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The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria cover

The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria

Chapter 342: PETITION OF THE QUAKERS AGAINST THE SLAVE TRADE.
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About This Book

The volume traces British political, parliamentary, and military developments from the accession of George III through the early nineteenth century, chronicling changes of ministry and cabinet, debates over colonial taxation and the American conflict, parliamentary controversies involving figures such as Wilkes and Warren Hastings, questions of Catholic relief and slave-trade abolition, and responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, including major naval and continental campaigns, the union with Ireland, and domestic legislation on finance, civil liberties, and parliamentary reform.

PETITION OF THE QUAKERS AGAINST THE SLAVE TRADE.

Towards the end of the session, a bill was introduced for regulating the trade of the African Company, in which there was a clause prohibiting its officers from exporting negroes. This encouraged the Quakers to present a petition for the total abolition of the slave trade: a petition that may be said to have laid the foundation of those generous and persevering exertions of gifted individuals, as Clarkson and Wilberforce, which finally succeeded in effecting the abolition of that loathsome traffic in the bones and sinews of man; which had for centuries been carried on without compunction.