The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (50 page)

It is doubtful that Calhoun had ever been really convinced by
Gurney’s reports on the success of British emancipation. In any event, he and other Southern leaders would now interpret British policy as an effort to undermine successful foreign slavery, as a means of counteracting the disastrous failure of their own experiment with emancipation. Calhoun rightly predicted that Britain would try to restore plantation production in the Caribbean by importing huge numbers of only nominally free “
coolie” labor from
India. Yet he affirmed that such investment could never succeed unless Britain also destroyed the rival slave societies that “have refused to follow her suicidal policy” and that could therefore keep the prices of tropical staples “so low as to prevent their cultivation with profit, in the possessions of Great Britain, by what she is pleased to call free labor.” Examples of Lord Aberdeen’s professed antislavery policy could be seen in Britain’s interference in Cuba (which expelled the British consul and abolitionist
David Turnbull for supposedly plotting a
slave insurrection) and
most alarmingly in the new Republic of
Texas, a site Britons feared could promote the
reestablishment of the African
slave trade. Calhoun’s deep concern over Britain’s antislavery pressures on Texas helped lead to America’s annexation of the slaveholding republic in 1845 and thus to the
Mexican-American War and the extraordinary expansion of the American West.
⁷⁷

With slavery expanding in the United States and thousands of African slaves being imported into
Cuba each year, the prospects seemed increasingly dim that the world would follow the example of British emancipation, as abolitionists and statesmen had hoped in 1833. As the London
Times
put it in 1857,

The views of academic social scientists were no more hopeful. In the words of
Nassau W. Senior, one of Britain’s most venerable political economists, noting in 1855 that American slaveholders were now coveting Cuba and thinking of annexing
Jamaica, “We do not venture to hope that we or our sons or grandsons, will see American slavery extirpated from the earth.”
⁷⁸

On the other hand, the importation of thousands of indentured Indian coolie laborers into
Trinidad, British
Guiana, and
Mauritius (in the Indian Ocean) helped to restore some levels of
sugar production and prevent a total collapse of free produce imports into Britain. In the decade following the 1846 Sugar Duties Act, British consumption of slave-grown sugar rose from virtually nothing to 40 percent of British supply, but it could have been much more. Similarly, from 1831 to 1857, British sugar imports from the British West Indies dropped from 4 million to only 3 million hundredweight. That British emancipation was not a total economic failure can be seen in the fact that it served as a model for the
Dutch in 1863 (reinforced by the American Civil War). Having ended their slave trade in 1814, the conservative
Dutch now established an apprenticeship system that lasted more than twice as long as the British system. They also paid much more compensation to colonial planters and introduced Asian indentured labor immediately after the end of apprenticeship, so that in the West Indian colony of Suriname, laborers from India and Java outnumbered ex-slaves within a decade. And none of these measures prevented a postemancipation decline in Dutch sugar exports.
⁷⁹

By the 1850s, even the British proponents of free labor ideology had revised their assumptions to take account of the supposedly
temporary
success of slave economies when competing with newly freed plantation labor. But, as
Seymour Drescher imaginatively argues, a rather sudden upsurge of racial ideology beginning in the late 1840s served as the most important way of reconciling—for
white
people—the West Indian economic failure with belief in the superiority of free labor. This is all the more remarkable in view of the relative absence of racist arguments in the earlier British debates over the slave trade and slave emancipation. But
Thomas Carlyle’s notorious 1849 essay,
Occasional Discourses on the Negro
[later
Nigger
]
Question
, coincided with the blossoming of scientific racism in Europe and especially America. The rise of British resentment against abolitionists’ “privileging” West Indian blacks carried over to the widespread but by no means universal view that blacks were so inherently lazy and lacking in ambition and incentive that they would never do much work unless compelled to do so. As the
Times
put it in 1848:

But despite much talk of “inferior races” and agreement that it was “the slow, indolent temperament of the African race,” as
The
Economist
put it, that explained the economic failure of British emancipation, there were no calls for reenslavement. The immense popularity in the 1850s of
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
which sold a million copies in Britain, pointed to the limits of racist ideology.
And as we have seen, when Frederick Douglass spoke at an American celebration of British emancipation in 1858, he responded to the widespread belief in West Indian
economic failure by celebrating black achievement and the “failure” of whites to keep free blacks “in their place”:

It is important to stress that Britain remained the world’s leading supporter of antislavery policies—from the nation’s success in finally stopping the slave trade to Brazil in 1850 to Europe’s often Machiavellian embrace of antislavery in the 1880s’
Scramble for Africa. As philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah has shown, much of this central moral commitment emerged as a matter of Britain’s national
honor,
regardless of expense and ordinary self-interest. And, as
Drescher and others have made clear, the expense of Britain’s emancipation of slaves and of its prolonged efforts to abolish oceanic slave trading was prodigious.
⁸²

Yet, when judging the expense of slave emancipations—and America’s emancipation as the result of a
civil war was doubtless the costliest of all—one must consider the prolonged human costs of exploitive slave regimes. It would be difficult to calculate that expense if Britain’s 800,000 slaves or America’s 4 million slaves had not been freed for one or two or three more generations. In some respects there was an element of “failure” in all the emancipations, from Haiti to
the Northern American states, the
British and French colonies, the American
Civil War, and on to
Cuba and
Brazil in the 1880s. In no case did emancipation lead to a prosperous, racially egalitarian society. Yet as
Gurney observed in 1840 and as
Frederick Douglass argued eighteen years later, the freed slaves in the British colonies were immensely better off than under slavery.

As the British celebrated and redefined their great historical event, as at the
Jubilee meeting on August 1, 1884, they radically divorced the moral achievement from any economic issues. Their goal, as expressed by the Prince of Wales, was “to carry on this civilizing torch of freedom until its beneficent light shall shed abroad over all the earth.” As
Drescher concludes, “The great experiment was in fact a great improvisation. The true taproot of antislavery lay in its successful mass political mobilization around a fundamental uneconomic proposition.”
⁸³
Drescher and
Appiah both note that this antislavery commitment helped prevent Britain from following its best economic interest and recognizing the Confederacy in the American Civil War. One should add that it was the Civil War,
Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation, and the
Thirteenth Amendment that transformed the global meaning of Britain’s “mighty experiment.” While a war costing 750,000 military lives signified an opposite “solution” to the problem of slavery, it helped redefine Britain’s parliamentary act of 1833 as the launching of what
W. E. H. Lecky termed an “unwearied, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade” to exterminate slavery from the earth.
⁸⁴

On August 16, 1845, some three months after the publication of his best-selling and highly acclaimed
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,
the twenty-seven-year-old Frederick Douglass boarded the
Cambria,
a Cunard paddle steamer, and sailed from Boston toward Liverpool. During his antislavery lecture tours, Douglass had long been absent from his wife, Anna, and four children, but his ongoing decision to spend nearly two years in Britain represented a drastic tradeoff in values. While reluctant to leave his family, Douglass became increasingly aware that the spectacular sales and reviews of his book magnified the risk of his being recaptured as a fugitive slave. Massachusetts provided very limited protections, and Douglass’s owners, Hugh and
Thomas Auld, furious over the way Douglass had portrayed them, reportedly vowed to reenslave him. Britain not only provided a safe haven, but British abolitionists finally succeeded in raising funds and negotiating with
Hugh Auld for Douglass’s legal manumission.
¹

Given his success in America as a lecturer and author, Douglass was also strongly attracted by the prospect of touring Britain and Ireland
as a lecturer, exposing the evils of American slavery to audiences that were receptive and amazingly free from racial prejudice, according to the testimony of earlier black abolitionist visitors like the Reverend
Nathaniel Paul and
Charles Lenox Remond. The success of British abolitionists in mobilizing the public and emancipating 800,000 slaves drew increasing numbers of African Americans to this capital of abolitionism and reinforced the contrast between Americans and the British people, who, as
Samuel Ringgold Ward later told a Southampton audience, “were looked upon by the Negro as his especial friends and guardians, and surely the actions and sacrifices of the British people in the Negro’s behalf fully justified this idea.”
²

Douglass boarded the
Cambria
with a white friend,
James N. Buffum, a wealthy abolitionist and future mayor of Lynn, Massachusetts, who had earlier helped Douglass fight off a mob. Buffum had failed, despite its being a British ship, to obtain a cabin passage for Douglass on the
Cambria,
having been told that this “would give offense to the majority of American passengers.” Accordingly, Buffum also took a steerage compartment. But, after two days at sea, Douglass found that “one part of the ship was about as free to me as another,” and he even visited the first-class section at the invitation of fellow passengers, who often called on him in steerage.
³