Sky Eclat
JF-Expert Member
- Oct 17, 2012
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It’s nearing midnight, and in a few moments it will finally be August 1, 1838. By law, this will mark the end of slavery in the British Empire. In Jamaica - a British sugar growing colony - a Baptist congregation has been waiting expectantly all night. The clock ticks down to midnight, and in that precise moment, in the little church, the tumult is indescribable. Jubilant, the worshippers go outside and bury a coffin, symbolizing centuries of slavery. A worldwide celebration commences on hearing of the end of a great injustice. For hundreds of thousands of people around the world, this was the turning point of their lives.
What needs explaining, historically, is not the cruel fact of slavery itself, but instead, how it came to be seen as a crime. For centuries before 1838, many people saw slavery not as an abomination and a crime but as a seemingly permanent feature of human society. The change came through a movement of quite ordinary people that began in the late 18th century. It did not succeed quickly, or all at once. Rather, success came gradually, pushed along by social protest, and unfolding over several lifetimes. This was the mother of all citizen movements, inventing crucial tools for mobilizing public opinion and turning it into a powerful force. This was a pivotal moment in the dawning recognition of human rights, universal to us all.
. . .
Before the modern age, slavery, in many different forms and under different names, had been an almost universal phenomenon. Few premodern societies did not have some form of slavery or forced labor. In classical times, even Aristotle divided humanity into two great categories, slave and free. Ancient Rome would be unrecognizable without the many slaves who drove their economy. In medieval Europe, traffic in human beings was practiced in the growing towns.
Often, these were young men and women from Eastern Europe who were enslaved - indeed, the word slave in English comes from the name Slav, the major family of peoples living in Eastern Europe. From 1200 to 1500, the trading empires of the great Italian cities of Venice and Genoa did a brisk trade in slaves from the Caucasus mountain region, through the Black Sea, and sold in the slave markets of Cairo.
When Constantinople fell in 1453, remaining Christians were sold into slavery by the Turkish conquerors, and Christian Europe took Muslims as slaves in turn. Later in the Middle Ages, slavery as such mostly disappeared in northwestern Europe, but serfs and peasants were subject to conditions of harsh servitude. This pattern lingered for centuries more in Eastern Europe, where serfs were bought and sold as unfree labor.
Slavery came to the fore again in a massive way with the expansion of colonial empires, especially after the encounter with the American continents in the years following 1492. When Native Americans were decimated by the diseases of the Columbian Exchange, the Spanish brought slaves from Africa to Hispaniola around 1501, and this set a new pattern of Atlantic slavery: Slaves from Africa were forcibly taken to the plantations of the Americas. This pattern endured for 350 years on the vast plantations in the New World. The numbers here are so vast as to defy comprehension. From 1500 to 1820, it is estimated that up to 15 million Africans were torn from their homes and shipped across the Atlantic. Of that number, an estimated 4 to 6 million slaves did not survive the crossing.
In the 1600s, the Portuguese dominated this slave trade, but other competitors moved in. The Dutch dominated for a while, and then the British. The trade moved to state sponsored and private companies with many investors from around Europe. A dominant player was the British Royal African Company. They operated with a royal charter and their slaves were marked with the branding “RAC.” Although no one country was able to totally monopolize the Atlantic Slave Trade, eventually, the British dominated, carrying over 40% of the total slaves after the year 1640.
The pattern of shipping undertaken by these companies came to be called the “triangle trade.” Slave ships carried goods from England and Europe to West Africa; loaded up there with human cargo; moved across the Atlantic Ocean, disgorging those who survived; loaded up again with sugar, tobacco, and coffee; and sailed for northwestern Europe to begin the triangular cycle again.
The slave ships headed to the coasts of West Africa, from what is Senegal to Nigeria. Slaves were usually brought to the coast by African middlemen. These prisoners were often captives of wars or had been reduced to slavery because of their inability to pay debts. The ships waited for weeks to be fully loaded. Then began the horrors of the Atlantic crossing.
Aboard crowded ships, slaves were given only about four square feet of space. Chained together to hamper revolt, it was hard for the Africans to move about, and the decks were marked by horrible conditions that bred disease. The trip typically took a month from Africa to Brazil, or two months from Africa to the Caribbean or North America. On average, 15 percent of the slaves died en route, often many more. Slave ship crews also experienced high mortality rates due to yellow fever and malaria. Some desperate slaves tried to resist and more than 300 recorded mutinies took place on the slave ships. Very few of these attempts at escape were successful, however.
Those who survived the journey were put to work in the plantations of the colonies, especially the sugar plantations. Almost half of all Africans shipped across the Atlantic were sent to the Caribbean, Barbados, Jamaica, or Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti. Of the rest of the slave trade, about 40 percent of the slaves were shipped to Brazil; North America received some 5 percent.
Up to this point, there had been isolated criticisms of slavery among Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Adam Smith, but this criticism had been inconsistent. It was religion that finally produced the beginnings of a mass mobilization against slavery. In particular, this movement involved the Quakers. Members of this group believed in the fundamental equality of all people because of the immediate relationship each person could have with the divine. From these beliefs, the Quakers, both in England and in the American colonies spoke out against slavery. As early as 1688, Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, condemned slavery and the slave trade. By the 1760s, Quakers in Britain and America refused to accept slave traders into their communities. And in Philadelphia in 1775, they founded the world’s first antislavery society.
Around the same time, in England, Quakers cooperated with Evangelicals within the Church of England, Methodists, and Baptists to fight against the slave trade. In 1772, a legal case had prohibited slavery in the British Isles, so there were no slaves in Britain, but these activists were not content. The result of this movement was a powerful partnership that included the likes of Thomas Clarkson, a tireless organizer; the politician William Wilberforce in Parliament; and the African Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who had bought his freedom and published a best-selling autobiography.
The group decided to concentrate first on the slave trade rather than working on banning slavery, even though that goal was what almost all of them ultimately sought. Slavery itself seemed too socially and economically entrenched to be overthrown all at once, so their hope was that ending the trade would lead to the gradual extinction of the practice as a whole. Clarkson traveled the country, collecting information and gathering witnesses to testify in parliamentary investigations.
The movement’s political voice was Wilberforce, who advanced the legal cause in Parliament. Because many of the members of the movement were Quakers, and in turn, many of the Quakers were merchants, the movement was very business-like - efficient and inventive in its tactics. Activists worked to gather the dreadful facts of the slave trade and let those facts speak for themselves. They printed masses of pamphlets in many languages to convince an international audience. The message reached France, where the Marquis de Lafayette helped start a society with the same aims called the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. These activists pioneered the use of fundraising letters.
The abolitionists also made great use of visual art. The key example was the potter Josiah Wedgwood, who used his popular Wedgwood Pottery line to mass produce medallions that became world famous: It showed a kneeling African in chains asking the question, “Am I not a man and a brother?” This image was soon everywhere: on pottery, on bracelets, on hairpins, on cuff links, on snuff boxes. Benjamin Franklin praised the image as equal to the best pamphlet in the world in terms of changing minds.
Another winning tactic was the role of women and children. The women were crucial, speaking at public meetings, gathering signatures in petition drives, and organizing a boycott of sugar in 1791. Children joined in, passing out flyers. Soon, society was inflamed with the cause. The message appeared in debates, newspapers, and even poems. In Parliament, Wilberforce pushed the cause, and parliamentary committees investigated the details of the slave trade in hearings. Proslavery forces in Parliament organized as the West Indian lobby, advancing ludicrous arguments in favor of the institution. However, they were a powerful group with lots of money and got proposed bills banning the slave trade to fail over and over again.
Finally, in 1807, Parliament passed a ban, declaring the slave trade a form of piracy. The legislation damaged the British economy, but the moral argument trumped financial considerations. Soon after, the United States, the Netherlands, and France also prohibited the importation of slaves, but it would take another quarter century until the goal of freeing the slaves was achieved. In the meantime, the British government took action. In the decades after 1807, even during the war against Napoleon, the royal navy patrolled slave ship routes to stop the trade.
The British movement against slavery slowed down in the next decades, running out of energy and seemingly grew content to be “gradualist” in its hopes. This was until a new generation of outspoken women activists rose up to reenergize the movement and demand immediate abolition of slavery everywhere in the British Empire. Slave uprisings in Haiti and Jamaica helped convince many that emancipation had to come.
The hard work paid off in 1833, as Parliament passed legislation freeing some 800,000 slaves in the British Empire, mainly in the Caribbean islands. That emancipation came in stages, and owners were promised compensation, even though ex-slaves got none.
At long last, on August 1, 1838, the slaves were finally free. At the ground level, even if economic exploitation continued, experiencing the moral difference in status from slave to free had to be profound. Of course, this did not end the story or the crime of slavery all at once. Ex-slaves continued to labor in hard conditions, but at least without the old shackles. And slavery continued elsewhere in the Americas.
American abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison and the former slave Frederick Douglass, traveled to Britain and cooperated in a transatlantic movement for abolition. But tragically, it would take the US Civil War, which exacted some 750,000 lives, to free the slaves in the United States.
The last open slave market in the Americas, in Havana, Cuba, was shut down in 1869. Cuba stopped exporting slaves in 1870, as a result of naval interdiction by the United States and Britain, and abolished slavery in 1886. Finally, in 1888, slavery was abolished in Brazil.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to conclude there. Slavery continues today in many forms of involuntary labor, on many continents, and under new names. It is estimated that more than 20 million people are in servitude today worldwide. The anguish continues.
But in the fight against this injustice, the legal abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire was a powerful turning point. That August morning in 1838 brought great joy and comfort to the liberated Africans and left a lasting legacy. It created a new model for social mobilization, with key tactics and tools invented by the abolitionists, which are used by movements spearheaded by ordinary people today for countless causes.
In his book Bury the Chains, the historian Adam Hochschild sums up why these events were so important:
“This small group of people not only helped to end one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time; they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today. Think of what you’re likely to find in your mailbox - or electronic mailbox - over a month or two. An invitation to join the local chapter of a national environmental group. If you say yes, a logo to put on your car bumper.
A flier asking you to boycott California grapes or Guatemalan coffee. A poster to put in your window promoting this campaign. A notice that a prominent social activist will be reading from her new book at your local bookstore… Each of these tools, from the poster to the political book tour, from the consumer boycott to investigative reporting designed to stir people to action, is part of what we take for granted in a democracy.
Two and a half centuries ago, few people assumed this. When we wield any of these tools today, we are using techniques devised or perfected by the campaign that held its first meeting at 2 George Yard in 1787. From their successful crusade we still have much to learn. If, early that year, you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot.
The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would collapse. Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar.
Parliament was flooded with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on any other subject. And in 1792, the House of Commons passed the first law banning the slave trade. British slaves were not finally freed until long after that. But there was no mistaking something crucial: in an astonishingly short period of time, public opinion in Europe’s most powerful nation had undergone a sea change. From this unexpected transformation there would be no going back.”
Book Sources:
- “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves” by Adam Hochschild
- “A Short History of Slavery” by James Walvin
Pictures:
- A shocking diagram of the interior of the Brookes, an 18th century slave ship owned by a Liverpool family, actually showed fewer slaves than were sometimes transported and remains one of the most reproduced political images ever (Alamy).
- “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” pottery imagine by British abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood (1787). Children’s cartoon calling for the end of slavery in Britain. 18th-century children took an active role in the abolitionist cause by giving up sugar grown with slave labour.
