480 Chapter 24
Danubian provinces, and in Russia. The campaign
against colonial slavery also made some progress yet
left millions of people in bondage. The Congress of
Vienna adopted a proclamation ending the slave trade
in principle, but the same treaties accepted the exis-
tence of colonial slavery and returned lost colonies to
Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Spain knowing
that these were to be slave economies. Europe then ig-
nored the agreement ending the slave trade. The grow-
ing love of sweet foods demanded great quantities of
cane sugar from Caribbean plantations, where sugar
often accounted for 90 percent of the exports. Few peo-
ple paused with the poet William Cowper, who wrote,
“Think how many backs have smarted/For the sweets
your cane affords.” Thus, Bourbon France shipped more
than 125,000 new slaves to the Caribbean between
1814 and 1831, and other slave states behaved simi-
larly. In 1828 alone, 100,000 more African slaves were
shipped to the Americas, despite the closing of the
market in British colonies and the United States.
The Spanish revolution of 1820 led to a victory for
abolitionism when the Spanish colonies won indepen-
dence. The revolutionaries did not plan to end slavery
at first, but Simon Bolivar realized that liberating slaves
would increase his chances of victory. Bolivar adopted
military manumission (freeing the slaves in areas con-
quered) in his campaigns after 1815, and his speech to
the revolutionary congress of 1821 led to a Manumis-
sion Law. Bolivar thus doubly earned the nickname “El
Libertador” (the liberator), by freeing a region from
Spain and a class from slavery, but slavery persisted in
those Spanish territories that did not win indepen-
dence. Coffee and sugar plantations in Cuba required
more than 200,000 slaves and those in Puerto Rico,
17,500.
Abolitionists won another important victory in
British colonies. The British antislavery movement, led
by Quakers and other Dissenters, had been gaining
strength since the late eighteenth century. They found
an effective leader in William Wilberforce, an M.P. and
the head of an Anglican evangelical sect. Wilberforce
founded the Antislavery Society with the aim of
abolishing all slavery, and his movement flooded Parlia-
ment with petitions. In its first year, the Antislavery So-
ciety opened 220 local chapters and submitted 825
petitions, with hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Abolitionism gained strength during the turbulent years
of 1830–32, when many members of Parliament feared
a revolution in Britain. At that moment, the British
Caribbean experienced another slave rebellion (the
third since 1815). On Christmas Day 1831, more than
20,000 Jamaican slaves revolted. The British army
quelled the revolt, but 14 whites and 200 slaves were
killed, while 312 more slaves were executed later. The
message from Jamaica, alongside the news from Paris,
Brussels, and the Kentish countryside, persuaded the
Whig government to abolish slavery in the British
colonies in 1834.