Antislavery Movements

Although enslaved conditions persist even in the global era, the terms slavery and antislavery movements usually refer to the historical slave trade of earlier centuries. Antislavery movements, also known as abolitionist movements, aimed to abolish trade in African slaves and slavery in western Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

Abolitionists were driven by the rationalist ideology rooted in the Enlightenment with its belief in the inherent rights of a human being, or liberal humanism, or by the doctrine of the Society of Friends (Quakers) that, because there is something of God in everybody, all persons must be valued equally. Quakers became the pioneering abolitionists in Protestant-majority countries such as Britain, British America, and the United States. Their campaign was complemented by some liberal individuals in England who took the cases of [Page 74]recaptured Black slaves to the courts. Slaves' repeated rebellions also advanced abolitionism.

The German and Dutch Quakers in German-town, Pennsylvania, were the first to protest against the enslavement of Africans in 1688. Eight years later, Pennsylvanian Quakers officially declared their opposition to the importing of African slaves into North America. As the 18th century unrolled, sentiment against the slave trade grew steadily in North America and western Europe. So, too, did the number of slave rebellions, organized or spontaneous. During the 17th and 18th centuries, there were over 250 slave uprisings or attempted uprisings in North America. In the British West Indies, slaves revolted 73 times in the 18th century.

The slave rebellion in France's Caribbean colony of Santo Domingo (later renamed Haiti) in 1791–2 years after the French Revolution—led to the abolition of slavery by Paris in order to retain the local population's loyalty to revolutionary France. The popularly elected Assembly of the First Republic (1792–1794) abolished slavery in France and its colonies in 1794. Although Napoleon I reestablished slavery and slave trade in 1802, the founding of the Black Republic of Haiti gave impetus to the abolitionist movements in the Caribbean and South America.

Whether they worked as plantation laborers or house servants, slaves were treated as property in law. In 1720 and 1749, English courts ruled that a runaway slave in England could be recovered. In 1772, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield considered the case of James Somersett, an escaped slave who had been recaptured and put aboard a Jamaica-bound ship. He concluded his verdict thus: “The state of slavery is … so odious that nothing can support it but positive law. … I cannot say that this case is allowed or approved by the law of England and therefore the black must be discharged” (Hiro, 1991, p. 3). This judgment is wrongly construed to mean that, thereafter, slavery in England became illegal. Nothing of the sort happened. Mansfield's verdict merely said that, until Parliament enacted specific legislation covering slavery, the power in dispute—to transport a slave from England to the colonies—could not be exercised legally.

Because of the tireless campaigning by Quakers and other citizens through speeches, sermons, and pamphlets—combined with the founding of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in Philadelphia in 1775—Penn-sylvania became the first American state to pass a law for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in 1780. In contrast, slavery and slave trade were entrenched in the 11 southern colonies of British America and the West Indies colonies of the British Empire, where they were inextricably linked with the plantation economy based on slave labor.

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