And when even Edward Long and Samuel Estwick, two leading figures in the anti abolition movement, have conceded that slavery is "repugnant to English law" before the success of the Revolutionary War? After all, they too have the facts on the ground and they're people who would be inclined to see the upside for slavery wherever it was.
Again, do note that I never said-or implied-that abolitionism was not a thing at all prior to the 1780s. But your counter-argument here isn't exactly all that great because it does not contradict, in the least bit, the argument that John F.P., myself, and others have made that the Revolution and its success did provide a major boost to abolitionism on both sides of the Atlantic.
I really don't think you can honestly conclude that abolitionist sentiment was not already well advanced before the ARW itself took place - statements from the time clearly show it.
The sentiment certainly was there to an extent, yes. But again, you fail to realize that prior to the ARW, as
@John Fredrick Parker correctly points out, the abolitionist movement was barely organized, if at all, prior to the post-ARW era.
And while it may not have become the grand public cause that it was OTL, it was certainly in the public eye - and seen as fundamentally immoral.
Things were headed in that direction, yes, but sadly, it was not yet at that point; in reality, many Britons circa 1775 still did not give much of a thought one way or the other about slavery-or even knew that abolitionism was a thing in some case. Of course, that
would begin change in fairly short order, but it took the Revolutionary War and Britain losing the 13 Colonies to do so.
This is why it's equally possible to argue that the grand public cause was delayed more than two decades by the wars with France.
No, I'm afraid that is simply objectively incorrect. It is, in fact, not possible to do so plausibly, and I am honestly baffled as to how you came up with this particular bit of rebuttal in the first place.
I'm not really sure I see the logic behind a delay of a generation, unless the British populace switches to seeing slavery as a public good .....
That, thankfully, would have been highly unlikely-and dare I say-substantially implausible, even-for a variety of reasons-I'm sure most of us will agree on that.
It's possible that the movement towards seeing it as a bad thing was inspired by the way the Americans were pro-slavery,
I've seen little, if any, conclusive evidence for this, however.
but then again the American pro-slavery attitude was defined in large part by difference with Britain anyway -
Not really in those days, though-granted, it's very true there were pro-slavery elements in the Patriots just as there were anti-slavery elements, there's no doubt about that. But the American pro-slavery attitudes that developed, particularly from 1830 onwards IOTL had much more to do with both economics as well as slavery becoming a way of life + part of a system of social control, than based on anything to do with antagonism with Britain.
and the British still have the ability to define themselves (as had been done for generations) as a country of freedom as opposed to the oppression on the Continent. It's this logic of "Britain as country of freedom" which was behind the Mansfield decision, and it's very hard indeed to butterfly away by no-ARW given it clearly predates it.
That may be true, but even IOTL it took until the 1830s to ban slavery entirely.
Of course, we can certainly discuss how things might have gone differently, and I'm all for discussing the possibilities. But we can't deny the facts before us, and they just so happen to tell us that, IOTL, while abolitionism did exist prior to the 1770s and did have some potential, it also did not start to become a truly major sociopolitical phenomenon on either side of the Atlantic until the 1780s, which coincides to at least some degree with the success of the American Revolution. To what exact extent, and how directly, admittedly remains debatable to a point, but the effect was no doubt significant nonetheless.