 1772.¹¹⁶ James Somerset, an enslaved African, was brought to Britain by Charles Stewart. Somerset escaped but was recaptured and detained by Stewart. The abolitionist Granville Sharp and others petitioned the courts to compel Stewart to release Somerset on the grounds that the law of England did not recognize slavery and that therefore Stewart was unlawfully detaining Somerset. This trial generated much publicity and resulted in the judge, Lord Mansfield, determining that the common law did not recognize slavery and that slavery could only be recognized under the common law through the creation of positive legislation that ruled it explicitly to be legal.¹¹⁷^,¹¹⁸ Since no positive legislation regarding slavery existed in England, slave owners could not, whilst in England, legally exercise the rights over slaves that the laws of the colonies granted them. Consequently, Mansfield ruled that Stewart had no right to detain Somerset. However, Mansfield’s ruling left slavery in the colonies unaffected, as in the colonies legislation did exist that outlined the obligations of slaves to masters.¹¹⁹ Contradictory attitudes and the gulf between stated values and action pertaining to slavery are underlined by the fact that after the trial it was widely celebrated that slavery did not exist in England.¹²⁰ Yet simultaneously the British were heavily involved in the slave trade, and in British colonies the institution of slavery remained as strong as ever.¹²¹

Slavery as a Political Problem

Organized antislavery activism began in the American colonies, rather than in Britain. There are records of antislavery activity in early colonial history.¹²² In 1652, Rhode Island legislated that slavery would be abolished and bonded labor limited to 10 years, although this law was never actually enforced.¹²³^,¹²⁴ By the time of deteriorating relations between the colonies and Britain in the late 1760s, slave imports were frequently listed as a grievance against the imperial government, and some colonies had passed legislation to ban the import of slaves.¹²⁵ Some of the opposition to the import of slaves came from those who believed slavery was immoral.¹²⁶ These sentiments were based on religious conviction, and the notion that the enslaved had a natural right to liberty.¹²⁷^,¹²⁸ But much opposition to continued slave imports was primarily based on the belief that slavery was inexpedient, as continued expansion of the slave system threatened the development of colonies based on free labor—and injected a potentially explosive element into colonial society.¹²⁹ Often, antislavery legislation and petitions were supported by those whose primary aim was to set the colonies against the British government (who frequently vetoed attempts to limit the slave trade).¹³⁰ Regardless of the motivation, antislavery activism in revolutionary America was limited to areas where slavery was of limited and declining economic importance, and deferred to propertied interests. For instance, when slaves were emancipated in the North this only applied to the children of slaves upon their reaching adulthood.¹³¹

The American Revolution led to increased discussion of slavery. Those who opposed American independence frequently cited the institution of chattel slavery as a means of portraying colonists as brutes and hypocrites. This is most famously seen in Samuel Johnson’s description of American calls for independence as “Yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes.”¹³² In turn, figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee blamed the British for implanting slavery into the colonies and pointed to the hypocrisy of the British condemnation of plantation slavery whilst still facilitating the slave trade.¹³³ The freeing of slaves who fled from rebels and agreed to fight for the British, as well as British refusal to return black loyalists to slavery during the surrender of loyalist forces were both used by the British as a means of establishing their moral superiority over the independent colonies.¹³⁴^,¹³⁵ Brown argues that the chief effect of the American Revolution on the British abolitionist movement that emerged in 1787 was that the revolution caused slavery to be conceived of as a political problem that was amenable to legislative solutions, rather than an ever-present evil in the world. The discussion of slavery by both loyalists and rebels laid the blame at the feet of various particular actors, whether these were American planters or British slave traders.¹³⁶ The revolutionary period also saw the colonies legislating to restrict the imports of slaves, the first significant legislative effort to limit the expansion of the slave trade.¹³⁷

It is also worth drawing attention to the relationship between abolitionism and the broader desire for political reform in this period. American abolitionists presented their attack on slavery as the logical extension of the principles of natural rights and liberty that were invoked in justification of the American revolution.¹³⁸^,¹³⁹ In Britain, several leading abolitionists had sympathies with other radical political causes.¹⁴⁰ “Radical” was a term coined later in this period to denote those who sought fundamental reform of existing constitutional arrangements in a democratic direction, and who often invoked the notions of natural rights in support of their cause.¹⁴¹ For example, the abolitionist Granville Sharp supported the American Revolution and devoted a great deal of energy to radical political causes.¹⁴² Sharp was heavily involved in the Society for Constitutional Information, an organization that worked to achieve these ends. The Society for Constitutional Information and other radical groups such as the London Corresponding Society voiced support for abolitionism efforts.¹⁴³ However, many abolitionists would not have identified themselves as radicals. Wilberforce was particularly keen to distance the abolitionist movement from radicalism and advised Thomas Clarkson to remain discreet about his sympathy for the French Revolution.¹⁴⁴ Anti-abolitionists would attempt to undermine the abolitionist movement by associating it with radical political causes, and fear of this association caused abolitionists to put their mass petitioning campaigns on hiatus following the French Revolution.¹⁴⁵^,¹⁴⁶ Although radical politics had a role in explaining the abolitionist movement, abolitionism was one cause among many supported by political radicals, and it would take individuals focusing on the anti-slavery cause, rather than a more general radical program, to create a mass movement for abolition.¹⁴⁷

Developing a Means of Attacking Slavery

As noted earlier, Brown argues that a successful social movement must not only generate opposition to an institution but also provide a concrete way of attacking that institution. Those opposed to slavery could have sought to attack the institution in various ways. They could have chosen to campaign for emancipation of slaves, for regulation of plantations, or for the ambitious schemes of developing colonies of free blacks in West Africa discussed previously. Although abolitionists worked on some of these schemes, when the organized abolitionist movement emerged in the 1780s, its central focus was campaigning for Parliament to abolish the slave trade.¹⁴⁸

It is worth discussing why abolition of the slave trade rather than another cause such as emancipation of slaves became the focus of the early antislavery movement. Some figures such as Ramsay did not think that immediate emancipation of slaves would be wise.¹⁴⁹ For the most part however, the decision to focus on abolition of the slave trade rather than emancipation was a strategic one—and upon the success of abolition, abolitionists began to campaign for emancipation.¹⁵⁰

The West Indies were dependent upon continuous imports of slaves to maintain the plantation system, so abolishing the slave trade would restrict the growth of slavery even if it did not destroy the institution.¹⁵¹ It was also hoped that the abolition of the slave trade would ameliorate the cruelty of slavery, as the shipping of captives across the Atlantic involved particularly appalling conditions and high rates of mortality, even by the standards of plantation slavery. Many abolitionists felt that once planters were deprived of the opportunity to import more slaves, this would force them to take better care of the slaves who they owned. Ramsey and Clarkson claimed that the abolition of the slave trade would lead to masters trying to reduce morbidity and mortality amongst slaves whom could now not so easily be replaced.They also argued that plantation owners would need to invest in the human capital of their slaves to achieve increases in productivity, rather than simply increasing the number of slaves purchased. Ramsey and Clarkson believed that this would necessitate masters taking steps to educate and train their slaves.¹⁵²^,¹⁵³

Abolishing the slave trade also seemed a more attainable goal than emancipation. Abolition did not require a resolution of difficult issues such as whether planters were to be compensated and by how much, or what role newly emancipated slaves would have in the West Indian economy and society.¹⁵⁴ Campaigning for abolition rather than emancipation also allowed those opposed to slavery to claim that their actions would not even be especially harmful for West Indian planters.¹⁵⁵^,¹⁵⁶ The final consideration in favour of campaigning for abolition rather than emancipation was that the means to make a persuasive case for abolition were more readily available. Obtaining reliable information about conditions on plantations was difficult due to the fact that planters controlled access to plantations and that the West Indies were so far from Britain. Obtaining reliable information on conditions in the transatlantic slave trade was simply a matter of interviewing sailors in British ports who had been on slave ships.¹⁵⁷ Furthermore, the experiences of people in Britain meant that they had an understanding of the dangers and poor conditions of sea travel that they did not have of chattel slavery. It was also easy to demonstrate the appalling conditions on slave ships by dividing the area of deckage of the ship by the number of captives on board.¹⁵⁸

The Origin of Dedicated Anti-slavery Activists

The emergence of individuals prepared to dedicate significant amounts of time and resources to attacking the institution of slavery was a necessary step towards the emergence of an abolitionist movement. This section explores some of the most important ways in which individuals came to be involved in organized abolition by looking at the involvement of members of the Religious Society of Friends in abolitionism, the seeds of abolitionism in the Anglican mainstream, and finally at abolitionism and Evangelical Anglicanism.

Abolitionism and the Religious Society of Friends

Members of the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), played a hugely important role in both the British and American abolitionist movements. In 1783 Quakers delivered the first abolitionist petition to Parliament, founded the first dedicated anti-slavery organization in the United Kingdom, and engaged in the circulation of abolitionist literature.¹⁵⁹ In England between 1783 and 1787, almost all abolitionist publications were printed by the Quaker James Phillips.¹⁶⁰ Quaker involvement in abolitionist activity might seem to necessarily flow from their beliefs in the equality of all people, opposition to hierarchy, and willingness to defy established norms—yet in the 1660s most Quakers in the New World who could afford to own slaves or invest in slavery did so.¹⁶¹ Quaker opposition to slavery emerged as part of a reformation of Quakerism in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.¹⁶² This led to the Quakers resolving to stop holding slaves or being involved in the slave trade in 1761.¹⁶³ Even at this point, Quaker opposition to slavery more commonly involved Quakers isolating themselves from the institution of slavery rather than actively opposing it.¹⁶⁴ The fact that Quakers came to actively oppose the institution of slavery owes a great deal to the activities of the Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet.¹⁶⁵ Benezet led Philadelphia Quakers in mobilizing Quakers in support of abolishing slavery in 1772, and by 1775 Philadelphia Quakers had founded the first abolitionist society—the Society for the Relief of Unfree Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.¹⁶⁶^,¹⁶⁷

The role of Quakerism in organized British abolitionism emerged through tensions within British Quakerism.¹⁶⁸ Although Quakers had distributed antislavery pamphlets prior to 1783, British Quakers had shown much less enthusiasm for political action than their American counterparts.¹⁶⁹^,¹⁷⁰ Thirteen Quaker ministers arrived in Britain following the end of the American War of Independence with the aim of reinvigorating British Quakerism.¹⁷¹ They found that in many areas, attendance at meetings—especially amongst wealthy and powerful Quakers—had fallen off, and that in some instances Quakers were even paying tithes to the established Church.¹⁷² The resolution to work to actively oppose slavery issued by the London Quaker Meeting in 1783 represents the triumph of the American Quaker ministers and their allies who sought to revitalize British Quakerism over a more conservative British Quaker hierarchy.¹⁷³^,¹⁷⁴

Seeds of Abolitionism in the Anglican Church

Although the Church of England was by no means a hive of abolitionist activity, a strain of anti-slavery opinion existed in the Anglican Communion.¹⁷⁵ Early Anglican interest in slavery almost exclusively concerned the question of how to convert slaves to Christianity and “Christianize” the institution.¹⁷⁶ The Society for the Promulgation of the Gospel was formed in 1701 with the stated purpose of converting “heathens” throughout the British Empire.¹⁷⁷ The Society struggled to achieve anything but the most meager success in converting slaves to Christianity, and failed three times between 1700 and 1714 in attempts to make it imperial law to convert slaves to Christianity.¹⁷⁸^,¹⁷⁹ Planters largely lacked any interest in facilitating the conversion of slaves, and indeed often impeded efforts to do so.¹⁸⁰ Indeed, the clergy in the West Indies struggled in their efforts to get even white Caribbeans to attend church.¹⁸¹ Planters feared that if large numbers of slaves received religious instruction and converted, then this would undermine their authority by empowering religious leaders and putting spiritual authority over their temporal authority.¹⁸² They also worried that if the slaves were Christian, this would increase sympathy for slaves and therefore promote abolitionist sentiments.¹⁸³ By the late 1750s, Anglican clergy interested in converting Africans regularly concluded that civil change in the West Indies was a necessary prerequisite for widespread conversion.¹⁸⁴

The intransigence of West Indian planters that James Ramsay experienced in facilitating the work of the Church may have been a factor in his decision to dedicate much of his life to anti-slavery activity.¹⁸⁵ When serving as a ship’s surgeon, Ramsey witnessed the appalling conditions upon slave ships, and resolved to spend his life ministering to slaves.¹⁸⁶ Upon arriving in the Caribbean he was disgusted by the impiety of the planters and frustrated by the obstacles they put in the way of his attempts to preach to slaves. This led him to become convinced that gradually dismantling the slave system was not only the best means to improve the condition of Africans but also the only means to promote Christianity amongst Africans.¹⁸⁷ This can be seen in the fact that Ramsey’s first book condemning the institution of slavery and proposing gradual reformation and abolition was entitled An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of Slaves in British Sugar Colonies.¹⁸⁸

In 1779, the abolitionist Granville Sharp sought to convince Anglican Bishops to actively oppose the slave trade.¹⁸⁹ Although few of them would go as far as publically supporting legislation to abolish the slave trade, Sharp did create some productive relationships with the Anglican hierarchy.¹⁹⁰ Beliby Porteus, the Bishop of Chester, would become a supporter of abolition and a close associate of Ramsay.¹⁹¹ Granville would develop a close relationship with John Hinchcliffe, the Bishop of Peterborough, who would invite Sharp to Cambridge University in 1781 to discuss the reform of the slave trade.¹⁹² In a public sermon in 1784, Peter Peckard, Vice-Chancellor of the University, would describe the slave trade as “the disgrace of our country.” The following year he would set the examination question “Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?” This would move future abolitionist Thomas Clarkson to begin investigating the institution of slavery.¹⁹³

Evangelical Anglicans and Abolitionism

Ramsey’s antislavery activism spread amongst those who enjoyed social prominence and political standing through the Evangelical movement in the Church of England.¹⁹⁴^,¹⁹⁵ Evangelicals were critical of the state of Christianity in society, and sought to promote a more “vital Christianity,” in which individuals were reborn into a Christian faith to which they had previously had only a nominal commitment.¹⁹⁶ Teston in Kent became a particularly important center of abolitionist activity, for it was there that Barham Court, the home of Elizabeth Bouverie and Charles and Margaret Middleton, was located.¹⁹⁷^,¹⁹⁸ Charles and Margaret Middleton and their wider social circle engaged in political and philanthropic work in accordance with their evangelical ideals, such as supporting local charities and the growing Sunday School movement in Britain.¹⁹⁹^,²⁰⁰ In 1787, Charles Middleton joined William Wilberforce in securing from George III a proclamation against vice and immorality, with the aim of prompting magistrates to enforce with more vigour laws aimed to combat indecency.²⁰¹ The Teston circle’s focus on antislavery activism owes much to James Ramsey, who was vicar at Teston and whose patrons were the Middletons.²⁰² His own work and activism appears to have persuaded the Middletons and their wider social circle to engage in activism against the slave trade. Thomas Clarkson was invited to Teston after the success of his prize-winning essay against the slave trade, and there he pledged his life to opposing slavery.²⁰³^,²⁰⁴ It was at Teston that Margaret Middleton called on her husband to propose a bill to abolish slavery in the House of Commons. Charles thought himself a poor orator, and decided to ask William Wilberforce to introduce the bill. Wilberforce went on to spearhead the parliamentary campaign for abolition.²⁰⁵^,²⁰⁶

Methods of Change; The Strategy and Tactics of the British Abolitionist Movement

When looking at the strategy of organized abolitionists in Britain, it is helpful to look at the Quaker campaign prior to the formation of the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, and the subsequent campaign. The Quakers delivered a petition to Parliament in 1783 and received warm words from members but no concrete action.²⁰⁷ The Quakers’ campaign focused on converting established opinion to abolition, rather than trying to bring that opinion to bear through mass petitioning, as in the later abolitionist movement. By 1787 the Quakers had contacted every member of Parliament and justice of the peace in Britain in an attempt to persuade them to support abolition, as well as numerous other prominent individuals.²⁰⁸ The Quakers also engaged in serious efforts to raise the profile of abolition in the public consciousness. They did this by printing antislavery notices and letters in newspapers, and by publishing antislavery literature.²⁰⁹ These efforts were successful; by 1785 all educated people would have been aware of the abolitionist pamphlet by Anthony Benezet, The Case of Our Fellow Creatures. The Quakers also published Ramsay’s 1784 book An Essay on the Treatment and the Conversion of African Slaves in the West Indian Sugar Colonies, which received critical acclaim and prompted an outraged response from the West Indian cause—as well as a high profile exchange of published arguments between Ramsey and anti-abolitionists.²¹⁰^,²¹¹ Ramsay’s attack seems to have particularly angered the West Indians, due to the fact that Ramsay had much more extensive experience of plantation slavery and West Indian society than earlier abolitionists, which he used to lay bare the brutality of the Caribbean colonies.²¹² Yet for all of their attempts to change public opinion, Quaker efforts had not resulted in any legislative change by 1787.

The London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was significant in that it coordinated abolitionist activity and used it to apply pressure to Parliament via mass petitioning.²¹³ It also formally brought together abolitionists from different religious denominations. The Society’s first goals were to gather information for a suspected parliamentary inquiry and make contact with provincial antislavery activists. Thomas Clarkson was dispatched to achieve this end.²¹⁴ Clarkson was delighted to find that in Manchester an abolitionist committee already existed and was gathering signatures for a petition to Parliament.²¹⁵ As the London Committee discovered, abolitionism was a grassroots movement; regional abolitionist committees drove their own petitioning efforts, and communities frequently organized their own abolitionist committees upon reading other petitions and discussions of the abolitionist movement in newspapers.²¹⁶ Yet as the movement grew, the London Committee would play an important role in coordinating petitioning campaigns and regional activity in addition to producing antislavery literature and shaping the legislative agenda in Parliament.²¹⁷^,²¹⁸

At a conservative estimate, 60,000 individuals signed antislavery petitions in Great Britain in 1788.²¹⁹ This, alongside the efforts of abolitionists in Parliament, led the government to create a Privy Council Committee to investigate the conditions of slaves. This was the first time the British government had approached the question of slavery with a view to the welfare of slaves.²²⁰ Abolition was formally introduced into the House of Commons, and although Parliament resolved to gather more information, the Dolben Act was passed. This attempted to improve the condition of slaves through setting regulations for slave ships.²²¹^,²²²

Over the next eighteen years, abolition would be formally introduced to Parliament twelve times—passing the House of Commons on two occasions before being blocked by the House of Lords.²²³ In addition to this, the Lords would block bills attempting to end the selling of slaves to foreign colonies and banning the trade in certain parts of Africa.²²⁴ Abolitionists would not only introduce legislation and present petitions but also engage in a variety of actions to sustain support for the movement. Abolitionists continued to submit information to parliamentary inquiries into the slave trade, which would be reported and discussed in the newspapers.²²⁵^,²²⁶ Abolitionists also continued to print new materials, including the testimony and arguments of former slaves such as Ottobah Cugoano.²²⁷ The antislavery movement offered additional avenues than petitioning for its supporters to engage in political activism. The wearing of antislavery badges became fashionable, prints of the slave ship Brookes (which demonstrated the appalling conditions of slave ships simply by showing how Africans were crammed into the hull) were produced en masse and distributed, and an “antisaccahrite” movement to boycott West Indian sugar emerged—although leading abolitionists were divided over whether to support it.²²⁸^,²²⁹^,²³⁰

The abolitionist movement pressed legislation to limit the institution of slavery even when this stopped short of complete abolition. In addition to the Dolben Act, the Abolitionist movement secured the passage of the Foreign Slave Trade Act, passed in 1806. This banned the importing of slaves into the colonies of rival powers whilst leaving the slave trade within the British Empire unaffected.²³¹^,²³²

The petitioning campaigns of the abolitionists attracted an unprecedented level of popular support. One abolitionist petition was signed by a two thirds of all eligible adult males living in the booming industrial city of Manchester.²³³ Abolitionists attempted to use this popular sentiment to apply political pressure by coordinating the arrival of petitions from across Britain with the introduction of abolitionist legislation.²³⁴ As mentioned, fear of being tarred as dangerous subversives in the aftermath of the French Revolution caused abolitionists to dial back their mass lobbying efforts for several years after 1791, and this has been cited as the reason why a popular movement that was attracting mass support in the late 1780s took until 1807 to achieve its end.²³⁵ Another difficulty the abolitionists faced was the intransigence of the House of Lords. This unelected chamber was less sensitive to popular pressure and was primarily concerned with the economic prosperity and security of the Empire rather than humanitarian ends.²³⁶ Abolitionists managed to maximize the application of popular pressure for their final bill by ensuring that allies in the government delayed the introduction of legislation until after a general election had installed a House of Commons that was very supportive of their cause.²³⁷ They introduced legislation first in the Lords rather than in the Commons, reducing the chance that a bill passed in one house would die in the other, as had happened in the past.²³⁸^,²³⁹

The abolitionist movement achieved success through coordinating activities, raising the profile of the issue of abolition in popular discourse, and creating a mass movement of an unprecedented size. With the help of allies in Parliament and in the government they managed to translate popular opinion into legislative action, even in an era in which the British government was much less responsive to the popular will than contemporary liberal democracies.

Section 3

Lessons for Animal Advocates

This section attempts to distill lessons for animal advocates (or at least points to think about) from the preceding examination of the British abolitionist movement. These points are grouped under three broad headings. The first part, “Opportunities,” attempts to answer a question regarding the level of effectiveness that animal advocates can hope to achieve. The second part, “Strategy,” discusses what a broad understanding of the British abolitionist movement—including what its goals were, how it presented itself and where it drew its support—can teach us about contemporary animal advocacy. The third part, “Tactics,” suggests some lessons that animal advocates today may be able to learn from the particular way in which the abolitionists organized and attempted to bring pressure to bear on Parliament.

Opportunities

There are reasons to believe that animal advocacy faces deep challenges that many other social movements do not. One of these challenges is that those who are most affected are unable to lead a movement themselves. The history of abolitionism in Britain gives us reason to believe this challenge can be overcome. The triumph of various social movements throughout history have often seemed to involve an oppressed group developing in strength (whether this be economic or organizational) and using this strength to improve its position in society. We may be skeptical of whether members of oppressing groups can ever be trusted to campaign effectively for the oppressed. Yet the British abolitionist movement up to 1807 gives us reason to hope that social movements can be successful even when they are led by those who potentially stand to gain from their own membership in the oppressing class. Although the writings of the formerly enslaved made an important contribution to the British abolitionist movement, the distribution of power and educational resources—as well as the very small number of black people in Britain—meant that the leaders of the abolitionist movement, including Ramsay,²⁴⁰ Clarkson,²⁴¹ and Wilberforce²⁴² were almost entirely white, and therefore had little to gain materially from a successful abolition movement.

Another deep challenge faced by animal advocates is their need to overcome the empathy gap that many people have with regard to animals. The brutality of the slaughterhouse and the factory farm is not something that most people encounter in their daily lives. Although people are capable of feeling great affection for pets, people do not generally feel the same emotional bonds with farm animals.²⁴³ In some ways, this too is analogous to the situation in which the British abolitionists found themselves. Very few black people lived in Britain at the time and most of the people who signed petitions against slavery would never have witnessed slavery first hand, nor had ever met an enslaved person.²⁴⁴ Although the voices of the formerly enslaved would begin to make themselves heard by the end of this period, for the most part attempts to change public attitudes around slavery involved white people advocating on behalf of enslaved black people. The empathy gaps caused by perceived racial difference and geographic distance are probably less than those caused by species difference, but abolitionists did not have many of the tools which animal advocates possess today, such as photographic and video evidence. It seems that if abolitionists were able to convince white British people in the eighteenth century to take action on behalf of black people in the Caribbean and West Africa, we can hope that animal advocates are able to convince people to take action on behalf of animals today.

Finally, we might be concerned that as long as animal agriculture remains profitable and can produce cheap animal products for consumption, the animal advocacy movement will never make serious headway. We might think that the wealth and power of established interests will prevent animal advocates from making progress. The success of the British abolitionist movement challenges such a point of view. As argued in Section 2, slavery was seen as economically productive and many in Britain profited from it in 1807.²⁴⁵ Nevertheless, a morally motivated social movement was able to seriously attack the institution of slavery before eventually abolishing it 30 years later. The abolitionist campaign was doubtlessly aided by the fact that plantation slavery was seen as being less important to Britain’s economic prosperity than it had been in the past.²⁴⁶ Therefore, we can expect that if the economic importance of animal agriculture diminishes, perhaps due to successful competition from cultured meat, the position of the animal advocacy movement will be strengthened. However, an understanding of the abolitionist movement prior to 1807 gives us reason to think that the development of cultured meats may not be necessary for the reformation or perhaps even the abolition of factory farming. It is also worth noting that in the same way that West Indian sugar became less important as the British Empire became more economically developed, animal agriculture is a much less important part of the modern economy than it has been in previous centuries.²⁴⁷

Strategy

The broad, strategic approach of the British abolitionist movement holds a few lessons for contemporary animal advocates. All leading British abolitionists sought the emancipation of slaves, though they differed as to whether they thought immediate or gradual emancipation was most wise. However, rather than expending energy campaigning for emancipation, they focused on campaigning for abolition of the slave trade.²⁴⁸^,²⁴⁹ As mentioned in section 2, abolishing the slave trade was the most tractable means with which to attack the institution of slavery for several reasons.²⁵⁰^,²⁵¹ It didn’t raise difficult policy questions such as whether plantation owners were to be compensated and how freed slaves would be integrated into West Indian society. It also meant that plantation owners couldn’t complain of instantaneous economic ruination, as they might if posed with full emancipation. Finally, it was much easier to gather information on the slave trade through publicizing the testimony of British sailors than it was to gather information on slavery in the West Indies.²⁵² Abolitionists were also not afraid to be incrementalist in their approach. When it was clear that the slave trade wouldn’t be abolished in 1788, abolitionists in Parliament secured the Dolben amendment to regulate the slave trade.²⁵³ Ramsay and Clarkson, though seeking full emancipation for slaves, argued that abolishing the slave trade would lead to improved conditions on plantations.²⁵⁴

The clear parallel for the animal advocacy movement would be to focus resources on pursuing change in the most tractable areas, whilst remaining clear that many animal advocates seek the eventual abolition of all forms of animal exploitation. This might mean focusing efforts on abolishing some of the worst practices found in factory farming, such as extreme confinement. We might hope that in the same way that the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade created a movement that would eventually emancipate slaves, a campaign to abolish extreme confinement and other abuses of animals may lead to a movement that will eventually achieve even more radical change in our treatment of animals.

Another aspect of the abolitionist movement that animal advocates might be able to learn from is its breadth and inclusivity. Evangelical Anglicans united with religious non-conformists such as the Quakers in an era where denominational differences were far more important than today.²⁵⁵ Indeed the Anglican abolitionist Granville Sharp penned long letters to the Quaker Abolitionist Anthony Benezet, attempting to convince him of the error of his religious beliefs and the need to accept Anglican doctrine.²⁵⁶ Nevertheless, Sharp was excited to work alongside Benezet in the antislavery cause. In an era characterized by revolutionary violence and bitter battles over the shape of the constitution (most famously over whether to expand the franchise to more adult men) political radicals like Granville Sharp were able to join common cause with political conservatives like Wilberforce in campaigning against slavery. Furthermore, British abolitionists were able to effectively distance the movement from forms of radicalism that were more threatening to the British establishment—such as that seen in revolutionary France—and were cautious with engaging in direct action at times when there was concern about political insurrection. This undermined attempts by the West Indian interest to tar abolitionists as radicals, and helped ensure that those who felt alarmed at developments in France would not feel that they had anything to fear from the abolitionist movement.

The animal advocacy movement may be able to emulate the abolitionist movement by bringing together a broad coalition of groups around a cause such as abolishing factory farming even if these groups share very different beliefs and motivations. Those who primarily want to abolish animal agriculture due to its cruelty to animals may be best served by working closely with those who want to abolish it due to its environmental impact—and both these groups in turn may find it advantageous to work with those who do not seek to end animal agriculture, but merely to curb its worst excesses. Focusing on a particular policy goal such as abolishing extreme confinement may help to prevent fragmentation of the movement on the basis of other issues such as the necessity of a vegan diet, medical experimentation on animals, and the permissibility of other forms of usage and ownership of animals. The precedent of the abolitionist movement indicates that the animal advocacy movement should distance itself from groups whose tactics are seen as extreme and whose agendas are seen as highly disruptive to the existing social order.

Finally, the abolitionist movement seems to constitute evidence that it is better to focus on changing institutions rather than individual behaviour. Although a movement to boycott slave grown sugar did emerge during the later part of this period, it did not receive support from all leading abolitionists.²⁵⁷ The emphasis of British abolitionists was on raising awareness of the horrors of slavery and promoting petitions to achieve legislative change.²⁵⁸ Boycotting slave grown sugar was a means for individuals to show support for abolition in their daily lives and align themselves with the movement. Abolitionists also provided other avenues for individuals to display support. These included the wearing of the famous badge designed by Wedgewood which featured a kneeling slave with the caption “Am I not a man and a brother?” and the display of cheap antislavery prints such as the print of the slave ship Brookes, which depicted a floor plan of a slave ship and how slaves were crammed onto each deck.²⁵⁹ Abolitionists did not make it a precondition of supporting abolition to isolate oneself from the benefits of slavery. A particularly stark example of this is the huge and early support for abolition in the city of Manchester, as demonstrated by the fact that two thirds of eligible voters had signed petitions supporting the abolition of the slave trade in 1788.²⁶⁰^,²⁶¹ Abolitionists were pleased that a booming town like Manchester supported the abolition of the slave trade, yet Manchester was booming on the back of the Lancashire textile industry, which was heavily dependent on cotton cultivated by slaves.²⁶²

The lesson animal advocates can learn from this is to take a more institutional approach to advocacy. This involves framing animal abuse as being an institutional problem that demands collective action rather than attacking individual consumers of animal products. The most radical implication of this is that the animal advocacy movement would perhaps be more successful if veganism and vegetarianism were not seen as necessary prerequisites to identifying with or supporting the movement. Whatever the case, a lesson from abolitionism is that it may well be more effective to emphasise political activity focused on legislative change rather than changing individual consumption patterns.

Tactics

Organized abolition from 1787 involved close coordination between abolitionists in Parliament and grassroots activists throughout the country. Petitions were organized in response to parliamentary motions, votes, and inquiries.²⁶³ Legislative activity both raised the profile of the cause and created specific events that prompted people to take action, even though most attempts to legislate came to nothing.²⁶⁴ If the animal advocacy movement is able to frequently propose legislation—either through ballot initiative or allies in legislature—this might serve to raise the profile of animal advocacy, prompt individuals to take action, and, in doing this, strengthen the movement.

The key challenge to implementing this strategy would be winning over individual legislators and convincing them that the cause of animal advocacy is sufficiently important to be worth spending limited legislative time upon. The Quaker abolitionist movement not only published antislavery pamphlets and notices in newspapers for general public consumption, but also directly targeted individual members of Parliament and other influential figures (such as clergy and justices of the peace) by sending them abolitionist literature.²⁶⁵ Many pressure groups adopt similar forms of lobbying today, though it seems plausible that the volume of similar correspondence legislators receive today is vastly greater, making this tactic less effective.

One interesting means by which the abolitionist movement seems to have created support amongst elites was through the presence of abolitionist activity at the University of Cambridge, one of only two universities in England prior to the nineteenth century.²⁶⁶^,²⁶⁷ The abolitionist Granville Sharp had convinced a handful of clergy associated with the university of the necessity of abolition.²⁶⁸ This meant that speakers who supported abolition attended the university. Indeed, the abolitionist Clarkson’s road to becoming a dedicated anti-slavery activist is commonly claimed to have started with his writing a competition-winning undergraduate essay on the legality of slavery.²⁶⁹^,²⁷⁰^,²⁷¹ The competition was set by the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge, Peter Peckard.²⁷² It is worth noting that other prominent figures who supported abolition—such as Wilberforce and Pitt the Younger—were also in Cambridge at a similar time period, though it is unclear to what extent abolitionist activity in Cambridge may have affected them. In any case, this provides some evidence that attempting to promote the discussion of the animal advocacy cause in leading universities may be a means by which to change the opinion of individuals who may be in a position to effect major change at a later point in their life.

The means by which abolitionists translated mass support into political pressure was primarily through the gathering of signatures for petitions, and eventually by making abolition an issue during election campaigns. The success of abolitionist efforts is in many ways astonishing by today’s standards. For instance, in Manchester, abolitionists were able to get two thirds of eligible voters to support abolition, and abolitionist petitions to Parliament were the longest ever received (in many years they also outnumbered petitions for any other cause). Of course the electorate in this time period was much smaller, and petitioning was much less common, so the expected impact of petitioning today is likely to be less than it was in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, there are means of applying pressure that are open to animal advocates today that were not available to abolitionists. For fear of inspiring civil unrest, abolitionists did not organize mass marches and gatherings, whereas today such demonstrations and other forms of peaceful direct action are accepted as an integral part of a healthy democracy. It was also much more difficult for social movements to put pressure on legislators in eighteenth century Britain than it is today. At the time, there was no strong party system, and those parliamentarians who had to actually contest competitive elections either had wealthy patrons or independent means that allowed them to do so. Today, pressure can be put on legislators through campaign finance, volunteering, and the ability to stand as a candidate for a political party (contingent upon having a reformist stance on animal issues).

The grassroots abolitionist movement in the U.K. was driven by regional abolitionist committees which organized their own activities, and in many cases started themselves upon hearing about abolitionist activity elsewhere.²⁷³ Keeping the antislavery movement in the public eye through publications, petitioning, and attempting to pass legislation seems to have been important for prompting these groups to take life. At the same time, speaking tours by abolitionists and targeting literature at community leaders may have had some impact on causing these regional committees to form. Animal advocates may want to investigate what active steps could be taken to form regional groups dedicated to animal advocacy campaigns and not be afraid to have such groups self-start if momentum behind a certain campaign increases. Churches also seem to have been a very important group around which individuals would organize before forming non-denominational abolitionist committees. It is worth considering whether there are community groups today that might be similarly fertile ground for sowing the seeds of animal advocacy.

Crucially, although the abolitionist movement was a grassroots movement, activities were coordinated by the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.²⁷⁴ As the London Committee managed the abolitionist agenda in Parliament, it could appeal to regional groups to engage in activism in a way maximally conducive to supporting this agenda, such as delivering petitions to Parliament just before motions for abolition were introduced by parliamentarians.²⁷⁵ A further means by which the London Committee was able to coordinate the abolitionist movement throughout the whole nation was by having among its members the primary publishers of abolitionist material. This model for how a grassroots movement could be effectively centrally coordinated could be adopted in other contexts. For instance, an organization dedicated to reducing the exploitation of animals could engage in a campaign for a set of specific legislative goals, whilst encouraging local groups to form and engage in activism to support their effort.

It is always worth remembering that the context of abolition was radically different from the one in which contemporary animal advocates find themselves. The ways in which the eighteenth century British abolitionist movement differ from the contemporary animal advocacy movement are food for thought. Nevertheless, interesting parallels do exist between these movements, and these parallels are sufficiently large as to encourage us to think about the lessons we can learn from this historical success and to consider the actionable takeaways these similarities might suggest.

“Before the 1820s, slave uprisings usually placed British abolitionists very much on the defensive. Their primary reflex was to exculpate themselves from association with violence. In its immediate aftermath, the Saint Domingue slave revolution produced widespread anxiety among the friends of abolition for a number of years, although some insisted that insurgent slaves were reacting to lifelong inhumane treatment and only vindicating their human rights. Wilberforce was convinced that scenes of brutal revenge ‘operated to the injury of our cause.’ Even the sympathetic Clarkson was concerned that the Saint Domingue rebellion was detrimental to abolitionism in England. Anti-abolitionists incessantly conflated the revolutionary threat in the Caribbean with the more formidable threat at home from belligerent France.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 254). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Haiti, whose population is almost entirely descended from African slaves, won independence from France in 1804.” Ferguson, Girault, et al. Haiti (2016). Source page.
“In the end, of all the large-scale slave revolts in the British Caribbean, abolitionists lavished most attention on the Demerara uprising. The Demerara revolt subverted many theories, abolitionist and antiabolitionist alike, about the causes of slave revolts. The uprising deserves careful scrutiny because the comparative behaviors of slaves and masters contributed crucially to a shift in metropolitan opinion about emancipation. Demerara, in 1823, was still the most ‘African’ of the British Caribbean colonies.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 255). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The advent of political abolitionism opened up new public space for Africans. In quick succession, Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano became shapers of opinion rather than voiceless victims. To the themes of brutality published by Ramsay, Clarkson, and the Quakers, Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787) boldly added a prescient argument for the creation of a maritime blockade against slavers. Two years later, the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or Gustavus Vassa, the African made its author the most widely known African in Britain. Equiano’s best-selling book and nationwide lecture tours provided most Britons with the most personalized experience of the Atlantic slave system they were to receive.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Capitalism and Slavery made the connection between the economic decline of the British Caribbean and the decision to abolish the slave trade … Sugar and slavery had, for the first 130 years generated extraordinary profits … Williams argued that this capital formation targeted the manufacturing sectors that ushered in Britain’s Industrial Revolution … The parliamentary offensive against the slave trade, Williams wrote, was part of this broader attack against sugar producers and the mercantilist policies that had long supported the industry. For Williams, the humanitarian sentiment of antislavery was of little importance because policy makers were merely motivated by the material needs of the country.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 9–10). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Summarising Williams, E. (1944/1994) Capitalism and Slavery (pp.51–107). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.
“Drescher coined the term ‘Econocide’ in order to emphasise that humanitarian arguments against the odious traffic in humans had triumphed over more economically rational choices.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 11). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.In reference to Drescher, S. (1977) Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
“Williams was wrong on a number of points in his analysis of the fall of the British sugar industry, but these errors and inconsistencies do not detract from his core thesis, which, I argue, is sound.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 14). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Beginning with the Navigation Act of 1651, merchants lobbied government to impose trade restrictions … This law marked the beginning of British mercantile protectionism and was followed by a series of complementary laws that insulated colonial planters from foreign competition.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 5–6). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“… planters also claimed that the tropical monoculture made the Caribbean islands an ideal trading partner with the mother country.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 22). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“British tax laws encouraged raw muscovado export from Jamaica in order to support Britain’s own sugar baking industry.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 90). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Before the American Revolution, Jamaican planters imported North American foodstuffs … The Caribbean colonies faced disaster beginning in 1774 when the Continental Congress agreed to ‘withhold all commercial intercourse with Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies.’ The subsequent high prices of food continued after the Revolution.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 151). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Coelho calculated that the Caribbean colonies and the restrictions on trade cost Britons about £1 million per year, net of any benefits. Outfitting and paying soldiers to protect the islands was a substantial component of the cost but 80% of the net burden was paid in higher sugar prices relative to European market prices; on average British consumers paid 10 shillings per hundredweight of sugar more than European consumers.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Summarising Coelho, P. R. P. (1973) The Profitability of Imperialism: The British Experience in the West Indies, 1768–1772. Explorations in Economic History, 10, 264, 278.
“Neither imports from nor exports to the British West Indies declined at the end of the eighteenth century. On the contrary both categories increased sharply in value toward 1800 and reached levels well above the putative ‘golden age’ before the American revolution … the British West Indies were generally the most important sector to Britain for the entire century between 1722 and 1822.” Drescher, S. (1977) Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (pp. 16–17). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. See also tables detailing absolute value and percentage share of exports and imports to West Indies in Ibid (pp.18–25).
“… the letter of the Navigation Acts and protectionist duties served to encourage the economic advancement of the Caribbean islands. Planters and merchants could stand by imperial policy because it clearly served their industry.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 6). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The British slave traders were even officially, faring quite well during the period 1750–1807 … The British share of the trade rose sharply at the end of the eighteenth century and was maintained through 1805 reaching a peak or near peak just before abolition. Britain remained the premier carrier of slaves to the end, accounting for over half the world total between 1791 and 1806 … Over the period 1761–1807 the slave trade yielded an average profit of just under 10% on invested capital.” “Neither imports from nor exports to the British West Indies declined at the end of the eighteenth century, On the contrary both categories increased sharply in value toward 1800 and reached levels well above the putative ‘golden age’ before the American revolution … the British West Indies were generally the most important sector to Britain for the entire century between 1722 and 1822.” Drescher, S. (1977) Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (p. 30). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. See also tables outlining the British slave trade in absolute numbers and market share in Ibid (pp.25–31).
“British tax laws encouraged raw muscovado export from Jamaica in order to support Britain’s own sugar baking industry.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 90). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) had cast suspicion on the mercantilist rhetoric and entire framework of government rules that regulated and directed colonial economic development … Smith wondered if the Navigation Acts—which excluded foreign colonial staples—prevented Britain from fully exploiting the advantages offered by overseas trade. Under the Atlantic colonial system, Smith argued that market distortions encouraged overzealous lending to planters, overinvestment in the colonial trade, and higher consumer prices … Smith was therefore claiming that the type of “monopoly” that was cultivated by the Navigation Acts actually caused an overinvestment in American trade so that the British economy was supporting the colonies and not vice versa.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Before the American Revolution, Jamaican planters imported North American foodstuffs … The Caribbean colonies faced disaster beginning in 1774 when the Continental Congress agreed to ‘withhold all commercial intercourse with Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies.’ The subsequent high prices of food continued after the Revolution.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 151). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Today, no historian disputes the fact that the Revolution affected planter profits—for thousands of slaves literally starved to death as a result of the cessation of North American trade—but there is no consensus with regard to the long-run effect American independence might have had on the West Indian economy.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 8). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Whereas British military forces were dispersed for campaigns on the North American continent, francophone populations in the British conquered islands were important agents in the loss of Grenada, St. Vincent, and Dominica to the French.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 122). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Between 1778 and 1781, the volume of the British slave trade fell to its lowest point since the seventeenth century. By the time of the surrender at Yorktown, it was reduced to one-fifth of its prewar magnitude. Plantation profits also dropped to their lowest point in the eighteenth century.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 122). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“This new political and economic environment meant that the marriage between orthodox mercantilism and the self-interest of planters had become increasingly strained, making the pleas for special favor an increasingly complex task for West India colonists. Elite planters in London were particularly conscious of the widening gulf between their self interest and the traditional tenets of mercantilism.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 8). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“United States vessels were officially excluded from conducting business with British planters under the Navigation acts … For ten years the planters complained about these restrictions, for it eliminated the cheap American trade because of the high cost of conducting voyages from Britain to the United States before heading to the West Indies.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 246). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The rapid succession of West Indian pamphlets in 1807 is interesting for several reasons … The third issue of note is the common set of solutions offered by these authors … (1) requiring distillers to use sugar instead of grain; (2) increasing a bounty on sugar exports; (3) discouraging the American neutral trade; and/or (4) suspending the Navigation Acts and allowing British sugar growers to utilise cheap American shipping.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The rapid succession of West Indian pamphlets in 1807 is interesting for several reasons … The third issue of note is the common set of solutions offered by these authors … (1) requiring distillers to use sugar instead of grain; (2) increasing a bounty on sugar exports; (3) discouraging the American neutral trade; and/or (4) suspending the Navigation Acts and allowing British sugar growers to utilise cheap American shipping.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Because of the threat of spreading French radicalism, the events in St. Domingue, Europe’s largest single provider of sugar, proved a mixed blessing for British sugar growers.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 210). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“For each successful black petition for freedom accepted by the Admiralty Court of Paris between 1777 and the outbreak of the Saint Domingue Revolution in 1791, nearly 10,000 African slaves were loaded on French ships for the French colonies.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Haiti, whose population is almost entirely descended from African slaves, won independence from France in 1804.” Ferguson, Girault, et al. Haiti (2016). Source page.
“… the destruction of the giant sugar colony reinvigorated the British sugar economy. Both European and West Indian sugar prices rose rapidly so that at the market’s peak in 1795, the inflation adjusted farmgate price for sugar was nearly 30% higher than in the season immediately preceding the uprising.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“… the destruction of the giant sugar colony reinvigorated the British sugar economy. Both European and West Indian sugar prices rose rapidly so that at the market’s peak in 1795, the inflation adjusted farmgate price for sugar was nearly 30% higher than in the season immediately preceding the uprising.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In response to the destruction of the St. Domingue sugar economy, British planters increased their production by nearly 100% between 1790 and 1800.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 238). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“If the London Times is any measure, surging sugar prices produced a ‘general dissatisfaction’ with the colonial system. On November 16, 1791 it put forth that “the present high price of Sugar … arises from monopoly and not scarcity; and consequently it should be the first business of Parliament to make a strict investigation of the measure.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 119). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“By mid-April 1792 the Common responded and in early May a Committee of the Whole House was formed for the purpose of interviewing sugar bakers for their opinion on the ultimate cause of the high prices and whether they believed the proposed ‘Bill for regulating the Exportation of Sugar’ would provide consumer relief … the bill … was passed on June 6 1792. The act initiated a suspension of the drawback when the price exceeded 50s per hundredweight, with the hope that exports would be reduced, if not prohibited.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 119–120). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“By late 1799, however, it was apparent that the infant Cuban sugar industry was in a good position to squeeze the relatively inefficient British growers out of European markets as St. Domingue planters had done during the previous century.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 252). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The British West Indian planters were being economically squeezed in the new century … Having been squeezed out of the European market by low cost Spanish sugar growers, excess capacity was so apparent that glut was the watchword of the times.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 270). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Not all planters were dependent on this protectionism for survival, but by the final decades of the eighteenth century, only a small portion of British grown sugar was re-exported to the Continent, for the common reckoning was that French planters could undersell the British by as much as one-third.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The crux of the problem was that British growers were dependent on continental markets that were now failing them.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 245). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The catastrophic decline in prices in the 1800s, therefore, depressed the value of plantations, thereby ensuring a normal rate of return for new investors, while burning the many planters who had sunk capital into the island in the boom years of the 1790s.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 236). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“… nearly 100 Jamaican estates were thrown up or sold for debt, while another 115 faced pending lawsuits (out of around 830).” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 252). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The difficulty in moving British sugar to European markets was intensified after 1803, as Napoleon abandoned the peace of Amiens and launched a number of trade restrictions against Great Britain, culminating with his Berlin Decree in November 1806.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 244). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Parliamentarians had listened to seven years of intensifying West Indian complaint and they would hear much more about sugar market saturation during the following twelve months. The testimonies delivered to the Distillery Committee (January 2–13) and the parliamentary West India Committee (July) were infused with a negative analysis about the surplus of sugar and at least half a dozen West Indian publication would underscore the crisis that had dogged the West Indies for the previous seven years.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 244). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The rapid succession of West Indian pamphlets in 1807 is interesting for several reasons … The third issue of note is the common set of solutions offered by these authors … (1) requiring distillers to use sugar instead of grain; (2) increasing a bounty on sugar exports; (3) discouraging the American neutral trade; and/or (4) suspending the Navigation Acts and allowing British sugar growers to utilise cheap American shipping.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Young, however, summarised what he considered to be conventional wisdom in his preface, explaining that the ‘West India interest [is] in decline.'” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 244). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“According to Young’s figures … Planters were rewarded for their efforts in the nineteenth century with falling ‘net income,’ which he estimated to have tumbled by 50 percent between 1796 and 1805.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 245). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The rapid succession of West Indian pamphlets in 1807 is interesting for several reasons. First, there is almost nothing noted about the slave trade in these pieces. The most that was said is that abolitionism heightened the potential for slave rebellion and checked the further expansion of sugar production.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The rapid succession of West Indian pamphlets in 1807 is interesting for several reasons … The third issue of note is the common set of solutions offered by these authors. Because government had attempted to regulate sugar prices when they were high in the 1790s, it was obliged to help out by (1) requiring distillers to use sugar instead of grain; (2) increasing a bounty on sugar exports; (3) discouraging the American neutral trade; and/or (4) suspending the Navigation Acts and allowing British sugar growers to utilise cheap American shipping.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Parliament was moved by the merchant lobbying effort, declaring in the preamble of a tax-holiday bill that ‘the owners and consignees [of sugar] … are utterly unable to find an immediate market for large quantities now on hand, and further importation to a considerable extent is expected.’ To help those who had consigned more sugar than the market could bear, the government allowed for the postponement of sugar duty payment until April 1, 1800, when presumably the market would clear. To expedite this process, the government simultaneously lowered ‘the duties upon spirits distilled from melasses or sugar’ while banning the ‘distillation of spirits from wheat or wheat flour’ in England.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 240). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The collective efforts of the Society [of West Indian Merchants and Planters] won concessions from Parliament. The first achievement was that the tax on foreign brandy was raised, thus providing some relief for the marketing of Jamaican rum. Second additional export bounties were placed on refined sugar, and, in a break with traditional tax policy, on muscovado as well. And third, and most important, West Indian whining about neutral shipping helped move forward the well-known orders-in-council on November 11 that slapped further offensive trade restrictions on American intercourse with France.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 270). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Petitioners focused first and foremost on the need for political action against an offense to humanity, justice, and sound policy. Subsequent generations of petitions against the slave trade also stressed moral grounds for reform under the same triad of ‘humanity, religion and justice.’ Less than 5 percent of those petitions to come added any promise of economic advantage.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 215). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Ramsay had initiated Britain’s first genuine print debate on the abolition question … His criticism were laid out in the pamphlet An Enquiry into the Effects of Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade (1784), a book, An Essay on the Treatment and the Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784) … Both publications were scorching indictments of the ways in which masters cared for their slaves, but the former attacked the entire political-economic foundation of the sugar industry. The ‘monopoly of the British market’ afforded by protectionist duties, had created a particularly callous group of slaveholders because the artificially high returns cultivated the expectation of absenteeism and grand living in London.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 167). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“He wrote [of slaves] for ‘every degree of liberty conferred upon them would be so much aim to their present masters’ … ‘[T]he monopoly of the British market alone enables them to [the planters] to carry on the culture of sugarcane, by the unprofitably high-priced labour of slaves.'” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 168–169). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Ramsay devoted two additional pamphlets in 1788 that further addressed the political economy of abolition. In both pieces he proposed what would later be referred to as the ‘decline thesis.’ By yearly importing slaves, going deeper into debt, and receiving negative economic profits on their investments, he claimed that planters were engaged in suicidal business practice … On a microscopic level, Ramsay argued that inconsiderate planters tended to overproduce.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 175). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In the main, slaves were forced to work excessively hard while enduring ‘cruel and unusual usage.’ This was tragic for slaves, but Clarkson, like Ramsay, also argued it was economically inefficient for the planter. Without a slave trade, they argued, planters would be forced to come to an understanding that there is profit to be derived from paternalism. Freed from a speculative business model, Caribbean planters would have a less manic agenda and secure greater long-run profits, while promoting social stability in the islands.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“… Ramsay’s assertion that sugar ‘raised in the East Indies by free people’ was only three shillings and four-pence per cwt. [ as opposed to more expensive West Indian sugar]. This free labour position was one that the Reverent did not waver from when the Privy Council Committee on the Treatment of Slaves asked him if the ‘Labour of Slaves [is] cheaper than that of Free Men[?].’ His response was an emphatic ‘Impossible; for the Planters Advocate acknowledges, that a Slave does not One-third the ordinary work of a Free Man; and the Purchase and Insurance of a Slave are heavy articles, that take not place in the Case of a Free Labourer.'” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 169). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Clarkson analogised that planters were like an English farmer who would ‘purchase a [post] horse at a certain price, and a certain age,’ then profitably working it ‘through twice the work which he ought to perform at a given time.’ This business strategy of course had dreadful consequences for the slaves, but Clarkson also speculated that it had a negative effect on the planter’s own pocket book, for planters collectively chased after short-term profits as opposed to considering the long-term opportunities available by cultivating the human capital of their bondsmen.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 170–171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In the main, slaves were forced to work excessively hard while enduring ‘cruel and unusual usage.’ This was tragic for slaves, but Clarkson, like Ramsay, also argued it was economically inefficient for the planter. Without a slave trade, they argued, planters would be forced to come to an understanding that there is profit to be derived from paternalism. Freed from a speculative business model, Caribbean planters would have a less manic agenda and secure greater long-run profits, while promoting social stability in the islands.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Clarkson would spell out a proposal for reforming the entire colonial system in his Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (1788) and in Essay on the Comparative Efficiency of Regulation or Abolition as Applied to the Slave Trade (1789). Neither of these pieces went as far as Ramsay’s work by suggesting free labor could produce sugar more cheaply than slave labor.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 170). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Thus, Clarkson was proposing to reorient British navigation, which he predicted would expand humanity, liberty and wealth throughout the Atlantic basin. Africans, Planters and Britons, he argued would all be beneficiaries from his new scheme.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The slave trade, therefore, had retarded the advancement of Africa, while the ‘new commerce’ would have a contrary effect.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 172). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“He insisted that ‘Included in the term abolition,’ was the development of a new African economy … He called for Britain to help with this transition by colonising parts of coastal Africa ‘by means of purchase … in an honourable way.’ These territories would be free of the slave traders and would serve as a safe haven for any African needing asylum.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“This civilisation would be productive of the most beneficial effects to ourselves: for in proportion as we civilise a people we increase their wants; and we should create therefore, from this circumstance alone, another source of additional consumption of our manufactures even within the same space.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quoting Clarkson in Essays on the Impolicy, 115
“The Clarkson-Ramsay economics predicted that Africa, Britain and the plantation colonies would all benefit from the abolition of the slave trade.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 176). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Granville Sharp nearly exhausted his personal wealth to sustain the floundering venture in 1788 because he thought the Sierra Leone project ‘the most effective means of destroying the slave trade.'” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 321). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The treasury spent more than thirty thousand pounds transporting black loyalists from Nova Scotia and London to Sierra Leone between 1786 and 1792.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 301). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“A group of freed slaves arrived in Sierra Leone from England in 1787 to form a settlement. It failed but was revived by the Sierra Leone Company, a commercial company sponsored by English opponents of the slave trade … After the British Parliament made the slave trade illegal in 1807, the British government took over the settlement (Jan. 1, 1808) as a naval base against the slave trade and as a centre to which slaves, captured in transit across the Atlantic, could be brought and freed.” Source page.
“… the extent of the problem facing British sugar growers can best be measured by the 1804 report of the Jamaica House of the Assembly, which was later submitted to the Commons as part of a series of papers regarding the slave trade. This rambling piece was the longest document in this parliamentary collection and was widely known by contemporary writers, who mined it for data and arguments both in support of and against the West Indian cause.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 241). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“… the committee concurred with James Ramsay’s 1789 overproduction thesis … , claiming that ‘Far from being, in all Cases a Symptom of Prosperity, extending plantations is not unfrequently a Paroxysm of Despair.'” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 242). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In 1804, Pitt’s return to office and the uncertainty about the impact of newly independent Haiti on the British islands encouraged Wilberforce to reintroduce his abolition motion. The bill successfully passed through the House of Commons late in June, only to falter at the old hurdle. The House of Lords, quite untroubled by any sense of emergency, repeated their earlier insistence on hearing new evidence. The friends of abolition in the upper House advised postponement until the following year.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 226). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In the House of Lords which had historically proved reluctant to sacrifice national interest on the altar of humanitarianism, the economic argument was used to full effect by Lord Grenville. In the Commons where abolition was all but guaranteed in 1807 the economic argument was not totally absent …” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 270). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“… the resurrection of James Ramsay’s political-economic justification for abolition was a central theme in William Grenville’s summertime speech before the Lords.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 254). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The persistence of the sugar glut made it easy for him [Grenville] to press on with the claim that there was an economic flaw in the planter’s addiction to African slave trade: the economic context of the new century strengthened the notion that general abolition would not have negative consequences for the planters of the nation, but rather would help reform flawed West Indian business practices.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 254). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“… the common refrain among the other speeches was that abolition posed no threat to the planter class in any way.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 257). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Grenville also promised that the unilateral elimination of the British slave trade would not bolster foreign involvement in slaving. The Americans were expected to abolish their own slave trade soon (1808), while France was incapable of expanding their slaving operations since Trafalgar. But most important was the fact that merchants in war-torn Europe could not produce the necessary capital to sponsor a significant flow of trade from Africa to the New World.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 257). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Petitioners focused first and foremost on the need for political action against an offense to humanity, justice, and sound policy. Subsequent generations of petitions against the slave trade also stressed moral grounds for reform under the same triad of ‘humanity, religion and justice.’ Less than 5 percent of those petitions to come added any promise of economic advantage.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 215). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“While the cause of humanity and justice dominated the attack on the slave trade, one is struck by the role ‘policy’ played in the rhetoric of those MPs in support of abolition.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Free trade did not suit all merchants and shipowners, however, and was not fully implemented until the 1840s and 1850s. In 1846, in an atmosphere of divided opinion, Parliament took the controversial step of repealing the regulations which had guarded British corn prices since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Three years later, the Navigation Laws, which had underpinned the whole policy of protection of British goods for two centuries, were also repealed. In his Budget of 1853, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Ewart Gladstone repealed or reduced duties on 250 articles. In his next Budget, in 1860, he removed nearly all remaining protectionist regulations.” Source page.
“The Corn Laws were finally repealed in 1846, a triumph for the manufacturers, whose expansion had been hampered by protection of grain, against the landed interests.” Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Corn Laws (2016). Source page.
“During the decade before British abolition, the empire acquired ten times more undeveloped territory suitable for slavery than it had occupied during the whole previous century in Trinidad, Guiana, and South Africa.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 224). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Neither imports from nor exports to the British West Indies declined at the end of the eighteenth century, On the contrary both categories increased sharply in value toward 1800 and reached levels well above the putative ‘golden age’ before the American revolution … the British West Indies were generally the most important sector to Britain for the entire century between 1722 and 1822.” Drescher, S. (1977) Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (pp. 16–17). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. See also tables detailing absolute value and percentage share of exports and imports to West Indies in Ibid (pp.18–25).
“Until British policies began to inhibit slavery’s growth, the British transatlantic slave trade also reached its all time peak. By the end of the eighteenth century, British slavers were landing 50,000 slaves per year in the Americas and moving nearly 60 percent of the total number of captives shipped across the ocean.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 206). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Interdicting the slave trade would hobble the economy of the enemy. So, the abolitionist rationale for passing foreign trade prohibition a few months before the Act of 1807 was that fresh slaves were ‘seeds of production’ not ‘seeds of destruction.'” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Although it is impossible to argue whether or not the economic decline caused the destruction of the British Atlantic slave trade, it can at the very least explain the timing of Parliament’s final decision on the matter.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 18). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The 1807 ban on British slaving was not the consequence of a heightened surge in humanitarian sentiment, but the result of a changing economic context that allowed abolition to be construed as having a positive effect on the colonial interest.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 254). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In the House of Lords, which had historically proved reluctant to sacrifice national interest on the altar of humanitarianism, the economic argument was used to full effect by Lord Grenville.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 270). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Against this background arose a revolution, beginning as a series of conflicts from the early 1790s. Among the causes of the conflicts were the affranchis’ frustrations with a racist society, turmoil created in the colony by the French Revolution, nationalistic rhetoric expressed during Vodou ceremonies, the continuing brutality of slave owners, and wars between European powers.” Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Haitian Revolution (2016). Source page.
“The organizers were clearly less worried about too little popular enthusiasm for abolition than too much. Their most important concern was actually the danger to their own popular mobilization from linkage with other or more radical programs. Most members of the London Committee also feared that other political issues might impinge on the abolitionist mobilization. Clarkson, who was himself very sympathetic to the French Revolution, was explicitly warned by Wilberforce to steer clear of discussing it for fear of damaging the abolition cause.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 227). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“By then, the political window for agitation had closed. Fear of domestic radicalism was compounded by the twin threat of revolutionary slave emancipation in the Caribbean and still more by French revolutionary expansion in Europe. Early in 1793, as Britain went to war with France, ‘odium had fallen on collective applications’ to Parliament for any reform.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 223). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“For an antislavery movement to develop in Britain, then, four things had to happen. In the first place, the enslavement of Africans had to be considered, in the abstract, a moral wrong. Second, that moral wrong had to attain political significance; it had to attract sustained interest and become a cause for concern. Third, those concerned needed a way to act, a way to address the concerns that had emerged. And, fourth specific individuals and groups had to make a confrontation with the slave system a personal and collective mission, a priority that lasted beyond initial protests and could sustain itself with coherent organization and institutional commitments.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 29). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“A Spanish theologian, Tomas de Mercado, condemned the brutality of the Middle Passage in 1569 more than two centuries before the better-known and more consequential writings of Anthony Benezet. Jurist Bartolome de Albornoz asserted the natural right to enslaved Africans to liberty as early as 1573.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 39). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Several of the key activists in the late eighteenth century did read the works of their predecessors and self-consciously expanded on their insights … More often though, the history of antislavery before the 1760s is the history of isolated moralists … first reacting to the inhumanities they witnessed, and then labouring (often unassisted) to denounce institutions in which the vast majority of contemporaries had acquiesced.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 40–41). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Until the 1760s in the British Atlantic world, antislavery publications—pamphlets concerned solely with the immorality or injustice of slavery—came exclusively from men and women who had seen slavery for themselves.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 43). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Villeinage, the only legal form of human bondage in England, had fallen into disuse by the early sixteenth century.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 44). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, just as they began to establish American colonies, the English started to think of themselves as unusually and distinctively free.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 44). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In the protection of personal liberty, the common law was fundamental. By 1600, it was taken to either have delimited or eliminated private jurisdiction in England, subjecting everyone regardless of status, to the rule of law … Of equal importance to the emerging idea of liberty was constitutional government. Parliament emerged from a turbulent era of revolution, restoration and dynastic rivalry by the early eighteenth century as the guarantor of public liberty, as the principal restraint on royal absolutism, and as the champion of Protestantism in a Europe dominated by Catholic rulers.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 46–47). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The British knew their overseas empire as Protestant, commercial, maritime and free, and that self-conception helped quiet suggestions that exploitative, territorially aggressive, and tyrannical regimes were developing in their colonies.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 52). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Severe restraints on their autonomy and mobility left most apprentices, servants and day labourers in England a species of unfree labor. Involuntary service in parish workhouses increasingly was the prescribed fate for the orphaned and impoverished. Routinely and legally in times of war the admiralty forcibly impressed sailors into the Royal Navy, a practice that its opponents sometimes derided as a form of slavery … Under the common law, the head of a household held property in his dependents—in his wife, their children the resident servants.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 44). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Still, the authority exercised by slaveholders in the Americas was something new in both scope and kind … Moreover, enslaved Africans suffered a degree of powerlessness in the colonies wholly without equal elsewhere in British dominions. The potentially interminable length of service, the transmission of unfree status from parent to child, and the lack of access to legal protection (particularly in the plantation colonies) distinguished the servitude of slaves from the servitude of English laborers.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 45–46). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“English colonists oping to make their fortunes had in front of them the example of the Spanish tobacco fields on the Venezuelan coast and the Portuguese sugar plantations of Brazil. Matching their success seemed to mean tapping into the Spanish and Portuguese supplies of African labour … given the precedents set elsewhere in the Americas before the English arrived, a refusal to acquire and employ slaves would have been the truly surprising choice. In the Americas, those who had access to slave labor, and who could afford the price, bought slaves.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 49). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The slave system, then, enjoyed what looked like insurmountable support before the Revolutionary era. Both the plantation colonies and the network of Atlantic slave traders sustained lobbies to see that Parliament and the crown honoured their needs and interests.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 54). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Some colonists in British North America wanted nothing to do with slaves or slavery. Slaveholding conflicted with who they thought they were and why they had chosen to settle these colonies. Religious pilgrims from German-speaking Europe,for example, seem to have taken to slavery especially slowly … in 1688, German-speaking converts to Quakerism residing alongside the Delaware River wrote the well known Germantown protest, a pioneering statement that declared slavery to be an injustice and an embarrassment to the Quaker faith … Ten years would pass before the Moravian brethren at Wachovia acceded to the purchase of slaves for their first settlements in the North Carolina back country. Calvinist settlers in Northfield, Massachusetts, inspired by the Evangelical revivals in the Connecticut River valley, disparaged the authority of their Old Light minister by declaring that his ownership of a slave offered sufficient proof of his greed.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 87). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“If antislavery sentiment, alone, could have caused an anti-slavery movement, the campaign against the British slave trade should have commenced at least fifty years before it did. Slave traders in Britain encountered public disapproval early in the eighteenth century … An exhaustive stroll through the printed records of the early eighteenth century would show that remarks [condemning slavery] like these were rare. More significant than their number, though, are the offhand manner in which they were expressed and the breadth of antislavery sentiment they assumed decades before antislavery movements developed. The authors of these statements did not regard their opinions as controversial. Moral opposition to the enslavement of Africans required neither justification nor elaboration. It spoke for itself.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 37–38). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“…the many who expressed unhappiness with human bondage, in public or in private, thought it was futile to pursue political change. No one before 1760 believed that the British government could be persuaded to adjust its priorities. And the decentralized structure of the British Empire made the prospect of imperial regulation almost impossible to imagine.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 55). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“… the decentralized structure of the British Empire made the prospect of imperial regulation almost impossible to imagine. The colonial legislatures constructed slave codes through the freedom they enjoyed to govern their own affairs. If the crown had the authority to veto these laws as it rarely chose to do so.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 55). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“From a global perspective, the earth’s rulers appeared as committed to perpetuating bondage as they had when the Portuguese purchased their first slaves on the African coast three centuries earlier. In 1772, Arthur Young offered a bird’s eye view of bondage throughout the globe. He made the zone of freedom. appear narrow indeed … Young estimated that of the earth’s 775 million inhabitants, all but 33 million could be classified as unfree. If British readers could take pride in the statistic that one in three free people were subjects of his Britannic majesty, the proportions did not encourage optimism about the immediate prospects of humanity as a whole.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Few in England thought of Africans as natural slaves in the Aristotlean sense. At the same time, many did seem to assume that, in some way the African captives, as heathens, savages, and inferiors, had deserved their fate. Assumptions about racial difference would limit the development of sincere concern for unfree Africans throughout the eighteenth century even as antislavery campaigns first took shape.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 50–51). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“It now seems certain that coherent theories of biological difference did not take concrete shape until the early nineteenth century.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 50). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Before the nineteenth century, institutionalized racism, whether in the form of Iberian regimes of castas or northern Euro-American denials of civic equality, was directed more at free nonwhites than slaves. Although slavery was virtually uncontested as a necessary institution, neither did the beneficiaries or the critics of slavery take more than passing note of the rising scientific interest in race.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (pp. 84–85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Slavery was out of mind because it was very much out of sight. The British enjoyed the fruits of slavery while incurring few of its social or cultural costs. Not faced daily with the dangers of living in a slave society the residents of the British Isles had no immediate reason to dwell on the customs taking shape several thousand miles away.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 51). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The enslavement of Africans in the Americas appeared to the first English sojourners as a necessary fact of colonial settlement. Like the distinctive topography, flora, fauna and peoples, the institution of human bondage made the New World new.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 49). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Apologists could and did fall back on the sanctity of private property, the economic value of slave labour, and the national interest in sustaining valuable Atlantic trades.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 369). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“He argued that African societies and cultures were unskilled, uneducated and savage. For example, Michael Renwick Sergant, a merchant from Liverpool claimed: ‘We ought to consider whether the negroes in a well regulated plantation, under the protection of a kind master, do not enjoy as great, nay, even greater advantages than when under their own despotic governments.’ In his publication ‘The history of the British West Indies’ (published 1819), Mr Edwards also uses this argument when he describes a woman who said she prefered Jamaica to Guinea as people were not killed there.” Source page.
“The celebrants were warned that the doctrine of equality was not to be so construed as to subvert order and subordination; that they were not to think that African slavery was worse than moral sin; that the slave trade had benefited ‘multitudes … brought from the darkness of paganism, to a Christian land,’ and that they were not to expect a change in the domestic institution in the South.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 137). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The absence of any indigenous uprising in their own colonies prompted the British government to dismiss the possibility of abolitionist-inspired revolts as a bugaboo conjured up by antiabolitionists.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (pp. 225–226). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In England … the metropolitan core kept slavery at a distance by turning a blind common law eye toward the institution. The English government fully acknowledged property rights in persons on the Atlantic and the piecemeal construction of slave laws in each of their colonies. It avoided creating an imperial black code in the manner of the monarchs of Spain, Portugal, and France. The earliest, most famous, and most terse decision by English Chief Justice, John Holt, put the matter succinctly in a series of freedom suits in the early 1700s. The English common law he declared, took no ‘notice of Negroes being different from other men. By the common law no man can have a property in another, but [only] in special cases, as in a villein, but [not to kill him] so in captives took in war, but the taker may not kill him, but may sell them for ransom: there is no such thing as a slave by the law of England.'” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 97). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Even deportation, the colonial legality of the masters’ ultimate weapon, was at risk. Those who claimed this right over their black servants were unwilling to test its validity in the courts, preferring to spirit blacks aboard vessels bound for the Americas.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 99). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The issue came to a head in 1771, when a slave, James Somerset, was seized by his master and released on a writ of habeas corpus obtained by Granville Sharp, England’s most active abolitionist. The case came before England’s chief justice, Lord Mansfield. The hearings extended from January to June 1772.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 99). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The case quickly became the most widely publicized and discussed court drama over slavery in English history. In addition to extensive news coverage, more essays were published in the wake of the trial than the country had ever seen. The essays produced a level of public discussion that would not again be equaled until the emergence of political abolitionism fifteen years later.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 99). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“However, all of the reported variants of the original decision, and there were many, agree on a few common principles: English law did not allow a master residing in England to deport someone on the grounds that he was legally a slave in some other region. Slavery was a variety of domination that had to be specifically sanctioned within the laws of each legal jurisdiction. Charles Steuart was not permitted to forcibly detain James Somerset within England to transport him back to a place in which he was still recognized as a slave. No monetary or other considerations to slaveowners could override the absence of positive law allowing slavery.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 111). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Whatever the weight of the West India interest in British politics, it did not extend to institutionalizing slavery in the metropole. During the hearings Mansfield made it clear that if the planters wanted legal enforcement of their claims in England such enforcement would have to come from national legislation. A West Indian sounding of support in parliament failed to arouse any response. The West Indians’ sole consolation was that Mansfield left the institution intact abroad.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 105). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Thereafter, however, blacks wrote as axiomatically of the absence of slavery in England as did the most self-congratulatory white correspondents in the popular press.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“One could also belittle the freeing of blacks in London while Britain still sanctioned trading them abroad in record numbers.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 103). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“More than a decade before the development of abolitionism in Britain the middle and northern colonies in North America presented the unusual spectacle of societies with slaves turning against the practice of human bondage.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 106). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The Rhode Island General Court in 1652 established a ten-year ceiling on terms of service for all men and women.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 42). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Even in the case of Rhode Island, there is no evidence that the restriction on perpetual servitude was enforced.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 106). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“By 1774, imperial vetoes of slave trade restrictions were being added to the long list grievances against Britain. Action against slave imports was sufficiently consensual that the first Continental Congress could add it to the list of its economic sanctions against British trade.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 109). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“A substantial minority in revolutionary America came to think of slavery not only as a moral wrong, but also antislavery as a moral good, perhaps even a moral duty.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 106). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Evangelical clergy warned that the fate of the revolution turned upon the renunciation of collective sins like slavery.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 106). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“A Massachusetts writer argued in 1773 that patriots had an obligation to assist those enslaved men and women seeking their freedom, since this would show that instead of ‘being pretended Friends to Liberty, we are really hearty for the general and unalienable Rights of Mankind.’ Rhode Island legislators instituted a ban on slave imports because, they declared in their abolition law of 1774, ‘those who are desirous of enjoying all the advantages of liberty themselves, should be willing to extend personal liberty to others.'” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 106–107). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Benezet’s letter to Sharp also subtly alluded to a major caveat in this potentially potent political petition. The people of the Chesapeake slave colonies were convinced, he noted, ‘of the inexpediency, if not all of them of the iniquity of any further importation of negroes.’ ‘Inexpediency’ summed up the thrust of considerations that induced the Virginia House of Burgesses … to repeatedly and ultimately unanimously demand the cessation of slave importations. Some stressed the considerations of security. Others emphasized the discouragement to a diversified economy caused by importations of slaves to whites, both skilled and unskilled. Others were disturbed by the difficulty that a large proportion of African slaves posed to the development of a community that wished to build itself in the image of free English societies on the other side of the Atlantic. All arguments converged on a point that would echo in Virginia throughout the age of revolution. There were already too many blacks in the colony. A ban on imports would help to diminish the black presence in the region. Many of those opposed to the slave trade carefully differentiated their expedient positions from any attack on property in persons.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 108). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“… patriots used antislavery initiatives to inflict damage on the crown’s colonial agents. A lobbying campaign against slave imports in 1773 aimed to embarrass Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, far more than to change the laws of the colony. Legislators knew Hutchinson, fare more than to change the laws of the colony. Legislators knew Hutchinson would block the proposed abolition bill. He had royal instructions to do so and had vetoed a similar bill three years earlier. No matter. The abolition bill placed colonists on record as champions of liberty, positioned Hutchinson as a defender of the slave trade, and cast an unflattering light on the royal prerogative.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 138–139). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In practice, the Revolutionary generation set in motion only a gradual and ‘grudging emancipation,’ in the historian Alfred Young’s apt words, and only in those regions where slavery was of limited and declining importance. There, north of the Chesapeake, the pace of change displayed the persistent willingness to honour propertied interests. In most instances northern governments liberated only the unborn children of the enslaved, and only once those children reached adulthood.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 108). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“… expressions of shock and disgust at American hypocrisy, performed a vital rhetorical function. They accentuated broader claims about the legitimacy of British rule and the illegitimacy of rebellion. Samuel Johnson saved his now famous query regarding the ‘drivers of Negroes’ and their ‘yelps for liberty’ for the final passage of Taxation No Tyranny to ensure it’s dramatic effect.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 122). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“If Adam Smith cared about the abuse of Africans, wrote Arthur Lee, ‘instead of listening to the gratification of slanderous prejudice,’ he should have ‘exerted his abilities in dissuading Europeans from a barbarous trade.’ It was absurd for the British to congratulate themselves for ‘setting free a single Slave,’ observed Benjamin Franklin days after the Somerset case, when British merchants were ‘encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands‘ were ‘dragged into slavery.'” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 135). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“At a pivotal meeting at Orangetown New York, on May 6, 1783, Carleton informed a shocked George Washington of his intention to take the liberated slaves living in New York to Nova Scotia. British proclamations had freed rebels’ slaves from servitude, Carleton explained. They could no longer be considered property. Carleton and his entourage … took great pleasure in posturing as liberators before the before the commander in chief of the Continental Army.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 299). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Four decades after the Declaration of Independence, John Quincy Adams had to endure a lecture by Lord Liverpool, to the effect that those who had been offered their freedom could not ‘in good conscience’ be handed back into slavery.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 133). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Together, British and American propagandists during the era of the American Revolution politicized involvement in the slave system. Indeed, with respect to Atlantic slavery, they invented the notion of complicity. The years of crisis produced a preoccupation with affixing blame. And the consequence was a profound shift in what the historian Thomas Haskell once called the conventions governing the attribution of moral responsibility. No longer was disapproval directed vaguely against the slave system as a whole or against archetypal slaveholders. The American conflict offered up identifiable villains: colonials who cried for liberty but denied freedom to their slaves, British statesmen who honoured the interests of African traders and prevented colonials from curtailing slave imports … If particular individuals and groups could be held responsible for slavery, then they could also be held responsible for correcting the wrongs they had created.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 151–152). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In the colonies, the principal weapon against the slave trade was the power to tax. Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island imposed bans or severely restrictive duties on slave imports between 1769 and 1774. Other colonies would have enacted similar laws if imperial administrators had allowed … The nonimportation movements of 1769 and 1770 had a limited effect on the slave trade … However, the more vigorously enforced resolves instituted by the Continental Congress in 1774 and 1776 brought the slave trade to a standstill until the end of the Revolutionary War.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 135–136). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“A Massachusetts writer argued in 1773 that patriots had an obligation to assist those enslaved men and women seeking their freedom, since this would show that instead of ‘being pretended Friends to Liberty, we are really hearty for the general and unalienable Rights of Mankind.’ Rhode Island legislators instituted a ban on slave imports because, they declared in their abolition law of 1774, ‘those who are desirous of enjoying all the advantages of liberty themselves, should be willing to extend personal liberty to others.'” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 106–107). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“So, a year later, the ruling radicals of the newly independent state [Pennsylvania] described their gradual emancipation law of 1780 as the fulfillment of the Revolutionary movement, as an instance in which they could ‘extend a portion of that freedom to others, which has been extended to us … and release them from a state of thraldom, to which we ourselves were tyrannically doomed, and from which we have now every prospect of being delivered.'” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 141). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In the winter of 1792, the antisaccharite movement appeared to be but one more symptom of many radical challenges sweeping across the Atlantic world. Every British radical political organization hailed the surge of abolitionist petitions as the harbinger of still greater transformations. They happily incorporated ‘the end of the slave trade’ into their toasts and resolutions. The Society for Constitutional Information and the London Corresponding Society found a natural affinity in the plight of enslaved Africans and oppressed Britons.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 222). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Radical in politics, one who desires extreme change of part or all of the social order. The word was first used in a political sense in England, and its introduction is generally ascribed to Charles James Fox, who in 1797 declared for a ‘radical reform’ consisting of a drastic expansion of the franchise to the point of universal manhood suffrage. The term radical thereafter began to be used as a general term covering all those who supported the movement for parliamentary reform.” Source page.
“Sharp stood at the center of a network of reform-minded activists during the American conflict. His persistent defence of personal liberties and his principled advocacy of constitutional reform linked him to those ‘friends of America’ in London who opposed the conflict … Sharp revived his role as public advocate for the liberties of the subject during the American war and, with James Oglethorpe, fought the impressment of London seamen in the months following his antislavery tracts. With the earl of Effingham and John Cartwright, military officers who refused to fight in the American conflict, Sharp publicly opposed the wartime suspension of habeas corpus rights. Simultaneously, beginning in 1777, Sharp began to work closely with Cartwright, John Jebb, Capel Lofft and the duke of Richmond, the nucleus of a group that in 1780 coalesced as the Society for Constitutional Information, the intellectual wing of London political dissent.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 188–189). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“This decision to side with colonial patriots helped commit British radicals to an embrace of American antislavery politics” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 149). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Most members of the London Committee also feared that other political issues might impinge on the abolitionist mobilization. Clarkson, who was himself very sympathetic to the French Revolution, was explicitly warned by Wilberforce to steer clear of discussing it for fear of damaging the abolition cause.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 220). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“As the flow of abolition petitions peaked early in 1792, the counterabolitionist strategy broadened to conflate abolitionism, not only with slave emancipation, but with every potential threat to public order, foreign and domestic. Antiabolitionists widely advertised publications detailing the horrors of the revolution in Saint Domingue. Clarkson felt impelled to publish a denial of membership in the Jacobin club of Paris. The London Committee also published his refutation of the West India Committee’s accusation that the British abolitionist movement was responsible for the Saint Domingue uprising.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 222). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In 1788, the House of Lords had barely assented to the Dolben regulatory measure. The House of Lord insisted upon hearing its own evidence and put off beginning the hearings until the following session. By then, the political window for agitation had closed. Fear of domestic radicalism was compounded by the twin threat of revolutionary slave emancipation in the Caribbean and still more by French revolutionary expansion in Europe. Early in 1793, as Britain went to war with France, ‘odium had fallen on collective applications’ to Parliament for any reform.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 223). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Yet with respect to slavery, Sharp perhaps was not selective enough. If he was the most determined British opponent of slavery during the Revolutionary era, antislavery never mattered more to him during these years than the protests against the American war of the campaign to reform the legislature … Sharp seems not to have considered pushing abolitionism on the country associations despite his close engagement with the campaign for political reform. On the subject of slavery, he never developed a scheme for the national dissemination of propaganda, although he contributed to a similar program conducted by the Society for Constitutional Information.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 199–200). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The first British activists failed in their effort to promote antislavery measures, in part because they lacked a viable program of reform. The plans they devised required from the imperial state powers that it appeared to possess … Subsequently, in the 1780s reformers would shift their attention to abolishing the slave trade which Parliament had unquestioned authority to regulate.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 257). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“To Ramsay, absolute dependence in slavery left the unfree worse than savages … to free slaves without moral instruction, he reasoned, would leave them without the facility for self-advancement … A persisting concern for stability, commerce and civic harmony, then figured prominently in these schemes. The emancipationists envisioned an ordered and orderly transition to freedom.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 236–237). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“British abolitionists, therefore, turned their complete attention to dismantling colonial slavery. The institution was still susceptible to direct metropolitan public pressure. In 1823, a new organization modestly called itself a ‘Society for Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of British Colonial Slavery.’ Within seven years, it sharpened its policy into a single demand for immediate slave emancipation. By 1833, it successfully completed its popular campaign for the formal ending of the institution of slavery. Five years later, another popular campaign aborted the apprenticeship system that had been established for former slaves as a transitional stage to full freedom. By 1838, all special restraints on labor relations for ex-slaves were terminated.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 248). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Riding the roaring boom [of 1814] … the British slave interest would ordinarily have hailed the present with hosannas and the future with optimism. Yet … Without the restoration of the slave trade, production must continue to stagnate until the distant moment when the demographic situation had dramatically altered … The dearth of labor meant that both the frontier and renewed Continental demand were worthless incentives to expansion. The system could no longer respond.” Drescher, S. (1977) Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. (p. 149) Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
“Complementing the declining proportion of Africans in the labor force was an expected increase in the care given to slaves in the West Indies. Without the prospect of ‘an annual supply,’ the planter would no longer be able to stint on food, clothing, antenatal care and medical attention … No longer addicted to the false economy of African labor, the West Indian proprietor would benefit from the opportunity to cultivate the skills of slaves born on the estate.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 174). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In the main, slaves were forced to work excessively hard while enduring ‘cruel and unusual usage.’ This was tragic for slaves, but Clarkson, like Ramsay, also argued it was economically inefficient for the planter. Without a slave trade, they argued, planters would be forced to come to an understanding that there is profit to be derived from paternalism.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The London Committee chose to build on preexisting hostility toward British slaving by calling for an end to the slave trade instead of calling for emancipation. This decision to narrow their attack was based on three pragmatic considerations. First it was widely understood that few MPs would entertain the notion of meddling with ownership of slaves because such action would constitute an infringement of the subject’s right to hold property … Whilst it was theoretically acceptable for the British government to offer compensation to slave owners in exchange for emancipation, the cost would have been enormous for an already financially strained government.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 164). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Clarkson analogised that planters were like and English farmer who would ‘purchase a [post] horse at a certain price, and a certain age,’ then profitably working it ‘through twice the work which he ought to perform at a given time.’ This business strategy of course had dreadful consequences for the slaves, but Clarkson also speculated that it had a negative effect on the planter’s own pocket book, for planters collectively chased after short-term profits as opposed to considering the long-term opportunities available by cultivating the human capital of their bondsmen.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 170–171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“… the common refrain among the other speeches was that abolition posed no threat to the planter class in any way.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 257). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“A second reason for the narrow attack on the slave trade, and not the institution of slavery, itself, had to do with the comparative difficulty of gathering empirical evidence on the treatment of slaves in the Caribbean relative to collecting data on the Middle Passage. With the vast majority of slaving voyages in the British Empire originating from English ports, the London Committee could marshal hard data on shipboard conditions that was irrefutable. Slave merchants were not eager to have their business investigated, but it was impossible to prevent interviews with sailors who could offer eyewitness accounts of the treatment of African slaves to the Americas. The slave trade was relatively easy to study because the human cost was quantifiable. Annual estimates of the number of slaves, the number of deaths and the number of women and children aboard a ship could be tabulated, while similar morbidity and mortality figures for the Caribbean would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to collect.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 164–165). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.”
“The public was also more likely to understand the horrors of shipboard conditions. The cramped quarters, the lack of sanitary facilities and the barbarity inherent in the slave trade could easily be proven by calculating the ratio of human cargo to vessel size.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 165). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.”
“Quakers delivered the first abolition petition to the House of Commons (1783), established the first antislavery committees and associations in the British Isles (1783) and initiated the systematic circulation of abolitionist literature.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p.391). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Almost every single anti-slavery tract printed in England, between 1783 and 1787, including James Ramsey’s Essay, came of the printing press of Quaker publisher James Phillips.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p.391). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“More than other sects, Quakers attempted to realize in practice the egalitarian principles implicit in the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation. Friends knew that Christ had enjoined compassion for the weak. And they knew that the violence required to institute and sustain slavery conflicted with their unique commitment to pacifism … Friends could identify more readily with the enslaved since they, too, in both England and North America, had known persecution. Quakers moreover, regarded themselves as a people apart, committed distinctively to sustaining distance from a sinful world … These doctrines did not prevent the vast majority of Quakers from investing in the slave trade or holding slaves. Most who did, could.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 88–89). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The crisis that occurred during and after the Seven Years War, which culminated in a reformation of American Quakerism, has been well described. Moral reformers concerned with decline of piety within the religious society made use of the war’s strain on Quaker politicians to promote a renunciation of worldliness and a new fidelity to sectarian principles. Quaker elders agreed to disown slave traders and discourage slaveholding within the sect as part of a more general campaign to purify the religious society.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 90–91). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“When the London Yearly Meeting banned Friends from participating in the slave trade in 1761, it established a new standard of discipline for its members rather than registering a public protest against human commerce.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 395). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“If Quaker actions indicated what they thought true Christians should do, that was a conclusion others would need to draw for themselves. The leaders of the reformation within the Society of Friends in Britain did not, at first, push the antislavery campaign beyond the boundaries of the sect.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 395). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Anthony Benezet of Philadelphia differed from the other Friends active in the antislavery movement before the American Revolution. Unlike his contemporaries, he looked beyond the borders of the Society of Friends … In the last years of the colonial era, Anthony Benezet acted as the leading propagandist for slave trade abolition and its chief investigator. His tracts reached every colony on the eastern seaboard north of the Carolinas.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 396–397). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Anthony Benezet of Philadelphia had been patiently transforming his local Society of Friends into the first denomination to set a goal of withdrawing itself from connection with slavery. By 1772, he had expanded his mission to include the abolition of slavery and the slave trade throughout the British Empire.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 107). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The same year, Philadelphia Quakers established the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first association in the British Atlantic world dedicated to the promotion of antislavery principles.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 108). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“English Quaker abolitionism in the 1780s emerged out of tensions within the Society of Friends, tensions that the antislavery movement itself would help to heal.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 394). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“English Friends, in fact, cooperated rather less than first appears. The London leadership evinced no more than a hesitant embrace of colonial abolitionism despite their supportive words.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 404). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In May 1767 the London Meeting for Sufferings reprinted fifteen hundred copies of A Caution and Warning and distributed them to each member of parliament.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 402). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“After the peace, thirteen Quaker ministers from the former colonies journeyed to England in 1783 and 1784 to extend and expand the campaign against worldliness within the Society of Friends.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 414). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“At Hertford, Friends ignored strictures against the paying of tithes. In Norwich, lax members routinely arrived late to meetings for worship. Too often, the grandees of the Grace Church Street Meeting in London failed to attend at all.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 415). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“John Pemberton and the other Quaker ministers from America set the less strict London patriciate on edge. Quaker elders in England did not take well to what they thought of as a challenge to their spiritual and temporal authority … [There were] sharp divisions within the Society of Friends at the pivotal gathering in 1783. The proposed campaign for slave trade abolition, therefore, constituted one part of a broader and deeper set of questions concerning religious discipline, reform, the role of female ministers in Quaker governance, and the very meaning of Quakerism in the aftermath of war, revolution and American independence.”
“In 1783 … religious reformers exploited the size and solemnity of a Yearly Meeting to bully reluctant elders into accepting new antislavery commitments … On June 16 273 Quaker men signed a petition to the House of Commons that declared the ‘suffering situation’ of ‘the enslaved Negroes’ ‘a subject calling for the humane Interposition of the legislature’ and asked members to consider an abolition of the slave trade.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 422). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Granville Sharp would have a decisive impact on the crystallisation of antislavery impulses in certain circles within the Church of England … The intensity of these efforts, however, must be set alongside the modesty of the results. If Sharp raised consciousness, he did not start a movement. The tireless cajoling of bishops produced few genuine converts. Most had no desire to take a public position on a question of commercial policy.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 195). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“… those looking for ways to ‘help’ the enslaved were inclined to choose religious rather than legal solutions. They endorsed measures that would bring slavery in line with concepts of Christian servitude: ideally, slaves would honour their masters as earthly representatives of divine authority; masters, in turn, would tend to the spiritual welfare to the enslaved because God had tended to them, because the enslaved also were children of God. In this way the authority of God would sanctify and circumscribe the authority of the master, putting an end to the cycle of intimidation and violence endemic to colonial slavery.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 56–57). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The declared mission of … the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded in 1701, included the religious instruction of heathens throughout British dominions.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 61). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Historians of antislavery frequently dismiss these initiatives since they fell short of an attack on slavery and, with respect to Christian conversions produced meagre results.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 62). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Three times, however, in 1703, 1710 and 1714, the SPG attempted (and failed) to introduce legislation that would have made Christian instruction of slaves imperial law.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 63). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In several instances, planters took aggressive steps to obstruct Christian missionaries … More frequently, planters simply harassed subversive or disruptive ministers into silence … Aspiring missionaries often complained privately about the restrictions slaveholders placed on their work among the enslaved.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 66–67). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Ramsey already knew that he did not like much about life in the Caribbean … The planters displayed contempt for Christianity purely to irritate him. ‘It was a kind of fashion,’ he wrote in 1771, ‘Which prevails almost universally among all our ranks of people to refrain from coming to church.'” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 74). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Even worse [Christian missionaries] claim to sovereignty in spiritual matters threatened to intrude on the authority of planters in temporal affairs.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 59). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“At the time, few slaveholders thought that Christian preaching would make slavery more secure … Converting field workers en masse however, threatened a dangerous restructuring of social relations. To uphold slavery, it helped to regard Africans as radically different and inferior people. Converting heathens into Christians risked removing a fundamental marker of difference. The enslaved would begin to worship with and among the free. Under such circumstances, it would be difficult to think of the enslaved as brutes and thus to treat them brutally …” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 59). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“As the frustrated Codrington chaplain, John Hodgson, explained in the late 1750s, a renewed effort to convert the slaves would require far more than a dedicated agent and instructional books. In fact little could be done for slaves until there had been ‘a great Change of their Condition, by introducing among them the Regulations, and Advantages of civil Life,’ until something was done to ameliorate slavery.'” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 73). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“If slaveholders in Saint Kitts had permitted Ramsey to instruct some of the enslaved men and women in his parish, his appetite for reform might have been satisfied.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 74). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“As a naval surgeon in the late 1750s he had come to the aid of distressed slave ships wracked by dysentery. The human suffering he saw there gave him his life’s mission … Ramsey devoted himself to preaching amongst the enslaved.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 74). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Although Ramsey had married into a prominent Saint Kitts family, he refused to identify with an aristocracy that, as he saw it, lacked manners, honor, or humanity. In 1768 he began to write an essay that detailed ways to facilitate the religious instruction of enslaved Africans in the sugar colonies. By the time he had completed a draft in 1771, he had decided that only intervention by the state, legal protection for the slaves, and provisions for limited civil rights would facilitate the spread of Christianity in the slave quarters.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 74). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“… Ramsey published the revised version of the manuscript in 1784 as An Essay Concerning the Treatment and Conversion of Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies …” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 252). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Sharp lobbied the bishops to introduce the abolition bill two years later, in 1779, when the House of Commons established a committee to investigate the administration of the African slave trade.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 194). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“If Sharp raised consciousness, he did not start a movement. The tireless cajoling of Bishops produced few genuine converts. Most had no desire to take a public position on a question of commercial policy.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 195). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester … commenced inquiries into the character of Caribbean slavery in these months’ his inquiry would culminate in a consequential partnership with the West Indian activist the Reverend James Ramsey.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 194). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“John Hinchcliffe Bishop of Peterborough, ‘exerted himself in an extraordinary manner, in calling upon a variety of people who have knowledge of the trade and reading all the books he can find upon the subject, in order that he may be enabled to answer the pleas of interested people who endeavour to promote the trade.’ … Hinchcliffe and Richard Watson invited Sharp to the University in the spring of 1781 to discuss with them ideas for promoting ameliorative reform.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 194–195). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The slave trade … declared university vice-chancellor Peter Peckard … was … ‘the disgrace of our country.’ Peckard would set the examination question in 1785—Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?—that would move the twenty-five-year-old Thomas Clarkson to investigate the conditions of the British slave trade.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 195). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“By leading an abolition movement, the Evangelicals could draw on more positive associations to give a benevolent, less repressive cast to their broader crusade for moral reform.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 387). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“By leading an abolition movement, the Evangelicals could draw on more positive associations to give a benevolent, less repressive cast to their broader crusade for moral reform.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 387). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Roger Antsey, the last to study the topic with care, concluded that Evangelical antislavery originated in the peculiar features of Evangelicalism itself. It sprang, he proposed, from the dynamics of spiritual rebirth, from the convulsive experience of conversion to ‘vital Christianity.’ He identified the crucial elements as, first, a deepened awareness of personal sin, and second a renewed faith in the saving grace offered by God and conferred through Christ’s atonement on the cross … Evangelicals did not perform good works to be saved, since salvation, they believed, could come only through faith. Instead, thankfulness propelled them into active propagation of the gospel, so that others could recognize the sin within themselves and then choose to surrender themselves to God.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 336). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“More important to the early history of abolitionism was the coterie of devout Anglicans gathered at Barham Court, the principal estate in the village of Teston.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 342). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Bouverie shared Barham Court with her childhood friend, the devout Lady Margaret Middleton, and Sir Charles Middleton, comptroller of the navy and, as of 1784, member of Parliament for Rochester.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 343). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Bouverie’s philanthropies, wrote Hannah More, were ‘boundless.’ She was the principal donor to the Teston charity school. In the manicured park encircling Barham Court she kept a ‘Chamber for sick beggars, poor vagrant ones come there to lie in …'” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 343). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The Testonites joined in the rapidly spreading Sunday school movement, an initiative designed to provide instruction in the gospel to children of the poor and curb profanation of the Sabbath.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 346). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“… he (Bishop Porteous) assisted William Wilberforce in securing from George III a proclamation against vice and immorality, a declaration aimed at spurring magistrates to enforce existing laws with greater vigor. Sir Charles Middleton joined Porteus and Wilberforce in recruiting noblemen and bishops for the voluntary society they formed to ensure attention to the King’s proclamation.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 346). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“A preoccupation with slavery in the British West Indies distinguished the Teston clan from their contemporaries, a preoccupation that originated in their long association with the Reverend James Ramsey, the Teston parish viar as of 1781. Ramsey owed his career to Teston patronage and the good offices of Charles Middleton in particular.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 346–347). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In the fall of 1786, the Teston clan received a visit from Thomas Clarkson, who had just published his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Clarkson went to Teston at the invitation of James Ramsay, who learned of Clarkson’s work through the publisher they shared, the Quaker printer James Phillips.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 377). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In Teston, in the fall of 1786, a youthful Thomas Clarkson pledged his energies to a national campaign for slave trade abolition.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 342). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“These meetings decided the political agenda along the lines Ramsey had proposed. Margaret Middleton called on Charles to introduce an abolition bill to the House of Commons. A poor orator, Charles thought he could not do the cause justice, so he suggested that they solicit William Wilberforce the young member of Parliament for Yorkshire, just then in the throes of a turbulent crisis in faith.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 377). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“And in Teston … William Wilberforce first agreed to bring the cause before Parliament … In 1789, in the weeks before he introduced in the House of Commons the first motion for slave trade abolition, Wilberforce ‘and the whole Junto of Abolitionists,’ Hannah More reported, were ‘locked up’ at Barham Court, ‘slaving till two o’clock every morning.’ Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 342). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“On June 16, 273 Quaker men signed a petition to the House of Commons that declared the ‘suffering situation’ of ‘the enslaved Negroes’ ‘a subject calling for the humane Interposition of the legislature’ and asked members to consider an abolition of the slave trade. The politicians surprised Friends with their response. ‘Favourably received,’ a relieved David Barclay told the London Meeting for Suffering several days later … The Society of Friends gave them an opportunity to voice their support for liberty and humanity. It cost them nothing and committed them to little more than praising Friends for their noble gesture. In 1783, as throughout the eighteenth century, it was easy to oppose the slave trade in theory and back the slave trade in practice.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 422–423). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The Friends took care to target men positioned to shape commercial and imperial policy … They targeted nearly every official in the local and national government, from country justices of the peace to the commissioners of the navy and the customers … Dozens of Quakers across England devoted countless hours in 1784 and 1785 to placing antislavery literature in the proper hands.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 428). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In the summer of 1783, in the same months that the Meeting for Sufferings appointed a standing committee to lobby “those who count,” a smaller body worked surreptitiously to litter the British press with selections from antislavery literature … [they] purchased space to print antislavery notices in the London and provincial press.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 429). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“No well-read person could have been unaware of The Case of Our Fellow-Creatures by the late 1780s.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 427). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The Essay differed from previous commentaries on Caribbean slavery in several ways … there was effusive praise from critics … it left the West Indian interest apoplectic.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 364–366). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The Essay differed from previous commentaries on Caribbean slavery in several ways … there was its authority. The product of nearly two decades of living, writing and thinking in the West Indies, the author possessed an unusual command of his subject.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 364–365). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Organized abolitionism began in May 1787, with the formation in London of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (the London Committee). As J.R. Oldfield has demonstrated, the London Committee would thereafter remain the nation’s headquarters and coordinating center for popular mobilization.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (pp. 213–214). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Its members hoped that their provincial contacts would support an anticipated parliamentary intervention through local communications and petitions to representatives. The London Committee’s first priority was to gather first-hand evidence for an anticipated parliamentary inquiry. Thomas Clarkson was dispatched on a journey to Bristol and Liverpool, two slave-trading towns that were least likely to take the lead in furnishing abolitionist pressure on their MPs.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 214). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“On his way back to London, Clarkson was surprised and delighted to find that the town of Manchester had already formed its own abolitionist committee and intended to submit a mass petition to Parliament. From the outset, organized religious dissenters also rallied to the movement—Unitarians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and Evangelical Anglicans added their support to the Quaker cadres on grounds of morality, justice, and religion.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 214). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The Manchester petition of December 1787 was innovative in another major respect. Newspapers were especially significant in the first national mobilization. There is no evidence that the local petitioning committees were in direct contact with each other during the initial campaign. Based upon Manchester’s prior efforts at mobilization on economic issues, its abolitionists reprinted their petition in every major newspaper in England, calling for similar petitions. This summons probably helped to ensure that petitions for abolition composed more than half the total of petitions sent to Parliament in the 1787–1788 sessions.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 215). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The London Committee resolved that the time had come to renew its appeal to the nation for what was denied by Parliament. This time the mobilization was not left to the hazards of local initiatives. Clarkson systematically toured England. Another agent, William Dickson, covered Scotland. The emissaries were no longer seeking, but were dispensing evidence in the form of a carefully selected abstract of the testimony before the Select Parliamentary Committee. They also orchestrated the timing of petition meetings to ‘excite the flame,’ but delay its ‘flaring forth’ until the mass of petitions could simultaneously arrive in Parliament.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (pp. 219–220). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“From the Quakers, who formed its original majority, the London Committee inherited experience in business organization, sources of funding, and a publishing and distribution network for books, pamphlets, official reports, and letters.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 213). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“This summons probably helped to ensure that petitions for abolition composed more than half the total of petitions sent to Parliament in the 1787–1788 sessions. At a conservative estimate, at least 60,000 individuals signed the abolition petitions of 1788.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 215). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In February 1788, the prime minister, invoking intense popular interest, launched an inquiry of the Privy Council committee for trade and plantations into the slave trade. Its very mission marked a paradigmatic break with more than a century of governmental attention to the African slave trade. Instead of seeking ways to protect and enhance the trade, this investigation signaled a fundamental shift in the relationship between the metropolis and its overseas slave system. For the first time, the British political system was asked to treat Africans as fellow human beings in a foreign land rather than as factors of trade and production.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In 1788, the House of Lords had barely assented to the Dolben regulatory measure.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 223). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Dolben introduced a Bill on 21 May to regulate the numbers of enslaved Africans carried from Africa to the West Indies.” Source page.
“During the next eighteen years, bills for the abolition of the British slave trade would be moved twelve more times in Parliament, but always as an open question and not a government measure. Twice before 1807, abolition bills would succeed in the Commons only to be stymied in the upper house.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Before 1806, two partial bills for eliminating British slaving to foreign colonies or from certain parts of the African coast would suffer similar fates in the House of Lords.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
During the three years following the 1788 campaign, the London abolitionists focused their energies on procuring witnesses and evidence to be laid before a Commons Select Committee on the slave trade obtained by Wilberforce in 1789.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 217). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Parliamentary debates and governmental initiatives were now the daily grist of provincial newspaper readers. When legislative debates extended over weeks and months, newspapers, associations, libraries, debating societies, and public meetings offered parallel venues for ongoing discussions and petitions to the national legislature.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 209). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The advent of political abolitionism opened up new public space for Africans. In quick succession, Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano became shapers of opinion rather than voiceless victims. To the themes of brutality published by Ramsay, Clarkson, and the Quakers, Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787) boldly added a prescient argument for the creation of a maritime blockade against slavers. Two years later, the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African made its author the most widely known African in Britain. Equiano’s best-selling book and nationwide lecture tours provided most Britons with the most personalized experience of the Atlantic slave system they were to receive.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The image was widely reproduced on domestic objects like crockery and also became popular on fashion accessories. According to Clarkson, gentlemen had the image ‘inlaid in gold on the lid of their snuffboxes. Of the ladies several wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for the hair. At length, the taste for wearing them became general; and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity, and freedom.'” Source page.
“In addition to its official seal with a kneeling slave, the Committee circulated the famous print of the slave ship Brookes. As a cheap, mass-produced product, it endured for a generation as the most widely disseminated image of the slave trade.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 217). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“A nationwide campaign was launched to abstain from the consumption of slave-grown sugar. This ‘antisaccharite’ movement was more than just a symbolic means of pollution avoidance. It was meant to be an instrument of direct economic coercion against the whole slave interest and it dramatically broadened the public sphere. Special appeals were directed toward women, as managers of the household budget. They stressed women’s special sensitivity to family separations and offered the boycott as a means of compensating for their exclusion from the petition campaign. Children, too, were also urged, and volunteered, to become part of this national consumer mobilization. On his speaking tours, Equiano distributed pamphlets against consuming slave sugar. Again, the bolder Clarkson privately favored the antisaccharite agitation in hopes of increasing the turnout for petitions, but Wilberforce feared abstention as likely to alienate moderates.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 221). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“After the passage of the foreign slave trade act in May 1806, attention immediately turned to the question of total abolition.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 226). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In 1805 and 1806, it was the parliamentary abolitionists who led the charge in demanding that British slave traders be prohibited from carrying Africans to foreign or conquered colonies. Interdicting the slave trade would hobble the economy of the enemy.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Manchester’s abolitionist signers represented about two-thirds of its eligible adult males.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“They also orchestrated the timing of petition meetings to ‘excite the flame,’ but delay its ‘flaring forth’ until the mass of petitions could simultaneously arrive in Parliament.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 220). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Early in 1793, as Britain went to war with France, ‘odium had fallen on collective applications’ to Parliament for any reform. Nothing resembling the great popular agitation of 1792 was repeated before the passage of slave trade abolition acts in 1806–1807. Some historians have seen Parliamentary abolition as having occurred within a long lull in popular participation, stretching from 1792 until the 1820s. If one looks beyond mass petitioning, however, the role of public opinion in 1806–1807 is abundant. In accounting for its changed form, one must bear in mind both the magnitude of the reactionary culture of the 1790s and abolition’s relatively rapid reappearance as the first successful reform movement after the French Revolutionary decade. Even in the 1790s, for all of the innuendos about Wilberforce and Jacobinsim, the House of Commons never refused to consider his annual motions for abolition. By 1804, fears of popular radicalism had subsided.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 223). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In the House of Lords which had historically proved reluctant to sacrifice national interest on the altar of humanitarianism, the economic argument was used to full effect by Lord Grenville. In the Commons where abolition was all but guaranteed in 1807 the economic argument was not totally absent …” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 270). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Stephen Fuller, the Colonial Agent for Jamaica, had anticipated the situation: ‘The stream of popularity runs against us,’ he wrote as early as January 1788, ‘but I trust nevertheless that common-sense is with us, and that wicked as we are when compared with the abolishers, the wisdom and policy of this country will protect us.’ ‘Common’ sense was institutionalized in the House of Lords. Until 1806, the peers would invoke their prerogative of independent examination to prevent the general abolition bills approved by the House of Commons from moving on to a definitive vote.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 227). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Grenville introduced the general abolition bill to the Lords on January 2, 1807 …” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 254). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“After a short committee debate on February 6, and an easy passage on the third reading (February 10), the bill was immediately sent to the Commons for its first reading there.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 258). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Slavery was of ambiguous legality in England throughout the 18th century, and definitely illegal after the Somerset case in 1772.

“… [A]ll of the reported variants of the original decision, and there were many, agree on a few common principles: English law did not allow a master residing in England to deport someone on the grounds that he was legally a slave in some other region. Slavery was a variety of domination that had to be specifically sanctioned within the laws of each legal jurisdiction. Charles Steuart was not permitted to forcibly detain James Somerset within England to transport him back to a place in which he was still recognized as a slave. No monetary or other considerations to slaveowners could override the absence of positive law allowing slavery.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 111). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

As far as the population of black people in Britain at the time, National Archives gives estimates of 15–20,000, where the 15,000 estimate comes from the Somerset case. The first census in Britain was in 1801 and found 10.5 million people in Great Britain. That would imply about 1 in 500 people in Britain were black during this period.
“Interdicting the slave trade would hobble the economy of the enemy. So, the abolitionist rationale for passing foreign trade prohibition a few months before the Act of 1807 was that fresh slaves were ‘seeds of production’ not ‘seeds of destruction.'” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 171). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The persistence of the sugar glut made it easy for [Grenville] to press on with the claim that there was an economic flaw in the planter’s addiction to African slave trade: the economic context of the new century strengthened the notion that general abolition would not have negative consequences for the planters of the nation, but rather would help reform flawed West Indian business practices.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 254). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Source page.
“The London Committee chose to build on preexisting hostility toward British slaving by calling for an end to the slave trade instead of calling for emancipation. This decision to narrow their attack was based on three pragmatic considerations. First it was widely understood that few MPs would entertain the notion of meddling with ownership of slaves because such action would constitute an infringement of the subject’s right to hold property … Whilst it was theoretically acceptable for the British government to offer compensation to slave owners in exchange for emancipation, the cost would have been enormous for an already financially strained government.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 164). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“A second reason for the narrow attack on the slave trade, and not the institution of slavery, itself, had to do with the comparative difficulty of gathering empirical evidence on the treatment of slaves in the Caribbean relative to collecting data on the Middle Passage. With the vast majority of slaving voyages in the British Empire originating from English ports, the London Committee could marshal hard data on shipboard conditions that was irrefutable. Slave merchants were not eager to have their business investigated, but it was impossible to prevent interviews with sailors who could offer eyewitness accounts of the treatment of African slaves to the Americas. The slave trade was relatively easy to study because the human cost was quantifiable. Annual estimates of the number of slaves, the number of deaths and the number of women and children aboard a ship could be tabulated, while similar morbidity and mortality figures for the Caribbean would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to collect.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 164–165). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.”
“A second reason for the narrow attack on the slave trade, and not the institution of slavery, itself, had to do with the comparative difficulty of gathering empirical evidence on the treatment of slaves in the Caribbean relative to collecting data on the Middle Passage. With the vast majority of slaving voyages in the British Empire originating from English ports, the London Committee could marshal hard data on shipboard conditions that was irrefutable. Slave merchants were not eager to have their business investigated, but it was impossible to prevent interviews with sailors who could offer eyewitness accounts of the treatment of African slaves to the Americas. The slave trade was relatively easy to study because the human cost was quantifiable. Annual estimates of the number of slaves, the number of deaths and the number of women and children aboard a ship could be tabulated, while similar morbidity and mortality figures for the Caribbean would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to collect.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 164–165). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.”
“The public was also more likely to understand the horrors of shipboard conditions. The cramped quarters, the lack of sanitary facilities and the barbarity inherent in the slave trade could easily be proven by calculating the ratio of human cargo to vessel size.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 165). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.”
“A second reason for the narrow attack on the slave trade, and not the institution of slavery, itself, had to do with the comparative difficulty of gathering empirical evidence on the treatment of slaves in the Caribbean relative to collecting data on the Middle Passage. With the vast majority of slaving voyages in the British Empire originating from English ports, the London Committee could marshal hard data on shipboard conditions that was irrefutable. Slave merchants were not eager to have their business investigated, but it was impossible to prevent interviews with sailors who could offer eyewitness accounts of the treatment of African slaves to the Americas. The slave trade was relatively easy to study because the human cost was quantifiable. Annual estimates of the number of slaves, the number of deaths and the number of women and children aboard a ship could be tabulated, while similar morbidity and mortality figures for the Caribbean would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to collect.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (pp. 164–165). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.”
“Dolben introduced a Bill on 21 May to regulate the numbers of enslaved Africans carried from Africa to the West Indies.” Source page.
“In the main, slaves were forced to work excessively hard while enduring ‘cruel and unusual usage.’ This was tragic for slaves, but Clarkson, like Ramsay, also argued it was economically inefficient for the planter. Without a slave trade, they argued, planters would be forced to come to an understanding that there is profit to be derived from paternalism. Freed from a speculative business model, Caribbean planters would have a less manic agenda and secure greater long-run profits, while promoting social stability in the islands.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“On his way back to London, Clarkson was surprised and delighted to find that the town of Manchester had already formed its own abolitionist committee and intended to submit a mass petition to Parliament. From the outset, organized religious dissenters also rallied to the movement—Unitarians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and Evangelical Anglicans added their support to the Quaker cadres on grounds of morality, justice, and religion.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 214). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Sharp stood at the center of a network of reform-minded activists during the American conflict. His persistent defence of personal liberties and his principled advocacy of constitutional reform linked him to those ‘friends of America’ in London who opposed the conflict.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 188–189). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“A nationwide campaign was launched to abstain from the consumption of slave-grown sugar. This ‘antisaccharite’ movement was more than just a symbolic means of pollution avoidance. It was meant to be an instrument of direct economic coercion against the whole slave interest and it dramatically broadened the public sphere. Special appeals were directed toward women, as managers of the household budget. They stressed women’s special sensitivity to family separations and offered the boycott as a means of compensating for their exclusion from the petition campaign. Children, too, were also urged, and volunteered, to become part of this national consumer mobilization. On his speaking tours, Equiano distributed pamphlets against consuming slave sugar. Again, the bolder Clarkson privately favored the antisaccharite agitation in hopes of increasing the turnout for petitions, but Wilberforce feared abstention as likely to alienate moderates.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 221). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Petitioners focused first and foremost on the need for political action against an offense to humanity, justice, and sound policy. Subsequent generations of petitions against the slave trade also stressed moral grounds for reform under the same triad of ‘humanity, religion and justice.’ Less than 5 percent of those petitions to come added any promise of economic advantage.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 215). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The image was widely reproduced on domestic objects like crockery and also became popular on fashion accessories. According to Clarkson, gentlemen had the image ‘inlaid in gold on the lid of their snuffboxes. Of the ladies several wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for the hair. At length, the taste for wearing them became general; and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity, and freedom.'” Source page.

“In addition to its official seal with a kneeling slave, the Committee circulated the famous print of the slave ship Brookes. As a cheap, mass-produced product, it endured for a generation as the most widely disseminated image of the slave trade.”
“This summons probably helped to ensure that petitions for abolition composed more than half the total of petitions sent to Parliament in the 1787–1788 sessions. At a conservative estimate, at least 60,000 individuals signed the abolition petitions of 1788.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 215). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Manchester’s abolitionist signers represented about two-thirds of its eligible adult males.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“In 1717 it was merely a market town of 10,000 people, but by 1851 its textile (chiefly cotton) industries had so prospered that it had become a manufacturing and commercial city of more than 300,000 inhabitants, already spilling out its suburbs and absorbing its industrial satellites.” Source page.
“Parliamentary debates and governmental initiatives were now the daily grist of provincial newspaper readers. When legislative debates extended over weeks and months, newspapers, associations, libraries, debating societies, and public meetings offered parallel venues for ongoing discussions and petitions to the national legislature.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 209). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“During the next eighteen years, bills for the abolition of the British slave trade would be moved twelve more times in Parliament, but always as an open question and not a government measure. Twice before 1807, abolition bills would succeed in the Commons only to be stymied in the upper house.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Quakers delivered the first abolition petition to the House of Commons (1783), established the first antislavery committees and associations in the British Isles (1783) and initiated the systematic circulation of abolitionist literature.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p.391). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Which university is the third oldest in England is contested: “In the middle of the top 10 league table is University College London. Based in the capital, the university itself is the third oldest university in England, founded in 1826.” Source page.
“Durham was founded in 1832 … England’s third oldest university has a strong collegiate system.” Source page.
“John Hinchcliffe Bishop of Peterborough, ‘exerted himself in an extraordinary manner, in calling upon a variety of people who have knowledge of the trade and reading all the books he can find upon the subject, in order that he may be enabled to answer the pleas of interested people who endeavour to promote the trade.’ … Hinchcliffe and Richard Watson invited Sharp to the University in the spring of 1781 to discuss with them ideas for promoting ameliorative reform.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (pp. 194–195). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In Teston, in the fall of 1786, a youthful Thomas Clarkson pledged his energies to a national campaign for slave trade abolition.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 342). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“In the fall of 1786, the Teston clan received a visit from Thomas Clarkson, who had just published his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Clarkson went to Teston at the invitation of James Ramsay, who learned of Clarkson’s work through the publisher they shared, the Quaker printer James Phillips.” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 377). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“Clarkson would spell out a proposal for reforming the entire colonial system in his Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (1788) and in Essay on the Comparative Efficiency of Regulation or Abolition as Applied to the Slave Trade (1789). Neither of these pieces went as far as Ramsay’s work by suggesting free labor could produce sugar more cheaply than slave labor.” Ryden, D. B. (2009) West Indian Slavery and British Abolition 1783–1807 (p. 170). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Peter Peckard invited undergraduates competing for a university essay prize in 1785 to consider, ‘Is it right to make slaves of others against their will?'” Brown, Christopher Leslie. (2006) Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (p. 435). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
“The Manchester petition of December 1787 was innovative in another major respect. Newspapers were especially significant in the first national mobilization. There is no evidence that the local petitioning committees were in direct contact with each other during the initial campaign. Based upon Manchester’s prior efforts at mobilization on economic issues, its abolitionists reprinted their petition in every major newspaper in England, calling for similar petitions. This summons probably helped to ensure that petitions for abolition composed more than half the total of petitions sent to Parliament in the 1787–1788 sessions.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 215). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Organized abolitionism began in May 1787, with the formation in London of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (the London Committee). As J.R. Oldfield has demonstrated, the London Committee would thereafter remain the nation’s headquarters and coordinating center for popular mobilization.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (pp. 213–214). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“They also orchestrated the timing of petition meetings to ‘excite the flame,’ but delay its ‘flaring forth’ until the mass of petitions could simultaneously arrive in Parliament.” Drescher, S. (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (p. 220). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.