George III Approved Slave-Trade Abolition

On March 25, 1807, British King George III granted royal assent to the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which banned trading enslaved people across the British Empire. George never personally owned enslaved people. In a private essay written as Prince of Wales during the late 1750s, he called the justifications for enslaving Indigenous Americans absurd and argued that the reasons used to defend enslaving Africans should make people hold the practice in "execration."

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