Abolition of the Slave Trade

The Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Trade-in
Africans (1807)

The task which slaves failed to accomplish was taken up successfully and
completed by a group of abolitionists including humanitarians, members of a
a religious sect called Quakers and some industrialists. These included men
like Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Thomas
Fowell-Buxton.

The Quakers

The Quakers were the first opponents of slavery in the British islands. It was
a religious group known as the Society of Friends founded by George Fox, a
Non-Conformist in 1648. The members held religious meetings in ordinary
buildings without the rituals of a church service. They avoided any kind of
amusement or elaborate dress. Their lives were based on love and never used
violence. Those Quakers who went to Pennsylvania and Barbados were
instructed by George Fox to welcome their slaves to religious services, treat
them kindly and free them after a number of years of faithful service.
The Quakers acted as a pressure group in the movement for the abolition of
slavery. They were the first campaigners in England against the slave trade
and in 1727 passed a proposal against the slave trade. Between 1750 and
1800, abolition became a religious crusade for the Quakers. Eleven of the
twelve committees of the ‘’Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave
Trade’’ were Quakers. The society was later joined by members of other
denominations. The Quakers were the leading force in the movement outside
Parliament.

The Clapham Sect or the Saints

The Established Church in Britain and her colonies was the Church of
England. Within the Church of England, an evangelical movement grew up in
the 18th century. These members wanted more emphasis on salvation
through good works and morality. Within this movement was the ‘’Clapham
Sect’’. Among them were William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, Thomas
Clarkson, James Stephen and Zachary Macaulay. These men such as
Ramsay, Stephen and Zachary had the first-hand experience of the evils of
slavery. The contribution of the Saints to abolition was great.

The Industrialists

The abolition movement coincided with the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
The new industrialists were producing goods more cheaply and in greater
quantities. However, the flood of cheap manufactured goods which they
were producing, needed wider markets which the slave-populated islands
could not provide. In 1760, commercial interests strongly supported slavery
but by 1800, they were becoming indifferent and later against it. However,
the humanitarian motive was present in many industrialists since many of
them were members of the Non-Conformists Churches.

Granville Sharp

Granville Sharp was the first man to agitate publicly against the slave trade.
He was an apprenticed tailor and then he became a clerk in the Ordinance
(Supplies) department of the British Government. He was a devout Christian.
He taught himself Greek and Hebrew in his spare time. He never gave up
working for a cause in which he believed. He resigned from his Government
post when the American War of Independence broke out, because he was in
sympathy with the Americans.
In 1765, his interest turned to the abolition movement when he met an
African stumbling down a London street. Jonathan Strong had just been
beaten and turned out of the house of his master, a Barbadian lawyer living
in England. Sharp took the wounded man to his brother who was a doctor
and looked after him until he was well again. The brothers found him a job as
a messenger for a nearby pharmacy. Two years later, Strong was spied by
his master who seized him and sold him to a Jamaican planter for 30 Euros.
Sharpe took the case to court and managed to have Strong set free.
However, the judge refused to give a judgment on whether the English law
allowed a man to be bought and sold as a slave.
After that, Granville Sharp was determined to get a clear ruling against
slavery in England. He studied the law and the conditions of slaves in the
country. He noted that in 1749, a judge, Lord Hardwicke, had ruled that a
slave who ran away in England could be legally recovered. In 1770, he took
the case of Thomas Lewis to court. Lewis was a slave who had been seized
and put on board a ship to the Caribbean. The jury freed Lewis only because
the master could not prove ownership. Once again the court managed to
avoid ruling on the question of whether slavery was illegal.
However, the opportunity came when he took the case of James Somerset to
court. Somerset, like Strong, had been turned out by his master, a Virginian
planter and then seized again. This time the master had clear proof of
ownership.

Mansfield’s Judgement (1772)
In February 1772, Somerset’s case was presented before Chief Justice Lord
Mansfield. Eventually, he ruled in June 1772, that his study of the laws of
England found that the power of the master to use force on a slave was
unknown to the laws of England. Somerset was set free as well as thousands
of other slaves in England. Mansfield’s ruling paved the way for the
opponents of the slave trade to organize their attack.

The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade
In 1787, an anti-slavery society was formed called ‘’The Society for Effecting
the Abolition of the Slave Trade’’. Most of the members of the Society were
Quakers and some belonged to an ever-growing evangelical movement
which was trying to make the Church of England show as much concern
about spreading religious ideas as the Baptists and Methodists. Included in
this group were Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and
other abolitionists such as Henry Thornton, Zachary Macaulay and James
Ramsay.
The society was determined to have a law passed in Parliament to abolish
the slave trade. It hoped that after that, slavery would be forced to collapse
because of the lack of supply of slaves. The society had the support of
Prime Minister William Pitt, William Wilberforce became the spokesman
in Parliament and Thomas Clarkson provided the evidence.

Thomas Clarkson
Thomas Clarkson was known as the ‘’eyes and ears’’ of William Wilberforce.
He was born in 1760 and was the son of Reverend John Clarkson, a school
master. In 1785, he won a Latin essay prize at Cambridge entitled ‘’Should
men be given into slavery against their will?’’ He showed that there was no
justification for slavery.
In 1786, he published this essay in English and circulated it among influential
people. From then, he devoted his life to abolition, collecting evidence
against the slave trade and urging people to take action against what was
morally wrong. He worked closely with the Society to abolish slavery.
In 1788, he visited slave trading ports such as Liverpool, Bristol and
Lancaster collecting evidence such as shackles, thumbscrews, branding irons
and teeth chisels that were used in the trade. He also interviewed thousands
of seamen and lived in personal danger. He continued to trade extensively
until 1792 when his health failed and he had to retire.

William Wilberforce
William Wilberforce was a Member of Parliament as well as a member of the
‘’Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade’’. He was considered
the most famous of those members who introduced the abolition issue into
the debate in the House of Commons. In 1787, he was approached by Thomas
Clarkson to take up the cause of abolition. The evidence collected by Thomas
Clarkson convinced William Wilberforce and other members of Parliament
that the slave trade was an ‘’affront to God and below the dignity of a
civilized people’’. Outside Parliament, the movement gained support from
missionary societies, humanitarians, and by many industrialists.

William Wilberforce became the spokesman on abolition. He spoke so
regularly on the abolition that it became known as the ‘’perennial
resolution’’. He was the personal friend of Prime Minister William Pitt and so
was able to encourage him to introduce a resolution against the slave trade
in the House of Commons. Meanwhile, a law was passed which limited the
number of slaves carried according to the ship. William Wilberforce put
forward a proposal to abolish the slave trade in 1789 in a masterly three-hour
speech and in 1791 but was defeated. In 1792, he achieved partial
success when the House of Commons passed a resolution: ‘’That the slave
trade ought to be gradually abolished.’’
In 1792, the campaign for abolition experienced two major problems. Firstly,
the French Revolution followed by the revolutionary wars, thus causing the
Prime Minister, William Pitt to withdraw his support for abolition. He wanted
the government to devote all its energies to the war in France. The second
obstacle was the West India Interest which consisted of London merchants
and English landowners with interests in the West Indies and who were
members of Parliament. They made slavery their chief concern and began a
serious counter-propaganda campaign in 1792 so that they succeeded in
having abolition deterred.
William Wilberforce continued to the next 14 years to put forward a proposal
to end the slave trade. The parliamentary campaign was strengthened by
three new members of the Clapham Sect: James Stephen, Zachary Macaulay
and Henry Brougham. The campaign was further strengthened by the death
of William Pitt in 1806. His successor, James Fox, was a keen supporter of
abolition. In 1807, the English Parliament passed the Act to abolish the Slave
Trade.

Reasons, why the Act to abolish the Slave Trade, was passed
1. The hard work and the relentless efforts of abolitionists like Wilberforce
kept the question of abolition fresh in the minds of the public, and won
the support of those involved with shipping, and who were previously
opposed to abolition. In 1807, Liverpool, a major slave-trading port,
voted for the abolition of the slave trade.
2. During the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon Bonaparte, the French ruler,
established a continental blockade which was designed to cripple
Britain’s trade. This blockade created a glut on the sugar market in
Britain, as British goods were confined to the British market. As a
result, the price of sugar declined, and so the British government
decided in 1807 that the only solution was to reduce sugar production.
To accomplish this, it meant that the Slave Trade had to be abolished.
3. Some planters in the older British colonies like Jamaica and Barbados,
supported the abolition of the Slave Trade. They believed that if the
Slave Trade was extended to the newly acquired Crown colonies like
Trinidad and Tobago and St. Lucia, these colonies would begin to
produce sugar, and market conditions would further deteriorate with
the introduction of sugar from these territories.
4. British slave traders also supplied slaves to foreign territories. These
slaves produced sugar which helped to create competition for the
British West Indian sugar producers. In order to deprive the foreign
territories and newly acquired British territories of slaves, for the
purpose of protecting their own sugar interest, the planters in colonies
like Jamaica, Antigua and Barbados supported the abolition of the
Slave Trade.
5. The death of Prime Minister, William Pitt, in 1806 also favored the
abolitionists’ cause since, in his later years, he had withdrawn his
support for the anti-slavery movement, and so he had become
somewhat of a hindrance to the success of the abolitionists. His
successor, Charles James Fox, supported the movement, and in 1807,
Parliament passed the Act to abolish the Slave Trade.