A response to Daniel I. O’Neill

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Edmund Burke on slavery and the slave trade: a response to Gregory M. Collins

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Gregory M. Collins is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University, 31 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 Edmund Burke to Henry Dundas, 9 April 1792, in P.J. Marshall and John A. Woods, eds., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (hereafter “CEB”), vol. 7 January 1792-August 1794 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 124.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 122.

4 Warren M. Elofson and John A. Woods, eds., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 3, Party, Parliament, and the American War 1774–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 563.

5 The Debates in Parliament on the Resolutions and Bill for the Abolition of Slavery in the British Colonies, Session 1833 (London: Piccadilly, 1834), 521.

6 Marshall, Edmund Burke & the British Empire in the West Indies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 228.

7 Ibid., 227.

8 Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 231.

9 Smith, ‘Edmund Burke’s Negro Code’, History Today 26 (1976): 720–22.

10 The Parliamentary History of England, vol. XXXIII (London: T.C. Hansard, 1818), 570.

11 The Parliamentary History of England, vol. XXXII (London: T.C. Hansard, 1818), 894.

12 ‘Anti-Slavery Society,’ in The British Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Mark Doyle, vols. 1–2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2018), 144.

13 Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, vol. V (London: John Murray, 1839), 157.

14 The Parliamentary Debates, vol. IX (London: T.C. Hansard, 1824), 259.

15 The Parliamentary Debates, vol. X (London: T.C. Hansard, 1824), 1152.

16 Debates in Parliament, Session 1833, 47.

17 Hawkins, The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby, vol. I, Ascent: 1799–1851 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 26.

18 Debates in Parliament, Session 1833, 49.

19 Ibid., 365–66.

20 Ibid., 521.

21 Ibid., 833.

22 Kent Archives, Stanhope MSS U1590/S5/O4/12 Wilberforce to Tomline (Pretyman) 15 May 1806.

23 Wilberforce, A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Addressed to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of Yorkshire (London: Luke Hansard & Sons, 1807), 241.

24 William Hague, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007), 474.

25 Ibid., 481.

26 O’Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 75.

27 For Bourke, see Marshall, British West Indies, 168–69.

28 Brown, Moral Capital, 301–2.

29 Ibid., 312.

30 See Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2004), 238; Philippe R. Girard, ‘Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in Saint-Domingue, 1799-1803’, French Historical Studies 32 (2009): 591; and Philippe R. Girard, ‘Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal’, William and Mary Quarterly 69 (2012): 554, 557–58.

31 ‘Mottoes for Anti-Slavery Wafers,’ The Liberator, October 22, 1841, 1, http://fair-use.org/the-liberator/1841/10/22/the-liberator-11-43.pdf; William Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery; A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres; With a View of the Slavery Question in the United States (New York: William Harned, 1852), 28; The American Anti-Slavery Almanac, for 1839 (New York: S.W. Benedict, 1839), 45; and William Jay, Miscellaneous Writings on Slavery (Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1853), 144.

32 ‘Allies of Freedom’, National Anti-Slavery Standard, September 29, 1855, accessed via Accessible Archives.

33 Wilberforce, Letter, 239.

34 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, vol. I (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 55–56; Wilson Armistead, Anthony Benezet: From the Original Memoir (London: A.W. Bennett, 1859), 27-28; and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 184.