Lot 81
Parliament
An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 25th March 1807
Auction: Other Properties | Wed 25 February from 10am | Lots 63 to 255
Description
[in:] A Collection of the Public General Statutes Passed in the Forty-Seventh Year of … King George the Third. London: George Eyre and Andrew Strahan, 1807. Folio (28.9 x 18.1cm), contemporary half calf, marbled boards, 466 pp., continuous pagination and register, with An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade at pp. [317]-326, with woodcut royal arms at head, the volume covering acts passed in January-April 1807 (the only session of the third parliament), and containing 55 other acts of parliament, relating to army and navy pay and discipline, trade (including South Sea trade), import duties, taxation, law and order, Ireland, annuities for members of the royal family, etc:, general title page along with lists of the public general and local and personal acts, and index, bound at end of the volume; joints cracked, spine, boards, edges and corners worn, marginal hole obscuring pagination of pp. 322-3
Footnote
'The African Slave Trade, and all and all manner of dealing and trading in the purchase, sale, barter, or transfer of slaves, or of persons intended to be sold, transferred, used, or dealt with as slaves, practised or carried on, in, at, to or from any part of the coast or countries of Africa, shall be, and the same is hereby utterly abolished, prohibited, and declared to be unlawful.’
The Abolition Act took effect on 1st May 1807, the culmination of 18 years of abolitionist campaigning to pass a bill; an act passed later that year, in the first session of the Fourth Parliament, prevented 'any dealing or trafficking in the buying or selling of slaves within the colony of Sierra Leone.'