A Bi-centenary Remembrance
Sunday 25 March this year marks a very important date in British history. On this date in 1807 a Bill was enacted in the House of Common in London that outlawed the transport of slaves in British ships anywhere on the high seas. It was an important legal milestone on the road that led to the final and total abolition of slavery in the British Empire 26 years later in 1833. In this series of three articles we are marking this anniversary and noting the leading part played in the anti-slavery campaign by evangelical Christians.
Origins of the British Slave Trade:
Britain and her empire became joined in the slave trade in the 16th century. This involved taking black African men and women from their homeland against their will and selling them to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean and cotton plantations in America. Most of these slaves were stolen from their villages, often by their own chiefs, and then sold to the captains of British ships. The journeys to the West Indies and America were horrifying ordeals for the slaves. Herded like cattle in stifling conditions in the over-filled holds of the ships, they were subject to indescribable squalor and prey to typhoid, dysentery and other killing diseases. Not only were the many corpses dumped overboard like unwanted rubbish, but there was certified evidence that many captains dumped the sick overboard without waiting for them to die.
In this 21st century we may find these facts difficult to handle but the evidence for Britain’s slave traffic is detailed and terrible. Two of our great national heroes, Sir Francis Drake and his cousin, Sir John Howard, have an honoured place in British history because they defeated Spanish attacks on Britain. But Drake and Howard were among the first British sea captains to carry slaves across the oceans and sell them as chattels. The arithmetic of this traffic is truly horrific. It has been calculated that in the two hundred years from 1600 to 1800, no fewer than twelve million black men, women and children were forcibly taken from Africa and sold as slaves. What cannot be computed is how many of these 12 million died at sea and were unceremoniously tossed overboard. Many merchants in Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow grew very rich because they bought, owned and sold slaves. The first legal action in Britain against the slave trade was taken in 1772. At that time many of those who owned plantations in the Caribbean and America continued to live in Britain. They brought many slaves to work in their homes and estates and by the 1770s there were as many as 12,000 slaves employed by these plantation owners in England and Scotland. In the famous Somerset Case, heard before Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, in London in 1772, it was ruled that owning and employing slaves in Britain was illegal. Lord Mansfield delivered a landmark verdict. ‘Let justice be done though the heavens may fall.’ This ruling put an end to the employment of slaves in Britain but not in her colonies. That legal and humanitarian battle was yet to come. In the next two articles we will see the part played in that decisive victory by evangelical Christians. Dr H B McGonigle is Senior Lecturer in Historical Theology, Church History and Wesley Studies in Nazarene Theological College, Manchester, England.
Tha Abolition of Slavery