Hannah-Rose Murray. Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles.

Abstract

Interest in the experience of enslaved and formerly enslaved people in the British Isles has increased substantially in recent years, but attention has mostly focused on the period before 1838 and the end of legal slavery in the British Empire. In Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles, Hannah-Rose Murray reveals a later history, telling the stories of dozens of nineteenth-century African American visitors to Britain who came to mobilize support for British campaigns that aimed to persuade the United States to abolish slavery and, later, which raised awareness of the legacies of slavery. These visitors traveled widely throughout the British Isles from the 1830s onward, collectively delivering tens of thousands of public lectures in town halls, churches, and assembly rooms in which they spoke of their personal experience of enslavement and encouraged Britons to lobby their representatives, write to newspapers, and boycott goods produced by slaves. Their talks became media events, widely reported and discussed in the Victorian press. “By sharing their oratorical, visual, and literary testimonies to transatlantic audiences,” argues Murray, “African American activists were soldiers in the fight for liberty” (3).