The Propaganda of Anti-Slavery

Abstract

It has been argued that one of the crucial reasons for the success of the anti-slavery movement in Britain was the unprecedented support it came to acquire in the years 1798–1838.¹ In a society where Government was unaccustomed to the arts of containing and deflecting public pressure, the public demand for abolition of the slave trade and later emancipation of the slaves was not merely more powerful than any comparable movement but, significantly, it was thought by contemporaries to be irresistible. It is easy to take a cynical view of this — to fall back on a deterministic position and argue that no British Government could have contemplated ending so economically important a system as slavery unless flaws had begun to appear in that previously profitable edifice. At the very time the British ended the slave trade in 1807 the slave system was not regarded as unprofitable by contemporaries. Indeed the work of Seymour Drescher has shown that abolition came at a time of economic buoyancy for the slave system.² If this is true, and if it is also true that anti-slavery became the political issue which attracted more support from more varied social groups, the time is ripe for a closer examination of the anti-slavery campaign.