The United States went through a devastating civil war to end slavery—the deadliest war in American history. Have you ever thought about how the British ended slavery in their Caribbean possessions such as Barbados and Jamaica?
The answer is, in a word, “peacefully.” It happened fifteen years before our 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and 17 years before the end of our Civil War.
I don’t mean to gloss over the turmoil—there were major slave revolts in British territories before the Emancipation Act was adopted in 1833, and full emancipation did not arrive until 1838. From 1787, when the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was created (mostly by Quakers), protests against the slave trade in Britain were fierce, long-lasting, and initially futile.
But by 1838 all former slaves in the British possessions were free—without a widespread war. Continue reading “Why Didn’t the U.S. Free the Slaves the Way Britain Did?”