In 1713, Britain acquired the asiento de Negros, an agreement to to annually supply Spanish America with 140,000 enslaved Africans. In 1746 political economist Malachy Postlethwayte was moved to declare the slave trade “an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation.” However, just eighty-seven years later in 1833, Parliament abolished West Indian slavery. How could public sentiment swing so decisively? Modern scholarship correlates abolitionism with the rise of Enlightenment sensibilities, liberal capitalism, and Evangelical Protestantism. These factors undoubtedly mattered, yet often unaddressed is the coalescing of British national identity around ideas linked to abolitionism in ways powerful enough to shape public opinion. In truth, the growth of British nationalism and abolitionism were inseparable, making arguments over slavery into arguments about British character as defined by ideals of Protestant piety, liberty, empire, and commerce.
The lyrics to James Thomson’s 1740 “Rule Britannia,” capture Britain’s fledgling nationalism. Its second line: “And guardian angels sung this strain: Rule Britannia, rule the waves, Britons never will be slaves,” associates nationhood with God’s providence for Protestant Britain, resistance to despotism, and maritime dominance to the benefit of commercial empire. Amidst a struggle for colonies and profits against Catholic France and Spain, British nationalism emphasized Protestant identity against irreligious, tyrannous, decadent, and wasteful Catholicism. British national identity was essentially formed in opposition to an external enemy.
Abolitionists exploited this relationship between English Protestantism and the rest of the world to make distinctions between colonial and metropolitan life proof of colonial slaveholders’ opposition to British national virtues. William Blake’s 1810 poem Jerusalem marries Protestant fervor and national purpose, vowing “I will not cease from Mental Fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green & pleasant Land.” Slaveholders’ failure to instruct their slaves in Christianity or live by Christian principles became abolitionist refrains.
Catholicism was entangled with tyranny in British imagination. Edinburgh journeymen denounced Catholicism for “denying to the common people the free use of the holy scriptures.” A British soldier abroad wrote Catholics “do not read the Bible; the priests have entire control over the masses.” Political tyranny followed religious tyranny. The ascendant Whigs believed their forebears’ 1688 Glorious Revolution saved Britain from French-backed Catholic despotism. “Let France grow proud, beneath the tyrant’s lust, While the rack’d people crawl, and lick the dust,” started the inscription to William Hogarth’s Gate of Calais. It concluded that “the manly genius of this isle disdains, All tinsel slavery, or golden chain.” Love of liberty tinged patriotism with populism. Patriotic vigilance against irreligious tyranny encouraged abolitionists to decry slavery as despotism. Into the mid-nineteenth century, slavery was increasingly thought of as a foreign institution employed by Catholic despotisms like Spain, Brazil, Portugal, and France. France abolished slavery in 1794 only for Napoleon to reinstate it in 1802.
For centuries the remoteness of the West Indies from Britain insulated these slave societies from criticism. Since different environments made for different institutions, Britons could accept West Indians as distant countrymen without confronting slavery as a problem for British values. Claiming “the West Indies cannot be cultivated by Europeans, whose constitutions will not bear fatigue in that climate,” William Puleteny explained that colonists embraced “some other class of the human species who, being natives of warmer climates, are able to endure that degree of labor and fatigue.” Slavery thus understood reflected environmental differences, not moral or national ones. However, maturing national motifs of Protestantism, liberty, commerce, and empire, alongside their impious, tyrannical, and decadent antitypes, distanced Britain not only from Catholic rivals but from its West Indian colonies. In this context, abolitionists stigmatized slave ownership as anti-British by attacking it as irreligious, despotic, wasteful, and decadent.
Protestantism’s intersection with popular sentiments of anti-Catholicism, fear of tyranny, and commercialism, sharpened criticism of slavery as impious. Abolitionists argued that slaveholder refusal to let missionaries proselytize the enslaved was an attack on direct access to scripture. As with Catholic despotisms, this was “denying to the common people the free use of the holy scripture.” Such denial exposed the moral corruption of colonial tyranny. Quaker abolitionist John Woolman observed that “no master was saintly enough to avoid the temptations of absolute power; slavery, instead of being ameliorated by Christianity, corrupted the wellsprings of true religion.” The danger was unavoidable, “slavery, in its mildest shape, has something dangerous and threatening to virtue,” wrote James Ramsay. It “encouraged masters to become tyrants.”
Abolitionists also linked religious attacks on slavery to commercial morality. William Wilberforce did so negatively in 1788, arguing greed had led British merchants away from the virtuous commerce that was the nation’s true prosperity. “Interest can draw a film across the eyes, so thick, that total blindness could do no more,” Wilberforce warned. He challenged his countrymen to accept that “a trade founded in iniquity, and carried on as this was, must be abolished.” John Wesley used commerce to blame the slave trade, “a worse than pagan abomination,” on fellow Britons. “It is you that induce the African villain to sell his countrymen,” Wesley thundered. Insisting “it is your money, that is the spring of all,” suggesting British money could end slave-trafficking. Lord Kames positively connected morality and commerce to criticize slavery, arguing that “contracts and promises are not confined to commercial dealings: they serve also to make benevolence a duty, independent of any pecuniary interest.” Slaveholders, however, participated in a distorted economy of unfree workers and unfair prices. They did not develop benevolence like their British counterparts. Adam Smith likewise held that slavery subverted the moral foundations of commerce: The enslaved could neither enter contracts nor keep them because free enterprise required free persons.
Granville Sharp publicly worried the slave trade and plantation slavery were undermining British liberty. He was joined by Charles James Fox who decried the “virtual representation” of the West Indian “interest” in the House of Commons, condemning it as a malign foreign influence. That opulent West Indians bought “rotten boroughs” in Parliament offended radicals like John Wade, who in his Black Book condemned how the ruling class “conquers and retains useless colonies” to benefit itself. Playwright Oliver Goldsmith opined that European colonists lost their national virtues and succumbed to “all the luxurious manners of the Asiatics.” He continued, “after two or three generations at farthest, the blood loses its primitive qualities, and those of the climate manifest themselves in men, animals and plants.” Colonists resembled their exotic environs in the British national imagination, not their distant ancestry. The national “othering” of the West Indian bolstered the arguments and broadened the appeal of abolitionism as a national response to the foreign practice of slaveholding.
Between 1807 and 1838, British governments dismantled and criminalized institutions of human bondage, which, in some permutation, had been acceptable for most of human history. Politicians, historians, and popular opinion have marveled at this transition. For nineteenth century historian William Leckey, the anti-slavery movement was “among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations.” In the late twentieth century, David Brion Davis characterized abolitionism as a “remarkable shift in moral consciousness.” Many causes have been cited to explain this shift in moral consciousness, ranging from political ideology to religious fervor, to the progress capitalism. Though nationalism has not been absent from this conversation, it has often been seen as one cause among others in the anti-slavery movement, and not as a bridge among causes. The integration of disparate themes of piety, liberty, empire, and commerce within the framework of British nationalism shows that nationalism was more than a discrete factor in the emergence of abolitionism. Rather, it formed the connective tissue which structured the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century debate on slavery.