scholarly journals Slavery and Abolition in Chartist Thought and Culture, 1838–1850

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Tom Scriven
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Andrew Jackson ◽  
Core Component ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Wage Labour ◽  
William Lloyd Garrison ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Abstract In Britain between 1838 and 1858, the Chartist movement demanded the implementation of the ‘Six Points’, a parcel of parliamentary reforms centred on universal male suffrage. Despite the movement's recognized importance, little study has been made into Chartism's attitude towards slavery and abolitionism. This article will provide the first comprehensive study of this topic, from Chartism's origins in the 1830s until its decline in the decade after 1848. It will illustrate that Chartism was influenced by the radical labour component of the ‘Democratic’ coalition that supported President Andrew Jackson. This helped reinforce amongst early Chartists theories that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery, alongside a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged. By 1842, however, various changes within the movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment with Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology amongst American labour radicals profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which greatly informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the American Civil War.

Frederick Douglass

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Palmer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Black American ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The Church

Frederick Douglass, Black abolitionist, author, and statesman, was born into chattel slavery in the United States in 1818. Douglass’s antislavery activism inspired his sons to fight in the Civil War to end slavery in the nation (1861–1865). It also enabled him to meet other U.S. abolitionists such as James McCune Smith, the first Black American graduate in medicine (Glasgow University, 1837), as well as John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Douglass arrived in Scotland in 1846, where he gave many lectures on the evils of chattel slavery and was aware of the roles politicians and the church played in maintaining this institution. He argued that if the Free Church of Scotland refused to help to abolish slavery in the United States, it should “Send Back The Money” that it acquired from slaveholding investors. A commemorative plaque to Frederick Douglass was unveiled in Edinburgh in November 2018. This article reflects on Frederick Douglass’s activism in Scotland and what it means for Scotland’s African diasporic residents. 

Receptions of Rome in Debates on Slavery in the U.S.A.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Malamud
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Black Struggle ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Intense Debate

American abolitionists not only invoked the Roman allusions and comparisons employed by the revolutionary generation’s fight for liberty from the British crown, but also adapted or subverted them in service of the black struggle for freedom. Rather than rejecting Roman society outright because it was a slaveholding society—the primal “Roman error” from their perspective—many abolitionists instead deployed figures and images from Roman antiquity in their own struggles against the despotism of chattel slavery. Supporters of emancipation and black civil rights, this chapter shows, thus engaged in an intense debate over the correct reception of ancient Rome with proslavery Southerners, who argued that slavery in both Rome and America enabled liberty and civilization. Bringing the discussion into the present day, this chapter offers a contemporary example of arguments over the correct reception of ancient Rome in relation to American slavery and the American Civil War.

The Lebanese Civil War 1975–90

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Jamal Wakim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
Lebanese Civil War ◽  
Organized Violence ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Leftist Parties

This article argues that the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) was in essence a terror of state directed by mercantile economic and political elites (the comprador class) controlling the Lebanese state and society against the middle and poorer classes (the working class). The aim of this terror or organized violence was to subdue the subordinate classes, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against the confessional system that operated for the benefit of the comprador class. The rebellion was expressed by members of the working-class joining cross-confessional nationalist and leftist parties. Hence, violence was aimed at reestablishing the confessional order as a means to restore a hegemonic system that served the interests of the comprador class at a time when this class was rehabilitating its economic role by resurrecting the financial system, which had received a severe blow in the late 1960s. It effected this rehabilitation through the Taif Agreement signed between Lebanese parliamentarians in 1989, under the auspices of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to favor the new mercantile elite led by Rafiq Hariri.

Loach on Loach

1998 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Social Conscience ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Ken Loach ◽  
Tv Production

Ken Loach is one of Britain's most distinguished, and respected, film-makers. His career embraces both film and television. His landmark TV production of Cathy Come Home caused such an outcry over the plight of the homeless that Shelter was established in response. His film work is as remarkable as his television work. He makes tough, uncompromising films about a beleaguered working class – but with a poetry (as in Kes) and with a humanity soaked in humour (as in Riff Raff and Raining Stones). His work has been feted, especially on the Continent where Riff Raff received the Felix award (Europe's equivalent of the Oscar). Raining Stones won the Jury Prize at Cannes and the Best British Film of the Year award, and Land and Freedom, his film about the Spanish Civil War, won the International Critics prize at Cannes. Loach on Loach is an exploration of Ken Loach's cinema of social conscience, making much use of interviews and conversations with the man himself.

Isaac Nelson

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
William Lloyd Garrison ◽  
History Of ◽  
County Mayo ◽  
Member Of Parliament

This book reconsiders the career of an important, controversial, but neglected figure in this history of Irish Presbyterianism. The Revd Isaac Nelson is mostly remembered for his opposition to the evangelical revival of 1859, but this book demonstrates that there was much more to Nelson’s career. Nelson started out as a protégé of Henry Cooke and as an exemplary young evangelical minister. Upon aligning himself with the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society and joining forces with American abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Nelson emerged as a powerful voice against compromise with slaveholders. One of the central objectives of this book is to show that anti-slavery, especially his involvement with the ‘Send Back the Money’ controversy in the Free Church of Scotland and the debate over fellowship with slaveholders at the Evangelical Alliance, was crucially important to the development of Nelson into one of Irish Presbyterianism’s most controversial figures. His later opposition to the 1859 Revival has often been understood as being indicative of Nelson’s opposition to evangelicalism. This book argues that such a conclusion is mistaken and that Nelson opposed the Revival as a Presbyterian evangelical. His later involvement with the Land League and the Irish Home Rule movement, including his tenure as the Member of Parliament for County Mayo, could be easily dismissed as an entirely discreditable affair. While avoiding romantic nostalgia in relation to Nelson’s nationalism, this book argues that Nelson’s basis for advocating Home Rule was not as peculiar as it might first appear.

Wartime

Keep the Days ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 47-69
Author(s):  
Steven M. Stowe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Moment

This chapter looks at women diarists from the southern slave-owning class looking at civil war. Some wrote a great deal about the battles and politics, while others wrote only occasionally about the far-reaching conflict. But all of the diarists comment on the sheer, local craziness of war—the reversals, weird occurrences, and outright destruction of lives and the material world. War demanded that they write in their diaries, but war also made writing inadequate. War shook up everything normal, and so the diarist found herself writing how normal time turned into something else—wartime. Women found themselves writing about cannonades and enemy soldiers at the door, about strange mutations in everything “every-day,” in the routines of home, the choice of clothing and food, and in the novel presence of working-class white men in the shape of Confederate soldiers. Wartime challenged women’s inventiveness as diarists, and it shows how the diary as a text—open, changeable, tied to the moment—brings wartime close to readers today.

Captains and Navigators

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-59
Author(s):  
Dominic Scott ◽  
R. Edward Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Core Component ◽  
Or Organization ◽  
A Company

This chapter discusses the comparison between a leader and a navigator, implicit in the well-known ‘ship of state’ image, which Plato uses in the Republic. A core component of the navigator model is that the leader helps a country or organization that has opted to take a new direction and that needs someone with a distinctive kind of expertise to get them there. As with the doctor model, the decisions of the leader may often appear unpalatable and, when the going gets tough, the leader also needs to be able to command unity on board. The chapter illustrates the model with two examples: Frederick Douglass, who helped steer America towards the abolition of slavery; and James McGill, who tried to steer AT&T from being a company heavily based around engineering and manufacturing towards a digital future, more reliant on marketing.

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