286 Political Activity and Resistance to Oppression: From the American Revolution to the Civil War
the institution of slavery was fundamentally evil. However,
the colonies of British America were not involved as heav-
ily in the Atlantic slave trade per se, but were rather on the
receiving end of the trade, buying slaves from British trad-
ers. Some American colonists were active in the Atlantic
slave trade, and the economies of certain areas, such as the
port cities of Boston, New York, and Charleston, relied to
a large extent on the profi ts from the shipping and selling
of slaves. Nonetheless, the British colonies of the American
mainland were primarily recipients of England’s Atlantic
trade, rather than conductors of the trade. Further, there
was no American equivalent of the Somerset case. Slavery
was legal by statute throughout the American colonies.
Laws were craft ed in the colonies that protected the insti-
tution of slavery and fostered its expansion and growth in
the American colonies in the North and the South. Th us,
although America’s abolitionists were part of the movement
that was growing on both sides of the Atlantic, their focus
was on making the institution of slavery itself illegal. An-
other important diff erence between the abolitionist move-
ment in England and that of the United States was that in
England there were only a handful of black abolitionists
because there was a tiny black population in England at the
turn of the 18th century. Th ings were very diff erent on the
American mainland, where free blacks and fugitive slaves
eventually spearheaded the abolitionist movement. In fact,
the movement in the United States was thoroughly inter-
racial; men and women, both black and white, worked to-
gether in the fi ght against slavery.
Nonetheless, the issue of the Atlantic slave trade was
pressing as America transitioned from a loosely connected
group of British colonies to the sovereign state of the United
States. As the former colonies came together as states, with
economic ties between them and regulated by the new fed-
eral government, divergent economic interests relating to
the slave trade emerged. Th e issue was hotly contested at
the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1789.
Th e Articles of Confederation that had bound the states to-
gether as one nation proved ineff ective, due in large part
to the lack of suffi cient centralized power. One of the pri-
mary ways this problem was addressed was the creation of
a list of enumerated powers given to Congress by Article 1,
Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution. One of these powers
was the Commerce Clause, which gave Congress the ex-
clusive right to regulate commerce between the states and
with foreign powers. Th e states of the Lower South, such asendorsed by King George III on March 25, 1807. Abolition
of the trade was ultimately successful as a result of (1) the
organization and mobilization of abolitionist sentiment on
moral grounds and (2) the West Indies slaver lobby and
their English agrarian allies’ decline in strength in the face
of the rising industrial capitalism. England had lost the
colonies that made up the new nation of the United States,
which had resulted in a smaller plantation economy for the
empire. Th is reduced the political power that slave planta-
tion owners had in England. England’s rapid industrializa-
tion during the last two decades of the 18th century had
begun changing the political and economic landscape of
the British Empire. Th e Parliament and Privy Council’s de-
tailed study of the slave trade and the potential impact of
its abolition on the British economy led political and eco-
nomic leaders to believe that abolition would be more prof-
itable in the long run. Th e British people began to believe
in the greater strength and profi tability of free labor in an
industrial economy. Th e convergence of interest between
the abolitionist movement that opposed slavery on moral
grounds and that of the new industrializing market forces
ultimately resulted in the British Empire’s abolition of the
slave trade. Lawmakers believed that abolition worked in
favor of England’s new economic model, which involved
moving away from an emphasis on Caribbean plantations
and slave trading and toward the control of West Africa
itself. It also emphasized the establishment of palm oil
production needed to run England’s industrial machinery
and the use of laborers that England did not have to feed
or transport. Economic historians debate whether abolition
ultimately had a positive or negative impact on the Brit-
ish economy in hindsight, but it is clear from the historical
record that those in power believed in abolition’s positive
economic impact at the time. Abolitionists and advocates
of industrialization were ultimately able to overpower the
proponents of Britain’s slave plantation economy.
Abolition in the United States
Abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in the United States
followed a very diff erent path, even though an abolition-
ist movement grew in British North American mainland
colonies in the 1700s just as it had in England. In fact,
SEAST was organized on both sides of the Atlantic. And
like in England, abolitionists were primarily Quakers and
other deeply religious men and women who believed that