The subsequent spread of highly regimented and large-scale manufacturing, long hours of work, and increasing use of female and child labor gave strong ammunition to nineteenth-century Southern American defenders of racial slavery, such as George Fitzhugh and John C. Calhoun, who contended that American slavery was infinitely more humane than British industrial bondage. Since America was soon flooded with evidence of British working-class suffering and exploitation—from parliamentary reports, articles in the Edinburgh Review and London Times, to the writings of Engels, Carlyle, and Dickens—the belief that British wage slavery was at least as dehumanizing as American chattel slavery was by no means confined to proslavery Southerners. A famous British traveler to America like geologist Sir Charles Lyell could report, “The Negroes, so far as I have yet seen them, whether in domestic service or on the farms, appear very cheerful and free from care, better fed than a large part of the labouring class of Europe.”38
Of course, the majority of British writers condemned American slavery as a barbarous anachronism. And, as we have already seen, Cunliffe shows that the opposing views played into the hands of critics of America and Britain as opposing “reference groups”—an arrogant democratic republic dependent on viciously exploited black slave labor, and an aristocratic monarchy in which thousands of poor factory children worked up to thirteen hours or more a day. Even in the North, many Americans became convinced that British abolitionism, with its increasing attacks on American slavery, was a part of a massive plot, led by the aristocrats, Church, and manufacturers, to divert attention from British forms of slavery. Even worse, the antidemocratic conspiracy supposedly aimed to undermine the American Union by exploiting sectional divisions and sending British abolitionists like George Thompson to America to foment discord. Cunliffe cites the extremely hostile, violent response to Thompson, even in Massachusetts, as evidence of this Anglophobia and commitment to patriotic unity.39
This background provides some context and perspective for the way Frederick Douglass addressed the subject of wage and chattel slavery, which he did on various occasions during his first time in Britain. Since brief summaries can’t begin to do justice to the profundity and eloquence of his talks or the importance of his arguments, I will devote some space to the text of his extraordinary speech at Bristol, where he and William Lloyd Garrison both addressed a fairly select audience on August 25, 1846. Repeating many points made in earlier talks, Douglass concentrated on the unique nature of American slavery—whose central evil lay not in whipping and other physical abuse, but in a total domination that closed down the brain and soul of every dehumanized individual.40
After asking the audience to attribute his possible lack of refinement to his experiences as a slave, Douglass stressed that he was not there “to trouble them with any horrible details” of his life as a slave, which could be found in his autobiography. His purpose was rather to examine “the wrongs of three millions of his fellow-countrymen in the United States,” where slavery “assumed a more horrible form” than had ever existed in any other nation. Like David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Angelina Grimké, and James McCune Smith, Douglass made it clear he was referring to “the moral condition of the slaves” more than to “the lashing, branding, cathauling, hunting, imprisoning”:
In the first place he [the slave] was denied all intellectual improvement. It was made by the laws punishable with death, for a second offence, to teach a slave his letters. In the next place, there was … an utter abolition of the institution of marriage. A slave was not protected in that relation. He might be separated from his partner at any time at the will or caprice of his master. His own wishes or will were never consulted—he lived only for his master’s interest, and his master might do whatever he liked with him.41
Throughout his speech Douglass noted some reasons that a British audience might find it difficult or impossible to grasp the full horrors of American slavery. In the United States, there was a “class of philosophers” who denied blacks “equal humanity with the whites, and who spoke of them as being the connecting-link between humanity and the brute creation.” In Britain, various writers and others regarded American slavery with some indifference “on account of the political disadvantages under which some portion of the subjects of this country were said to labour.” This was a clear reference to the Chartist demand for universal male suffrage as an antidote to economic exploitation. Showing that he was well aware of the larger debate, Douglass noted he had heard some individuals say, “ ‘Why talk to us of American slavery—why speak to us of slavery 3000 miles off? We have slavery in England!’ ” Largely as a result of ignorance, according to Douglass, some writers diminished the horrors of American slavery by speaking “of slavery in the army, slavery in the navy, and looking upon the labouring population [contemplating] them as slaves.” One reformer had exclaimed, “ ‘Why does not England set the example by doing away with these forms of slavery at home, before it called upon the United States to do so?’ ”
Yet was he there boldly to proclaim that there was no more similarity between slavery, as existing in the United States, and any institution in this country, than there was between light and darkness. Only look at the condition of the slave, stripped of every right—denied every privilege, he had not even the privilege of saying “myself”—his head, his eyes, his hands, his heart, his bones, his sinews, his soul, his immortal spirit, were all the property of another. He might not decide any question for himself—any question relating to his own actions. The master—the man who claimed property in his person—assumed the right to decide all things for him—what he should eat, how he should eat, what he should drink; to whom he should speak, what he should speak; for whom he should work and under what circumstances; when he should marry, to whom he should marry, and how long the marriage covenant should continue, for they claimed the power of separating those who considered themselves joined together before God (hear). They took upon themselves to determine for the slave what was right and what was wrong, and they had a very different code of morals from that contained in the decalogue.
Douglass had already stressed that he had “not one word to say in defence of any form of oppression on earth—not a sentence in extenuation of the conduct of any tyrant on earth.” He wished and prayed “that tyranny and oppression of every kind might have an end (cheers).” Yet in the United States “there were three millions of human beings who were denied the right to improve themselves; the more like brutes they could be made, the more beastly in their habits they could be made, the better were the wishes of the master accomplished—for his desire was to break up as far as possible all likeness to mankind on the part of the slave.” For this purpose, Douglass continued, masters divided families, took the infant from the mother, made it penal for the slave to be taught his letters, or for a woman “to defend her person from the brutal outrage of an unfeeling master.”
In short, the slave was “a mere thing”:
—a human brute, dragged down from the condition of a man and ranked with the brute creation. Were there any such in this country? No—not one (hear). They had their rags and their poverty, their hard toiling for a subsistence, as also they had in the Northern states of America, but they had not slavery (cheers). No man could assert over another the right of property—he was free to act—free to go and free to come; but the slave was bound in unending chains—he could not improve, progress was annihilated with him.
Despite his reassuring words about opposing all forms of tyranny and oppression (and, as we will see, he supported and lectured with various Chartists), Douglass’s analysis of American chattel slavery and his protest against extending the concept of slavery to British forms of labor implied some support for the British status quo. According to Douglass, ignorance of the true evils of American chattel slavery prevented many good-hearted Britons from understanding that there was no more similarity between British and American systems of labor than “between light and darkness.” Britain, in his view, ha
d not only succeeded in emancipating their colonial slaves, but British workers were free from owners intent on their total dehumanization; they were free to act or to come and go as they wished. Though Douglass ignored crucial aspects of British “wage slavery,” the audience seemed to approve with “cheers.” Douglass’s long lecture, like a somewhat later one in Sheffield that made similar points, ended with “long-continued cheering” or “much applause”42
There is much conflicting evidence regarding working-class and radical reform group support for British abolitionists, and this question fits into a long-term past debate among historians over the degree to which abolitionism stimulated and reinforced domestic reform or provided “moral capital” for the ruling classes, unintentionally diverting attention from domestic issues like “wage slavery.” In briefly examining this issue, which provides the larger context for Douglass’s efforts to differentiate chattel slavery from other types of oppression, it is essential to draw a distinction between the period after 1830 in Britain, which was marked by domestic turbulence and a protracted public struggle for a variety of political and economic rights, and the earlier conservative decades, beginning in the late 1790s, when British leaders were obsessed with the radical French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. For William Wilberforce, James Stephen, and the other “Saints” and government leaders who succeeded in abolishing the slave trade and moving toward very gradualist antislavery policies, it was essential to maintain a sharp distinction between the evils of the colonial slave world and the ostensibly free institutions that had been imperiled both by French tyranny and English “Jacobins.” The constant comparisons in early abolitionist literature between the agony of black slaves and the smiling, contented life of English “husbandmen” was not fortuitous. Abolitionists repeatedly reminded Britons that the Somerset decision of 1772 had outlawed slavery in England.43
There was clearly a dramatic change in the 1830s, especially following the Reform Act of 1832 and the harsh New Poor Law of 1834, as numerous progressive organizations tried to copy the techniques of the incredibly successful abolition movement. Pamphlets, broadsides, and petitions for various causes often included some words opposing slavery or apprenticeship, although antislavery publications seldom reciprocated. Historians Betty Fladeland and Seymour Drescher long ago provided conclusive evidence of strong ties between British abolitionism and movements to expand suffrage, aid the poor, and reduce the hours of workers, especially children, in factories.44
But even Fladeland acknowledges that in the early decades of the nineteenth century abolitionists were “constant targets of the radical press,” which portrayed abolitionist leaders as “pious hypocrites who wrung their hands over the plight of far-off black slaves while at home they eased their consciences by supplying the poor with Bibles instead of bread.”45 Fladeland begins a different essay, which emphasizes the later strong links between abolitionists and Chartists, by stressing that a reader of workingmen’s newspapers and journals for the 1820s and 1830s “might easily conclude that the working classes’ worst enemies were the members of anti-slavery societies who were dedicated to freeing black slaves in far-off colonies while being blindly insensitive to the exploitation of white workers at home.” Historian Patricia Hollis argues that from 1823 to the 1840s, “the abolitionist cause attracted little working-class support, much working-class indifference, and considerable working-class hostility.” She adds that “the major labor reform leaders, William Cobbett, Richard Oastler, and Bronterre O’Brien, [despite their opposition to slavery], all excoriated abolitionists as hypocrites, indifferent to poverty and suffering at home…[who] financed their philanthropy abroad by increasing the exploitation of their white ‘slaves’ at home.” From one radical perspective, Britain’s traditional abolitionists sought to impose a Christian, moralistic ethic upon black slaves who would merely be converted into more servile wage slaves in a capitalist society. Such abolitionists were said to be guilty not only of ignoring the worse plight of British “wage slaves,” but of philosophically and even politically supporting the domestic status quo, a fact dramatized by the well-known emancipationists who supported the incredibly oppressive 1834 Poor Law, which separated family members within the new workhouses.46
This prejudice against certain aspects of the traditional antislavery movement gave added justification to the Chartists’ widespread efforts to raid, disrupt, and take over abolitionist meetings. Following the large-scale armed rebellion at Newport in 1839, which led to the government’s arrest of hundreds of Chartists, three of whom were convicted of high treason and sentenced to death (later commuted to transportation for life), the group adopted a policy of attending and interrupting public gatherings of many kinds, ranging from meetings of parish churches to those of the Anti-Corn Law League, in attempts to focus public attention on the plight of the poor and disfranchised. But, given their major desire to build on the successful abolitionist movement, Chartists were especially eager to interrupt and gain some control over such abolitionist meetings as the Glasgow Emancipation Society in 1840 and the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. These struggles to obtain resolutions on “wage slavery” and manhood suffrage involved bitter disputes and nearly violent confrontations.47
When William Lloyd Garrison came to Britain to attend the 1840 World Convention, he was horrified by the terrible condition of the poor and the oppressive character of a monarchical, aristocratic society, but he was also deeply troubled by the Chartist efforts “to take violent possession of meetings convened expressly for anti-slavery purposes, and to transform their character and design.” As Garrison wrote in The Liberator, “In their struggle to obtain those rights and privileges which belong to them as men, and of which they are now ruthlessly deprived, I sympathize with all my heart, and wish them a speedy and complete victory!” But the Chartists’ behavior at the antislavery meetings “is both dastardly and criminal, and certainly most unwise and impolitic for themselves.”48
Despite these reservations, Garrison’s relations with the Chartist movement in 1840 and 1846 shed light on the ways that Frederick Douglass’s desire to maintain and preserve the unique evil of chattel slavery could be combined with efforts to relieve the suffering and degradation of other oppressed peoples. In a speech in Glasgow in 1840, Garrison anticipated Douglass’s defense of the unique evil of American chattel slavery:
Although he expressed sympathy for oppressed labor, he insisted that there was a basic and essential difference between a so-called white slave and a real black slave—the difference between oppression and slavery. Whereas the white laborer may be impoverished and exploited, he nevertheless had freedom to work for his employer or to seek work elsewhere. The slave had to do his master’s bidding or suffer the consequences—perhaps even death itself.49
Yet Garrison called for the support of Chartist goals, though in 1840 he was surprised to find little support for the movement. For the first time Garrison was struck by the way narrow-minded abolitionists ignored the suffering and degradation of British workers, and by the fact that “nine-tenths of mankind are living in squalid poverty and abject servitude in order to sustain in idleness and profligacy the one-tenth!” If England “looked beautiful,” he told Samuel J. May upon his return, it was “sitting on a volcano,” as evidenced by the anger evoked by the Chartists.50
When Garrison entered the chapel in Glasgow to speak to a large audience assembled by the Glasgow Emancipation Society, a Chartist handed him a placard entitled “Have we no white slaves?” and signed “A WHITE SLAVE.” Garrison put it in his pocket and resolved to read it to the meeting, without even consulting his close friend George Thompson, who introduced him, who led the British wing of Garrisonians, and who in 1842 publicly joined the Chartists. After first emphasizing that “not a single white SLAVE can be found” in all the possessions of Great Britain, Garrison went on to ask whether it was not true that there were thousands of British workers both at home and abroad “who are deprived of their just ri
ghts—who are grievously oppressed—who are dying, even in the midst of abundance, of actual starvation?” After the audience shouted “YES!” he called on British abolitionists to prove themselves the true friends of suffering humanity abroad “by showing that they were the best friends of suffering humanity at home.” But when he asked whether the abolitionists were in fact carrying out this dual obligation, the response from various parts of the chapel was “No! no! no!” Garrison then expressed deep regret, a hope that this was not true “of all of them,” and gave his reasons for reading the Chartist placard signed “A White Slave.” This support for Chartist goals was then later interrupted by a well-known Chartist from the audience who outraged the audience by trying to make a speech. Garrison wrote that “I, for one, should have had no objection to his being heard; yet he was clearly out of order, and had no just cause to complain of the meeting.”51
Six years later, when Garrison returned to Britain and often spoke in company with Douglass, he sent his wife an account of his addressing a large meeting of “Moral Suasion Chartists” (also called Moral Force Chartists, as opposed to Physical Force Chartists), who responded with thunderous and protracted applause that “made the building quake” and “adopted by acclamation a highly flattering resolution.” Since he did not appear in his “official capacity as an abolitionist,” Garrison felt free to fully identify himself with “all the unpopular reformatory movements in this country,” even if that would alienate some “good society folks.” As he talked to “the workingmen of England,” he knew “that the cause of my enslaved countrymen cannot possibly be injured by my advocacy of the rights of all men, or by my opposition to all tyranny.”52
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