Great Britain Was The Dominant Power in the Slave Trade

A lot of people may wonder: why would people of African descent who found themselves in America take up arms for American independence? What was in it for them? We may never know the exact thoughts for each individual. None are known to have kept a daily diary, like John Adams and some others did. But here are some possibilities:

Great Britain became the dominant power in the trans-Atlantic slave trade after 1664. Portugal still did a larger volume of commerce, from Angola to its massive sugar plantations in Brazil. But after winning a war with the Dutch and turning New Amsterdam into New York, Britain also took over the lion's share of the rest of the slave trade. Most enslaved Africans transported to North America arrived 1720-1780 on British ships. Taking up arms against the empire that bought and sold a man or his immediate ancestors could make a lot of sense.

In fact, for almost fifty years, the trade was dominated by the Royal Africa Company, which counted as its royal patron James, Duke of York, brother of the king, a future king himself. Even after the British government ended the company's monopoly, bowing to claims that the right to trade in slaves was "a cherished English liberty," the royal family was heavily invested in the trade. Only 25 years before the Declaration of Independence was signed, King George II (father of George III) had issued a decree that the colony of Georgia must allow inhabitants to purchase and own slaves. Until then, the colony's board of proprietors had prohibited traffic in slaves, and many anti-slavery religous settlements had found a home in Georgia. Self-emancipated slaves from South Carolina had found a home there too.

Thomas Jefferson was not entirely wrong to include in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence a charge that the King of England "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere,or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." John Adams wrote almost fifty years later, "I knew his southern brethren would never suffer" that language "to pass in congress." Jefferson wrote that the clause had been removed "in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia" with the consent of his "Northern brethren" who had fewer slaves, but had been "pretty considerable carriers of them to others." All of that was true -- nobody had clean hands. But taking up arms against the British king and parliament made sense to thousands, among them, many of African descent.

King George III and his dynasty were recognizable patrons of slavery and the slave trade. The British movement to abolish the slave trade mostly developed after the American Revolution, but when William Wilberforce introduced his first bill in the British parliament to abolish commerce in human flesh, two of his strongest opponents were William, Duke of Clarence, son of King George III, and Sir Banastre Tarleton, who earned a reputation for savage reprisals against continental forces during the war for American independence. Wilberforce only gained 16 votes for his bill. Most members of parliament, whether Tory (conservative) or Whig (liberal) either had direct investments in sugar plantations in the West Indies, or in ships that transported slaves, or represented cities that relied on the trade for much of their prosperity.

Slaves were among the many commodities that the united colonies ceased buying under the Non-Importation Agreements. These were intended to put pressure on Great Britain to recognize and respond to the colonies' grievances. Georgia and South Carolina were the only states that continued to import a large volume of slaves from Africa after the Revolutionary War. What could not be anticipated in 1776 or even 1783 was the development of a massive intra-state slave trade. The supply from across the ocean was sharply curtailed, while demand from newly opening lands planted with cotton sharply increased. States like Virginia, where tobacco cultivation had depleted essential nutrients in the soil, and landowners switched to crop requiring less labor, had a surplus of slaves to sell off. That was decades in the future.