Britain Abolishes Slave Trade

March 25, 1807

After twenty years of Wilberforce's sermons and Clarkson's evidence, Parliament made trading in enslaved human beings a crime for British subjects. Slavery itself would survive in the colonies for another generation, but the Royal Navy now cruised the Atlantic stopping slavers - a moral navy, and a useful one. The West Africa Squadron, tasked with enforcement, freed approximately 150,000 captives from slave ships over the next six decades.