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

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.

The Sun in its Glory: The Diffusion of Jonathan Dymond’s Works in the United States, 1831-1836

The English Quaker and linen-draper Jonathan Dymond (1796-1828) is best known for his strong philosophic articulation of the testimony against war. The first American edition of Dymond’s work, though, was published not by Quakers but by a small group of activist-thinkers in north-eastern Connecticut, the Windham County Peace Society, which issued a thousand copies of Dymond’s The Applicability of the Pacific Principles of the New Testament to the Conduct of States in the spring of 1832. Dymond’s systematic moral philosophy extended into many corners of the burgeoning philanthropic movements in New England, most notably among Immediate Abolitionists, within the Peace movement and in support of the extension of women’s education. Numerous non-Quakers embraced and publicised his thought in this period: William Lloyd Garrison, the multi-religious family of George Benson Sr., famed Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing, Unitarian Abolitionist Samuel J. May, Abolitionist editor Charles Burleigh, Thomas Grimké and his famous sisters Sarah and Angelina. Perhaps the most intriguing instance of this concerns white Abolitionist educator Prudence Crandall - a former Quaker herself - and the Black students attending the Canterbury Academy where she taught; they had access to chapters from Dymond’s Essays on the Principles of Morality prior to that book’s publication in the United States. This article focuses on the theoretical and practical aspects of Dymond’s contention that Christianity must call forth moral consistency, coupled with his evident respect for women’s intellect. These features of his thought gave to this influential generation of New England Abolitionists a philosophical-religious base. This article expands the understanding of Dymond’s American impact past its obvious relevance in Garrisonian non-resistance to an appreciation of how his moral philosophy fitted the radical ethos of the 1830s.

Smashing the Liquor Machine

This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you’ve never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that touched virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. American prohibition was only part of a global phenomenon, which included pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Tomáš Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Temperance wasn’t “American exceptionalism,” but one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. Temperance was intrinsically linked to progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights and indigenous rights. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F. E. W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory “liquor machine” that profited off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States.

The Ties that Bind

This Chapter looks in details at the close personal friendship between George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison, from their first meeting in London in 1833 to Thompson’s death in 1878. It explores in detail Thompson’s loyalty to Garrison, a loyalty that in many ways alienated him from mainstream British abolitionists. The Chapter also discusses Thompson’s role in raising British support for the Union cause during the American Civil War. Part of the intention here is to set Anglo-American co-operation within a personal context. The friendship between Thompson and Garrison sheds important light on how personal bonds underpinned the wider transatlantic abolitionist movement, at the same time accentuating the importance of international co-operation, not simply as an idea but as a lived experience.

The Ties that Bind

This book explores the close affinities that bound together anti-slavery activists in Britain and the USA during the mid-nineteenth century, years that witnessed the overthrow of slavery in both the British Caribbean and the American South. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the book sheds important new light on the dynamics of abolitionist opinion building during the Age of Reform, from books and artefacts to anti-slavery songs, lectures and placards. Building an anti-slavery public required patience and perseverance. It also involved an engagement with politics, even if anti-slavery activists disagreed about what form that engagement should take. This is a book about the importance of transatlantic co-operation and the transmission of ideas and practices. Yet, at the same time, it is also alert to the tensions that underlay these Atlantic affinities, particularly when it came to what was sometimes perceived as the increasing Americanization of anti-slavery protest culture. Above all, the book stresses the importance of personality, perhaps best exemplified in the enduring transatlantic friendship between George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison.

Repressive Legislation: Slave Codes, Northern Black Laws, and Southern Black Codes

Beginning in the 1630s, colonial assemblies in English America and later the new United States used legislation and constitutions to enslave Africans and deny free blacks civil rights, including free movement, freedom of marriage, freedom of occupation and, of course, citizenship and the vote. Across the next two centuries, blacks and a minority of whites critiqued the oppressive racialist system. Blacks employed varied tactics to challenge their enslavement, from running away to inciting revolts. Others used fiery rhetoric and printed tracts. In the 1760s, when whites began to search for political and philosophical arguments to challenge what they perceived as political oppression from London, they labeled their experience as “slavery.” The colonists also developed compelling arguments that gave some of them the insight that enslaving Africans was as wrong as what they called British oppression. The Massachusetts lawyer James Otis wiped the mirror clean in The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, stating “The colonists, black and white . . . are free-born British subjects . . . entitled to all the essential civil rights.” The Declaration of Independence polished the stained mirror by asserting, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” However, the Constitution of the United States negated these gains by offering federal protection for slavery; it was a covenant with death, as abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison later asserted. After the Revolution, many states passed black laws to deprive blacks of the same rights as whites. Blacks commonly could not vote, testify in court against a white, or serve on juries. States barred black children from public schools. The Civil War offered the promise of equality with whites, but when the war ended, many southern states immediately passed black codes to deny blacks the gains won in emancipation.

The Spirit of Abolition

In the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, the Hebrew prophet exhorts the reader to transcend rote ritualism and engage directly in service to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed. In exhorting his allies to do likewise, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison drew on this language frequently, most canonically in his 1833 “Declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention” and his 1859 “Eulogy for John Brown.” In the generation in between, something extraordinary happened: the goal of ending slavery completely lurched from the cultural margins to the center. Inspired by this precedent, this chapter explores some of the extraordinary religious organizing taking place in the trenches under the banner of prison abolition, from Protestants and Catholics, to Muslims and Jews, to those who are spiritual but not religious.