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Shackled Africans being taken into slavery (Getty Images) View more images
Once they had decided to do so, the British took half a century to stop slavery in the Empire. Planters had to be compensated. Special medals were minted and ladies sewed samplers to mark the passing of the Imperial slave trade.
The high time of British slaving started with the activities of John Hawkins sponsored by Elizabeth I in the 16th century to the patronage of the future James II as a governor of the Royal Africa Company (1672) that sold 90,000 black slaves into the Americas. By the 1700s Britain was the biggest slave trader in Europe and within the treaties of Utrecht (1713-14) the British had exclusive rights to slaving across the Atlantic. By the 1760s a ship full of slaves was leaving a British port every other day.
In the 1770s the mood changed partly due to the Mansfield Judgment (see below). Also the anti-slavery movement came at a time when the decline in the West Indian sugar market made slaves too expensive.
By the 1780s the sugar industry in the West Indies was certainly in decline and slaves, sometimes costing 拢200 each, were too uneconomical labour. Sugar production costs had increased over 20 years or so by 75%. Slave prices in the same period had risen on average by 140%. Sugar prices were falling and so the economics no longer made sense especially to absentee landlords wanting to spend their money in Britain instead of modernising their plantations.
In 1788 (the year the first convicts were sent to Australia) more than 100 anti-slavery petitions were presented to Parliament. In 1789 a freed slave Olaudah Equiano, published what were claimed to be his memoirs, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, The African. It was a best seller. The mood for change and the economics were coinciding.
Thomas Clarkson was a classicist who with people like William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, James Stephen and Henry Thornton established what became known as the Clapham Sect - after the place, then a village, where many of them lived. Clarkson et al were the most memorable of the anti-slavery campaigners. It was Clarkson who published in 1808 the widely-read two-volume History of the Abolition of the African Slave-trade.
There were in the second half of the 1700s about 10,000 black slaves in England. One of them, James Somersett, escaped. Somersett's master reserved the right to sell him to a West Indies planter. A long legal battle followed and in 1772 the then Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield ruled in the slave's favour saying that "slavery is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law". There being no such law in England, "the black must be discharged." Known as the Mansfield Judgment, the Lord Chief Justice's ruling advanced the anti-slavery campaign more than any other single event.
jim Bumstead An aside to the ending of the slave trade:
The Birmingham gun makers never achieved the "recognition" of the London Makers (though most of the london gun parts were made in Birmingham, and often assembled there). When there were no European wars, the Birmingham makers fell on hard times. They built a new market: "Trade Guns" - very cheap, very low quality muskets were made for exchange one-for-one for slaves on the African coast. Since after three-four firings the barrel was ruined, there was always a market waiting for the next slave ship.
With the winding up of the slave trade, a new market was needed. It was found in N. America where a "rifle" could be traded for a pile of animal pelts the same height as the gun length. These second generation Trade guns were easily distinguished from the "slave" guns - the barrels were a foot longer!. Information courtesy of the Birmingham Gun Proving House.
Excerpt from a letter to Thomas Clarkson from William Dickson, 1787
"Of the Africans, above one fourth perished on the voyage to the West Indies, and four and a half percent more died on average in the fortnight intervening between the days of entry and sale. To close this awful triumph of the King of terrors, about two in five of all whom the planters bought were lost in seasoning within the first three years and before they could be said to have yielded any productive labour. Now if seven years be the average labouring period of bought slaves, a lot of five should yield thirty five years of labour; and two of them having died, each of the other three must yield nearly twelve years or with the three years of seasoning, nearly fifteen years. But to look for fifteen years of even blank existence, without labour, from each of the survivors of a worse than pestilential mortality, heartless and enfeebled as they must generally be, would be madly romantic."
A freed slave describes his passage to Barbados
Excerpt from The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, The African by Olaudah Equiano
"I had never experienced anything of this kind before. If I could have gotten over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not. The crew used to watch very closely those of us who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water. I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating. This indeed was often the case with myself. I inquired of these what was to be done with us. They gave me to understand we were to be carried to these white people's country to work for them. I then was a little revived, and thought if it were no worse than working, my situation was not so desperate. But still I feared that I should be put to death, the white people looked and acted in so savage a manner."
