The role of the Quakers
The British campaign to end the slave trade was largely initiated by a small core of followers of the Quaker faith, or Society of Friends, who viewed it as a violation of their fundamental belief in the equality of all although many Friends were successful traders or businessmen who directly profited from the slave trade.

Public speaking and pamphleteering had been used by methods of propaganda were already well-established had been  tools used with much success spreading their faith and it was through those same channels that they directed their anti-slavery campaign.

In 1783, the Committee on the Slave Trade was established by the Quaker Meeting for Sufferings and the first substantial anti-slavery petition was submitted to Parliament. Four years later, The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded with Granville Sharp as president of a mostly Quaker committee.

Records seem to suggest that the slavery question was not quite such a burning issue for Friends at local level. The campaign was brought to the attention of the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Quarterly Meeting on only a handful of occasions.

Minutes of 24 March 1785 record the proposal to distribute ninety copies of Anthony Benezet’s pamphlet among Friends. It was reported at the next meeting that copies had been distributed where thought necessary ‘but there are some yet remaining in hand’. [Cambridgeshire Archives: R59/25/1/6]

‘Slavery Inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity’
In 1788, the Baptist minister Rev. Robert Robinson, who was also involved in the Cambridge petition against the slave trade, preached a lengthy sermon at the Baptist Meeting House in Cambridge ‘which attempts to shew that slavery is inconsistent with the genius of the Christian religion...’.

Public petitions
From 1783, public pressure for the abolition of the slave trade was brought to bear on the government through petitioning. In the January and February of 1788, the University and Borough of Cambridge submitted the first of many petitions to the House of Commons for the abolition of the slave trade.
‘In hostility to that traffic [slavery], the town and country acted in union most cordially the university also, stimulated both by their own feelings and the unrivalled eloquence of their Member Mr Pitt who zealously cooperated with them’
[Reminiscences of the university, town and county of Cambridge H. Gunning, 1855]

A defence of slavery
Among the records of the Tharp family of Chippenham is a printed account of the rebellion which took place in Grenada in 1795 when the mulatto plantation owner Julien Fedon freed his slaves and formed an army with enslaved Africans from other plantations and some French settlers.

The lengthy preface to this account, written in 1823 by someone identifying himself only as ‘A Military Man Nearly thirty years resident in the West Indies’ defends the rights of the plantation owners; ‘They have risen superior to all their misfortunes with a perseverance that has been worthy of the character of the country which gave them birth’ and argues against legislating for the abolition of slavery; ‘ the change from bondage to freedom among the blacks ought to be the work of time and of that tendency to gradual growth or variation inherent in all human institution’.