Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Show me examples of your "mature" opinions!

Jefferson? A damn slave owner and had it off with a couple of the female ones. Don't start giving me guff about principles when you live where you do. Your country bums about itself like clowns in a circus.

Jefferson? A damn slave owner and had it off with a couple of the female ones. Don't start giving me guff about principles when you live where you do. Your country bums about itself like clowns in a circus.

I would also remind that the British Commonwealth was originally from the old Empire and your lot could not do anything like that unless you corrupt a nation or invade it.

Jefferson? A damn slave owner and had it off with a couple of the female ones.

Scots proudly played their part in the abolition of the trade. But for a time we misted over our role as perpetrators of this barbarism. Many of Scotish industries, schools and churches were founded from the profits of African slavery.

ignorance and void your corner has.

.....Gt Britain was ahead of the USA in doing away with slavery.....

.........What you practiced totally contradicted all those boasting great principles when you broke away and the so-called principled leaders did slavery.  So decades after the British Empire did away with the thing you lot lived a constant hypocrisy and racial matters are still deeply flawed in the wonderful claimant of so-called principled country stuff. Clutch at daft straws but your history is damnable and still is.

Britain followed in the footsteps of the Portuguese in voyaging to the west coast of Africa and enslaving Africans. The British participation in what has come to be called the 'nefarious trade' was begun by Sir John Hawkins with the support and investment of Elizabeth I in 1573. (15) By fair means and foul, Britain outwitted its European rivals and became the premier trader in the enslaved from the seventeenth century onwards, and retained this position till 1807. Britain supplied enslaved African women, men and children to all European colonies in the Americas.

The 'Slave Coast' came to be dotted with European forts, their massive guns facing out to sea to warn off rival European slave traders. Each 'castle' incorporated prisons or 'barracoons' in which the enslaved women, children and men were kept, awaiting purchase by the traders, who could initially only reach the coast at those times of the year when the winds blew in the right direction. The prisons – without sanitation, with little air – must have been hell-holes in the humid coastal climates. The death rates are not known.

The trade became a very lucrative business. Bristol grew rich on it, then Liverpool. London also dealt in slaves as did some of the smaller British ports. (16) The specialised vessels were built in many British shipyards, but most were constructed in Liverpool. Laden with trade goods (guns and ammunition, rum, metal goods and cloth) they sailed to the 'Slave Coast', exchanged the goods for human beings, packed them into the vessels like sardines and sailed them across the Atlantic. On arrival, those left alive were oiled to make them look healthy and put on the auction block. Again, death rates (during the voyage) are unknown: one estimate, for the 1840s, is 25 per cent.

Plantation and mine-owners bought the Africans – and more died in the process called 'seasoning'. In the British colonies the slaves were treated as non-human: they were 'chattels', to be worked to death as it was cheaper to purchase another slave than to keep one alive. Though seen as non-human, as many of the enslaved women were raped, clearly at one level they were recognised as at least rapeable human beings. There was no opprobrium attached to rape, torture, or to beating your slaves to death. The enslaved in the British colonies had no legal rights as they were not human – they were not permitted to marry and couples and their children were often sold off separately.

Historian Paul Lovejoy has estimated that between 1701 and 1800 about 40 per cent of the approximately more than 6 million enslaved Africans were transported in British vessels. (It must be noted that this figure is believed by some to be a considerable underestimate.) Lovejoy estimated that well over 2 million more were exported between 1811 and 1867 – again, many believe the numbers were much greater. (17)

Abolition of the trade by Britain

Europeans who were Roman Catholics often treated their slaves more humanely than those of the Protestant faith, perhaps especially the members of the Church of England, which owned slaves in the West Indies. (Roman Catholics did not deny Africans their humanity and made attempts at conversion, while British slaveowners forbade church attendance.) The enslavement of Africans was justified in Britain by claiming that they were barbaric savages, without laws or religions, and, according to some 'observers' and academics, without even a language; they would acquire civilisation on the plantations.

In the 1770s, some Christians in Britain began to question this interpretation of the Bible. They began a campaign to convert the population to their perspective and to influence Parliament by forming anti-slavery associations. Slavery was declared a sin. According to some interpreters of William Wilberforce, the main abolitionist spokesperson in Parliament, it was this fear of not going to heaven that impelled him to carry on the abolitionist struggle for over 20 years. (18)

Parliamentarians and others who could read, or had the time to attend meetings, were well informed about slavery by the books published by two ex-slaves, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano; slightly less dramatic and emphatic anti-slavery books were published by Ignatius Sancho and Ukwasaw Groniosaw. Equiano, like Thomas Clarkson (another truly remarkable man), lectured up and down the country, and in Ireland. (19)

The Act making it illegal for Britons to participate in the trade in enslaved Africans was passed by Parliament in March 1807, after some 20 years of campaigning. Precisely why so many people signed petitions and why Parliament voted for the Act is debatable. (20) It is somewhat curious that many of the chief – including Quaker – abolitionists were importers of slave-grown produce. (21)
Slave emancipation by Britain

A few Britons – including the British Africans – were not content with abolition and campaigned for the emancipation of slaves. This was another long struggle. Among the most forceful were the women abolitionists, who, being denied a voice by the men, formed their own organisations and went door-knocking, asking people to stop using slave-grown products such as sugar and tobacco. The most outspoken was probably Elizabeth Heyrick who believed in immediate emancipation, as opposed to the men who supported gradual freedom. (22)

This battle was won when Parliament passed the Emancipation Act in 1833; as the struggle was led by men, it was for gradual emancipation. But protests, often violent in the West Indies, resulted in freedom in 1838. The slaveowners were granted £20 million (about £1 billion today) compensation; all the freed received was the opportunity to labour for the paltry wages that had now to be offered.

This Act only freed the enslaved in the West Indies, Cape Town, Mauritius and Canada. Slavery continued in the rest of the British Empire. Even the importation of slaves into a British colony continued – into Mauritius, obtained from the French after the Napoleonic Wars, where importation was not stopped until about 1820. (23)
Emancipation in Britain

Africans have lived in Britain since they arrived as troops within the Roman armies. How many came here in more modern times, i.e., since the fifteenth century, has not been researched. They begin to appear in parish records of births and deaths from the sixteenth century. (24) Again, what proportion was free and how many were slaves is not yet known. The famous decision by Chief Justice Lord Mansfield in 1772 in the case of James Somerset, taken to court by activist Granville Sharp, merely stated that Africans could not be exported from the UK to the West Indies as slaves. There was no consistency in the many court judgements on the legality of slavery in Great Britain. (25)

The efficacy of the Acts

As there was almost nothing done to ensure that the Acts were obeyed, slave traders continued their activities, as did the shipbuilders. Information about this was sent to Parliament by the abolitionists, some of the captains in the Anti-Slavery Squadrons and British consular officials in slave-worked Cuba and Brazil. Investigations were held, more Acts were passed, but all to no avail, as no means of enforcement was put in place in Britain. All the government did was to set up the Anti-Slavery Squadron – at first comprised of old, semi-derelict naval vessels, unfit for the coastal conditions. To enable them to stop slavers of other nationalities, Britain entered into treaties with other slaving countries. But these were also ignored. The slave trade continued, unabated.

Britain not only continued to build slaving vessels, but it financed the trade, insured it, crewed some of it and probably even created the many national flags carried by the vessels to avoid condemnation. Britain also manufactured about 80 per cent of the goods traded for slaves on the Coast. (26).............

SLAVERY

THE USA    from  1775  to  1865          =  90 years

GREAT BRITAIN    from  1573  to  1833  =  260 years

Put that in yer book Fossil!  

From the start of the USA aided by your masons...

Well Southern boy I am fortunate not to be a FM and stick to a proper Proddy organisation the OO. That that lot after pretending to be Indians and leaving their aprons behind were the creators of the corporate republic.  At least my degrees with it are spiritually based.