Christians and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

In June 1783 the Quakers, gathered for their yearly meeting, petitioned the House of Commons against the slave trade; Thomas Clarkson calls it the first petition for abolition ever presented to Parliament (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 4). John Wesley had written in 1774 that slave-holding could not be consistent with any degree of natural justice (Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery IV.3), and had called on captains, merchants and planters to give it up (Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery V.1–5).

Clarkson, a Cambridge graduate in deacon’s orders, won a prize in 1785 for a Latin essay on whether it is right to enslave people against their will, and gave himself to the cause (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 7) (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 8). On 22 May 1787 a committee for abolishing the trade was formed in London; all but three of its members were Quakers, and William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament, had agreed to raise the question in the Commons (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 10). His sons print from his journal for 28 October 1787: “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners” (Life of Wilberforce vol. 1, p. 149).

In March 1789 Olaudah Equiano, who had been a slave, dedicated his autobiography to Parliament in the hope of relieving his “suffering countrymen” (Equiano, Interesting Narrative dedication). He describes the hold of a slave ship and a sale at which brothers were parted, and asks the “nominal Christians” responsible whether they learned this from their God (Equiano, Interesting Narrative ch. 2).

Other Christians defended the trade. In 1788 Raymund Harris, by Clarkson’s account a former clergyman and Jesuit (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 22), dedicated to the corporation of Liverpool a pamphlet arguing that the trade agreed with the law of nature, the law of Moses and the Christian law (Harris, Scriptural Researches dedication and preface, p. vii). A missionary society owned slaves. Bishop Beilby Porteus preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in February 1783 (Porteus, Sermons contents, sermon 17). He spoke of “the slaves employed on their plantations” in Barbados, on lands left to the Society by General Codrington, and urged it to begin the work of conversion with them (Porteus, Sermons sermon 17, pp. 406–407).

Wilberforce brought the question before the Commons on 12 May 1789 (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 24). In April 1791 his motion to stop the import of slaves from Africa was lost by 163 votes to 88 (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 26). On 23 February 1807 the Commons voted by 283 to 16 to proceed with a bill from the Lords, and it received the royal assent on 25 March (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 33). The Act declared the African slave trade “utterly abolished, prohibited, and declared to be unlawful” from 1 May 1807 (Slave Trade Act 1807 s. 1). It ended the British trade, not slavery: a further Act of 1833 declared the slaves in the British colonies free from 1 August 1834, bound them to work on as apprenticed labourers, and granted twenty million pounds to compensate their owners (Slavery Abolition Act 1833 s. 1, 12 and 24). In 1839 Pope Gregory XVI condemned the trade, wrote that numerous Christians still practised it, and forbade any Catholic to defend it as permissible (Gregory XVI, In supremo apostolatus par. 5–6).