OCL History – Year 8

Abolition of Slavery Anthology

Abolitionists or agency, why was slavery

abolished?

Your name: _______________________________

Your teacher: _____________________________ 1

 English abolitionists or agency of the
enslaved, why was the slave trade
abolished in 1807?
Contents:

Chronology (Timelines)………………………………………………......3

Maps……………………………………………………………………….....4

Lesson 1:What was the Transatlantic Slave Trade? ………………..5

Lesson 2: How did the Zong massacre propel abolitionists into action?
………………………………………………………………………6

Lesson 3: Did twelve men in a printing shop change the world in 1787?
…………………………………………………………………….10

Lesson 4: What impact did the Haitian Revolution have on abolition?

……………………………………………………………….....14

Lesson 5: What changed in 1807? ………………………………...17

2
Chronology:

Timeline 1: Slave Trade in context of other periods studied

Timeline 2: Abolition of Slavery

3
Maps:

Map 1: Map showing the transatlantic slave trade, often referred to as the
‘Triangular Trade’

4
 Lesson 1: What was the Transatlantic Slave Trade?

Extract 1 – Taken from The International Slavery Museum.

1 For more than 2,000 years people in many different parts of the world have forced their fellow humans into slavery.
2 Between about 1500 and 1900, Europeans forcibly uprooted millions of people from throughout West Africa and
3 West Central Africa and shipped them across the Atlantic in conditions of great cruelty. To refer to the Africans who
4 were enslaved only as 'slaves' strips them of their identity. They were, for instance, farmers, merchants, priests,
5 soldiers, goldsmiths and musicians. They were husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. They
6 could be Yoruba, Igbo, Akan or Kongolese.
7
8 European slavers dispersed them across the Americas to lead lives of degradation and brutality, without thought for
9 their personal lives. They were not free to live or go where they wanted. They planted, cultivated, and harvested
10 crops. They earned no money from their labour. Their work often lasted 12 or 14 hours a day. Many were subjected to
11 cruel whippings as punishment if they did not work hard enough. They died young. Millions perished in the process.
12 As a result, people of African descent are spread throughout the Americas and Western Europe. This is called the
13 African Diaspora.
14
15
16 Knowledge Check:
17
A. The life of enslaved people was…
18 1. Hard, but it gave people the chance to explore new places
19
2. Brutal, they worked long hours for no pay, had no freedom, and did hard work.
20
3. Deserved, because they were all criminals who were being punished for their crimes
21
22
23
Now write:
24
25 The life of enslaved people was… for example…

There are many people of African heritage in America and Western Europe because… 5
26 The transatlantic slave trade generally followed a
27 triangular route. Traders set out from European
28 ports towards Africa's west coast. There they
29 bought people in exchange for goods and loaded
30 them into the ships. The voyage across the
31 Atlantic, known as the Middle Passage, generally
32 took 6 to 8 weeks. The horrific, cramped, and
33 dirty conditions resulted in more than 1 in 10
34 slaves dying onboard.
35
36
37 Once in the Americas those Africans who had survived the journey were offloaded for sale and put to work as
38 enslaved labour. The ships then returned to Europe with goods such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice and later cotton,
39 which had been produced by the enslaved people working on the plantations in European colonies.
40
41 The triangle, involving three continents, was complete. European capital, African labour and American land and
42 resources combined to supply a European market. The colonists in the Americas also made direct slaving voyages to
43 Africa, which did not follow the triangular route. This trade increased after 1800, particularly from Brazil.
44
45 The story of the transatlantic slave trade is the story of people on all three continents, as well as the dreaded 'Middle
46 Passage' voyage. At the high point of the trade close to 80,000 chained and shackled Africans were loaded onto slave
47 ships and transported to the New World each year. In parts of the Americas, slaves far outnumbered free persons. The
48 same was true in parts of Africa, and it was from these millions of indigenous slaves that African chiefs and dealers
49 drew most of the men and women they sold to Europeans. But it wasn’t just Europeans who engaged in slaving,
50 African slaves were spread throughout the Islamic world, and the Ottoman Empire enslaved other peoples as well. In
51 India and other parts of Asia, tens of millions of farmworkers were in outright slavery as well.
52
53
54
55

Knowledge Check:
A. Who was involved in the selling, shipping, and keeping of enslaved Africans?

1. Europeans were the only ones involved

2. Europeans, African Chiefs, and Asian empires all played a role in the trade.

3. Europeans and Asian Empires were the only ones involved.

6
Lesson 2: How did the Zong massacre propel abolitionists into action, and
what methods did they use?

Story 1– Taken from ‘Black and British’ by David Olusoga.

1 In September 1781 the Zong, a Liverpool registered slave-ship, sailed from Accra in Ghana with 442 slaves on
2 board, around twice the number a ship of that size could reasonably expect to transport without catastrophic loss of
3 life. By December, after a series of amateurish and baffling navigational errors, the ship was running out of
4 freshwater and disease had broken out on the slave decks and among the crew. To preserve supplies and protect
5 their profits by ensuring that at least some of the slaves reached the market in Jamaica alive, the crew of the Zong
6 cast 133 of the sickliest slaves overboard. The slaves had no hope of survival, sinking to their death in the cold,
7 murky depths of the Atlantic ocean. This was not done in a single moment of murderous haste but gradually and
8 systematically, over the course of three days. 10 of the enslaved Africans took matters into their own hands,
9 jumping overboard to their deaths rather than waiting to see if they would thrown over by the ship’s crew. It was a
10 clinical massacre of innocence, but it had stemmed from a strange mixture of callous self-interest and professional
11 incompetence, for when the Zong arrived in Jamaica just three weeks later there were still 420 gallons of water on
12 board. The terrible incident was brought to wider national attention only when the owners of the Zong filed an
13 insurance claim against the loss of ‘cargo’, demanding 30 pounds for each slave cast overboard.
14
15
16

7
Lesson 2: How did the Zong massacre propel abolitionists into action, and
what methods did they use?
Extract 2 – Taken from ‘Black and British’ by David Olusoga.

1 The campaign against slavery began as a mere rumbling of discontent among minority religious groups in the
2 1770s and 1780s. From those unpromising beginnings, it became a vast national movement. Within the span of a
3 single lifetime the people of Britain would reject and repudiate a trade which their own countrymen had perfected
4 and a plantation system that provided products upon which almost everyone relied upon to some extent. The
5 traffic in enslaved Africans was nevermore detestable than in 1783 when the details of what took place on board
6 the Zong became known in Britain.
7
8 The first anonymous reports of the case were spotted in the English newspapers by the watch full eye of Olaudah
9 Equiano, a former slave, possibly born in Nigeria, who had purchased his freedom and was living as a free man in
10 London. When the insurance case came to court in 1783 the cold, financial reasoning behind the massacre appalled
11 all those who heard it, as instead of feeling any guilt for the killing of so many slaves, the owners of the Zong only
12 cared about their loss of money. After hearing the evidence Lord Chief Justice, Mansfield privately admitted that
13 the case ‘shocks one very much’. Mansfield found against the shipowners and did not grant them any insurance
14 money for the slaves they had massacred.
15
16 Equiano, determined to help end the slave trade, knew exactly who to take news of this shocking incident to…
17 Granville Sharp. Sharp had already spent the last twenty years fighting the cause of slaves in Britain, ensuring that
18 enslaved Africans who made it to Britain could not be forced back to the New World to work on the plantations.
19 He knew how to kick up a fuss and maximise the publicity. Following Equiano’s tip-off, Sharp attended court and
20 recorded the speeches and testimonies given. These were then published, adding to the moral case against the slave
21 trade that was slowly building in the public’s consciousness.
22
23
24
25
Knowledge Check:
26
27 A. The shocking events of what had happened on board the Zong became public…
1. Straight after it had happened in 1781
28
29 2. But no one really cared about what had happened

30 3. In 1783, when the owners tried to claim money for the murdered slaves
31

8
 .
26 Sharp and Equiano also sought unsuccessfully to bring criminal charges against the crew of the Zong, but in
27 this they were unsuccessful and no one ever faced trial for the massacre. Great Britain’s Solicitor General,
28 Justice John Lee, refused to take up the criminal charges claiming “What is this claim that human people
29 have been thrown overboard... Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving
30 honourable men of murder… The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.”
31
32 Yet the fact that the case had garnered so much publicity and shocked so many millions was significant in
33 itself. The murder of the sick or the disruptive onboard slave ships was a routine practise as old as the Slave
34 Trade. But never before have the details of so terrible a case had been brought to the attention of so many.
35 For the first time, the majority of the British public had been shown some of the darkest secrets of the slave
36 trade. The popular outrage that reverberated from the Zong affair made it the next milestone in the
37 development of the abolitionist cause.
38
39 Although those who were responsible for the Zong massacre were never brought to justice, the event itself
40 increased the profile of abolitionists such as Granville Sharp and Olaudah Equiano and brought new
41 converts including Thomas Clarkson and Reverend John Ramsay to the cause. 
42
43 Four years after the Zong affair, in 1787, (the trial was in 1783), Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson set
44 up the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The abolitionist movement was formally born.
45 Its place of birth was a printing shop at 2 George Yard, London, long ago demolished. On 22nd May, twelve
46 men – nine Quakers and the rest Evangelical Anglicans gathered together and formed themselves into the
47 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
48
49
50
51
52
53

Knowledge Check:

A. Which best describes the impact of the Zong case on people’s attitudes in Britain?
1. Everyone in Britain was horrified by what had happened, but no one did anything about
it.

2. Very few people were affected by the details of what had happened.

3. Most people were horrified, but some still did not see enslaved people as real humans

Now write:

As a result of the Zong massacre… 9

However…
Lesson 3: Did twelve men in a printing shop change the world in 1787?

Story 2 – Taken from ‘Bury the Chains’ by Adam Hochschild.

1 Strangely, in a city where it seems that on almost every block a famous event or resident is commemorated
2 by a blue and white glazed plaque, non marks this spot. All you can see today, after you leave the Bank
3 station of the London Underground, walk several blocks, and then take a few steps into a courtyard, are a
4 few office buildings, an ancient pub, and, on the site itself, 2 George Yard, a glass and steel high rise.
5 Nothing remains of the bookstore and printing shop that once stood here, or recalls the spring day more than
6 200 years ago when a dozen people - a sombre-looking crew, most of them not removing their high round
7 black hats - walked through its door and sat down for a meeting. Cities build monuments to kings, prime
8 ministers, and generals, not to citizens with no official position who once gathered in a printing shop. Yet
9 what these citizens began rippled across the world and we feel its after-effects still. The result of this series
10 of events began that afternoon in London, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, was “absolutely without precedent…
11 If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary.”
12
13
14

10
Lesson 3: Did twelve men in a printing shop change the world in 1787?

Extract 3 – Taken from ‘Bury the Chains’ by Adam Hochschild.

1 By the end of the 1800s, slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost everywhere. The abolitionists of the
2 antislavery movement had achieved their goal in little more than one lifetime. But this had not happened by
3 chance. It took the hard work of individuals to convince, persuade and compel society and politicians that
4 Britain should no longer play a role in the slave trade.
5
6 It would be the late afternoon of May 22nd, 1787, when twelve determined men sat down in the printing
7 shop at 2 George yard, amid flatbed presses, wooden trays of type, and large sheets of freshly printed book
8 pages, to begin one of the most ambitious and brilliantly organised citizens movements of all time. Thomas
9 Clarkson, a 25 year old Englishman, was the principal organiser of the gathering at George Yard. Redhead,
10 dressed in black, he was the youngest of those who went to the shop that day, perhaps tucking his head
11 slightly as he came to the doorway as he a full six inches taller than the average Englishman of his time. In
12 the years to come, his 16 hour day campaigning against slavery would take him by horseback on the 35,000-
13 mile odyssey, from waterfront pubs to an audience with an emperor, from the decks of Navy ships to
14 parliamentary hearing rooms. More than once people would threaten to kill him, and on a Liverpool pier in
15 the midst of a storm, a group of slave ships would nearly succeed. Almost forgotten today, he remains one of
16 the towering figures in the history of human rights.
17
18
19
20 Now write:
21
English abolitionists worked incredibly hard to campaign to abolish the Slave Trade. For example,
22 Thomas Clarkson…
23 All of the 12 founding members, Thomas Clarkson; Granville Sharp; Philip Sampson; William Dillwyn;
(+Furthermore…)
24 John Barton; George Harrison; Samuel Hoare Jr; Joseph Hooper; John Lloyd; Joseph Woods; James Phillips
25 and Richard Phillips, were religious men and were deeply shocked by what they came to learn about slavery
26 and the slave trade. But in England itself, there were no chained captives, no whip wielding overseers on
27 horseback stalking the rows of sugar cane. The abolitionists' first job was to make Britons understand what
28 lay behind the sugar they ate, the tobacco they smoked, the coffee they drank.
29
30
31
32

11
33 To achieve that aim the early abolitionists embarked upon a campaign of public education, popular
34 persuasion, and political lobbying that was unprecedented in scale and revolutionary in nature. They wrote
35 and published thousands of books and pamphlets and pioneered the use of the mass petition as a
36 campaigning tool. They harvested millions of individual signatures from the British public and delivered to
37 parliament hundreds of petitions. Historians have calculated that between 1787 and 1792, 1.5 million people
38 in Britain signed petitions against the slave trade, when the national population was just 12 million.
39
40
41
Knowledge Check:
42
43 A. The abolitionists tried to convince parliament to end the Slave Trade by…
1. Getting huge numbers of the British public to sign petitions against the slave trade
44
45 2. Getting well known people to sign petitions against the slave trade

46 3. Using violence against politicians to show them what being a slave was like.
47
48
49 The abolition movement also deployed the boycott as a political weapon. Abolitionists were encouraged to
50 eschew (avoid) the use of cane sugar produced by slaves and instead add lemon to their tea. In his address to
51 the people of Great Britain of 1791, the abolitionist William Fox wrote, ‘... if we purchase the commodity,
52 we participate in the crime… in every pound of sugar used… we may be considered as consuming 2 ounces
53 of human flesh.’ 200,000 copies of William Fox’s address were printed, and they circulated around Britain
54 and America. Thousands of public meetings were held across the country, and speeches often went on for
55 hours. To demonstrate the most brutal aspects of the slave trade, the abolitionists acquired its tools and
56 shackles, metal punishment collars, and whips. With these vile props, they confronted their audiences with
57 physical evidence of the violence of the salve trade. The most successful of the abolitionist gatherings
58 became enormous events, attracting crowds of 10s of thousands strong, and at the end of the speeches there
59 were always opportunities to sign petitions and to purchase abolitionist tracts, pamphlets and, increasingly
60 books.
61
62 The anti-slavery campaign in England was something never seen before: it was the first time a large number
63 of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights. And most
64 startling of all, the rights of people of another colour, on another continent.
65
66
67
68
69

12
Lesson 4: What impact did the Haitian Revolution have on abolition?

Story 3– ‘At the Foot of Vesuvius’, taken from ‘Bury the Chains’ by Adam Hochschild.

1 At 10:00 PM on August 22nd, 1791, the ‘volcano’ erupted. Drumbeats gave the signal. Slaves attacked plantation
2 buildings with pruning hooks, machetes, and torches. For miles around, they set fire to everything connected with
3 the hated work of sugar cultivation: cane fields, mills, boiling houses, and warehouses. Machinery that would not
4 burn they smashed with sledgehammers. They murdered white men in their beds. They nailed one member of the
5 slave-catching militia alive to the gate of his plantation and chopped off his arms and legs. They tied a carpenter
6 between two planks and sawed him in half. Two sons of a white planter and a slave woman stabbed their father to
7 death. Planters had been meting out similar violence to their slaves for generations, but news of these atrocities
8 sent waves of horror through Europe because for the first time white people were being killed by the hundreds, a
9 toll that would soon mount into the thousands. The world was turned upside down.
10
11 French soldiers on the island of St Dominique were confident they could put down the uprising, as they had
12 suppressed various small revolts in the past. One group of officers calmly continued their dinner even when an
13 alarm warned them that rebels were approaching. “We were eating heartily until the moment a cannonball passed
14 through the window and carried away, right under our beards, the table, and all the plates.”
15
16 Eventually, after 12 years, 4 months, 1 week, and 4 days, in 1804, the rebellion was successful, having fought off
17 the French, then British and Spanish, and for the first time in a Caribbean colony, slavery was ended. The French
18 imposed name of St Dominque was cast off, just as the slaves had cast off their chains, and Haiti was born.
19
20
21
22

13
Extract 4 – Taken from ‘Black and British’ by David Olusoga.

1 It was the largest slave rebellion in history and the only one that was successful. The Haitian Revolution
2 and its ending of slavery on the island led, eventually, to the creation of the first sovereign black state in the
3 Western Hemisphere. To the British defenders of slavery, and its increasingly conservative ruling class, the
4 carnage in Saint Domingue was viewed as evidence that slavery, for all its inherent evils, was capable of
5 restraining the supposedly innate violence of the black race. For this reason, they argued that slavery should
6 be tolerated and all talk of abolition ended.
7
8
9 The icon of the abolition movement was the
10 famous image of the enslaved man kneeling with
11 his hands in chains, asking ‘Am I Not A Man And
12 A Brother?’. Designed by the Quaker abolitionist
13 Josiah Wedgwood, it was one of the most
14 compelling and brilliant pieces of political
15 marketing ever devised. By depicting the
16 enslaved man as a fellow human being, but
17 helpless, it emphasised the idea that abolition was
18 an act of Christian charity and humanitarian
19 compassion.
20
21
22
23 The Haitian Revolution, and it’s violent nature was used by pro-slavery campaigners to argue that the racial
24 character of Africans was a savage people whose innate capacity for violence necessitated brutal suppression and
25 justified slavery. They argued that such acts demonstrated Africans were not the same type of ‘Man’.
26

Knowledge Check:

A. One interpretation of the Haitian revolution is that the brutal violence…

1. Hindered abolition, as pro-slavery campaigners used it to suggest Black people needed

to be chained up to prevent such violence.

2. Hindered abolition, as British abolitionists realised they were wrong about Black people
being their ‘brothers’.

3. Meant abolition was not needed, as all enslaved people had freed themselves.

14
Extract 5 – Taken from ‘Natives’ by Akala.

1 It is absolutely inconceivable that Britain would have suddenly had the moral epiphany in 1807 to abolish
2 the slave trade if they had successfully invaded Haiti, making them undisputed masters of the Caribbean by
3 holding the two most important Caribbean colonies of the time, Haiti and Jamaica. Whilst there were many
4 abolitionists in Britain, and the British public were at this time aware of the horrors of the trade, many of
5 those in power were still making fistfuls of profit from the trade. Had Britain been able to capture the vast
6 sugar and coffee plantations of St Dominique (Haiti), which produced over 40% of the world’s sugar and
7 half of the world’s coffee, the moral cause for ending the slave trade would have been crushed under the
8 greed of the rich to become even more wealthy, no matter how many Africans had to die.
9
10 During the course of the unsuccessful British invasion, from 1793-1798, parliament voted against ending the
11 slave trade five times, all whilst the Prime Minister, William Pitt, spent £10million funding the British
12 invasion, which cost the lives of 15,000 British soldiers. It hardly seems likely that having spent so much
13 money and blood that the British government would have then simply have ended the trade that provided
14 the free labour to cultivate the sugar and coffee grown on Haiti a few years later.
15
16 However, Just 3 years after the Haitian Revolution had finally succeeded, the ex-slaves of Haiti, led by
17 Toussaint L’Ouverture, having fought off Britain, Spain and France, Parliament voted to abolish the Slave
18 Trade. Their actions, whilst violent, proved that enslaved Africans were far from helpless, and although this
19 initially undermined the abolitionists attempts to show that Black people were humans, at the end of the
20 revolution many people in Britain began to consider whether the slave trade itself was responsible for the
21 violence, rather than the enslaved people themselves.
22
23 The success of the revolution also sparked great fear that enslaved people would be inspired by what had
24 happened and more uprisings would take place. Sources suggest that enslaved Africans actually engaged in
25 many acts of resistance both during the Middle Passage, as well as on plantations, the Haitian Revolution
26 was not the first time the enslaved had tired to cast of their chains, but it was the most successful and had the
27 biggest impact.
28
29
30
31
32
Knowledge Check:

A. Another interpretation of the Haitian revolution is that it eventually helped abolition as…

1. It prevented Britain from gaining the valuable sugar and coffee plantations, which would
have needed more slaves to work them.

2. The violence was seen necessary by the British Public

3. It started a chain reaction of successful slave rebellions.

15
Lesson 5: What changed in 1807?

Extract 6 – Taken from ‘Black and British’ by David Olusoga.

1 William Wilberforce began his struggle to bring about those ‘greater mercies’ in May 1789. Leader of the
2 parliamentary side of the abolitionist campaign, he had been convinced of the need to end the slave trade by the
3 work of Society for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, and in particular, the work of Thomas Clarkson
4
5
Knowledge Check:
6
7 A. Why did the Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce join the fight to abolish the
slave trade?
8
1. He suddenly saw that the salve trade was evil.
9
10 2. Details of the Zong massacre compelled him to act.

11 3. He was persuaded by the work of English abolitionists to help end the slave trade
12
13 Wilberforce delivered his first speech against the slave trade to the House of Commons that year. The speech was
14 three and a half hours long and instead of openly criticising the slave traders he spoke of collective national guilt.
15 He said “I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common, indeed, with the whole
16 parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all
17 guilty”. The first Bill to bring about the abolition of the trade was introduced to the House of Commons by
18 Wilberforce in 1791. It failed.
19
20 Wilberforce went on to introduce Bills for the general abolition of the slave trade every year between 1794 and
21 1799. They were all voted down. Despite huge public agitation and the continuing growth of the abolitionist
22 movement the issue of slavery rarely dominated the attention of parliamentarians. The wars with France, poor
23 harvests, widespread distress among the poor, and a rebellion in Ireland made it increasingly difficult for Clarkson,
24 Wilberforce, and their allies to keep the abuses of the slave traders at the forefront of MPs minds - despite the
25 constant barrage of new abolitionist pamphlets and the constant drumbeat of mass public meetings and fiery
26 speeches. By 1804 Wilberforce had come to fear that the momentum that had been built up behind the movement
27 in the 1790s had been lost.
28
29
30
16
31
 Knowledge Check:
1
2 A. Why was William Wilberforce worried that the slave trade would never be abolished?
3
1. The abolitionists had stopped campaigning and the public had forgotten the horrors of
4 the slave trade.
5 2. Despite all the campaigning and public outrage, most MPs were more interested in other
6 events, such as war with France.

7 3. Britain had captured Haiti and needed to send slaves to work on the sugar and coffee
plantations there.
8
9
10
In 1805 yet another Bill was defeated in the Commons by a narrow margin but that year the political mood began
11
to shift.
12
13
Decisive victory over the French at Trafalgar strengthened Britain’s military and economic position in the world.
14
Parliament had changed too. Many of the proslavery members who had thwarted attempts to prohibit the trade had
15
retired or passed away and the election of 1806 changed the complexion of parliament. A new, younger generation
16
of parliamentarians took up their places on the benches of the House of Commons and Wilberforce seized the
17
opportunity. After so many parliamentary failures and after years of opposition from the Lords, Wilberforce’s final
18
abolition Bill was presented before a parliament far more sympathetic to his ambitions than any that had been
19
called previously. The Bill, introduced in 1807, passed through both houses and came into force on the 1st of
20
January 1808. The British slave trade, beginning in the 1660s under King Charles the second, had, by this act, been
21
‘utterly abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful.’
22
23
24

Now write:

Finally, after years of campaigning, (+abolished) (+1807) (+members of parliament)

17