Short Essay 2

The abolitionist movement in Britain was, for a long time, assumed to have been “entirely or even heavily dominated by ‘Quakers, evangelicals and Rational Dissenters’” (Hudson 562). These supposed radicals were considered outcasts, both socially and politically, and were thought to oppose slavery not on the basis on morality, but because they were opposed to the government and the capitalist system in place. A lot of people became extremely wealthy because of the business of slavery, further widening the status of the lower and upper classes.
Even though there were very vocal opponents to slavery, it was still pretty popular in England. Bristol considers its “Golden Age” during the eighteenth century at height of its involvement in the slave trades (Richardson 49). Unfortunately, Bristol did not use its new wealth and status to move into other avenues of business, and when slave trading died out so did the city. There were possibly more proponents of slavery in Bristol than opponents, solely based on the fact that the city was so successful at slave-trading and did not work to find anything else to offer economically to society.
Other cities, such as Liverpool and Glasgow, used their “association with slavery…for even more dramatic local growth and development in the following century” (Richardson 50). Since these cities had more to sustain them than just slavery, people there may have been more willing to abolish slavery and put an end to the slave trades because they had other business opportunities in which to make money. Louis d’Anjou claimed that the first abolitionists were people who had been “left out in the cold” by capitalism and therefore “set out to recreate their society, beginning with the abolition of forced labor” (Hudson 559).
It is simply untrue that only and all radicals were abolitionists. In fact, “some radicals were even directly implicated in the slave-trade” (Hudson 560). The Anglican Church was not entirely absolved of any entanglements with slavery either, having had inherited a plantation in Virginia (Hudson 562). Yet some of the biggest opponents to slavery were social and political conservatives who belonged to the Church (Hudson 560), and it has been reported more recently that some conservative groups rooted in the Church were much more involved in the abolitionist movement than previously thought (Hudson 562).
Early abolitionists in England could be considered both “left-wing” and “right wing” politically. Radicals that opposed slavery did so primarily as an effort to bring down the government and/or capitalism. Many of these radicals were unable to exploit slavery for personal gains as the elite had done and they were unhappy about it. Abolitionist conservatives more often opposed slavery based on moral grounds, even though some of them had become wealth due to their (or their family’s) involvement in slavery.