Vice-Regal Saint: An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade
William Wilberforce, the sickly shrimp of a man who sank the slave ships, often saw his personal battle against slavery as a divinely ordained crusade.
200 year ago today, March 25, 1807, An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade received Royal Assent: "Be it therefore enacted by the King's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the Authority of the same, That from and after the First Day of May One thousand eight hundred and seven, the African Slave Trade, and all and all manner of dealing and trading in the Purchase, Sale, Barter, or Transfer of Slaves, or of Persons intended to be sold, transferred, used, or dealt with as Slaves, practiced or carried on, in, at, to or from any Part of the Coast or Countries of Africa, shall be, and the same is hereby utterly abolished, prohibited, and declared to be unlawful"
Enabled by Lord Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, which had given Britain the sea power to ensure that any ban could be enforced, Great Britain set about convincing other nations to follow same. Incredibly, the United States abolished its African slave trade at the same time. Both laws were finalized in March of 1807, the British law being effective on May 1, 1807 and the American law on January 1, 1808.
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3 comments:
If only the Arabs had been bound by that law.
Burton
Not so fast with the back-patting, chaps.
Just as it's hard to celebrate Britain's abolition of the death penalty when London's PC rules on capital punishment caes in the Caribbean, so too did this Act not restrict slavery among its colonies in the British Caribbean and the Americas. British slave traders continued trafficking in slaves throughout the British West Indian islands and the Guiana colonies of Berbice and Demerara-Essequibo. George Stephen wrote that in 1809, slave ships, under foreign flags, had been fitted out in London and Liverpool, in order to import enslaved persons to British colonies, via Spanish and Portuguese settlements.
It's possible that Britain made more money out of the trade and slavery AFTER 1807 and the 1833 Emancipation Act, which made owning slaves illegal. (The enslaved were freed only in the West Indies and Cape Town; the last Acts abolishing slavery were, as I tell my class learning about the League of Nations, in Sierra Leone as late as 1927 and the Gold Coast in 1928.)
In this painting Wilberforce bears a remarkable likeness to Alan Rickman. -- Kristan at The Victorian Peeper (www.victorianpeeper.blogspot.com)
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