Douglass was well aware that even by 1858 antislavery was still far from becoming a “united voice” of the Northern American states and that this contrast with Britain had raised immense obstacles to the idea of America simply following the British example. Apart from public opinion, the British Parliament had had almost complete control over the colonies. The American Congress was bound by a Constitution that protected states’ rights, and slaveholders retained immense power in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Moreover, a deep tradition of Anglophobia played into the hands of opponents of abolitionism, who were able to portray the reformers as subversive agents of a British plot to divide and destroy the antimonarchic republic.
When noted British abolitionists like Charles Stuart and George Thompson came to the North in the 1830s, hoping to rally popular support by applying the successful British lecturing techniques, they were often met by hostile and even dangerous mobs—which also victimized many American abolitionist speakers. According to Thompson, in “this heaven-favored, but mob-cursed land,” public opinion had by the mid-1830s become a “demon of oppression.”9
Thus, in 1834, not long before British Emancipation Day, Charles Stuart joined an abolitionist meeting in Middletown, Connecticut, which The Liberator described as “cogent, temperate, and solemn.” Stuart had converted Theodore Dwight Weld, a chief architect of the American antislavery movement, to the abolitionist cause, and was celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic for such seminal works as The West India Question: Immediate Emancipation Safe and Practical. But after an angry mob confronted and interrupted the meeting, a U.S. Navy lieutenant challenged Stuart to a duel and proclaimed him a liar and coward. Then the mob threw eggs, attacked and injured some speakers, and threatened to tar and feather Stuart and a colleague before aid finally came from a sheriff and some members of the nearby Wesleyan college.
As Stuart and Thompson discovered, the “public sphere” of the United States was drastically different from that in Britain, where abolitionists faced little if any public hostility and had for decades succeeded in mobilizing mass support from a spectrum of social classes. Nevertheless, the British and American antislavery movements were intricately interconnected, and speakers like Stuart and Thompson did travel widely and make an impression. The American reformers’ obsession with petitioning Congress, despite no likelihood of success, was largely the result of the highly successful British petition campaigns to end the slave trade, emancipate British slaves, and end the apprenticeship system. American abolitionists greatly benefited from the vibrant transatlantic abolitionist print culture and also found significant British financial, moral, and religious support for their cause from the 1830s to the Civil War. And this tradition of popular antislavery support, some of it even from the British working class, played a key role in preventing Britain from following its economic self-interest by intervening in the war and recognizing the cotton-producing Confederacy.
THE ENACTMENT OF BRITISH EMANCIPATION
Perceptions of British emancipation involved a kind of double vision of historical change. On the one hand, as we have seen, the freeing of some 800,000 slaves was viewed as an eschatological event, an event related to the Hebrew Jubilee, the millennium, the Last Judgment, and the ultimate destiny of mankind. Such sharp breaks in history did not occur in a continuous line with the events before and after them. According to the apocalyptic rhetoric, Providence had revealed itself through a new human ability, the ability of an enlightened and righteous public to control events.
On the other hand, British political leaders feared abrupt or revolutionary change. In addition to the examples of the French and Haitian revolutions and subsequent slave insurrections, the British public seemed on the verge of revolt in the early 1830s as democratic dreams clashed with a highly undemocratic political order. Moreover, the West India lobby was still powerful enough to gain crucial concessions. Even after years of public petitioning, the Jamaican slave revolt of 1831, and the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832, it took many long months for Thomas Fowell Buxton, Lord Howick, Edward Stanley, the younger James Stephen, and other government officials to hammer out a compromised emancipation bill. Thus British slave emancipation could also be seen as another result of pragmatic political negotiation.
But the eschatological achievement confirmed the evangelical faith of Wilberforce and others that the very existence of slavery had provided Protestant Christianity with an epic stage for vindicating itself as the most liberating force in human history. Abolishing slavery became a way for a nation to accumulate “moral capital,” overcoming self-centered materialism and responding to the Enlightenment’s sweeping attacks on institutional religion.10 One of the French philosophes’ most damning charges had been that Christians, with the exception of a few Quakers, had continued to defend colonial slavery. But the same Enlightenment had furthered scientific racism, and the French Revolution had led to Napoleon’s reinstituting slavery and the slave trade in 1801–2. The elder James Stephen, who exploited this French moral regression, exemplified the double vision when he called on the British public to chant in unison a demand as “simple” as that of Jehovah’s messenger to Pharaoh, “LET THE PEOPLE GO,” and then leave the practical means to Parliament.11
Government leaders as well as abolitionists accepted this conceptual demarcation between the formal act or command of emancipation, with all its religious overtones, and the “practical” regulations to give the command effect.12 There was a parallel dichotomy between the “voice” of the British public, seen as a pure and spontaneous expression of Christian morality, and the political arts of compromise that were needed to balance contending interests and advance the common good. Even within the Stephen family, the younger James, who drafted the final emancipation act, sought to ensure ordered, sequential progress, whereas his father and his brother George invoked the imagery of holy warriors annihilating a demonic power.13
While many British economists and legislators urged caution and delay in any even gradual attempt to convert slaves into free laborers, British abolitionists were blessed, compared to their American or even French counterparts, in the fact that defenders of the status quo hardly ever claimed that blacks were racially inferior in capability, even if they exhibited some of the backward traits of “savages.” Seymour Drescher has made the extraordinary discovery that despite the racist writings of such eighteenth-century figures as Edward Long and even David Hume, defenders of slavery in Parliament ignored racial arguments and for some sixty years appeals to race played almost no role in the government’s discussions of the slave trade, slavery, and apprenticeship. In fact, when attacking the slave trade and then slavery, Wilberforce quoted Long’s comparison of Africans with apes, “assured that his audience, in or out of Parliament, would react to such arguments ‘with astonishment as well as with disgust.’ ” Since even Britain had become infected with various forms of racism by the late 1840s and 1850s, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Buxton, and their colleagues were very fortunate in finding a time when white legislators and much of the public were quite free of racial prejudice.14
The British movement against slavery itself began around 1814 in a very reserved, conservative way, exemplified by the amelioration acts of 1823 and 1826, and then changed dramatically by 1830 with demands for “immediate” emancipation. We have already examined the role of free blacks in steering the American movement toward immediatism by 1830. While Quaker reformers maintained connections between the British and American movements—the American Benjamin Lundy, for example, reprinted in his Genius of Universal Emancipation Elizabeth Heyrick’s 1824 radical British pamphlet, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition—it is still remarkable that the two movements, facing entirely different situations, developed along parallel lines and reached a crucial turning point by 1830.15 When it became clear that ending the slave trade in 1807 was not encouraging planters to reform and “ameliorate” the institution, Wilberforce led a parliamentary campaign for his brot
her-in-law James Stephen’s ideal of a central Registry of all British colonial slaves, which would not only reveal illegal importations but also provide data on mortality rates and thus serve as an entering wedge for British reform legislation.16 In 1816, the parliamentary debates helped trigger a major slave uprising in Barbados, which, unlike the Jamaican revolt of 1831–32, set back further significant discussions of slavery for some years.
Following the lead of Liverpool’s wealthy Quaker merchant James Cropper, the London abolitionists formed in 1823 the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery. The word “mitigation” reflected the earlier hope and expectation that ending the slave trade would induce West Indian planters to improve the treatment of slaves and begin to transform them into a self-reproducing peasantry, thereby obtaining the supposed economic advantages of free labor. The abolitionists confronted the powerful Society of West Indian Planters and Merchants, which claimed that much moral progress had already transformed British colonial slavery into a humane and highly paternalistic institution. The owners of the majority of West Indian estates lived as absentee landlords in England, where, united with wealthy merchants, they purported to favor their own ameliorative measures, including the religious instruction of slaves, something strongly resisted in the colonies.
In 1823, Thomas Fowell Buxton, who replaced the aging Wilberforce as the abolitionist leader in Parliament, presented resolutions that included freeing all slave children born after a fixed date and measures to prepare the other slaves for freedom by slow degrees. To the delight of the planters and merchants, who had conferred with the government, George Canning, leader of the House of Commons, then seized the initiative and presented the government’s own ameliorative resolutions, which were adopted without opposition. While Canning vaguely committed the government to future emancipation, he made it clear that planters themselves would be the agents for slow, step-by-step change. And by 1830 it was clear that planters had successfully resisted any major amelioration, and, by castigating even gradual abolitionism as a dangerous threat to security, had begun convincing many reformers that Elizabeth Heyrick had been right in proclaiming in her subtitle that immediate emancipation was The Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery.17
The efforts of the abolitionists’ new Agency Committee of paid lecturers, who beginning in the summer of 1831 adopted the methods of religious revivalists as they circulated petitions and traveled from town to town elaborating on the sins of slavery, were immensely enhanced by a great slave insurrection in Jamaica, soon known as the Baptist War.18 On the night of December 27, 1831, a white Presbyterian missionary described the clusters of fire as estates were consumed and “then the sky became a sheet of flame, as if the whole country had become a vast furnace.” Yet he added that “amid the wild excitement of the night, not one freeman’s life was taken, not one freewoman molested by the insurgent slaves.”
As some sixty thousand Jamaican slaves joined the monthlong rebellion—led by a slave elite including drivers, carpenters, coopers, and blacksmiths—planters and Jamaican legislators agreed that English missionaries and their slave converts, especially Baptists, were the cause of the upheaval. While the missionaries opposed such violence and insisted that they had coupled their campaign to Christianize and uplift the blacks with admonitions against disobedience, a large number of the rebel leaders were Christian converts who were well aware of the political agitation over slavery in Britain. Many domestic slaves had even concluded from the overheard ranting and raving of Jamaican whites that the English king or government wished to free them.19
It was doubtless this consciousness of an English antislavery public, along with the influence of missionaries, that explains the slaves’ extraordinary determination to prevent the slaughter of whites, both in Jamaica and in the earlier 1823 three-day uprising in Demerara (part of later British Guiana). In the latter colony, where missionary John Smith was sentenced to be hanged after being wrongly tried for inciting the slaves to rebel, many of the ten to twelve thousand rebels carried guns, cutlasses, or knives, and more than 255 blacks were killed or wounded by colonial troops in the confrontations. Yet the slaves, who slapped and whipped some captured masters and overseers, killed no more than two or three white men. This amazing self-discipline helped British missionaries to defend the slaves and dramatize Demerara as a godless colony where Christian missionaries were violently persecuted. (Smith, who died in jail of consumption, was soon celebrated in Britain as the “Demerara Martyr.”) In the much larger and longer (by more than a factor of ten) Jamaican war, slaves burned hundreds of plantation houses, destroyed fields of sugarcane and other crops, and engaged in virtual battles that led to a final death toll of some 540 blacks. But throughout the month, no more than fourteen whites were killed.20
If Jamaican blacks had killed hundreds of whites, preaching abolition to thousands of Britons would have been much more difficult for William Knibb and other refugee missionaries in 1832 and 1833. The issue of religious persecution greatly strengthened abolitionism as missionaries testified before the Select Committee of the House of Commons, and played a central role in depicting the cruelty of godless planters and the virtues and victimization of slaves.21
Following the Jamaican rebellion, about a dozen refugee missionaries returned to England, where they were hailed as heroes. In response to the strict rules of the established Anglican Church, the English public had long struggled for the rights of nonconformist sects, such as the Baptists and Methodists, who had greatly expanded their memberships. By 1832, religious dissenters, who were strongly inclined toward abolitionism, represented about 21 percent of the English electorate. Large crowds listened to missionaries’ accounts of being jailed, tarred and feathered, and threatened with death as Jamaican mobs destroyed dozens of chapels. One missionary, Henry Whitely, published an account of his persecution and of the brutal treatment of slaves, excerpts of which Thomas Fowell Buxton read to a very receptive audience. Hatchard’s bookstore in Piccadilly sold 200,000 copies of the work within two weeks.22 The missionaries were careful to underscore their own innocence with respect to any instigation of the rebellion and even to wrongly insist that most black Christians had tried to protect their masters’ property and had refused to participate in the rebellion. Their vivid descriptions of the evils of slavery had an immense impact on British public opinion.
In America, the news of a massive Jamaican slave rebellion had a very different and alarming meaning. The seeming connection between British abolitionist activity and the Jamaican slave insurrection greatly enhanced Southern fears and the argument that even news of antislavery agitation would almost certainly lead to slave uprisings. Yet the Northern religious press, traditionally sensitive to Southern opinion, now disregarded past boundaries in depicting the Jamaican persecution of missionaries. The Boston Recorder frankly reported, in 1831, “the [British] religious newspapers and magazines that we receive are unanimous in favor of immediate adoption of [abolitionist] measures by Parliament.… the treatment of the Jamaica Missionaries … has awakened a spirit throughout the kingdom, that will not soon sleep.”23
The issue of immediate slave emancipation arose in Britain at a time of protracted public struggle for a wide range of political and social rights. It was the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 that revolutionized the prospects of slave emancipation, which would not have been possible under the traditional system of political representation. Proposed by the Whigs and led by Prime Minister Lord Grey, the reform granted seats in the House of Commons to the large cities that had grown during the early Industrial Revolution, and cut representation from the so-called rotten boroughs, where Tories had benefited from very small electorates. Despite a significant increase in the size of the electorate, voting was still limited to less than 17 percent of adult males. But the West India interest lost many seats in the House of Commons. Following the next election, they could count on only thirty-five MP Representatives, as
opposed to well over one hundred who had pledged in the campaign to support immediate emancipation. In the fall of 1832, Buxton joyfully concluded that “things are ripe for obtaining nearly the full extent of our wishes.” Confident that the Whig administration would introduce a satisfactory bill, he even cautioned abolitionists to avoid militant agitation that might alarm conservatives, especially in the House of Lords.24
But the British cabinet faced a complex problem. By 1833, the ratio of British petition signatures calling for immediate emancipation, compared to those in opposition, came to more than 250 to 1. The abolitionists’ extraordinary mobilization led some 20 percent of all British men, many religious dissenters, to sign antislavery petitions that year. Yet concessions would have to be won from the West Indians, who had the active sympathy of the king and of powerful Tories (and some Whigs), who were above all worried about the violation of established rights to private property. Since a defining feature of chattel slavery was the inheritable and transferable claim of ownership in human beings and their offspring, how could such claims be challenged without challenging the very principle of hereditary private property? Lord Grey, the prime minister, made it clear that no measure for emancipation could be proposed without first obtaining the West Indians’ consent.25
By late March, Buxton changed his mind and saw the need to encourage the militant public crusade for immediate emancipation. Even the elderly Wilberforce, who had opposed inciting public agitation, was persuaded to publicly initiate a petition to Parliament. In 1833, Parliament received more than five thousand antislavery petitions, containing some 1.3 million signatures (roughly 30 percent signed by women). Most notable, perhaps, was a monstrous document, the largest single antislavery petition in British history, sewn and pasted together by a team including Buxton’s daughter Priscilla, and signed by 187,000 women. Buxton expressed temporary despair when he first read the plan drafted by the colonial secretary, Edward Stanley, which included compensation to slaveholders and a long apprenticeship for slaves. But after Stanley presented the plan to the House of Commons, Buxton exclaimed to Priscilla that “Emancipation is effected, the thing is done.”26
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 34
