Slavery was, I believe, the necessary but not sufficient precondition for the American Civil War. Lincoln and the Republican Party had pledged to stop the spread of slavery to the Federal territories; Lincoln’s election as President in November 1860 directly led to the secession of the Southern states.
But what if Britain had won the American Revolution, and remained in control of its American colonies? Assume that America was not exempted from the terms of the act, as India was. Would the Southern colonies have rebelled when slavery was abolished in virtually all British-ruled lands worldwide?
In your scenario, had their grandfathers experienced a failed attempt at revolution in 1776, or had it never come up? I think that might make a difference.
In addition, whatever the English overlords were doing in the 50+ years following the time of the revolution would make a big difference. I think they would have installed very loyal governors in each colony, and probably they would have faced a number of attempted revolutions even if the first one had occurred and failed. The free newspapers would have been shut down and it could have been very difficult to build a consensus for revolution in the south.
The South wouldn’t have had its own effective military force in that scenario, I don’t think - it’s not how the British did it in their other colonies, anyway. So I think the plantation owners would either have to put up with it or pull up sticks, as happened elsewhere.
British abolition included financial compensation for the owners of freed slaves. That was more politically palatable when it was a few islands in the West Indies. If faced with an invoice for every slave from South Carolina to Missouri, abolition may not have gotten the same traction
Did the British also purchase Louisiana? In other words, was there a vast, unsettled territory that could have been colonized by slaveholders? Was there a Missouri compromise of 1820 that defined how much of that territory would be slave? Or were the slaveholders restricted to east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio rivers? In other words, was slavery still a viable institution, or had it already been put on the road to extinction?
Depending on what happened with the western territories they may have had plenty of land to use as compensation. They might have been able to work out a tax deal also, I suspect the slave owners would already have been paying hefty taxes for slave ownership to the crown.
A Free Press is essential for the democratic institution of owning other people !
Anyway, don’t see why they should. They allowed very scurrilous anti-British/anti-Establishment newspapers in most colonies throughout the 19th century. Partly through sloth, partly because the owners if persecuted would shout their fool heads off claiming sweet martyr status ( as in Britain itself — The Times started off as anti-Establishment despisers of the monarchy, and most newspaper magnates in addition to being mad, just loved whining about the Historic Rights of Englishmen ).
Jamaica and the West Indies were a lot richer than the 13 Colonies in the 18th century ( the British accepted the loss of America easily: losing the West Indies ( which nearly happened when French naval power was in the ascendant several times ) would have been a disaster.
Paying off slave-owners, particularly when done through debentures, and through converting the slaves’ status to indentured servants, would be probably easier when dealing with the often impoverished American slavocracy than with the rich West Indies. If there’s one thing striking about the great American slave-owners, such as Washington and Jefferson, right down to the Secession is their vast amounts of debt, and vast amounts of self-pity for not having enough money.
This was a 19th century aristocratic constant.
The British tried to have peace with the Indian tribes by restricting westward expansion of the Americans; this was as much a proximate cause of the Revolution as the fear of the British banning slavery after the Somerset decision.
In no universe, real or imaginary, would the French have sold Louisiana to the British.
Nor the Spanish selling anything to them either: the Spanish, when not doing their favorite thing and killing Frenchmen, were as often as not fighting the British from 1750 to 1815. Of course, the British and colonists together might have conquered Louisiana from the French, in the same way as they stole Canada.
The costs of Britain running the Preventative Squadron throughout the 19th century were immense; against Spanish, Portuguese, French, American, African, Cuban hatred or indifference. Having the North American continent onside would have stamped out the slave trade that much quicker.
I can’t imagine the Iberians getting around to leading the fight against slavery until, maybe 1960. The South, 1920 at the latest.
However, had the Revolution not succeeded, then the northern states might just as well continued their own slaveries, and made common cause with the South against the British. *** Freedom and Slavery Forever !
I was thinking that there had been a failed revolution and they’d take measures to prevent that from happening again. I’m sure by 1833 there’d be plenty of newspapers, but also plenty of censorship, often from the fear of imprisonment or death. It is all speculation however.
I would wonder if abolition would have happened at all under those circumstances. Cotton was already becoming a hugely profitable crop - and indispensable to English manufactures.
I don’t think there would have been a rebellion. Attitudes about slavery hardened a lot in the decades before 1860. In 1833, there was still a widespread view even in the south that slavery was more of a necessary evil rather than a positive good. The cotton boom was just getting started in 1833. The slave owners never would have been as powerful in Parliament as they were in Congress and wouldn’t have been able to entrench their position. Fighting the British Empire would have been a more daunting prospect than fighting the northern half of the United States. And potential rebels in the situation the OP described wouldn’t be buoyed up by the memory of a successful American Revolution.
Sugar being a hugely profitable crop (and a consideable “sugar lobby” in Parliament) did not stop abolition - though it slowed it down.
“I OWN I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans,
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?”
My prediction is “no rebellion”. The reasons have been mentioned in part above:
(1) No successful history of rebellion to draw on. If the Brits own the US, that implies no (successful) American Revolution.
(2) Other colonies dependent on slavery went slave-free without rebellions.
(3) The abolition proposals would probably have been tied to compensation.
(4) No history of intense secional conflict leading up to abolition.
(5) Practically, a rebellion would pit the South against the might of the entire British Empire, not just the North. It would be seen as hopeless.
I couldn’t find the number of slaves freed by the British but the number of slaves in the US was around 2 million in 1840 just after the British freed the slaves in the West Indies. One way slavery was different in the US then in the West Indies was that the population was increasing in the US due to an increase in those born in slavery whereas the slave population in the West Indies was decreasing and before the outlawing of the slave trade new slaves had to be imported. This made US slaves much more valuable than in other areas of the Americas.
Given that compensating slave owners made up 40% of England’s government expenses in 1833 when it happened, and that US slaves were more valuable and very numerous, it seems unlikely that the British government could have offered the same amount of compensation for the slave owners if the US had been included. The reduced amount of compensation along with the increased opportunity costs to the national budget likely would have lowered support for abolishing slavery in the British Empire. Since the law’s passage was a close call as it happened, it likely would have not have happened at the same time if America was still British.
That’s fighting the hypothetical though - the question is, assuming abolition happened, would the (likely) lower level of compensation have sparked rebellion?
Were it more expensive to free the slaves because there were x amount added from North America ( which like every other British colony would be practically self-governing by that point ) wouldn’t the British Exchequer be that much more full from American taxes over the previous 50 years — even if as seems likely there would have continued a lower tax-rate in than Britain and perhaps a lower tax-rate than that which the independent U.S. had to impose — therefore greater able to shell out more to free those x amount of slaves ?
I dont think the South would have put up with* any* level of compensation. Lincoln never suggested freeing the slaves before the South revolted, it was just the thought that they were losing the long term fight and would have to give up their slaves someday that caused them to revolt.
Southern slavery wasnt just a economic thing- many of political leaders/ slaveholders at the top realized that it was actually fiscally unsound. It was a deeply held racist thing.
Certainly that was a part of it - it was also all caught up in rivalry with the hated North. The issue would be, would these things (racism and sectional rivalry) have been enough to push the South into rebellion against the Brits?
Part of the Southern reasoning in starting the real rebellion was that they could always earn cash by selling cotton to the Brits (before the Yankee blockade), and there was always the hope that the Brits could be persuaded to help them. If it was the Brits who were imposing abolition, this would not be a possibility. With Brits the enemy and ‘ruling the waves’, how would the rebellion finance itself?