^ The Slave Trade 



resulted in the prohibition of the slave trade in 1 807-11, 

 and in the abolition of slavery throughout all the British 

 dominions in the year 1833-40. Before this, however, 

 many good people in the United States and in the British 

 West Indies had been granting freedom to their slaves. Some 

 of these were discontented with their position, and either drifted 

 to England or vaguely desired to return to Africa. As free 

 men they felt themselves out of touch with their environment 

 in America. The Church of England (which in a great measure 

 only really awoke to a true sense of its duties and responsibilities 

 in the nineteenth century) was rather on the side of the white 

 people and the masters than on that of the blacks. It condoned 

 or approved of slavery, and when it preached to the slaves at 

 all, counselled contentment with the condition in which God 

 had been pleased to place them. Nearly all the Negroes in 

 America who could obtain education and choose their own 

 reHgious sect became Baptists or Wesleyans. As an unconscious 

 tribute to John Wesley, it may be stated that his name is one 

 of the commonest even at the present day amongst West 

 African or West Indian Negroes who are descended from 

 freed slaves. 



Those who felt that vagrant Negroes were out of place 

 in the English polity, in the streets of London and in Lancashire 

 towns, and those who in the West Indies or in Canada 

 realised the difficulty of a free black man living alongside 

 a white colonist, began to entertain the idea of repatriating 

 Negroes freed from slavery, of sending them back to Africa. 

 The somewhat fanatical " philanthropy " of those who promoted 

 this scheme in both hemispheres to a great extent spoilt the 

 immediate results of their well-meant efforts. If the repatriation 

 movement had been conducted in a more deliberate and scientific 

 manner, ex-slaves would have been interrogated as to the tribe 

 VOL. 1 113 8 



