26 S. U. Abramova(S. Crowther, J. Horton), whose names are widely known even now, came
from among the emancipated Africans who studied later in different missions
and in Fourah Bay College.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Church had connived
in the slave trade; in the nineteenth century the missionaries concentrated
their activities on helping emancipated Africans and victims of the trade.
The anti-slavery blockade also enabled a thorough study to be made of
the situation on the western and eastern coasts of Africa, and when the time
of direct colonial seizures arrived the slogan 'Abolition of the Slave Trade'
was used to justify annexations.
In the nineteenth century the abolitionist movement in Europe was aimed
at curbing the slave trade and abolishing African slave labour in the West
Indian colonies. T. Clarkson, W. Wilberforce and T. F. Buxton in Great
Britain and V. Scholcher in France did much to solve these problems. Other
slave-trading countries, in utter disregard of their declarations to the contrary,
continued to export slaves in keeping with the needs of their colonies' eco-
nomies. The United States of America, which had abolished the slave trade,
regularly imported new groups of slaves. According to the materials of the
United States Senate, the works of several nineteenth-century authors and
documents of the British Foreign Office, the United States carried on the slave
trade until the Civil War. Many southern planters and northern manufacturers
regarded the import of slaves as a necessary requisite for the successful devel-
opment of the plantation economy (the internal slave trade could not cope
with the growing need for manpower).
It is common knowledge that the attitude to slavery of Africans split
the country into two hostile camps. The history of abolitionism in the United
States has its heroes and martyrs. Seeking to justify the right to own people,
the adversaries of abolitionism did not confine themselves to economic reasons
but resorted to racism. In the nineteenth century the United States became
the centre of racism with regard to African slaves. The works of Morton and
Nott^26 published there viewed Africans as second-rate people, good only for
serving the white man.
In the nineteenth century, following the routing of Napoleon's army,
the international prestige of Russia increased substantially. Russia had never
exported slaves from Africa. But the Russian Government began to take an
active part in international negotiations on measures to put an end to the
export of slaves from Africa. In 1841 it signed together with the Great Britain,
Prussia and France The Treaty of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In the mid-
nineteenth century the movement for the abolition of serfdom was gaining
momentum in Russia. In those years the progressive Russian public devoted
much attention to questions dealing with the slave trade and the position of
African slaves, namely in the United States, drawing a silent parallel with the