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Region: Right to Life

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The Federation of Roborian

New Dolgaria wrote:I'd probably say I would be a patriot, but one of my major problems with the patriots was the status of slavery. In Britain at the time, slavery was in the process of dying out, while in America it was thriving. Many African Americans (and Native Americans) fought for/in alliance with the British because they would be treated worse by a newly-independent America. Of course, if I was actually a 1770s colonist, odds are I would have been just as prejudiced as the vast majority of white Americans at the time, so that probably wouldn't have been a problem for me.

I tend to disagree in regards to the timing. At the time, I do not see too much daylight between 'British' and 'Colonial' ideas on slavery, in part because they were still functionally one and the same, Colonial slavery ran on the approval of the British government. The British military treated slaves better during the Revolution on practical grounds to gain advantage, but coming out of the war it was the United States that first took more aggressive action against the slave trade pre-England, even with Wilberforce's frankly heroic efforts there.

At that point, you see the big cultural shift around slavery from something that is hoped to become unneeded, to a necessary evil, to a positive good (in a way that eerily mirrors the abortion movement), and I think a fair part of that was driven by economics. The South in the United States remained and grew increasingly pro-slavery because they profited from it, while England, no longer benefitting economically from slavery on the American mainland, was more free to create movements against it. It is worth noting that even when they did come around to abolishing slavery, they opted-out slavery in India for quite some time due to that same profit incentive.

I think a case can be made that at the time of the Revolution that Britain may have been marginally more anti-slavery than the colonies (though one could counter-argue that the North was more abolitionist than them), but I do not think there is any night-and-day difference, and if they had won the war, I fully expect that slavery would have continued under their rule in the Americans for near as long or perhaps even longer than in an independent United States.

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