The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (74 page)

65.
Campbell,
The Slave Catchers,
23–25.

66.
Ibid., 207; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “A Federal Assault: African Americans and the Impact of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,” in
Slavery and the Law,
ed.
Paul Finkelman (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 144–45, 148–51; Leonard W. Levy, “Sims’ Case: The Fugitive Slave Law in Boston in 1851,”
The Journal of Negro History
35, no. 1 (Jan. 1950): 72 and passim. Paul Finkelman states that the whole Sims retrieval cost as much as $100,000 if you count salaries and other peripheral expenses. Paul Finkelman, “Fugitive Slave Law of 1850” in
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass,
ed. Paul Findelman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 74–78.

67.
Calhoun’s famous speech, read on the floor of the Senate by Senator
James Mason from Virginia (due to Calhoun’s sickly state) on March 4, 1850, illustrates the testlike atmosphere offered by Calhoun and like-minded Southern congressmen: “But will the North agree to do this [compromise]? It is for her to answer this question. But, I will say, she cannot refuse, if she has half the love of the Union which she professes to have. …At all events, the responsibility of saving the Union rests on the North, and not the South. The South cannot save it by any act of hers, and the North may save it without any sacrifice whatever, unless to do justice, and to perform her duties under the Constitution.… If you, who represent the stronger portion, cannot agree to settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so, and we shall know what to do, when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.” John Caldwell Calhoun, “Speech on the Slavery Question,”
in
The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 1849–1850
, vol. 27, ed. Clyde N. Wilson and Shirley B. Cook (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003) 210–11.

68.
“From the Nashville American: ABOLITIONISTS AND FREE NEGROES,”
The Liberator,
October 18, 1850.

69.
Luther Lee,
Autobiography of the Rev. Luther Lee
(New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1882), 335–36. Such views were by no means limited to radical clergymen. According to
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the law was one that “everyone of you will break on the earliest opportunity—a law which no man can obey, or abet obeying, without loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the name of a gentleman.” Quoted in Campbell,
Slave Catchers,
50.

70.
The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison,
ed. Louis Ruchames, vol. 4:
From Disunionism to the Brink of War, 1850–1860
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), 41.

71.
John Stauffer,
The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002), 255.

72.
Ibid., 170–73, 236, 255.

73.
Frederick Douglass, “John Brown: An Address at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College” in
Meteor of War: The John Brown Story,
ed. Zoe Trodd and John Stauffer (Maplecrest, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 2004), 206.

74.
Stauffer,
Black Hearts of Men,
p. 37. Stauffer notes that Emerson borrowed the words from his friend Mattie Griffith.

75.
Hahn,
A Nation Under Our Feet,
68–78.

76.
Hahn,
Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom,
57–61.

1.
Ralph Wardlaw,
The Jubilee: A Sermon Preached in West George-Street Chapel, Glasgow, on Friday, August 1st 1834, the Memorial Day of Negro Emancipation in the British Colonies
(Glasgow, 1834), 13, 16–27, 20.

2.
Ibid., 26–37.

3.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address Delivered in Concord on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies, August 1, 1844,” in
Complete Works of Emerson
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–04), 11:99, 115–16, 135.

4.
Frederick Douglass, “Freedom in the West Indies: An Address Delivered in Poughkeepsie, New York, on 2 August 1858,”
The Frederick Douglass Papers,
Series One,
Speeches, Debates, and Interviews,
ed., John W. Blassingame, vol. 3,
1855–63
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 217–21.

5.
Ibid., 215–17.

6.
Ibid., 216–17.

7.
Seymour Drescher,
The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 202–3. For a detailed analysis of the astounding costs of Britain’s campaign against both the slave trade and slavery, see Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, “Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade,”
International Organization
53, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 631–68. Drescher points out that even Kaufmann and Pape overlook the cost of depreciating plantation values from 1808 to the 1850s. Drescher,
Mighty Experiment,
285n4.

8.
Douglass, “Freedom in the West Indies,” 219–21.

9.
Letters and Addresses of George Thompson, during his Mission in the United States
(Boston, 1837), 107.

10.
Reginald Coupland,
Wilberforce: A Narrative
(Oxford, 1923), 240–41.

11.
James Stephen,
The Slavery in the West Indian Colonies Delineated, as It Exists Both in Law and Practice, and Compared with Slavery in Other Countries, Ancient and Modern
(London, 1824–30), 2:401–2.

12.
Of course, many abolitionists opposed specific measures, such as compensation and apprenticeship, while still accepting and celebrating the British emancipation act.

13.
David Brion Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 174–77.

14.
Drescher,
Mighty Experiment,
75–86, 125. Some proponents of slave “amelioration” did argue that African savages needed time to overcome the indolence and licentiousness of uncivilized men (108). It should be added that Wilberforce devoted some attention to refuting racist arguments in his 1807 book on the abolition of the slave trade.
William Wilberforce,
A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Addressed to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of Yorkshire
(London, 1807), 57–85, 127–33.

15.
David Brion Davis, “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” in Davis,
From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 238–57.

16.
Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress,
176–77. By 1814, James
Stephen, in the Colonial Office, became convinced that many slaves were being smuggled into the British West Indian colonies, and he succeeded in obtaining local slave registrations in a number of the colonies. But in 1815 Wilberforce failed to get a central registry intended to open the way to ameliorative measures. (I am indebted to Stanley L. Engerman for sending me a copy of his paper in 2011, “Monitoring the Abolition of the International Slave Trade: Slave Registration in the British Caribbean and the Recording of Slaves in the United States.”)

17.
Substance of the Debate in the House of Commons, on the 15th May, 1823, on a Motion for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions
…(London, 1823), 1–21.
J. R. Ward shows that West Indian planters did respond to abolitionist demands for amelioration and succeeded in raising the slaves’ standard of living and productive efficiency, but failed to change the dehumanizing aspects of the institution that greatly troubled reformers. Ward,
British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

18.
Agency Committee speakers focused attention on religious and moral themes as opposed to questions of free labor and economic outcomes. Drescher,
Mighty Experiment,
122.

19.
Michael Craton,
Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 291–303, 315.

20.
Ibid., 267–90, 300–302, 312–21.

21.
Mary Turner,
Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Society, 1787–1834
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 20–21, 171–73.

22.
Betty Fladeland,
Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 202; Robert William Fogel,
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 230. Fogel argues that the
Grey government was eager to gain the support of the religious dissenters, especially
Methodists, as a “main counterweight to the radicals,” who among other things “viewed the abolitionist campaign with deep suspicion, denouncing it as an instrument intended to divert attention from the plight of the English workers” (30–31).

23.
Edward Bartlett Rugemer,
The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 132.

24.
Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress,
200.

25.
For details regarding the negotiations that led to emancipation, see ibid., 198–219; and Seymour Drescher,
Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 248–66.

26.
Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress,
202–03; Drescher,
Abolition,
250.

27.
Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress,
203.

28.
Proceedings and Resolutions of the West India Body, Consequent on Mr. Secretary Stanley’s
Communication of the Outline of the Intended Measure Respecting Slavery, May 1833,
Public Record Office London, (London, 1833), 3–12.

29.
George Stephen to Daniel O’Connell, May 29, 1833. George Stephen Papers (unidentified when I consulted them), the Hull Museums, UK.

30.
Adam Hochschild,
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 347; Drescher,
Mighty Experiment,
136. Since this compensation came to 40 percent of the government’s average annual income and three times the expenditure on the
Poor Law, it required additional public borrowing.
Nicholas Draper has recently provided a comprehensive analysis of the extent and importance of the absentee owners who received a large share of the compensation.
The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation, and British Society at the End of Slavery
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

31.
Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress,
204–5.

32.
Ibid., 205. When the apprentices’ uncompensated labor is added to the £20 million compensation, it appears that slave owners received nearly full compensation for the value of their slaves.

33.
The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison,
ed. Walter M. Merrill, vol. 1,
I Will Be Heard, 1822–1835
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 230–31, 237–38;
Thomas Clarkson to “Mr. Buxton,” from Playford Hall, September 25, 1833, Clarkson Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. After rejoicing over the abolition of slavery, even with compensation paid to planters, Clarkson expressed hope that a society would be formed to see that the intentions of Parliament were actually carried out, as the African Institution was founded to monitor the enforcement of the ending of the slave trade. Such a society, Clarkson added, would start correspondence with all the islands.

34.
MS Brit. emp. S.444, XXIV, Buxton Papers, Rhodes House, Oxford. (In view of possible changes in classification, I did this research many years ago.)

35.
Rugemer,
The Problem of Emancipation,
117, and passim. Rugemer shows in great detail how
Bryan Edwards’s writing on the
Haitian Revolution influenced later developments of the theory that antislavery agitation was responsible for specific slave revolts.

36.
Ibid., 118, 120, 122.

37.
Ibid., 156–60.

38.
Ibid.

39.
Howard Temperley,
British Antislavery, 1833–1870
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 119–20; Fogel,
Without Consent or Contract,
406–11. Fogel argues that slavery was “intrinsically evil because its productive efficiency arose directly out of the oppression of its laborers,” and concludes that “Whatever the opportunity for a peaceful abolition of slavery along British lines before 1845, it surely was nonexistent after that date” (411–12).

40.
Stanley L. Engerman has documented the striking differences between the British slave colonies with regard to sugar production before and after emancipation in “Economic Change and Contract Labor in the British Caribbean: The End of Slavers and the Adjustment to Emancipation,”
Explorations in Economic History
21 (1984): 133–50.

41.
James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball,
Emancipation in the West Indies. A Six Months’ Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837
(New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838), iii–vi.

42.
Ibid., 7, 12.

43.
Ibid., iii.

44.
Benjamin David Weber, “
Emancipation in the West Indies
: Thome and Kimball’s Interpretation and the Shift in American Antislavery Discourse, 1834–1840” (essay written as candidate for honors in history at Oberlin College, Professor Carol Lasser, Advisor, Spring 2007), 7–23.