Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition. Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815–1859

Abstract

The nineteenth-century British took their anti-slavery heritage seriously. Westminster Abbey, the pantheon of the nation, contains several memorials of men who campaigned and legislated against the slave trade and slavery. One of the earliest, inaugurated in 1822, shows Charles James Fox dying in the presence of an Mrican. On bended knees the African gratefully acknowledges Fox's crucial role in 1806 during the process that terminated Britain's participation in the slave trade. As Joseph C. Dorsey points out in his Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition. Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815–1859, the British were not content with asserting their sense of national morality through the beatific sentiments of the evangelical-humanitarian public and the legislative enactments of sympathetic politicians. British abolitionism also spoke through the mouth of the cannon. At the Congress of Vienna the British Government embarked on several decades of diplomatic pressure with the intention of forcing other governments to prohibit their citizens from participating in the transatlantic slave trade. As the hegemonic ruler of the waves, the British had the means to enforce the treaties that they made with foreign powers, and until far into the century the Royal Navy maintained a squadron of warships to deter slave traders from making the Atlantic crossing. Landings were made on the African coast, and slave-trading depots were destroyed.