SLAVE TRADE ABOLITION

Slave Trade Abolition

Slave Trade Abolition

Slavery has existed in various forms as a social institution since Ancient Greece. Then, as with later examples, slaves were usually taken from the unprotected peripheries of society. Criminals and socially excluded people were forced into slavery. Prisoners of war were commonly taken as slaves and indeed wars were often motivated by the quest for slaves. There have been many different forms of slavery involving varying degrees of ownership and some slaves were more properly described as pawns. Slaves have not always had their social mobility severely restricted and were sometimes able to rise to high office as in the Roman and Ottoman empires. The trans-Atlantic trade in slaves transformed the perceptions and the practices of slavery and turned it into a more brutal and less flexible institution which illegally persists in some parts of the world in the present day (Bales, 2005). This paper discusses in support of humanitarianism activities in ending slave trade, as compared to the traditional view of the economists on profit margins.

Slaves played an important role in the abolition of the institution, as well. Of course, it was the Civil War that brought slavery's end, and most know of the economic differences, the rising sectionalism, and the debate over slavery's expansion that were key factors in the coming of that struggle. But fewer are aware that slaves, largely in their quest for personal liberty, forced the question about freedom for all. On the one hand, individuals who had been slaves and had achieved their freedom over the course of the country's early history were major participants in the abolition movement. Many free slaves refused to go back to Africa. Thus, through the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, free blacks spoke, petitioned, wrote pamphlets, published newspapers, formed organizations, participated politically, fought in Kansas, and died in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry—all for the cause of ending slavery. On the other hand, once the Civil War began and Union armies marched anywhere near enslaved men, women, and children, the slaves ran for Union lines. By doing so, they forced the hand of President Lincoln to make the abolition of slavery one of the goals of the war. (Klingberg, 1968)

The 18th century formed the watershed in the system of American slavery. Although individuals, and even groups such as the Quakers, had always opposed slave trade and the slavery, common condemnation to the system gained strength during the later eighteenth century, primarily due to the growth of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality, and British Evangelical Protestantism. Opposition to slavery became increasingly more coordinated in England, and it eventually had a profound impact, with the abolition of the English slave trade in 1807. Before that, prodded by Granville Sharp and other abolitionists, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared slavery illegal in Great Britain in 1772, giving enormous impetus to the British antislavery movement.

At the same time that European governments contemplated administrative measures against slavery and the slave trade, the implacable opposition of ...