Politics and the Public Conscience

Slave Emancipation and the Abolitionst Movement in Britain

Edith F. Hurwitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032037981
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000409031
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

It was the vitality of British Protestantism in its relationship with the state which largely accounts for the achievement of emancipation and the success of the British Anti-Slavery Movement. This book, originally published in 1873, analyses the factors which made the Anti-Slavery Movement so successful. It exposes the roots of its passionate support and explains How the government came to accept the objectives of religious idealists. It sets the abolition of slavery in the larger perspective of British history.

INTRODUCTION

1
Introduction

The success of the British Anti-Slavery Movement indicates that there have been moments in British history when values have taken precedence over economics, when the spiritual triumphed over the material. The vitality of British Protestantism and its relationship with the Protestant state account in large part for the success of the British Anti-Slavery Movement. Its denominations had been at various times in their history both radical and conservative, and in 1833 its radicalism assumed revolutionary proportions. This study attempts to explain the movement’s ideological impact upon British society both in terms of the causes of its triumphs and the reasons for its popular success.

The rational yardstick which historians use to judge events can thus go so far and no further in explaining this phenomenon. The abolitionist movement coerced the political leaders, forcing men and parties to bow to their demands. A reform movement triumphed which based its appeal to the nation on the raw emotion of religious fervour.

The ‘vitality’ of the Anti-Slavery Movement and its ultimate successes can be viewed in the perspective of its evangelical dynamic. Its ideology called for action as well as pinning down an evil. If society was supporting an ‘incalculable wrong’ the movement’s leaders were prepared to act against it.

For Christians who had lost faith in the revealed word of God, the slavery conflict was itself a revelation which reanimated religious symbols, providing a new sense of historical identity and purpose. Having its genesis in a Christian revival, the movement and its leaders continued to show the zeal of the convert for fundamental Christian truth. Because this regenerative truth, once grasped, seemed so self-evident, they shared an easy confidence in its ability to reform. Truth needs only to reach the heart for it quickly to dissolve all sin.

Hitherto historians who have dealt with the movement have collected its various threads into a single skein sometimes called humanitarianism and at other times called enlightened philanthropy. The eighteenth century’s infatuation with the primitive, the noble savage, and its worship of benevolence have also been taken into account as factors essential for the birth of the Anti-Slavery crusade. Still another and more contemporary twist which attempts to refute these explanations was first expounded by Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery (1944). His thesis was that ‘mature industrial capitalism’ destroyed the slave system while the slave trade was abolished to protect the older British colonies in the Caribbean from the competition of newer colonies acquired by Britain as a result of the Napoleonic wars.

What all these views have failed to take into account is the character of the ideology which cast a critical eye on slavery. While it is true that the environment and the culture of the times had something to do with the acceptance of the values of the reformers, it was the more particular appeal of the Anti-Slavery Movement itself that determined the outcome of the cause. Thus arguments that the abolition of slavery came about as a result of the accommodation of class and economic interests, or because of certain cultural sensibilities and predispositions, fail to grasp the impact that ethical values, stemming from religious ideology, had on British society.

To go beyond and yet at the same time to take into account these more traditional factors of interpretation, David Brion Davis has developed the moral approach to the problem. Favoured in the past by W. E. H. Lecky, it has been subjected to the scrutiny of contemporary historical scholarship. Professor Davis believes that ‘slavery has always been a source of social and psychological tension’ in Western culture but that the ‘underlying contradiction of slavery’ really was made clear when ‘the institution was closely linked with American colonization…’. Living with these conditions, Davis implies, motivated some men to seek reform. For Davis the ‘Problem of Slavery in Western Culture’ is a problem of the ‘conflict of moral values’ in history. It is also a problem of analysing the situational factors that determine the course of events that led individuals and groups to take up the cause of moral reform. Yet with it all there was also the question of individual commitment. As Davis notes: ‘no matter how ripe the time, there would be no coalescing of anti-slavery opinion until specific decision and commitments were taken by individual men.’¹

1 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, New York, 1966).

This study employs a conceptual framework similar to that of Professor Davis in that it assumes that slavery posed a moral conflict to the ideological traditions of Great Britain. It illustrates the interaction between ideology and individual commitment in its more specific British Protestant context. In terms of British society it places in a historical continuum the continuing clash between the value system of key constituents of the community and the activities of the Protestant state.

The approach has been to view the movement against slavery in the British Empire as an important example of the revitalization of moral values in a Christian culture. The ethical traditions of western civilization founded on the notion of an available and transcendental God who views all men as equal have throughout history been subverted by many forces. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries slavery both in its British and American contexts proved to be a most serious threat to these ethical values. It was the British nation through certain significant groups in its society that most effectively thwarted that challenge and arrested that threat. Thus this study will attempt to explain the conditions upon which a moral tradition, the underlying ethos of a Christian culture, can be shaped and moulded into a force for political achievement.

The eighteenth-century evangelical revival laid the foundation for a wide variety of Christian reform movements. William Wilberforce and his fellows at Clapham, and before them Wesley and Whitefield, initiated a new approach to spreading the gospels of Christianity by making them practically applicable to a wide variety of social problems and individual conflicts’. Dissenting religious denominations such as the Quakers, Baptists, Unitarians, Presbyterians and newly formed Methodists also sought to revitalize and rejuvenate their religious bodies by branching out into new areas of Christian expression for their members to participate in.

Reformers were on the verge of a brave new world; from the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century that world was formed slowly and surely with zeal and dedication. It was embraced by the British middle class as a result of lecturing, preaching, admonitions and the reading of the literature of reform. The call was out to accept God’s boundless grace and for doing God’s work on earth. Practical programmes of individual participation such as societies against gaming and for distributing the Bible were formed.

The evangelical voices behind these reforms whether they were Anglican or Dissenting assumed that similar reforms were possible in the slave colonies. For these were controlled by British subjects endowed with the qualities common to all other Englishmen in that they had the power as mortals to receive the grace of God. As the society that opposed vice advised Englishmen not to partake of it, so the abolitionists ultimately admonished British subjects to free themselves from supporting slavery.

The Anglican evangelicals under the leadership of Wilberforce with the backing of Nonconformist sects were impelled by the nature of the objectives of reform to bring their cause into the political arena. From 1787 on there was a new spirit of religion active in political protest, and its most enduring expression was found in the Anti-Slavery crusade. To the abolitionists and their followers slavery was a problem of morals; the slave was denied religion and prevented from worshipping God. Slavery kept Africans heathens when they could become Christians. Those who participated in slavery and the slave trade were therefore impeding God’s work. ‘You cannot exercise an improper dominion over a fellow creature’, Thomas Clarkson declared, ‘but by a wise ordering of providence you must necessarily injure yourself.’ The goal of the abolitionists was to promote Christianity among those who had sinned by participating in slavery and the slave trade and among the Negro slaves who had been denied access to Christianity. All who joined the abolitionist fold became agents of God.

British abolitionists were sure that their reform proposals would win out only after they had converted the state and its citizens. Abolitionists did not wish to do away with the existing social order. They had a profound respect for the institutions of British society. As they saw it, the achievement of the goal of reform—abolition—was a fundamental method of conserving those institutions inasmuch as they were guardians of the moral order. As its aim was to reaffirm the values of society, the abolitionists’ movement won the respect and loyalty of key constituents of the social order.

The political hierarchy of British society resisted many demands for reform in the nineteenth century. The values of classical liberalism, the image of a society of independent individuals free to pursue their callings uncoerced by the state, was the viewpoint that most often prevailed. Yet this value consensus was completely overthrown to accommodate the demands of Protestant communities for the abolition of slavery. This most daring use of state power was almost without precedent in all of British history. That the British state should deprive its most distinguished citizens of their property even if it was in human form was an unprecedented use of state power in any age and certainly in the age of liberalism. Though there were monetary compensations, the sacramental value that private property had in English common law was overturned.

This study will concentrate on the why and wherefore of slave emancipation. The political struggle over the slave trade has not been dealt with, because in terms of British history the Emancipation Act of 1833 was a far more radical piece of legislation than the abolition of the slave trade. After all, there had been, since at least the seventeenth century, a long tradition of the regulation of commerce by the British state. However, there was no precedent at all for an act of parliament that deprived important British citizens of their private property and then compensated them for it at great cost to the state. The Anti-Slavery Movement sought and secured the emancipation of 800,000 slaves in the British Empire.

At that moment in history, the Christian values of British tradition were given the sanctification not only of words but of deeds by the Protestant state. It was in Great Britain in 1833 that a political and ecclesiastical establishment, formed and operating through a consensus of well-established power relationships that had long supported not only the vested interests connected with slavery but also the values of property on which that institution was based, took the revolutionary step of doing away with them both.

Yet it is usually the 1832 Reform Bill which appears as the most discussed, analysed and dramatized event of the 1830s. In the perspective of time, however, the abolition of slavery by legislative statute reveals at least as much about the character of the British nation as does the Reform Bill. Was it perhaps the particular historic compromise between the established Anglican Church and Protestant Dissenters in 1688 which sowed the seeds for the abolition of the slavery in 1833; and which swung the state to an acceptance of moral equality?

The Emancipation Act might be considered as a forecasting of things to come. In an age of paternalism, in an age of empire, in an undemocratic age, it proclaimed a principle of equality. It is more than a century since that Emancipation Act, and in the passage of time many other movements of social reform have brought the British state to act on this principle. Yet it was in 1833 that it was first acknowledged because the enslaved African posed a challenge to the Christian conscience.

Like other milestones of history, the emancipation of the slaves came about as a result of a complex set of causes that created the historical moment at which this goal was achieved. There were long-range factors that had to do with the dash and conflict created in British society by the abolitionist movement. There were the political factors that had to do with the reform of parliament. And there were finally the many elements of chance, the many moments during the final stages of the struggle when the success of emancipation turned on the political tensions of the immediate conflict. There was also the role of individuals; the fate of slave emancipation might have been radically different had there not been Thomas Fowell Buxton and Edward Stanley in key leadership positions. The study of this event does expose the limitations of historical inquiry. There can be little doubt, however, that the given nexus in time in which the campaign was waged set the stage for the revolutionary event. Whether history is made by individuals, social change created by chance events, long term considerations or a combination ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction
• Documents
• Index