The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, also known as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and sometimes referred to as the Abolition Society or Anti-Slavery Society, was a British abolitionist group formed on 22 May 1787. The objective of abolishing the slave trade was achieved in 1807. The abolition of slavery in all British colonies followed in 1833.
Adam Hochschild posits that this anti-slavery movement is the first peaceful social movement which all modern social movements are built upon.[2]
The society was established by twelve men; including prominent campaigners Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, who, as Anglicans, were able to be more influential in Parliament than the more numerous Quaker founding members. The society worked to educate the public about the abuses of the slave trade and achieved the abolition of the international slave trade when the British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1807, at which time the society ceased its activities. (The United States also prohibited the African slave trade the same year, to take effect in 1808.)
The first anti-slavery statement was written by Dutch and German Quakers, who met at Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1688. English Quakers began to express their official disapproval of the slave trade in 1727 and promote reforms. From the 1750s, a number of Quakers in Britain's American colonies also began to oppose slavery and called on English Quakers to take action with parliament. They encouraged their fellow citizens, including Quaker slave owners, to improve conditions for slaves, educate their slaves in Christianity, reading and writing, and gradually emancipate (free) them.[citation needed]
An informal group of six Quakers pioneered the British abolitionist movement in 1783 when the London Society of Friends' yearly meeting presented its petition against the slave trade to Parliament, signed by over 300 Quakers. They were also influenced by the publicity that year about the Zong massacre, as the shipowners were litigating a claim for insurance against losses due to more than 132 slaves having been killed on their ship.[citation needed]
Foundation
"In 1787, approximately three-quarters of the people on Earth lived under some form of enslavement, serfdom, debt bondage or indentured servitude. There were no slaves in Britain itself, but the vast majority of its people accepted slavery in the British West Indies as perfectly normal."[3]
The Quakers decided to form a small, committed, non-denominational group so as to gain greater Church of England and Parliamentary support. The new, non-denominational committee formed in 1787 had nine Quaker members and three Anglicans. As Quakers were not prepared to receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the rites of the Church of England, they were not permitted to serve as Members of Parliament, having Anglican members strengthened the committee's likelihood of influencing Parliament.[4] The new society was named the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, later often referred to simply as the Abolition Society.[5]
The reverberations from what happened on this spot, on the late afternoon of 22 May 1787, eventually caught the attention of millions of people around the world, including the first and greatest student of what today we call civil society. The result of the series of events begun that afternoon in London, wrote French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville decades later, was "absolutely without precedent...If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary". The building that once stood at 2 George Yard was a bookstore and printing shop. The proprietor was James Phillips, publisher and printer for Britain's small community of Quakers. On that May afternoon, after the pressmen and typesetters had gone home for the day, 12 men filed through his doors. They formed themselves into a committee with what seemed to their fellow Londoners a hopelessly idealistic and impractical aim: ending first the slave trade and then slavery itself in the most powerful empire on Earth." -- Los Angeles Times: The Idea That Brought Slavery to Its Knees.[6]
Membership
Nine of the twelve founding members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, or The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, were Quakers:[4]
Five of the Quakers had been amongst the informal group of six Quakers who had pioneered the movement in 1783, when the first petition against the slave trade was presented to Parliament.
Three Anglicans were founding members:
Thomas Clarkson, campaigner and author of an influential essay against the slave trade;
The society did not aim at ending slavery altogether, but only to abolish British involvement in the international slave trade. They would do this by awareness-raising campaigns highlighting some of the cruel practices involved in the trade.[5]
The mission of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was to inform the public of the inhuman and immoral treatment of enslaved Africans committed in the name of slavery, to campaign in favour of a new law to abolish the slave trade and enforce this throughout the British Empire. The society's methods for pursuing its goals included writing and publishing anti-slavery books, abolitionist prints, posters and pamphlets, and organising lecture tours in the towns and cities of England. Clarkson's Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade, published in 1788, was one of the first books on the subject.[4]
Petitions were presented to the House of Commons (over 100 in 1788[7]), anti-slavery rallies held, and a range of anti-slavery medallions, crockery and bronze figurines were made, notably with the support of the Unitarian potter Josiah Wedgwood whose production of pottery medallions featuring a slave in chains with the simple but effective question: "Am I not a man and a brother?" was very effective in bringing public attention to abolition.[8][4] The Wedgwood medallion was the most famous image of a black person in all of 18th-century art.[9] Clarkson wrote; "ladies wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for their hair. At length the taste for wearing them became general, and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom".[10]
By educating the public, the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade gained many members. In 1787, Clarkson's speaking tour of the great ports and cities of England raised public interest. Publication of the African Olaudah Equiano's autobiography heightened public awareness, as the former slave expressed an unanswerable case against slavery in a work of literary merit. In 1789 Clarkson's promoted the committee's cause by encouraging the sale of Equiano's memoir and inviting the former slave to lecture in British ports linked to the slave trade.
William Wilberforce introduced the first Bill to abolish the slave trade in 1791, which was defeated by 163 votes to 88.[4] As Wilberforce continued to bring the issue of the slave trade before Parliament, Clarkson and others on the Committee travelled, raised funds, lobbied, and wrote anti-slavery works. They conducted a protracted parliamentary campaign, during which Wilberforce introduced a motion in favour of abolition almost every year.
Membership
The committee was later joined by the Quaker philanthropist William Allen, who worked closely with Wilberforce and with his fellow Quaker members,[citation needed] and Wilberforce's fellow members of the Clapham Sect were subscribers to the society as well.[11] Director of the Bank of England and founding member of the Philanthropic Society in St. George's Fields[12]Jeremiah Harman was also a promenade supporter[13] and subscriber[13] of the initial publication of the Society.[13]
Female membership
According to Claire Midgley (2004), the proportion of female subscribers to the society was typical of philanthropic societies of the time. Across the whole society, female subscribers comprised about 10 per cent of the membership, while in some centres, notably Manchester (with 68 women, or nearly a quarter of the total), the percentage was higher. Some of the most identifiable women were members of leading Quaker families, such as the wife of William Dillwyn, Sarah; others were members of the Clapham Sect and also members of the African Institution, and others were members of wealthy Unitarian families in Manchester.[14] By 1788 there were 206 female subscribers.[15] One prominent female subscriber was writer and polymath Elizabeth Carter.[7]
Related societies
Several members of the society also subscribed to the African Institution (founded 1807 to create a viable, civilised refuge for freed slaves in Sierra Leone[16]).[7] The Sons of Africa abolitionist society had a membership of educated Londoners, mostly African former slaves. It was closely connected to the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.[citation needed]
Petitioning peaked in 1792, with up to 100,000 signatures (Manchester alone contributed 10,639), and regional anti-slavery groups started taking the lead, especially in the north of England.[7]
Women had increasingly played a larger role in the anti-slavery movement[17] but could not take a direct role in Parliament. They sometimes formed their own anti-slavery societies. Many women were horrified that, under slavery, women and children were taken away from their families. In 1824, Elizabeth Heyrick published a pamphlet titled Immediate not Gradual Abolition, in which she urged the immediate emancipation of slaves in the British colonies.[18]
Despite the little influence they carried, many female abolitionists made a big impact on the abolition of the slave trade. An important campaigner was Anne Knight. She was born into a Quaker family in Essex and took active roles in the anti-slavery campaigns. Knight formed the Chelmsford Female Anti-Slavery Society. She also toured France, giving lectures on the immorality of slavery.[citation needed]
In 1807, the British Parliament voted to abolish the international slave trade under the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act,[5] and enforce this through its maritime power, the Royal Navy.[21] The society wound up its work after the Act was passed.[4]
The United States also prohibited the African slave trade in the same year, taking effect on 1 January 1808.[22]
In 1808 a separate Act was passed in the UK to give greater British protection to Freetown in West Africa (now the capital of Sierra Leone), a colony established in 1788 for the resettlement of former slaves and Poor Blacks from London, as well as Black Loyalists who had initially been relocated to Nova Scotia following the American Revolutionary War. The Timni chief Nembana sold a strip of land to a British official to establish this colony for freed slaves. When the Royal Navy later intercepted illegal slave trading ships, its crews frequently resettled the liberated Africans at Freetown.[citation needed]
From 1823, the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (also known as the Anti-Slavery Society) became the primary organised group working for legislation to abolish slavery. The Society and supporters, including captive and freed Africans, missionaries and evangelical movements in the colonies, worked to achieve the first stage of legal emancipation in the colonies. It also supported abolitionists in the United States. Many British supported lecture tours by American abolitionists in Britain who were raising funds for efforts in the United States. Such supporters sometimes provided refuge to Americans who had escaped from slavery and helped raise money to buy their freedom, as for Frederick Douglass.[citation needed]
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate slaves around the world.
William Wilberforce was a British politician, a philanthropist, and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780, and became an independent Member of Parliament (MP) for Yorkshire (1784–1812). In 1785, he underwent a conversion experience and became an Evangelical Anglican, which resulted in major changes to his lifestyle and a lifelong concern for reform.
The Clapham Sect, or Clapham Saints, were a group of social reformers associated with Holy Trinity Clapham in the period from the 1780s to the 1840s. Despite the label "sect", most members remained in the established Church of England, which was highly interwoven with offices of state. However, its successors were in many cases outside of the established Anglican Church.
James Stephen was the principal English lawyer associated with the movement for the abolition of slavery. Stephen was born in Poole, Dorset; the family home later being removed to Stoke Newington. He married twice and was the father of Sir James Stephen, grandfather of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen and Sir Leslie Stephen, and great-grandfather of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Thomas Clarkson was an English abolitionist, and a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. He helped found the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and helped achieve passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which ended British trade in slaves.
The Slave Trade Act 1807, officially An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom prohibiting the slave trade in the British Empire. Although it did not abolish the practice of slavery, it encouraged British action to press other nation states to abolish their own slave trades. It took effect on 1 May 1807, after 18 years of trying to pass an abolition bill.
Zachary Macaulay was a Scottish statistician and abolitionist who was a founder of London University and of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and a Governor of British Sierra Leone.
The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which provided for the gradual abolition of slavery in most parts of the British Empire. It was passed by Earl Grey's reforming administration and expanded the jurisdiction of the Slave Trade Act 1807 and made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire, with the exception of "the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company", Ceylon, and Saint Helena. The Act came into force on 1 August 1834, and was repealed in 1998 as a part of wider rationalisation of English statute law; however, later anti-slavery legislation remains in force.
The Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, founded in 1823 and known as the London Anti-Slavery Society during 1838 before ceasing to exist in that year, was commonly referred to as the Anti-Slavery Society.
Rev. James Ramsay was a Scottish ship's surgeon, Anglican priest, and leading abolitionist in Great Britain.
Elizabeth Heyrick was an English philanthropist and campaigner against the slave trade. She supported immediate, rather than gradual, abolition.
The free-produce movement was an international boycott of goods produced by slave labor. It was used by the abolitionist movement as a non-violent way for individuals, including the disenfranchised, to fight slavery.
The Sons of Africa were a late-18th-century group in Britain that campaigned to end African chattel slavery. The "corresponding society" has been called the Britain's first black political organisation. Its members were educated Africans in London, including formerly enslaved men such as Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano and other leading members of London's black community.
The World Anti-Slavery Convention met for the first time at Exeter Hall in London, on 12–23 June 1840. It was organised by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, largely on the initiative of the English Quaker Joseph Sturge. The exclusion of women from the convention gave a great impetus to the women's suffrage movement in the United States.
Abolitionism in the United Kingdom was the movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to end the practice of slavery, whether formal or informal, in the United Kingdom, the British Empire and the world, including ending the Atlantic slave trade. It was part of a wider abolitionism movement in Western Europe and the Americas.
Although many Enlightenment philosophers opposed slavery, it was Christian activists, attracted by strong religious elements, who initiated and organized an abolitionist movement. Throughout Europe and the United States, Christians, usually from "un-institutional" Christian faith movements, not directly connected with traditional state churches, or "non-conformist" believers within established churches, were to be found at the forefront of the abolitionist movements.
James Cropper (1773–1840) was an English businessman and philanthropist, known as an abolitionist who made a major contribution to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833.
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves is a non-fiction book by Adam Hochschild that was first published by Houghton Mifflin on January 7, 2005. The book is a narrative history of the late 18th- and early 19th-century anti-slavery movement in the British Empire. The story centers around a group of British abolitionist campaigners and traces their campaign from its beginnings with Somerset v Stewart in 1772 until full emancipation for all British slaves was legally granted in 1838. The book looks at the setbacks the abolitionists faced as well as the campaign tactics they used, and explains how they were ultimately able to end the practice of slavery in Britain.
The origins of slavery in France can be traced back to the Merovingian dynasty in the 4th century. At least five Frankish queens during that period were former slaves: Ingund, Fredegund, Bilichild, Nanthild, and Balthild. Slavery continued under the Carolingian Empire.
The Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion was an abolitionist symbol produced and distributed by British potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood in 1787 as a seal for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The medallion depicts a kneeling Black man in chains with his hands raised to the heavens; it is inscribed with the phrase "Am I not a man and a brother?"
References
1 2 3 Leo D'Anjou (1996). Social Movements and Cultural Change: The First Abolition Campaign. Aldine de Gruyter. p.198. ISBN978-0-202-30522-6.
↑ "Wedgwood". Archived from the original on 8 July 2009. Retrieved 13 July 2009. Thomas Clarkson wrote; ladies wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for their hair. At length the taste for wearing them became general, and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom.
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