William Lloyd Garrison, Transatlantic Abolitionism and Colonisation in the Mid Nineteenth Century: The Revival of the Peculiar Solution?

Abstract

One of the most persistent white responses to the ‘problem’ of slavery and race relations in the nineteenth-century United States was to suggest the removal and relocation of African Americans. The transatlantic abolitionist movement, however, decisively rejected colonisation in the early 1830s, and conventional wisdom suggests that they maintained their firm opposition from that point onwards. It is curious, then, that abolitionists in Britain and the United States enthusiastically received a text in 1857 – The Impending Crisis of the South – calling for colonisation as well as abolition. This article explains the reasons why they did so. It demonstrates that the Garrisonians recognised the book's potential for influencing the critical presidential election of 1860 and consequently sought to aid efforts to ensure wide circulation, belying their reputation for avoiding electoral politics.