Politics is mostly about money and guns, so how did it fit into the society of 1800?
Slavery was one arm of an economic cycle across the atlantic with trade in sugar, cotton, manufactured goods, and slaves.
The belief that was pretty universal was that africans weren't men, they were 3/5th's a man or similar, so trading them was "okay". To understand history to have to understand that people thought in fundermentally different ways in the past.
Therefore in order to maintain the money coming in from the trading routes, and to maintain a military presence in the Caribbean to oppose the French, politicians were opposed to the end of the slave trade.
Eventually the evangelical church commited itself, led by the Wedgewood and Darwin families (yes, that Darwin), to the end of slavery.
They launched what was for the day a very sophisticated political and legal campaign, and eventually won the legal battles, and the battle of public opinion.
Also the English legal system has a precidence structure to it, and there was a legal precident, from 1034 (the year 1034) that said slavery was illegal in the UK.
Eventually to end the slave trade Britain had to fight a war, which cost significantly more than any profits from slaving, and wrote Spain a million pound cheque to stop trading (which was a lot in those days).
So slavery went from a economic and military foundation to a hated and fought evil, that many died to end, in the political arena.
So you might say slavery effected politics more than politics affected slavery.
|
Linear Mode
