A bolitionism blossomed in the United States in the 1830s, but its roots stretched back to the 1780s in Britain and America. Developments in both countries led to a transatlantic antislavery movement with shared ideas, strategies, activists, songs, and, eventually, victories.

An important source of antislavery sentiment derived from the Quaker religion, with its deep convictions regarding human equality. But moral sentiment alone does not make a political movement. English Quakers, customarily an apolitical group, awoke to sudden antislavery zeal in 1783, triggered in part by the loss of the imperial war for America and the debate it spurred about citizenship and slavery. The end of the war also brought a delegation of Philadelphia Quakers to meet with the London group, and an immediate result was the first petition requesting that Parliament abolish the slave trade.

The English Quakers, now joined by a scattering of evangelical Anglicans and Methodists, formed the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 and in just five years became a force to be reckoned with. They amassed thousands of signatures on petitions to Parliament. They organized a boycott of slave-produced sugar from the British West Indies that involved 300,000 Britons. (Women, the traditional cooks of English families, were essential to the effort.) In 1789, the society scored a publicity coup by publishing two chilling illustrations of slave ships stacked with human cargo. These images, reprinted by the thousands, created a sensation. The society mobilized the resulting groundswell of antislavery sentiment to pressure Parliament once again. A sympathetic member of that body, the Methodist William Wilberforce, brought the anti–slave trade issue to a debate and vote in 1791; it lost.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Quakers in 1784 launched their own Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, which worked to end slavery in that state and petitioned the confederation congress—unsuccessfully—to end American participation in the international slave trade. When the First Congress met in 1790, this antislavery society delivered two petitions in quick succession, one to ban the slave trade and a second to ban slavery itself (see chapter 9, “Historical Question”). In rejecting both petitions, Congress pointed to the U.S. Constitution’s clause that prohibited federal regulation of the trade before 1808.

The antislavery movement also took root in France, with the founding of the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of Blacks) in 1788. Inspired by Quaker groups in London and Philadelphia, the Société sent petitions to the French National Assembly. All three antislavery groups, in close communication, agreed that ending the slave trade was the critical first step in abolishing slavery. That goal was achieved once the revolution of liberté and égalité came to France; a 1794 decree of the National Assembly freed all French colonial slaves and termed them citizens.

Success came more slowly in Britain and America. In 1807, Parliament finally made it illegal for British ships to transport Africans into slavery. A year later, the United States also banned the international slave trade. The rapid natural increase of the African American population made passage of this law relatively easy. Older slave states along the coast supported the ban because it actually increased the value of their native-born slaves who were sold and transported west in the domestic slave trade.

British antislavery forces took a new tack in the 1820s, when women became active and pushed beyond the ban on trade. Quaker widow Elizabeth Heyrick authored Immediate Not Gradual Abolition in 1824, prompting the formation of scores of all-women societies. American women abolitionists soon followed suit. Abolitionists again bombarded Parliament with a massive petition campaign, and 30 percent of the 1.3 million signatures submitted in 1833 were women’s. That year, Parliament finally passed the Abolition of Slavery Act, which freed all slave children under age six and gradually phased out slavery for everyone older during a four-year apprenticeship. The act also provided financial compensation for owners (£20 million), a key proviso made possible by the relatively small number of slave owners in the British slaveholding colonies.

The success of the British movement generated even greater transatlantic communication. In 1840, British and American abolitionists came together in full force at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Most of the 409 delegates were from Britain and the West Indies, although 53 Americans and half a dozen French delegates also attended. Ten days of meetings produced speeches and reports on the worldwide practice of slavery, along with debates over various economic and religious strategies to end it. A key plan was to publicize throughout America the British movement’s success in achieving emancipation. The delegates closed their meeting fully energized by their international congress, called to propose international solutions to an international problem.

America in a Global Context

Connect to the Big Idea

What parts of American abolitionism owed their origins and inspiration to European models? Do you think there were aspects of American abolitionism that would have emerged even without any European models? Why or why not?