The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (75 page)

I am much indebted to this brilliant and highly original essay. A published version can be seen in “Emancipation 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.

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.)

23.
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton,
Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North
(New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979), 85.

24.
Black Abolitionist Papers,
1:42–43.

25.
Ibid., 1:38–39.

26.
Ibid.

27.
Ibid., 44–46.

28.
Blackett,
Building an Antislavery Wall,
6.

29.
Ibid., 195.

30.
Richard Huzzey,
Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian
Britain
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), 76–77.

31.
Ibid., passim; Betty Fladeland,
Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1884), 49–73. As Fladeland shows, Sturge worked for a variety of reform causes, including abolitionism, from his early twenties.

32.
Henry Highland Garnet,
Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of his Life … And also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America
(New York, 1848), 92; Henry Highland Garnet,
A Memorial Discourse; by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12
,
1865
, with an introduction by James McCune Smith, M.D. (Philadelphia, 1865), 69–74.

33.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave,
ed. Benjamin Quarles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 66–67, 95; Waldo E. Martin,
The Mind of Frederick Douglass
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 29.

34.
Soskis, “
Heroic Exile:
The Transatlantic Development of Frederick Douglass,” 23–25.

35.
Blassingame,
Frederick Douglass Papers,
Series One, 1:35, 42.

36.
Cunliffe,
Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery,
9–10, 27, 69–70. In 1847, Oastler helped win the Factory Act limiting the work of such children to a ten-hour day.

37.
Gilbert Francklyn,
Observations, Occasioned by the Attempts Made in England to Effect the Abolition of the Slave Trade
…(Kingston, Jamaica, 1788; repr., London, 1789), 10–12, 27–42, 74–75.