In retrospect, it appears that the earlier great success of the British antislavery movement depended first on a concentrated focus on the British slave trade, then on emancipating British colonial slaves and apprentices. However, by the late 1830s, when antislavery had permeated British culture, the government was intensifying its efforts to end the international slave trade and some abolitionists had turned not only to global slavery but to domestic oppression of various kinds, a development that foreshadowed the delayed concerns over all forms of coerced labor that arose after the complete outlawing of chattel slavery in the Americas in 1888 and then, aided by the United Nations in 1962, in the world.
JOSEPH STURGE, FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AND THE CHARTISTS—THE DECLINE AND EXPANSION OF ANTISLAVERY IN THE 1850S
We have already taken note of Joseph Sturge, the wealthy Quaker corn merchant and abolitionist leader who probably best dramatizes the later connections between antislavery and radical reform. Having supported a variety of causes as a young man, Sturge in effect retired from work before age forty and devoted his full time to antislavery, temperance, adult education, abolishing the Corn Laws, ending capital punishment, advocating universal manhood suffrage, and aiding the poor in his home city of Birmingham. In London he was instrumental in founding and managing the World Anti-Slavery Conventions of 1840 and 1843; he traveled to the West Indies and testified before parliamentary committees as part of the successful campaign to abolish apprenticeship; and in 1841 he even toured the United States, wanting especially to reinvigorate Quaker antislavery activity and promote more unity among the divided American abolitionists. With respect to the effects of political democracy, Sturge was impressed by the relative comfort and prosperity of America’s white workers. After being rebuffed by proslavery president John Tyler, he sent a protest to every member of Congress.53
But it was in 1838 that the British abolitionists’ final triumph of ending apprenticeship coincided with the founding of the radical Chartist movement. As the Chartists fought for universal male suffrage—some of them threatening violence, partly in response to violent government repression—they drew constant analogies between the condition of British laborers and chattel slaves. Though totally committed to pacifism and nonviolence, Sturge supported and worked with the Chartists, believing that universal male voting provided the key to solving the larger problem of class discrimination and oppression.54
While there are numerous other instances of progressive unions between antislavery and domestic reform, especially in the 1830s and 1840s, Joseph Surge was exceptional in having the time, energy, wealth, and motivation to combine having a leading role in the abolitionist movement with such activities as founding a pacifist newspaper and helping to launch the Complete Suffrage Movement. And though Frederick Douglass was still a “Garrisonian,” and the Garrisonians were in sharp conflict with Sturge’s British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass interacted with Sturge and acquired much respect for him. In December 1845, Douglass visited Birmingham in order to address Sturge’s local temperance society. As noted in chapter 8, temperance was the only other major reform movement that really attracted Douglass, in part because he had witnessed the ways slaveholders used alcohol to pacify slaves, and later became deeply disturbed by the amount of alcohol consumed by free African Americans and the poverty-stricken Irish. In Birmingham, Douglass was a dinner guest at Sturge’s home, and on May 18, 1846, the two men met again in London, when the anti-Garrisonian BFASS somewhat surprisingly invited Douglass to lecture, as well as demanded that the Free Church of Scotland “send back the money” that had been donated by American slaveholders. Disappointed by the small turnout, Sturge not only arranged another meeting for Douglass, crowding Finsbury chapel “almost to suffocation” on May 22 with 2,500 to 3,000 people, but immediately raised $500 after hearing that Douglass might remain in the British Isles if he could afford to bring over his wife and children. While Douglass decided to return to America, he repeatedly praised Sturge, despite their different views of British industrial labor.55
For Douglass and other black American abolitionists, representing a country in which slavery was expanding, not shrinking, the first priority was to mobilize British public opinion behind efforts to cut off all supportive ties with American slavery. As Douglass exhorted the large London audience assembled by Joseph Sturge on May 22, 1846:
To tear off the mask from this abominable system, to expose it to the light of heaven, aye, to the heat of the sun, that it may burn and wither it out of existence, is my object in coming to this country.… What would I have you then do? I would have the church, in the first place—Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist, all persuasions—to declare, in their conventions, associations, synods, conferences…“no Christian fellowship with slave holders.” (Loud cheers.)
I want the slave holder surrounded, as by a wall of anti-slavery fire, so that he may see the condemnation of himself and his system glaring down in letters of light. I want him to feel that he has no sympathy in England, Scotland, or Ireland; that he has none in Canada, none in Mexico, none among the poor wild Indians.… I would have condemnation blaze down upon him in every direction, till, stunned and overwhelmed with shame and confusion, he is compelled to let go the grasp he holds upon the persons of his victims, and restore them to their long-standing rights (Loud cheers.)56
This goal of global expansion, of recruiting antislavery support in ways that would isolate, disgrace, and dishonor American slaveholders, reinforced American abolitionism and proved to be compatible with Chartist concerns for the disfranchised and oppressed British workers. Other black Americans, such as Charles L. Remond and Henry Highland Garnet, could also identify with such workers since, as blacks, they were deeply aware of their own deprivations and inequalities, including disfranchisement, even when legally free. Remond was repeatedly asked “what Americans were prepared to do to help oppressed British workers in return for help received to abolish American slavery.” Garnet promised to work to unify the causes of slaves and poor whites, and Douglass supposedly even called himself “a Chartist.”57 In 1846 Garrison, Douglass, Henry Clarke Wright, and many other American visitors seemed committed to Chartist principles and worked closely with such “moral suasion” Chartist leaders as William Lovett and Henry Vincent, both long committed to the antislavery cause. Of course, for most Americans in the 1840s, there was nothing especially radical about such demands in the People’s Charter of 1838 as total manhood suffrage, a secret ballot, no property requirement of members of Parliament, and payment for MPs. Yet Britain did not reach these goals until well after the American Civil War. The 1840s, a great decade of reform agitation, culminated in the failed revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the death of Chartism in Britain, and proslavery triumphs in the United States.
Some events in Britain in the 1850s seemed to encourage the expansion of slavery in America and confirm the American slaveholders’ symbols of progress from the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to the Dred Scott Decision of 1857 (see chapter 10). The rise of antiblack and “scientific” racism supported the broad consensus that British slave emancipation had been a disastrous economic failure and that the prospect of further emancipation, as the London Times put it in 1857, was “never more distant than now.”58 Yet, on May 11, 1853, when Frederick Douglass delivered a long speech to the anti-Garrisonian British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, regarding “the future prospects of the whole colored people in the United States,” he moved from proslavery victories, such as the Compromise of 1850, to the slaveholders’ decisive failure in suppressing “discussion”:
Why, Sir, look all over the North; look South—look at home—look abroad—look at the whole civilized world—and what are all this vast multitude doing at this moment? Why, Sir, they are reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and when they have read that, they will probably read “The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—a key not only to the Cabin, but, I believe to the slave’s darkest dungeon. A nation’s hand, with that “key,” will unlo
ck the slave prisons to millions. Then look at the authoress of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” There is nothing in her reception abroad which indicates a declension of interest in the great subject which she has done so much to unfold and illustrate. The landing of a Princess on the shores of England would not have produced the same sensation.…
Herein, sirs, is our hope. Slavery cannot bear discussion; it is a monster of darkness.59
Despite his enthusiasm, Douglass did not exaggerate the impact of the most influential novel ever written by an American. After being published serially in the National Era, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold some 310,000 copies within a year in the United States (about three times the number of the two previous record-setting American novels), a million copies in the United Kingdom (also three times the record), and more than 2 million copies worldwide. Given the absence of international copyright, there were many pirated editions. The book was translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Flemish, Polish, and Magyar, and then into Portuguese, Welsh, Russian, Arabic, and other languages. Since the novel was widely read aloud in families and literary groups, Garrison’s The Liberator estimated some 10 million total readers.60
Frederick Douglass, who as we have seen had later close ties and correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe (she wrote to him in 1851 requesting information on cotton plantations), was well aware of her triumphant tour of Great Britain in the spring and summer of 1853, where as historian David Reynolds points out, she was “feted, cheered, and praised” wherever she went. In London she met such notables as Prime Minister Palmerston and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens. Three years later she met Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and succeeded in obtaining funds and a petition signed by 562,800 British women urging American women to work for the abolition of slavery. Reynolds emphasizes that Stowe’s influence on Western culture was extended by “Uncle Tomitudes,” representations of characters or scenes from the novel in plays, paintings, engravings, and countless other popular media, usually with an antislavery message. He adds that the book thus paved the way for the North’s openness to an antislavery presidential candidate like Lincoln, and “stiffened the South’s resolve to defend slavery and demonize the North.”61
Nevertheless, while Stowe stimulated an antislavery revival in Britain, and though Prime Minister Palmerston, a lifelong enemy of slavery and the slave trade, allegedly read her novel from cover to cover three times,62 he and other leaders refused to see Abraham Lincoln as a genuine enemy of slavery and were at times prepared (as I shall show in the epilogue) to recognize and support the Confederacy and intervene to put an end to the American Civil War.
Epilogue
1
Many years ago, when I was writing my book Slavery and Human Progress, I was surprised to discover that in Britain a few leading liberals like John Stuart Mill and John Elliott Cairnes attempted to respond to a sudden and unexpected upsurge of opinion hostile to the Northern cause early in the American Civil War. “Why is it,” Mill asked in 1862, “that the nation which is at the head of abolitionism, not only feels no sympathy with those who are fighting against the slave holding conspiracy, but actually desires its success? Why is the general voice of our press, the general sentiment of our people, bitterly reproachful to the North, while for the South, the aggressors in the war, we have either mild apologies or direct and downright encouragement?”1
Since Mill and Cairnes sought to refute the prevalent but false British view that even early in the war the Lincoln administration had no interest in ending slavery, one would assume that the British would have responded initially with great enthusiasm to Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, and the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. It is true that the Confederate defeat at Antietam and Lincoln’s related proclamations did check the greatest chance of British and French intervention to end the war and recognize Confederate independence. But most traditional accounts downplay or ignore the way the British press widely denounced both proclamations as “a cynical and desperate ploy.” As the London Times, which represented the views of the wealthier classes, put it on January 15, 1863:
It must also be remembered that this act of the PRESIDENT, if it purposed to strike off the fetters of one race, is a flagrant attack on the liberties of another. The attempt to free the blacks is a flagrant attack on the liberties of the whites. Nothing can be more unconstitutional, more illegal, more entirely subversive of the compact on which the American Confederacy rests, than the claim set up by the PRESIDENT to interfere with the laws of individual States by his Proclamation.… It is preposterous to say that war gives these powers; they are the purest usurpation.… [T]he President well knows that not a slaveholder in the South will obey his Proclamation, that it can only be enforced by violence, and that if the negroes obtain freedom it will be by the utter destruction of their masters.… LINCOLN bases his act on military necessity, and invokes the considerate judgment of mankind and the judgment of ALMIGHTY GOD.… Mankind will be slow to believe that an act avowedly the result of military considerations has been dictated by a sincere desire for the benefit of those who, under the semblance of emancipation, are thus marked out for destruction, and HE who made man in His own image can scarcely … look with approbation on a measure which, under the pretence of emancipation, intends to reduce the South to the frightful condition of Santo Domingo.2
Outrage over the massacre of British whites in the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857–58 gave new force to the traditional fear of provoking another Haitian-like uprising of slaves, a fear now infused by the racism that developed in the 1850s. The Times, along with other papers, accused Lincoln of inciting Southern slaves to kill their owners: “[He] will appeal to the black blood of the African; he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when the blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait till the rising flames tell that all is consummated, and he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.”3
In chapter 10 I stressed that it was the British public’s traditional hostility to slavery that played a key role in preventing their government from intervening in the American Civil War and recognizing the independence of the cotton-producing Confederacy. But while the spokesmen for the middle and working classes were more pro-American and generally supported the Union, Charles Francis Adams, America’s minister in England, emphasized that “the great body of aristocratic and wealthy commercial classes are anxious to see the United States go to pieces.” By 1860, America symbolized democratic social and political reforms that the British establishment abhorred and that British progressives would struggle to achieve for many decades.4 Nevertheless, when historian Amanda Foreman began research on her comprehensive book A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, she was shocked to find evidence of support of the Confederacy among some people generally considered as belonging to the “progressive” classes in Britain—“journalists, writers, university students, actors, social reformers, even the clergy.”5 Even liberal newspapers like the Morning Advertiser were stunned by Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation: “We can give no credit to President Lincoln.… the motive was not any abhorrence of Slavery in itself, but a sordid, selfish motive.” Many writers complained that if Lincoln had really opposed slavery, he would not have exempted the slaveholding Border States. They thus ignored Lincoln’s constitutional restrictions and his crucial need to prevent Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri from joining the Confederacy. Thus according to the antislavery Spectator, “the principle asserted is not that a human being cannot own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”6 In Britain there was widespread misunderstanding of the American government and its constitutional limitations.
This negative response to the American government’s prosecution of the war—matched by the strong hostility of the Northern public to Britain—was clearly related to
decades of Anglo-American conflict going back to the War of 1812 and the American Revolution. At the very beginning of the Civil War, Britain led other nations in recognizing the Confederate states as a belligerent power and declaring its own neutrality in the conflict, an act that outraged Secretary of State William H. Seward, who kept warning of war if Britain took the next step of recognizing the South as a nation. Given Britain’s deep dependence on cotton from the Southern states and the war’s effect in paralyzing the cotton textile industry, bringing mass unemployment to Lancashire, Southern leaders were initially very confident that the need for cotton would make British and wider European intervention inevitable. The South even imposed an informal embargo on cotton exports, which ironically reinforced the limited effects of the Northern naval blockade on the South. Even some British antislavery writers were convinced that a Northern victory would continue to jeopardize Lancashire’s main supply of cotton and result in permanent tariff barriers on British manufactures.7
Many Britons even believed that Confederate independence would actually hasten emancipation by separating the South from the racist and antiabolitionist North, and exposing the Confederacy to pressure from “progressive” free-labor nations. Confederate agents and propagandists did their best to confirm such expectations, and spread lies to a gullible British public about the Confederacy’s intent to abolish slavery after winning independence. Late in the war, some British leaders expressed great regret that Confederate president Jefferson Davis had not emancipated the slaves in 1863, when the successes of Robert E. Lee’s army had reached its highest point.8
As news arrived in England in September 1862 that Lee’s army was marching north and had invaded Maryland, Lord Palmerston, the seventy-seven-year-old prime minister, revived plans for intervention. Though long committed to antislavery, Palmerston had experienced bitter conflicts with the United States when he was foreign secretary. Fearing, with some reason, the American goal of annexing Canada, he complained that Yankees were “disagreeable fellows,” “totally unscrupulous and dishonest and determined somehow or other to carry their Point.” Such negativity was reinforced during the war by a succession of conflicts with the Union that on occasion threatened the possibility of Britain’s entry into the war. As late as December 1864, Lord John Russell, Britain’s foreign secretary, told Charles Francis Adams that the responsibility for preventing an Anglo-American war depended on the two of them finding “a safe issue from this, as we had from so many other troubles that had sprung up during this war.”9
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 41