Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787)

The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in London on 22 May 1787 by twelve men, most of them Quakers, to end Britain’s part in the Atlantic slave trade. Led by figures such as Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, it organised one of the first modern public campaigns, using petitions, pamphlets, images and consumer boycotts. Its work helped bring about the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807.

Background

By the 1780s Britain was the largest slave-trading nation in the Atlantic world. Ships from Liverpool, London and Bristol carried tens of thousands of Africans each year to the Caribbean and the Americas, across the Middle Passage.

Opposition had been growing for decades. Quakers in Britain and America had condemned slaveholding and, in 1783, the London Yearly Meeting of Quakers presented a petition to Parliament against the slave trade. Granville Sharp had won the Somerset case in 1772 and publicised the killings on the Zong, while Black writers in London were adding their own testimony.

In 1785 Thomas Clarkson, a young Cambridge graduate, won a university Latin essay prize on the question of whether it was lawful to enslave others against their will. Researching the subject convinced him that the trade was a moral evil, and he published an English version of his essay in 1786. He soon met Quaker activists and Sharp, who were looking for a way to turn concern into action.

Founding in 1787

On 22 May 1787 twelve men met at 2 George Yard, Lombard Street, the premises of the Quaker printer and bookseller James Phillips. Nine were Quakers, including Phillips, William Dillwyn, John Barton, George Harrison, Samuel Hoare, Joseph Hooper, John Lloyd, Joseph Woods and Richard Phillips. The other three were Anglicans: Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson and Philip Sansom.

Sharp became chairman, and Samuel Hoare acted as treasurer. Because Quakers could not then sit in Parliament, the committee needed a parliamentary champion, and in 1787 the young MP William Wilberforce agreed to lead the cause in the House of Commons, although he was not a founding member.

A deliberate strategy: the trade, not slavery

At its early meetings the committee decided to campaign against the slave trade rather than against slavery itself. Sharp would have preferred to attack both, but the majority argued that Parliament’s power over British shipping was clear, while slavery in the colonies raised difficult questions of property and colonial rights.

Many members also believed that ending the supply of new captives would force planters to treat enslaved people better and would lead slavery to wither away. That hope proved mistaken, and it took a separate campaign to win the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

Campaign methods

The society’s methods became a model for later pressure groups. Clarkson travelled thousands of miles, visiting Bristol and Liverpool to interview sailors, collect muster rolls and gather objects such as shackles and thumbscrews. His evidence fed into a Privy Council inquiry in 1788 and later parliamentary hearings.

The committee raised money, set up correspondence with local committees across Britain, and printed large quantities of pamphlets and reports. In 1788 more than 100 petitions against the trade reached Parliament, and in 1792 a further wave of 519 petitions arrived, with signatures commonly estimated at around 390,000.

Images were central. The society adopted a seal showing a kneeling African man in chains asking “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”, and Josiah Wedgwood, who joined the cause, produced cameo medallions based on it. They were set into brooches, hairpins and snuff boxes. In 1788–1789 the committee also published the diagram of the slave ship Brookes, which became the campaign’s most famous image.

In 1791–1792, after Parliament rejected abolition, campaigners promoted a boycott of slave-grown sugar. Contemporary estimates suggested that several hundred thousand people stopped using West Indian sugar, many of them women who managed household spending.

Allies beyond the committee

The committee itself was made up of white men, but the movement it led was much broader. Women could not vote or sit on the committee, yet they were prominent in the sugar boycott, wrote poems and pamphlets against the trade, and bought and wore the Wedgwood medallions. Writers such as Hannah More and Ann Yearsley published anti-slavery poems in 1788.

Black Britons also played an important part. Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, members of a group known as the Sons of Africa, wrote letters to newspapers and politicians, and Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), became one of the most widely read works of the campaign. Equiano toured Britain and Ireland promoting his book and the cause.

The society also built links abroad. It corresponded with abolitionists in Philadelphia and with the Société des Amis des Noirs, founded in Paris in 1788, which adopted a French version of the kneeling-slave emblem.

Parliamentary battles and setbacks

Wilberforce gave his first major speech against the trade on 12 May 1789. Regulation came first: Dolben’s Act of 1788 limited the number of captives a ship could carry according to its tonnage. But in April 1791 the Commons defeated Wilberforce’s motion for abolition by 163 votes to 88.

In 1792 the Commons voted for gradual abolition, but the House of Lords delayed it. The French Revolution, the war with France from 1793 and the Haitian Revolution made reform look dangerous to many in the political elite, and the society’s activity slowed during the 1790s.

Clarkson himself suffered a physical and nervous breakdown in 1794 after years of travel and retired from active campaigning for nearly a decade. Wilberforce continued to bring motions in the Commons almost every year, but each was defeated or delayed.

Revival and victory

The committee revived in 1804, and Clarkson returned to campaigning. Changing political circumstances, including the Union with Ireland in 1801, which brought Irish MPs to Westminster, and the coalition government led by Lord Grenville in 1806, opened the way.

A Foreign Slave Trade Act in 1806, which barred British subjects from supplying captives to foreign colonies, cut away a large part of the trade and weakened its defenders. The government presented it partly as a wartime measure against France, a tactic suggested by the lawyer James Stephen, which made it easier for wavering MPs to support.

The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act received royal assent on 25 March 1807 and banned British subjects from the trade from 1 May 1807. Its work largely done, the committee was succeeded by the African Institution, founded in 1807 to monitor enforcement and promote what its members saw as legitimate trade with Africa.

Timeline

• 1783: London Quakers petition Parliament against the slave trade.
• 1786: Clarkson publishes his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species.
• 1787, 22 May: The society is founded at George Yard, Lombard Street.
• 1787: The society adopts its “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” seal.
• 1788: Over 100 petitions reach Parliament; Dolben’s Act regulates slave ships.
• 1789, 12 May: Wilberforce’s first major Commons speech against the trade.
• 1791, April: The Commons rejects abolition by 163 votes to 88.
• 1792: 519 petitions reach Parliament.
• 1807, 25 March: The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act becomes law.

Why it matters

The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade showed how a small committee could mobilise a nation through print, images, petitions and boycotts. Its campaign ended British participation in one of history’s largest forced migrations and invented many of the tools that reform movements still use.