History Knowledge Organiser: Why have historians disagreed about the
abolition of the slave trade?
Key Terms
Definitions
Triangular Trade
3 way trade involving slaves between America, Europe and Africa.
Commodities
A product that can be bought and sold normally agricultural but in
the terms of slave they are considered to be someone else’s
commodity.
Caribbean
A place near America where slaves were taken and sold.
Human Rights
A right which is believed to belong to every person.
De-humanised
To be treated as if you are not human. You are also made to feel
that way.
Property
When something is owned by someone.
KPI 5: To be able to analyse and evaluate sources relating to the treatment and experience of
slaves (this would include the middle passage).
The Triangular Trade
The slave trade began with Portuguese, and some Spanish, traders taking African slaves to the American
colonies they had conquered in the 15th century. British sailors became involved in the trade in the 16th
century, and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave them the right to sell slaves in the Spanish Empire.
In the 18th century, perhaps 6 million Africans were taken to the Americas as slaves, at least a third of them
in British ships.
• For the British slave traders it was a three-legged journey, called the 'triangular trade':
• Taking trade goods, such as guns and brandy, to Africa to exchange for slaves.
• Then taking the slaves on the 'Middle Passage' across the Atlantic to sell in the West Indies and North
America.
• Finally, taking a cargo of rum and sugar back to sell in England.
The march to the coast
Following their capture, the captives would be marched to the coast. The only reliable
European account of the harsh reality of the slave caravans comes from the explorer
Mungo Park writing in the 1790s. Of the indigenous slave markets, he wrote: 'There are
indeed regular markets where the value of a slave in the eye of an African purchaser
increases in proportion to his distance from his native kingdom.'
Writing on behalf of the Africa Association, a British explorers' oraganisation Park
reported that a typical column of slaves would spend eight hours a day on the road,
covering about 20 miles. They were joined in pairs at the leg and a chain would attach
them, one to another, at the neck. Park accompanied one such caravan from the banks of
the Niger to the River Gambia and was touched by the sufferings of those 'doomed ... to a
life of captivity in a foreign land'.
Coastal slave forts
The ultimate destination of the enslaved would often be one of the European forts on the
coast, such as Elmina, Bunce Island or the island of Gorée.
A map showing the Triangular Trade between
America, Europe and Africa. Africa traded
people, Europe traded guns for people,
America received people to work on
plantations in return for trading commodities
such as Cotton, Tobacco and sugar.
Source A shows slaves being transported
towards the coast. They are chained up and
made to walk.
Close to Cape Verde, Gorée (in what is now Senegal) had a pleasant climate, an abundance
of fish and fresh water. Its history was typical of many of the European forts and castles
that dotted the Atlantic seaboard. First claimed by the Portuguese, it was owned in turn
by the Dutch, the English and the French. Gorée was also famed among European traders
for its many fine houses.
Within the walls of the forts, the African captives would languish, perhaps for months, in
overcrowded dungeons. Conflict between different ethnic groups and between Europeans
and their European masters was the norm. Revolts were commonplace, and their brutal
and bloody suppression routine. Conditions in these forts accounted for many deaths
during the transatlantic slave trade.
KPI 5: To be able to analyse and evaluate sources relating to the treatment and experience of
slaves (this would include the middle passage).
Source B
The violence of the Africans, by murdering whole crews and destroying ships when they can, calls for
the same confinements as if they were wolves or wild boars.
From ‘History of Jamaica’ by E. Long, 1774.
Source C shows the hull of a slave ship.
There was little light, slaves were chained
up and kept in extremely crowded and
dirty conditions.
The Middle Passage
The average slaving voyage from the West African coast to the Caribbean or the Americas took six to
eight weeks. The new terrors experienced by the enslaved people and the inhuman discipline that
accompanied this – ships' crews, outnumbered 10 to 1 by their captives, resorted to the use of iron
muzzles and whips to exert control – would be a foretaste of the misery that awaited the Africans on
the other side of the Atlantic.
Languishing below decks in the slave hold were people thrown together from very different societies,
languages and cultures, some of whom had recently been at war with each other.
They were chained together on two tiers of shelves with less than 1 metre (330 cm) in which to sit up
in – in fact, the shelves of many cargo holds measured less than 0.45m (1.5ft) in height. Male slaves
were usually shackled together at the foot. In theory, each man was allotted a space of 1.8m (6ft) by
0.4m (1ft 4in) and each woman 1.5m (5ft) by 0.4m (1ft 4in). Girls were granted an area 1.4m (4ft 6in)
by 0.3m (1ft). Men were quartered separately from the women and children. This separation and the
levels of violence and aggression aboard slave ships made acts of physical and sexual abuse by the
sailors a feature of all voyages.
Food consisted mostly of starch: biscuit, flour, yam and beans flavoured with palm oil and hot peppers.
Occasionally there were concessions of salt beef and lime juice.
The loss of life was high on all voyages, particularly during the first part, when disease and
psychological trauma were especially lethal. Amoebic dysentery, scurvy, smallpox and measles were
common causes of death. Between 1680 and 1688, an average of 23% of the Royal African Company's
human 'cargoes' died en route to the Americas.
Key Terms
Definitions
Middle
Passage
The 6-8 week journey to the Caribbean for the slaves on board the
ships.
Baracoon
A fort on the west coast of Africa where slaves were kept before being
transported.
Languish
be forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation
scurvy
Scurvy is a disease resulting from a lack of vitamin C. Early symptoms
include weakness, feeling tired, curly hair, and sore arms and legs.
perished
Perish means to die, but it suggests a slow, gradual, nonviolent death.
Starving to death is perishing.
When disease began to spread, there was a tendency to throw the sicker Africans
overboard. There was even a case where 132 captives were drowned so that the
slave-ship owners could claim on the insurance. In all, an estimated 5 million
Africans – 30% of all those transported –perished before they reached the
Americas.
Not everyone could survive such routine torture and deprivation, and the weak
and frail were quickly broken both physically and mentally. Inevitably a level of
insanity grew among the enslaved during the passage, and there is considerable
evidence from slave owners that many Africans arrived in the Caribbean and the
Americas psychologically traumatised.
The accounts of life on board a slave ship given by the captains differ considerably
from those of their captives Speaking before the House of Commons, slave ship
Captain Thomas Tobin likened the conditions on board his ship to those of a
'nursery in any private family' where the crew busied themselves 'making
everything as comfortable as could possibly be for the slaves'.
KPI 5: To be able to analyse and evaluate sources relating to the treatment and experience of
slaves (this would include the middle passage).
The next great hurdle for the captives involved another stage of separation. Almost from the moment the
ships docked on the other side of the Atlantic, a majority of the Africans were organised into groups and
taken off to be sold, although on some Caribbean islands, laws were passed that people could not be sold
within 24 hours of landing.
Public auctions were the most common method of dispersal. However, there were also direct
consignments, by which a plantation owner would previously have made arrangements with a merchant to
bring enslaved people direct to their plantation, a given number of slaves per year.
Following disembarkation, auction blocks and holding pens were the centres of activity. Captives deemed
unfit for sale were classed as 'refuse' and were either sold cheaply in groups or left to perish where they lay
on the docks. Those to be sold were washed, shaved and rubbed with palm oil to disguise injuries sustained
during the voyage.
Following their sale, through a process known as 'seasoning', the Africans were forced, often under torture,
to accept identities suited to lifelong servitude. Having already been branded once in Africa, they would be
branded a second time by their legal owners, who would also give them a Christian name. African practices
and customs of all kinds were discouraged. Some captives already weakened by the horrors of the voyage
committed suicide. Others died under the pressure of the 'seasoning'.
Plantations
Plantations had been used with great effect long before the Europeans settled in the Americas. Sugar cane
plantations, for example, had thrived around the Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages, supplying an
expensive sweetener for Europe's élites. So when European merchants and adventurers began to sail and
trade around the Atlantic, they took the plantation model with them and transplanted it into a string of
new settlements – above all, in sugar.
T he early plantations used a mix of labour: European settlers, local indigenous peoples and African slaves.
This combination was rarely successful in sugar: Europeans disliked the work and the indigenous peoples
refused to do it. Thus sugar soon came to depend overwhelmingly on forced African slave labour.
As sugar came to dominate the landscape, plantations became bigger. And as they proliferated and as
demand for sugar in Europe increased, the plantations' demand for Africans grew proportionally. Wherever
a colony produced increased volumes of sugar, there we find massive importations of enslaved Africans. By
1600, perhaps 200,000 Africans had been shipped from West Africa as slaves. Fifty years later, that figure
had increased to 800,000.
This was not true of sugar. In North America, the British turned to slavery for the cultivation of tobacco on
plantations clustered around the Virginia, which provided an easy maritime route to Europe and,
increasingly, to the centre of the tobacco trade in Glasgow. By 1750, some 145,000 enslaved Africans
worked in the region. Later, when the British began rice cultivation in the Carolinas, they again turned to
the plantation model and the number of slaves grew rapidly: by 1750, 40,000 had been trafficked there.
Key Terms
Definitions
Plantation
Similar idea to a farm where crops were grown eg Cotton, Sugar
and Tobacco.
Overseer
Normally a slave that made sure other slaves were working.
Cat and nine tails
This was used to describe the style of whip that was used to
punish slaves.
American cotton plantations
This massive expansion of the enslaved population of the Americas was all
made possible, of course, by the transatlantic slave trade. In some regions,
however, the enslaved population began to increase with the birth of children
born on the plantations and planters came to rely less and less on arrivals from
Africa. This was especially striking in North America.
The rise of cotton in the United States came late in the history of slavery. After
1800, plantations growing this crop began to spread across a huge stretch of
the American South, as far west at the what is now New Mexico’s border. The
plantation was once again the key to local commercial success. By 1860, there
were 4 million slaves in the US, some 60% of whom worked in cotton.
But the plantation has a much broader importance than simply the history of
sugar: it was the organisational tool that enabled European settlers to develop
key areas of the tropical and semi-tropical Americas. And it did this primarily by
providing colonial settlers with the crucial means of dragooning and organising
unfree labour to raise a host of tropical and semi-tropical crops.
Levels of skill
Field hands tended to be labelled as unskilled, but their efforts were complemented by
those of others. The plantations depended on skilled slaves – masons, joiners, coopers,
metalworkers – to keep factories, fields, equipment and transport prepared and
functioning. The needs of the wider slave community were served by other vital workers:
cooks, nurses and seamstresses.
Those who were skilled and experienced in agriculture were often responsible for
important decisions on plantations: when cane was ready to harvest, when sugar juices
were ready, when tobacco leaves were ideal for picking, how best to pack, load and
transport the commodities grown on the plantation.
Everywhere, in all plantation societies, domestic slaves catered for every need of local
owners and managers, White and mixed-race, in their homes. Visitors to plantations were
often amazed at just how many domestic slaves were to be found in and around the homes
of planters and the managerial élite.
The lash and other punishments
Plantation slaves were expected to work as and when their owners and ‘overseers’
dictated. To a marked degree, their treatment depended on the individuals in charge. Yet
the most brutal aspect of their lives was not so much personal ill-treatment (though there
was plenty of that), but the system itself.
Those who were forced to work on the plantations were considered chattel (items of
property), commodities owned by others. Slave owners determined the nature of the
enslaved’s daily working lives – and even what happened to them when they were not at
work. The lash – both its image and its sound – is perhaps the most common memory of
plantation slavery, and critics and visitors were often astonished at how frequently they
saw plantation slaves physically abused. Normally such punishment was used to force them
to work, but the lash was also employed for a range of offences or even in a cavalier
fashion, in the hands of men and women to whom brutality was a way of life.
But plantation slavery did not function simply because of threats or violence. Slaves were
also cajoled and persuaded to work. They were given small incentives – extra foods,
clothing, time free from work – in the hope that they would work effectively. They were
also given land on which to cultivate foodstuffs or rear animals for their own use. Yet
violence was the ultimate threat and the lubricant of the entire system, much as it had
been on the slave ship.
Personal violations
Plantation slaves suffered other personal violations. They could be moved from one property
to another. An owner might, without notice, sell them to someone else, or they might be sold
when a planter died or fell on hard times. Moreover, they might be moved simply because the
owner had bequeathed them as part of his property to his children. Slaves found themselves
removed, in an instant to a distant, unknown location, leaving behind family and loved ones,
friends and community. This was one of the most bitterly resented features of plantation life
right across all plantation colonies. Sexual exploitation of women occurred too.
Resistance:
Many planters regarded slave religion as a form of resistance: a vehicle through which slaves could defy
their masters' wishes. Towards the end of slavery in the Americas the enslaved used religious meetings and
their own encoded songs to provide secret messages of how to run away via the Underground Railroad. It
would take many years after Emancipation for those codes to be shared and understood by the world.
In fact, slaves devised myriad ways of resisting. The most open – and most dangerous – was revolt. More
common was the daily round of opposition that characterised plantation slavery everywhere: footdragging, feigning ignorance, being uncooperative and 'artful'. When we add together these various slave
responses, a picture emerges of persistent non-compliance, revealing that resistance was built into the
social and human fabric of plantation life.
Sometimes enslaved Africans would resort to more open or violent means of resistance, including the
poisoning of animals and owners, and sometimes turned it against themselves by committing infanticide,
self-mutilation and suicide. It was not unusual for slaves to absent themselves from enslavement for a few
hours or a few days, regardless of the punishment they might receive on their return. It is estimated that
about 10% of all the enslaved took such action, which sometimes involved moving temporarily to another
location or, for those held captive in the Caribbean, even to another island.
Resistance to slavery had a long history, beginning in Africa itself. Rebellion would reach its peak in 1791,
when the enslaved people of the French colony of St Domingue defeated three European powers to
establish the first Black republic: Haiti.
The importance of African culture – names, craftsmanship, languages, scientific knowledge, beliefs,
philosophy, music and dance, was that it provided the psychological support to help the captives resist the
process of enslavement. The act of enslavement involved attempts to break the will and ignore the
humanity of slaves in what was known as 'seasoning'.
The maroons of Jamaica
In Britain, the Jamaican maroons are the most well known. Settlements had been established on the island
from the time of Spanish rule, and the Spanish actually released many enslaved Africans when the British
invaded and occupied Jamaica in 1655. The British in turn came to an agreement with one band of maroons
led Juan Lubola as early as 1658, and by the 18th century, there were two main maroon groups on the
island.
The British colonial forces attempted to suppress them in the 1st Maroon War of 1731–9. It was
inconclusive but led to the treaty of 1739, which gave the maroons land and some rights in return for
assisting the British against foreign invasion and for helping in the hunt for and return of runaway slaves.
The treaty clearly undermined maroon independence and led to the 2nd Maroon War of 1795, involving
only one group of maroons. Severely outnumbered, The Trelawny Maroons were eventually forced to
surrender and subsequently deported to Nova Scotia (in Canada) and then to Britain's new West African
colony of Sierra Leone.
Key Terms
Definitions
Resistance
Enslaved African Americans resisted slavery in a variety of active and
passive ways. "Day-to-day resistance" was the most common form of
opposition to slavery.
Rebellion
An act of armed resistance to an established government or leader.
Maroons
The actual word means living on mountain tops. These were a group of
slaves that forced Britain into a peace treaty in 1739
Insubordination
defiance of authority; refusal to obey orders.
Slave stories
Mary Prince
Mary Prince's account of her life gives us an insight into the life of an enslaved woman in the late
18th and early 19th centuries. Hers is the only known biography of an enslaved woman from the
British West Indies, and is more than just a personal story. It was also a contribution to the antislavery campaign written by a Black woman who represented those enslaved people whose stories
would never be heard.
Born in Bermuda in 1788, Mary's life was at first relatively tranquil. Purchased and made ‘the pet’ of
Betsey Williams, the daughter of her owners, she experienced kindness and affection. However,
when Betsey's mother died in 1798 and her father decided to marry again, Mr Williams sold Mary
and two of her sisters to raise money for the wedding. Mary's description of being sold is told with
great sadness:
The black morning at length came; it came too soon for my poor mother and us. Whilst she was
putting on us the new osnaburgs [a coarse cloth used for work clothes] in which we were to be sold,
she said, in a sorrowful voice (I shall never forget it!), 'See, I am shrouding my poor children; what a
task for a mother!' ... the [other] slaves could say nothing to comfort us; they could only weep and
lament with us. When I left my dear little brothers and the house in which I had been brought up, I
thought my heart would burst.
Thus, at an early age, Mary experienced loss and separation and came to understand that her life
was not her own but subject to the whims of those who owned her.
Her time with Captain Ingham and his wife, her new owners, introduced her to deprivation and
hardship. She was witness to the torture of children and the murder of another servant called Hetty,
and had first-hand experience of the types of instruments used for flogging: 'To strip me naked – to
hang me up by the wrists and lay my flesh open with the cow skin, was an ordinary punishment for
even a slight offence.'
On one occasion she was tied to a ladder and given 100 lashes for accidentally breaking an already
cracked vase. On another, she was struck in the back for allowing a cow to wander off – a blow that
resulted in a lifelong injury.
Mary Prince's narrative shows that enslaved workers had to be resourceful and sought the means of
survival through a variety of different roles. Women bore many burdens during slavery: in addition
to coerced labour and punishment, they had to take care of their owners' children as well as their
own and were often subject to acts of physical and sexual violence.
Like free people, enslaved workers would try to earn money by participating in the economy,
combining their work as field hands, domestics and artisans with their own commercial activities.
Mary Prince earned money by washing other people's clothes and selling yams, meat and coffee,
with the aim of somehow purchasing her freedom. She persisted towards this end, even though her
owners would not allow her to become free.
In her own active way, Mary resisted her enslavement by trying to change her status. For
example, unusually she had five owners when most enslaved workers had only one or two
during their lifetime. It may have been that she was sold so many times because she was
particularly resistance to enslavement. She would demonstrate this by working slowly or
feigning ignorance or sickness.
She was very strong willed, and there are instances in her narrative where she is seen to stand
up to her owners for their cruel treatment. For instance, without permission, she married
Daniel James in 1826, a free Black man who was a carpenter, whom she had met at Moravian
church meetings. Mr and Mrs Wood, her owners at this time, were so angry that Mary was
flogged with a horse whip. 'I thought it very hard to be whipped at my time of life for getting a
husband – I told her so,' she later wrote.
When the Woods travelled to London in 1828, taking Mary with them, she finally found a
means to escape, although it meant never seeing her husband again.
Mary Prince's narrative offers a sense of how one woman could overcome psychological and
physical trauma and hardship. She highlights not only the horrors of slavery, but also how the
human spirit can prevail.
KPI 6: To be able to assess why it took so long for the Slave Trade to be abolished.
KPI 6: To be able to assess why it took so long for the Slave Trade to be abolished.
The Campaign for Abolition
Equiano was an African writer whose experiences as a slave prompted him to become involved in the British
abolition movement.
In his autobiography, Olaudah Equiano writes that he was born in the Eboe province, in the area that is now
southern Nigeria. He describes how he was kidnapped with his sister at around the age of 11, sold by local
slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic to Barbados and then Virginia.
In the absence of written records it is not certain whether Equiano's description of his early life is accurate.
Doubt also stems from the fact that, in later life, he twice listed a birthplace in the Americas.
Complaints about the slave trade were unusual before the mid-18th century. Although
details of its harshness were well known (not least from information provided by the
thousands of sailors who worked the slave ships), any moral qualms were off-set by the
trade’s unquestioned benefits.
The maritime nations involved were keen to promote their own share of the trade and
to hinder their rivals. In addition, planters and colonial officials recognised that the
wealth flowing from the plantations depended on a regular supply of Africans to work
on the plantations. To suggest that the slave trade was wrong – immoral or un-Christian
– was to threaten the creation of material well-being. Why challenge a form of trade
that clearly benefited the Europeans and their colonists?
Apart from the uncertainty about his early years, everything Equiano describes in his extraordinary
autobiography can be verified. In Virginia he was sold to a Royal Navy officer, Lieutenant Michael Pascal,
who renamed him 'Gustavus Vassa' after the 16th-century Swedish king. Equiano travelled the oceans with
Pascal for eight years, during which time he was baptised and learned to read and write.
Yet from the earliest days of the trade, some voices had been raised against it,
suggesting that there was something ethically troubling about it. Catholic churchmen
saw problems with it in terms of religion, and others were deeply concerned by the
sheer brutality involved. These objections went unheeded, however, in the rush to
advance and expand plantation prosperity based on African slave labour.
Pascal then sold Equiano to a ship captain in London, who took him to Montserrat, where he was sold to
the prominent merchant Robert King. While working as a deckhand, valet and barber for King, Equiano
earned money by trading on the side. In only three years, he made enough money to buy his own freedom.
Equiano then spent much of the next 20 years travelling the world, including trips to Turkey and the Arctic.
In 1786 in London, he became involved in the movement to abolish slavery. He was a prominent member
of the 'Sons of Africa', a group of 12 black men who campaigned for abolition.
Abolition of the trade, not of slavery itself
In 1789 he published his autobiography, 'The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or
Gustavus Vassa, the African'. He travelled widely promoting the book, which became immensely popular,
helped the abolitionist cause, and made Equiano a wealthy man. It is one of the earliest books published by
a black African writer.
In 1792, Equiano married an Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen, and they had two daughters. Equiano died on
31 March 1797.
Quote from Equiano
'I was often witness to cruelties of every kind,' he wrote,
which were exercised on my unhappy fellow slaves ... in
Montserrat I have seen a Negro man staked to the
ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears cut
off bit by bit ... another Negro man was half hanged and
then burnt for attempting to poison a cruel overseer.
The London Abolition Committee was keen to present its arguments to Parliament.
Indeed only Parliament could answer the abolitionists' demands. The abolitionists
decided not to press for an end to slavery itself (though some members of the
committee wanted total emancipation). Instead they opted to demand the abolition of
the slave trade, which seemed more practical and manageable. After all, the bulk of the
slave ships left from British ports, and Parliament could regulate – or ban – the
movement of shipping from Britain itself.
Yet even that was a massive task. Abolitionists needed an influential spokesman in
Parliament, a man who knew his way around the corridors of power, who could impress
Parliament, and whose careful judgement would not be doubted by others. William
Wilberforce was the natural candidate.
The opposition
To persuade Parliament to end the British slave trade, the abolitionists had to win over
opinion in both the Commons and the Lords. But they faced resolute opposition from
powerful interests in Parliament, especially in the Lords, and in the country at large.
After all, major commercial interests were determined to see the slave trade continue.
Merchants, shippers, financiers, planters, colonial officials – all these and more saw their
future livelihoods tied to the slave trade.
Thus, the abolition campaign had to overcome this powerful sectional group – which
had its own spokesmen in Parliament – and the part of the general public who opposed
them. In 1787, the slave trade lobby felt confident that their arguments and their
economic position were secure. So unassailable did the slave trade (and slavery) seem
that few could have imagined how effective and how quick the abolitionist campaign
would prove to be. From 1787, the abolitionists soon outflanked the slave trade lobby.
KPI 6: To be able to assess why it took so long for the Slave Trade to be abolished.
The public campaign
The abolition movement operated on two levels. First, there was the parliamentary campaign led by
Wilberforce, but the real engine behind abolition was its public following. This campaign was led by
Thomas Clarkson who quickly transformed himself from a young researcher, initially destined for a
clerical career, which had been won over to abolition by what he had read, into a hugely influential
speaker and persuader. It was his empirical research, carried out among sailors in British slave ports,
that yielded astonishing and irrefutable data about the slave trade.
The popular and influential Clarkson covered 35,000 miles between 1787 and 1794, lecturing
wherever he went and gathering data for further use in the cause. He spoke to packed audiences in
churches, chapels and meeting halls. At the docksides, sailors told him the squalid details of life (and
death) on the ships. In addition, ships' documents revealed that the slave ships, far from being a
nursery for the Royal Navy, devoured sailors in extraordinary numbers. They both violated the
Africans and killed off or crippled the seafarers.
Information and propaganda
Clarkson built up a list of experienced men who had spent time on the slave ships so, when
Parliament, prompted by Wilberforce, began its official scrutiny of the trade; he was able to marshal
persuasive witnesses to add their voices to the abolitionist cause. What those men said - about the
ships and their sailors, about the nature of enslavement on the African coast, about African rebellion
and the ensuing violent repression, about the miseries and data of the Atlantic crossing all added up
to a picture of systematic brutalisation that shocked even those already opposed to the trade. In the
process, more and more people were persuaded that here was a form of trade that was hard to
justify – even though it yielded such material bounty to Britain, among others.
With the launch of the abolition campaign in 1787, information about the slave trade found its way
into all corners of British life. In large part, it did so because of the remarkable propaganda campaign
orchestrated by the abolitionists.
Their most persuasive weapon was the printed material distributed across the country, free, by local
abolitionists. Tracts published in London were reprinted and distributed in the provinces. Local
sympathisers put their own thoughts in writing, in pamphlets or as contributions to local
newspapers. Older abolitionist writing was reprinted, new lectures were printed, and evidence given
to parliamentary committees was published. The volume of printed abolitionist material was
staggering. And so too was the number of people turning out to hear abolitionists speak against the
trade. They filled chapels and lecture halls to overflowing, eager to hear the abolitionist message.
A new argument
On his lecture tours, Clarkson carried with him a chest filled with commodities and products from
Africa. Dozens of items were paraded before his audiences – cotton, peppers, hides, wood, dye, and
African artefacts – all to show that Africa had more to offer the outside commercial world than its
enslaved humanity. Normal trade could readily replace the trade for slaves.
KPI 6: To be able to assess why it took so long for the Slave Trade to be abolished.
The more Clarkson talked to men who had worked on the African coast, the more commodities he
added to his chest. Here was a new argument in the denunciations of the slave trade. Not only
was the trade cruel and un-Christian, but it also blocked the development of more normal forms
of trade. To those who said that abolition of the slave trade would bring about economic disaster,
Clarkson (and, later, others) answered that normal trade with Africa would flourish – if only the
slave trade were abolished.