Abstract
There are some well-known points where the history of the British attack on the slave trade and the history of overseas missions intersect. It would have been surprising if they had not, for the tradition of connections between missionary activity and compassion for black people was a long-standing one. Several of the earliest polemicists, like Morgan Godwyn, were interested first in evangelisation and secondly in slavery.1 The colony of Sierra Leone was founded as much to spread Christianity in Africa as to cut off the slave trade at its source. Both the death of missionary Smith in Demerara in 1824, and the imprisonment of missionary Knibb in Jamaica in 1832, had a major political impact on the campaign against West Indian slavery. The disastrous Niger expedition of 1841, which brought about a revolution in public attitudes to slave trade suppression, was set in motion by the combined force of commercial, abolitionist and missionary sentiment. Even after the Great Exhibition, the ‘Africa fever’ which smote the British public in the wake of Livingstone’s discoveries was fuelled by a combination of zeal for missions and anxiety over the East African and Saharan slave trades.
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Notes and References
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C. Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists, 1833–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1981, forthcoming) appendices.
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See also Scott, From Office to Profession. The New England Evangelical Ministry, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia, 1978);
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Quoted in J. H. Hinton, Memoirs of William Knibb, Missionary in Jamaica (1847) p. 45.
W. Knibb and P. Borthwick, Colonial Slavery. Defense of the Baptist Missionaries (1833). See also P. Wright, Knibb ‘The Notorious,’ Slaves’ Missionary, 1803–1845 (1973) pp. 112 ff.
Whipple, Relation of the American Board … to Slavery, passim; R. J. Berkhofer, Salvation in the Savage. An Analysis of Protestant Missions to the American Indian and the American Indian Response, 1787–1852 (Lexington, Kentucky, 1965) pp. 141–2.
J. Dunlop, American Slavery: Organic Sins, or the Iniquity of Licensed Injustice (Edinburgh, 1846) p. 12.
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© 1982 Michael Craton, Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, Betty Fladeland, David Geggus, B. W. Higman, C. Duncan Rice, James Walvin
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Rice, C.D. (1982). The Missionary Context of the British Anti-Slavery Movement. In: Walvin, J. (eds) Slavery and British Society 1776–1846. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16775-3_7
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