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May 16 - June 15, 2019
This terrible incident was brought to wider national attention only when the owners of the Zong filed an insurance claim against the loss of ‘cargo’, demanding £30 for each slave cast overboard.
The popular outrage that reverberated from the Zong affair made it the next milestone in the development of the abolitionist cause.
The murder of the sick or the disruptive on board slave ships was a routine practice.
Its place of birth was a printing shop at 2 George Yard, London, a building long ago demolished.
This group of twelve – nine Quakers and the rest Evangelical Anglicans – formed themselves into the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
Their partnership epitomizes the movement’s twin-track approach of popular agitation and parliamentary strategizing.
One recurring theme repeated and developed by many of those who disapproved of slavery was that it was outdated; that while it might be profitable in the short term its continuation risked impeding human development.
Slavery, its opponents argued, was not just immoral but also very much inferior to free labour, free enterprise and free trade.
An attack on slavery was therefore, by its nature, an assault on property rights which were a near-sacred concept in the late eighteenth century, when voting rights and political power were dependent upon the ownership of property.
if the trade was ended and the supply of slaves cut off then the whole system would ‘wither on the vine’.
‘If we purchase the commodity we participate in the crime. The slave-dealer, the slave-holder, and the slave-driver, are virtually the agents of the consumer, and may be considered as employed and hired by him to procure the commodity . . . In every pound of sugar used . . . we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh’.
In a strident and damning work, Cugoano demanded an immediate end to both the slave trade and slavery and used his own life story to build his case.
The Sons of Africa were just as energetic as the white abolitionists, writing letters and making speeches, although the records of their activities are far from complete and much about them remains unknown.
it was willing to free the enormous amount of wasted intellect and energy that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was bottled up within the women of Britain.
The energies and compassion of women were thus given an outlet and female abolitionists formed their own organizations and committees.
women brought anti-slavery politics into the home via the sugar boycott.
After a conversion to Christianity he had – some years later – an epiphany and wrote a powerful anti-slavery tract, Thoughts upon the African slave trade.
In 1797 he concluded that Britain’s ‘African trade is a national sin, for the enormities which accompany it are now generally known; and though perhaps the greater part of the nation would be pleased if it were suppressed, yet as it does not immediately affect their own interest, they are passive.’15
The hardships and inconveniences suffered by the Negroes during the passage are scarcely to be enumerated or conceived. They are far more violently affected by seasickness than Europeans. It frequently terminates in death, especially among the women. But the exclusion of fresh air is among the most intolerable. For the purpose of admitting this needful refreshment, most of the ships in the slave trade are provided, between the decks, with five or six air-ports on each side of the ship of about five inches in length and four in breadth. In addition, some ships, but not one in twenty, have what
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There was hunger in England, deserters from the army were hunted down in the streets, Tom Paine’s book The Rights of Man was banned and a radical, fractious mood hung in the air.
The rich and their representatives craved political and economic stability above anything else and the fates of the enslaved Africans, far away on the sugar islands of the West Indies, slipped precipitously down the political agenda.
The Haitian Revolution ended slavery on that island and led, eventually, to the creation of the first sovereign black state in the Western hemisphere.
mixing as it did French revolutionary ideology with potent and ancient fears of supposed black savagery.
‘It is to be hoped, for heaven’s sake, we shall hear no more of abolishing the slave trade,’ wrote a correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine who believed the rebellion in St Domingue was incontrovertible proof that ‘the Negro race are but a set of wild beasts’.
Although parts of it still exist today, the name ‘West India Docks’ has almost disappeared from the map of London, surviving only as the name of a street and a railway station. The area is today known as Canary Wharf.
Hibbert is the villain of the piece. He can be thought of as the ‘anti-Wilberforce’,
The determination of the enslaved to resist their oppression weakened the slave system but simultaneously had the effect of alarming an already nervous British public and, periodically, wrong-footing the abolitionist movement.
Abolition was portrayed as something that was to be given to the enslaved by the British people rather than seized by them.
This discomfort about black agency was repeatedly seized upon by the growing pro-slavery lobby and channelled into propaganda
The first significant parliamentary breakthrough in the abolitionist struggle was the Dolben Act of 1788, named after Sir William Dolben,
The Dolben Act set limits for the number of slaves that could be carried on a ship, at five slaves per three tons,
Yet the bill of 1796 failed by only four votes after one group of pro-abolition MPs went to the opera and missed the vote. There were rumours that the performance of the comic opera The Two Hunchbacks that had drawn the lawmakers away from the chamber had been arranged by the supporters of the slave trade.
The bill passed through both houses, receiving the Royal Assent from George III on 25 March 1807, and came into force on 1 January 1808. The British slave trade, begun in the 1660s under King Charles II, had, by this act, been ‘utterly abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful’.
Immediate emancipation of the slaves, they argued, would be a disaster for both the slaves and the slave owners.
The faith in gradualism said much about the racial ideas that prevailed among the abolitionists and most people in nineteenth-century Britain. It said nothing about the capacities and inner nature of African people.
Unable to buy new slaves but determined to maintain their profits the slave owners had increased the burdens they placed upon their human property.
The concept of the soul and the belief that all souls were equal before the eyes of God did not sit comfortably with the practice of chattel slavery or the maintenance of racial hierarchies. The biblical stories of redemption, of a Promised Land and salvation seemed to speak directly to the slaves, and offer them the hope that their plight might be ended.
In 1823 a new generation of abolitionists, along with a smattering of the old guard, launched a second crusade.
The most eloquent and compelling of the advocates of ‘immediatism’ were women and the most dynamic of them was Elizabeth Heyrick, a Quaker schoolteacher from Leicester. In 1824 she wrote a pamphlet entitled Immediate, not Gradual Abolition.
In the city of Sheffield there was something approaching a schism, with the women’s abolitionist society demanding immediate abolition and the men’s committee advocating gradualism.
rebellion in Jamaican history began as a sit-down strike in the cane fields, an almost Gandhian act of non-violent civil disobedience.
The rebellion – which came also to be known as the Baptist War – was arguably the final factor that tipped the scales in favour of abolition.
The government recognized that it would have to foot the bill: twenty million pounds was raised and set aside to compensate the forty-six thousand slave owners. That sum represented 40 per cent of all government spending for the year 1833 and is the equivalent of around seventeen billion pounds today,
All slaves who worked the fields were to continue their labours for an additional six years, unpaid and for the same masters. Domestic slaves were to work for a further four years. This system was euphemistically called ‘apprenticeship’,
It was the evening of 31 July 1838 and over the entrance to the chapel yard a banner had been placed carrying the single word – ‘FREEDOM’
As the bell struck the first chime of midnight he continued, ‘The clock is striking. The monster is dead: the negro is free.’
A headstone placed above the grave read, ‘Colonial Slavery died 31 July 1838, Age 276 years’.29
The contributions of the black abolitionists, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Ottobah Cuguano, the Sons of Africa and others were also redacted, and a similar fate befell the female abolitionists, like Elizabeth Heyrick and Hannah More.
The painting, Benjamin Robert Haydon’s depiction of the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, belongs to the genre of art known as history painting, great panoramas that capture decisive moments in human affairs.
The World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in the Freemasons’ Hall, Great Queen Street, London between 12 and 23 June 1840.
