Days That Changed the World: The Defining Events of World History by Williams Hywel

Author:Williams, Hywel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / World
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2014-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

23 August 1833

Parliament Passes the Emancipation Act

The Abolition of Slavery

Am I Not a Man and a Brother?

Motto of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade

They are not my men and brethren, these strange people…

W.M. Thackeray

Guilt, indifference and hypocrisy marked the British parliamentary debates on the Emancipation Bill and no cabinet minister was present for the backbenchers’ speeches during the summer of 1833. The twenty-three-year-old MP William Gladstone, whose family fortune relied on a sugar plantation in Demerara, made his first major parliamentary speech and said his father’s estate manager in Jamaica was ‘proverbial for humanity’. Still at that time a Tory, he conceded that at some future date slavery had to go and then voted against the Bill. The Emancipation Bill was nonetheless passed (23 August) by the House of Commons and William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the anti-slavery campaign’s chief parliamentarian, died on 29 July in the knowledge that his life’s work was about to be accomplished. The 776,000 slaves on Britain’s plantation colonies were freed from 1 August 1834 – although under a system of bound apprenticeship which lasted until 1837. Slaves who were under six were freed immediately. Slave owners received £120 million in compensation for the human chattels they had lost.

By the late eighteenth century slavery was so ancient an institution that it seemed a natural part of the social hierarchy. Britons might never be slaves but the enslaved Africans in the British colonies had become part of the fabric of a civilization. It helped therefore that William Wilberforce was no revolutionary but part of the English establishment – diplomatic, deferential and humorous – a good ‘House of Commons man’. Even his opium addiction was not unusual in the high society of his age. It was his conversion to evangelical Christianity which changed Wilberforce from being yet another amiable and indolent upper-class Englishman since it opened his eyes to the iniquity of slavery, and he brought the characteristic emotionalism of evangelical principle, as well as his personal popularity, to the abolitionist campaign. He became a member of the Clapham Sect, a close-knit group of well-connected and prosperous evangelicals who thought that Britain, including its association with slavery, needed energizing national reform.

Britain’s abolition (1807) of the slave trade (although not ownership) in the West Indies had been followed by an Enforcement Bill (1811) which prescribed transportation and sentences of hard labour for British subjects who took part in the business. By 1819 all British colonies had established registers so that the rights of those who claimed slaves as their property could be tried in the courts. Britain also ensured that the countries which were a party to the Congress of Vienna agreed in principle to abolish the slave trade. Wilberforce had established the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and from 1821 onwards he returned to the cause, helping to found the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions. The object now was the abolition of slavery itself

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