Is there a good online resource or book (good as in interesting and factual, not necessarily good as in scholarly) telling what happened to slaves in England when slavery was banned there in 1807?
Slavery was banned in England before 1807. It was pretty much banned by Sommerset’s case in 1772, although there had been previous cases saying that slavery was illegal in England. The 1807 Act abolished the slave trade, and an act in 1832 abolished slavery almost entirely in the Empire.
How many slaves were there in England, ever? (I mean black slaves, of course, not slaves of the Roman or thralls of the Dark Ages periods.)
The emancipation of slaves in England (as opposed to those in the British Empire) actually happened in 1772 and this came about rather than as a result of a ban, but as a result of a ruling that slavery was illegal under English law. I.e. though prior to this ruling there existed a few thousand de facto slaves in England imported from abroad their actual legal status was unclear (due to severalcontradictory rulings) until challenged when it ruled that slavery was incompatible with English Common Law.
Of course going back even further you had various forms of serfdom up until roughly the end of the middle ages and full-blown slavery throuought the early middle ages
Peabody’s There Are No Slaves In France includes a fascinating account of Boucaux v. Verdelin, the French parallel to Somersett’s Case. Unlike Somersett, Boucaux not only won his freedom, but was awarded back pay from the time he set foot on French soil (he had been brought to France from Haiti by his owner, an aide-de-camp to the military governor of Haiti).
You can read some of the book here, although it doesn’t get in to what happened to them afterwards. I imagine Boucaux had as much trouble collecting his judgment as he did in winning his freedom.
Very very few in permanent residence. Slavery in the modern era (post renaissance) was always unpopular in England. The fact that slavery was used in distant colonies was accepted by some as being unpleasant but “necessary” for economic reasons.
Some Americans have an idea that slavery was somehow imposed on America by the English against the wishes of the freedom-loving folk of what became the USA - completely glossing over the 80+ years between the American Revolution and the US Civil War. Not true. Slavery was always deeply unpopular with the English people and those members of the merchant class and aristocracy who benefited from the slave trade were regularly attacked for it by all of the churches, and by the majority of the population.
The ban of 1807 didn’t “emancipate the slaves in Britain” because there weren’t any. The ban was intended to stop British subjects from engaging in the slave trade outside of Britain. Which meant, in practice, ship’s crews who were supplying African slaves to the Americas.
If slaves were emancipated in 1772 in England what happened during the years before the Revolution in the colonies?
Nothing – not in the 13 Colonies, not in Barbados or Jamaica. Slavery in Britain’s colonies was not abolished until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
According to Though The Heavens Fall, a book I read about the Somersett case, the ruling was that slavery wasn’t legal under the common law because it was a great enough thing to require an Act of Parliament to give it a legal status, and there was no Act legalising slavery in this country. There was, however, under the colonial laws of Jamaica and some of the North American colonies, and those which hadn’t had such laws tended to bring them in quite quickly after Somersett to maintain the status quo.
Moved this to Cafe Society from Great Debates. I think this is the better place to get a book recommendation, even about a Great Debates-y subject.
There were about 15,000 African/Carribbean slaves known by the Crown to have been imported by 1772. One of the “problems” Lord Mansfield (who authored the Somersett decision) foresaw with his ruling was “[t]he setting 14,000 or 15,000 men at once loose by a solemn opinion, is very disagreeable in the effects it threatens.” (fortunately, he went ahead and did it anyway).
As in, “what the hell will we do with 15,000 unemployed free negroes?”
There were a couple of slave uprisings in Massachusetts from 1772 to '74. It’s been suggested that they thought the English ban to apply to all British possessions, and were upset to discover that it didn’t.
However, developments in English common law did not have a dispositive effect on other common law jurisdictions even then, even those under British control.
That’s it in a nutshell:
Not to challenge you, Shakester, but how do we know this? I’m curious about how England had slavery and yet never had the long-term issues with slavery and race that the U.S. did.
Not a book, but a movie: Amazing Grace
Because there weren’t enough slaves, or later free black people, for it to become an issue. British slaves were almost entirely in the Carribean and the North American colonies, not in England.
I saw this just recently. (Mostly, I’ll admit, to catch Benedict Cumberbatch playing Pitt the Younger.) Experts: How accurate was it?
But I have some ideas on why was it different here. Britain’s slaves were the ones running the plantations overseas. At home, they had tenants on estates. And employees working the new Satanic Mills. And Irish. And Scots. Different sorts of oppression were built into the society–& dealt with, later.
Slavery was too important here & had to be ended in a bloodier manner…
The general story seems accurate. There were changes for dramatic effect, but they seem to be minor.
I wonder, however, if that was part of what Jefferson was talking about when he claimed that King George had “excited domestic insurrections amongst us”. An American slave owner could think that the English example would encourage slave uprisings. (Although I realize it was more directly caused by Lord Dunmore’s proclamation.)
I wrote a long and detailed reply to this, and I thought I posted it. It seems to have magically vanished.
Steophan and Bridget Burke make the same basic points I did.
Almost all of the slaves in Britain were domestic servants to the aristocracy. Black slaves were a status symbol. They weren’t agricultural labourers because there wasn’t any shortage of agricultural labourers in the UK.
When they were emancipated, many continued to be servants and received wages. Most of them just blended into the general working class population.
[quote=“Shakester, post:18, topic:586077”]
I wrote a long and detailed reply to this, and I thought I posted it. It seems to have magically vanished.
OTE]
Tell me about it !
Spend a lot of time making lucid and very relevant points on a subject that is totally worthwhile and it disappears into the ether.
Do it again and then it vanishes again.
One reason that slavery was so hated in England and other parts of Europe where it was legal was that there was no shortage there of cheap labor, thus every slave purchased took jobs from people already there. The reason it became so popular in America was because of the lack of ready cheap labor, and it died in the north largely due to the non-stop immigration. (Philadelphia alone processed more immigrants per year in the 18th century than the Carolinas and Georgia combined.)
The Catholic Church was a leader in the condemnation of slavery. While they were never able to get it outlawed in Spanish lands they did work various ways by which slaves could gain their freedom into the laws. For example, in Cuba it was mandatory that if a slave managed to raise 5% of his purchase price the owner had to enter a contract with him; the church would act as the middleman. Once the slave had purchased half of his freedom he would be allowed to spend 3 days away from his master’s holdings each week in which he could earn money to apply to his purchase. Once he had raised 105% of his purchase price the church gave the money to the owner, holding the other 5% as a service charge. While certainly this worked better in theory than practice and I’m sure more than a few slaves who managed to raise the 5% never lived to pay it off, at least it was better than in North America where a master was never under any obligation to sell a slave his freedom.
Also worth noting that it was perfectly legal for an Englishman to own slaves after the abolition, he just couldn’t own them in England. Many English fortunes were founded on fortunes from slave manned plantations in the Caribbean- I mentioned in another thread that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father owned hundreds if not thousands of slaves- and this was perfectly legal. (In literature, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights would almost certainly have been a slaveowner.)
African slaves in Europe were often used less as laborers than as colorful/exotic/status symbol domestic help, usually in high visibility professions such as coachmen or footmen or musicians. However, not all of the slaves in Europe were African. Beginning with Columbus many New World “adventurers*” took many New World Indians to Europe, among them the Patuxet known to history as Squanto; by the time the Pilgrims settled what’s now Plymouth he was fluent in Portuguese and English and had some Spanish due to his captivity in Europe; he was ultimately purchased and freed by an order of monks. Further east whites were used as slaves in some parts of eastern Europe until well past the Renaissance era and Turks captured in battle could be sold as slaves in Austria. (As with European p.o.w.s those who were rich enough were legally ransomed.)
Adventurer was used along the same lines as we would use investor, not in the “daring explorer” sense.