American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. Peculiar Institution in International Perspective by Enrico Dal Lago

Author:Enrico Dal Lago [Lago, Enrico Dal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317263784
Google: gz5ACwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28409745
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

British Abolitionism and the 1833 Emancipation Act

Within the contours of Atlantic abolitionism, there were close links between Britain and the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. For this reason, it is possible to see clear parallels in the development of antislavery sentiment and achievements in the two countries. This is apparent from the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade (in 1807 in Britain, and in 1808 in the United States) to the making of societies invoking colonization, or the return of blacks to Africa, and gradual abolition in the 1810s and 1820s, to the rise of much more radical institutions demanding the immediate abolition of slavery.17

After winning a great victory with the 1807 abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, most antislavery advocates in Britain were convinced that its effects would lead to a general amelioration of the life of the slaves in the British colonies in the West Indies. However, this proved not to be the case. Thus, several of them gathered in 1823 to form a Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions, or the Anti-Slavery Society (ASS). Among the members were veteran antislavery activists Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, and the latter’s acknowledged successor Thomas Fowell Buxton. The ASS’s objectives were primarily the protection of slaves from mistreatment, and, similarly to the American Colonization Society on the other side of the Atlantic, the achievement of gradual emancipation.18

Though the ASS was instrumental in forcing the British Parliament to better the conditions of slaves through measures that promoted religious instruction, removed obstacles to manumission, and, above all, succeeded in banning the flogging of women, its limited achievements, due mainly to the planters’ resistance, could not prevent the periodical occurrence of slave rebellions. Two large revolts—the 1823 one in Demerara and the 1831 to 1832 Baptist War in Jamaica—framed the period of transition of the British antislavery movement from gradualism to immediatism. This was also following the publication of Elizabeth Heyrick’s pamphlet Immediate, not Gradual Abolition in 1824.19

In 1830 to 1831, the London group of the ASS reorganized itself and broke away, embracing the new abolitionism, and establishing the radical Agency Committee. Similar to the AASS in the United States, the committee’s goal was the dissemination of abolitionist literature and ideas, and the signing of petitions in order to persuade the people to endorse, in the words of Howard Temperley, the “immediate and unconditional emancipation of all the slaves in Britain’s overseas possession.” 20

Partly as a result of this flurry of activity, partly fearing more massive slave insurrection, and partly influenced by the increasingly popular argument on the moral and economic superiority of free labor over slavery, in 1833, Parliament passed the Emancipation Act, which freed almost 800,000 slaves in all the British colonies by August 1, 1834. The Act compensated slaveholders for their loss, stating that ex-slaves had to undergo an unpaid “apprenticeship” period originally of 12, then 6, and finally 4 years, so that actual emancipation really occurred in 1838.

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