THE IMPACT OF SLAVERY ON BRITISH RADICAL POLITICS: 1787–1838

THE IMPACT OF SLAVERY ON BRITISH RADICAL POLITICS: 1787-1838

James Walvin

Department of History University of York

York, England

The economic and social forces that destroyed the British slave trade and slavery in the British West Indies have been the subject of detailed and contro- versial analysis in the past 30 years. Rarely, however, have the abolitionist campaigns between 1787-1 838 been seen as an element in a burgeoning, popular radical movment in Britain. These were the years of widespread agitation and extraparliamentary pressure for a range of reforms, and in the process an articulate and highly organized popular radical movement evolved. The purpose of this paper is to outline the role played by the campaigns against the slave trade and slavery within that popular movement; to suggest the importance of popular antagonism towards the slave trade and slavery within the wider abolitionist cause, and finally to argue that the experience and rhetoric of the antislavery cause were infused into other early nineteenth-century working class agitation.

* * * * * The immediate political origins of British abolition lay in a small band of

committed men, led by Granville Sharp, who sought both to relieve the distress of London’s black poor in the 1760s and 1770s, and t o secure alegally guaranteed freedom for England’s black community. The consequent legal cases, culminating in the 1772 Somerset case, generated wide press coverage, popular interest and support for Sharp’s work. Though the legal question remained technically unre- solved, in the course of the last quarter of the century i t became increasingly difficult for slaveholders in London to maintain their hold over their black property in the face of mounting public hostility and growing black resistance.’ Moreover, the years of the American revolt produced in England a political debate about social and representational rights. From 1780 onwards alarm about the conduct of the war, coupled to concern about the principles of representation that lay at the heart of the conflict, led t o the emergence of pressure groups anxious to end the political corruption that they felt had brought about the war. The resulting Association movement and the Society for Constitutional Informa- tion (SCI), helped to lay the foundations for future radical agitation, including that against slavery.?

The Associations and the SCI, consisting primarily of propertied, enfranchised gentlemen, concentrated on public lectures and petitions t o Parliament and publishing cheap and abundant radical tracts. But their most obvious, single success was to illustrate the effectiveness of extraparliamentary pressure in recruiting a wide and articulate opinion. In the process, the SCI was particularly important in establishing in London and the provinces centers of radical discussion from which later abolitionist and reforming groups evolved. Moreover many of the XI’S members-and writers whose tracts i t published-were prominent, early abolitionists.3

The SCI pattern of agitation was followed by the Abolition Society after

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1787 and the speed with which the abolitionist organization grew in 1787-1788 was due in part to the existence of small groups of men who had been active at an earlier stage of reform agitation. Thomas Clarkson’s efforts for abolition up and down the country undoubtedly rallied support; often, however, abolitionist sentiment went before him. In Manchester, for example, local members of the SCI, led by Thomas Walker and Thomas Cooper, had already been active, and Clarkson was pleasantly surprised to discover “the spirit which was then begin- ning t o show itself among the people of Manchester and of other places, on the subject of the slave trade . . . .”

The immediate need was for an abolitionist initiative, and Clarkson suggested that abolitionist feeling “would unquestionably manifest itself further b y break- ing out into petitions to parliament for its abolition.”4 Although petitioning was an established approach to Parliament, it had, again, received a boost from the reforming groups of the 1780s. Like Clarkson, Wilberforce too realized the need to summon up a wider force for abolition: “the public voice should be exerted in our support as loudly and universally as possible.”S Very soon, however, that voice was to prove too strident and universal even for Wilberforce.

The example was set by the embryonic textile town of Manchester f rom where Thomas Walker and friends advertised their own abolitionist petition in newspapers throughout the country. In Manchester itself the abolitionist response was exceptional, with 10,639 names on the petition and high financial contribu- tions raised for the cause. The Manchester petition was rapidly copied throughout the country and by May 1788 abolitionist petitions flooded into Parliament.6 The table of the House of Commons “was loaded with petitions from every part of the kingdom’’-more than 100 in all, including one from the heart of the slavetrading country, Bristol, which “was sigd by a great number.”’ M.P.’s were in no doubt that a powerful feeling had been registered against the trade.8 The outcome was heightened public awareness of the slave trade as a political issue, the inauguration of an ongoing parliamentary debate about abolition, and the establishment of a Privy Council committee whose findings eventually helped t o ameliorate conditions on the middle passage. In the long term, however, petitioning was t o become the standard abolitionist approach t o Parliament, and it was to remain a dominant feature of radical working class politics until the 1840s.

The one society that had kept the issue of parliamentary reform alive throughout the 1780s-the SCI-began t o register strong abolitionist tremors, declaring that “the abolition of the Slave trade would be truely honourable t o the present times and worthy of Example t o other enlightened Nations.” The society seems to have been guided in that direction by the admission t o its ranks of the Man- Chester abolitionists.9 But the most important work of t h e society could only be appreciated in retrospect, for it was responsible for laying the foundations of a new wave of popular radical agitation which flourished after 1791 and which embraced and gave a new dimension to abolitionism. The SCI and its most prominent member, Tom Paine, proved seminal in the formation of artisan corresponding societies, notably in London, Sheffield, Manchester and Norwich, by offering their organization, radical connections and publications t o the artisan organizers. Thomas Hardy, founder of the dominant London Corresponding Society (LCS) exemplified this process. Hardy, an immigrant Scot, had educated himself politically on those tracts “published gratis by the Society for Constitu- tional Information . . . and some excellent pamphlets by Granville Sharp, Major Cartwright, Dr Jebb, Dr Price, Thomas Day, Rev. Mr Stone, Cape1 Lofft . . .”lo .-all of whom were members of the SCI and prominent abolitionists. Moreover, Hardy’s contacts with friends in the SCI proved decisive when he set ou t to estab-

Walvin: Slavery’s Impact on British Politics 345

lish the LCS. Indeed, wherever a more plebeian brand of radical organization sprang up in 1790-1 792 the influence of the SCI could be seen at work.”

These new corresponding societies, anxious t o secure a range of reforms, more particularly parliamentary reform, were of a coarser social composition than any mass political movement since the English Revolution of the previous century. Moreover they found in Paine’s Rights of Man, especially Part Two, a powerful reflection and assertion of their own political ideology. Selling perhaps upwards of 200,000 copies by late 1792 (and thereby revealing a degree of literacy that alarmed the government and its supporters), The Rights of Man was humanitarian and egalitarian and established a discussion about rights that was, again, unprecedented since the seventeeth century.’* The title and irreverent tone of Paine’s book rapidly became the vernacular of popular radical debate and those working men who adopted its creed placed n o national barrier on the rights of man (following the precedent of the French Declaration of Rights). The rights of man, wrote Thomas Hardy in 1792, “are not confined solely t o this small island but are extended t o the whole human race, black and white, high or low, rich or poor.” When writing t o opponents of the slave trade, Hardy “inferred from that that you was [sic] a friend of freedom o n the broad basis of the Rights of Man . . .”I3 -an assumption that the middleclass abolitionists were t o destroy by their unremitting hostility to reform a t home. But among his peers Hardy accurately saw the bond between reform at home and abolition. Indeed this connection had been appreciated even earlier. In 1788 for example, Major Cartwright, the doyen of eighteenth century reformers, confided t o his wife:

Should the West Indian slaves, who but the other day had not the slightest pros- pect of such an event, find themselves emancipated, who shall say that there is no hope o f our constitutional rights and liberties being restored?l4

Thomas Hardy had the added advantage of giving shelter t o the African, Olaudah Equiano, who “is now writing memoirs of his life in my house.” More- over, Equiano put Hardy in contact with provincial abolitionists whom the African had met o n his abolitionist forays in the late 1780s.15 It is revealing that the most prominent black spokesman from England’s black community in the 1780s should provide useful political contacts for the man who was to usher in the radical movement of the 1790s.

Coincidental with the genesis of popular radical societies, Thomas Clarkson embarked on another nationwide lecture tour and while the parallel push within Parliament for abolition failed again in 179 1 , contemporaries were in n o doubt of the growing gulf between public feeling and parliamentary indecision: “Here are the representatives, o r the servants, of the people, speaking a different language from that of their constituents; for I have n o doubt that, had the voice of the people been faithfully conveyed through the House of Commons, the point had been gained instead of lost.”l6 But Clarkson’s efforts were not in vain for in the spring of 1792 a record number of petitions arrived a t Parliament in support of Wilberforce’s by now annual abolition motion. An estimated 508 petitions called for abolition. In Manchester, Walker’s earlier work, now propa- gated by the more comprehensively radical Constitutional Society, yielded 20,000 signatures (from a population of 60,000).17 Inevitable defeat in the Commons could n o longer hide the widening popular base t o the abolitionist cause. And it was the very popularity of that cause that began to provoke deep concern.

Widely-based reform societies, drawing upon the unrepresented and mouthing Paine’s epithets in a variety of provincial societies, were drawn by sympathy and


example towards the revolution in France. And as the revolution cast an increasingly sinister shadow across Europe, a process of transmutation began; English radicals became, in the eyes of their increasingly alarmed opponents, English Jacobins. Reforming ambitions and tactics came t o be opposed simply because they seemed to owe their inspiration and ideals t o the revolution. Even the act of petitioning was suspect. In 1792 Lord Sheffield deplored abolitionist petitions because they were “obtained through the medium of associations; to which he had always proclaimed himself an enemy.”la The act of raising petitionsexposed a political issue to the gaze and possible participation of those whom many considered beyond the political pale. Complaints were registered against abolition petitions because “multitudes of the signatures . . . . were of indigent people”; “the petitioners for abolition consisted chiefly of ignorant people, en- thusiastically inclined . . . .” Equally alarming was the fact that opposition was prominent in those cities with an economic commitment to the slave trade.19 Abolition was not merely popular but it seemed economically confused and confusing.

By the spring of 1793, some months after the outbreak of war with France, the rapid growth of the popular societies and the tactics they adopted left loyal opponents in no doubts that the campaign for abolition was itself tarred with the same Jacobinical brush, despite the powerful conservative, pro-Pitt line of Wilberforce and friends. In the very weeks Parliament was debating the slave trade, the corresponding societies were busy mustering huge petitions for parliamentary reform; opponents of both reform and abolition had n o difficulty in associating and damning the two. On April 11, 1793, the Earl of Abingdon said:

. . . the idea of abolishing the slave trade is connected with the levelling system and the rights of man; his lordship asked who could controvert such a proposition? For the very definition of the terms themselves, as descriptive of the thing, what does the abolition of the slave trade mean more or less, than liberty and equality? What more or less than the rights of man? And what are the rights of man, but the foolish fundamental principles of this new philosophy. If proofs are wanting, look at the colony of St Domingo, and see what the rights o f man have done there.20

As if to prove Abingdon’s point, a mere three weeks later the corresponding societies inundated Parliament with reform petitions. The Sheffield document contained 8,000 names; that from Edinburgh was “of the whole length of the house.” The LCS petition took 30 minutes t o read.21 To all this Pitt reacted with hostility, dismissing the reform petitions as fabricated manipulations of opinion. Yet, five years earlier convinced that the first wave of abolitionist petitions represented popular feeling, Pitt had been moved t o sponsor a motion for abolition in the Commons.22 The intervening revolution in France with its attendant havoc in St. Domingue and its popular radical reflexes in Britain had completely transformed the political climate. For the unenfranchised t o gather, organize and speak so volubly in times of national danger was seen as subversive. In private, Pitt was negotiating with the Home Secretary, Dundas, t o curb the passion for radical pressure groups23 and it seems clear that it was the domestic threat, much more than any repercussions of black freedom in the West Indies, which persuaded Pitt to abandon his public commitment t o abolition. Domestic considerations prevailed on the Prime Minister-and few more so than the nationwide mushrooming of radical societies who demanded a restoration of their own rights. Moreover, they also made demands for abolition, and throughout the popular democratic movement between 1791-1795 the issue of the slave trade became part of a wider democratic sensibility and an element in the demand for the general restitution of lost political and human rights.


In the early 1790s, Sheffield proved the largest and most strident of provincial radical societies and, like their friends in London, they drew upon a local reforming tradition from the 1780s, best expressed in an excellent local newspaper Tl7e Sheffield Register. The Sheffield society, established in 1791, took as its main purpose “to disseminate knowledge universally ; more especially that species of Knowledge which immediately concerns our Fellow Creatures as human be- ings.”24 When, in 1794 the society organized its largestever public meeting, a resolution was passed calling for an end t o the slave trade. “Wishing t o be rid of the weight of oppression under which we groan, we areinduced t o compassionate those who groan also . . .” Comparing the lot of the English poor t o West Indian slaves, the meeting attacked the slavetraders “those unfeeling barbarians.” More interesting, however, the Sheffield radicals insisted that since “no compromise can be made between Freedom and Tyranny,” there should be a “total Emanci- pation of the Negro Slaves”*s ; this at a time when the Abolition Society was concerned solely with ending the slave trade.

The Sheffield meeting of April 1794 was dominated by a forceful young ora- tor, Henry Redhead Yorke, who, born in the West Indies, had been wooed from his early pro-planter beliefs by a visit t o revolutionary France.26 Yorke was a good, though rare, example of the contagion of French principles so feared by Pitt and his supporters, and it was the determination t o resist and isolate any political demands for change that seemed inspired by the revolution which was ultimately to undermine both the popular radical movement and the popular base to abolition. The bright hopes of 1789 that the revolution would assist the fight for black freedom were cruelly dispelled as the revolution lurched into violence and confusion, and Englishmen of reforming and abolitionist sensibilities came to be damned as agents of the revolution. Wilberforce complained that “People connect democratical principles with the Abolition of the Slave Trade and will not hear mention of it.”27 Men who remained publically committed to abolition were thought to be equally sympathetic t o the revolution, “I d o not imagine [said Wilberforce] that we could meet with 20 persons in Hull a t present who would sign a petition, that are not republicans”.2B Ironically, Wilberforce suf- fered at the hands of this political confusion, being denounced among “the JACO- BINS of England, the Wilberforces, the Coopers, the Paines, and the Clarksons . . . .” Despite such unlikely, incompatible company, the anonymous author proclaimed “I am justified in classing the promoters of Abolition and Republicans together.”29

The belief that political change of any kind was influenced by the revolution led to a dramatic peeling away of moderate support for abolition and reform. But the more determined radicals continued publically t o press for abolition. In London, much of the burdenofaddressing the vast crowds that gathered to listen to the LCS in 1974-5 fell to John Thelwall, who, in the capital and provinces, used Clarkson’s example of mass lectures t o great effect. Thelwall reserved some of his most biting criticism for slavery, comparing the lot of the slaves t o the English poor. But, while unequivocally opposed to slavery, he expressed the radical frustration at the monopoly which the slave issue had come t o exercise over the public imagination:

0 Wilberforce, If thou art indeed that man of humanity which thy zeal in the cause of the wretched African would lead us to believe, seek not so wide for objects of they benevolence . . . The seed, the root of oppression is here and here the cure must begin . . . . If we would dispense justice to our distant colonies, we must begin by rooting out from the centre the corruption by which that cruelty and injustice is countenanced and defended.%


To Thelwall and his fellow radicals, the corrupt political patronage exercised by West Indian wealth provided one of the most telling criticisms of the slave colonies.31 The corollary was that an end to plantocratic power, based on slavery, would minimize their political leverage in London. Equally, reforlfi of Parliament would undermine the political base that the West Indians needed to defend their economic system, and it was variations on this structural radical critique of the West Indian connection that peppered the popular campaign against slavery up to the Reform Act of 1832.

While Thelwall was hectoring his audiences in 1795, his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge was similarly engaged in Bristol in a series of brilliant lectures in which “he appeared ‘like a comet or meteor’ on the Bristol horizon”.32 On June 16, Coleridge lectured on the slave trade, dealing like Thelwall with the comparative lot of black and white. For his evidence Coleridge drew heavily upon three tracts of the 1780s-those by Clarkson, Wadstrom and Benezet-and his lecture consequently mirrored those publications.33 But in the process, Coleridge transformed the intellectual propaganda of the early abolitionist movement, aimed as it was at an influential minority, into the popular, radical vernacular of the 1790s. Coleridge, like Thelwall, Hardy, Walker and others in and around the popular societies, became the mouthpiece through which the issue of black freedom was passed onto the people, Once the issues had percolated down, through associations, corresponding societies and lectures, the people gave abolition the strength of their unprecedented numbers.

The activities of the corresponding societies reached a peak in November and December 1795, and to curb their mass meetings, lectures and dissemination of literature, the government rushed through the “TWO Acts” in December. The purpose and result of these Acts was to render illegal the mass base to radical politics. Thereafter, until total outlawry in 1799, the radical groups fell into feuding fragments and the two issues of parliamentary reform and abolition died as public questions.” To a certain extent the cause of abolition (unlike parliamentary reform) no longer needed public pressure (which, in any case, had become counterproductive in such a hostile atmosphere), for the efforts of 1787-1795 had firmly lodged the issue of abolition inside Parliament. It had been largely accidental that abolition had not been achieved in the early 1790s, but the cause undoubtedly faltered under the impact of the revolutions in France and St. Domingue and the widening hostility of the propertied towards those groups of working men who linked reform to abolition. While on the one hand the popular radicals gave abolition its greatest strength and support, their pres- ence, in the eyes of many, stripped the cause of its respectability. Ironically, despite the public pressure between 1787-95, when abolition came, it was effected largely as a result of a change of ministry and political realignments.35 Nonethe- less public opinion had played an important part by giving the cause a mass public voice and impressing the public mood on Parliament. In its turn, Parlia- ment belatedly “complied with the general feeling”.36

* * * * *

The severe restraints placed on public radical politics in 1799 continued throughout the war years, rendering England immune from the displays of open and massive agitation that had characterized 179 1-1 795. Reforming zeal was thrust underground and given little legal opportunity to display itself. But abolitionists had little cause to campaign for, after 1807, since they hoped that abolition would lead to amelioration in slave conditions in the West Indies. Few


wanted immediate emancipation and they sat back to await the proof of the anticipated benefits of abolition.37 But in the summer of 1814 with war appar- ently a t an end and peace negotiations under way in Vienna, the political climate changed-for the worse-for it became clear that the allied negotiators might allow France the right t o continue slavetrading.38 In June-July 1814 therefore, the abolitionists set ou t t o generate, in a reprise of the successful tactics of 1787- 1795, a groundswell of pressure whose simple purpose was t o commit the govem- ment t o international abolition.

The public meetings convened t o petition for international abolition were often the first political gatherings t o be held since that last wave of agitation 20 years before.39 The issue was simple and the tactics accordingly straightforward. Organized and encouraged by the old abolitionists-now joined by a wise group of prominent radicals, reformers and Whigs-the people were urged t o discuss and support abolition. Wilberforce assumed that the nation was behind the cause; Samuel Whitbread hoped that their petitions “would be signed by almost every man in this country who could write his name.’” Using the pseudonym “Alfred” (the most popular of radical camouflages in the 1790s) an anonymous letter writer to The Times intoned:

My countrymen! Let us arise as one man throughout the kingdom, and at once cry NO to the further continuance of this detestable crime . . . . Let the voice of the British nation once declare itself and the African Slave Trade must universally cease .41

It was of course to prove more difficult than the author imagined. It is arguable that in promoting such an abolition, the British could afford t o be altruistic a t the economic expense of others, but nonetheless the public response was exceptional. By late June 18 14 The Times made daily references t o the growing volume of abolition agitation.42 In the end, some 806 petitions, containing between % and 1 % million names, were showered o n Parliament, and that f rom a population of about 12 millions.43 A substantial proportion of the adult population had come out against the slave trade; in the small Yorkshire town of Guiseley, for instance, 2,000 men (from a total population of 7,000) signed an abolitionist petition.@ But even more illuminating is the fact that proportionately more names were attached to the 1814 petitions than t o the 1848 Chartist petition, which is often viewed as an index t o contemporary demand for political change.45 Glancing at the seemingly impossible task of parliamentary reform, Samuel Whit bread com plained :

The country never has, and I fear, never will, express a feeling so general as they have done about the slave trade; if they had, Parliament would long since have been reformed. . . .46

The public insistence on abolition was felt t o be politically irresistible. Lord Castlereagh, unaccustomed t o such public constraints o n the conduct of foreign affairs, informed the Ambassador in Spain:

The nation is bent upon this subject. I believe there is hardly a village that has not met and petitioned upon it; both Houses of Parliament are pledged to press i t ; and the ministers must make it the basis o f their p01icy.~7

No less a figure than Talleyrand felt the unaccustomed weight of public pressure, bemoaning that abolition had “become for the English people a passion carried t o fanaticism, and one which the ministry is no longer a t liberty t o check.”e Castlereagh felt that the abolitionist groundswell was both counterproductive and damaging t o the British efforts in Vienna:


The more I have occasion to observe the temper of foreign powers on the question of abolition, the more strongly impressed I am with the sense of the prejudice that results not only to the interests of the question itself, but of our foreign relations generally from the display of popular impatience which has been excited. and is kept up in England on this subject.

It is impossible to persuade foreign nations that this sentiment is unmixed with views of colonial policy . . . .@

The outcome was to be greatly disappointing t o the abolitionists for, in the protracted diplomatic wanderings of the European Congress, from Vienna in 1814 t o Verona in 1822, abolition was lost t o a complexity of more pressing issues and commitments. All that came of the initial public push, followed by years of negotiations, were “vague generalities of verbal reprobation.”sO While public opinion could influence British governments, those administrations could not necessarily persuade their European counterparts of the benefits of abolition.

* * * * *

Failure in diplomacy had been partly offset for the humanitarians by James Stephens’ slave registration scheme, evidence from which reinforced the suspicion that West Indian slaves were failing to enjoy the expected benefits of abolition. Consequently, in 1823, the humanitarians, strengthened by new men (Cropper, Macauley, Buxton and Lord Suffield) regrouped to press for amelioration and emancipation. And throughout the ensuing campaigns, despite all the vicissi- tudes and differences over tactics and goals, the groundswell of public opposition t o slavery was an unmistakable feature. The traditional, well-proved tactics were used again; in 1823 Clarkson’s lecture tour yielded 200 antislavery committees and 225 petitions; a year later a similar tour produced 600 petitions.51 And, from 1823, the public climate was even more favorable t o the antislavery cause. In April 1823, Wilberforce noted “The country take up our cause surprisingly, the petitions, considering the little effort, very numerous”.5* By 1826, it was pressure from rank and file followers of antislavery which, in conjunction with evidence from the West Indies that the planters seemed incapable of implement- ing amelioration, had brought forward demands for immediate emancipation.53 Thereafter antislavery literature insisted o n black freedom-first demanded by thousands of Sheffield cutlers in 1794.

While the progress of emancipation was inextricably bound up with the detailed machinations of domestic British politics ( the fall of Ministries, changes of Ministers and the complicated relations with the West Indian colonies), the issue of black freedom was in the late 1820s (as in the years 179 1-1 795) carried along as a popular measure by the rising tide of democratic sensibility. Trade union reform, factory legislation, Catholic emancipation and the revived and intensified demands for parliamentary reform, together with the antislavery campaign, cumulatively produced a remarkable political climate and much of this agitation took place in, and was directed towards, working class communities. Demands for black freedom were integral t o the wider insistence that Parliament should restore or safeguard lost rights.

Foremost among the advocates of black freedom were the nonconformists and by the late 1820s the significance of their opposition t o slavery lay, not in the antiquity of Dissent’s resistance to slavery, but in the fact that large areas of that nonconformity were now working class.9 As in the 1790s the coarseness of the plebeian voice was added t o the more refined voice against slavery. Of

Walvin: Slavery’s Impact on British Politics 35 1

course the last push against slavery, from 1828 onwards, offers the most convinc- ing evidence of the economic self-interest in the emancipationist struggle. I t also witnessed a conjunction of disinterested efforts and economically inspired opposition, personified in James Cropper, the Quaker East India merchant.55 But thousands rallied to the cause irrespective of economic interests, and the Baptists and Methodists, for instance, were able to whip up such extensive support for black freedom, not through economic arguments, but because they had made such deep inroads into the new working class communities (paralleling their drives into West Indian slave societies). The Methodists in particular had a virtual spiritual monopoly in certain working class areas; and it was they who first sought to extract a personal statement on slavery from all parliamentary candidates.56 Methodists and Baptists were urged t o purge Parliament of its West Indian boroughmongers and simultaneously rid the colonies of the evil of slavery .

The West India lobby and its powerful propagandists unconsciously helped to focus diverse reforming groups into a united opposition; for emancipationists, parliamentary reformers and varied religious sects the planters in Parliament were a symbol of all their complaints. William Cobbett, who was won over to emancipationism by popular pressure from his constituents in Oldham, noted:

I t now appears that, in fact, these slaves are in general the properry of English boroughmongers and that the fruit of the labour of these slaves, has long been converted into the means of making us slaves at home . . . . their continuing to hold slaves cannot be good to the people of England.57

Emancipation thus came to be seen as a blow for morality, religion and reform at home.

Between 1828-33, thousands of proslavery and emancipationist tracts flew off the presses and the slavery issue was rarely absent from the newspapers. The issue of “the Bill” t o reform Parliament and the push for emancipation politicized the country as never before. Nor needed the people be literate to grasp the arguments, for some of the best efforts of peripatetic emancipation lecturers were reserved for the working class chapels in the industrial cities, exemplified by one of the most effective of antislavery lecturers, George Thompson, himself “a man of humble origins and with no early education”.sB While it is true that the Agency Committee orchestrated these campaigns, it is significant that they made the decision t o rally a wider, popular constituency t o their side. And the popular response was overwhelming.

The most notable new groups t o side with emancipation were female. In the 179Os, on the other hand, with the exception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s contribu- tion, women played no part in the radical societies. But in the 1820s and 1830s female emancipationists provided certain women with their first organized and coherent political role in modern British society. A female Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1825 in Sheffield with a membership of 80, within a year had dis- tributed 1,400 pamphlets, printed 2,000 copies of two tracts, and published a collection of antislavery poetry. Furthermore, these women directed their efforts “chiefly among the poor of this town” and even commissioned an “Address t o the Labouring Classes.”59 Nor could the efforts of such groups be ignored. In 183 1 two women alone raised 187,000 names t o a petition.60 The irony remains of course that unenfranchised women were appealing t o the unenfranchised poor on behalf of unenfranchised blacks. And in these activities it is difficult to see evidence of anything other than the power of conviction at work.

3 52 Annals New York Academy of Sciences

Not surprisingly the question of black freedom became an electoral issue. At the General Election of 1830, it was the key issue in the West Riding and Bristol and would have dominated the nationwide election but for the outbreak of revolution in France.61 The election two years later was influenced even further by emancipation. Attempts were made to persuade candidates to issue a statement on slavery; of 147 who did, 116 favored freedom, while all but a handful of opponents had West Indian connections.62 Throughout, petitioning Parliament remained the most direct way of bringing the strength of popular feeling to Parliament’s attention. In 1831-2 some 1% million names were forwared to Parliament; later, unhappiness with the apprenticeship scheme was registered by a further million names.63

Petitioning was clearly an excellent way of registering feeling, a point adopted even more forcefully by the Chartists in the late 1830s and 1840s. They, and other working class movements, not only adopted the petition, but they were equally influenced by the rhetoric of antislavery. Chartists complained of the Reform Act that “Our slavery has been exchanged for an apprenticeship to liberty . . . ‘’64 Richard Oastler, in launching his factory reform campaign, also drew upon the lesson of antislavery. In his important article “Yorkshire Slavery” he asserted:

Thousands of our fellowcreatures and fellow subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire rown . . . . are at this very moment existing in a state of slavery, more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system “colonid slavery” . . . .6

Corn law campaigners were equally impressed by antislavery. Richard Cobden, musing on the Corn Laws, concluded:

It appears to me that a moral and even a religious spirit may be infused into that topic, and if agitated in the same manner that the question of slavery has been, it will be inestible.”

Time and again, the tactics and rhetoric of antislavery informed and inspired other reform groups.

The campaigns of 1787-95 and 1823-33 (and the intervening spasm of 1814) have more links than is generally recognized. Some of the personnel, organiza- tions and ideological themes remained throughout, but so too did popular support. But in retrospect that support remains as elusive as any form of public opinion; at times it seems spontaneous, at others manipulated. But the popular voice against the slave trade and slavery was characteristic of the campaigns. Moreover, that voice was felt to be politically significant both by the organizers of the campaigns and by the ministries against which it was directed. Clearest and most strident in its final phase, when it devetailed with wider demands for reform, this popular complaint against the trade and slavery found its genesis in the 1780s and 1790s when nascent popular radicalism was born of the political ferment generated by the revolutions in America and France.

Whatever the economic forces at work undermining the slave trade and slavery, substantial numbers of ordinary people came to view slavery as an evil. And they insisted on their right to register an opinion on the matter. Hence abolition was not simply the preserve of propertied, informed and educated opinion. Successive governments, from Pitt’s startled administration in 1792 to Grey’s reformed government of 1832, were faced by demands for black freedom, not merely from their peers but from people who were beyond the political pale.

Abolition came to belong to the world of popular politics where mass meet-


ings, public education, widely-touted petitions and democratic sensibility were the order of the day. And it was from similar circumstances that the early Char- tists and other working class groups evolved. Abolition was an early element in the evolution of popular radical politics in England, and the tactics and language of abolition were infused into related working class movements. Working men evolved the belief “that there is n o such thing as servitude in nature”67 and they demanded a restitution of their natural rights. Indeed, the view that was t o shape working class responses towards slavery had been expressed as early as 1792 by Thomas Hardy:

I am fully persuaded that there is no man, who is, from principle, an advocate of the liberty of the black man, but will zealously support the rights of the white man, and vice versa.68

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13. 14.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

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CLARKSON, THOMAS. 1808. The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave nade by the British Parliament (2 vols.). Vol. I: 415416. London.

WILBERFORCE, R. & S. WILBERFORCE. 1839. me Life of William Wilberforce (5 vols.). Vol. 11, chapt. 10. London.

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Documents

THE IMPACT OF SLAVERY ON BRITISH RADICAL POLITICS: 1787–1838