When the English did away with slavery in the early 1800’s were there actual slaves in England? Or were they all in the colonies? Were the slaves all Black, or were there Asian and/or Caucasian slaves as well? I realize that there was a fine line between “slavery” and “indentured servitude”… but I’m talking acutal slaves.
While I’m asking, does anyone know when the other Western European nations (France, Germany, Spain, Holland etc.) outlawed slavery?
It’s a completely different timescale to the question asked, but Oliver Cromwell oversaw the exporting of Irish prisoners as slaves in the 1600s. There’s a (highly nationalist) site here: http://republican-news.org/archive/1997/February20/20stkt.html
I dont know if this is relevant or not, but at a certain point in English history slavery (in the roman sense) was outlawed due to the expansion of the Catholic Church.
I’m curious, when somebody like Thoman Jefferson entered England or France, what was the legal status of their slaves on those voyages?
According to the BBC, there were some 14,000 black slaves in Britain at the time of the 1772 Somerset decision, which began the process of ending slavery there. (The Somerset decision didn’t free slaves, but did make it impossible for them to be exported from Britain itself. The buying and selling of slaves was outlawed in 1807; existing slaves were freed in 1833.)
These slaves were all imports, and all ultimately of African heritage. Most had been made slaves in the British colonies and brought back to Britain: colonies often had special clauses in their charters that aknowledged that their slaves could be brought into England and still be treated as such.
Of course, long, long before the African slave trade began in the 15th century, there had been other slaves in Britain–white slaves. The Romans who colonized Britain in ancient times used slaves, and the practice of European slavery (I hesitate to call it white slavery, since that brings something else to mind…) persisted until the high Middle Ages. The Domesday Book of 1087, which recorded every scrap of land and every inhabitant of England also records the existence of slaves.
The interesting thing about this medieval British slavery is that it just died out (or rather transformed into the less stringent legal concept of serfdom), without much of an aggressive campaign against it. (Though the Church did mount a campaign to prohibit selling Christian slaves to infidels.)
By 1200, slavery had simply vanished from England. Thus by the time African slaves began to be imported from the colonies into Britain several hundred years later, there were no white slaves left in the country.
Strictly speaking, any slaves brought to France were free. However, many did not know this was the case. Some undoubtedly claimed their freedom, and then had to learn very quickly how to support themselves in a foreign country.
Sally Hemming’s son Madison Hemmings gave an account in 1873 of his mother’s stay in France and return to Virginia. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson sent for Hemmings to escort his daughter Maria from Virginia to Paris: