Chapter 4 - Assessing Abolition: Investigating the Results of British Emancipation

Summary

In 1833, the British Parliament voted to abolish slavery in its overseas colonies, establishing a four-year “apprenticeship” system to gradually transition the slave-based agricultural system to a wage-based economy. This chapter focuses on American responses to British abolition. People on both sides of the slavery issue were keen to observe the outcome of freedom at the heart of Britain’s lucrative plantation economy, and both Americans and the British clamored to witness and record the unfolding of emancipation on the black-majority sugar islands. In the process, this chapter shows, anti-slavery advocates honed various forms of social investigation to prove and publicize their belief that emancipation could succeed in the sectionally divided United States.