The argument over abolition
usually splinters on whether the British Slave Trade Act (1807) came about as
the result of moral campaigning rather than that harder interface of
realpolitik; ie that there were economic motives at play. I think both of
these responses are valid and need not be mutually exclusive. Just to situate
ourselves a bit and maybe pick an example that certainly makes sense to me - in
1775 at the beginning of the American war of independence British crown forces
promised freedom to slaves who deserted their masters in the colonies and who
joined the British army. The first three hundred blacks who arrived were
enlisted as the Royal Ethiopian Regiment and given uniforms emblazoned with the
provocative words LIBERTY TO SLAVES. This had nothing to do with the desire to
end slavery of course but was merely intended to destabilise the plantations and
undermine an important source of economic power for the rebel colonies. After
the war some were employed by the Royal Navy or on merchants ships, some were
brought to Britain (employed as manservants and so on ala Mansfield’s ruling)
while others, less happily, were sent to the West Indies and re-enslaved. But
the greater bulk (some 3,000 former slaves) stayed in New York with the residual
forces of the defeated British army as it prepared to evacuate. With the end of
the war in 1783 the question then arose during the course of the treaty
negotiations with the victorious Americans as to what should become of the
former slaves.
George Washington and other large plantation owners had already forwarded lists of runaway slaves to their representatives in New York whom they wished to see returned as a part of the treaty negotiations. When the final touches were being added to the peace treaty Washington simply assumed that the slaves would be returned; their situation clearly falling under the treaty‘s obligations regarding the ‘preservation of property’. However, Guy Carleton, the British commander, replied that his ‘conscience as an officer’ required him to respect the original promise made to the slaves. “The National honour must be kept with all colours”. Thus Carleton argued the British were not guilty of breaching the terms of the peace treaty since their proclamation had already freed them and so they could not be construed as being subject to the treaty’s clauses on property and went on to further inform the shocked Washington that many had already, in fact, set sail for England. “Already embarked!” says he. The question of compensation, to which Carleton at least admitted some British liability, became a bone of contention for the two governments for many years to come. Only towards the end of his presidency did Washington stop asking for their return and instead focused on seeking compensation. The dispute was finally arbitrated by the Tsar of Russia in 1826 when the American plantation owners (‘or their heirs‘) were reimbursed to the tune of half the value of their market price - index linked presumably.
The long running nature of this saga coupled with its being one of the few positives which emerged from the fiasco of the American colonial war must have made a deep impression on the British public. Critics such as Edmund Burke had long pointed to the punitive levels of crown taxation which hastened the American revolt and so this incident of ‘freeing the slaves’ on a point of national honour emerged as at least one issue on which Britain could lay claim to the higher moral ground. This is not an inconsiderable thing either given the level of introspection involved when a nation collectively scours the wreck of a costly war and asks itself belatedly what could have been different. Very little could be salvaged from the raft of poor policy decisions which led to the deterioration of relations with the colonists but this issue on which Carleton stood his ground at least offered something of a pleasant aperitif on an otherwise unwholesome engagement. The decision to grant freedom on the condition of armed service to runaway slaves was a wholly tactical manouevre based on realpolitik - slaves who did not revolt were offered no such concessions and would have certainly remained slaves had the colonists been defeated - but it created the conditions whereby the issues of slavery and freedom could be equated in the public mind with a stubbornly adhered-to ‘point of principle’, now writ large and doubly magnified as the parting shot in an international war which also consumed the resources and fixed attention of their great rival France. There were few people in British public life in 1783 who questioned the legitimacy of slavery as an institution or the ethics of slave ownership and these relationships of course weren’t something that were being scrutinised to any degree by Carleton at the time (though it is open to debate to what extent his actions may be inferred to express sympathy for emancipation) - but what the affair did do, at the very least, was to elevate into the public consciousness that crucial binary of “slavery” and “freedom” in the context of international tensions and, tellingly, on a pivot which seemed to secure ‘moral capital’ for a partially redeemed British crown.
Merely by having these two concepts consistently associated in an ongoing trans-Atlantic discourse which hinged on the propriety or otherwise of Carleton’s decision and which involved points of principle where ‘national honour’ was at stake, merely by being aired, did this slowly enable the elementary trappings of the original debate to dissolve and allow this fateful, much publicised binary to fuse, fertilise and reciprocally engender prevailing Enlightenment notions of universal rights. The fallout over the Treaty of Paris and the circumstances of British withdrawal contributed then, in the British context, to creating a more receptive environment for early abolitionists such as the Quakers, Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson who, in 1787, would eventually form the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. This especial receptivity of the general public was everywhere to be seen by Clarkson - who was the real dynamo behind the movement - as he travelled the length and breadth of the country (over 16,000 km on horseback) gathering statements from seamen, ships doctors and former slaves and collecting petitions for parliament. In Manchester, which stood to lose as much commercially as Bristol or Liverpool since they supplied the bulk of the industrial goods which were bought by traders to purchase the slaves on the West African coast - 10,000 signatures were petitioned. As Wilberforce began the Society’s campaign in parliament - a campaign that hinged entirely on the unacceptable morality of the slave trade - it was clear that it was not the attitude of the British public or even the British legislature which halted progress (many Slave Trade Bills over the next twenty years were passed by the Commons only to be vetoed in the Lords) but West Indian lobby groups and landed interests in the House of Lords who were themselves, more often than not, plantation owners.
Also, there was a considerable bulk of opposition who had no commercial ties to the West Indies and who agreed on principle with the moral argument of the Abolitionists but who were nevertheless opposed to reform on account of the damage that this would have on the British economy. One third of imports and exports came from the triangular trade and sugar grown in the West Indies accounted for more than half of the total value of its imports (10m of 17m pounds in 1806); and this is without considering the trade’s vital role in providing a ‘nursery for seamen’, some 17,000 strong, which would go on to form the backbone of the Royal Navy - the very source of Britain’s imperial might. It was this large bloc of legislators, Lords members included, who had to be won over if the campaign were going to succeed and given that the majority were already clear in their mind that the trade was abhorrent from a moral perspective (the depositions painstakingly obtained by Clarkson had over time put paid to that argument) - they remained to be swayed on economic arguments. And while Wilberforce steadfastly stuck to his guns in highlighting the moral repugnance of the trade the real difference came from arguments framed in economic terms (some of whom were also undoubtedly abolitionists in the moral sense) which stressed that to continue the trade would in itself lead to economic disaster. There were a number of issues raised here on behalf of those concerned about the impact of abolition on the British exchequer. These related to how the ongoing war with France was being fought, the changing nature of the sugar trade itself (Cuba’s land being cleared for plantations by the Spanish for example making investment less attractive as profits were sure to collapse), the ubiquity of slave smuggling and the impossibility of practically enforcing a ban, the possibility of navy ‘impressments’ using slave stock thereby replenishing a severely depleted Royal Navy, the need to starve French colonies of slaves and not least the example of the Haitian revolution (St. Domingue) which horrified investors everywhere.
So there is a confluence of actuating forces here; the initial impetus for reform and undoubtedly the motivating force behind men such as Clarkson and Wilberforce is the “over-riding moral imperative” as they saw it, (and without their efforts after all there wouldn’t have been in place any legislation to be enacted) but war-time realpolitik, in addition to the appalling economic consequences of the war itself led many to revise their notions of the slave trade as a profitable concern. When the Act was eventually passed (after twenty years of lobbying) Martinique and Guadeloupe were still in French hands - such were these islands profitability that France gave up all claims to Canada after the Seven Years War in order to keep them - and Napoleon was continually intriguing to have St. Domingue restored to French power. Between 1793 and 1801 of the nearly 90,000 men enlisted in the British army in the West Indies 45,000 died in battle or from wounds or from disease and a further 14,000 were discharged too wounded or infirm to continue. This casualty list came not from fighting Napoleon’s forces but in the struggle against former black slaves who were determined never to be enslaved again. In Haiti, the French planters, horrified by the Jacobin government’s abolition of slavery in 1793 invited the British to take over the colony and Pitt sunk all available resources into the struggle. The war was a disaster, leaving 100,000 Africans dead but the British beaten into a retreat and with every soldier in their ranks left with the conviction that the ‘Negroes’ would gladly die rather than submit to a life of bondage.
If slavery in the West Indies were so much an improvement over their previous state of existence - which is what the spin doctors of the West Indian planter’s lobby had been informing Westminster for the past fifteen years - then why would they fight so ferociously for their freedom, for their ’rights of man’. The conclusion was unavoidable - their lives under bondage really were an abomination - just as Clarkson and the abolitionists had been maintaining for years but even worse from the perspective of the fiscal anatomists who weighed up the West Indies solely as a profitable concern was the observation that once the ‘rights of man’ genie had got out of the bottle it was impossible to regard their Caribbean investments with any certainty. It’s difficult to quantify with any certainty just how many of the formerly intransigent bloc who year after year voted down Wilberforce’s proposals were ultimately swayed by moral arguments - no doubt it takes time for the passions of the few to infect the many - but it would be naïve to discount also the laws of realpolitik which, as night follows day, habitually sways the judgement of powerbrokers.
So, while I don’t think the laws of realpolitik were miraculously suspended on the night of March 25th, 1807 we may yet see here the spirit of Margaret Mead’s dictum;
“Never doubt, that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
George Washington and other large plantation owners had already forwarded lists of runaway slaves to their representatives in New York whom they wished to see returned as a part of the treaty negotiations. When the final touches were being added to the peace treaty Washington simply assumed that the slaves would be returned; their situation clearly falling under the treaty‘s obligations regarding the ‘preservation of property’. However, Guy Carleton, the British commander, replied that his ‘conscience as an officer’ required him to respect the original promise made to the slaves. “The National honour must be kept with all colours”. Thus Carleton argued the British were not guilty of breaching the terms of the peace treaty since their proclamation had already freed them and so they could not be construed as being subject to the treaty’s clauses on property and went on to further inform the shocked Washington that many had already, in fact, set sail for England. “Already embarked!” says he. The question of compensation, to which Carleton at least admitted some British liability, became a bone of contention for the two governments for many years to come. Only towards the end of his presidency did Washington stop asking for their return and instead focused on seeking compensation. The dispute was finally arbitrated by the Tsar of Russia in 1826 when the American plantation owners (‘or their heirs‘) were reimbursed to the tune of half the value of their market price - index linked presumably.
The long running nature of this saga coupled with its being one of the few positives which emerged from the fiasco of the American colonial war must have made a deep impression on the British public. Critics such as Edmund Burke had long pointed to the punitive levels of crown taxation which hastened the American revolt and so this incident of ‘freeing the slaves’ on a point of national honour emerged as at least one issue on which Britain could lay claim to the higher moral ground. This is not an inconsiderable thing either given the level of introspection involved when a nation collectively scours the wreck of a costly war and asks itself belatedly what could have been different. Very little could be salvaged from the raft of poor policy decisions which led to the deterioration of relations with the colonists but this issue on which Carleton stood his ground at least offered something of a pleasant aperitif on an otherwise unwholesome engagement. The decision to grant freedom on the condition of armed service to runaway slaves was a wholly tactical manouevre based on realpolitik - slaves who did not revolt were offered no such concessions and would have certainly remained slaves had the colonists been defeated - but it created the conditions whereby the issues of slavery and freedom could be equated in the public mind with a stubbornly adhered-to ‘point of principle’, now writ large and doubly magnified as the parting shot in an international war which also consumed the resources and fixed attention of their great rival France. There were few people in British public life in 1783 who questioned the legitimacy of slavery as an institution or the ethics of slave ownership and these relationships of course weren’t something that were being scrutinised to any degree by Carleton at the time (though it is open to debate to what extent his actions may be inferred to express sympathy for emancipation) - but what the affair did do, at the very least, was to elevate into the public consciousness that crucial binary of “slavery” and “freedom” in the context of international tensions and, tellingly, on a pivot which seemed to secure ‘moral capital’ for a partially redeemed British crown.
Merely by having these two concepts consistently associated in an ongoing trans-Atlantic discourse which hinged on the propriety or otherwise of Carleton’s decision and which involved points of principle where ‘national honour’ was at stake, merely by being aired, did this slowly enable the elementary trappings of the original debate to dissolve and allow this fateful, much publicised binary to fuse, fertilise and reciprocally engender prevailing Enlightenment notions of universal rights. The fallout over the Treaty of Paris and the circumstances of British withdrawal contributed then, in the British context, to creating a more receptive environment for early abolitionists such as the Quakers, Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson who, in 1787, would eventually form the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. This especial receptivity of the general public was everywhere to be seen by Clarkson - who was the real dynamo behind the movement - as he travelled the length and breadth of the country (over 16,000 km on horseback) gathering statements from seamen, ships doctors and former slaves and collecting petitions for parliament. In Manchester, which stood to lose as much commercially as Bristol or Liverpool since they supplied the bulk of the industrial goods which were bought by traders to purchase the slaves on the West African coast - 10,000 signatures were petitioned. As Wilberforce began the Society’s campaign in parliament - a campaign that hinged entirely on the unacceptable morality of the slave trade - it was clear that it was not the attitude of the British public or even the British legislature which halted progress (many Slave Trade Bills over the next twenty years were passed by the Commons only to be vetoed in the Lords) but West Indian lobby groups and landed interests in the House of Lords who were themselves, more often than not, plantation owners.
Also, there was a considerable bulk of opposition who had no commercial ties to the West Indies and who agreed on principle with the moral argument of the Abolitionists but who were nevertheless opposed to reform on account of the damage that this would have on the British economy. One third of imports and exports came from the triangular trade and sugar grown in the West Indies accounted for more than half of the total value of its imports (10m of 17m pounds in 1806); and this is without considering the trade’s vital role in providing a ‘nursery for seamen’, some 17,000 strong, which would go on to form the backbone of the Royal Navy - the very source of Britain’s imperial might. It was this large bloc of legislators, Lords members included, who had to be won over if the campaign were going to succeed and given that the majority were already clear in their mind that the trade was abhorrent from a moral perspective (the depositions painstakingly obtained by Clarkson had over time put paid to that argument) - they remained to be swayed on economic arguments. And while Wilberforce steadfastly stuck to his guns in highlighting the moral repugnance of the trade the real difference came from arguments framed in economic terms (some of whom were also undoubtedly abolitionists in the moral sense) which stressed that to continue the trade would in itself lead to economic disaster. There were a number of issues raised here on behalf of those concerned about the impact of abolition on the British exchequer. These related to how the ongoing war with France was being fought, the changing nature of the sugar trade itself (Cuba’s land being cleared for plantations by the Spanish for example making investment less attractive as profits were sure to collapse), the ubiquity of slave smuggling and the impossibility of practically enforcing a ban, the possibility of navy ‘impressments’ using slave stock thereby replenishing a severely depleted Royal Navy, the need to starve French colonies of slaves and not least the example of the Haitian revolution (St. Domingue) which horrified investors everywhere.
So there is a confluence of actuating forces here; the initial impetus for reform and undoubtedly the motivating force behind men such as Clarkson and Wilberforce is the “over-riding moral imperative” as they saw it, (and without their efforts after all there wouldn’t have been in place any legislation to be enacted) but war-time realpolitik, in addition to the appalling economic consequences of the war itself led many to revise their notions of the slave trade as a profitable concern. When the Act was eventually passed (after twenty years of lobbying) Martinique and Guadeloupe were still in French hands - such were these islands profitability that France gave up all claims to Canada after the Seven Years War in order to keep them - and Napoleon was continually intriguing to have St. Domingue restored to French power. Between 1793 and 1801 of the nearly 90,000 men enlisted in the British army in the West Indies 45,000 died in battle or from wounds or from disease and a further 14,000 were discharged too wounded or infirm to continue. This casualty list came not from fighting Napoleon’s forces but in the struggle against former black slaves who were determined never to be enslaved again. In Haiti, the French planters, horrified by the Jacobin government’s abolition of slavery in 1793 invited the British to take over the colony and Pitt sunk all available resources into the struggle. The war was a disaster, leaving 100,000 Africans dead but the British beaten into a retreat and with every soldier in their ranks left with the conviction that the ‘Negroes’ would gladly die rather than submit to a life of bondage.
If slavery in the West Indies were so much an improvement over their previous state of existence - which is what the spin doctors of the West Indian planter’s lobby had been informing Westminster for the past fifteen years - then why would they fight so ferociously for their freedom, for their ’rights of man’. The conclusion was unavoidable - their lives under bondage really were an abomination - just as Clarkson and the abolitionists had been maintaining for years but even worse from the perspective of the fiscal anatomists who weighed up the West Indies solely as a profitable concern was the observation that once the ‘rights of man’ genie had got out of the bottle it was impossible to regard their Caribbean investments with any certainty. It’s difficult to quantify with any certainty just how many of the formerly intransigent bloc who year after year voted down Wilberforce’s proposals were ultimately swayed by moral arguments - no doubt it takes time for the passions of the few to infect the many - but it would be naïve to discount also the laws of realpolitik which, as night follows day, habitually sways the judgement of powerbrokers.
So, while I don’t think the laws of realpolitik were miraculously suspended on the night of March 25th, 1807 we may yet see here the spirit of Margaret Mead’s dictum;
“Never doubt, that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
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