Abolitionism by Richard S. Newman

Author:Richard S. Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190213244
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

Global abolitionism in the 1840s

On the international scene, the 1840s saw a renewed spirit of abolitionist mobilization. Buoyed by the success of the Emancipation Act, British abolitionists organized the inaugural World Antislavery Convention in London, which gathered reformers from Great Britain, the European continent, and the United States. Despite its attempt to build consensus, the convention could not escape debates roiling the U.S. movement. When it convened in June 1840, the convention’s organizers would not seat women, including luminaries like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mott challenged British officials but to no avail. When a Jamaican delegate said that women’s participation would devalue the meeting, she replied that the same thing had been said about admitting African Americans to U.S. abolition societies. Women were eventually seated as “guests” but Mott and Stanton vowed to push more fervently for women’s rights in America.

The contretemps notwithstanding, the World Antislavery Convention was a success. Nearly five hundred delegates examined a range of important issues, from slavery’s spread in the southwestern United States to the continuing problem of the overseas slave trade to Russian serfdom. Perhaps two thousand people watched the proceedings, with no riots or violent outbursts occurring.

The convention solidified British leadership in transatlantic abolitionism. In 1838, reformers founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) to spur “universal emancipation” overseas. Though ostensibly focused on freedom in the British Empire, the BFASS’s constitution sought to protect “all persons captured as slaves” and stop the “sale and barter of human beings.” The group met annually, corresponded with abolitionists throughout Atlantic society, and relaunched The Antislavery Reporter to draw attention to emancipation debates in France, slave-trading Brazil, and concerns over unfree labor in British India.

Led by a combination of rising and established reformers—from George Thompson, who came on the scene in the 1830s, to longtime Quaker activist William Allen—British abolitionists helped Americans sharpen their defense of immediate abolition. Where critics blasted immediate emancipation as chaotic, British abolitionists hailed it as successful. Indeed, the lesson of British emancipation in the Caribbean was that it should have occurred sooner and without the terrible obstacle of apprenticeship for former slaves. Thompson spread this message on lecture tours of the United States, where he often faced hostile crowds. Thompson called emancipation safe and told audiences from New York to New England that the facts of freedom were on his side. Even after fleeing the “assassin’s knife,” and returning to England, Thompson’s reprinted lectures on slavery and abolition galvanized American reformers.

Joseph Sturge picked up where Thompson left, touring the United States in the 1840s with positive reports about British emancipation. By then, Sturge was already known for his influential fact-finding mission on the horrors of apprenticeship in the Caribbean. Sturge’s pamphlet on the matter convinced Parliament to convert apprenticeship into total emancipation in 1838. From then on, Sturge made clear, free labor systems were working well. Indeed, by midcentury, productivity and exports in many colonies had returned to pre-emancipation levels.

British defenses of emancipation came at a critical time. Building

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