King George IV | Document signed, appointing a commissioner to a court responsible for emancipating slaves, 1824

King George IV

Document signed ("George R")

Warrant, signed at the head, rehearsing the agreement between George III and the King of Portugal for preventing the 'illicit Traffic in Slaves' and for appointing commissions on the coast of Africa and Brazil to arbitrate cases of captured slave vessels, hereby confirming Daniel Molloy Hamilton as the new Commissioner of Arbitration in Sierra Leone in succession to Edward Fitzgerald, deceased, and James Woods as his new secretary, counter-signed by the Secretary of State George Canning, on vellum, with papered seal, 5 pages, folio, Brighton, 6 February 1824, stab-stitched in vellum wrappers, some soiling and wear including to royal signature, rodent damage to upper edge not affecting text, strengthened at fold

The Slave Trade Act of 1807 had made the British slave trade illlegal, and established a Vice Admiralty court in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to process slave ships captured by the Royal Navy. This was the first court in the British Empire with an explicit mandate to release people from slavery. After the end of the Napleonic Wars the court developed into an international Court of Mixed Commission through a series of international treaties. The aggressive actions of the Royal Navy in pursuing slave ships of other nations in the following decades did much to undermine the trans-Atlantic trade, and the court at Freetown emancipated more than 80,000 people between 1808 and 1871.

PROVENANCE:

Sotheby's, London, 16 December 1996, lot 162