Agitation conducted by the great philanthropist, Wilberforce, had early
committed British Government and people to a crusade against the African
slave trade. This British policy was clearly announced to the world in
the negotiations at Vienna in 1814-15. But Britain herself still
supported the institution of slavery in her West Indian colonies and it
was not until British humanitarian sentiment had forced emancipation
upon the unwilling sugar planters, in 1833, that the nation was morally
free to criticize American domestic slavery. Meanwhile great
emancipation societies, with many branches, all virile and active, had
grown up in England and in Scotland. These now turned to an attack on
slavery the world over, and especially on American slavery. The great
American abolitionist, Garrison, found more support in England than in
his own country; his weekly paper, _The Liberator_, is full of messages
of cheer from British friends and societies, and of quotations from a
sympathetic, though generally provincial, British press.

From 1830 to 1850 British anti-slavery sentiment was at its height. It
watched with anxiety the evidence of a developing struggle over slavery
in the United States, hopeful, as each crisis arose, that the free
Northern States would impose their will upon the Southern Slave States.
But as each crisis turned to compromise, seemingly enhancing the power
of the South, and committing America to a retention of slavery, the
hopes of British abolitionists waned. The North did indeed, to British
opinion, become identified with opposition to the expansion of slavery,
but after the "great compromise of 1850," where the elder American
statesmen of both North and South proclaimed the "finality" of that
measure, British sympathy for the North rapidly lessened. Moreover,
after 1850, there was in Britain itself a decay of general humanitarian
sentiment as regards slavery. The crusade had begun to seem hopeless and
the earlier vigorous agitators were dead. The British Government still