ABSTRACT
The crusade against the slave trade had, in Great Britain, enlisted a wide variety of impeccably respectable personages, working under the restricted suffrage conditions of the time with caution and a strong regard for the rights of slaveholders. Once the slave trade was driven outside the law, antislavery was put on the agenda. Friends in Great Britain, including William Allen, noted scientist and philanthropist, and James Cropper, a Liverpool merchant, maintained their antislavery work. The real crisis was precipitated in August 1831 when a remarkable slave, Nat Turner, a religious fanatic, long convinced that he was destined to free his fellow bondsmen, led a revolt of some seventy Negroes in Southampton County in southeast Virginia. The decay of reform there would extend not only to slavery, but even to Negro education, and this despite an allegedly friendly attitude on the part of the public.
