The Minutes of the Society for the Abolition of Slave Trade

On 28 January 2025, I went down to London from York to renew my British Library card (after the November 2023 cyber attack, all cards became invalid). I wanted to look up a manuscript that would help establish the connections I was looking for between the French and English abolitionist societies of the late eighteenth century. 
 
I had found a footnote in Vincent Carretta’s book on Olaudah Equiano, suggesting that the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) had advised a French correspondent to attempt to create a similar society in France, (Chapter 11, loc 4767, footnote 46).

​So, hopeful, I took a train down to London, renewed my card, and went up to the Manuscripts room to order what I wanted. I did not in fact know what it was I wanted – all I had was a manuscript number and a date. The helpful reference desk librarian informed me that this was a ‘volume 1’ and that it would be ready in just over an hour. So down I went to meet my friend and celebrity blogger Eric for lunch in the Members’s café. Then I went back down to the cloakroom, as I had not sufficiently filled my British Library transparent bag for the day, and up again to the second floor, to pick up my manuscript.
 
Here is what I found: 

The first image is the cover of minutes book, a weather-beaten leather cover, with a gold embossed title 'Fair minute book'. The second image reads (in Clarkson's handwriting): 
‘This book records the proceeding so the Committee from its formation on the 22 of May 1787 to Feby 26. 1788.’ 
The third, in beautiful rounded and large handwriting that is typical of the entire manuscript describes the purpose and composition of the new Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade: 

May 22 1787
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. 
RESOLVED, that Granville Sharpe, Joseph Woods, Samuel Hoare Junior, William Dillwyn, George Harrison, James Phillips, Richard Phillips, Thomas Clarkson, Philip Sansom, John Lloyd, Joseph Hooper and John Barton be a Committee for procuring such Information and Evidence and for distributing Clarkson’s Essay and such other Publications, as may tend to the Abolition of the Salve Trade, and for directing the Application of such monies, as are already, or may hereafter be collected for the above Purposes. 

Aside from Clarkson, Granville Sharp and Philip Sansom, who were Anglicans, the members were all quakers. They met, after business hours, at the book and printshop of James Phillips, at number 2 George Yard. Phillips is also the printer who published Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, two years later.  
 
Thomas Clarkson, while one of the founding members, was not often present at the meetings. When he gave the book to a friend for safekeeping in the 80s, he made a note of the pages he himself had written. 

​Most of the Society’s activity seems to be reading letters, deciding how to respond to them, deciding what to print and in what quantity, who to send books to, receiving money from donors and sending money to Clarkson so he and Falconbridge can gather evidence. 

Although the minutes make the meetings sound rather sedate – and as they were attended mostly by quakers, they would have been sober and serious occasions – the correspondence they engaged in was of seditious potential, as they not only gathered support from England for their work, but encouraged other countries to do work towards the abolition of the trade. There are correspondents in Philadelphia (a Quaker foothold) about the funding of such societies, and about efforts at educating previously enslaved people. 
 
There are also two separate correspondents in France. The first is Brissot (together with Etienne Claviere, Swiss banker, and later French revolutionary) who founded the Societe des Amis des Noirs, in February 1788. The second is the Marquis de Lafayette, who wished to encourage SEAST and assure them that similar efforts were being made in France, so that France and England would, together, set an example by abolishing the slave trade, that other countries in Europe would then have to follow.

​Watch this space for more!