Storm clouds were already on the horizon when the first wave of abolition reached its peak. These were related to the revolutionary situation in France and its major sugar colony, St Domingue, both of which became violent and volatile places as the breakdown of the most prominent ancien régime in Europe proceeded after 1789. Historians are divided on what impact these events had on the course of abolition, but it will be argued here that while the initial challenges to the status quo seemed to boost abolitionist fortunes, the longer term prospect undermined them.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man established in principle the notion of secular human rights and made the very existence of slavery problematic. It reinforced the notion that slavery could not be simply justified as an economic necessity but was ipso facto an abuse of human, or in eighteenth-century parlance, natural rights. Before 1789, abolitionist writers generally framed this argument in terms of Christian benevolence: it was morally wrong to deprive God's subjects of the opportunity to live a righteous life. Within these terms, slavery was a Christian sin; it made Christ's wounds bleed; yet rather perversely it also brought it within the moral pale. In the spectrum of Christian sin, slavery was intolerable, inviting irrevocable damnation, yet it had to be nobly borne until such time that the law was changed or God's deliverance intervened. Some Methodist missionaries in the Caribbean could even argue that the ‘loss of liberty was more than compensated by the inward freedom from the law of sin and death’. And for the slaver it was always possible to ask God's forgiveness and redeem oneself. Slavery thus paradoxically offered spiritual opportunities for the transcendent joy of redemption, compromised only by the trauma of witnessing unspeakable human suffering. John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, best represented the tortured soul of a slaver turned evangelical in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, wrestling with his conscience in a public confession that revealed much but never quite everything about the ugly business of the Trade.

The radical declaration of 1789 offered a more forthright denunciation of slavery and a boost to abolition.