You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.
— Representative Thomas W. Cobb of Georgia 1819
By 1807 the abolitionist groups had a very sizeable faction of like-minded members in the British Parliament. At their height they controlled 35 to 40 seats. Known as the "Saints," the alliance was led by the best known of the anti-slave trade campaigners, William Wilberforce, who had taken on the cause of abolition in 1787 after having read the evidence that Thomas Clarkson had amassed against the trade.
During the Commons debates on outlawing slavery throughout the British dominions Dickens, who prided himself in the 1830s on his radical views, acquired an acute awareness of the brutality of the slave trade and of the dire conditions under which slavers transported Africans to the Americas. The debates culminated in the passage of the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833 as its chief proponent, William Wilberforce, lay dying. — Philip V. Allingham, Professor Emeritus, Lakehead University
Dickens expressed the fervent hope that the United States would live up to the high ideals of the Declaration of Independence by finally enacting Negro emancipation:
We believe that earnest and dispassionate inquiry among men experienced in all the details of the question, would lead eventually to a performance by America of the moral duty of emancipation in a way that might wipe out every reproach for the past treatment of the negroes, and reflect eternal honour on the stars and stripes. [Household Words, 18 September 1852, page 5]— Charles Dickens
This culminated in :
Put in context i think the south felt their markets threatened.
I'm not sure of where you are going here, but I would agree the Southern Colonies had no business with such a union in the first place. My point, however, was that by1860 most of the Southern States had had enough – the incoming Lincoln regime was the final straw.
"I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has, in reality, nothing on earth to do with it, in any kind of association with any generous or chivalrous sentiment on the part of the North. But the North having gradually got to itself the making of the laws and the settlement of the tariffs, and having taxed South most abominably for its own advantage, began to see, as the country grew, that unless it advocated the laying down of a geographical line beyond which slavery should not extend, the South would necessarily to recover its old political power, and be able to help itself a little in the adjustment of the commercial affairs.
Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens."
As to Secession being Rebellion, it is distinctly provable by State papers that Washington, considered it no such thing – that Massachusetts, now loudest against it, has itself asserted its right to secede, again and again – and that years ago, when the two Carolinas began to train their militia expressly for Secession, commissioners sent to treat with them and to represent the disastrous policy of such secession, never hinted it would be rebellion."
Charles Dickens letter to the WW Cerjet 16 March 1862