Thomas Pringle was secretary, and others who became involved with the society or who supported it included radical MP and dissenter William Smith; the Whig lawyers Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, Thomas Denman, 1st Baron Denman, the judge Stephen Lushington, and James Mackintosh; Quaker scientists William Allen and Luke Howard; and Irish political leader Daniel O'Connell.
Broadly, there were abolitionists who insisted on the full working out of the gradual process of abolition and amelioration (which had its successes), and the generally younger, more radical members, whose moral outlook regarded slavery as a mortal sin to be ended forthwith.
The idea was to engender public pressure for a new act of Parliament to outlaw slavery, rather than continue the gradualism of Whitehall's negotiations, mainly with colonial governments.
In 1831 George Stephen and Joseph Sturge formed a ginger group within the Anti-Slavery Society, the Agency Committee, to campaign for this new act of Parliament.
[citation needed] Jamaican mixed-race campaigners such as Louis Celeste Lecesne and Richard Hill were also members of the Anti-Slavery Society.
[citation needed] The indentured labour schemes were particularly opposed by Sturge and the Agency Committee; the full working out of the act would take several years, with slavery eventually being abolished throughout the British West Indies on 1 August 1838.
[citation needed] Renamed the London Anti-Slavery Society in 1838, the organisation ceased to exist in this year.