The Anti-Slavery Movement
Evangelical Christianity in Britain and Enlightenment ideas on the continent served as inspiration for anti-slavery movements in Western Europe. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, wrote Thoughts on Slavery in 1744, one of the first moral tracts to oppose slavery. However, three people led the English parliamentary effort.
One was Granville Sharp, who won the 1772 Mansfield case that made slavery illegal in England. Thomas Clarkson wrote A Summary View of the Slave Trade and the Probable Causes of Its Abolition (1787). The third was famed parliamentary orator William Wilberforce. Cambridge evangelical preachers inspired Clarkson and Wilberforce.
J. Stephen, T. Babbington, Z. Macaulay, and ex-slave Olaudah Equiano joined them to form the Anti-Slave Trade Society. Due to its Methodist Church affiliation, strong organizing, pamphleteering, and large petitions to parliament, the society inspired other reform-minded pressure groups.
The group overcame the entrenched power of the West Indies sugar lobby and opposition in the House of Lords to outlaw the slave trade (for British citizens) and establish the Sierra Leone Colony in West Africa for freed slaves in 1807 with votes from the Irish bloc in the House of Commons and behind-the-scenes support from politicians like William Pitt and Lord Grenville.
Other nations banned slavery: Denmark in 1803, the US in 1808, Sweden in 1813, and the Netherlands in 1814. In its extreme phase (1793), the French National Assembly abolished the slave trade and slavery, but Napoleon reinstated it, and the French West Indies would not abolish it until the 1840s.
The Brazilian slave trade ended in the 1850s due to British diplomatic and naval pressure. T.F. Buxton created the Anti-Slavery Society in Exeter Hall, London, in 1823, revitalizing the British humanitarian movement.
The Montego Bay uprising and the gruesome planter retribution of 1831, which killed over 600 Africans, prompted British Caribbean slaves to rebel ten years before slavery was abolished.
As before, these events sparked British public action. James Stephen, Jr.’s final 1833 Emancipation Bill, which the reformed 1832 parliament approved (subject to slave owners receiving compensation and former slaves serving a seven-year apprenticeship), required Jamaican legislature approval. Most ex-slaves, frustrated and disappointed, would cause more turmoil and insurrection in Jamaica.
Most European Caribbean possessions did not release slaves until 40 years after the British attempt. The British Anti-Slavery Society corresponded with American abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and New Englanders, until the Civil War in the 1860s.
Most of the great powers, including Britain, saw African internal slavery (sometimes called “domestic servitude”) differently from New World plantation slavery, so colonial governments moved slowly to avoid angering African rulers and upsetting indigenous social structures.
However, British humanitarians swore to stop the interior slave trade and raiding.
Beginning with the River Niger expeditions of the 1840s and 1850s, Buxton and African preacher Samuel Ajayi Crowther promoted “legitimate trade” (primarily palm product exports) to replace them.
David Livingstone’s 1841–1873 expeditions and missionary work in east and southern Africa inspired late nineteenth-century African anti-slavery organizations. But this also prefaced and justified imperialism and territorial annexation during the “scramble for Africa.”
Like most European nations, French colonial policy on abolishing slavery in Africa was inconsistent and uneven. The majority of colonial powers used strict labor recruitment and transport worker programs to perpetuate slavery.
Frederick Lugard (c. 1900) epitomized “abolitionist imperialism” in British colonial Africa by conquering the northern Nigerian Muslim emirates. Britain employed diplomatic influence, colonial administration, legal nonrecognition of slavery, and naval and military efforts to suppress the slave trade and slavery in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Most African countries abolished internal slavery over the previous century as former slaves assimilated into their host society. However, slave raiding and labor have returned in modern times. The humanitarian abolitionist movement continues at Anti-Slavery International.
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