Abolitionism

• 1. Introduction

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  Abolitionism is the political movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved people around the world. On the 22nd of June 1772, a British judge named Lord Mansfield delivered a verdict that would reverberate across the Atlantic. The enslaved man James Somersett had been captured, imprisoned on a ship, and was bound for Jamaica to be resold. Three godparents had filed a writ of habeas corpus. Mansfield had to decide whether English common law recognized slavery at all. His ruling declared that slavery was "so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law" and ordered Somersett discharged. That single judgment helped ignite a movement. How did scattered acts of resistance and philosophical argument build into a force that eventually dismantled one of the oldest human institutions? The answers reach back to medieval France, forward to modern-day Mauritania, and into the courtrooms, churches, and printing presses of a dozen nations in between.

• 2. First Cracks in the Institution

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  France is the country that first moved to outlaw slavery, though the story is more complicated than any simple decree. In 1315, King Louis X issued a proclamation declaring that "France signifies freedom" and that any enslaved person setting foot on French soil should be freed. That principle was tested in 1571, when a Norman slave merchant tried to sell enslaved people in Bordeaux. He was arrested and his enslaved people freed by the Parlement of Guyenne. Yet thousands of enslaved Africans remained present in France during the 18th century, and French colonies in the Caribbean depended on enslaved labor for their sugarcane plantations.

  Long before Louis X's decree, a woman who had been enslaved herself shaped the early abolition of the slave trade in France. Balthild of Chelles, who had been enslaved and then became queen consort of Neustria and Burgundy through her marriage to Clovis II, served as regent from 657. During her rule she abolished the trade in enslaved people, though not slavery itself. Her personal charity was to purchase and free enslaved people, especially children.

  In Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi abolished chattel slavery across the country in 1590, though other forms of coerced labor would persist. Spain moved against the enslavement of indigenous people in its colonies with the New Laws of 1542, driven in part by the writings of Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican priest who had witnessed the encomienda system firsthand. His book, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, helped push those laws through, and ultimately triggered the Valladolid debate, described as the first European argument about the rights of colonized people.

• 3. The Somersett Case and British Law

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  Joseph Knight read about the Somersett case and drew his own conclusions. Knight was an African man who had been purchased by John Wedderburn in Jamaica and brought to Scotland. Married with a child, he left Wedderburn and filed a freedom suit. Wedderburn argued that Knight owed him "perpetual servitude". In 1778 the Court of Session of Scotland ruled against Wedderburn, finding that chattel slavery was not recognized under Scots law and that enslaved people could seek court protection to leave a master.

  The legal groundwork in Scotland had actually been laid decades earlier. Two freedom suits, Montgomery v. Sheddan in 1755 and Spens v. Dalrymple in 1769, had established legal procedure in British courts before the Somersett ruling. Each plaintiff had been baptized in Scotland. Both cases ended before a decision, due to the deaths of the plaintiff and defendant respectively, but they set a precedent.

  Even as these cases challenged slavery, a different form of bondage was legal in Scotland. From 1606, colliers and salters had been bound by law to the works where they labored and could be sold with those works. A 1775 act intended to end what Parliament itself called "a state of slavery and bondage" proved ineffective, and it took a further act in 1799 to finally emancipate them.

  Adam Smith, writing The Wealth of Nations in 1776, built the economic case for abolition. He argued that slavery cost more than free labor once security, housing, food, and the high death rate of enslaved people were factored in, and that free workers would be more productive because they had personal incentives. The anti-slavery argument now had both a moral ruling from Lord Mansfield and an economic critique from the era's most prominent economist.

• 4. The British Campaign

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  In 1787, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in London. William Wilberforce led the parliamentary campaign, while Thomas Clarkson became the group's most prominent researcher, gathering data on the trade. One of the campaign's most effective tools was the Josiah Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion of 1787, bearing the image and the words "Am I Not A Man and a Brother?" Clarkson described it as "promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom".

  The 1792 Slave Trade Bill passed the House of Commons but was "mangled and mutilated" by amendments and stalled in the House of Lords for years. Wilberforce's biographer William Hague considers the unfinished abolition to be the greatest failure of Prime Minister Pitt. The Slave Trade Act finally passed on the 25th of March 1807, making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire. Britain then used its influence to pressure other countries into treaties and authorized the Royal Navy to seize foreign slave ships.

  But ending the trade was not ending slavery. The 1807 act even repealed the earlier Amelioration Act 1798, which had tried to improve conditions for enslaved people in the colonies. In the 1820s the abolitionist movement revived with a new target: slavery itself. The Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions was founded in 1823. On the 28th of August 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed. The state purchased enslaved people from their enslavers and freed them, completing the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire by 1838.

  In 1839, Joseph Sturge founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which pushed to outlaw slavery worldwide and pressed the government to treat slave traders as pirates. It continues today as Anti-Slavery International, considered the world's oldest international human rights organization.

• 5. Haiti and the Cost of Freedom

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  The only country to free itself from slavery through self-liberation was a former French colony: Haiti, through the revolution of 1791-1804. The rebellion began in Saint-Domingue in 1791, the largest French Caribbean colony, led by formerly enslaved people including Georges Biassou, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In 1793, French Civil Commissioners Leger-Felicite Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel issued what they called the first emancipation proclamation of the modern world, the Decree of 16 Pluviose An II. Their strategic purpose was to bring Black troops into the French military fold.

  On the 4th of February 1794, the Convention in Paris, under Maximilien Robespierre, abolished slavery formally in France and its colonies. But the victory was short-lived. Napoleon Bonaparte, influenced by the slaveholding family of his wife and pressured by planters threatening to hand the Caribbean islands to Britain, promulgated the law of the 20th of May 1802 restoring slavery. He sent military governors and troops to enforce it.

  On the 10th of May 1802, Colonel Delgres launched a rebellion in Guadeloupe against Napoleon's general. It was repressed. Napoleon sent more than 20,000 troops to Saint-Domingue; two-thirds died, mostly from yellow fever. The decisive Battle of Vertières ended with a French defeat, and Haiti declared independence in 1804. France refused to recognize it and forced Haiti to pay reparations for losses during the revolution. That debt, including secondary debts and interest, was not paid off until 1947. One major cause of Haiti's enduring poverty traces directly to that demand. Napoleon, seeing the collapse of his Caribbean ambitions, sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803.

• 6. The American Fight

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  Vermont was the first American state to abolish slavery, in 1777, followed by Pennsylvania's gradual emancipation act in 1780. By 1804 all northern states had ended it, though this did not mean enslaved people already in those states were immediately freed; some were required to work without wages as "indentured servants" for two more decades.

  In the fifteen southern states by the 1850s, slavery was legally entrenched. The 1860 census counted four million enslaved people in the United States. Abolitionist newspapers like The Liberator, founded by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831, could not be mailed to southern post offices. Amos Dresser, a white alumnus of Lane Theological Seminary, was publicly whipped in Nashville, Tennessee, for simply possessing abolitionist publications. The mob murder of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy on the 7th of November 1837 in Alton, Illinois, was covered nationwide and caused a surge in abolitionist society membership; by 1840, more than 15,000 people had joined such societies.

  Black activists were central to the campaign. Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved man, published the North Star newspaper from 1847 to 1851. Charles Henry Langston and John Mercer Langston helped found the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. Harriet Tubman took direct action. Phillis Wheatley challenged the institution through her writing.

  On the 1st of January 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, changing the legal status of three million enslaved people in Confederate states from enslaved to "henceforward... free". It also allowed formerly enslaved people to join the United States Colored Troops. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, ended slavery for non-criminals throughout the country, though it preserved an exception for punishment of a crime. Colorado became the first state to remove similar language from its own constitution, through a ballot referendum in 2018.

• 7. The International Framework

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  The first attempt by non-governmental organizations to coordinate abolition globally was the World Anti-Slavery Convention, held at Exeter Hall in London from the 12th to the 23rd of June 1840. Thomas Clarkson was the key speaker. The Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference of 1889-90 brought colonial governments together, concluding with the Brussels Conference Act of 1890, which was later revised by the Convention of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1919.

  The League of Nations took up the cause through a series of commissions. The Temporary Slavery Commission, founded in 1924, conducted a global investigation. Its work underpinned the 1926 Slavery Convention, which the source describes as a turning point in banning slavery globally. The Committee of Experts on Slavery followed in 1932 to review enforcement, and the Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery conducted investigations of all colonial empires between 1934 and 1939.

  On the 10th of December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4 of which explicitly prohibited slavery in all its forms. At that point, the Arab world remained the only region where institutional chattel slavery was still legal. Faisal of Saudi Arabia prohibited the owning of enslaved people in November 1962. Yemen followed in 1962, Dubai in 1963, and Oman in 1970. Mauritania issued a presidential decree abolishing slavery in 1981, making it the most recent country to do so formally.

  In Wallachia and Moldavia, between 1843 and 1855, principalities emancipated all 250,000 enslaved Roma people. Russia emancipated its serfs in 1861, though that act failed to prevent the unrest that contributed to the revolutions of 1917. Brazil became the last country in the Americas to outlaw slavery in 1888, with the Lei Aurea, the "Golden Law".

  The International Labour Organization estimates that 20.9 million people remain victims of human trafficking globally, including 5.5 million children, of whom 55 percent are women and girls. The movement that began with Lord Mansfield's 1772 ruling remains unfinished.