'Contrary to the Principles of Justice, Humanity and Sound Policy': The Slave Trade, Parliamentary Politics and the Abolition Act, 1807

In June 1806, for the first time after nearly 20 years of campaigning inside and outside parliament, the Commons and the Lords united in declaring that the British slave trade was 'contrary to the principles of justice, humanity, and sound policy'.¹ When a bill was introduced early the following year, intended to give these joint resolutions legislative effect, it used exactly the same words at the beginning of its preamble (or initial justificatory statement). The formulation, which would resurface continually in parliamentary debates, was not new. Indeed, it had been used, in a slightly different order ('humanity, justice, and sound policy'), by William Pitt, the prime minister, on introducing his delaying motion on inquiry into the slave trade in May 1788, when the abolitionists were already being associated with the cause of 'justice and humanity'. The words 'justice, humanity and sound policy' were used again by Henry Dundas, the minister most strongly associated with those wishing to resist immediate abolition, in his twelfth resolution on the subject on 23 April 1792.² For Pitt, as for Dundas, the phrase encapsulated the evident conflict that arose between opposing the slave trade for genuinely sincere humanitarian and religious reasons (justice for Africa, as it were), and supporting it on the necessary ground of prudential 'sound policy'. By the latter they meant, not the modern sense of opting for a preferred course of action, but the importance of adhering to the generally unquestioned commercial and strategic requirements of national and imperial government as a whole.³ The abolitionists naturally emphasized the immorality of the slave trade and its apologists took their stand on the viability of the existing trading system, but, with each side producing counter arguments that employed their opponents' own modes of discourse, the issues of 'justice and humanity' as against 'sound policy' were never really as separate as they might appear.⁴

Nevertheless, in examining the causes of the ultimate success of the abolition movement in Britain, historians long agreed that humanitarian motives had been paramount. Such was true whether, as by the extra-parliamentary activist Thomas Clarkson, the credit was given to a confluence of influential writers and campaigners,⁵ or whether, as his later idolisers asserted, the glory was entirely owing to the cause's leading Commons advocate, William Wilberforce.⁶ This comfortable consensus was shattered by the challenging and polemical 'decline thesis' propounded in 1944 by Eric Williams, who argued that British abolition was almost entirely induced by economic and geopolitical factors of domestic and colonial policy, with humanitarian ideas serving only as a cynical cover for self-interest.⁷ Since later commentators have been able to demonstrate that by the early nineteenth century there was neither an actual nor a perceived long-term downturn in the prosperity of the West Indian colonies, attention has turned instead to hypotheses concerning the role of working and middle class opinion in the eventual attainment of abolition.⁸ Yet the first great outburst of anti-slavery activity, including hundreds of petitions to parliament, occurred in the years 1788-92, when little was done to show for it, and the Abolition Act went through in 1807, when popular opinion was far more muted. Although no obvious correlation between direct public pressure and legislative success can therefore necessarily be deduced, what seems certain is that the long-term weight of public hostility to the slave trade, both within the dissenting and radical reform traditions and, perhaps critically, among those in the socially and religiously conservative mainstream, had a considerable impact on the abolition movement.⁹

As Howard Temperley has pointed out in relation to claims that abolition resulted from economic factors, it is necessary to show how such background causes 'were translated into political actions and finally into specific legislative acts'.¹⁰ The trick for the abolitionists, cleverly exploiting favourable commercial and strategic arguments in the Commons, was to square the circle between the two apparently irreconcilable approaches of humanitarianism and self-interest at the parliamentary level. According to the accepted interpretation of...