Chapter 11

Chapter 11 of Hochschild's Bury the Chains returns to King George III who was now recovering from his temporary insanity. Shortly after he recovered, with politics returning to normal, Wilberforce introduced the 1789 Anti-Slavery Bill to the Parliament. A pro-slavery member, Hawkesbury, was the head of the committee on Trade and Plantations, but was shown to be fair to the abolitionists. Both sides go back and forth in a hearing offering testimony to support their sides. The abolitionists receive a major break when they discovered a diagram of a fully loaded slave ship highlighting the terrible conditions slaves endured being packed together like sardines. The abolitionists encountered a problem when many said that if Britain abolished the slave trade, slave traders would move to France where the slave trade was still legal. The abolitionists did gain a boon for their side when Marquis de Lafayette started an abolitionist group of his own in France. If the abolitionists could abolish the slave trade in France they would undercut a major pro-slavery argument in Great Britain. Then James Stephen is re-introduced...for no real reason. Wilberforce attempted to abate fears of the economny tanking without slavery by saying that new slaves would be born without the brutal slave trade, which would in turn increase British prosperity. Even so, he was unable to assuage fears of the competition from France. The chapter comes to a close with one major positive and one major for the movement. The negative is that James Ramsey was a martyr of the movement, passing after a hemorrhage. The positive though was that Lafayette was appointed the mayor of Paris which would certainly give him more clout.