The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (55 page)

While there are numerous other instances of progressive unions between antislavery and domestic reform, especially in the 1830s and 1840s, Joseph Surge was exceptional in having the time, energy, wealth, and motivation to combine having a leading role in the abolitionist movement with such activities as founding a pacifist newspaper and helping to launch the
Complete Suffrage Movement. And though Frederick Douglass was still a “Garrisonian,” and the Garrisonians were in sharp conflict with Sturge’s British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass interacted with Sturge and acquired much respect for him. In December 1845, Douglass visited
Birmingham in order to address Sturge’s local
temperance society. As noted in
chapter 8
, temperance was the only other major reform movement that really attracted Douglass, in part because he had witnessed the ways slaveholders used alcohol to pacify slaves, and later became deeply disturbed by the amount of alcohol consumed by free African Americans and the poverty-stricken Irish. In Birmingham, Douglass was a dinner guest at Sturge’s home, and on May 18, 1846, the two men met again in London, when the anti-Garrisonian BFASS somewhat surprisingly invited Douglass to lecture, as well as demanded that the Free Church of Scotland “send back the money” that had been donated by American slaveholders. Disappointed by the small turnout, Sturge not only arranged another meeting for Douglass, crowding Finsbury chapel “almost to suffocation” on May 22 with 2,500 to 3,000 people, but immediately raised $500 after hearing that Douglass might remain in the British Isles if he could afford to bring over his wife and children. While Douglass decided to return to America, he repeatedly praised Sturge, despite their different views of British industrial labor.
⁵⁵

For Douglass and other black American abolitionists, representing a country in which slavery was expanding, not shrinking, the first priority was to mobilize British public opinion behind efforts to cut off all supportive ties with American slavery. As Douglass exhorted the large London audience assembled by Joseph Sturge on May 22, 1846:

This goal of global expansion, of recruiting antislavery support in ways that would isolate, disgrace, and dishonor American slaveholders, reinforced American abolitionism and proved to be compatible with
Chartist concerns for the disfranchised and oppressed British workers. Other black Americans, such as Charles L.
Remond and
Henry Highland Garnet, could also identify with such workers since, as blacks, they were deeply aware of their own deprivations and inequalities, including disfranchisement, even when legally free. Remond was repeatedly asked “what Americans were prepared to do to help oppressed British workers in return for help received to abolish American slavery.” Garnet promised to work to unify the causes of slaves and poor whites, and Douglass supposedly even called himself “a Chartist.”
⁵⁷
In 1846 Garrison, Douglass,
Henry Clarke Wright, and many other American visitors seemed committed to Chartist principles and worked closely with such “moral suasion” Chartist leaders as
William Lovett and
Henry Vincent, both long committed to the
antislavery cause. Of course, for most Americans in the 1840s, there was nothing especially radical about such demands in the
People’s Charter of 1838 as total manhood suffrage, a secret ballot, no property requirement of members of Parliament, and payment for MPs. Yet Britain did not reach these goals until well after the American Civil War. The 1840s, a great decade of reform agitation, culminated in the failed revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the death of Chartism in Britain, and proslavery triumphs in the United States.

Some events in Britain in the 1850s seemed to encourage the expansion of slavery in America and confirm the American slaveholders’ symbols of progress from the
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to the
Dred Scott Decision of 1857 (see
chapter 10
). The rise of antiblack and “scientific” racism supported the broad consensus that
British slave emancipation had been a disastrous economic failure and that the prospect of further emancipation, as the London
Times
put it in 1857, was “never more distant than now.”
⁵⁸
Yet, on May 11, 1853, when Frederick Douglass delivered a long speech to the anti-Garrisonian British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, regarding “the future prospects of the whole colored people in the United States,” he moved from proslavery victories, such as the Compromise of 1850, to the slaveholders’ decisive failure in suppressing “discussion”:

Despite his enthusiasm, Douglass did not exaggerate the impact of the most influential novel ever written by an American. After being published serially in the
National Era, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
sold some
310,000 copies within a year in the United States (about three times the number of the two previous record-setting American novels), a million copies in the United Kingdom (also three times the record), and more than 2 million copies worldwide. Given the absence of international copyright, there were many pirated editions. The book was translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Flemish, Polish, and Magyar, and then into Portuguese, Welsh, Russian, Arabic, and other languages. Since the novel was widely read aloud in families and literary groups, Garrison’s
The
Liberator
estimated some 10 million total readers.
⁶⁰

Frederick Douglass, who as we have seen had later close ties and correspondence with
Harriet Beecher Stowe (she wrote to him in 1851 requesting information on cotton plantations), was well aware of her triumphant tour of Great Britain in the spring and summer of 1853, where as historian
David Reynolds points out, she was “feted, cheered, and praised” wherever she went. In London she met such notables as Prime Minister
Palmerston and Mr. and Mrs.
Charles Dickens. Three years later she met Queen
Victoria and Prince
Albert, and succeeded in obtaining funds and a petition signed by 562,800 British women urging American women to work for the abolition of slavery. Reynolds emphasizes that Stowe’s influence on Western culture was extended by “Uncle Tomitudes,” representations of characters or scenes from the novel in plays, paintings, engravings, and countless other popular media, usually with an antislavery message. He adds that the book thus paved the way for the North’s openness to an antislavery presidential candidate like Lincoln, and “stiffened the South’s resolve to defend slavery and demonize the North.”
⁶¹

Nevertheless, while Stowe stimulated an antislavery revival in Britain, and though Prime Minister Palmerston, a lifelong enemy of slavery and the
slave trade, allegedly read her novel from cover to cover three times,
⁶²
he and other leaders refused to see
Abraham Lincoln as a genuine enemy of slavery and were at times prepared (as I shall show in the epilogue) to recognize and support the Confederacy and intervene to put an end to the American
Civil War.

Many years ago, when I was writing my book
Slavery and Human Progress,
I was surprised to discover that in Britain a few leading liberals like
John Stuart Mill and
John Elliott Cairnes attempted to respond to a sudden and unexpected upsurge of opinion hostile to the Northern cause early in the American
Civil War. “Why is it,” Mill asked in 1862, “that the nation which is at the head of abolitionism, not only feels no sympathy with those who are fighting against the slave holding conspiracy, but actually desires its success? Why is the general voice of our press, the general sentiment of our people, bitterly reproachful to the North, while for the South, the aggressors in the war, we have either mild apologies or direct and downright encouragement?”
¹

Since Mill and Cairnes sought to refute the prevalent but false
British view that even early in the war the Lincoln administration had no interest in ending slavery, one would assume that the British would have responded initially with great enthusiasm to Lincoln’s Preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, and the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. It is true that the Confederate defeat at
Antietam and Lincoln’s related proclamations did check the greatest chance of British and French intervention to end the war and recognize Confederate independence. But most traditional accounts downplay or ignore the way the British press widely denounced both proclamations as “a cynical and desperate ploy.”
As the London
Times,
which represented the views of the wealthier classes, put it on January 15, 1863:

Outrage over the massacre of British whites in the
Indian
Sepoy Mutiny of 1857–58 gave new force to the traditional fear of provoking another Haitian-like uprising of slaves, a fear now infused by the racism that developed in the 1850s. The
Times,
along with other papers, accused Lincoln of inciting Southern slaves to kill their owners: “[He] will appeal to the black blood of the African; he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when the blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait till the rising flames tell that all is consummated, and he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.”
³

In
chapter 10
I stressed that it was the British public’s traditional
hostility to slavery that played a key role in preventing their government from intervening in the American Civil War and recognizing the independence of the
cotton-producing Confederacy. But while the spokesmen for the middle and working classes were more pro-American and generally supported the Union,
Charles Francis Adams, America’s minister in England, emphasized that “the great body of aristocratic and wealthy commercial classes are anxious to see the United States go to pieces.” By 1860, America symbolized democratic social and political reforms that the British establishment abhorred and that British progressives would struggle to achieve for many decades.
⁴
Nevertheless, when historian
Amanda Foreman began research on her comprehensive book
A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War,
she was shocked to find evidence of support of the Confederacy among some people generally considered as belonging to the “progressive” classes in Britain—“journalists, writers, university students, actors, social reformers, even the clergy.”
⁵
Even liberal newspapers like the
Morning Advertiser
were stunned by Lincoln’s Preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation: “We can give no credit to President Lincoln.… the motive was not any abhorrence of Slavery in itself, but a sordid, selfish motive.” Many writers complained that if Lincoln had really opposed slavery, he would not have exempted the slaveholding Border States. They thus ignored Lincoln’s constitutional restrictions and his crucial need to prevent
Maryland,
Delaware,
Kentucky, and
Missouri from joining the Confederacy. Thus according to the antislavery
Spectator,
“the principle asserted is not that a human being cannot own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”
⁶
In Britain there was widespread misunderstanding of the American government and its constitutional limitations.