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♡Slaves being freed in england, March 25, 1807♡

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♡Slaves being freed in england, March 25, 1807♡

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♡British work to try and end slave trade in africa♡

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♡British work to try and end slave trade in africa♡

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The Tragic Life of Queen Victoria’s African Goddaughter | Sarah Forbes Bonetta

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Why Did Britain Abolish Slavery in 1833? (Pt 1)

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1807 - The Year Britain Abolished Its Slave Trade (Part 1)

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♡British sailors and their anti-slavery missions.♡

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♡British sailors and their anti-slavery missions.♡

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The HMS Gannet's History of Anti-Slavery Missions

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The Black Victorians (Victorian Era 1800s-1900s)

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♡English history: Black princess Sarah Forbes Bonetta♡

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♡English history: Black princess Sarah Forbes Bonetta♡

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The story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the African orphan who became the protégée of Queen Victoria, reads more like fiction than fact.

Born in West Africa, in what is now south-west Nigeria, she was captured as a child and held in captivity by the King of Dahomey before she was gifted to a British naval captain and taken to England. There, Queen Victoria took her under her wing, and by the time she reached adulthood she had taken her place in Victorian high society and become a celebrity - as well as part of the contemporary debate about race, slavery and empire.

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Sarah Forbes Bonetta, Queen Victoria's African Protégée

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The story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the African orphan who became the protégée of Queen Victoria, reads more like fiction than fact.

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Abolition of the slave trade and slavery in Britain

Towards the end of the 18th century, a movement emerged calling for an end to the slave trade and, later, slavery itself. Professor John Oldfield traces the road to abolition from the 1780s to the 1830s, highlighting the impacts of grass-roots organisation, leadership, Black resistance and pro-slavery interests.

Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade officially began, with royal approval, in 1663. In less than 150 years, Britain was responsible for transporting millions of enslaved Africans to colonies in the Americas, where men, women and children were forced to work on plantations and denied basic rights. This inhumane system led to the emergence of racist ideas and pseudoscience that were used to justify it.

Towards the end of the 18th century, a movement emerged calling for an end to the slave trade and, later, slavery itself. Abolitionism was one of the most successful reform movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. It was also one of the most protracted. It took 20 years to abolish Britain's involvement in the slave trade and a further 26 years to abolish British colonial slavery in the Caribbean. While it is tempting to see abolition as a triumphalist story, the reality is rather different. Each stage in this struggle was bitterly fought over, pitting anti-slavery activists against powerful pro-slavery interests. The international context was also important, as were grass-roots organisation, strong leadership and what today we might call capacity building; that is, efforts to create unity and purpose, even in the face of determined opposition.

Forming Britain's first anti-slavery society

Properly speaking, the history of large-scale British anti-slavery organising dates from the late 1780s. Of course, there were important initiatives before this date, including Lord Mansfield's decision in the Somersett case (1772), which set a limit on the ability of masters to take African 'servants' out of Britain against their will. There were also Granville Sharp's efforts, along with those of the free Africans Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, to publicise the facts of the 1781 Zong massacre, in which the owner of the Zong attempted to collect insurance money for 133 sick and dying enslaved Africans who had been thrown overboard, as the ship lay stranded in the mid-Atlantic. But these stirrings did not as yet represent a coherent movement. That was to come in the years immediately following the American Revolution (1776-1783). It is no coincidence, for instance, that the first organised anti-slavery society in Britain, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST), was founded in May 1787, taking its inspiration from events on the other side of the Atlantic, where the American Revolution had witnessed the first tentative steps to abolish slavery and the slave trade, mainly in Northern colonies (now states) such as Pennsylvania and New York.

Minutes of the Committee for the abolition of the slave trade

'At a Meeting held for the Purpose of taking the Slave Trade into consideration, it was resolved that the said Trade was both impolitick and unjust': minutes from the first meeting of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (22 May 1787).

The early British movement differed from its American counterpart in one important respect, however. As its name implied, the SEAST was organised with the declared intention of tackling slavery in the British Caribbean at its source. Namely, the highly lucrative transatlantic slave trade that British merchants and traders had done so much to perfect, being responsible for 50 per cent of all enslaved Africans - roughly 3.4 million people - shipped from Africa to the Americas between 1662 and 1807. The wealth derived from this trade not only created large personal fortunes but also provided a stimulus to British industry, not least when it came to the outfitting of ships bound for the west coast of Africa and the processing of colonial products such as sugar, tobacco and cotton. Furthermore, the rise of plantation complexes that depended on enslaved African labour underpinned Britain's imperialistic expansion in the Americas, at the same time creating important links between economic interests and state power.

Creating a social movement

It is worth stressing that at this time the slave trade was not only legal but also considered by many an essential and necessary part of the British Empire, both as a source of wealth and as a 'training ground' for British seamen. The first task facing the SEAST, therefore, was to create a constituency for anti-slavery; in effect, to turn an idea (that the slave trade was wrong) into a social movement that would mobilise thousands of Britons. An important lead came from Thomas Clarkson, one of the founding members of the SEAST, who on his various tours of Britain worked assiduously to raise public awareness of the horrors of the slave trade. The nearest thing at this period to a full-time professional reformer, Clarkson was also the author of An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1786), one of the foundational texts of the early abolitionist movement. At the same time, the SEAST harnessed a wide range of opinion-building techniques, among them advertising, public meetings, letter writing, and the circulation of books and pamphlets. They also gave the movement an important visual identity, most memorably through Josiah Wedgwood's image of a kneeling enslaved man, together with the motto ' Am I Not a Man and a Brother '. Popular in its day, in recent decades this image has been criticised for depicting enslaved Africans as passive and deferential, while ignoring the resistance of enslaved and formerly enslaved people.

Medal produced for the abolitionist campaign

Drawing of the slave ship 'Brookes'

This engraving of a slave ship was published in the 1780s by abolitionists to raise awareness about the horrors of the Middle Passage. Although it shows 454 people, the maximum allowed by British law from 1788, the Brookes carried as many as 609 at one time.

More recently, too, there has been wider recognition that this was a diverse movement. For instance, many women across all classes subscribed to local anti-slavery committees or else made their presence felt through boycotting slave-produced goods, principally sugar. At its peak, the abstention campaign of 1791-92 is said to have involved as many as 300,000 people. Many formerly enslaved Africans were also part of the movement, among them Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano. Both men were members of the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist group formed by Africans in Britain and which had close connections with SEAST. In his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery, originally published in 1787, Cugoano argued for the total abolition of slavery and produced what Vincent Carretta has described as the 'most overt and extended challenges to slavery ever made by an English-speaking person of African descent'. Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789) was, if anything, more influential still, going through nine British editions in little more than five years. Equiano was also an effective anti-slavery lecturer. In 1791, he spent eight and a half months in Ireland. The following year, he visited Scotland and spoke to meetings in Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Cambridge and Durham.

Petitioning parliament and opposition to abolition

These pioneering efforts resulted into two highly successful petition campaigns that provided William Wilberforce, the movement's chief parliamentary spokesman, with the ammunition he needed as he fought to bring the slave trade to the attention of the British House of Commons. The first of these campaigns took place in 1788, the second in 1792 when 519 petitions were presented to the Commons, 'the largest number ever submitted to the House on a single subject or in a single session'. Moreover, the tactic nearly worked. In 1792, the House of Commons voted in favour of the gradual abolition of the slave trade, a decision subsequently reversed by the House of Lords, which insisted on hearing its own evidence for and against the trade. Over the years, this would become a familiar story. Wilberforce's opponents were well organised and hugely influential. Chief among them was the powerful London Society of West Indian Planters and Merchants, which had close links with the City of London, as well as with MPs, some of whom - like William Beckford - were themselves absentee planters. Forced on to the defensive, the abolition movement lost momentum after 1792. The French Revolution, notably the September Massacres of 1792, also took its toll, frightening off many would-be supporters of abolition, leading to accusations from pro-slavery advocates that Wilberforce and his followers were unpatriotic Jacobin sympathisers bent on the subversion of the British Constitution.

The Benevolent Planters by Thomas Bellamy

Thomas Bellamy's play The Benevolent Planters was used as a propaganda tool by the pro-slavery group, the West India Lobby.

Meanwhile, enslaved people in the Caribbean continued to resist and fight against slavery, such as by running away, deeds of non-cooperation and organised, collective rebellions. Beginning in August 1791, thousands of enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) rose up against the profoundly brutal slave regime. Led by Toussaint L'Ouverture and later by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the revolutionary struggle lasted for 12 years and resulted in the abolition of slavery and Haitian independence. These events were pivotal for the wider abolitionist movement in Britain and elsewhere, and later provided the inspiration for the work of C L R James (1901-1989) and others, who drew on the revolt to highlight the role of enslaved people in the Caribbean in fighting for their own freedom.

Toussaint L'Ouverture on horseback

A powerful image of Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave who helped to fight colonial forces on the island of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) and was a leader of the Haitian Revolution.

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Held by© Victoria and Albert Museum

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C L R James, 1938

'The revolt is the only successful slave revolt in history': C L R James introduces his subject in the preface to the first edition of The Black Jacobins.

Usage terms Copyright © Estate of CLR James, reproduced courtesy of the Curtis Brown Group. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work.

Passing the 1807 Slave Trade Abolition Act

It is a measure of Wilberforce's commitment to abolition that throughout these turbulent years he went on presenting to Parliament his annual motions against the slave trade. Eventually, the tide began to turn in the abolitionists' favour. Events in the Caribbean, particularly the Saint Domingue slave uprising (1791) and the emergence of Haiti (1804) as an independent Black republic, convinced many MPs that it might be worth sacrificing the slave trade, if by doing so that meant reducing the possibility of further rebellions and therefore preserving Britain's own slave colonies. As war broke out again in Europe (1804-15), others, both inside and outside Parliament, also began to question the wisdom of supplying enslaved Africans to Britain's enemies, chief among them France and Spain.

Capitalising on this shift in the geopolitical situation, abolitionists started to chip away at the legal provisions that protected the slave trade. This occurred first through the Foreign Slave Trade Act (1806), which prohibited British slave traders from operating in territories belonging to foreign powers, and then the Slave Trade Abolition Act of March 1807, which abolished Britain's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade once and for all. It was a momentous decision and one that was also a personal triumph for Wilberforce, as well as the members of the SEAST. But it is worth emphasising that this unfolding drama was set in motion by events in the Caribbean. The final push towards 1807 was also made easier by the knowledge that the USA was about to abolish its own international slave trade, as set out under the terms of the US Constitution. In this sense, the national and the international were always in delicate balance with each other, sometimes colliding, at other times coalescing to effect meaningful political change.

The next stage: Campaigning for the (gradual) abolition of slavery

Wilberforce had hoped that abolition of the slave trade would signal the slow death of slavery, as colonial interests were forced to reform the institution from within. By the early 1820s, however, it was obvious that this policy was not working, largely because of the illegal slave trade but also because of the failure of British diplomatic efforts to internationalise abolition. As a result, in 1823 Wilberforce, Clarkson and others organised the Anti-Slavery Society, or, to give it its full title, the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions. The new organisation signalled a radical new departure in British anti-slavery politics. Yet it is important to note that the society did not demand the immediate overthrow of slavery, merely the adoption of measures designed to 'mitigate' its worst abuses, together with a plan for gradual emancipation leading ultimately (it was not said when) to complete freedom. This gradualist approach initially proved popular with anti-slavery activists. The Anti-Slavery Society quickly established an impressive network of local and regional auxiliaries, including many female societies, some of them more active than their male counterparts. Estimates vary, but it seems likely that over 70 'ladies associations' were active between 1825 and 1833. One of the most enterprising was the Birmingham Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves, which besides distributing books and pamphlets also designed and created a range of anti-slavery artefacts, including work bags, pin holders and samplers, examples of which still survive in British museums.

The History of Mary Prince

The History of Mary Prince, published in 1831, is a key abolitionist text and a rare example of a woman's autobiography. Prince's story and account of enslavement was written down by Susanna Strickland and edited by Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society.

A new direction: 'immediatism'

As it turned out, the British government backed many of the Anti-Slavery Society's proposals but - fatally - left it to colonial legislatures, dominated by slaveholders, to take the necessary action. The result was a stand-off. Try as they might to keep up pressure on government ministers, by the end of the 1820s many activists were beginning to question both their reliance on petitioning and the merits of their overall strategy. Responding to this challenge, in 1831 younger members of the Anti-Slavery Society organised the Agency Committee, which marked yet another new departure. First and foremost, the Agency Committee committed itself to 'immediatism', an idea that had been anticipated by Elizabeth Heyrick in 1824 in her pamphlet ' Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition '. Immediatism could (and did) mean different things to different people, but for most grass-roots activists it implied some form of immediate parliamentary action, aimed at breaking the deadlock in the Caribbean. Vague promises were no longer considered enough. With this in mind, the members of the Agency Committee set out to take their message to the country, hiring a team of five 'agents' or lecturers whose job it was to appeal directly to the public conscience.

Immediate, not Gradual Abolition by Elizabeth Heyrick

Broadside about an anti-slavery speech made by an abolitionist political candidate in Hull

In this speech, a political candidate states 'I think it is now high time to come forward, and demand the immediate Abolition of Slavery'. It was given in 1832 to Members of the Society of Friends and the Friends of the Abolition of Slavery.

Usage terms By permission of Wilberforce House Museum, Hull

Passing the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act: Black resistance in the Caribbean and expanding the British electorate

Between 1831 and 1833, the British campaign against slavery in the Caribbean entered its final phase. Two factors were important here. The first was Black resistance and, in particular, the Baptist War in Jamaica (1831-32). This was the latest and largest in a series of slave revolts that raised awkward questions about the long-term viability of slave societies in the British Caribbean, as well as about the brutally oppressive methods used by colonial authorities to suppress the rebellions. The second factor was the Reform Bill of 1832, which not only increased the size of the British electorate but also created 67 new constituencies, among them industrial towns such as Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds. Here was an opportunity for anti-slavery activists to press home their advantage. Adopting many of the techniques developed by the Agency Committee, British abolitionists stepped up their pressure on prospective parliamentary candidates, publicly 'outing' those who represented the West India interest or who supported gradualism. Predictably, Tory newspapers complained about these attempts to 'dictate' to voters. Nevertheless, by harnessing techniques of this kind, anti-slavery activists helped to shape the composition of the First Reformed Parliament and, with it, the drive towards the Emancipation Act of 1833, even if at the final hurdle they were forced to accept significant concessions, chief among them the £20 million granted to slaveholders in compensation for the loss of their 'property'. It is also worth highlighting that no financial compensation was provided to the hundreds of thousands of people who were emancipated from slavery, a glaring omission that provides the background to contemporary calls for reparations, both in the UK and the Caribbean.

Jamaica: its past and present state

This illustration is titled 'Emancipation Day 1834', but in fact it probably shows the celebrations outside Government House in Jamaica in 1838 when the period of 'apprenticeship' ended.

Abolition and emancipation: a false dawn?

After 1833, activists waged a further successful campaign, this time against the so-called 'apprenticeship' system that formed another integral part of the Emancipation Act. By 1838, slavery in the British Caribbean had to all and intents and purposes been abolished. But, in saying this, emancipation proved something of a false dawn. Post-1833 many planters in the Caribbean shifted to rely on indentured Indian and Chinese labourers, an exploitative system that was only finally abandoned in 1920. Meanwhile, the 800,000 or more people emancipated under the 1833 Act were left to eke out an existence for themselves, while at the same time pressing for their civil and political rights, under a constitutional system that still treated them as 'dependents' rather than citizens. In this sense, 1833 or 1838 was no more an 'end' than was 1807, but the start of another protracted struggle for people of African descent, this time towards full independence.

An account of the period of so-called 'apprenticeship', the transition between slavery to freedom

This proclamation set out the terms of 'apprenticeship'. It explains that the former enslaved people would still have to work for their former owners. They could face punishment if they did not.

Map of Jamaica, 1856

This map of Jamaica was published just over twenty years after the ending of slavery and almost ten years before the Morant Bay Rebellion. Such maps were useful for government officials, colonial administrators, military commanders and landowners. They also acted as a visual reminder that the British were in charge in Jamaica and elsewhere across the empire.

This entangled history had a significant impact on how Britain reckoned with slavery. After 1833, it became customary to view transatlantic slavery through the moral triumph of abolition, thereby substituting the horrors of slavery and the slave trade for a 'culture of abolitionism'. Whether seen through the lens of abolitionist relics or celebrations and commemorations, what is striking about this specific 'history' is its silencing of African perspectives. It is only in the past 30 or 40 years - and particularly since the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 - that scholars have become more attentive to the long histories of British involvement in all aspects of slavery, to the Black presence in Britain and to the gross inequalities associated with slavery and colonialism.

Further reading

David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (OUP, 2006)

Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (London: Macmillan, 2005)

C L R James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938)

David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan Macmillan, 2016)

James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London: HarperCollins, 1992)

Footnotes

[1] For the Zong case, see James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the Fall of Slavery (Yale University Press, 2011).

[2] David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (OUP, 2006), p. 152.

[3] For these figures, see David Richardson, 'The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660-1807', in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. II, The Eighteenth Century (OUP, 1998), p. 441.

[4] J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 42-46, 155-59.

[5] Oldfield, Popular Politics, p. 57.

[6] Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiment on the Evils of Slavery, ed. Vincent Carretta (1787; rpt. London: Penguin Books. 1999), p. i.

[7] For Equiano, see Oldfield, Popular Politics, p. 125.

[8] Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilisation in Comparative Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 80.

[9] Oldfield, Popular Politics, pp. 60-61.

[10] C L R James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938), Preface vii.

[11] For these diplomatic efforts, see Paul Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-48: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).

[12] Howard Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, 1833-1870 (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 9-10.

[13] Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-187 0 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 202.

[14] Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, pp. 12-14.

[15] Davis, Inhuman Bondage, Chapter 11.

[16] David Cannadine, Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 (London: Penguin Books, 2018), pp. 161-62.

[17] J. R. Oldfield, The Ties that Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820-1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2020), Chapter 2.

[18] This compensation money provided the starting point for the first phase of UCL's Legacies of British Slave-ownership work, see <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/> [accessed December 2020].

[19] Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, pp. 30-41.

Article credit: J R Oldfield, 'Abolition of the slave trade and slavery in Britain'.

Written byProfessor John Oldfield

John Oldfield is Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at The University of Hull. John's passion is in producing pioneering research into historic slavery, taking lessons learned from the past so we can imagine a future that is different and tackle the growing issue of modern day slavery. John received the prestigious Queen's Anniversary Prize in 2015, in recognition of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation's world-leading research into slavery and emancipation issues. Research is used to inform public practice and policy, at local, national and international levels. Publications include The Ties that Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820-1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2020).

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Abolition of the slave trade and slavery in Britain | The British Library

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Towards the end of the 18th century, a movement emerged calling for an end to Britain's involvement with the slave trade and, later, slavery itself. Professor John Oldfield traces the road to abolition from the 1780s to the 1830s, highlighting the impacts of grass-roots organisation, leadership, Black resistance and pro-slavery interests.

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Anti-Slave Trade Patrols America withdrew from the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. With The Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, both the United States and Great Britain agreed to work towards ending the slave trade. The U.S. Navy's role in the struggle against slavery began in 1820 when warships deployed off West Africa to catch American slave ships.

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Portrait of George Bridgetower, a
violinist whose brilliance dazzled Beethoven. (Image by Alamy)

In January 1826, a starry-eyed, 16-year-old medical student, Charles Darwin, engaged the formerly enslaved John Edmonstone to teach him the art of preserving birds at Edinburgh University. Every day for two months, for a fee of one guinea an hour and totalling more than 40 hours, Edmonstone relayed the latest techniques. Darwin went on to directly apply Edmonstone's teachings during the voyage of HMS Beagle (1831-36), where he preserved a mockingbird collection from the Galapagos. This became the raw material that informed his theory of evolution. It owed a debt to Edmonstone - now largely forgotten.

In our book, Black Victorians: Hidden in History, we show that there were many people of African descent living, working and marrying in Victorian Britain. They were not just onlookers. They were active and embedded participants who moulded the Victorian landscape.

This is not a novel point. A litany of largely black historians - from the Victorian era to the present day - have discussed, documented and analysed the black British presence in the 19th century. But the statement that there were black Victorians helping to build Great Britain hasn't properly landed in Victorian studies.

This is a strange state of affairs. Since at least the first century AD, Britain's population included people from north Africa. There were people of African descent in the courts and societies of Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, as brilliantly documented by Onyeka Nubia and Miranda Kaufmann. As the English (and, later, British) colonised lands and enslaved fellow human beings, more people of African descent came to Britain.

Questions of ethnicity

By the 18th century, there were thousands of people of African descent living and working in Britain (as well as Asians and Native Americans). It has been estimated that, by the late 18th century, there were 10,000-20,000 black people living in England. They married and had children, who did the same, assimilating into British society.

But the first national census in 1801 was mute on questions of ethnicity (in fact, ethnicity wasn't mentioned in the census until 1991). What's more, in undertaking
genealogical research, you soon learn that the location in which someone was born doesn't necessarily indicate ethnicity. There's also the fact that women mostly altered their names upon marriage, the enslaved were cruelly given the names of their captors, and contemporary descriptions such as "dark" could be applied to white as well as black Victorians.

So, archival obfuscation might partly account for the relative historiographical oversight. Ignorance, disinterest, neglect and racism are other explanations as well. Black Victorian assimilation is another. Yet local studies have revealed that black people were relatively common in densely populated areas such as London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Kent, and in our book we explore individuals active across British society - everyone from William Cuffay, the Chartist leader who campaigned for political rights for the working classes, to Fanny Eaton, the domestic worker and Pre-Raphaelite muse.

We mined an array of archives to prove the point: in Haringey, London, there are photographs of the black footballer Walter Tull , who played for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town, and the nurses Sister Freda - who worked at Tottenham Hospital - and Asarto Ward . At Waltham Forest, there are stories of Madagascan Christian refugees; at the Museum of Croydon, materials on the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; at the Lambeth Palace Library, the letters of the black bishop Samuel Crowther. The Black Cultural Archives in London is also an invaluable resource.

They were not just onlookers. They were active participants who moulded the Victorian landscape

The digitisation of archives has helped resurrect silenced voices. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose 'Hiawatha's Wedding Feast' made him world-famous in 1898, gave interviews to The Musical Times where he forcibly asserted: "It has been stated again and again that I was born in the West Indies. This is not the case. I was born in London."

The National Archives have made accessible the state trial reports of William Cuffay who, when charged in 1848 with intending to "levy war against the queen", defiantly addressed the Old Bailey: "I know my cause is good, and I have a self-approving conscience that will bear me up against anything, and that would bear me up even to the scaffold; therefore I think I can endure any punishment proudly. I feel no disgrace at being called a felon." Cuffay, born and raised in Kent, was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania for life.

Racism for the masses

Scratch the surface of the era, then, and black Victorians become visible and perceptively active in areas ranging from politics to art, sports to entertainment, theology to law and the menial and skilled trades.

This was at a time when the notion of "race" was assuming even greater importance. In scientific circles, the advancing theory of polygenism stated that humanity was divided into separate groups with inherited, biological differences (and white was deemed superior to black). Meanwhile, an expanding empire brutally subjugated people across the globe, and despite the abolition of slavery within that empire, Britain still relied on the cotton picked by the enslaved. Back home, the entertainment industry was taking racism to the masses, notably in the form of "human zoos" and blackface minstrelsy. (It was partly due to this racist form of entertainment that the acclaimed black actor Ira Aldridge was vilified for "defiling" Shakespeare's Othello in the 19th century.)

It was in this context that black Victorians both triumphed and struggled across the social scale. Social investigator Henry Mayhew recorded a number of black Victorians living on the margins. One such man, who was labelled a "Negro Beggar", had travelled from America to Britain having heard that in Britain "whites did not look down on them [black people] and ill-treat them, as they do in New York". Yet the "Negro Beggar" (Mayhew never gives us his name) struggled to find work and when he tried to get employment on English ships, "they won't have me", he told Mayhew.

Denied a lowly job on the ships, the "Negro Beggar" was also denied access to public establishments. ("At some places they don't care to take a man of colour in," he said). He was also subject to racist taunts: "The butchers call me Othello, and ask me why I killed my wife."

Mayhew labelled another black Victorian, Edward Albert, "The negro crossing-sweeper, who had lost both his legs". Albert told Mayhew: "I was a little boy when the slaves in Jamaica got their freedom." Aged nine, Albert joined the Royal Navy as a cabin boy, before working his way up to head cook. It was on one voyage that he suffered frostbite to his legs: "After my limbs became affected, the master of the vessel, and mate, took me to the ship's oven, in order... to cure me; my feet ... were put into the oven; in consequence of the treatment, my feet burst through the intense swelling, and mortification ensued..."

Albert was subsequently abandoned by the vessel, but he was determined to seek justice, telling Mayhew: "I will never leave England or Scotland until I get my rights." He wrote a memoir, Brief Sketch of the Life of Edward Albert or the Dead Man Come to Life Again, which outlined his brutal treatment and asserted his hitherto denied rights. What ultimately happened to Albert, we do not know.

William Cuffay, who
campaigned for working-class voting rights. (Image by Alamy)

Elsewhere, another black Victorian was telling his story from the social margins, deep inside a Victorian mental asylum. Joseph Peters (c1843-83), a seaman born in present-day Liberia, wrote to the medical superintendent: "I should like you to release me that I may go to my own people." Peters passionately retold his biography, which included the death of his father when he was a child, the poverty he and his mother experienced, and his life as a seaman traversing the globe: "Hoping you will give me my liberty," he concluded in his letter. Peters never did get his freedom: he died six years later and was buried in the asylum cemetery in 1883.

Pablo Fanque was born into a workhouse in Norwich but escaped by joining the circus. In 1841, after perfecting the art of acrobatics and equestrianism, he started his own group, winning praise for his respectable circus and posthumously finding immortalisation in the Beatles song, 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!' (In which, inspired by an 1843 poster promoting one of Fanque's circuses, John Lennon sings: "The Hendersons will all be there; Late of Pablo Fanque's fair, what a scene.")
On the podcast | Hannah-Rose Murray describes how African American abolitionists toured Britain in the 19th century:
Life on the margins

At the other end of the social scale, there were people like the Jamaican millionaire George Stiebel - whose father was probably Sigismund Stiebel, a German merchant living in London - and Nathaniel Wells, a black country gentleman who inherited a fortune from his slave-owning father and lived a life of respectability in Wales. He served as sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1818, and was also an investor, warden to his local church and a proficient artist.

Meanwhile, a host of west African elites trained, studied and traded in Britain while others, such as Sarah Forbes Bonetta, were connected to royalty. Born in what is now Nigeria, and orphaned at an early age, Bonetta became a renowned presence within the upper echelons of Victorian society having been introduced to Queen Victoria in 1850. The queen took an instant liking to Bonetta and agreed to support her. In 1862, Bonetta married James Pinson Labulo Davies , a Yoruba polymath from Sierra Leone. They had three children - one of whom, Victoria, became goddaughter to the queen.

A host of west African elites trained, studied and traded in Britain, while others were connected to royalty

There were, naturally, black Victorians among the burgeoning middle classes - like Dr George Rice , a renowned medical director, and Thomas Birch Freeman, who was born in Britain and moved to west Africa as a Methodist missionary. Africans and Asians came to Britain from the ever-growing empire as interracial couples cohabited, married and had children. Migration was always part of Britain's story.

Indeed, throughout the Victorian era, a host of black Americans travelled to Britain to denounce slavery. Black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Ellen Craft and William Craft addressed thousands of people on the topics of slavery, temperance and suffrage, building and strengthening an African American tradition that sought to inflame popular opinion against American slavery. Douglass later recalled that on his visit to Britain in the 1840s, he felt a sense of freedom: "I breathe and lo! The chattel becomes a man."

Another abolitionist speaker, Sarah Parker Remond, travelled to Britain in 1858 and denounced "American despotism" in a series of highly praised lectures. She also reminded her British audiences: "When I walk through the streets of Manchester, and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125m worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not 1 cent of that money has ever reached the hands of the labourers."

Her rhetoric developed into a black feminist, anti-racist discourse, fuelled by the likes of Ida B Wells in Britain. Educator, editor, feminist and activist, Wells crossed the Atlantic in the 1890s, having been invited by the writers Isabelle Mayo and Catherine Impey (founder of the anti-racist journal Anti-Caste: Devoted to the Interests of Coloured Race). Wells denounced lynching and segregation in America, aiming to "give the world the black people's side of the story", as she stated in 1894.

By the century's end, despite the hardening of racial attitudes, there were powerful countervailing forces. Pan-Africanism found notable expression in the First Pan-African Conference in London, 1900, which affirmed in its worldwide address: "Let the nations of the world respect the integrity and independence of the free Negro states of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, and the rest, and let the inhabitants of these states, the independent tribes of Africa, the Negroes of the West Indies and America, and the black subjects of all nations... fight bravely, that they may prove... their incontestable right to be counted among the great brotherhood of mankind."

Appreciating the presence of black Victorians today makes their incontestable right to be counted among the brotherhood and sisterhood of mankind indelible to the Victorian world. They cannot be unseen.
Keshia N Abraham and John Woolf are historians and authors. Their new book, Black Victorians: Hidden in History, was published by Duckworth Books in September 2022 This article first appeared in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine

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Black Victorians: the hidden Britons who helped shape the 19th century

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In January 1826, a starry-eyed, 16-year-old medical student, Charles Darwin, engaged the formerly enslaved John Edmonstone to teach him the art of preserving birds at Edinburgh University. Every day for two months, for a fee of one guinea an hour and totalling more than 40 hours, Edmonstone relayed the latest techniques.

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Sara Forbes Bonetta ( Black History Month Special)

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Listen to this episode from Long may she reign on Spotify. Sara Forbes Bonetta was an unlikely story in the Victorian era. As child her family was murdered, and she was taken captive by an African king, until captain Forbes saw her and rescued her.

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The Abolition of the British Slave Trade

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Listen to this episode from History Daily on Spotify. March 25, 1807. The British Parliament abolishes the slave trade in the British West Indies.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Black Victorians: radicals, muses, inmates & aristocrats

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Listen to this episode from History Extra podcast on Spotify. From political agitators and artist's muses to composers, sailors, asylum inmates and the goddaughter of the queen herself, black people led a variety of fascinating lives in Victorian Britain.

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On 28 August 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was given royal assent in Britain. This legislation terminated an institution that, for generations, had been the source of an incredibly lucrative trade and commerce.

Why Britain would abolish such a brutal and degrading institution appears self-evident in the world we live in today. Slavery was, by definition, a morally indefensible and corrupt system.

Nonetheless, within the context of abolition, it is important to remember that while sugar and slavery had created enormous fortunes for a small but very influential community on both sides of the Atlantic, the exploitation of enslaved workers also contributed heavily to the wider prosperity of the nation.

It was not only planters who benefitted from the significant West Indian branch of British colonial commerce, but the merchants, sugar refiners, manufacturers, insurance brokers, attorneys, shipbuilders and money lenders - all of whom were invested in the institution in some form or another.

And so, an understanding of the intense opposition facing abolitionists in their fight to see the liberation of slaves, as well as an idea of the scale in which slavery commercially permeated throughout British society, begs the question: Why did Britain abolish slavery in 1833?

Background

By ending the traffic of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in 1807, those within the 'Abolition Society', such as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, had achieved an unprecedented feat. Yet it was never their intention to stop there.

Ending the slave trade had prevented the continuation of a profoundly cruel commerce but had brought no change to the condition of enslaved people. As Wilberforce wrote in his Appeal in 1823, "all early abolitionists had declared that the extinction of slavery was their great and ultimate project."

In the same year that Wilberforce's Appeal was published, a new 'Anti-Slavery Society' was formed. As had been the case in 1787, a great emphasis was placed on using various campaigning tools in order to gain support from the general public in order to influence parliament, as opposed to the traditional methods of backdoor lobbying.

1. Failure of amelioration

One major factor that enabled abolitionists to argue for emancipation was the failure of the government's 'amelioration' policy. In 1823, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Canning, introduced a series of resolutions that called for the improvement of conditions for slaves in His Majesty's colonies. These included the promotion of Christianity amongst the enslaved community and further legal protection.

Many abolitionists were able to prove that planters had ingnored these policies by highlighting slave population decreases within the West Indies, falling marriage rates, the continuance of native cultural practises (such as 'Obeah') and more importantly, the perpetuation of slave uprisings.

2. Late slave rebellions

Between 1807 and 1833, three of Britain's most valuable Caribbean colonies all experienced violent slave uprisings. Barbados was the first to witness a revolt in 1816, while the colony of Demerara in British Guyana saw a full-scale rebellion in 1823. The largest of all slave uprisings, nevertheless, occurred in Jamaica in 1831-32. 60,000 slaves looted and scorched property across 300 estates on the island.

Despite the significant property damage caused by the insurgents and the fact that they considerably outnumbered colonists, all three uprisings were quelled and suppressed with brutal consequences. Rebel slaves and those who were suspected to have conspired were tortured and executed. A universal retaliation occurred in all three dominions toward missionary communities, whom many planters suspected to have instigated the revolts.

The rebellions in the West Indies, accompanied by the brutal suppressions, strengthened abolitionist arguments regarding the instability of the Caribbean dominions. They argued that upholding the institution was bound to cause more violence and unrest.

The backlash of the rebellions also fed into anti-slavery narratives that stressed the immoral, violent and 'un-British' nature of the Caribbean planter class. This was an important element in shifting public opinion against the West India Lobby.

3. Declining image of colonial planters

White colonists in the West Indies were always viewed with suspicion from those in the metropole. They were often disdained for their excessively ostentatious displays of wealth and their gluttonous habits.

In the aftermath of the rebellions, accusations made against colonists, as to their bad taste and lack of class, were strengthened by reports of the violent backlashes.

Divisions were not only created between the planter class and the general public in Britain, but within the West India Lobby itself. Cracks were beginning to emerge between local or "creole" planters and the absentee proprietor community residing in Britain. The latter group were becoming increasingly favourable to the idea of emancipation if sufficient compensation was granted.

Local planters were far more invested in the institution, not only financially, but culturally and socially, and so they resented the fact that planters in Britain were ignorantly willing to sacrifice slavery in return for remuneration.

4. Overproduction and economic deterioration

One of the most convincing arguments presented to parliament during the emancipation debates highlighted the economic deterioration of the West Indian colonies. In 1807, it could be proven that the Caribbean dominions remained Britain's most lucrative colonies in terms of trade. This was no longer the case by 1833.

The main reason why the colonies were struggling was because plantations were overproducing sugar. According to the Colonial Secretary, Edward Stanley, sugar exported from the West Indies had risen from 72,644 tons in 1803 to 189,350 tons by 1831 - this now far exceeded domestic demand. As a result, the price of sugar fell. Sadly, this only led planters to produce more sugar in order to achieve economies of scale and so a vicious cycle had been created.

Facing increasing competition from colonies such as Cuba and Brazil, the West Indian colonies, protected by a monopoly that gave them low-tariff access to the British market, were beginning to become more of a burden on the British treasury, than a valued asset.

5. Free labour ideology

Economics proved to be one of the first social sciences applied to the political debate over slavery. Abolitionists attempted to use Adam Smith's 'Free Market' ideology and apply it to proceedings.

They insisted that free labour was a far superior model as it was cheaper, more productive and efficient. This was proven by the success of the free labour system employed in the East Indies.

6. A new Whig government

One cannot underestimate the influence of the political environment when it comes to understanding why emancipation occurred. It is no coincidence that slavery was abolished only a year after the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the subsequent election of a Whig Government under the leadership of Lord Grey.

The Reform Act had allowed the Whigs to achieve a large majority in the House of Commons, eradicating 'rotten boroughs' that had previously gifted parliamentary seats to wealthy members of the West Indian Interest. The election in 1832 had led to a further 200 pledged candidates who were in favour of ending slavery.

7. Compensation

Many historians have rightly argued that without the promise of compensation for slaveholders, an abolition bill would not have received enough support to pass in parliament. Originally proposed as a £15,000,000 loan, the government soon pledged a grant of £20,000,000 to approximately 47,000 claimants, some of whom owned only a few slaves and others who owned thousands.

Compensation allowed the British government to attain support from a significant proportion of absentee proprietors who could be secure in the knowledge that their financial re-imbursement could be re-invested in other commercial enterprises.

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On 28 August 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was given royal assent in Britain. This legislation terminated an institution that, for generations, had been the source of an incredibly lucrative trade and commerce. Why Britain would abolish such a brutal and degrading institution appears self-evident in the world we live in today.