The history of British anti-slavery agitation begins with Quakers, Methodists, and some Anglicans in the 1770s and 1780s. In the aftermath of the cross-oceanic revivals of the 1730s-60s, some among the English evanglical community (in both dissenter and Anglican congregations) came to find slavery to be morally repugnant and began calling for its abolition, or at least the abolition of the slave trade. The 1772 Somerset case, in theory, declared that slavery was illegal in England, but it was not actually enforced very much. But the main slavery was in England’s colonies, not England, anyway.

Defeat in the American Revolution helped further stimulate anti-slavery agitation as the evangelicals increasingly saw England’s defeat as a punishment for tolerance of slavery. In the 1780s, organized protests against slavery began with the creation of the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. It was decided to focus on abolishing the slave trade in hopes that would force slave owners to reform.

Between 1787 and 1807 when the Slave Trade was banned, the committee and its allies made abolishment popular, but property interests still dominated the English government, so it was only the pressures of the Napoleonic Wars which made its abolition in 1807 possible. (The full story of this would take too long to explain here).

Similarly, the control of the English government by the gentry, with their focus on property rights uber alles, ensured that it would take another 26 years to abolish slavery itself.

By the 1820s, it became clear that slavery remained a moral blight on the nation, despite it continuing to be vastly profitable. Englishmen at every level of society began to turn on it, finding it morally repugnant and a violation of the rights of Englishmen. It is to be noted that the political economists of the day allied themselves with the evangelicals, calling for free wage labor to replace inefficient and immoral slavery. It was this advocacy of freedom for the slaves which led Carlyle to dub economics ‘the dismal science’.

But abolition was only possible when political reform broke the power of the gentry, who were innately inclined to defend the property rights of slave-owners, who were, after all, fellow land-owners. In the late 1820s, first dissenters, then catholics gained the right to vote, and the 1832 Reform act lowered the level of property needed to vote and broke up the rotten bouroughs.

By this time, the English public had worked itself into a complete lather over slavery. While the pro-slavery forces fought to the last ditch, the overwhelming sentiment of the public had to be taken into account. Petitions flooded in by the thousands, calling for an end to slavery.

And so a compensated emancipation took place, even though slavery remained vastly profitable.

Having devoted a lot of time to this subject, I can say that the English public was extremely hot for an end to slavery in 1833, and if the Southern states had still been in the Empire, it would not have surprised me for them to ram it down the South’s throat by force.

Post 1833, the English public gradually became disenchanted with the freeing of the slaves as the Caribbean sank into poverty and the slaves failed to instantly turn into Europeans, but in 1833, the strength of English anti-slavery sentiment could not have been denied by the South except by force.

What a world can be encompassed in an artfully placed “simply.”

Perhaps you should. You might learn humility.

tom t: Britain had no qualms about buying Southern slave-produced cotton (indeed, its textile industry was heavily dependent upon it, I believe) and was prepared to recognize the South if the War had taken a turn in favor of the Confederacy. Absolutely no way would it have abolished slavery if the Revolution had failed.

Unfortunately for your argument, Britain actually abolished slavery in 1772, four years before the Declaration of Independence. (R. v. Knowles ex parte Somerset).

(To be precise, slavery was abolished in England and Wales in 1772, and, as a result, in Scotland in 1776.)

(To be even more precise, slavery wasn’t abolished as such, but ruled never to have been legal in the first place; in fact, slavery in England had been illegal since 1102.)

The 1833 act simply extended this decision to the rest of the Empire.

An interesting reference is this New Yorker account (http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?060508crat_atlarge) of the last days of the American Revolution, when escaped slaves, many of whom had fought alongside the British Army to win their freedom, crammed into New York to evacuate ahead of Washington’s advancing troops, who would have returned them to slavery.

That December, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore’s proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. “There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,” a cousin of Washington’s wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, “Liberty is sweet.”

Pitt, in 1777: I would participate to them every enjoyment and freedom which the colonizing subjects of a free state can possess, or wish to possess; and I do not see why they should not enjoy every fundamental right in their property, and every original substantial liberty, which Devonshire, or Surrey, or the county I live in, or any other county in England, can claim; reserving always, as the sacred right of the mother country, the due constitutional dependency of the colonies.

An alternative counterfactual, in which George III came to his senses and installed a “Whig” government (which would have had the support of the country on this issue at least) sees the immediate issues that motivated the New Englanders resolved by negotiation and concession. British abolition laws would have applied to the intact empire and the slave states would then have had to decide whether to secede on that issue alone. I question whether they would have got away with it.

The revolution and the subsequent wars kept the Tories in office for decades and killed off most efforts for democratic or progressive (it wasn’t until about 1830 that the Whigs got back and pushed through a very limited Reform Act in 1832).

“In 1774, fearful that the French-speaking population of Quebec (as the colony was now called) would side with the rebels of the Thirteen Colonies to the south, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act giving recognition to French law, Catholic religion and French language in the colony; before that Catholics had been excluded from public office and recruitment of priests and brothers forbidden, effectively shutting down Quebec’s schools and colleges. The first British policy of assimilation (1763-1774) was deemed a failure. Both the petitions and demands of the Canadiens’ élites, and Governor Guy Carleton, played an important part in convincing London of dropping the assimilation scheme, but the looming American revolt was certainly a factor. By the Quebec Act, the Quebec people obtained their first Charter of rights. That paved the way to later official recognition of the French language and French culture. The Act allowed Canadiens to maintain French civil law and sanctioned the freedom of religious choice, allowing the Roman Catholic Church to remain. It also restored the Ohio Valley to Quebec, reserving the territory for the fur trade.”

So I can see your point, but I definitely think that Britain placated the Quebecois French more than they otherwise would have precisely because of the rebellious colonies and later the United States.