N.b. Below I'll generally be referring to "anti-slavery" and "abolition", but an important distinction is that many mainstream abolitionists preferred to focus on abolishing the
slave trade rather than slavery comprehensively. Slave ownership and commerce was not fully outlawed in Britain and the empire until 1833, but I'm not interested in reading another paper just for that.
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Eighteenth-century culture was therefore saturated with casual references to the violence done to social norms by the slave trade.
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The security of the system was often revealed in the instances of its casual
condemnation. Just ten years before the emergence of abolitionism the author of The Present State of the
West Inddies (1778), p. 11, noted, In passing, ‘this [slave] trade, to the disgrace of the age, has so deeply taken
root, it is become so necessary to the present state of affairs, and our wants have justified it in a manner so
absolute that it is almost common-place to cry out the barbarity and cruelty of it’.
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The following year a quaker abolitionist committee obtained an audience with
the new ministry, led by the young William Pitt. Once again there was praise for the
principle, but the committee were told that ‘the time was not yet come to bring the
affair to maturity’.’ [...] They were not encouraged by the parliamentary response. By
1785 their distribution of 11,000 copies of Benezet’s principal pamphlet to all M.P.s,
justices of the Peace and clergy had resulted in ‘an approbation of our benevolence . . .
but little prospect of success’.’
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Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, pp. 63, 206 n. 42. As late as 1785 an item in the London Public
Advertirer (21 Jan. 1785), warned that to expect any relief from parliament was to expect the impossible ’till
Negroes, by having boroughs for their property and loans at their disposal, shall have a party in the House
of Commons at their command’.
Naturally spurs adjacent hope for all manner of radical reforms to move into the realm of possibility in the near future.
Anyway, the principle of disgust toward slavery among the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia was well-entrenched, but diffident and sporadic in the face of conservative economic defenses and the absence of any mass movement contravening the influence of slaveholders and slave-dependent industries. Abolition was a niche issue that received little press. Anti-slavery activists were largely ignorant and independent of one another until organizations began coalescing in the late 1980s. (Lotta Quakers unsurprisingly.) The summer of 1987 was when everything changed, because the abolitionist movement coalesced around the London Committee and convinced MP William Wilberforce to take up the cause; he was friends with legendary PM William Pitt the Younger, who also got on board the bandwagon and launched an inquiry into slavery in early 1788 (although "[h]e ‘studiously avoided’ revealing his own views and the opposition chose to remain silent.’").
[Interesting historical intersection: There is a suggestion that William Pitt took up the abolition issue as a distraction from the growing campaign to impeach Warren Hastings, which itself was a subject of discussion across the Atlantic at the United States Constitutional Convention, referenced by George Mason during the drafting of the impeachment clause. He said, "“Treason will not reach many great and dangerous offences. Hastings is not guilty of treason.” Cool stuff. There's always so much shit going on.]
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Contrary to one important historiographical tradition, British abolitionism did not
emerge at a moment of chastened anxiety or national humiliation arising from the
loss of the North American colonies. It was not an attempt to resuscitate Britain's
threatened image as the torchbearer of liberty in comparison with the new American
rep~blic.'~ Nor was it a direct response to heightened internal class conflict or to the
devaluation of the British slave system in relation to the empire or the e~onomy.'~
To the extent that moral self-scrutiny became an aspect of the post-war imperial
discourse, it did so in the context of revived national self-confidence. By almost
every empirical measure popular abolitionism emerged at one of the most benign
conjunctures of British history in the century between the Seven Years' War and
the American Civil War. A survey of London's newspapers in 1786-7 evidences a
nation revelling in its prosperity, security and power. From Cornwall to Aberdeen
came reports that indicated the most abundant harvest in a decade, and, in some
places, in living memory. Industry was thriving and the cotton industry in particular
was expanding at an unprecedented rate. Labour disputes had diminished in the coal
mines and artisan friendly societies were congratulated on their performance. Pitt
was given full credit for the administration's successful financial planning and for the
anticipation of a budgetary surplus."
Prospects beyond the seas seemed equally bright. British goods were winning out
everywhere. The new French treaty was throwing open a new market for British
manufactures. British trade dominated entrepots from Canton to America. The West
Indies was sending a fine crop of sugar. The French islands were producing cotton
wool for English industry and expanding British West Indian output promised future
imperial self-sufficiency.
What the press found most exhilarating was Britain's transformed international
position. Plagued by aristocratic revolt and popular rioting, France was verging on
bankruptcy and military impotence. The Netherlands was descending into revolution.
The Dutch East and West Indian Companies were both foundering. Britons were
most fascinated by unfolding developments in the new American republic. In 1786
and 1787 newspapers offered an unending flow of bad news from New England
to Georgia: rebellion in Massachusetts; inflation in Rhode Island; stagnation in
Philadelphia; ferment in New York; problems in Georgia and Carolina. The American
confederation itself seemed to be disintegrating.
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Whatever may have contributed to transforming abolitionism from a popular
sentiment to a political movement in 1787, it was not any widespread notion that the
British needed to snatch the role of liberty’s champion back from the United States.
Popular abolitionism proceeded from a different premise: how could the world’s most
secure, free, religous, just, prosperous and moral nation allow itself to remain the
premier perpetrator of the world’s most deadly, brutal, unjust and immoral offences
to humanity? How could its people, once fully informed of its inhumanity, hope to
continue to be blessed with peace, prosperity and power?
Manchester led the way in the 1787-8 mass campaigning of the abolitionist movement. Despite being a proto-industrial cotton town, the majority of it's adult males (the working class) signed a petition for abolition. Liverpool as a city was the biggest resister, whose mercantilist petition uncivilly accused abolitionists of inciting rebellion.
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Along with Birmingham’s later petition,
Manchester was given pride of place in affirming that the broadly popular and
economically informed portion of the nation had opted for abolition. Its petition did
not concern itself with the policy or economic aspects of the abolitionist case, setting
a general pattern that was to be followed throughout the next 50 years. Petitioners
focused first and foremost on the need for political action against an offence to
humanity, justice and national honour. Subsequent petitions against the trade also
stressed moral grounds for reform under the same triad of ‘humanity, religion and
justice.’ Less than five per cent of those to come added any promise of economic
advantage. [...] Nevertheless, a systematic study of parliamentary
rhetoric in the major debates until 1807 indicates that, by ratios of two and three
to one, abolitionists consistently emphasized moral over other reasons for action.
Their opponents conversely emphasized economic and security reasons, by the same
ratios. This indicates that the moral versus economic dichotomy inherited from the
pre-political period remained remarkably stable throughout the two decades before
abolition was enacted
Makes me itch to do a socialism.
Petitions were central to the expansion of the abolition campaign, as were the newspapers in publicizing them. The majority of petitions to Parliament in 1787-8 were abolitionist ones. At least 60,000 signatories in a country of (from a brief Wiki skim) between 6 (~1740) and 10 million (~1800).
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The first campaign caught allies of the slave interest by surprise. They appeared to
be overwhelmed by the speed and breadth of the national mobilization. The slave
interest was as dismayed by the adhesion of prelates, universities and other corporate
communities as by the large popular base.’ [...] Disoriented opponents searched for historical perspective.
One writer was reminded ominously of 1772, the year of the Somerset case in England and of Virginia's appeal
for the ending of the slave trade to the colony. More general were the terms thereafter
applied to popular supporters of abolitionism by distressed defenders of the trade:
‘general clamour’, ‘popular emotion’, ‘phrenzy’, ‘fanaticism’, etc. All these terms
implicitly recognized that the appeal for action was both widely and emotionally
shared. Published appeals against the new movement almost always acknowledged
that their own ‘side has scarce found a single defender’.’’
From the outset the slave interest made no attempt to initiate a broad counterpetition drive
or to reach beyond their traditional interest network. Over the next
two decades the slave interest would have ample opportunities to claim that the
intensity of public feeling had cooled. They would never assert that the public had
repudiated its origmal judgment. Anti-abolitionists therefore focused their collective
political energies on pamphleteering, parliamentary lobbying and private appeals to
sympathetic governmental officials
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In May 1788 the issue of abolition was formally introduced into the house of
commons as part of an implicit dialogue between parliament and people. Standing in
for the ill Wilberforce, the prime minister framed his motion as a necessary response
to ‘the great number and variety of petitions’ that bespoke an engaged public. Pitt
was powerfully seconded by other luminaries in the House. Charles James Fox and
Edmund Burke drew attention to the table of the House, loaded with petitions. Fox
noted that he would have moved for consideration of abolition himself in the absence
of Wilberforce’s commitment. Public opinion, in its activist sense, had ensured
parliamentary consideration on both sides of the House.
Legislative efforts to regulate the Middle Passage arising from the above struggled because the opposition could now sink its teeth into specific proposals, and the House of Lords was opposed by its nature (and diluted the substance by a large measure). William Pitt was opposed in supporting this "Dolben Bill" by his cabinet, and had to threaten to resign to see it through the Commons.
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Further removed from the pressures of public
opinion, the peers saw no reason to put a hitherto unchallenged component of
the nation’s commercial and naval supremacy at risk. [...]
The fate of the Dolben Bill foreshadowed the parliamentary struggle to come.
During the next 18 years the abolition of the British slave trade would be moved 12
more times in parliament, but always as an open question not a government measure.
Twice before 1807 abolition bills would succeed in the Commons only to be stymied
in the upper house. Before 1806 partial bills for eliminating British transportation of
slaves to foreign colonies, or from certain parts of the African coast would suffer a
similar fate in the Lords. 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 Lords. Until 1806 the peers
would usually invoke their prerogative of independent examination to prevent the
abolition bills passed by the Commons from moving on to a definitive vote. Almost
20 years later abolitionists would have to develop a two-session, two-house, strategy
to achieve total victory.
After 1788, "the provincial committee system remained ‘the heart of organized anti-slavery’" and they turned to propagandizing and
organizing (important term there) the public and laying groundwork for popular mobilization (which is different than organization) by bringing commoner witnesses to Parliament in the form of sailors and secondhand slave accounts (Negroes were not permitted to testify before the select committee). Women and blacks also began participating visibly in the movement (e.g. Phyllis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano).
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An observer wrote that the ‘whole committee was in a laugh’,
and Wilberforce was asked, ‘Will you bring your ship-keepers, ship-sweepers, and
deck cleaners in competition with our admirals and men of honor?’32
Parliament stonewalled abolition until Wilberforce introduced a motion in April 1791.
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At the end of the debate a backbencher concisely
summed up the situation: ‘The leaders, it was true were for the abolition; but the
minor orators, the pygmies, would, he trusted, carry this day the question against
them. The property of the West Indians was at stake.’ Abolition was defeated by a
vote of 163 to 88. Whatever the merits of their argument, Roger Anstey concluded,
the abolitionists lost resoundingly
The London Committee resolved to channel future-Bernie Sanders by
mobilizing the latent popular sentiment against Parliament, reprioritizing moral over economic facts. Local initiatives were replaced with centralized command and control.
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The agents’ function was to ‘excite the flame’, but
delay its flaring forth until the mass of petitions could simultaneously converge on
parliament.4”
The results far exceeded the committee’s expectations. Even two decades later
Clarkson’s sober History allowed itself a moment of awe:
Of the enthusiasm of the nation at this time none can form an opinion but they
who witnessed it. There never was perhaps a season when so much virtuous feeling
pervaded all ranks . . , The current ran with such strength and rapidity that it was
impossible to stem it . . . [No petitions] were ever more numerous, as far as we
have any record of such transactions . . . The account stood thus. For regulation
there was one; against all abolition there were four; and for the total abolition of
the trade five hundred and nineteen.4’
Seriously, take a break to watch any Sanders campaign ad.
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Upwards of 400,000 names flowed into London just in time for the opening of
Wilberforce’s second motion. These were probably the largest numbers of both
petitions and signatures ever simultaneously reaching parliament on a single subject.
In some parts of the country between a quarter and a third of the adult male population
petitioned for abolition, with Manchester’s proportion reaching nearly 50 per cent.4
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Polemics could, of course, be matched by opposition propaganda. Signatures could not.
[...]
The popular response to the great campaign of 1791-2 indicates that the abolitionists
requested and received almost unlimited support within the contemporary
boundaries of legitimate signers. The organizers were clearly less worried about too
little popular enthusiasm for abolition than too much.
Mainstream abolitionists became concerned with becoming associated with fellow travelers who wanted full emancipation or equality between races. Many abolitionists claimed they wanted full abolition, but that to propound more than the abolition of the slave
trade itself was too extreme for public consumption (lolcentrists). The French Revolution entering its maximalist stage (
enjoy) did not calm any nerves.
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Dickson was warned to steer the
potential petition committees away from any discussion of policy except the most
general idea, that ‘what is unjust must be impolitick’
"There are many paths to Medicare for All" - lolcentrists.
Another thing alarming the leadership was a boycott campaign against slave-grown sugar appealing to the people's power of the purse. (As noted above, women could not sign petitions.)
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Special appeals were directed towards women, as managers of the household budget.
They stressed women’s sensitivity to family destruction and offered them 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.
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Although Clarkson privately favoured the anti-saccharite agitation in hopes of
increasing the turnout for petitions, Wilberforce feared abstention as likely to alienate
moderates.46
Hmm... lolcentrists.
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Some abstentionist polemics
explicitly identified the British legislature, as constituted, as an institution that was
unlikely to abolish the slave trade. Since parliament had failed to heed the express will
of the people, the people had to ‘manifest to Europe and the World that public spirit,
that virtuous abhorrence of SLAVERY, to which a British SENATE is unable - or
unwilling to aspire’.~’
The language of this radical voice of abolition resonated with other voices calling
for fundamental political reform in Britain. In the winter of 1792 the anti-saccharite
movement appeared to be but one more symptom of many radical challenges
sweeping across the Atlantic world. [...] The counter-abolitionist strategy broadened to conflate abolitionism not only
with slave emancipation, but with every potential threat to public order, foreign and domestic.
You mean, "socialism!!1"
Ahem - lolconservatives
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The unprecedented pile of sheets on the table in 1792 emboldened some abolitionist
M.P.s to welcome the charge that schoolboys and people of the lowest status had
signed on: ‘What did this prove but that individuals of all sorts, conditions and ages,
young and old, master and scholar, high and low, rich and poor, the risen and the
rising generation, had unanimously set every nerve on stretch for the overthrow of
the . . . abominable and the indefensible?
Hear hear.
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The house of commons voted for gradual abolition by a
vote of 230 to 85, and for an immediate end to the British trade to foreign colonies.
By a far smaller margin, the Commons voted to set the date of total abolition at 1796.
The House of Lords kills it. It's pretty clear by now that preserving slavery, or at least the trade in slaves, was an issue of popular resonance of a kind with tax cuts for the rich today. Are upper chambers inevitably the reactionary enemies of the people?
So, between 1792 and 1806 there are no more great episodes of public agitation against slavery. Motions for abolition were submitted, and failed, about a dozen times. I assume, and the author concurs, the wars of the coalitions and the general state crackdown on radicalism and reformism in Britain may have had something to do with it. Mass petitioning as a form of public engagement seems to have died during this era, but beneath the surface British national homogenization in the face of the Napoleonic threat propagandized liberty and freedom in a way that associated it naturally with the status of black slaves. The fact that France had reinstituted colonial slavery under the Consulate helped this along. "Britons never never never shall be slaves" and whatnot. Also, white Britons were growing less freaked out by the legacy of the Haitian revolt and were intrigued by the trade opportunities.
Pitt returned for his last hurrah as PM. Wilberforce introduced yet another abolition motion in mid-1804. It passed. The House of Lords killed it again. Wilberforce lost majority support for his bill in the Commons.
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As Anstey concluded, the victory of 1804 had been deceptive. ‘Enemies had only to exert
themselves more, and friends less, and the day was lost.’5
Ain't that the truth, brother.
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Regrouping after the
unexpected setback, the London committee decided that renewed popular pressure
was essential to break the stalemate. For the first time since 1792 Clarkson was
dispatched on another tour to reconnect with the local communities. He reported
on the relative ignorance of the younger abolitionists but was more struck by a
widespread welcome that could be turned into activism. The energy of the new
generation could furnish the movement ‘with endless sources of rallying’.
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As early as 1805 the slave interest protested that the ‘violent’ propaganda being worked up
Well, if you say so. :eyebrows:
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The West India Committee had to revive its dormant propaganda committee.
Who says the British weren't ahead of their time?
Now in 1806, the moderates were prominent in the movement once more and proposed only to abolish the British trade to "foreign and conquered colonies". But in fact it was a Trojan Horse for a slippery slope to total abolition of the British slave trade. Robert Peel (the father of the guy you're thinking of) was a prominent opponent; the bill nevertheless passed on wartime economic arguments.
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With the passage of the Foreign Slave Trade Bill in May 1806, attention turned to
the question of total abolition. Grenville and the abolitionists were aware that they
had passed the bill on the grounds that it would help the British colonies keep a
wartime edge over their competitors. Final abolition would have to contradict that
rationale and return to the original abolitionist grounds of ‘justice and humanity’.~’
James Stephen urged Grenville to delay the final motion until after the autumn
general election, so that M.P.s might be ‘instructed by luge bodies of their constituents
to vote for an abolition of the slave trade’.
Apparently this worked and - Christ, why does all this feel so modern? Wilberforce, who it should be noted had been an Independent for 20 years by now, got to watch as the 1806 election obliterated 40 years of Tory dominance in Parliament in a landslide (though Cons would once again maintain large majorities from 1812-1831, which is probably very important for British history).
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In the crucial debate in the Commons, on 23 February 1807, the actual margin of victory
was 283 in favour and only 16 opposed.60
The ‘noes’ figure is intriguing. In the last previous vote on a total abolition bill in
1805, a far thinner house had produced 70 votes for abolition and 77 against. Two
years later, in a House casting twice as many votes, the bill’s opponents could produce
no more than one-fifth as many votes as they had in 1805.
Wilberforce was campaigning for total abolition of the trade now, and the author rhetorically asks why opposition to abolition had died out in the Commons. His answer is "the weight of public opinion."
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Liverpool’s General Gascoyne complained that:
every measure that invention or art could devise to create a popular clamour was
resorted to on this occasion. The church, the theatre, and the press, had laboured
to create a prejudice against the Slave Trade . . . The attempts to make a popular
clamour against the trade were never so conspicuous as during the late Election, when
the public newspapers teemed with abuse of the trade, and when promises were
required from different candidates that they would oppose its continuance. There never
had been any question agitated since that of parliamentary reform, in which so much
industry had been exerted to raise a popular prejudice and clamour, and to make
the trade an object of universal detestation. In every manufacturing town and borough
in the kingdom, all those arts had been tried.61
'All these damned people in the country believing the same things that inconvenience me and voting on that basis!' Wow, what a
conservative. Sure enough, his Wiki page identifies him as an "Ultra-Tory", which was a far-right faction at the time. Now, once the bill made it through the legislature and received royal assent the government promptly collapsed, returning Tories to a slim majority, but the new government could not revoke the law. In what I think might be be an early example of thermostatic public opinion, the success of the antislavery campaign fanned a lot of social discord and
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[i]n Liverpool, rioters terrorized William Roscoe, one of their M.P.s, into withdrawing from politics in 1807 because he had voted for the bill.
Boo Liverpool, go Manchester.
In an epilogue on 1814, the author describes how Wilberforce criticized the government's (first) Treaty of Paris ending the Continental War because it relicensed the French slave trade for five years. The London Committee once again reactivated and launch another round of public relations campaigning.
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Once more abolitionists launched the largest petition campaign Britain had ever seen.65
In some ways it was the most impressive of the entire struggle. Clarkson and some
quakers threw themselves back into their old routine of co-ordination, now eased
by many other hands. Begnning in late June, the abolitionists presented parliament
with 806 petitions before the session ended late in July. Ultimately, a total of
1,370 petitions arrived, well above the average annual number of all other petitions
reaching parliament between 181 1 and 1815. At one point abolitionists estimated
that 750,000 people had signed up. Paul Kielstra has calculated the final total to have
been 1,375,000, although this figure may include petitions sent up to both houses
of parliament. In any event, for a nation with no more than four million males over
the age of 16, between a fifth and a third of all those eligible to sign had added their
names to the appeal.
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Castlereagh’s own evaluation of the campaign was concise: ‘the nation is bent upon
this object. I believe that there is hardly a village that has not met and petitioned.’
The duke of Wellington registered a similar impression on his way back to France
to renegotiate the slave trade article: ‘I was not aware till I had been some time here
[London] of the degree of frenzy existing here about the slave trade. People in general
appear to think that it would suit the policy of this nation to go to war to put an end
to that abominable traffic.’”
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When Clarkson wrote of the petitions, ‘All England is moving’, he could finally
claim that this opinion was as close as Britons might ever get to consensus. Had he
chosen to update his History in 1814, he might well have summed up public opinion
as: in favour of revision, 1,370 petitions; against, nil.
Crucially, even the West Indies interests had come around to supporting abolition, after having been such fierce opponents for a generation. Another process familiar to our contemporary relationship to capitalist industry.
The author concludes:
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With this great surge of petitioning, abolition moved beyond registering a protest
against an article in a peace treaty. It definitively launched Britain into a long-term
international moral and political campaign against the transatlantic slave trade. It was
a pioneering development in the link being forged between the terms of public
discourse and the mobilization of public opinion. In the course of a single generation
abolition had evolved from the programme of an innovative public contender into
a settled fixture of national policy. The first great reform movement to revive
after the general eclipse of the 1790s, its power was successively ratified in legislative
victories and governmental policy. By 1814 abolitionism had spawned the first human
rights organization and altered the world’s perspective on the future of slavery as an
institution.69
