“Improper and Almost Rebellious Conduct”

Abstract

Abstract The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act provided for the gradual emancipation of eight hundred thousand human beings. It also confirmed the sovereignty of King-in-Parliament over all people residing in British dominions and resolved a long-standing dispute over whether enslaved people were private property or royal subjects entitled to legal safeguards. This debate first emerged in the late eighteenth century but acquired additional urgency following the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, when attempts to mitigate slavery through the enactment of ameliorative statutes and procedural reforms encouraged enslaved people to petition magistrates for redress in cases of abuse. Slaves vigorously defended their newly granted rights to bodily protection, sustenance, and family preservation through the instigation of legal complaints against overseers, managers, and slave owners. By the 1820s, enslaved litigants across Britain’s empire were publicly and collectively petitioning colonial magistrates to intercede on their behalf. The judicialization of quotidian battles over the terms of enslavement refashioned colonial social relations, affirmed enslaved people’s status as British subjects, and generated volumes of case files that circulated back to the metropole, where the Colonial Office cited them in critical assessments of slave law and where abolitionists used them to press for immediate emancipation. Enslaved people’s legal activism was operationally antislavery; it eroded the power of colonial enslavers and prodded Parliament to pass the 1833 Abolition Act.