Abolition of Slavery
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Abolition of Slavery’
William Wilberforce told Parliament that the more his opponents slandered him, the more he was sure he was winning.
William Wilberforce, Britain’s leading anti-slavery campaigner, was accused of ‘fanaticism’ for his refusal to accept the prevailing customs of the day. But as he warned Parliament, such jibes only made him more determined to fight on.
Samuel Smiles explains why the London and Birmingham Railway was an achievement superior to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
When the London and Birmingham Railway opened in 1838, it was an engineering marvel. But progress from the era of the Great Pyramids to Britain’s railways did not lie in engineering alone. It lay in the fact that the industrial revolution was an achievement not of servants gratifying a political elite, but of free men pursuing their own advantages.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden believed British politicians supporting the slave-owning American South had been led a merry dance.
Richard Cobden MP had considerable sympathy with the Confederate States in the American Civil War of 1861-1865, as he regarded Washington as arrogantly meddlesome and corrupted by big business. But in 1863 he held up a report from the US Congress and told his Rochdale constituents that the South’s politicians had forfeited any right to an Englishman’s goodwill.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden offered a startling analogy for the American Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republicans won the US general election in 1860, prompting eleven slave-owning southern States to declare independence. Some in Westminster sympathised, saying the national result did not reflect the majority of southern voters – but Richard Cobden was scornful.
American anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass contrasts two kinds of ‘nationalist’.
American anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in 1845, and loved it. But in time he came to realise that there are two kinds of nationalist: those who want freedom everywhere, and those who want it only for themselves, and will enslave any other land or people in order to get it.
Frederick Douglass, the American runaway slave turned Abolitionist, spent some of his happiest days in Britain.
Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland, and became one of America’s leading Abolitionists. Gently forgiving but firm of purpose, Douglass was a champion not only of Abolition but of freedom everywhere, suspicious of communism, committed to national sovereignty and free markets. And in 1845, he instantly fell in love with the British.