It was during the reign of George III that abolitionism began to be a major social movement, leading to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. But what do we know about the king’s views on slavery? Professor Trevor Burnard considers the evidence
A story often told about George III (1738–1820) is that he was being driven in a carriage, along with the prime minister, presumably William Pitt the Younger, when he encountered a much grander equipage belonging to a wealthy West Indian planter.
George turned to Pitt and muttered “How about the duties, eh Pitt? How about the duties?” The implication behind the story is that such ostentatious displays of wealth by absentee planters showed that West Indian planters could be taxed more – and that the substantial revenues that Britain received from sugar Customs duties could be further enhanced.
The story is undoubtedly fictional. It is unlikely that any British monarch has ever shared a carriage with his or her prime minister. It is also a story that is suitably ambivalent; it does not indicate one way or another George’s opinions about slavery in the British West Indies, where most sugar coming to Britain was produced, save that the king demonstrated an eager readiness to advance the tax revenues of Britain alongside a recognition that the wealth produced through sugar in the Caribbean was considerable.
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That ambivalence about slavery is important because we don’t really know for certain what George’s attitude towards slavery and the slave trade was in the second half of the 18th century. We wish we knew more about his precise views.
George was an important figure in the history of slavery in the British empire. It was during his reign, for example, that abolitionism began to be a major social movement, leading to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
It was also during his long reign (1760-1820) that Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and plantation agriculture reached its height. Britain received massive wealth from its plantation colonies in the British West Indies and British North America. In 1774, if you added the wealth of those plantation colonies to the wealth of England and Wales, the total would increase by almost a quarter; only London contributed more to British wealth than its overseas slave societies. Britain was the greatest slave trader in the world during the 18th century, its activities peaking in the 1790s, when the start of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) led to a boom in sugar production and hence the importation of enslaved people in the British Caribbean.
A budding abolitionist?
There are some hints that as the Prince of Wales, George III expressed budding abolitionist ideas. David Armitage of Harvard University has examined his early writings when he was being tutored in political thought and international law in the 1750s. His examination of George’s essay on Montesquieu’s De L’esprit des loix (1748) shows that a young George completely accepted Montesquieu’s arguments that slavery was immoral. In his essay, George argued that there could be no basis for slavery in natural law, civil law or the law of nations because it was wrong to enslave any person against their will.
Watch: An introduction to George III
These were precocious arguments in Anglo-America in the 1750s. Only a couple of Quakers in Philadelphia, such as Benjamin Lay (1681–1759) and John Woolman (1720–1772) expressed such sentiments in writing before the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).
George tempered his remarks, however, by suggesting that while slavery was inappropriate for European societies, it might be more amenable for places where hot climates made work impossible for white people but possible for “effeminate” (the king’s description) peoples in the intemperate East – by which he meant Africa, Asia and parts of America including the Carribean.
- Read more | Michael Wood on the ongoing legacy of slavery
Like most Englishmen of his day, it appears that the young George held racist views about black capacity, meaning that while he could acknowledge the theoretical inhumanity of the Atlantic slave system, he accepted its necessity in order to keep the British plantations and the sugar islands in particular profitable. Suzanne Schwarz of the University of Worcester, in an important article in the English Historical Review (2023), notes how while condemning the institution of slavery he accepted black inferiority, calling Africans “wooly headed with monstrous features”.
George’s immediate family seem to have favoured pro-slavery rather than anti-slavery positions – notably his seven sons, who each were in the House of Lords and who either directly or through proxy voted against the abolition of the slave trade in debates in the 1790s on the abolition of the slave trade.
We can infer that George felt similarly, although we cannot know his position for certain. He did nothing to aid parliamentary passage of antislavery bills – and pre-1807 did much to support planters in the West Indies, notably in the American Revolution where the defence of Jamaica from French attack was a major priority.
On the flipside, the king did not put up an opposition to the passing of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade bill, while he had opposed attempted bills for Catholic emancipation. He viewed assenting to the latter a violation of his coronation vows. That was not the case for anything to do with slavery.
But his assent to the 1807 bill tells us little by itself. His third son, William IV, signed the abolition of slavery in the British empire into law in 1833, despite being fiercely committed to a pro-slavery position as the leader of opposition to abolition of slave trade bills in the House of Lords in the 1790s and 1800s.
Some members of the royal family were abolitionist. The king’s nephew, the Duke of Gloucester was a fervent abolitionist and expressed his opinions so strongly that he became a pall bearer at the funeral of the great anti-slavery advocate William Wilberforce in 1833. Although she expressed no opinion either way about slavery, Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, owned a collection of anti-slavery texts, as is recorded in lists of her library.
An unusual monarch
George III was unusual for English and British monarchs in the 17th and 18th century through seemingly having no direct involvement in transatlantic slavery.
Charles II set up the Royal African Company in 1672, which provided the bulk of African captives destined to become slaves across the English Atlantic empire His brother, James VII and II, as Duke of York, was governor of this company with direct financial interest in this powerful trading organisation.
William III was given shares in the Royal African Company. The king of Spain awarded Queen Anne the asiento, or the right to trade enslaved Africans from the British empire to Spanish America, which would prove lucrative – providing Anne and the first two Hanoverian Georges with a comfortable annual income.
That direct involvement in slavery had ended by the time that George III took the throne in 1760, but there is little sign that George III used his lack of personal involvement in slavery to support abolitionism. Certainly, people at the time, such as the black abolitionist, Olaudah Equiano, thought George III a pro-slavery supporter.
His consistent attachment to property rights and his realisation, once he had become king, that wealth from the plantations was vital for British prosperity, led him to set his face against a quick end to the slave trade which he called, in one of his rare direct comments on abolition, “false phylanthropy”.
It is possible that behind the scenes he was influential at delaying the abolition of the slave trade by a decade – a decade in which, Schwarz tells us, more than 40,000 Africans lost their lives in the notorious Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Charles James Fox, a politician from the abolitionist side of the argument and an opponent of George III on many occasions, thought the king a friend to the pro-slavery cause – as did the British agent for Jamaica, Stephen Fuller. “‘His Majesty is a true Friend to the Colonies. I am of opinion we owe more to him than is generally known in regard to the defeat [of] the absurd attempt of abolishing the Slave Trade”, Fuller remarked.
Future US president Thomas Jefferson also thought that George was a supporter of the slave trade, attacking him in a draft of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Not included in the final version, it decried George III as a monarch “who had waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere”.
That was hyperbole and hypocritical coming from someone who never stopped being a racist slave holder, but it probably sums up George’s position reasonably accurately. George III got some of the reflected glory from the efforts of Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson in achieving the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807. But after he became king in 1760, George III’s actions – or lack of actions at least – protected slavery in British America and then, after the American Revolution, in the Caribbean. He was no abolitionist, just like his many of his predecessors and successors.
Trevor Graeme Burnard is professor of history at the University of Hull. He is a specialist in the history of slavery in the Atlantic world