8. Douglass, “Freedom in the West Indies,” 219–21.
9. Letters and Addresses of George Thompson, during his Mission in the United States (Boston, 1837), 107.
10. Reginald Coupland, Wilberforce: A Narrative (Oxford, 1923), 240–41.
11. James Stephen, The Slavery in the West Indian Colonies Delineated, as It Exists Both in Law and Practice, and Compared with Slavery in Other Countries, Ancient and Modern (London, 1824–30), 2:401–2.
12. Of course, many abolitionists opposed specific measures, such as compensation and apprenticeship, while still accepting and celebrating the British emancipation act.
13. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 174–77.
14. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 75–86, 125. Some proponents of slave “amelioration” did argue that African savages needed time to overcome the indolence and licentiousness of uncivilized men (108). It should be added that Wilberforce devoted some attention to refuting racist arguments in his 1807 book on the abolition of the slave trade. William Wilberforce, A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Addressed to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of Yorkshire (London, 1807), 57–85, 127–33.
15. David Brion Davis, “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” in Davis, From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 238–57.
16. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 176–77. By 1814, James Stephen, in the Colonial Office, became convinced that many slaves were being smuggled into the British West Indian colonies, and he succeeded in obtaining local slave registrations in a number of the colonies. But in 1815 Wilberforce failed to get a central registry intended to open the way to ameliorative measures. (I am indebted to Stanley L. Engerman for sending me a copy of his paper in 2011, “Monitoring the Abolition of the International Slave Trade: Slave Registration in the British Caribbean and the Recording of Slaves in the United States.”)
17. Substance of the Debate in the House of Commons, on the 15th May, 1823, on a Motion for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions…(London, 1823), 1–21. J. R. Ward shows that West Indian planters did respond to abolitionist demands for amelioration and succeeded in raising the slaves’ standard of living and productive efficiency, but failed to change the dehumanizing aspects of the institution that greatly troubled reformers. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
18. Agency Committee speakers focused attention on religious and moral themes as opposed to questions of free labor and economic outcomes. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 122.
19. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 291–303, 315.
20. Ibid., 267–90, 300–302, 312–21.
21. Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Society, 1787–1834 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 20–21, 171–73.
22. Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 202; Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 230. Fogel argues that the Grey government was eager to gain the support of the religious dissenters, especially Methodists, as a “main counterweight to the radicals,” who among other things “viewed the abolitionist campaign with deep suspicion, denouncing it as an instrument intended to divert attention from the plight of the English workers” (30–31).
23. Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 132.
24. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 200.
25. For details regarding the negotiations that led to emancipation, see ibid., 198–219; and Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 248–66.
26. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 202–03; Drescher, Abolition, 250.
27. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 203.
28. Proceedings and Resolutions of the West India Body, Consequent on Mr. Secretary Stanley’s Communication of the Outline of the Intended Measure Respecting Slavery, May 1833, Public Record Office London, (London, 1833), 3–12.
29. George Stephen to Daniel O’Connell, May 29, 1833. George Stephen Papers (unidentified when I consulted them), the Hull Museums, UK.
30. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 347; Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 136. Since this compensation came to 40 percent of the government’s average annual income and three times the expenditure on the Poor Law, it required additional public borrowing. Nicholas Draper has recently provided a comprehensive analysis of the extent and importance of the absentee owners who received a large share of the compensation. The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation, and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
31. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 204–5.
32. Ibid., 205. When the apprentices’ uncompensated labor is added to the £20 million compensation, it appears that slave owners received nearly full compensation for the value of their slaves.
33. The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, ed. Walter M. Merrill, vol. 1, I Will Be Heard, 1822–1835 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 230–31, 237–38; Thomas Clarkson to “Mr. Buxton,” from Playford Hall, September 25, 1833, Clarkson Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. After rejoicing over the abolition of slavery, even with compensation paid to planters, Clarkson expressed hope that a society would be formed to see that the intentions of Parliament were actually carried out, as the African Institution was founded to monitor the enforcement of the ending of the slave trade. Such a society, Clarkson added, would start correspondence with all the islands.
34. MS Brit. emp. S.444, XXIV, Buxton Papers, Rhodes House, Oxford. (In view of possible changes in classification, I did this research many years ago.)
35. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation, 117, and passim. Rugemer shows in great detail how Bryan Edwards’s writing on the Haitian Revolution influenced later developments of the theory that antislavery agitation was responsible for specific slave revolts.
36. Ibid., 118, 120, 122.
37. Ibid., 156–60.
38. Ibid.
39. Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 1833–1870 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 119–20; Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 406–11. Fogel argues that slavery was “intrinsically evil because its productive efficiency arose directly out of the oppression of its laborers,” and concludes that “Whatever the opportunity for a peaceful abolition of slavery along British lines before 1845, it surely was nonexistent after that date” (411–12).
40. Stanley L. Engerman has documented the striking differences between the British slave colonies with regard to sugar production before and after emancipation in “Economic Change and Contract Labor in the British Caribbean: The End of Slavers and the Adjustment to Emancipation,” Explorations in Economic History 21 (1984): 133–50.
41. James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies. A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837 (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838), iii–vi.
42. Ibid., 7, 12.
43. Ibid., iii.
44. Benjamin David Weber, “Emancipation in the West Indies: Thome and Kimball’s Interpretation and the Shift in American Antislavery Discourse, 1834–1840” (essay written as candidate for honors in history at Oberlin College, Professor Carol Lasser, Advisor, Spring 2007), 7–23.
I am much indebted to this brilliant and highly original essay. A published version can be seen in “Emancipa
tion in the West Indies and the Freedom to Toil: Manual Labor and Moral Redemption in Transatlantic Discourse,” Journal of the Oxford University History Society 6, no. 1 (Feb. 2009).
45. Ibid., 1–3, 24, 28, 33–34, 39–40, 49, 61–68.
46. Thome and Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies, vi.
47. Ibid., 108.
48. Ibid, 90–91.
49. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation, 170.
50. For Gurney’s life, I have drawn on Memoirs of Joseph John Gurney; with Selections from his Journal and Correspondence, ed. Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, 4th ed. Two Volumes Complete in One (Philadelphia, 1857).
51. Ibid., 2:118–20, 220–32.
52. Charles Grier Sellers Jr., “The Travail of Slavery,” in The Southerner as American, ed. Charles Grier Sellers Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 40–71.
53. Joseph John Gurney, “Prefatory Letter to Thomas Fowell Buxton,” in A Winter in the West Indies, Described in Familiar Letters to Henry Clay, of Kentucky (London, 1840), xii–xiii.
54. James A. Rawley, “Joseph John Gurney’s Mission to America, 1837–1840,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49, no. 4 (March 1, 1963): 664.
55. Ibid., 666.
56. Ibid., 669–70.
57. Braithwaite, Memoirs of Joseph John Gurney, 2:129–30, 164–218, and passim.
58. Gurney, Winter in the West Indies, 19–21.
59. Ibid., 44–46, 67–69.
60. Ibid., 44–46, 54–58, 61–62, 67, 69.
61. Ibid., 143–44, 178.
62. Ibid., 100–101, 109.
63. Ibid., 100–101, 113, 117,
64. Ibid., 100–102, 117, 148, 166, 171–73.
65. Ibid., 111, 143–44, 151–52, 178–79, 183.
66. Ibid., 195–97. Gurney also describes his conversation with Calhoun in Braithwaite, Memoirs of Joseph John Gurney, 1:223–24. Except for Gurney’s highly optimistic account, there seems to be no evidence that Calhoun accepted his very positive view of the economic success of British emancipation, which Gurney himself qualifies in his descriptions of Jamaica.
67. Gurney, Winter in the West Indies, Appendix B: Reconciliation Respectfully Recommended to all Parties in the Colony of Jamaica, in a Letter Addressed to the Planters, 181–95.
68. Ibid., 183–85; Gurney, “Prefatory Letter to Thomas Fowell Buxton,” ibid., xiv–xvi. Gurney tried to counter any implication that slave labor was cheaper than free labor. He tried to give reasons for the temporary advantages of slaveholding Cuba and Brazil, and assured Buxton that in the future free labor in the West and East Indies and Africa would produce sugar and coffee in such abundance and at such a low price that slave-grown produce “will be driven from every market, even without the aid of prohibitory duties.”
69. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 126–27.
70. Ibid., 121–27. Back in Britain, Gurney continued to publicly oppose such measures.
71. It was not until 1860 that Britain outlawed the formal owning of slaves in India, which was exempted in the 1833 emancipation act. This was largely because Britain faced in India a complex and deeply rooted indigenous and largely domestic system of slavery and caste.
72. C. Duncan Rice, “ ‘Humanity Sold for Sugar!’ The British Abolitionist Response to Free Trade in Slave-Grown Sugar,” The Historical Journal 13, no. 3 (1970): 404–12; Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), chapter 5.
73. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 176–83.
74. Ibid.
75. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 283–85; I have drawn mainly on Steven Heath Mitton, “The Free World Confronted: The Problem of Slavery and Progress in American Foreign Relations, 1833–1844” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 2005), 133–45 and passim; and more recently on Mitton, “The Upshur Inquiry: Lost Lessons of the Great Experiment,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (April 2006): 89–124. I am also indebted to Stanley L. Engerman for the information about Trinidad.
76. Mitton, “Free World Confronted,” passim; Mitton, “Upshur Inquiry,” 89–124; Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 204–21; Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 169–72. For the Southern response to Lord Aberdeen’s famous statement, see The Southern Literary Messenger: Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts (Richmond, Virginia) 10 (Oct. 1844): 584.
77. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 1, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 355–452; Drescher, Abolition, 318–21; Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 210–21.
78. Quoted in Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 200–201. I have relied heavily on this work because of its extraordinary scholarship and detail.
79. Ibid., 204–205, 217.
80. Ibid., 217–25.
81. Douglass, “Freedom in the West Indies,” 219–21.
82. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 103–36. See also my review, David Brion Davis, “Honor Thy Honor,” New York Review of Books 58, no. 16 (Oct. 27, 2011): 46–48; Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 231–37; Kaufmann and Pape, “Explaining Costly International Moral Action,” 631–68.
83. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 236–37.
84. W. E. H. Lecky, A History of European Morals: From Augustus to Charlemagne, 2 vols. (1869, New York, 1876), 1:161.
11. THE BRITISH MYSTIQUE: BLACK ABOLITIONISTS IN BRITAIN—THE LEADER OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND CENTER OF “WAGE SLAVERY”
1. The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 3 vols.: 1841–46, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979; 1982; 1985), 1:252n4; 401n3; 481–82n4.
2. R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 8. For some insightful essays regarding Douglass’s time in Britain, see Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999).
3. Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, 1:62–63nn5–6.
4. Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, Dublin, Sept. 1, 1845, in Frederick Douglass Papers, General Correspondence, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
5. Ibid.
6. Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, 1:63.
7. Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, Dublin, Sept. 1, 1845, in Frederick Douglass Papers.
8. Ibid. For Douglass’s later accounts of the Cambria events, see Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, 1:62–66, 82–84, 90–92, 138–42. I have drawn a couple of points from these summaries, but since Douglass’s detailed letter to Garrison was written four or five days after his attempted lecture, it is probably the most accurate account.
9. Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 32.
10. R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 13; Benjamin Soskis, “Heroic Exile: The Transatlantic Development of Frederick Douglass, 1845–1847” (senior essay, Yale University, April 13, 1998), 8. (When writing this outstanding essay, which I directed and which won the 1998 Wrexham Prize for the best senior essay in the humanities, Mr. Soskis did extensive research in the UK and in the Frederick Douglass Papers. The essay, to which I am deeply indebted, is now available on line: www.yale.edu/glc/soskis/index.htm.)
11. David Brion Davis, The Great Republic: A History of the American People, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1985), 388.
12. Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery, 34–35, 38, 44.
13. Ibid., 56.
14. For the publicizing of Lord Aberdeen’s statement, see The Southern Literary Messenger: Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Arts (Richmond, Virginia)
, 10 (Oct. 1844): 584, which also affirmed that the abolition societies in the North were encouraged and incited by those in London (581).
15. W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 147.
16. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, ix–xi, 3–4.
17. “Speech by Nathaniel Paul, Delivered at the Trades’ Hall, Glasgow, Scotland, 2 December 1834,” The Black Abolitionist Papers, ed. C. Peter Ripley, vol. 1, The British Isles, 1830–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 56. For a brief biography of Paul, see ibid., 42–43.
18. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 4, 18, 52–53, 213.
19. Ibid., 51–55; Black Abolitionist Papers, 1:41–43.
20. The Liberator, October 1, 1831. 158.
21. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 53, 55–57; Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. (1934; repr., Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 1:6–7, 21–22, 25, 29–30, 35–36, 43, 48–49, 509; 2:562; Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 32–34, 86–87, 140. Like many other white abolitionists, it took Weld a bit longer to reject colonization, in part because of his awareness of the depth of white racial prejudice and the difficulties of achieving racial equality, to say nothing of the dangers of black retribution, signified by the Haitian Revolution and the recent Nat Turner revolt.
22. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 58–67; Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 217; on October 24, 1833, Clarkson wrote a private letter to a Mr. Crisp that “I am truly sorry, that after my last letter to you in which I expressed to you my desire to have no further concern with the discussion relating to the American Colonization Society, you should have written me again upon that subject.” He told of a recent four-hour visit with Garrison, and his determination to keep an open mind and examine Garrison’s views closely, “having much important American intelligence in our possession.” (Thomas Clarkson papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.)
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