Peter Williams, Jr.: “Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”

Impact

Not more than a week had passed before Peter Williams received a letter urging him to provide a copy of the oration, as “[The Committee of arrangements] apprehend a usefulness will arise from its publication.” According to this letter, the reception of the oration was warm, and the audience was pleased. This committee hoped that the publication would be “a means of enlightening the minds of some, and of promoting the great work of emancipation, as it relates to the African race in general, who are still held in bondage in the United States, and in other parts of the world.” As one of the first publications on abolition by an African American, the oration continues to hold a place of honor in African American history.

The prohibition of the slave trade had a positive, if not ideal, impact on the practice of slavery where it still existed. No longer did a slave master have a steady supply of slaves coming in from Africa and the West Indies. This limit to the supply chain forced slave masters to improve their treatment of slaves and their children—to treat them at least as well as they did their valued livestock—or else to pay higher prices for slaves traded internally. Cutting off the ready supply caused the price of slaves to increase, thus giving slaveholders an incentive to keep their slaves healthy, if not happy. It became more difficult to replace a slave who died or became incapacitated. Thus, slaveholders had to rethink their practices.

Of course, the end of the legal external slave trade was only a step. A large area of the country continued practicing slavery, even in the North (though Peter Williams’s home state, New York, had adopted a policy of gradual emancipation in 1799, to be completed by July 4, 1827). Much discrimination and prejudice against free African Americans also persisted in the North. The abolitionists simply kept going, trying to raise awareness—particularly among the increasingly oblivious northerners—about slavery and its evils. Unfortunately, in 1808 abolitionist societies were not quite ready to take on the proslavery arguments coming from the South. These societies had not come together yet to present a united front against the proslavery forces, with solid counterarguments, and so they did not have the power necessary to adequately fight these arguments. This would come about only over the next several decades.

There were others in the wider antislavery movement who were not necessarily abolitionists but who were for eventual emancipation and against the spread of slavery to new areas of the country. When the country began to ponder whether territories added to United States would allow slavery, these other antislavery forces began to lend credence to some of the abolitionist arguments against slavery and its spread, as well as add new arguments. Thus, both abolitionist and antislavery forces were strengthened during this debate over the introduction of slavery into new territories (started in earnest because of Missouri’s application for statehood and the resulting Missouri Compromise of 1820); it forced them to define themselves as a unified movement. Until this happened, however, abolitionist societies had limited power to persuade many in the North, much less the South, that slavery should be abolished in the entire nation.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, abolitionist societies came together especially to educate freed slaves and poor African Americans and help them support themselves and their families. By educating African Americans, these societies sought to make them more acceptable in an overwhelmingly white North. This campaign succeeded, but only to a limited extent. Even Peter Williams himself, an educated, respected, and active abolitionist, was denied admittance to the 1806 Convention of Abolitionist Societies in Philadelphia because he was not white. There was still a great deal of work to be done.