Featured
Anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp had a court order preventing Thomas Lewis being shipped off to slavery, but he had to find him first.
Granville Sharp (1735-1813), a clergyman’s son from Durham, was a vigorous anti-slavery campaigner, whose perseverance saved many lives. Among them was that of Thomas Lewis, whose fate was decided at a sensational trial on 20th February, 1771.
Samuel Pepys ran into a little knot of seafaring men at the Exchange, who told him some hair-raising tales about their time in Algiers.
On February 8th, 1661, Samuel Pepys, a civil servant with the Royal Navy, popped over to the Exchange to meet William Warren, who supplied wood for the nation’s warships. Warren was unavailable, but the convivial Pepys invited some Naval officers to the nearby Golden Fleece tavern, where he listened open-mouthed to their recollections of life in the slave compounds of Algiers.
The Russian Consul in New York issued a stern rebuke to those trying to break Britain’s ban on slave-trading by sailing under his nation’s colours.
Long after slavery was criminalised throughout the British Empire, the abuse went on unabated in the USA. Hoping to escape the wrath of the Royal Navy, traders with their wretched cargo would sail to America under false colours, but on April 2nd, 1836, the Russian Consul in New York, Alexis Eustaphieve (1755-1857), issued this stern Consular notice to any who thus dishonoured the Russian flag.
John Wesley called for a world in which no one was forced to go against his conscience or to serve against his will.
In Thoughts on Slavery (1774), Church of England clergyman John Wesley made an impassioned appeal for liberty. Of course his primary goal was to secure the release of those held in captivity as slaves; but his vision went beyond that, to a world in which no one forced others to do anything against their conscience and their will.
John Wesley wondered how those involved in the slave trade would feel if the tables were ever turned on them.
In 1774, Church of England clergyman John Wesley published Thoughts on Slavery, in which he joined the chorus (or choir, since it was overwhelmingly a Christian fellowship) of those demanding an end to the trade in slaves between Africa and Great Britain’s American colonies. His song was a simple one: Do as you would be done by; and he recalled an occasion when it had touched one heart in Liverpool.
Two years into America’s Civil War, cotton workers in Manchester defied current opinion among politicians and the press, and pledged their support to the Union.
Two years into the American Civil War (1861-65) many in England believed that economic self-interest may yet lie with the South. Nevertheless, the day before Lincoln’s historic declaration of emancipation on January 1st, 1863, cotton workers defied an urgent editorial in the Guardian and met at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall to approve a message of support for the Union.
In replying to a letter of support from Manchester’s cotton workers, US President Lincoln showed how deeply touched he had been.
Washington’s embargoes on cotton from the American South during the Civil War (1861-1865) hit the British cotton industry hard. Nonetheless, on New Year’s Eve, 1862, the day before the historic Emancipation Proclamation took effect, workers defied scare-mongering politicians and journalists to gather in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, and pledge their support to Abraham Lincoln. On January 19th, he replied.