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337 epilogue Defending the Human Commodity; or, Diversity and Diaspora A trade to [the] Spanish main for British manufactures and Indian goods, is cover’d wholly by a few slaves, and the Trade dependant altogether on that share in the assortment. —George Rose, 1806 Dey talk all kind of Country. —’Sibell, 1799 In 1806, frustrated by a recent string of defeats, British abolitionists developed a strategy to neutralize two key arguments for the slave trade, changing the debate in a way that forced defenders of the commerce to articulate the value of the intercolonial branch of the trade. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, momentum for abolishing the slave trade had surged in the British Empire (and in the newly independent United States), but in 1804 and 1805, not to mention several times in preceding decades, abolitionists had tried and failed to push bills for total slave trade abolition through Britain ’s Parliament. Slave trade proponents had employed two key arguments to keep parliamentary opinion on their side: that colonial economies would collapse without steady supplies of enslaved labor, and that the transatlantic slave trade—far from harming Africans—rescued them from a backward and heathen “Dark Continent” by delivering them into the light of Christian civilization . As Robert Bisset summed up the second point when opposing the total abolition bill of 1805, “By the Slave trade, humanity was essentially promoted, instead of being violated.” 1 Abolitionists refuted such arguments, citing evidence of horrific disease on slave ships and brutality on American plantations, but having failed to win the parliamentary battles in 1804 or 1805, they decided to exploit a different 1. Robert Bisset,The History of the Negro Slave Trade,in Its Connection with the Commerce and Prosperity of theWest Indies, and theWealth and Power of the British Empire (London, 1805), I, ix. For an overview of the pro–slave trade arguments, see David Beck Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807 (New York, 2009), chap. 8. 338 / Epilogue weakness in 1806. The logic of the pro–slave trade arguments only applied to deliveries of Africans to British colonies. If settlements would collapse without slave labor, abolitionists asked, why were British slave traders propping up the economies of French and Spanish America? If Africans benefited from being introduced to civility and Christianity in the Americas, then how could slave traders from Britain justify their sales of innocent, impressionable Africans to the colonies of backward, Catholic France and Spain? In 1806, abolitionists compelled slave trade supporters to confront such questions by pushing Parliament to consider a partial abolition that would bar traders only from selling Africans in foreign colonies. This penultimate act to outlawing the slave trade has been overshadowed in historical memory by the more thoroughgoing abolition of the following year, but the partial abolition held particular significance for the intercolonial trade, since slave dealers preferred to access foreign markets via transshipment. As such, the debate surrounding the 1806 act highlighted the intercolonial slave trade’s significance—or perceived significance —to British commerce.2 Focused solely on the slave trade to French and Spanish America, the 1806 debate forced defenders of the slave trade to emphasize the profitability of selling commodified people, since arguments about a workforce for British 2. On the abolitionists’ strategy in 1806, see [William Grenville?], “Observations in Answer to the Question ‘Whether a General Abolition Bill Should Now Be Brought into Parliament,’ May 19, 1806,” Dropmore Papers, CDLI, Additional Manuscripts, 59305, fol. 60, British Library, London (hereafter cited as BL, Add. MSS). Seymour Drescher argues that abolitionists’ critique of the foreign trade in 1806 was especially resonant in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, given the strong anti-French (and Spanish) sentiments in Britain (Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery [New York, 2009], 226). Abolitionists in the U.S. had actually made a similar argument about American involvement in slave trading to foreign territories a decade earlier. In a petition to Congress in 1790, Connecticut abolitionists argued “That the principle, ‘that the labor of slaves is necessary to the due cultivation of our land,’ has introduced a commerce in the human race far beyond the pretended necessities of our country, and has led the citizens of these States into a very extensive trade for the supply of other nations with slaves—a trade, in the end, generally unproductive to the adventurers, always destructive to the lives and morals of the seamen, and, as relative to the victims devoted to...

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