The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (45 page)

Wardlaw claimed that
Britain had averted “a gathering storm of divine retribution” for a national sin, and that the first day of a Jubilee year would inaugurate continuous progress in the cause of freedom, including the Christianization of the former slaves, some of whom would become missionaries in Africa. Above all, he rejoiced that “Britain’s trans-Atlantic daughter” had already caught the spirit of British philanthropy; and that once America joined Britain in setting “the united example of the entire, peaceful, and final extinction of slavery,—the world will be shamed into imitation.”
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Yet it is crucial to note that Wardlaw and his audience could simply take it for granted that West Indian blacks would and should continue to perform the same kinds of labor for the same former masters.

Despite highly conflicting reports in America concerning the response of West Indian blacks to emancipation,
Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed Wardlaw’s optimism in an influential speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Jubilee on August 1, 1844. For Emerson, British emancipation was “an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts; a day, which gave the immense fortification of a fact,—of gross history,—to ethical abstractions.” It
especially impressed Emerson that “the negro population was equal in nobleness to the deed.” Meeting in churches and chapels on the night of July 31, they had welcomed their emancipating moment with prayers and tears of joy, “but there was no riot, no feasting” and, according to one report, “not a single dance … nor so much as a fiddle played.” The next morning, Emerson assured his listeners, “with very few exceptions, every negro on every plantation was in the field at work.” Since the much criticized apprenticeship was also abolished on August 1 in 1838, the second emancipation was easily subsumed in the
first. Like
Wardlaw, Emerson stressed that “other revolutions have been the insurrection of the oppressed; this was the repentance of the tyrant,” the harbinger of a new era, when “the masses” would awaken and apply an absolute moral standard to every public question.
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For most free African Americans, the First (or Second) of August soon became a national holiday replacing the Fourth of July, a day of promise when both black and white
abolitionists could deliver orations and sermons that not only condemned the evils of slavery and racial discrimination but reminded the world that Britain, the tyrant symbolically overthrown every Fourth of July, must still teach white Americans the meaning of freedom.

Frederick
Douglass, who frequently spoke on such holidays, elaborated on this theme in a long address delivered to some three to four thousand blacks and whites in Poughkeepsie, New York, on August 2, 1858:

For Douglass, the profound goal was to make “this ever memorable day” the means of awakening the American people “in the cause of the fettered millions in our own land.” Douglass emphatically argued that the
British emancipation act was not an “experiment,” contrary to the views of Britain’s colonial secretary
Edward Stanley and the other framers of the law. Instead, according to Douglass, the act “naturally addresses itself to the highest and most ennobling attributes of
human nature.” Unequaled in “the annals of the world,” it was “a manifestation of Christian virtue … a confession and a renunciation of profitable sin at great expense, on a grand and commanding scale, by a great nation.” This victory was far from easy or undemanding; Douglass underscored the power of the selfish and “Satanic” interests and the repeated earlier defeats in
Parliament and out of Parliament.
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What finally made success possible was the spread of abolition sentiment “from individuals to multitudes all over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” In response to this united voice of the nation, the British Parliament “calmly” proceeded “to dissolve the relation of master and slave,” and “on the morning of the 1st of August 1834, eight hundred thousand colored members of the human family were instantly declared free, emancipated.” “They had been ranked, as our slaves are, with the beasts of the field, rated with bales of goods and barrels of rum, driven before the taskmaster’s lash.” “But all at once they learn that their bondage is ended, the taskmaster is dismissed, the whips and chains are buried, they are no longer slaves.” Douglass accepted abolitionist reports that the freed slaves had then “staggered and fell down, rose up, ran about, shouted, laughed, cried, sung.”
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But in 1858, as America moved toward the
Civil War, Douglass was especially concerned with including a response to the widespread British and American consensus that British West Indian emancipation had been a shocking
economic failure. The London
Times
had editorialized in 1857,

Employing irony, Douglass “admitted” that “in some respects” (from the slaveholders’ perspective) it had failed—that is, the British had failed to impose a repressive substitute for slavery and had failed to prevent former slaves and their descendants from creating their own farms and employments and from achieving civil rights or even becoming jurors and legislators.
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Douglass was here responding to the undeniable fact that
emancipation had led to a sharp decline in the production of
West Indian plantations, especially in larger colonies like Jamaica, where many freed blacks were able to obtain their own land and depend on at least subsistence agriculture. He even acknowledged Britain’s dependence on the importation of thousands of so-called East Indian
Coolies to replace the ex-slaves who had left the plantations. But for Douglass the preservation of the plantation system was not a priority. The priority was the condition and welfare of the former slaves, which had clearly been vastly improved in the twenty years since the
abolition of apprenticeship.

Douglass was well aware that even by 1858 antislavery was still far from becoming a “united voice” of the Northern American states and that this contrast with Britain had raised immense obstacles to the idea of America simply following the British example. Apart from public opinion, the British Parliament had had almost complete control over the colonies. The American Congress was bound by a Constitution that protected states’ rights, and slaveholders retained immense power in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Moreover, a deep tradition of Anglophobia played into the hands of opponents of abolitionism, who were able to portray the reformers as subversive agents of a British plot to divide and destroy the antimonarchic republic.

When noted British abolitionists like
Charles Stuart and
George Thompson came to the North in the 1830s, hoping to rally popular support by applying the successful British lecturing techniques, they were often met by hostile and even dangerous mobs—which also victimized many American abolitionist speakers. According to Thompson, in “this heaven-favored, but mob-cursed land,” public opinion had by the mid-1830s become a “
demon of oppression.
”
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Thus, in 1834, not long before British Emancipation Day, Charles Stuart joined an abolitionist meeting in Middletown, Connecticut, which
The
Liberator
described as “cogent, temperate, and solemn.” Stuart had converted
Theodore Dwight Weld, a chief architect of the American antislavery movement, to the abolitionist cause, and was celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic for such seminal works as
The West India Question: Immediate Emancipation Safe and Practical.
But after an angry mob confronted and interrupted the meeting, a U.S. Navy lieutenant challenged Stuart to a duel and proclaimed him a liar and
coward. Then the mob threw eggs, attacked and injured some speakers, and
threatened to tar and feather Stuart and a colleague before aid finally came from a sheriff and some members of the nearby Wesleyan college.

As Stuart and
Thompson discovered, the “public sphere” of the United States was drastically different from that in Britain, where
abolitionists faced little if any public hostility and had for decades succeeded in mobilizing mass support from a spectrum of social classes. Nevertheless, the British and American antislavery movements were intricately interconnected, and speakers like Stuart and Thompson did travel widely and make an impression. The American reformers’ obsession with petitioning Congress, despite no likelihood of success, was largely the result of the highly successful British petition campaigns to end the slave trade, emancipate British slaves, and end the apprenticeship system. American abolitionists greatly benefited from the vibrant transatlantic abolitionist print culture and also found significant British financial, moral, and religious support for their cause from the 1830s to the Civil War. And this tradition of popular antislavery support, some of it even from the British working class, played a key role in preventing Britain from following its economic self-interest by intervening in the war and recognizing the
cotton-producing Confederacy.

Perceptions of British emancipation involved a kind of double vision of historical change. On the one hand, as we have seen, the freeing of some 800,000 slaves was viewed as an eschatological event, an event related to the Hebrew
Jubilee, the millennium, the Last Judgment, and the ultimate destiny of mankind. Such sharp breaks in history did not occur in a continuous line with the events before and after them. According to the apocalyptic rhetoric, Providence had revealed itself through a new human ability, the ability of an enlightened and righteous public to control events.

On the other hand, British political leaders feared abrupt or revolutionary change. In addition to the examples of the
French and
Haitian revolutions and subsequent slave insurrections, the British public seemed on the verge of revolt in the early 1830s as democratic dreams clashed with a highly undemocratic political order. Moreover, the
West India lobby was still powerful enough to gain crucial concessions. Even after years of public petitioning, the Jamaican slave revolt of 1831, and the parliamentary
Reform Act of 1832, it took many long months for
Thomas Fowell Buxton,
Lord Howick,
Edward Stanley, the younger James
Stephen, and other government officials to hammer out a compromised emancipation bill. Thus
British slave emancipation could also be seen as another result of pragmatic political negotiation.

But the eschatological achievement confirmed the evangelical faith of
Wilberforce and others that the very existence of
slavery had provided Protestant Christianity with an epic stage for vindicating itself as the most liberating force in human history. Abolishing slavery became a way for a nation to accumulate “moral capital,” overcoming self-centered materialism and responding to the
Enlightenment’s sweeping attacks on institutional religion.
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One of the French philosophes’ most damning charges had been that Christians, with the exception of a few
Quakers, had continued to defend colonial slavery. But the same Enlightenment had furthered
scientific racism, and the
French Revolution had led to Napoleon’s reinstituting slavery and the slave trade in 1801–2. The elder James Stephen, who exploited this French moral regression, exemplified the double vision when he called on the British public to chant in unison a demand as “simple” as that of Jehovah’s messenger to
Pharaoh, “LET THE PEOPLE GO,” and then leave the practical means to Parliament.
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Government leaders as well as abolitionists accepted this conceptual demarcation between the formal act or command of emancipation, with all its religious overtones, and the “practical” regulations to give the command effect.
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There was a parallel dichotomy between the “voice” of the British public, seen as a pure and spontaneous expression of Christian morality, and the political arts of compromise that were needed to balance contending interests and advance the common good. Even within the Stephen family, the younger James, who drafted the final emancipation act, sought to ensure ordered, sequential progress, whereas his father and his brother George invoked the imagery of holy warriors annihilating a demonic power.
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While many British economists and legislators urged caution and delay in any even gradual attempt to convert slaves into free laborers, British abolitionists were blessed, compared to their American or even French counterparts, in the fact that defenders of the status
quo hardly ever claimed that blacks were racially inferior in capability, even if they exhibited some of the backward traits of “savages.” Seymour Drescher has made the extraordinary discovery that despite the racist writings of such eighteenth-century figures as
Edward Long and even
David Hume, defenders of
slavery in Parliament ignored racial arguments and for some sixty years appeals to race played almost no role in the government’s discussions of the slave trade, slavery, and
apprenticeship. In fact, when attacking the slave trade and then slavery, Wilberforce quoted Long’s comparison of Africans with apes, “assured that his audience, in or out of Parliament, would react to such arguments ‘with astonishment as well as with disgust.’ ” Since even Britain had become infected with various forms of racism by the late 1840s and 1850s, Wilberforce,
Clarkson,
Buxton, and their colleagues were very fortunate in finding a time when white legislators and much of the public were quite free of racial prejudice.
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