Antislavery Orthodoxy: Isaac Nelson and the Free Church of Scotland, c. 1843–65

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Christian Fellowship ◽  
High Esteem

The ‘Send back the money’ controversy between the Free Church of Scotland and zealous abolitionists was one of the most important events in nineteenth century Scottish religious history. The Revd Isaac Nelson of Belfast is best remembered for his anti-revivalism and his advocacy of Irish nationalism. What has often been forgotten is the centrality of antislavery to the making of Nelson's controversial reputation, even though he was held in high esteem by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. Accordingly, this article examines his opposition to the Free Church's receipt of monies from and extension of christian fellowship to the slaveholding churches in the United States. It highlights his critique of leading ecclesiastical statesmen, including Thomas Chalmers, William Cunningham and Robert S. Candlish. The essay also considers the sophisticated intellectual critique of chattel slavery that under-girded Nelson's opposition to the policy of the Free Kirk, as well as his evaluation of the nature of proslavery religion in America. By means of a biographical case study of an interesting outsider, this article seeks to provide a lens through which one of the most tragic incidents in Scotland's ecclesiastical past can be freshly examined.

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. 

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

Modern Rebels?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Whelehan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter explores different types of revolutionary violence adopted by Irish nationalists in Ireland and the Irish diaspora in the nineteenth century. Due to the limitations of past rebellions, militant nationalists sought to adopt new strategies that embraced science and modernity. This led to the adoption of an urban-bombing campaign in the 1880s carried out by networks of militants across Ireland, Europe, and the United States. Far from being peculiar to Irish nationalism, these violent strategies found parallels with other revolutionary movements in Europe and the United States.

Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Nelson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Irish Immigrants ◽  
Full Independence ◽  
The Caribbean

This is a book about Irish nationalism and how Irish nationalists developed their own conception of the Irish race. The book begins with an exploration of the discourse of race—from the nineteenth-century belief that “race is everything” to the more recent argument that there are no races. It focuses on how English observers constructed the “native” and Catholic Irish as uncivilized and savage, and on the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, where Irish immigrants were often portrayed in terms that had been applied mainly to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Most of the book focuses on how the Irish created their own identity—in the context of slavery and abolition, empire, and revolution. Since the Irish were a dispersed people, this process unfolded not only in Ireland, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. Many nationalists were determined to repudiate anything that could interfere with the goal of building a united movement aimed at achieving full independence for Ireland. But others, including men and women who are at the heart of this study, believed that the Irish struggle must create a more inclusive sense of Irish nationhood and stand for freedom everywhere. The book pays close attention to this argument within Irish nationalism, and to the ways it resonated with nationalists worldwide, from India to the Caribbean.

Mythological Pedagogies, or Suicide Clubs as Eugenic Alibi

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Brian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political

During the final two decades of the nineteenth century, newspapers reported that dozens of “suicide clubs” were operating in the United States. By restoring and pursuing the uncertainty that marked these reports, as well underscoring the ultimate unknowability of the men who became the stories’ main protagonists, this chapter argues that such reports served as mythic pedagogies for naturalizing a quickly consolidating eugenics rationale. The power to mythify entailed not only the bleeding out of biography and history but also the replenishing infusion of politically useful alternatives. In this particular case study, the hemorrhage was necessitated by the political urgency surrounding the labor question and by capitalists’ need for a different story. They needed a different “sense of life” that would reframe material realities, and they did so by ventriloquizing a handful of men who died by suicide.

Dark, Polluted Gold

2018 ◽  
pp. 31-104
Author(s):  
Alasdair Pettinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Main Issue ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
The Impact

Outlines the main issue that dominated Douglass’s speeches in Scotland in 1846: the campaign to persuade the Free Church of Scotland to return the funds it had raised from pro-slavery churches in the United States. Learning valuable lessons as a tactician and sharpening his oratorical skills, Douglass made the campaign his own, supported by antislavery networks in Scotland, especially the Glasgow Emancipation Society. But the potentially corrupting power of money preoccupied the abolitionists in other ways too. Some of his fellow-campaigners expressed concerns about Douglass’s own financial circumstances, worried that he might be ‘bought’ by rival organisations. Others were particularly upset at his consenting to the solicitation of contributions that were used to purchase his freedom. Douglass responded with robust justifications of his conduct. The chapter closes by assessing the impact of his lectures on his audiences, focusing on two women who recorded their impressions in private correspondence.

scholarly journals Cosmotopia Delineated: Rammohun Roy, William Adam, and the Calcutta Unitarian Committee

Itinerario ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 446-470
Author(s):  
Clare Midgley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article seeks to establish the value of the concept of cosmotopia to historians of intercultural connections through presenting a case study of the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, which was active between 1821 and 1828. In tandem, it aims to enhance understanding of the origins of one particularly sustained set of intercultural connections: the interfaith network which developed between an influential group of Hindu religious and social reformers, the Brahmo Samaj, and western Unitarian Christians. The article focusses on the collaboration between the two leading figures on the Committee: Rammohun Roy, the renowned founder of the Brahmo Samaj, who is often described as the Father of Modern India; and William Adam, a Scottish Baptist missionary who was condemned as the “second fallen Adam” after his “conversion” to Unitarianism by Rammohun Roy, and who went on to cofound a utopian community in the United States. It explores the Calcutta Unitarian Committee's activities within the cosmopolitan milieu of early colonial Calcutta, and clarifies its role in the emergence of the Brahmo Samaj, in the development of a unique approach to Christian mission among Unitarians, and in laying the foundations of a transnational network whose members were in the vanguard of religious innovation, radical social reform, and debates on the “woman question” in nineteenth-century India, Britain, and the United States. In conclusion, the article draws on the case study to offer some broader reflections on the relationship between utopianism, cosmopolitanism, and colonialism.

“Come out of such a land, you Irishmen”

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Nelson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Irish Immigrants ◽  
Daniel O'connell ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
Irish Identity ◽  
Irish Americans

This chapter examines Irish nationalism in the context of the debate over slavery and abolition. It focuses on the figure of Daniel O'Connell. O'Connell was by reputation Ireland's liberator; he certainly was the most authoritative and charismatic voice of the emerging Irish Catholic nation of the early and mid-nineteenth century. He was also an outspoken opponent of slavery—in fact, one of the most powerful antislavery voices in all of Europe. Seeing the White Republic, and Irish Americans, through O'Connell's eyes requires us to explore the complex circumstances that confronted Irish immigrants in the United States and to understand why they would not—and to some degree could not—embrace his antislavery views. What is perhaps most remarkable about O'Connell, though, is not his success or failure in this regard but his attempt to construct an Irish identity that required opposition to slavery and other forms of oppression as one of its essential components.

Ulster Unionists and Irish-American Nationalism in the Late Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 12-43
Author(s):  
Lindsey Flewelling
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
American Nationalism ◽  
Irish America ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Irish unionists increasingly associated Irish-America with violence and extremism. This chapter examines the relationship of Irish unionists and the United States in this era, as unionists denounced American funding of Irish nationalism, condemned Irish Parliamentary Party connections to violence and crime, and feared the threat of separatism. Unionists also emphasized the international appeal of their own movement as they attempted to draw support from the United States in their campaigns against Home Rule. This chapter concludes that the unionists’ approach to the United States was paradoxical and multifaceted, as they attempted to condemn Irish-American influence and extremism while at the same time seeking American aid for their own movement.

Cotton Capitalists

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Ethnic Networks ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Financial Relationships

Jewish merchants created a niche economy in the United States’ most important industry—cotton—which positioned them at the forefront of capitalist expansion for much of the second half of the nineteenth century. This book analyzes that niche economy and asks how it came to be. It argues that timing mattered, alongside a host of other structural factors, which created the conditions that allowed Jewish merchants to succeed in this particular capitalism. But it also argues that, within this milieu, the Jewish merchants’ status as a minority fueled their niche economy by fostering ethnic networks of trust. Trust served as the cornerstone of financial relationships, and it was frequently cultivated by shared ethnicity. While this book investigates the ways in which both structural factors and ethnic networks mattered in the emergence of this particular niche economy, it also acts as a case study that explores how ethnicity mattered in the development of global capitalism. The story of these American Jewish merchants is far more than the story of American Jewish success and integration—it is the story of how ethnicity mattered in the development of global capitalism.

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