Degrading, cruel and pernicious - Wilberforce tears into slavery

William Wilberforce has launched an extraordinary attack on slavery, as campaigners have begun to set up the new group which is to fight for its abolition.

On the opening page of a new pamphlet, just published, Mr Wilberforce describes slavery as “a system of the grossest injustice, of the most heathenish irreligion and immorality, of the most unprecedented degradation, and unrelenting cruelty”.

This message from the leading campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 is called “an appeal to the religion, justice, and humanity of the inhabitants of the British Empire in behalf of the negro slaves in the West Indies”.

Calling slavery “a national crime of the deepest moral malignity,” Mr Wilberforce says that its continuation “can only be accounted for by the generally prevailing ignorance of its real nature”.

Few Britons, he says, realise the condition of black slaves, with a mistaken focus previously on individual cases of cruelty, not the system as a whole. Mr Wilberforce says that plantation owners living in Britain are as ignorant as anyone,

William Wilberforce will switch his efforts to Parliament in the next week, when he will present a petition against slavery from the Society of Friends, the Quakers. The Dorset MP, Thomas Fowell Buxton, is then expected to take over the leadership of anti-slavery MPs.

The campaign is based at Aldermanbury in the City of London, and its central committee chaired by the progressive Whig MP for Norwich, William Smith

Thomas Clarkson, a leading campaigner against the slave trade but now aged 62, is to travel the country to mobilise a network of anti-slavery groups. It is clear that the AntiSlavery Society intends to deluge Parliament with petitions calling for early legislation against slavery.

Zachary Macaulay, who has experience as a manager at a sugar plantation with slaves in Jamaica, is expected to run a new magazine, the AntiSlavery Monthly Reporter.