The Wilberforce Song: How Enslaved Caribbean Blacks Heard British Abolitionists

The process of ending the British transatlantic slave trade was politically acrimonious, socially divisive and long drawn-out. In 1787, the British, led by Thomas Clarkson founded a Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The London Committee, as it was also known, agreed on a two-phased approach, separating the campaign to abolish the slave trade from general emancipation. First, it would seek to end the transatlantic slave trade, and second, it would urge the gradual abolish of slavery itself, both by legislative action in parliament. It was not until 1807 that any abolition action was authorized by parliament.¹

Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, the enslaved community had moved further along with respect to its own course of abolition action. A successful rebellion of the enslaved community in the French colony of St Domingue in 1791 placed the colony firmly in the political hands of chief military commander, Toussaint L'Ouverture, who immediately sought to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. In 1804, the blacks unilaterally declared their constitutional independence from France, and by extension from Britain, which had made an ill-fated military attempt to capture the colony from L'Ouverture.

At the outset the Haitian state, confronting the slave-owning powers of Europe and the United States, proclaimed abolition the centre of its domestic and foreign policy, consistent with the ten-year anti-slavery revolutionary war from which it emerged. It was the first nation of its kind in the modern world, an inspiring expression of the endemic abolition movement that had long typified the Caribbean colonial experience.² The British parliament passed its legislation to abolish the slave trade on 25 March 1807, providing that as from 1 May 1807, except where ships had already been cleared to trade, it would be unlawful for British subjects to participate in the transatlantic slave trade. Such ships would be allowed to operate until 1 March 1808.³

The abolition of the British slave trade has traditionally been presented as a benevolent act by the British state that acquiesced under the mounting pressure of opposing intellectual voices and the mass advocacy of religious and humanitarian activists. There is a substantial literature that details this rich history, but it does not, however, give adequate attention to the political role of enslaved communities in the Caribbean, who in the context of the wider Atlantic dimensions of the transatlantic slave trade, were its fiercest foes.⁴

Enslaved blacks everywhere focused their resistance politics upon both aspects of the crime against humanity, the transatlantic slave trade and slavery itself. The Haitian constitution, for example, reflected the precise thinking of the majority of the enslaved in the Caribbean. By providing that any enslaved person who arrived in Haiti would become automatically free and citizens, it set a benchmark in abolitionist politics for all nations. This legal facility was the most significant abolitionist development in the wider Atlantic world. By the time of the British act in 1807, L'Ouverture's revolutionary vision and policy had been operative for over a decade, gaining for him the status as principal abolitionist leader in the Caribbean, the Atlantic and beyond. Enslaved people from near and far were already fleeing to freedom in St Domingue before the state of Haiti was declared.⁵

The interactions between Caribbean and European abolitionists have not been fully researched, and certainly not recognized. Pride of place in the global abolition campaign has gone to the ideological and political leadership of the British, and to a lesser extent, the French. The British led the most persistent parliamentary campaign. But they also made the most money from the trade. The Portuguese may have shipped more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic but the British extracted the greatest per capita profits. This commercial circumstance had much to do with the timing and intensity of the British campaign.⁶

Recent research by David Eltis and Joseph Inikori has suggested that 12 to 15 million enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas between 1492 and 1870. The transatlantic slave trade was the largest involuntary human migration in recorded...