Difference between revisions of "Peace:May 1787"

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See also Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade

TONIGHT I will be Talking about a journey. The journey we all take together, as a species. How we, as a human race, can literally change the world.

On May 22, 1787 twelve men met to abolish the slave trade worldwide. In one short generation the British Empire abolished slavery, paving the way for worldwide abolishment of slavery.

A world without war is possible.

The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade

In 1787, approximately three quarters of the people on Earth lived under some form of enslavement, serfdom, debt bondage or indentured servitude. There were no slaves in Britain itself, but the vast majority of its people accepted slavery in the British West Indies as perfectly normal.

The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was a British abolitionist group, formed on 22 May 1787, by twelve men who gathered together at a printing shop in London, England. Within their lifetimes they saw slavery be abolished in Britain.^[1]

A Call to Action

This effort can be repeated today with American Foreign Policy. This can be done by actively positively encouraging our leaders to instead invest the money into our communities. Start with your congressional district today. Ask your leader to support peace, and tell them if they continue to vote for war you will reluctantly start a guerrilla marking campaign to alert the public that this congressman is someone who does not support bringing our war dollars home to your community.

The Idea That Brought Slavery to Its Knees

Insignia of the later British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society

2 George Yard, London, England

The reverberations from what happened on this spot, on the late afternoon of May 22, 1787, eventually caught the attention of millions of people around the world, including the first and greatest student of what today we call civil society. The result of the series of events begun that afternoon in London, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville decades later, was "absolutely without precedent...If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary."

The building that once stood at 2 George Yard was a bookstore and printing shop. The proprietor was James Phillips, publisher and printer for Britain's small community of Quakers. On that May afternoon, after the pressmen and typesetters had gone home for the day, 12 men filed through his doors. They formed themselves into a committee with what seemed to their fellow Londoners a hopelessly idealistic and impractical aim: ending first the slave trade and then slavery itself in the most powerful empire on Earth."^[2]

Notes

1. ↑ The Society achieved abolition of the international slave trade in 1807, enforced by the British Navy. The United States also prohibited the African slave trade that year, to take effect in 1808. Within their lifetimes these twelve men abolished slavery. It later was superseded by development of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823, which worked to abolish the institution of slavery throughout the British colonies. Abolition was passed by parliament in 1833 with emancipation completed by 1838. 1833-1787 = 46 years
2. ↑ Hochschild, Adam. (January 25, 2005) The Idea That Brought Slavery to Its Knees Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/25/opinion/oe-hochschild25

Further Information

Britain's legacy of slavery

See also

• Peace: Resume for Amnesty International

External links

• Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, also known as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and sometimes referred to as the Abolition Society or Anti-Slavery Society, was a British abolitionist group formed on 22 May 1787.

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The Idea That Brought Slavery to Its Knees

The Idea That Brought Slavery to Its Knees By Adam Hochschild January 25, 2005 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-25-oe-hochschild25-story.html

ADAM HOCHSCHILD'S LATEST BOOK IS "BURY THE CHAINS: PROPHETS AND REBELS IN THE FIGHT TO FREE AN EMPIRE'S SLAVES" Every Briton knows that the Magna Carta, which placed some of the first limits on the absolute power of kings, was signed in 1215 by a reluctant King John and his barons in a meadow at Runnymede, beside the Thames. Every American knows that the Declaration of Independence was adopted in Philadelphia in 1776, in the building later known as Independence Hall. But another such milestone, equally worth celebrating, too few people remember.

The document involved is merely the minutes of a meeting. And if you go today to the spot where the meeting took place, 2 George Yard, a small courtyard in London’s financial district, you will find no monument, no plaque, no troops of schoolchildren -- only the service entrance to an office building.

Yet the reverberations from what happened on this spot, on the late afternoon of May 22, 1787, eventually caught the attention of millions of people around the world, including the first and greatest student of what today we call civil society. The result of the series of events begun that afternoon in London, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville decades later, was “absolutely without precedent.... If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary.” The building that once stood at 2 George Yard was a bookstore and printing shop. The proprietor was James Phillips, publisher and printer for Britain’s small community of Quakers. On that May afternoon, after the pressmen and typesetters had gone home for the day, 12 men filed through his doors. They formed themselves into a committee with what seemed to their fellow Londoners a hopelessly idealistic and impractical aim: ending first the slave trade and then slavery itself in the most powerful empire on Earth. The interests they were taking on were entrenched and influential. Britain dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Roughly half the slaves taken across the ocean to its lucrative West Indian sugar islands, to the United States and to other European colonies were transported in British ships. Starting an anti-slavery movement in Britain in 1787 was like starting a renewable energy movement in Saudi Arabia today.

The minutes of that historic meeting, preserved in a leather-bound volume at the British Library, are only a single page long, in the clear, flowing handwriting of the committee’s firebrand organizer, Thomas Clarkson.

They begin simply: “At a Meeting held for the Purpose of taking the Slave Trade into consideration, it was resolved that the said Trade was both impolitick and unjust.” Throughout history, of course, slaves and other oppressed people have periodically staged uprisings. Given the conditions under which they lived, that was only to be expected. But what made the movement that grew out of the George Yard meeting so unprecedented was this: It was the first time that a large number of people in one country became outraged -- and stayed outraged for many years -- over the plight of other people, of another color, in other parts of the world.

The movement took off immediately, in a way that earlier scattered abolitionist efforts, in both Britain and North America, never had. Petitions flooded Parliament, which the following year took the timid first step of regulating conditions on the slave ships. Slavery became the prime topic of the London debating societies. Anti-slavery books and posters flooded the country. In a seven-year period, Clarkson rode 35,000 miles by horseback through England, Scotland and Wales, setting up local anti-slavery committees.

No one was more astonished than the powerful slave owners’ lobby, which previously had only concerned itself with sugar tariffs and the like. “The Press teems with pamphlets upon this subject, and my table is covered with them,” Stephen Fuller, London agent for the Jamaican planters, reported in despair to his employers. “The stream of popularity runs against us.”

The outpouring, moreover, defied economic self-interest. From Sheffield, famous for making knives, scissors, razors and the like, 769 metalworkers petitioned Parliament against the slave trade, saying that even though their wares had routinely been purchased by slave-ship captains and then traded to buy slaves in Africa, they nonetheless “consider the case of the nations of Africa as their own.” Fuller was amazed that the petitions pouring into Parliament were “stating no grievance or injury of any kind or sort, affecting the Petitioners themselves.”

It took the movement more than 50 years from that first meeting to end slavery in the British empire. That goal was finally reached in 1838, a full quarter of a century before slavery died in the United States. No more chained slaves cross the Atlantic today, but the spirit that crystallized at George Yard is with us in a different way. In the idea that those who suffer “no grievance or injury” have the obligation to speak up for those who have suffered them lies the birth of the vision that human rights are universal.

In this very unequal world of ours, where decisions made in our own country -- on subjects including military intervention, the sanctioning of torture and the complex economics of globalization -- connect us morally to the farthest corners of the Earth, this is an idea that seems more relevant than ever. In that sense, the process born on that long-ago afternoon in 1787 is not only incomplete, it has barely begun.