(1/2)

There was some opposition to the idea that slaveowners ought to be compensated for the loss of the right to claim their workforce as human property, but it was not the main focus of frustration and concern for abolitionists in debating the terms of emancipation. Instead the moral and political debate came to be centred around how slavery should be abolished and on what time-scale, with compensation itself playing a comparatively minor role in the debate.

The idea of compensated emancipation had long been discussed in both British and American political discourse - and the United States under Abraham Lincoln was considering a form of compensated emancipation virtually right up until the end of the Civil War. But it is important to understand that in the case of Britain, the bulk of the popular anti-slavery movement characterised by mass action and civic opposition came in the form of opposition to the transatlantic slave trade which the UK Parliament abolished in 1807. Thereafter anti-slavery activism went into decline in no small part because many abolitionists felt that the abolition of the slave trade would send Caribbean slavery into a death spiral from which it could not recover economically and socially (it did not and indeed, on the eve of abolition, the slave economy was just beginning to mount a meaningful recovery). There was a resurgence in anti-slavery activity in the 1820s as it became clear that Caribbean planters were determined to preserve the institution of slavery and that it was not likely to die out at rapid pace in the region, with the Anti-Slavery Society - today Anti-Slavery International - founded in 1823 with a number of parliamentary supporters. But the anti-slavery movement was divided between those who favoured a gradual, pragmatic, reformist approach to ending slavery, compromising with the economic concerns of the British elite and the Caribbean plantocracy, and those who favoured more radical approaches.

Elizabeth Heyrick wrote one of the first meaningful arguments for immediate emancipation in 1824 (later reprinted in the United States by abolitionists there). Heyrick was a Quaker abolitionist who dedicated much of her campaigning energy towards lobbying other abolitionists towards radical policies, and she was especially critical of William Wilberforce, the man who was widely credited as the leader of the parliamentary struggle to outlaw the slave trade, for not having put energy into campaigning for the rapid end of slavery. Heyrick addressed the issue of compensation in her piece, writing that:

If compensation be demanded as an act of justice to the slave holder, in the event of the liberation of his slaves; let justice take her free, impartial course; let compensation be made in the first place where is is most due, let compensation be first made to the slave, for his long years of uncompensated labour, degradation and suffering. It is in this quarter, that justice cries aloud for compensation - and if our attention is turned, but for a moment, to these two substantial and well authenticated claims - the demands of the slave holder (even had they been couched in terms less arrogant and insulting) will become not a little questionable.

The efforts of activists like Heyrick helped shift the abolitionist movement towards the position of immediate and total emancipation by the 1830s. In the 1832 general election - which saw the franchise widened and is generally considered the first 'real' parliamentary election in British history in the sense that it was broadly, though far from entirely, free and fair - just over 100 candidates were elected to the House of Commons having promised their constituents that they would vote for immediate, total emancipation. The new Liberal MP for Sheffield, James Buckingham, was one of the most prominent opponents of both Apprenticeship and the idea that slave owners should be compensated. Buckingham already had a national reputation and a track record of campaigning against slavery as well as violence and coercion in military recruitment and discipline. He was also one of the earliest advocates of progressive taxation in the UK: he presented a plan to pay down Britain's public debt in 1833 that called for the creation of a tiered system of income and property taxes (with the latter paid on property value but at the same rate as the individual's income, to avoid penalising low-income individuals with high-value property, something UK politicians still argue over today and have never implemented), in which the rich paid significantly more than lower earners, with a tax free threshold so that the lowest earners paid no tax at all, with surcharges so that landlords and high earning professionals paid extra. He was exceptional all round at the time for the depth of his radicalism - his election to the Commons in 1832 prompted a riot among conservative opponents with five fatalities - although also unpopular with Liberals because he would vote on an issue-by-issue basis, and on at least one occasion gave the Tories the swinging vote in the Commons.

There was some effort to push back against compensated emancipation in the Commons, but the abolitionists in Parliament were divided on the question of whether or not immediate emancipation should come with compensation for the slave owners. Some opposed the idea outright; others were willing to accept it only if the planters could prove a net loss in income after the end of slavery as a result to the shift to free labour; and others thought it only reasonable that the slave owners be compensated. In some cases it's worth pointing out that slave owners - whose allies in the Commons number only three dozen or so after 1832 - were not the intended beneficiaries of compensated emancipation: for some advocates of compensation as a means to end slavery, they were much more concerned about the financial impact on Britain's merchant and commercial interests if the plantation-owning elite of the Caribbean experience a sudden financial shock. The nature of the debate over how slavery should be ended, however, meant that compensation was not the hill most abolitionists were prepared to die on. The plantation establishment was aggressive in its attempt to defend and preserve slavery and the abolitionists recognised that, in being willing to compromise, they were more likely to receive a favourable response from the British Government. For their part in this period the British authorities in London were primarily concerned with finding a means of abolition that would not significantly disrupt the political and economic order in the British Caribbean: they wanted the emancipation of enslaved people to occur with minimal disruption and as little political chaos as possible and until the 1830s, the British elite felt the best way to ensure political stability in the region was to let the colonies largely govern themselves (this attitude changed rapidly after slavery's end and self-government was gradually dismantled in the British Caribbean for the rest of the 19th century).

The original proposal for the abolition of slavery did not in fact contain the fateful £20million in compensation for the slave owners. This was a time in Britain when there was considerable anxiety around the country's debt and public finances. Faced with a Commons made up of MPs who would be either reluctant to embrace compensation on moral grounds or out of anxiety over the impact on the nation's current account, the Cabinet at the time did not feel there was any chance of getting approval from Parliament to pay Caribbean slave owners, especially when their own parliamentary representation was so diminished. A plan was proposed to the Cabinet in 1833 that would have seen the enslaved population of the Caribbean emancipated as a matter of urgency but would have imposed a punitive tax on the earnings of the newly free black labourers - and only them - with the proceeds used to subsidise the incomes of the planter class, and a set of laws to compel black people to continue working, for a standard wage determined in legislation, on the plantation estates. This would have been supported heavily by a new set of preferential trade arrangements for the British Caribbean on agricultural goods like sugar. Henry Taylor, a senior civil servant early in his career who played a major role in the life of the British Caribbean for decades after the abolition of slavery, proposed an alternative plan in which enslaved people would begin working for wages from a certain date but would have to pay those wages to their owners in full until they had paid off their own value as a human commodity at the day of emancipation - the aspiration being that the average enslaved person would be freed within three to five years of the law being adopted and slavery would gradually end. Only the former plan seems to have made it to the Cabinet. In January 1833 the Cabinet resolved to trial the plan in one colony, but also committed that no matter what, slavery should end in the Caribbean by 1837.