Correspondence, writings, and printed materials relating to Smith's advocacy for the abolition of slavery in Great Britain and in Britain's colonies in the West Indies. Collection contains notes, statistics, and research on the slave trade between Africa and the British West Indies; slave revolts and the conditions on sugar plantations in the Caribbean; abolitionist tracts discussing moral, economic, and religious opposition to slavery; and diagrams of slave ships documenting conditions for enslaved people and casualty rates during transport. The bulk of the collection's correspondence is addressed to Smith. Letters of William Wilberforce and the Wilberforce family discuss personal affairs, politics, abolition, and other matters. Letters from Thomas Clarkson discuss the antislavery movement. Letters from Smith's constituents discuss politics, social conditions, parliamentary reform, British foreign trade, slavery in the West Indies, and economic conditions. Correspondents include Priscilla Buxton, Thomas Fowell Buxton, and Zachary Macaulay. Also contains a partially unpublished poem of Robert Southey entitled To the Exiled Patriots.
This collection consists of letters and writings to and from William Smith, as well as collected printed materials largely related to Smith's work opposing the slave trade and the abolition of slavery in British colonies in the early 1800s. Outstanding are the 24 letters of William Wilberforce (1759-1833); these discuss such topics as: religion, sickness in the family, his sickness which forced him to leave the House of Commons, his family and his desire for more private life with them, his relatives, political disappointments, trips and engagements, publishers, criminals in Great Britain and their punishment, resolutions and plans for the abolition of slavery, the antl-slavery society, the Jamaica Law, Spanish slave trade, Spanish abolition, William Pitt, Lord Grenville and his estate Dropmore, Dr. Channing, Robert Hall, and Thomas Buxton.
A number of the letters from Smith's many correspondents stand out. There are a number of letters around 1790 from various societies and committees discussing the abolition of slavery and approving Smith's actions; some of them also mention Wilberforce. A letter from J. Yule in Edinburgh of August 13, 1792, tells of the poor Scottish peasants who are being driven from their lands to make room for sheep which are more profitable. Three letters from James Muir between 1793 and 1797 discuss the case of his son who has been banished for fourteen years for Joining the Society for Parliamentary Reform. A letter from John Longley on January 31, 1796, tells of a book which he has just published on parliamentary reform and discusses various aspects of the English government from the viewpoint of a reformer. Thomas Coke on March 16, 1809, writes of the different slavery laws in Jamaica. A lengthy 1813 letter from Andrew Wedderburn, a Jamaica plantation owner, discusses the condition of the enslaved people after a storm, their food supplies, sickness and death, his attitude toward their care, the various uses of the land, the crops raised, the market for produce, the purchase and hiring of slaves. A number of letters from Bermuda, Nevis, St. Vincent, Barbados, and Berbice contain similar discussions. An unusually good letter comes from a planter in St. Vincent, April 4, 1816. Some of these planters' letters give in rather emphatic terms the case of the planters against the abolition of slavery. There is copy of a sermon preached at Port Royal, Jamaica, June 7, 1822, on the anniversary of the great earthquake (1692) which contains a very frank and oven criticism of the moral life of Port Royal.
One significant in the collection is a letter in very tiny handwriting from John Horseman, July 15, 1817, which includes the text of Robert Southey's poem entitled "To the Exiled Patriots." The only known publication of the poem is in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Essays on His Own Times, (1850) I, 19-20. Horseman's edition of the poem contains sixteen stanzas as compared to Coleridge's ten. In addition eight of the lines are different in the two editions.
Several letters from Thomas Clarkson between 1825 and 1827 discuss the methods to be used in the drive for complete abolition of slavery. A letter from T. Gisborne in 1829 accuses Smith of being a Papist. A lengthy petition in 1829 signed by 95 principal native inhabitants of Bombay, India, protests to the House of Commons against certain grievances and asks redress. A letter of Gilbert Shelton in Bermuda in 1832 comments with keen insight on the recent Reform Act, on Irish independence, and on the types of Christian missionaries in the West Indies; later letters from him give considerable details regarding the purchase of a life insurance Policy in England. Different letters in 1833 tell of the methods and problems involved in the abolition of slavery. A letter from James Stephen announces Wilberforce's death, July 29, 1833; also a letter from Wilberforce's son, Robert, tells of the death. There is a copy of a petition to Rev. H. W. Wilberforce signed by 127 members of both houses of Parliament requesting that William Wilberforce be buried in Westminster Abbey and that they be granted permission to attend the funeral. Several letters between the Clarksons and William Smith shortly offer Wilberforce's death concern Robert Wilberforce's proposed life of his father and his ideas of attacking some of Thomas Clarkson's claims for himself in the abolition movement.
The correspondents in this collection include: M. Babington, J. Barham, Richard Bickell, Henry Bright, Richard Brodbelt, Priscilla Buxton, Thomas Powell Buxton, Catherine Clarkson, Thomas Coke, Benjamin Cooper, John Frederick Garling, T. Gisborne, Andrew Grant, Robert Grosvenor, George Hibbert, John Horseman, Robert Harry Inglis, John Longley, Men Leith, Zachary Macaulay, A. Mavrocordato, James Muir, J. Plymley, D. Power, William Rathbone, Gilbert Salton, Philip Sansom, John Scott, B. Shank, Granville Sharp, E. Sharpe, James Stephen, W. Villers, Andrew Wedderborn, James Weeker, Barbara Ann Wilberforce, Robert I. Wilberforce, William Wilberforce, John Wright, and J. Yule.
In addition to the letters mentioned above, there is extensive evidence in the miscellaneous papers and the printed material on slavery. It includes Smith's notes and research on: spies in the slave trade, deaths (of crew and captives) on slave ships, food carried on slave ships, methods of obtaining slaves in Africa, conditions of Africans in Africa, British exports to Africa, eyewitness accounts and lists of witnesses, general information on the West Indies, estates and plantations, diseases and epidemics, population, mistreatment of slaves, breeding of slaves versus importation, description of a riot in Barbados in 1823 and the destruction of a Methodist chapel, printed petitions from the West Indies showing the increasingly difficult financial position of the sugar planters due to high taxes, shipping costs, and low prices, lists and copies of British Laws concerning slavery in the colonies, a planter's plan for the emancipation of slaves over a period of 34 years, conditions of slaves in French colonies, papers comparing the raising of sugar cane in the West Indies and in the East Indies and India, letters regarding the abolition of slavery in Ceylon, speeches in Parliament or manuscripts of books, Parliamentary resolutions, printed statements for and against slavery, history of the movement for abolition, newspaper excerpts, and magazine articles.