The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  Given his success in America as a lecturer and author, Douglass was also strongly attracted by the prospect of touring Britain and Ireland as a lecturer, exposing the evils of American slavery to audiences that were receptive and amazingly free from racial prejudice, according to the testimony of earlier black abolitionist visitors like the Reverend Nathaniel Paul and Charles Lenox Remond. The success of British abolitionists in mobilizing the public and emancipating 800,000 slaves drew increasing numbers of African Americans to this capital of abolitionism and reinforced the contrast between Americans and the British people, who, as Samuel Ringgold Ward later told a Southampton audience, “were looked upon by the Negro as his especial friends and guardians, and surely the actions and sacrifices of the British people in the Negro’s behalf fully justified this idea.”2

  Douglass boarded the Cambria with a white friend, James N. Buffum, a wealthy abolitionist and future mayor of Lynn, Massachusetts, who had earlier helped Douglass fight off a mob. Buffum had failed, despite its being a British ship, to obtain a cabin passage for Douglass on the Cambria, having been told that this “would give offense to the majority of American passengers.” Accordingly, Buffum also took a steerage compartment. But, after two days at sea, Douglass found that “one part of the ship was about as free to me as another,” and he even visited the first-class section at the invitation of fellow passengers, who often called on him in steerage.3

  As Douglass wrote to his friend and mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, the ship’s population could hardly have been more diverse. The famous fugitive slave now confronted the transatlantic world of the mid-1840s:

  [O]ur passengers were made up of nearly all costs [sic] of people, from different countries of the most opposite mode of thinking on all subjects. We had nearly all sorts of parties in morals, religion, and polities, as well as trades, callings, and professions. The Doctor and the Lawyer, the soldier and the sailor were there. The scheming Connecticut wood clock maker, the large, curly New York lion-tamer, the solemn Roman Catholic Bishop, and the Orthodox Quaker were there. A minister of the Free Church of Scotland, and a minister of the Church of England—the established Christian and the meandering Jew, the Whig and the Democrat, the white and the black, were there. There was the dark-visaged Spaniard, and the light-visaged Englishman—the man from Montreal, and the man from Mexico. There were slaveholders from Cuba, and slaveholders from Georgia. We had anti-slavery singing and pro-slavery grumbling; and at the same time that Governor Hammond’s Letters were being read, my Narrative was being circulated [and copies sold to passengers]. In the midst of the debate going on, there sprang up quite a desire, on the part of a number on board to have me lecture to them on slavery.4

  Douglass knew that Garrison would be pleased to learn that “from the moment we first lost sight of the American shore till we landed at Liverpool,” there was an “almost constant discussion of the subject of slavery—commencing cool but growing hotter every moment as it advanced.” “If suppressed in the saloon, it broke out in the steerage; and if it [repealed?] in the steerage, it was reversed in the saloon; and if suppressed in both, it broke out with redoubled energy high upon the saloon deck, in the open, refreshing, free ocean air.”5

  During most of the voyage, Douglass expressed delight in the way that “the sunshine of free discussion” enabled antislavery truths to triumph over the attempts to defend and justify slavery. However, on the night of August 27, as they approached the Irish coast and after Douglass had accepted the captain’s invitation to deliver an address on slavery, about a half dozen proslavery militants were determined to prevent him from speaking.6 They had concluded that “reason, morality, humanity, and Christianity” were all against them and that “argument was no longer any means of defense.” They therefore reverted to the use of brute force and made “bloody threats” to Douglass if he attempted to speak. Although the captain urged Douglass’s opponents to move to a different space, they “actually got up a mob—a real American, republican, democratic, Christian mob—and that, too, on the deck of a British steamer.”

  The captain succeeded temporarily in quieting the mob and introducing Douglass, but after he spoke a few words on the condition of slaves, Northerners from Connecticut and New Jersey shouted out, “That’s a lie!” and appeared anxious to strike him. Another called out, “Down with the Nigger!” One slaveholder from Cuba shook his fist in Douglass’s face, and said, “O, I wish I had you in Cuba!” “Ah!” said another, “I wish I had him in Savannah! We would use him up!” When Douglass tried to substantiate his claims by reading some passages from American slave laws, “the slaveholders, finding they were now to be fully exposed, rushed up about me with hands clenched, and swore I should not speak. They were ashamed to have American laws read before an English audience.” But such opponents were countered by antislavery supporters. When one mobster called for help in throwing Douglass overboard, a “noble-spirited” Irishman “assured the man who proposed to throw me overboard, that two could play at that game, and that, in the end, he might be thrown overboard himself.” Nevertheless, the disruption prevented Douglass from speaking and was only silenced when the captain “told the mobocrats if they did not cease their clamor, he would have them put in irons; and he actually sent for the irons, and doubtless would have made use of them, had not the rioters become orderly.”7

  Douglass would repeatedly describe this event in his speeches in Britain and Ireland, dramatizing the boundary between slaveholding America and Europe. As he summarized his feelings to Garrison:

  I declare, it is enough to make a slave ashamed of the country that enslaved him, to think of it. Without the slightest pretensions to patriotism, as the phrase goes, the conduct of the mobocratic Americans on board the Cambria almost made me ashamed to say I had run away from such a country. It was decidedly the most daring and disgraceful, as well as wicked exhibition of depravity, I ever witnessed, North or South.8

  AFRICAN AMERICANS EMBRACE THE MOTHER COUNTRY

  The relationship between Britain and the United States in the antebellum decades was infinitely complex. England provided most of the manufactures that America imported, and American cotton provided the basis for the textile factories that empowered England’s Industrial Revolution. British banks and citizens invested heavily in American securities and state and municipal bonds, while a host of churches and reform movements in both countries maintained intimate connections.9

  As Frederick Douglass told an audience in Belfast, America was indebted to Britain for her literature, religion, judicial system, and social institutions. Yet he stressed to other listeners that while the British had set a glorious model by emancipating 800,000 slaves, they were the ones who had originally introduced slavery to their colonies and now continued to support the institution by purchasing enormous amounts of slave-grown cotton and other products. Like most American abolitionists, Douglass was committed to democratic ideals and principles that sharply conflicted with Britain’s monarchy, aristocracy, and treatment of industrial workers. On the other hand, in his speeches Douglass sometimes likened his journey to Britain with his earlier escape from bondage to freedom, and could write to Garrison that “instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government.… I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man.”10

  The sense of a common heritage had long been personified in familial imagery—“mother country,” “our American cousins,” “parent and offspring.” But the American Revolution and War of 1812 greatly polarized this sense of family, as did continuing conflicts over the Canadian border and America’s expansion into Florida, Texas, and the Far West, conflicts that sometimes threatened war but were resolved by treaty. American presidents from Jefferson to Polk and Buchanan tended to see monarchial Britain as America’s “natural enemy,” dedicated to the humiliation and subjugation of her rebellious and increasingly democratic former colonies. Anglophobia had brought a fairly rapid death to the Federalist party. Hatred of England was further nourished b
y contemporaneous anti-American essays in British periodicals and unflattering descriptions by English travelers that were widely reprinted in the United States.11

  Historian Marcus Cunliffe noted long ago that both the British and Americans used the other as a negative reference group, “evoking the desired ideal of one’s own society by describing opposite characteristics in the other.” Uncle Sam and John Bull embodied the supposed worst qualities of republicanism and monarchy. According to the more hostile British accounts, “American republicanism entailed strident vulgarity, abject conformity, demagoguery, corrupt politics, and endemic violence. Its values were superficial. It treasured quantity rather than quality, and pursued the ‘Almighty Dollar’ with joyless intensity.” American critics focused attention on the extraordinarily expensive and superfluous monarchy, which “cost the British taxpayer as much as the entire outlay of the United States government,” and even worse, the aristocracy, “with their hereditary titles and their vast estates,” who cooperated with the bishops of the Church of England in exploiting and dominating the working poor, who were kept in a state of near destitution. As American writer John C. Cobden put it in his 1853 book, The White Slaves of England, “In no country are the few richer than in England, and in no country are the masses more fearfully wretched.”12

  According to Cunliffe, Americans increasingly blamed the repugnant traits of Irish immigrants on centuries of British mistreatment and also accused the British of deliberately dumping its paupers across the Atlantic, thus filling America’s urban streets with poverty and crime:

  [T]he apparent evidence convinced a remarkable number of sober citizens of the United States, first, that wage slavery was an inherent element in the British economy at home and throughout the British empire; second, that the antislavery propaganda of the aristocracy, the church, and the manufacturing and mercantile interest was a calculated device to divert attention from British forms of slavery; and third, that this propaganda concealed a diabolic plot to undermine and even destroy the American Union.13

  As we saw in chapter 10, such a view of British conspiracy was highly compatible with the official doctrines of Secretary of State Calhoun and many other Southern leaders regarding the motives and strategy of British promoters of antislavery. According to this theory, British leaders had responded to the economic disaster of West Indian emancipation by planning to undermine slavery in all other nations in order to improve the competitive advantage of her own colonies, including India. Calhoun succeeded in publicizing the private statement of Lord Aberdeen, the British foreign secretary, that “Britain desires, and is constantly exerting herself to procure, the general abolition of slavery throughout the world.” This helped Calhoun to identify even Northern efforts to block America’s annexation of slaveholding Texas—and antislavery movements in general—as part of a British plot to destroy the Union.14

  But Lord Aberdeen’s declaration of a national commitment to destroy human bondage only magnified the appeal and magnificence of Britain in the eyes of American abolitionists, especially black abolitionists. Yet, as we will see later, even black abolitionists would eventually need to respond to the issue of British “wage slavery”—to the fact that abolitionism reached unique success in the world’s first industrialized nation, the center of free labor ideology and a nation that became notorious for overworking women and even young children, in dismal, dehumanizing factories.

  W. Caleb McDaniel has recently published a brilliant book that dramatizes the profound paradox that the world’s leading model and advocate of democracy also defended an expanding system of racial slavery, while the world’s leading champion of antislavery was still a monarchic and highly aristocratic nation that, as the leader of the Industrial Revolution, also presented shocking examples of so-called wage slavery. McDaniel insightfully explores the way that Garrisonian abolitionists coped with this anomaly, as transatlantic reformers dedicated to both democracy and slave emancipation. The book is especially illuminating with respect to Garrisonians and the British Chartist efforts to blame poverty and low wages on political disempowerment and the need for universal manhood suffrage. Garrison at one point found it necessary to reassure the “working men” in his audience that in denouncing slavery, “I do not denounce democracy.”15

  Although the shocking conditions of the working poor were publicized in the press, novels, and parliamentary reports, capitalist Britain was seen by the 1840s and early 1850s as “the moral arbiter of the western world”—the home for democratic and radical exiles from Italy, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Germany, and Scandinavia, including such figures as Lajos Kossuth, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Karl Marx. Beginning in the early 1830s, virtually every important African American leader followed a similar path, hoping to gain British support for specific causes and to build what R. J. M. Blackett, quoting Frederick Douglass, terms a “moral cordon” around the United States, so that slaveholders would be overwhelmed wherever they went by denunciations of their so-called peculiar institution. African Americans’ affection for Britain was deepened immensely by its abolition of slavery in 1834 and of apprenticeship in 1838, supplemented by the World Antislavery Conventions in London in 1840 and 1843, while earlier black antislavery publications, such as Freedom’s Journal and David Walker’s Appeal, had expressed very positive views of the British, in part because of Canada’s reception of fugitive slaves. And we will remember that when James McCune Smith found himself barred from American universities, he enrolled in 1831 in the University of Glasgow and became a distinguished American physician.16

  Nathaniel Paul, a Baptist minister originally from Albany, New York, became the first major black abolitionist to travel to Britain to raise funds and promote the African American cause. In a speech at Glasgow, in 1834, Paul pointed to young McCune Smith, who was sitting on the platform, as an example of Britain’s lack of prejudice in providing for the education of a black man of “the highest respectability and intelligence.”17 Having founded the Albany African Church Association, a school for black children, and an Albany society for “the Improvement of the Colored People in Morals, Education, and the Mechanic Arts,” and having contributed regularly to Freedom’s Journal and then Rights of All, Paul joined the agrarian Wilberforce Colony in Ontario not long after it was established by blacks who fled the terrible racist laws and 1829 race riots in Cincinnati. Then early in 1832, he departed for England on a mission to raise money for the Canadian colony and for a proposed black manual labor college in New Haven, Connecticut, which the white community soon prohibited.18

  When Paul arrived in Britain, abolitionists had obtained enormous public support for immediate West Indian emancipation, and British interest in the United States had turned to debates over the alleged antislavery character of the American Colonization Society and African American colonization. Distressed by the growing attacks from American abolitionists, led as we have seen by African Americans, the ACS in 1831 shrewdly commissioned Elliott Cresson, a Quaker philanthropist and ardent supporter of colonization, to visit Britain and persuade abolitionists and humanitarians that the ACS represented the most realistic path to slave emancipation in America. Like even William Lloyd Garrison, Nathaniel Paul had originally been somewhat open to the missionary and antislavery potentialities of African colonization, but by 1832 he had come to see the ACS as a barrier to slave emancipation and a vicious source of racial prejudice. He therefore joined the passionate British abolitionist Charles Stuart in trying to counter Cresson’s crusade to raise funds and validate the colonization cause.19

  Captain Charles Stuart, a retired British officer who had served in India and had then become principal of the Utica Academy in upstate New York, became extremely influential in the Anglo-American antislavery cause. The work he wrote in his initial campaign against Elliott Cresson helped inspire Garrison to write his 1832 landmark, Thoughts on African Colonization.20

  Along with his crucial role in finally overcoming Cresson, whose arguments in 1831 h
ad greatly impressed Wilberforce and even persuaded Thomas Clarkson to write a commendation of the ACS and its work in Liberia, Stuart was instrumental in converting to the antislavery cause a man who would become one of the foremost American abolitionists. When living in New York’s “Burned-Over District” in the 1820s, during Charles Grandison Finney’s Great Religious Revival, Stuart, a devout Presbyterian, became a loving father figure for Theodore Dwight Weld, who would later become a leading abolitionist lecturer, author of the most important abolitionist book, and an adviser to John Quincy Adams’s congressional campaign against “gagging” antislavery petitions. In March and June of 1831, Stuart helped to transform “his beloved Theodore” by sending him letters and publications imploring him to engage his soul “in the Sacred cause of Negro emancipation” and expressing profound gratitude to God “that as we continue guilty of [slavery], he can refrain from fairly breaking up the world beneath our feet, and dashing us into sudden hell.”21

  By the time Garrison arrived in Britain in the summer of 1833, Cresson had been so damaged by the attacks of Stuart, Paul, and James Cropper, a pioneer British abolitionist and wealthy Liverpool merchant, that he was writing desperate letters to the ACS complaining about their proslavery statements (exposed in Stuart’s pamphlets) and lack of response to Garrison’s book. Paul, who as a minister had easy access to pulpits throughout the British Isles, quickly discovered that his dark skin color was a key asset and that British humanitarians would look upon blacks as the most legitimate, convincing, and knowledgeable proponents of American abolition. Indeed, Cresson soon pleaded with the leaders of the American Colonization Society to find a black man who could counteract Paul’s impact. Moreover, Paul represented a black colony in Canada that was in some ways a competitor with Liberia, but that was also a refuge from the kind of militant racism fostered by white colonizationists. Paul even played a crucial role in getting the current leadership of the British abolition movement to sign a document condemning the ACS; he even helped persuade Wilberforce to sign the “Protest” just before he died. According to Garrison’s account of their meeting, Paul’s evidence of free-black opposition finally convinced Clarkson to declare his neutrality on colonization after realizing he had been misled by Cresson.22