Transatlantic Abolitionism Research Articles

Maria Weston Chapman, French Salons, and Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

AbstractThis article examines the idea of anti-slavery sociability as part of a wider analysis of the informal elements of the transatlantic anti-slavery movement. It considers how American abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman drew support for the American anti-slavery cause from French salons during her time spent living in Paris from 1848 to 1855. This case-study highlights how a focus on the informal dimensions of anti-slavery activism illuminates the often underappreciated work of female abolitionists in the transatlantic reform sphere. Through the connections she established with the likes of French writer Victor Hugo and Russian exile Nicholas Tourgueneff at salons in Paris, most notably that of Mary Clarke Mohl on the Rue de Bac, Chapman was able to cultivate European support for abolitionism in myriad ways. This included financial donations, goods to be sold at anti-slavery bazaars, and, perhaps most importantly, testimonies against American slavery from renowned Europeans like Hugo that could be republished in the United States.

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

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).

Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray, and: The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield (review)

Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray, and: The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield (review)

Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray, and: The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield (review)

Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray, and: The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield (review)

The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1866

The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1866

The London Emancipation Society and Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Civil War Era, 1859–1865

ABSTRACT This article examines the activism of the London Emancipation Society (LES), a British anti-slavery organization initially established as the London Emancipation Committee in 1859 on the eve of the American Civil War. Scholars have long argued that the once-flourishing transatlantic abolitionist ties of earlier decades began to wane during the Civil War period. This article challenges that interpretation through an investigation of the LES and its key members. The article argues that transatlantic abolitionism did not wane during this period; rather, it was transformed by a new, cosmopolitan-minded generation of British abolitionists who nurtured existing as well as new ties across the Atlantic.

Transatlantic Discontinuity? The Clapham Sect's Influence in the United States

William Wilberforce and his coterie of evangelical activists have regularly attracted research. Attention, however, has focused almost exclusively on the group's efforts in Britain, with little scholarly work to date on its connections and trajectories overseas. This article examines the influence of Clapham thought and activity in the early American republic. By tracing transatlantic correspondence and reconstructing international relationships, it unveils the direct influence of Clapham theological understandings, notably in their challenge to received interpretations of racial inequality and competing national virtues. Less directly, as Clapham principles shaped Britain's policing of the seas and became enacted in diplomatic decisions, British moralism created friction and resentment with the U.S. government. Although the threads of overt ideological influence by the Clapham Sect appear thin with respect to antislavery, more nuanced influences in terms of race, theology, and empire reveal profound contextual challenges. Yet, the factors limiting the Clapham Sect's impact are as instructive as the influences because they illuminate the contrasts across the Atlantic, which turn out in this case to be more important than the continuities. Transnational approaches to history have often erred by overlooking the transformation of religious and moral ideas across borders, leaving our understanding of transatlantic abolitionism theologically impoverished. By situating Britain's most famous abolitionist group in a wider context, this article exposes the neglected role of race and competing moralities in nineteenth-century international religious history, confounding notions of simple transference of ideas and intellectual continuity across the Atlantic.

Jews in the Americas, 1776–1826

Jews in the Americas, 1776–1826

George Thompson, transatlantic abolitionism, and Britain in the American Civil War

ABSTRACTThe British abolitionist George Thompson was an unequalled public face of the Northern states in Britain during the American Civil War. Capitalising on his reputation from decades of anti-slavery activism stretching back to the 1830s, Thompson lectured convincingly to a variety of British audiences on the emancipationist potential of the war, encouraging them to lend their support to the Northern cause. Revealing his continuing intellectual debt and personal connections to the American abolitionists around William Lloyd Garrison, this article uses Thompson’s activism to emphasise the continuing importance of transatlantic Garrisonian ideology and networks in a period that historians have previously characterised as a ‘rupturing’ in the movement.

The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus

Reviewed by: The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus Michael E. Woods (bio) The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War. By Carl Lawrence Paulus. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 311. $49.95 cloth) When proslavery southerners evoked "the horrors of St. Domingo," they conjured images of a world turned upside down, in which blacks violated white bodies, seized white property, and demolished white supremacy. From 1791 through the secession winter, the Haitian Revolution shaped American slaveholders' memories of the past and expectations for the future. Carl Lawrence Paulus persuasively shows that fears of slave rebellion—darkened by Haiti's shadow; quickened by the thwarted conspiracies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner; and intensified by the transatlantic abolitionist movement—decisively shaped American proslavery politics. Southern [End Page 111] statesmen first responded by seeking to dominate the federal government, using its legal and military might to defend slavery against home-grown abolitionists and foreign, especially British, meddlers. Simultaneously, they conducted a broader political and cultural campaign to define abolitionism as a dangerously un-American movement and to make slavery's preservation an overriding national priority. Only upon the failure of this two-pronged effort to embed slavery in notions of America's national purpose and exceptional nature did slavery's champions resort to secession. By exploring the interrelated politics of fear and exceptionalism, Paulus contributes to a broader shift in historians' understanding of slavery, nationalism, and sectionalism in the nineteenth-century United States. Paulus covers events and issues that will be familiar to specialists. Based mainly on published primary sources, his narrative flows from Haiti to the major U.S. insurrection plots and thence to British West Indian emancipation, debates over abolitionist mailings and petitions, and the escalating conflict over slavery's expansion, particularly concerning Texas annexation and the Wilmot Proviso. But Paulus's steady focus on the political implications of slave rebellion invigorates his analysis of well-known issues. By foregrounding the specter of revolt, Paulus avoids overemphasizing the legal and constitutional abstractions which can obscure what precisely was at stake in the sectional struggle. Thus, the Wilmot Proviso controversy highlighted slaveholders' dread that a bottled-up slave population would someday explode into a Haitian-style inferno. Similarly, proslavery politicians' determination to gag abolitionist petitions represented a brazen attempt to co-opt the federal government, and seduce northern support, by branding antislavery activism as treason. From this useful vantage point, proslavery politics appears aggressive, not defensive, and national in ambition rather than purely regional. Paulus joins scholars such as Matthew Karp and Robert E. Bonner in documenting proslavery leaders' often successful efforts to make slavery a cornerstone of American national identity and its protection a centerpiece of federal policy. Implicitly, he also reinforces recent [End Page 112] studies that demonstrate how slave agency fomented sectional strife. Contests over American exceptionalism provide a second, if less robust, narrative thread. In several chapters this theme sharpens Paulus's analysis, as when he shows how southern (and northern) critics denounced abolitionists as fanatical Anglophiles who conspired against the ostensibly proslavery American Union. Antislavery agitation, they argued, threatened to destroy America's unique republican experiment. But elsewhere, particularly when fear of revolt offers the most compelling explanation for slaveholders' political demands, the exceptionalism theme seems somewhat forced. A clearer definition of the concept would have strengthened the overall argument for its influence. Paulus associates exceptionalism variously with patriotism, nationalism, republicanism, federalism, collective destiny, national security, and territorial policy. In modern usage, "exceptionalism" is certainly a malleable term, and here it becomes even more plastic because antebellum Americans did not use it. Exceptionalism may not offer the best lens through which to examine each and every one of the diverse political disputes covered in this book. At its best, however, Paulus's analysis demonstrates that the tactic of claiming "real" Americanism has a very long, and equally troubled, history. Michael E. Woods MICHAEL E. WOODS is an assistant professor of history at Marshall University. He is the author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (2016) and Emotional...

Transatlantic Abolitionist Discourse and the Body of Christ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”

Despite renewed interest in roles played by Christianity in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB), few scholars have discussed her treatment of the body of Christ—understood as both the figure of Christ and his body of followers—in her antislavery poem, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”. This article argues that “The Runaway Slave” reworks portrayals of the body of Christ in transatlantic abolitionist print culture. It examines the poem in its original context of publication in the 1848 issue of The Liberty Bell, the Boston-based antislavery annual. As EBB would have known from earlier issues of the annual that she received before writing her poem, its contributors—primarily though not exclusively privileged northern whites—represented themselves as messianic martyrs whose Christ-like suffering would liberate slaves. EBB’s poem challenges this self-glorifying rhetoric, in part by making a refrain out of words from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s well-known poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This refrain indicates that the symbols used by Liberty Bell authors to portray themselves as messianic martyrs might, to those they labor to liberate, seem perversely bound up in slavery and the color binary used to justify it. “Runaway Slave” further suggests that the Liberty Bell’s messianic rhetoric, like the slave system itself, parodies Christ’s sacrifice of himself for the good of others. In both cases, wittingly or not, whites seek to turn the bodily agony of blacks to their benefit, whether ethical or economic. Stressing that such parodies of the crucifixion only perpetuate racial violence, the poem pursues what we might call a post-secular vision of Christ’s body, suggesting that people can through love act as members of Christ outside of any official church body. EBB’s poem nevertheless risks trading in the abuses it critiques—a risk, the material history of her poem indicates, of which she might have been aware.

Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-slavery, c. 1787–1820 by J. R. Oldfield

Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-slavery, c. 1787‒1820. By J. R. Oldfield.

Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-Slavery, c.1787–1820, by J.R. Oldfield

Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-Slavery, c.1787–1820, by J.R. Oldfield

FREE-TRADE IDEOLOGY AND TRANSATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM: A HISTORIOGRAPHY

This essay seeks to trace the many—and often conflicting—economic ideological interpretations of the transatlantic abolitionist impulse. In particular, it explores the contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism, and highlights the understudied influence of Victorian free-trade ideology within the American abolitionist movement. By bringing together historiographical controversies from the American and British side, the essay calls into question long-standing conceptions regarding the relationship between free trade and abolitionism, and suggests new avenues for research.

Revising Torture: Moses Roper and the Visual Rhetoric of the Slave’s Body in the Transatlantic Abolition Movement

Revising Torture:Moses Roper and the Visual Rhetoric of the Slave’s Body in the Transatlantic Abolition Movement Martha J. Cutter (bio) Torture endeavors to dehumanize and render powerless its subjects; it also intends to shred human dignity and condense a person to a body in pain, or even to an animal that cannot articulate its torment. As Elaine Scarry has famously observed, physical pain habitually entails a "shattering of language" as the tortured individual is degraded into a state "anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned."1 More recently, Idelber Avelar has pointed to the ways in which "torture may lead to a trauma that eventually buries the subject into silence altogether."2 The torture of enslaved individuals, when represented in British and U.S. abolitionist rhetoric from the nineteenth century, therefore presents a distinct paradox in that this body must suffer, but it cannot in fact be mute—it must become spoken so as to encourage political change. Within this context, as numerous critics have discussed, formerly enslaved narrators struggled to script messages onto the tortured body not only of pain, but also of modes of agency and voice, to move from being contained within the corporeal and silent realm (as an object that was seen) into the verbal and spoken one.3 Abolitionist visual culture generally attempted to verbalize the anguished body of the slave, to inscribe messages into [End Page 371] its pain, yet it did not invest these corporealties with modes of agency; instead, as Marcus Wood has shown through a detailed examination of such images, it often disempowered African American individuals by rendering them as abject and silent victims of torture.4 Moreover, African Americans were not major producers of visual culture in the early to mid-nineteenth century—with a few notable exceptions such as the engraver Patrick H. Reason, the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and the daguerreotypist Augustus Washington. Stephen Best observes that "when it comes to the representation of the inner life of the enslaved, few of our sources are visual in nature. For slaves are not the subject of the visual imagination, they are its object."5 Yet if we widen our notion of "producer" to incorporate texts that contain both narrative and visual modes that work together synchronically, we may find some examples that characterize the enslaved as more than a silent and abject object within the visual culture of slavery. This essay examines an extraordinary but little analyzed visual-verbal figuration of the enslaved body that textually invests this corporeality with an alternative mode of subjectivity. Moses Roper (c. 1815-1891) was a fugitive U.S.-born slave whose memoir—A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery—was published in London first in 1837 and then in the United States in 1838.6 Roper’s narrative was extremely popular in the United Kingdom and the United States and was, according to Jeffrey Hotz, a "trans-Atlantic success."7 The 1838 edition of Roper’s text contained four illustrations and a portrait, so it was probably the first illustrated narrative ever published by a U.S.-born enslaved person. The artist of these illustrations is unknown, but they appear to work synergistically with the narrative to extend its meaning in productive and provocative ways. For the most part critics have viewed Roper’s account as distanced and remote from the experiences he narrates and paid little attention to the role of the illustrations.8 Yet when assessed within the evolving visual culture of transatlantic abolitionist discourse, Roper’s [End Page 372] text effectively indicts slavery by rescripting slavery’s violence through religious metaphors that manifest themselves on both a verbal and visual level. Roper’s narrative as a whole therefore depicts forms of agency and subjectivity that move beyond the master’s system of representation. Of course, the notion of slave agency may be problematic, as Saidiya Hartman has pointed out: "How is it possible to think ‘agency’ when the slave’s very condition of being or social existence is defined as a state of determinate negation? In other words, what are the constitutes of...

The Case of John L. Brown: Sex, Slavery, and the Trials of a Transatlantic Abolitionist Campaign

Nineteenth-century abolitionists viewed their transatlantic activism as a simple strategy in which the circulation of facts about slavery in Great Britain could place effective pressure on slaveholders in the United States. But the 1844 case of John L. Brown, a South Carolina man sentenced to death for helping a runaway slave to escape, reveals that transatlantic abolitionist campaigns could still be hampered by lag times in communication, by the difficulty of confirming reports from the South, and, most of all, by damaging rumors about interracial sex spread by anti-abolitionist opponents. This article uses the Brown case, which prompted important changes in the strategies of proslavery southerners, to suggest the importance of studying not only those transatlantic abolitionist campaigns that succeeded but also those that produced outcomes other than those intended by abolitionists themselves.

Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (review)

Reviewed by: Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism Stephen R. Porter (bio) Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell University Press 2011), 296 pages, ISBN 978-0-8014-4713-6. Readers of this journal are undoubtedly aware of the considerable attention given to international human rights by the academy in recent years. Scholarship on the contemporary and historical dimensions of human rights continues to proliferate, as have university human rights centers and programs of studies. These are welcome developments, certainly, not only for the prevalence of human rights discourses and practices in the current international milieu, but for the appealing avenues that human rights offers for exploring the past. For all of this academic interest in human rights, however, it is remarkable how little attention, by comparison, has been paid to a “cousin” of human rights. Humanitarianism has played arguably a similarly important role in contemporary global society as human rights, and perhaps an even richer part in the longer history of the modern world. Michael Barnett’s Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism represents a major attempt at correcting this imbalance, and largely succeeds. A book of ambitious scope, sophisticated analysis, extensive research, and elegant presentation, it is simultaneously a sweeping account of the evolution of Western-based humanitarian aid initiatives over the past two centuries and a clarion call for others to continue the project that this study begins. A political scientist, Barnett’s work will appeal to a wide audience of social scientists in his and related fields, to those in my discipline of history, to humanitarian aid practitioners, and to policymakers. Its clear prose, clean structure, and broad sweep will help it find a way onto the syllabi of important courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Those familiar with the 2008 volume that Barnett co-edited with Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarianism in Question: Power, Ethics, Politics, will find the third and final section of Empire of Humanity to be a welcome extension of that earlier endeavor’s examination of contemporary humanitarianism. But the sustained chronological scope of Empire of Humanity takes this newer title considerably beyond its predecessor. The two-century history of humanitarianism explored in the book’s first two sections offers much more than the type of historical background to recent phenomena sometimes found in social science monographs that give a mere nod to the past. In the best traditions of the Political Development schools of political science, Barnett approaches the past on its own terms rather than simply mining it for echoes of the present. The result is something more than, as Barnett too modestly claims, “one of the first accounts of modern humanitarianism.”1 It is the first broadly researched and historically nuanced study of humanitarianism that connects its modern, Western origins in the age of trans-Atlantic abolitionism with the post-Cold War era, and much in between. “[R]eading humanitarianism from its origins,” Barnett compellingly asserts, “gives a very different perspective on its [End Page 914] present, and reading its present gives a very different perspective on its past.”2 Marshalling evidence from existing literature, interviews with contemporary humanitarian aid personnel, organizational archives, and published primary sources, Barnett offers a framework—not a theory, he insists—for understanding the past and present dimensions of humanitarianism that is at once synchronic and diachronic. As for the former, Barnett argues that the history of humanitarianism must be understood as having operated over time in an ever-changing global environment shaped by geopolitics (“destruction”), capitalism (“production”), and ethics (“compassion”). He contemplates multiple sets of ever-present tensions that have consistently produced the defining “zigs and zags” of humanitarianism over the past two centuries. These include claims that: humanitarianism simultaneously aspires to improve society while also being a product of that society’s prejudices; different versions of humanitarianism compete with one another—most prominently, emergency-based versus longer term, root-cause, “alchemical” approaches; humanitarian claims to universally applicable ethics are necessarily circumscribed by the imaginative limitations of particular times, places, and perspectives; humanitarianism requires the paradox of “emancipation and domination” (or “paternalism”); and humanitarian acts tend to be simultaneously self-less and self-serving, spuriously claiming a sacrosanct...

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

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.

Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (review)

Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (review)

Saltwater anti-slavery: American abolitionists on the Atlantic Ocean in the Age of Steam

Despite the explosion of interdisciplinary interest in the Atlantic world, the Atlantic Ocean itself is often quickly passed over in studies of transatlantic abolitionism. However, this essay briefly considers what we might learn about abolitionists from a perspective that treats the ocean as a “place” in its own right. American abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century made numerous Atlantic crossings, and the crossings themselves – often aboard transatlantic steamships – offered significant and unique opportunities for abolitionist activism and self-fashioning. The architecture of the transatlantic passenger ship created a particular set of opportunities and constraints for political activism, while the experience of being on the ocean afforded abolitionist travelers unique opportunities for personal reflections on their political ideals and their self-transformation. By focusing on “saltwater anti-slavery” – defined here as the experiences of nineteenth-century American abolitionists at sea – this essay thus draws attention to the general differences that place made both to abolitionist activism and identity. It also suggests the value of treating the ocean and the transoceanic passenger ship as scenes of historical action and experience, not simply as places always en route or adjacent to settings on land.