What was the legal road to abolition?
Many enslaved took steps to free themselves and others. However, a change in law in Britain was needed to eventually make enslavement illegal. This was a very long process that involved campaigning and individual cases to be brought that over time led to changes of opinion about enslavement and helped to educate people. An important person in this was Granville Sharp, who was born in Northumberland and educated in Durham.
A long road
The road to the legal ending of enslavement in Britain and its empire was a long journey. Even with the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act which finally made it illegal, most of enslavement’s features were maintained with the use of apprenticeship. It had no plan to help the enslaved. It paid huge sums of money to the enslavers, including people in the Northeast, in compensation. Britain benefited from those people and from enslavement in other parts of the world for many years to come.
This took a long time and did not solve the plight of millions. It was important that its end was enshrined in law, albeit flawed laws. Granville Sharp used the legal system to get specific cases heard and people freed, although this involved individuals it did highlight enslavement’s evils and began a legal process that would lead to 1833. Others campaigned for an act of abolition that would end all enslavement.
While considering the legal road to abolition, it does not take away the courage of those who quietly resisted, those who loudly resisted and those who simply survived. These cases often came about because of the self-emancipation (through escaping from their enslaver) of many who were then captured and became the focus of court cases that did not take their views into consideration.
The court cases here tested the pompous Tudor English assumption that there were no enslaved people in England. However, the reality and legal cases proved otherwise.[1]
[1] Fryer, P., 1984. Staying power. London: Pluto Pr. pg113
Who was Granville Sharp?
Sharp was born in Rothbury in November 1735 in Durham.[1] When he was 15, he was sent to London to be a linen merchant. This work did not suit him, and he became an Ordinance Officer in the Tower of London.[2] Later he became involved in the abolition of enslavement.
When did Sharp become an abolitionist?
In 1765, Jonathan Strong was a teenaged, enslaved person in London, who having been beaten nearly to death by his enslaver was helped back to health by William Sharp, Granville’s brother. Two years later, Strong was seen by his former captor who demanded that he returned to enslavement and ‘sold’ Strong to another enslaver who was going to take Strong to Jamaica. Strong was jailed pending being sent to Jamaica. Granville Sharp gained Strong’s freedom in a court case. Strong was now, in the eyes of the law, a free person. Sharp was challenged to a duel by the enslaver. As Peter Fryer says, ‘Sharp was a Durham man and there was a core of granite in him. The incident at the Mansion House had made a deep impression on him, and he was not the kind of person to give way to bullies.’[3]
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This launched Sharp on a lifetime of working towards abolition. He campaigned but also acted. In this we can see a northeastern practical nature (like the Richardson family), wanting to make real progress.
Sadly, Jonathan Strong was injured so badly he died five years later.
[1] GRANT, H., 2021. GOOD SHARPS. [S.l.]: VINTAGE. Pg. 8.
[2] Durhammuseum.co.uk. 2022. Durham Museum. [online] Available at: <http://durhammuseum.co.uk/granville.html> [Accessed 1 October 2022].
[3] Fryer, P., n.d. Staying power. Pg 116
Content warning
Two of the most well known cases that went on to change public opinion in Britain were also two shocking examples of cruelty. Please be aware of this when reading on.
The Somerset Case
James Somerset was a person from Boston, Massachusetts. His enslaver brought him to England, and he promptly escaped. He was captured and set to be sent to the West Indies as punishment and to be returned to enslavement. when a case was brought before Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. Over a long period, arguments on both sides were heard. On one side, where Sharp was a key player, was the argument that England was too good a place to have slavery practised (but it was seen as acceptable to practise it elsewhere in the world). The other side amounted to a financial argument. Eventually, on 22nd June 1772 Mansfield ruled that if slavery wanted to exist in England then a law was needed to introduce it, so Somerset could not be forced to go on the ship to the West Indies.[1] Essentially it said that people could not be forced out of the country against their will.
While this was celebrated by Black people in the court and in England and by those opposed to enslavement, it did not outlaw enslavement or provide for protection against the very thing it argued.
It did show the English that there existed a huge double standard (which was to be built upon in the future), that enslavement was tolerated in England and encouraged in other parts of the empire, but when presented with its evils the law could not openly support it.
Unfortunately, we do not know what became of James Somerset, the most important person in this event has been lost to historians after this landmark case.[2]
News of the ruling spread to all parts of the British Empire. In America enslaved people ran away in the hope of reaching England.[3]
[1] Fryer, P., 1984. Staying power. London: Pluto Pr. pg125-126
[2] Olusoga, D., 2022. Black and British: A Forgotten History. Pan Macmillan. Pg 140
[3] Drescher, S., n.d. Abolition. pg104
The Zong Massacre trial.
In November 1781, an incompetently captained slave ship called Zong was on route to Jamaica. Over a period of two days 133 enslaved people were thrown to the sea and left to drown. The captain had decided that profit came before the wellbeing of the enslaved.[1] Women and children first, then men. Ten threw themselves into the sea rather than be thrown. One managed to climb back aboard the ship. In later hearings the crew said it was due to a lack of water that led to the decision to commit mass murder.
This horrendous event would have been forgotten had not a friend of Olaudah Equiano been present at a hearing where the owners of the ship tried to get compensation for themselves. Equiano informed Granville Sharp and the pair went to work on publicising this crime and trying to get justice. By publicising this mass murder, this case brought to the fore the grotesque double standards in the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans, that people could be so callously treated as property. Equiano’s work paved the way for a minor step forward in the Dolben Act in 1788.[2]
Sharp tried unsuccessfully to bring a criminal prosecution against the sailors and the company even though the act of mass murder had been openly admitted in insurance hearings. In writing about his attempts to bring a criminal prosecution, Sharp laid the blame at the country as a whole.[3]
The 133 who were very deliberately murdered should not have been the focal point for abolition when the millions of others were also treated with murderous inhumanity, however they highlighted to the British public this gruesome case that helped turn opinion towards abolition.
In the intervening years, the publication of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African was published in 1789 did so much to educate British readers. The Haitian revolution gave the country serious pause for thought.
There was a thought in Britain that abolitionism was linked to radical and French political thoughts. This was never the case but was laid to rest as the French sought to expand their use of enslavement.[4]
Yet this shift away from enslavement did not translate to success in parliament. Wilberforce's attempts to bring about abolition bills, while heard in parliament, were unsuccessful.
While attitudes slowly evolved, there was the West Indian lobby, whose money bought rotten boroughs (parliamentary areas that had only a few voters and were in the hands of only a few powerful people who chose the MP) and politicians with ease.[5] The power of Sugar maintained a powerful position in the British political system, riven with corruption. It also maintained low taxes on sugar, which made the sugar barons richer and the product quite cheap, so was used by many who would not want to pay more for it either in taxes or if it was being produced without enslavement.
Also, the profits from enslavement either directly or indirectly seeped into Britain and boosted many areas of industrial and country life.
In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the British imperial economy began to move away from its earlier sugar and mercantilism dominated economy, which would also contribute to allowing a shift in thought towards abolitionism.
[1] Taylor, E.R. (2000) If we must die: A history of shipboard insurrections during the slave trade. Louisiana, Lo: Louisiana State University Press. p68
[2]Fryer, Peter. Staying Power. University of Alberta, 1984, p. 127.
[3] Grant, Hester The Good Sharps. Penguin London p.247-248
[4] Drescher, S., n.d. Abolition. pg223-224
[5] Williams, E.E. (2022) Capitalism and slavery. London: Penguin Classics. p87
The Dolben Act 1788
On the back of the Zong massacre, an Oxford MP along with other others inspected a slave ship in a Thames dock and came away horrified. This led to a form of regulation on board slave ships, regulating numbers of enslaved, the keeping of a log and a doctor on board. The act
was weak and barely enforced but was a step towards recognition of the horrors of the trade.
The Grace Jones Case 1822
Grace Jones was an enslaved woman brought to England from Antigua. According to the law (from the Somerset Case) when she was brought to England, she should have been free. Yet when she was to be taken back to Antigua there was an argument between her enslaver and some government officials who said that she should be freed, as she had been in England and therefore freed. There was a court case and Grace Jones was returned to her enslaver.
Parliamentary attempts at abolition
William Wilberforce introduced bills in most years starting in 1789 till the end of the century, all failing to ban the trade, while being a focus for growing abolitionist feeling in Britain. British historian David Olusoga notes that in the early 1800s parliament was made up of a younger generation of MPs who wanted change, who were eventually numbered enough in 1804 to pass a ban on the trade of enslaved people.[1] Finally enacted in 1807, it hoped to tackle the trade from its navel flank, which would inflict limited damage on the trade rather than a head-on assault on the plantation owners.
Pressure continued and with the Sam Sharpe rebellion in 1831 and an abolition act was passed in 1836. Far from helping those who were enslaved, it did at least, legally end enslavement in British West Indian colonies after hundreds of years of kidnap and enslavement and ruin of West Indian Indigenous populations.
The motivation to finally end enslavement is debated over. Was it an act of humanitarianism or simply the mercy killing of an economic system that had run its course?
[1] Olusoga, D. (2021) Black and British: A forgotten history. London: Picador. P. 233
Over to You!
Historiography
Historiography is the study of how historians have interpreted events over time and why those interpretations change.
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Our Know More section looks at several historians' views on why enslavement ended.
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Your first challenge; Read the Know More section and consider which one you think makes the strongest argument.