Abolition Across the Pond
In February 1863, only weeks after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took effect, an extraordinary message crossed the Atlantic.
Citizens of Liverpool reminded Lincoln that Britain, too, had once tolerated and profited from slavery. They remembered that past with "mingled pain and pleasure"—pain that slavery had existed throughout Britain's West Indian colonies, but pride that Britain's "free spirit" had finally overcome powerful interests and "bade the oppressed go free."
Now, they believed, America had reached the same historic crossroads.
The Liverpool address invoked Britain's great abolitionists, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and Henry Thornton, and praised Lincoln's actions against slavery. The connection was unmistakable: Britain's abolitionists saw America's struggle as the continuation of a cause their own country had fought for generations. And that British victory had required an extraordinary alliance.
Wilberforce carried the battle into Parliament. Thomas Clarkson traveled thousands of miles gathering evidence of the slave trade's brutality. Granville Sharp fought slavery through the law. Henry Thornton, banker, parliamentarian, and Wilberforce's close friend, helped provide the political, organizational, and financial muscle behind the movement. James Stephen, a lawyer who knew the West Indies firsthand, supplied crucial legal arguments and helped devise legislation attacking the slave trade.
Others supplied something even more powerful: testimony. Olaudah Equiano, who had experienced enslavement himself, exposed the slave trade through his remarkable autobiography. Mary Prince, born into slavery in Bermuda, later told British readers what slavery meant from the inside: its violence, degradation, and destruction of families. Her book, the History of Mary Prince, published in 1831, became an important weapon in the final campaign for emancipation.
And then there was John Newton. Newton had once captained slave ships himself. After his religious conversion, he eventually became an outspoken opponent of the trade, describing before Parliament what he had witnessed and participated in. The former slave-ship captain who later wrote "Amazing Grace" became a striking witness against the very system from which he had once profited.
Together with thousands of petitioners, organizers, clergy, women, and ordinary citizens, these voices changed British public opinion. Their efforts helped abolish the British slave trade in 1807 and slavery throughout most of the British Empire beginning in 1834. The achievement was imperfect—slaveholders were compensated while the formerly enslaved were not—but Britain had demonstrated something extraordinary:
An institution protected by immense wealth and political power could be destroyed.
Thereafter, the movement crossed the Atlantic. Frederick Douglass, born into slavery in Maryland, escaped and became one of America's greatest abolitionist voices. In the 1840s he traveled through Britain and Ireland, speaking against American slavery. British supporters eventually raised the money to purchase his legal freedom.
By the time Lincoln rose to prominence, he was entering a struggle already generations old.
Lincoln was more cautious than abolitionists such as Douglass. Yet his moral judgment was unmistakable: "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong."
Then came the American Civil War. Enslaved people fled plantations for Union lines. Abolitionists intensified their demands. Congress attacked slavery through legislation. Douglass argued that America could not defeat the rebellion without attacking slavery itself.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln finally acted. The Emancipation Proclamation declared enslaved people in areas still in rebellion to "be, and henceforward shall be, free."
Across the Atlantic, Britain was watching.
In Manchester, the center of Britain's cotton industry, the Union and Emancipation Society supported the American antislavery cause even as the war devastated Lancashire's cotton economy. In August 1863, its members celebrated Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Port Hudson and declared that lasting reunion required "the unconditional abolition of all property in human beings."
The connection was not invented by historians generations later. People living through emancipation understood that these struggles were connected. Lincoln himself resisted the idea that one man had liberated millions. Looking back in 1864, he wrote: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." The road to emancipation did not begin at Lincoln's desk. It ran through Newton's confession, Equiano's testimony, Clarkson's investigations, Wilberforce's speeches, Thornton and Stephen's political work, Mary Prince's courageous story, British emancipation, Douglass's speeches, Harriet Tubman's journeys, and enslaved people who seized opportunities to pursue their own freedom.
Lincoln inherited that struggle—and, amid the catastrophe of civil war, helped transform it into national policy.
In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States.
More than thirty years earlier, Britain had begun doing the same throughout its empire. And in 1863, the people of Liverpool looked across the Atlantic and recognized what was happening.
