Ending Slavery and Serfdom: Abolition and Emancipation, 1789–1888

The scale of the crime

Between the 1500s and the 1860s, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships in the transatlantic slave trade, according to the major research database of slave voyages. Roughly 10.7 million survived the crossing. In 1789, slavery was legal in every European empire in the Americas and in most of the United States. A century later it was illegal almost everywhere in the Americas. How did that happen?

Historians once told this as a story of white reformers in Britain. Today they stress that many groups contributed, and that enslaved people themselves were central.

Who ended slavery?

1. Enslaved people. Resistance never stopped: escape, slowing work, sabotage, and revolt. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) showed slavery could be destroyed by force. Large revolts in the British Caribbean, such as in Demerara (1823) and the Jamaican Baptist War led by Samuel Sharpe (1831–1832), convinced many in Britain that slavery could not last. Revolts were crushed brutally, but they changed the debate.

2. Black writers and activists. Olaudah Equiano, who had been enslaved, published his Interesting Narrative in 1789; it became a best-seller and a powerful weapon against the slave trade. In the United States, Frederick Douglass published his Narrative (1845) and became a leading speaker; Harriet Tubman escaped and returned many times to guide others to freedom.

3. Religious and humanitarian movements. Quakers and evangelical Christians led early campaigns. In Britain, Thomas Clarkson gathered evidence and William Wilberforce led the parliamentary fight.

4. Mass public campaigns. British abolitionists organized petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures and a boycott of slave-grown sugar. Women were central: they led sugar boycotts and formed their own anti-slavery societies. In 1824, Elizabeth Heyrick called for immediate, not gradual, abolition.

5. Economic and political change. Some historians, following Eric Williams, argue that the Caribbean sugar economy was declining in importance and free-trade ideas made slavery less useful to Britain's rulers. Others reply that slavery was still profitable when it was abolished, so moral and political pressure must have mattered.

Abolition step by step

• Upper Canada (1793): Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe's Act to Limit Slavery banned bringing enslaved people into the colony and freed children born to enslaved mothers at age 25. It did not free anyone already enslaved. It followed the case of Chloe Cooley, an enslaved Black woman who was violently forced across the Niagara River to be sold in the United States.
• Britain: the slave trade was abolished in 1807, and the navy patrolled West Africa. The Slavery Abolition Act (1833) took effect on 1 August 1834 across the British Empire, including British North America. But formerly enslaved people in the Caribbean were forced into apprenticeship until 1838, and the government paid £20 million in compensation, to the enslavers, not to the enslaved. Since 2021, 1 August has been officially recognized in Canada as Emancipation Day.
• France: abolished in 1794, restored by Napoleon in 1802, abolished for good in 1848.
• Spanish America: gradual laws in the new republics; Chile (1823) and Mexico (1829) were early; others followed in the 1850s. Spain ended slavery in Cuba in 1886.
• United States: slavery expanded with cotton until the Civil War (1861–1865). The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended it.
• Brazil: the last country in the Americas, in 1888.
• Russia: Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861, more than 20 million people. They had to pay for land through decades of redemption payments, so freedom came with heavy debt.

The Underground Railroad and Canada West

After the US Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 allowed freedom seekers to be captured even in free states and returned to slavery, many travelled on to British North America. Tens of thousands of Black refugees reached Canada West (today's southern Ontario) before the Civil War, along with free Black Americans who left to escape growing danger.

They built communities in places such as Amherstburg, Windsor, Chatham, the Elgin (Buxton) Settlement near Chatham, St. Catharines and Toronto. Harriet Tubman lived in St. Catharines for several years in the 1850s. Mary Ann Shadd founded the newspaper The Provincial Freeman in 1853, becoming one of the first women in North America to publish a newspaper. Josiah Henson helped found the Dawn Settlement near Dresden.

Canada offered legal freedom, but not equality. Black residents faced discrimination in jobs and housing, and an 1850 law allowed separate schools for Black children in Canada West. Telling the story only as "Canada the safe haven" leaves out this racism.

The limits of emancipation

Abolition was a huge achievement, but freedom was often limited:

• Compensation went to enslavers. Britain's £20 million and Haiti's forced indemnity to France both paid slave owners, not the people they had enslaved.
• Land and power stayed with the old elites. In the Caribbean, the US South and Brazil, most formerly enslaved people had no land, and new laws restricted their movement and work.
• New forms of forced labour. To replace enslaved workers, planters brought indentured labourers from India and China to the Caribbean, Mauritius, South Africa and elsewhere; more than a million Indians went under indenture. Many faced harsh conditions.
• Abolition as an excuse for empire. European powers later claimed to be fighting the slave trade in Africa to justify conquering it (see the Scramble for Africa lesson).