 | | Coleridge denounced slavery |
Before 1698 the Royal African Company, a trading company based in London, held the British monopoly on all trade with Africa, though there is evidence suggesting that Bristol merchants were illegally trading in Africa for slaves during the 1670s. In 1698, after much pressure from ports around the country, the Royal African Company’s control over the trade for slaves was broken and Bristol's first slave ship, the Beginning, set sail for Africa. The captain bought a number of enslaved Africans and delivered them to Jamaica where they were sold and put to work on the plantations. Between 1698 and 1807, 2,108 ships left Bristol for Africa to exchange goods for enslaved Africans and take them to the Caribbean. Already a wealthy city and trading port, Bristol's involvement with the slave trade made it even richer. Move for abolition But in 1788, following a visit by abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, Bristol became the first city outside of London to set up a committee for the abolition of the slave trade. The first public meeting was held on 28 January, and agreed to establish a committee, collect money for the cause and start a petition. The committee approached the government about the slave trade, held meetings, and circulated petitions - signed by 800 people - ensuring Bristol papers were full of poems and letters condemning the slave trade. This was one of the first political campaigns in which women were allowed to be involved and they played an active role - particularly in the boycott of slave-produced sugar.
 | | Southey remembered at Bristol Cathedral |
Bristol poets Robert Southey, Hannah More and Anne Yearsley and Somerset-based William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge all wrote against the trade. Bristol-born Southey, a poet laureate, wrote a series of six poems condemning the slave trade. In his Sonnet III he says: "I thank thee Gracious God! That I do feel upon my cheek the glow Of indignation, when beneath the rod A sable brother writhes in silent woe." Anne Yearsley, a poor milk seller who was self-educated, was also a campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade. Among her writings against the "inhumanity of the slave-trade" was this one, condemning the city of her birth: "Bristol, thine heart hath throbb'd to glory.β€”Slaves, E'en Christian slaves, have shook their chains, and gaz'd With wonder and amazement on thee. Hence Ye grov'ling souls, who think the term I give, Of Christian slave, a paradox! to you I do not turn, but leave you to conception." Hannah More Yearsley was a contemporary, and sometime friend, of writer Hannah More. This influential Bristolian began her career as a playwright, and founded a school for young ladies in Park Street. She became an Evangelical Christian in her later years, establishing Sunday schools, writing religious tracts and campaigning against the slave trade.
 | | Former school founded by More in Park St |
Her poems against the slave trade, such as The Sorrows of Yamba, or the Negro Woman's Lamentation, were widely read. "Fir'd by no single wrongs, the countless host I mourn, by rapine dragg'd from Africa's coast. Perish th'illiberal thought which wou'd debase The native genius of the sable race!," she wrote. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist church, also wrote against slavery. He preached against the trade in his church, the New Room, in Broadmead, Bristol, where he attracted large congregations of rich and poor people. In 1774 he wrote, in his Thoughts Upon Slavery: "Perhaps you will say, 'I do not buy any Negroes; I only use those left me by my father.' So far is well; but is it enough to satisfy your own conscience? Had your father, have you, has any man living, a right to use another as a slave? It cannot be, even setting Revelation aside.
 | | Welsey preached in Bristol |
"It cannot be, that either war, or contract, can give any man such a property in another as he has in his sheep and oxen. Much less is it possible, that any child of man should ever be born a slave. Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air; and no human law can deprive him of that right which he derives from the law of nature." Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner is also associated with the slave trade by the text's recurrent images of disease, specifically of yellow fever, which "attacked like an army during the height of British cobnial slavery". The end? In 1807 the slave trade was ended in the British colonies. The new law affected the Caribbean islands owned by the British and meant that the buying and selling of slaves from Africa was no longer allowed - though slavery itself was not ended and slaves on the plantations remained as slaves. In 1833 the Emancipation Act was supposed to free the remaining slaves, but in practice many slaves were forced to work for a low wage for their old masters as apprentices. Despite all the work by campaigners, true 'freedom' didn't come until 1838, when the apprenticeship system was abolished. | 
