How would a British-ruled U.S. have dealt with slavery?

[CaliGuy]

Didn’t the British abolish slavery around 1808? The cotton gin would not have been around yet and the Southern plantation owners would not have had the political power they enjoyed after 1830. In OTL, many slaves were getting freed before 1800. So yes, slavery would have been abolished in British North America.

The cotton gin was invented in 1793, though.

 

[Avrorrange]

Would the British government be willing to purchase the freedom of slaves in the Southern U.S. in this TL?



Wasn't the amount of say that the colonies had in determining British policy almost zero due to their lack of representation in the British Parliament during this time, though?



Because Britain won the American Revolutionary War.



Out of curiosity--why exactly didn't Britain try making such a deal (freedom in exchange for joining the British military) with the slaves in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War in our TL?

Did they win by compromising or through simple brute force?

 

[CaliGuy]

Did they win by compromising or through simple brute force?

Mostly through brute force, but with compromise being a factor as well.

 

[Socrates]

Did the 1807 law ban slave trading between British colonies? I.e. the Bahamas and Jamaica? If so, a similar ban in this timeline would stop Virginia and Maryland selling to the deep south.

 

[AlanJWhite]

Did the 1807 law ban slave trading between British colonies? I.e. the Bahamas and Jamaica? If so, a similar ban in this timeline would stop Virginia and Maryland selling to the deep south.

In theory any trade by Britons was banned from 1808, though owning slaves was not.
... but trade in existing slaves was not actively policed before 1811, mostly due to calls on RN in the Napoleonic wars.

Caveat: the Admiralty did set up a tiny but effective anti slave taking squadron off West Africa in 1808, using small sloops and brigs.
After peace in 1815 this was expended significantly, especially since the British forced other nations at the Conference to also ban slave trading.

Therefore I would expect slave transfers within British North America to be banned and policed in roughly the same time frame
if only to improve the British diplomatic position especially if the European situation is different iTTL

 

[Derek Pullem]

Out of curiosity--why exactly didn't Britain try making such a deal (freedom in exchange for joining the British military) with the slaves in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War in our TL?

They did - Lord Dunmore freed between 1000-2000 slaves in the south and around 500 fought. Other slaves were freed later and served.

The point was that the number of armed ex-slaves was low due to the fear (on both sides) that they would rebel. If the British armed alot of slaves in the South they probably would have done better early in the war but they would have lost the support of many of the Southern Tory slave owners.

Ex-slaves fought on both sides - they gained their freedom usually when they fought for the British or the Northern Continentals.

 

[Hotpoint]

Out of curiosity--why exactly didn't Britain try making such a deal (freedom in exchange for joining the British military) with the slaves in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War in our TL?

They did - Lord Dunmore freed between 1000-2000 slaves in the south and around 500 fought. Other slaves were freed later and served.

It's actually one of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, to wit:

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us"

This does render the earlier phrase in the document "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" a tad amusing in retrospect.

 

[Moosemac]

It's actually one of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, to wit:

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us"

This does render the earlier phrase in the document "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" a tad amusing in retrospect.

Does add a bit of ambiguity to the conflict doesn't it? It is also why I think how stable the South is for the British would depend on how they won it. If in the ATL they didn't free any slaves, things can probably be restored, but if they won with the help of freed slaves.... than things will be much more difficult for them. And the more slaves are freed, the more Southerners are going to hate the British. Freeing Slaves was the probably the quickest way Southern sentiment shifted against the British in OTL, which surprised the British in some cases because they expected places like Charleston to be loyalist centers when it was quite the opposite.

 

[riggerrob]

Britain outlawed slavery during the industrial revolution after they discovered that machines worked cheaper than slaves.
One of the major motivations for the American Civil War was industrializing northern states trying to tell southern, slave-owning states to radically change their economies. Southern states were reluctant to free slaves because slaves were still popular on farms
OTOH slaves were never very popular in New England because slaves still had to be fed while they sat idle over the winter. By the time of the ARW, New England was over-populated. Why import slaves when NE struggled to feed its existing population on limited farmland?

New France only had small numbers of slaves - mostly in Montreal. Black slaves were kept as status symbols, often as domestic servants.

 

[JamesG]

Wasn't the amount of say that the colonies had in determining British policy almost zero due to their lack of representation in the British Parliament during this time, though

They weren't represented in parliament, but that doesn't mean they were without influence, or for that matter that they would be without influence in the future. For one thing, if they remained within the Empire, they would absolutely be the first choice source of cotton for the British textile industry (think of the impact the ACW, and particularly the blockade, had in Britain). They would hold powerful cultural ties to what might still be regarded as the mother country.

Also, I don't have stats for the 13 colonies, but most Caribbean plantations were owned by aristocrats in Britain. Even if this was never the case south of the OTL Mason-Dixon, as the ATL plantations scale up over time, they'll get investment from non-abolitionist Britons trying to make a quid.

I'm just saying that having a large slave owning section of the population that has influence in society, regardless of political representation, will quickly and drastically introduce butterflies to British abolition.

 

[oshron]

i'd think the South and other regions would still practice sharecropping even after the abolition of slavery, and the South in particular would probably have something like apartheid--after all, South Africa was part of the British Empire and developed that

 

[Socrates]

i'd think the South and other regions would still practice sharecropping even after the abolition of slavery, and the South in particular would probably have something like apartheid--after all, South Africa was part of the British Empire and developed that

The south had apartheid in our timeline. It was called Jim Crow.

 

[Indicus]

The fact that slavery is more profitable means that the abolition of the unholy institution in the British will happen significantly later. Something like the Caribbean, where Indians were imported as indentured servants, may occur in the South in this scenario.

 

[Hawkeye]

I heard somewhere that compensation for slaveholders, even with the south included, was still well within the capabilities of the British government. However I'm not sure if this would go through smoothly. The South in OTL was against compensation specifically because of what happened in the west indies but that still variable in this timeline (I still doubt that it would be met with much fanfare from any side).

 

[Jared]

Wasn't the amount of say that the colonies had in determining British policy almost zero due to their lack of representation in the British Parliament during this time, though?

No. The wealthier planter colonies of the Caribbean had substantial influence. They had this through a combination of some absentee landlords, influence on MPs chosen from "rotten boroughs", former slaveowners who had returned to Britain, MPs who had wealthy relatives involved in the slave trade/plantations, paid political agents from the Caribbean colonies, and the like. The West India lobby was the the recognised term for this group, sometimes referring to the lobbyists and sometimes to the MPs. In 1764, it was estimated that the West India lobby controlled 50 or 60 votes in the Commons, who were a crucial swing group.

The West India lobby had significant influence on British government policy even during the eighteenth century, such as ensuring the passage of various Molasses and Sugar Acts which kept French sugar out of the North American colonies (and hence maximised their own trade), and ensured that Canada rather than the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe were annexed after the Seven Years' War. (To prevent competition with their own sugar, of course.)

Even if their influence in the Commons failed, they still had the Lords. When the passage of abolition finally came during the 1830s, Wellington (as PM) made it clear that he would have the Lords veto any abolition proposals which were not broadly acceptable to all groups, including the West India lobby.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

The idea that the ARW was a key factor in the successful organizing of British Abolitionism is actually not that controversial when one looks at the debate in full -- in Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, Christopher Leslie Brown identifies (correctly, I think) two major schools of thought as to why the British Empire came to ban the Slave Trade in 1807, one about moral progress pushed by abolitionists, the other about the economics of Empire. The latter has its roots in the descendants of British Caribbean slaves re-examing the trade's end in the 20th Century; Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery (1944) in particular makes the case that it was economics that doomed the slave trade, and that abolitionists only "campaigned against the slave trade and slavery when it became economically convenient to do so" (Brown's paraphrasing). And the key event to this shift in the underlying economic reality, Williams said, was the loss of the North American colonies.

The other, older narrative has its origins in the first history of the movement, written in 1808 by none other than one of its most prominent leaders, Thomas Clarkson; focusing on the moral character of the British abolitionists and the British nation, it essentially made the case that the "moral arc of the universe [or at least Britain] bends toward justice", a sentiment that would be expressed by future abolitionists (and eventually Dr Martin Luther King). However, even Clarkson admitted that the success of the American Revolution played a vital role in the organizing in his movement, saying twenty years before he wrote his history, "As long as America was ours, there was no chance that a minister would have attended to the groans of the sons and daughters of Africa, however he might feel for their distress".

Brown seeks to look at other psychological motives for the abolitionists and their supporters, connecting the movement and its success to changing views on empire and nation, themselves brought on by (all together now) the success of the American Revolution. But whichever narrative we go with, the role of the America's Independence cannot be denied -- if we go with moral progress, then Britain's loss was necessary for her to seek redemption; if we go with economics, then the imperial economy must first take the hit of said loss; if we go with a change of political consciousness, then we need the previous one to be in crisis.

The fact remains that before anti-slavery sentiment in Britain organized itself into a movement in 1787, it was only that -- sentiment -- and posed no serious threat whatsoever to the vast slave interests in the Empire. To the idea that abolitionism was a trigger for the ARW, well -- the preceding sentence alone would destroy any pretense of taking it seriously, to say nothing of the fact that the Revolution began in Massachusetts (where slavery was far from essential to the economy), or that the Declaration originally laid the slave trade at the feet of the British Crown, or really the lack of any evidence whatsoever (save the odd letter of James Madison, written in the midst of the war, to some tory leaning plantation owners).

See, it's bullshit like this that shows why it's important to learn about the how abolitionism came to rise in the British Empire -- how the loss of the American Colonies (and the subsequently affected revolutions of France and Haiti) was absolutely essential to the context not only for the abolition of the slave trade but the very growth of true abolitionist sentiment into a politically meaningful movement. It's not "America taking credit for abolition", as critics say, but pushing back against this... thing -- at best naive historical determinism, and at worst, willfully blind and contrarian-for-its-own-sake counterfactual narrative -- giving a clearer understanding as to how this fundamental change in the history of Western moral and economic development came about.

 

[drewmcgunn]

John Fredrick Parker, you lay out your case convincingly with good cites. It's kinda discouraging to think that the work of men like Wilberforce as Clarkson would be stymied for perhaps as much as a generation if the ARW failed or was stillborn.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

Britain outlawed slavery during the industrial revolution after they discovered that machines worked cheaper than slaves.

I see this asserted a lot, but as far as I can tell it's a myth. Slaves were mostly used harvesting cash crops in the Caribbean and environs, whereas manufacturing was done in Britain itself by free craftsmen. IOW, the machines weren't competing with slaves, making the slave-to-machine cost comparison irrelevant.

 

[Saphroneth]

I thought I'd gather some of Robcraufurd's arguments about British abolitionism pre-American Revolutionary War, which was - if not yet at critical mass - certainly a pervasive sentiment, and one which everyone knew of even if they disagreed with it.

The reason it strikes me as likely that abolition would have happened more or less at the same time as historically is because the War of Independence strengthened the hand of the slave-owners. It took sovereignty away from a distant Westminster elite, left it with local wealthy elites in Washington and state capitals (many of whom had direct interests in slavery) and then increased the ability of those elites to block legislation they didn't like. That wasn't the aim of the Founding Fathers- though, had you told them that would be the effect, the majority wouldn't particularly have cared- any more than disenfranchising ethnic minorities was the aim of the British before 1832. Nevertheless, the political calculus seems to me to be:

Net balance of British abolitionism - Influence of Southern slaveowners + Influence of Northern abolitionists = 1830s abolition date.

And that's discounting the effect that earlier reform might have had: after all, the example of America's working classes contributing to government would have carried more weight in British debates if a) They were still on the inside of the tent in a recognisably British political system and b) They hadn't blotted their already-blotted copybook by teaming up with a continental dictator in the 1810s to launch a war of conquest.

Johnson's famous comment "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" dates from 1775.

Mansfield deliberately went out of his way to describe slavery as odious and unsupportable by anything other than positive law, giving institutional recognition to antislavery morality. What it shows is how far antislavery attitudes had spread through British society, particularly considering that Mansfield consulted with Blackstone before making the judgement. Taney chose to use the Dred Scott case as an opportunity to deny black people their rights: Mansfield used Somerset as an opportunity to affirm them. Of course, this is highly inconvenient if you're trying to make the case that British antislavery is a product of the Revolution, leaving the only solution as talking in very limited terms about the scope of the judgement rather than the scope of Mansfield's comments in the hope of playing down the attitudes which they display.

Edward Long and Samuel Estwick, two leading British slavery apologists, conceding in the aftermath of the Somerset case that slavery is 'repugnant to the spirit of English laws'

the first plan for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies being published in 1772 by Maurice Morgann, or Adam Smith calling colonial slave-owners "the refuse of the jails of Europe" in 1759, or Robert Robertson complaining in 1741 that "many Gentlemen of Figure... [insist] that to have any Hand in bringing any of the Human Species into *Bondage* is justly execrable, and that all who partake in the Sweets of *Liberty*, shou'd spare for no Cost to procure the same, as far as possible, for the rest of Mankind every where."

I think I've conclusively proved already that British antislavery attitudes are far stronger than you claim, so the main thing to do is contradict the idea that abolitionism results from the War of Independence. Firstly, the link between the language of the rebels and antislavery is far weaker than you claim: for generation after generation, the Americans see no inherent contradiction between "all men are created equal" and applying property qualifications to black voters, banning free blacks from settling in states, et cetera ad nauseam. However, the British belief that slavery is fundamentally immoral requires a far smaller push to turn it into abolitionism: just the belief that it's right to impose British moral customs on the dependent plantation societies in the Americas. This attitude is far more likely to emerge if Britain establishes its suzerainty in the Americas than if it loses the war.

If we grant your assumption that the language does count, then we have two scenarios. In the first, if slavery is America's "original sin" (Madison), and the American rebels lose the war in large part because the British free slaves, why wouldn't former rebels throw themselves into the antislavery cause with far more vigour than they did historically after God has given a clear judgement against it? In the second, if the constitutional question is settled peacefully, what other significant causes do potential rebels have to campaign for than the abolition of slavery? How much more effective would those antislavery advocates be if they could communicate and collaborate freely with British abolitionists? How many more people might Garrison have won over if he didn't have to call for the end of the Union in order to free the slaves?

 

[Socrates]

What were the changing economics of the empire that the American Revolution changed?

For me, there's actually a case the French Revolutuonary wars made a big impact, as the British wanted to prove how moral rhey were vs the French.