In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene, and; Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott

Abstract

Reviewed by: In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene, and; Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott Stephanie J. Richmond (bio) In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Edited by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene. ( Athens: University of George Press, 2021. Pp. 326. Cloth, $114.95; paper, $39.95.) Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America. By Elena K. Abbott. ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 304. Cloth, $89.99; paper, $29.99.) In the last decade, scholars have well documented the international history of the African American freedom struggle. Historians have chronicled the journeys of Black freedom fighters around the Atlantic world and explored how their connections shaped their activism. In two recently published books, the authors expand our understanding of how African American activists positioned themselves and the spaces they chose to inhabit in the context of their work for freedom and equality. Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene's collection of essays, In Search of Liberty, brings together scholars to weave a portrait of a vibrant and geographically diverse Black Atlantic. Organized geographically, the volume succeeds in recentering the transnational experience of Africans and African Americans as key to their freedom struggles. Elena K. Abbott, in her book Beacons of Liberty, examines one particular thread [End Page 112] of the international freedom struggle: the quest for free soil. In tracing the debates over and meanings of territories and colonies founded without slavery, Abbott brings the debate over free soil out of the American Midwest and into the larger conversation about freedom and slavery in the Atlantic. Both books fill important gaps in the historiography of the freedom struggle. In Search of Liberty is a collection of eleven essays that center internationalism in African American activism and intellectualism. Each section has particular strengths. The three essays on North America take us to the fringes of English-speaking North America, from Nova Scotia to Texas and Mexico. In particular, Thomas Mareite's essay on freedom seekers in Mexico is accessible and explains an often overlooked route on the Underground Railroad. Moving across the Atlantic to Africa, the essays in the next section spend a significant amount of time in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but Marcus Bruce's essay on missions in the Congo Free State brings a much-needed, new look at freedom struggles in post-slave-trade West Africa. The section on the Caribbean also stays close to some well-trodden ground with colonization schemes and the impact of Frederick Douglass and Haitian independence, but the three essays are solid contributions and highlight that the Caribbean was indeed international in context and in its position in African American thought. The final section, on Europe, is the one that does not hold up to the standards of the previous contributions. In particular, Pia Wiegmink's essay on African American women in Europe ignores a substantial body of scholarship on Black women's international travels. Angela F. Murphy's essay on abolitionists in Ireland is stronger but far too brief and focuses mainly on Frederick Douglass. Together, the eleven essays in the volume reveal the importance of international movement to the development of African American freedom philosophies. Elena K. Abbott's Beacons of Liberty examines the impact of free-soil havens outside the United States on the American antislavery movement. By examining the ways in which antislavery and Black newspapers reported on communities of self-emancipated and free people of African descent in Canada, the Caribbean, and West Africa, Abbott challenges the current historiography of both the Underground Railroad and abolitionism to look critically at the ways in which abolitionists and Black freedom seekers used international free soil to fight slavery in the United States. Studies of Black emigration from the United States have, to date, mainly focused on emigration to Africa or Europe. Abbott reminds us that the vast majority of African American emigrants settled just outside the United States' borders...