History Of Abolition Research Articles

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert

Reviewed by: Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert Kate Culkin (bio) Abolitionism, Puritanism, Slavery Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination. By Kenyon Gradert. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 256. Cloth, $50.00.) [End Page 310] In this nimble, innovative monograph, Kenyon Gradert makes a compelling case for the role Puritans played in the rhetoric and imagination of American abolitionists. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he traces the complex ways a diverse group of reformers and authors invoked a vision of their ancestors—literal and figurative—as fiery, principled warriors to push for the end of slavery. Along the way, he makes notable contributions to the fields of nineteenth-century American literature, the history of abolition, and the use of historical memory. Central to Gradert's argument is the claim that abolitionists' Puritans differ dramatically from the twenty-first-century vison of dour, conservative, and repressed forefathers developed out of Cold War and New Americanist analyses. For the abolitionists, he claims, "the Puritans' militant zeal acquired a new value in light of an increasingly belligerent slave power and a complicit North" (7). They reached to the past to frame their cause as a holy war and add it to a timeline for the country that stretched from Puritans' principled stand through the American Revolution and towards a glorious future. For Gradert, the accuracy of their portrayal is not important; the significance lies in how these reformers chose to depict Puritans and what that depiction reveals about their thought-process and their time. Gradert combines biographical detail, historic context, and literary analysis while focusing on figures ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Henry Highland Garnet. The most compelling sections address the people who aimed to invoke Puritans' passion and moral character, while wrestling with what they knew to be a more complex heritage. In his discussion of Lydia Maria Child, for instance, Gradert traces how her attempts to maneuver her frustrations with the patriarchal limits of her Calvinist upbringing, the reserve of her Unitarian contemporaries, and the pressures of lobbying for abolition while trying to support herself and her husband through her writing led to The Kansas Emigrants. Calling it a "novella best described as half feminist Western and half Puritan errand into the wilderness," he argues that, in this understudied work about New England abolitionists in the midst of Bleeding Kansas, Child "rechannels the Puritan spirit away from New England and into women's heroism as the settlers continue their ancestors' unfinished errand" (64, 66). For James Russell Lowell, abolition offered a way to give his life as a poet meaning, and poetry gave him a way to reimagine Puritan heritage as a "powerful resource for a progressive democracy," but the death of his two nephews in the Civil War caused him to grow [End Page 311] wary of unmitigated zeal, even for a righteous cause (112). In the final chapter, Gradert explores how Black authors such as Garnet invoked both the Mayflower and the slave ship to claim their place in American society. Tracing the Puritan influence through such varied written works, in addition, allows Gradert to bring new insight to well-studied moments in abolitionist historiography, such as the schism in the American Anti-Slavery Society and Emerson's turn towards antislavery. The book is well-written and well-organized, and there is a clear logic to the chapters' groupings, done variously by genre, gender, race, and, in the case of the Beechers, family. Disrupting these silos, however, might have been powerful. Some of Gradert's most interesting observations come through his comparison of how Child and Emerson navigated similar territory, but he puts Child in the chapter with members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and Emerson with male orators, limiting the space for this exploration. However, the chapter on Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, grouped because of their family relationship, leads to insightful comparisons of the approaches of and options for a male minister and a female novelist; they take different routes to arrive at the same end, using Puritan images to espouse a communal vision of religion quite unrecognizable as the Calvinism...

American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction by Stanley Harrold

Reviewed by: American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction by Stanley Harrold Craig Hollander (bio) American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction. By Stanley Harrold. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 296. Cloth, $39.50.) There is no shortage of books about abolitionism. But we are short on short books about abolitionism. Stanley Harrold's latest book, American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction, appears to be a more concise option than some of the other recent works covering antislavery and abolitionism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (I'm glancing warily at Manisha Sinha's masterful, but near 800-page behemoth, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition [New Haven, CT, 2016], on my shelf.) Despite its lofty title, though, American Abolitionism is not a comprehensive overview of "American Abolitionism." Instead, the book's subtitle provides a far more accurate description of its contents. Indeed, Harrold focuses almost exclusively on how private citizens attempted to promote various antislavery initiatives through petitioning, lobbying, and correspondence with interested statesmen. Obviously, historians have long known that some abolitionists engaged directly in politics. However, historical studies have tended to concentrate on those who employed moral suasion, [End Page 600] publishing, and oratory more than, say, petitioning. Harrold's book is therefore a welcome addition to the scholarship of antislavery. Perhaps the most impressive attribute of American Abolitionism is its range. To wit, it seems as though Harrold managed to chronicle every interaction that abolitionists had with their representatives between the colonial period and Reconstruction. Scholars of the field will already be familiar with a few of those interactions, such as when the Pennsylvania Abolition Society famously presented a petition signed by Benjamin Franklin to Congress in 1790. That said, the book mostly details more obscure attempts that abolitionists made to sway legislative or executive action. In his chapters on the early national period, Harrold meticulously documents how abolitionists in the North effectively steered their elected representatives to take antislavery positions. Such work was pivotal in some cases. In particular, Harrold shows that "in Illinois, abolitionists played an important role in defeating a proslavery effort that, if successful, could have changed the sectional balance of power" (51). The book then moves on to the antebellum period. Throughout that section, Harrold stresses that the Civil War (along with the abolition of slavery) would never have happened if abolitionists had not participated directly in politics. To be sure, this book provides a lot of information, not to mention ample food for thought. Through repetition alone, Harrold makes it clear that only a handful of politicians were ever truly receptive to the abolitionist agenda. That handful includes a few recognizable names, such as John Quincy Adams, Joshua Giddings, and Abraham Lincoln. Yet Harrold wisely focuses on second-tier politicians who might be new to readers, such as Charles Miner, William Hiester, William Slade, and Thomas Morris. Similarly, he spotlights the work of those abolitionists who sought to pull the strings of government. Such abolitionists—John Whittier, Joshua Leavitt, and David Lee Child among them—usually receive much less attention from historians than the likes of William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, and Frederick Douglass, who often voiced their misgivings about working through political channels. As a result, American Abolitionism could serve as a very helpful resource for those who would like to know how abolitionists influenced (or sought to influence) politicians during sectional crises. Just be advised that Harrold rarely strays from his topic. He therefore centers his narrative on politicians and those who felt at liberty to correspond and interact with politicians on a relatively equal footing (meaning white men). Put another way, [End Page 601] Harrold rarely addresses abolitionist actions outside the realm of electoral politics. This book is not without its problems, though. I would not characterize it as a page-turner, for instance. Most scholars of the period will be quite familiar with the various sectional disputes, after all. In addition, Harrold seems so eager to get to the next controversy in his long chronology that he fails to incorporate enough anecdotes, context, and source material to adequately color his...

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

June 01 2018 The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition. By ManishaSinha. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 810. $25.00.) Peter Hinks Peter Hinks Peter Hinks is the author of To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (1997). His research and writing are now focused on southeastern Connecticut, especially for the late eighteenth century. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Peter Hinks Peter Hinks is the author of To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (1997). His research and writing are now focused on southeastern Connecticut, especially for the late eighteenth century. Online Issn: 1937-2213 Print Issn: 0028-4866 © 2018 by The New England Quarterly2018The New England Quarterly The New England Quarterly (2018) 91 (2): 366–369. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00680 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Peter Hinks; The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition. The New England Quarterly 2018; 91 (2): 366–369. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00680 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe New England Quarterly Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2018 by The New England Quarterly2018The New England Quarterly Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States by Ira Berlin

Reviewed by: The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States by Ira Berlin Yael A. Sternhell The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States. By Ira Berlin. ( Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. [viii], 227. $22.95, ISBN 978–0-674–28608-5.) Perhaps more than any other historian, Ira Berlin is responsible for shaping our vision of Civil War emancipation. As the founding editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, he was the driving force behind Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, a portable archive of federal records documenting the drama of slavery's collapse in wartime. Over the years, the volumes in the series and the book of interpretive essays that accompanies them have served every historian writing on emancipation, and they are in many ways the basis of the field's shared knowledge of the emancipatory process. Thus, it is a good measure of our current historiographical moment that Berlin's new book abandons the war years as it strives to offer a fresh look at how slavery came to an end in the United States. The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States takes place largely above the Mason-Dixon Line and adopts an expansive chronological framework, starting in the late eighteenth century. With this approach, Berlin joins other prominent scholars, like Steven Hahn and Stephen Kantrowitz, who have also sought to move beyond an exclusive focus on the Civil War as the main act of American emancipation and reposition the 1861–1865 period as one episode, albeit a crucial one, in the black struggle for freedom, equality, and citizenship. This temporal approach is interlaced with a new geographical framing, in which the end of slavery in the United States is part of a transnational story that includes both the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1772 and Brazilian emancipation. Berlin's slender volume is composed of three essays that originated as the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard University. The first essay rejects the common narrative that the antislavery movement in America progressed in "stages," with major breaks along the way (p. 27). Berlin sees the destruction of slavery progressing not sequentially but simultaneously, "as the opponents of slavery warred on all fronts. To a remarkable degree, antislavery sentiment remained constant over the long haul" (p. 27). This long and consistent struggle, Berlin argues, was shaped throughout by four elements: the leadership of slaves and former slaves; black people's aspiration not just for freedom but also for equality and citizenship; a commitment to the principles articulated by the Declaration of Independence and their potential for transforming America into a multicultural democracy; and the central role of violence as a means of fighting the violence of slavery. The second essay narrates the story of America's first emancipations from New England to Pennsylvania. Despite its slow and halting progress, Berlin claims, the gradual demise of slavery in the North was a crucial moment in the history of the nation and the world. Slavery ceased to be a [End Page 186] continental institution, and free labor became the defining feature of life in large swaths of the United States. The third essay positions the upheaval of Civil War emancipation within a long tradition of militant abolitionism led by black activists, most prominently Denmark Vesey and David Walker. The nineteenth-century battle against slavery was fought in northern cities and border states in the upper South, between black communities and "an unsavory crew of slave catchers, kidnappers, and complicit law officers who found profit and satisfaction in the enslavement of black people" (p. 149). In that sense as Berlin sums up, "[t]he Civil War changed nothing and everything" (p. 158). Wartime emancipation relied on the same means and strove for the same goals as prewar abolitionism, and "their long history can be understood as one piece" (p. 175). Berlin's new book came out almost simultaneously with two heftier works, Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, 2016) and Patrick Rael's Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777...

The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition

Book Review| July 01 2017 The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. By Manisha Sinha. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. 768 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $37.50 (cloth); $25 (paper). Justin A. Pariseau Justin A. Pariseau Prairie State College Justin A. Pariseau is Assistant Professor of History at Prairie State College. He received his PhD from the College of William & Mary in 2015. His dissertation examined the combined efforts of black and white residents of Massachusetts whaling communities in support of the abolitionist cause and related social reforms. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2017) 36 (4): 67–68. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.4.0067 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Justin A. Pariseau; The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2017; 36 (4): 67–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.4.0067 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Manisha Sinha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.

Manisha Sinha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.

The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

Reviewed by: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha Thomas Coens (bio) The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. By Manisha Sinha. ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 768. $37.50 cloth) Despite being, to all appearances, among the heroes of American history, abolitionists have not always been looked upon kindly by American historians. In the estimation of many, if not most, historians writing in the century after the Civil War, they were self-righteous meddlers, at whose feet was placed a large share of the responsibility for plunging the nation into civil war. Skepticism about abolitionists, surprisingly, persisted long after the overt racism of the Dunning and Phillips schools was replaced in the 1960s and 1970s with more sympathetic attitudes toward the plight of African American slaves. In The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), David Brion Davis famously argued that abolitionists performed ideological dirty-work by valorizing free labor and thereby buttressing (if half-unwittingly) nascent capitalism. To Charles Sellers, and indeed to the entire generation of social historians whose work he synthesized in his Market Revolution (1991), abolitionists represented a “vanguard of capitalist liberalism”; their ostensible humanitarianism masked an agenda of cultural imperialism and “social control.” Denigration of abolitionism has abated somewhat in recent years, but it has by no means disappeared from within the profession. That abolitionist-bashing is still alive and well, at least in some quarters, is demonstrated [End Page 424] by Andrew Delbanco’s The Abolitionist Imagination (2012), which portrays antislavery crusaders as impatient zealots guilty of hastening an avoidable bloodbath. Rehabilitating the historical reputation of abolitionists is just one of the several accomplishments of Manisha Sinha’s magnificent new study The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. Drawing on an impressive array of both primary and secondary sources—the footnotes are truly a marvel to behold—it traces the abolition movement’s personnel, writings, and activities from the colonial period to the start of the Civil War. Sinha deftly combines a chronological approach, which allows her to move steadily forward in time, with chapters that treat one or another theme or issue, such as “The Woman Question,” “Fugitive Slave Abolitionism,” and “The Politics of Abolition.” According to Sinha, abolitionists were at the vanguard not of capitalism but of an expanded and more capacious conception of democracy and human rights. “Abolition was a radical, democratic movement,” Sinha writes at the start of her book, refusing to mince words about where she stands, one that “made a signal contribution to the discourse of both human rights and humanitarianism.” “It is no coincidence,” she notes, “that the brief, incomplete triumph of the abolitionist vision resulted in the greatest expansion of American democracy, and that the demise of abolition went hand in hand with the greatest contraction of democracy” (pp. 3–4). Sinha’s association of abolitionism with democratization not only runs counter to historians’ traditional skepticism about abolitionists’ motives but also questions the dominant understanding within the profession of the three-way relationship between capitalism, democracy, and antislavery activism. The dominant “market revolution” school sees antebellum American democracy as evolving in reaction to and in tension with the rise of capitalism and tends to lump antislavery crusaders with the aiders and abettors of capitalism rather than of democracy. Because abolitionists professed to be advocates of liberty and equality for all, arguing that they were actually carrying water for industrialists has always been akin to pounding a square [End Page 425] peg into a round hole, with concepts like “false consciousness” and class “ideology” acting as the hammers. According to Sinha, this is all nonsense. Not only were abolitionists sincere and passionate small-d democrats, but closer attention to their writings shows that most excoriated the excesses of capitalism and the emerging culture of the market. Within many of her rapid-fire but colorful and evocative portraits of individual abolitionists, Sinha is quick to emphasize their tendency to condemn not just slaveholding but the larger sins of acquisitiveness and rapacity with which they associated it. The Quaker John Woolman, for example, denounced “luxuries and wealth, developing an incipient critique of market society,” the black...

The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

Reviewed by: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha Elizabeth R. Varon (bio) The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. By Manisha Sinha. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. 768. Cloth, $37.50.) Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause is a tour de force: a timely analytical synthesis of modern scholarship on abolitionism, full of bracing insights [End Page 130] and correctives. The nearly six hundred pages of detailed text provide a chronological overview of the antislavery struggle, with the opening section of the book covering the movement’s eighteenth-century “first wave” and early republic transition period, and the bulk of the book analyzing antebellum “second wave” immediatism. Sinha’s focus is on the centrality of African Americans to the movement, and particularly on their ideas: methodologically, this is an intellectual history at heart, a lucid genealogy of abolitionist thought. Sinha is careful at every turn both to provide state-of-the-art portraits of familiar thinkers such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and to bring less well known figures, such as William Watkins, James Pennington, and Sarah Parker Remond, to the fore. She shows that such activists deserve credit for establishing and sustaining a black protest tradition that was the foundation of what scholars have called, misleadingly, “Garrisonian” immediatism. Watkins, a leading Baltimore reformer, offered up a pioneering critique of African colonization that William Lloyd Garrison reprised. James W. C. Pennington of Brooklyn formulated the “covenant with death and agreement with hell” critique of the Constitution that Garrison would echo. Remond, an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, worked to internationalize the antislavery movement through an 1858 lecture tour in Britain attended by thousands of listeners. These and many other reformers, in speeches, petitions, resolutions, poems, novels, editorials, and autobiographies, “developed a concerted intellectual response to American racism” (311). Sinha’s book is unabashedly revisionist, as she frequently takes aim at what she characterizes as the conventional wisdom among historians. To those who attribute the “first emancipation” in the North to a waning economic interest in slavery, Sinha responds that black activism, exemplified by the freedom suits of men and women determined to use the legal system as an instrument of liberation, was the true driving force behind slavery’s demise in the North. To those who argue that the antislavery movement entered a doldrums in the early nineteenth century, Sinha responds that organizations such as the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race—which combated kidnapping, promoted black education, and tracked the progress of global antislavery—bridged the gap between first-wave and second-wave abolitionism. To those who argue that abolitionists were bourgeois lackeys of the emerging capitalist order, Sinha responds that the movement’s rank and file was drawn from the laboring classes, not the comfortable middle class; that abolitionism allied itself with workers’ causes such as the ten-hour-day movement, and with socialist communitarian experiments; and that abolitionists emphasized the capitalist nature [End Page 131] of slavery and the collusion of slaveholding and mercantilist elites. Most important, rather than emphasizing abolitionism’s role in inspiring slave resistance and rebellion, as recent scholarship has done, Sinha reverses the equation: slave resistance and rebellion, she argues persuasively, inspired abolitionist activism. In their acts of rebellion, on land and on sea, and in their waves of flight through elaborate networks reaching into Canada, slaves demonstrated not only an “elemental” yearning for liberty but also a “cosmopolitan political sophistication” and knowledge of the “international geopolitics of slavery and freedom” (412). Rather than sharply contrasting the movement’s phases, Sinha emphasizes continuity. To recognize the centrality of African Americans to the antislavery movement, she shows, is to recognize that abolitionism was at every turn radical: black abolitionists demanded freedom “not simply as an act of mercy or benevolence but as acts of justice and retribution” (144). Sinha chronicles the divisions within the movement (over issues such as emigration) and traces the emergence of free-soil political parties. In her account of the fugitive slave controversies of the 1850s and of John Brown’s raid, she demonstrates how the...

Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin

Reviewed by: Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin John H. Matsui Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers. By Matthew J. Clavin. ( Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. [x] 252. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-08822-1.) Although never explicitly referred to as such, Matthew J. Clavin's book is a significant contribution to borderlands history. If borderlands history once emphasized the frontiers of nations and empires, it now deals with, as Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett have written, "ambiguous and often-unstable realms where boundaries are also crossroads, peripheries are also central places, homelands are also passing-through places, and the end points of empire are also forks in the road" ("On Borderlands," Journal of American History, 98 [September 2011], 338). These words ring true for Florida, which was the site of imperial and racial conflict as well as cooperation between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans well before the United States annexed it. The conflict between Spanish and English colonists, American nationals, Native Americans, and Africans over land and slavery hardly ceased in 1821. [End Page 407] This work's ambitious claims extend further than the existing research on self-emancipated slaves warrants. While at least three hundred fugitives from American slavery ran to Pensacola in the four decades before the American Civil War, they represent the tip of the iceberg of selfemancipated Americans in those years. Recent studies of the American abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad reinforce this sense of scale. Manisha Sinha notes that historians today estimate some 150,000 African Americans freed themselves by running away between 1830 and 1860 (The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition [New Haven, 2016], 382). Eric Foner concurs, suggesting that 1,000 to 5,000 annually voted with their feet for freedom in those three decades (Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad [New York, 2015], 4). Yet scale is not everything. Spanish Florida was a colonial society with slaves, but it also contained free people of color who "benefited from the absence of the inflexible binary racial divide that characterized neighboring Anglo-American societies and the strictly ordered caste system that persisted throughout much of Spanish America" (p. 26). Indeed, not only were some black Floridians free, but also some were armed. Louisiana's Third Battalion—stationed in Pensacola after the American Revolution—included black soldiers who wore red coats left behind by the British, an irony not missed by American visitors. Over a hundred black and mixed-race men formed part of the Pensacola militia, a phenomenon absent from the southern United States outside of New Orleans. By the final years of Spanish rule a majority of Pensacola's nearly one thousand residents were black. By 1860 Florida was by far the smallest of the future Confederate states in a demographic sense, and when admitted to the Union a few months before Texas, it had barely a quarter of the Lone Star State's population. Florida's white population was a third as large as that of Arkansas, the next smallest rebel state. Considering Florida's peripheral status and long coastline, it was little surprise that the Confederacy expended few resources on the defense of the state or that the Union was able to maintain control of Fort Pickens near Pensacola. By May 1862, Confederate forces abandoned the Pensacola region due to manpower shortages and the demand for soldiers along the western front in Tennessee. Black Floridians quickly allied with Union soldiers who occupied Florida. This military backwater was governed by abolitionist generals. Underground Railroad conductor Neal Dow of New England arrived at Pensacola as a Union brigadier general and began recruiting and arming slaves. Other antislavery officers organized Sunday schools where black soldiers and children alike could learn to read. From its inception as a Spanish colony through the American Civil War years, Florida defied the racial norms set by the Spanish, British, and Americans due in part to its location at the intersection of those competing worlds. Clavin has given American and borderlands historians an excellent study of one underappreciated frontier...

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

Ismael M. Montana. The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia.

The abolition of slavery by decree in Tunisia during the nineteenth century was certainly an exceptional event for any place on earth, but even more so in the Islamic world. In a series of antislavery measures in 1841, the ruler of Tunisia, Ahmad Bey, ended the Mediterranean slave trade, closed the slave market in Tunis, and also prohibited the overland slave trade from sub-Saharan regions to Tunisia. The apex came in January 1846 when Ahmad Bey formally abolished slavery. Ismael M. Montana revisits this unique episode and enquires into the reasons for abolition in the North African Ottoman dependency. True, this is a story of abolition outside the more familiar transatlantic scenery and one without a local abolitionist movement behind it. The local elites, including members of Ahmad Bey's own family, were not very supportive of his policies concerning slavery. In fact, his main source of inspiration and support was Sir Thomas Reade, the British consul in Tunis. The British put mild and friendly pressure on Ahmad Bey, constantly urging him to take action against slavery while giving him political support not only against his neighbors in Algeria—the French—but also against his suzerain, the Ottoman sultan. The ever-pragmatic ruler, not wishing to alienate a major ally, moves to do something against slavery. In this sense, the history of abolition in Tunisia parallels the mainstream narrative of British influence on abolition, especially since the ubiquitous British Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was also present in the region.

Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790–1820

Historians have represented the movement for the abolition of the slave trade as a turning point in international law, either characterising the formation of mixed commissions to adjudicate slave ship captures as elements of early human rights law or interpreting the treaty regime supporting the ban on the slave trade as marking a decisive shift towards positivism in international law. A closer look at the legal history of abolition suggests that such perspectives omit an important dimension: the ties between abolition and imperial legal consolidation. In exploring such ties, the article first examines prize law and its direct and indirect influence on calls for intra-imperial regulation of the slave trade, especially its effective criminalisation. Across the empire, efforts to ban the slave trade reflected and reinforced pressures to strengthen imperial legal authority by regulating and restricting planter legal prerogatives.

Rethinking Abolition in Algeria. Slavery and the "Indigenous Question"

Like in sub-saharan Africa, Algerian slavery died a "slow death". It did not end with French abolition in 1848 but maintained its importance in some regions through the nineteenth century. Partially shaped by the colonial administration’s pragmatism, the history of abolition in Algeria is similar to other parts of colonial Africa. At the same time, there are differences stemming from the special case of Algerian colonization. In particular, colonial planners faced the indigenous question, or how to create a settler colony in a country that was already settled. This essay examines how slavery, abolition, and the "indigenous question" came together in French plans of the 1840s to import slaves to Algeria. These plans helped colonial authorities envision a final solution to the indigenous question, whereby sub-Saharan Africans purchased as slaves would replace Algerian populations.

Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade

Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade Seymour Drescher (bio) Before the end of the war of American Independence the possibility of abolishing Britain's Atlantic slave trade had never been raised in parliament. No pressure group from without had urged its consideration. No member had moved its investigation. By the end of the French wars three decades later, parliament had shut down Britain's trade. Its government had begun a process of internationalizing abolition. For fully half a century after Waterloo every major initiative would be advertized to the world as the desire of both the government and the nation. This dramatic change was embedded in far larger transformations in British political culture and practice. The evolving dialogue between people and legislators was increasingly nationalized by the thickening network of provincial newspapers. Parliamentary debates and governmental initiatives were now the daily grist of provincial readers. Letters, advertisements for public gatherings, political pamphlets and news items about activities of political leaders in London provided fare for ongoing public conversations which linked provincial readers, not only with the centre in London, but with interested actors from all parts of the island. When parliamentary debates extended over weeks and months, newspapers, associations, libraries, debating societies and public meetings offered parallel venues for ongoing discussions and petitions to the national legislature.1 Within this broader process abolition came to occupy a distinctively innovative position. As we shall see, it combined new techniques of propaganda, petitioning and association with the organizational networking techniques of mercantile and manufacturing lobbyists. Between its emergence as a national political movement in 1787 and the internationalization of slave trade abolition at the end of the Napoleonic wars, political abolition became a pioneering organization in mobilizing hitherto untapped groups as actors for philanthropic and social reform. The movement's fortunes in parliament during those three decades were also emblematic of the difficulties entailed in converting public pressure into law and policy.2 [End Page 42] 1. Antislavery Sentiment before Mobilization One of the distinctive qualities of British political abolitionism was its emergence in conjunction with a massive wave of popular support in 1787-8. Christopher Brown has meticulously traced the long history of abolition's protohistory down to the eve of popular mobilization. Two themes stand out in this story. The first is the steady stream of articulated distaste and revulsion that the overseas slave system continually evoked in eighteenth-century writings. Few travel accounts, imperial histories or geographical compendia failed to mention its striking brutality and its deviance from metropolitan behavioural, legal and religious norms. Some commented upon the ease with which most participants accepted the indifference to human suffering entailed in its perpetuation. Eighteenth-century culture was therefore saturated with casual references to the violence done to social norms by the slave trade. By the mid-1780s apologists for the trade would have found most lines of defensive rationalization closed except those grounded on the sanctity of private property, the economic value of slave labour and the national interest in sustaining valuable Atlantic trades and products.3 The bad news for pioneer abolitionists was that these reasons, all linked to the need of African labour for staple agriculture in the tropics, were precisely those that had easily sustained the system against sporadic hostility for nearly a century. Arguments for the maintenance of the British transatlantic system were always fundamentally grounded in the necessity of the slave trade to sustain the wealth and power of the empire in a highly competitive world. From the early eighteenth century, writers also occasionally deplored the unexplored opportunities for greater development in Africa hindered by the slave trade. They almost invariably returned, however, to the premise that one had to develop trades based upon the world 'as it stands'.4 Throughout the century it was apparent that the British legislature held the key to restricting or prohibiting the slave trade. Britain's first abolitionist, Granville Sharp, exemplified the pervasive sense of helplessness when imagining attempts to influence parliament toward that end. In 1772, flush from his own judicial victory in the Somerset case, Sharp was delighted by Anthony Benezet's assurance from Philadelphia that 20,000 to 30...

Public Opinion On The Death Penalty

Research on public support for the death penalty has neglected comparative analysis. It is not clear whether the results of past research based disproportionately on the United States will replicate in other nations with varied institutional and cultural frameworks. The present article has two central aims: (a) to replicate U.S.-based findings, based on the theoretical perspectives of instrumentalism (crime-centeredness) and broader, non-crime-centered symbolic orientations, for a set of 17 nations, and (b) to partially test the elite leadership hypothesis. The latter refers to the notion that legal abolition of the death penalty will substantially delegitimate capital punishment in a nation's cultural system and will lead to a steady decline in death penalty support. Individual-level data are from the International Social Science Program and refer to 17,725 respondents in 17 nations. A multiple logistic regression analysis largely confirmed U.S.-based research. In particular, indicators from an instrumental approach that were found to be significant included individuals' degree of punitiveness and nations' homicide rates. Measures of symbolic orientations that were found to be significant predictors of death penalty support included authoritarianism and fundamentalism. Some support was found for the elite leadership hypothesis. Residents of abolitionist nations, especially if they resided in nations with a long history of abolition, were significantly less supportive of the death penalty than residents of retentionist nations. The full model explained 25 percent of the variance in support for capital punishment, providing systematic cross-national evidence for U.S.-based theories of death penalty support.

The Last Years of Slavery on the Sugar Plantations of Northeastern Brazil

B RAZIL WAS THE last independent country of the Americas to abolish slavery. But far in advance of the final abolition of i888 came the banning of the Atlantic slave trade, as well as various gradualist measures to reduce internal slavery, particularly the 1871 Law of Free Birth. Thus for half a century Brazilian slave owners had been forewarned that the institution would not endure indefinitely. It is understandable that neither slave owners nor government could face abolition with equanimity. Slavery had existed since the beginning of colonization; slaves represented wealth and property, and they were the labor force of the coffee and sugar plantations which were the mainstay of the country's economy. Many feared that chaos and impoverishment would follow abolition, and certainly the history of abolition in the West Indies did nothing to allay this fear. The sugar planters of the Northeast, some of them among Brazil's greatest slave owners, formed an important interest group in the national debate on abolition. The politics of the abolition campaign have been examined by several scholars.' In this paper I will leave politics to one side and examine instead certain aspects of slavery on the sugar plantations of the Northeast during the second half of the nineteenth century. In so doing I hope to provide some insights into Northeastern society and some understanding of why this society clung to slavery for so long. What in fact was the size of the slave population of the Northeast, and how effective were the various ameliorative laws passed between the 185os and i888 in reducing it? What was the importance of slave labor to the sugar plantations, and how important