Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade

Before the end of the war of American Independence the possibility of abolishing Britain's Atlantic slave trade had never been raised in parliament. No pressure group from without had urged its consideration. No member had moved its investigation. By the end of the French wars three decades later, parliament had shut down Britain's trade. Its government had begun a process of internationalizing abolition. For fully half a century after Waterloo every major initiative would be advertized to the world as the desire of both the government and the nation.

This dramatic change was embedded in far larger transformations in British political culture and practice. The evolving dialogue between people and legislators was increasingly nationalized by the thickening network of provincial newspapers. Parliamentary debates and governmental initiatives were now the daily grist of provincial readers. Letters, advertisements for public gatherings, political pamphlets and news items about activities of political leaders in London provided fare for ongoing public conversations which linked provincial readers, not only with the centre in London, but with interested actors from all parts of the island. When parliamentary debates extended over weeks and months, newspapers, associations, libraries, debating societies and public meetings offered parallel venues for ongoing discussions and petitions to the national legislature.¹

Within this broader process abolition came to occupy a distinctively innovative position. As we shall see, it combined new techniques of propaganda, petitioning and association with the organizational networking techniques of mercantile and manufacturing lobbyists. Between its emergence as a national political movement in 1787 and the internationalization of slave trade abolition at the end of the Napoleonic wars, political abolition became a pioneering organization in mobilizing hitherto untapped groups as actors for philanthropic and social reform. The movement's fortunes in parliament during those three decades were also emblematic of the difficulties entailed in converting public pressure into law and policy.²

1. Antislavery Sentiment before Mobilization

One of the distinctive qualities of British political abolitionism was its emergence in conjunction with a massive wave of popular support in 1787-8. Christopher Brown has meticulously traced the long history of abolition's protohistory down to the eve of popular mobilization. Two themes stand out in this story. The first is the steady stream of articulated distaste and revulsion that the overseas slave system continually evoked in eighteenth-century writings. Few travel accounts, imperial histories or geographical compendia failed to mention its striking brutality and its deviance from metropolitan behavioural, legal and religious norms. Some commented upon the ease with which most participants accepted the indifference to human suffering entailed in its perpetuation.

Eighteenth-century culture was therefore saturated with casual references to the violence done to social norms by the slave trade. By the mid-1780s apologists for the trade would have found most lines of defensive rationalization closed except those grounded on the sanctity of private property, the economic value of slave labour and the national interest in sustaining valuable Atlantic trades and products.³ The bad news for pioneer abolitionists was that these reasons, all linked to the need of African labour for staple agriculture in the tropics, were precisely those that had easily sustained the system against sporadic hostility for nearly a century.

Arguments for the maintenance of the British transatlantic system were always fundamentally grounded in the necessity of the slave trade to sustain the wealth and power of the empire in a highly competitive world. From the early eighteenth century, writers also occasionally deplored the unexplored opportunities for greater development in Africa hindered by the slave trade. They almost invariably returned, however, to the premise that one had to develop trades based upon the world 'as it stands'.⁴

Throughout the century it was apparent that the British legislature held the key to restricting or prohibiting the slave trade. Britain's first abolitionist, Granville Sharp, exemplified the pervasive sense of helplessness when imagining attempts to influence parliament toward that end. In 1772, flush from his own judicial victory in the Somerset case, Sharp was delighted by Anthony Benezet's assurance from Philadelphia that 20,000 to 30...