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No, Representative Bush, England and The United Kingdom was not poised to abolish slavery when the Colonies started getting uppity.
In fact, England barely beat the US in ending the practice. They banned it in 1833.
Yes, they were on the road to ending it, but didn't really start in earnest until after the Revolutionary War was over and the United States had ratified our current Constitution.
Slavery wasn't the issue to the colonists you think it was and you're off on your dates by quite a bit.
The agitation to quit the empire really begins in the mid-1760's right after the French and Indian War.
England trying to refill the coffers drained by that war entirely at the expense of the colonists is the main issue, not slavery, that led to The Declaration of Independence.
Representative Bush is likely unaware that all trade had to go through Crown approved vendors who set extortionate prices to import essential items and that the colonists were forbidden from manufacturing them.
Things like iron plows and hammer heads.
Things that were produced in the colonies were subject to much punitive taxation on top of exploitatively low sale prices to The Crown's approved buyers.
But it wasn't the imminent end of slavery that spurred the signers of The Declaration to pledge their lives and sacred honors to be rid of The Crown.
It's also absurd to think that the northern half of the Colonies would sign on to preserve slavery as a primary motive. Abolition was already moving in those future states.
If The Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, why isn't Canada's southern border in Pennsylvania?
Representative Bush should hit Wikipedia for an explanation of The Intolerable Acts.
Very well said. It is funny how some people want to rewrite history when they know it so badly. Saying it is ignorance is really giving them the benefit of the doubt. There are a lot of reasons to suspect that they are just plain liars who want to advance their political agenda at the expense of the truth.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's the whole planned phase-out of slavery in the United States until the Democratic party formed and got strong enough to maintain slavery. Yet another thing nobody talks about.
ReplyDeleteWe would have been slave-free before 1833.
Of course, England-England was slave-free after 1833. Their far-flung empire? Well, that depends on your definition of 'slave' as they did some seriously slavey things to their 'colonial natives' even way after WWI. Even in Canada.
The Founders themselves were uneasy with slavery, but couldn't see a way to end it other than gradually. If the cotton gin had come along after slavery was abolished, the South would have been a land of small cotton farms.
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