Conclusion

and Keywords to be supplied.

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.

Political Abolitionism

This Chapter deals with the wider question of political influence and how anti-slavery activists engaged with politics. In the past, this topic has been dominated by studies of anti-slavery petitions. While recognising the importance of petitioning, this chapter looks at complementary forms of political protest, chief among them the pledging of prospective parliamentary candidates, or what in the USA was called ‘the interrogatory system’. Pledging proved singularly effective in flushing out reluctant candidates but by its very nature it was seen as symptomatic of a new kind of politics that was at once brash, noisy and confrontational. The chapter looks at how these tactics were widely adopted in the USA, where direct political action eventually led to the organization of the Liberty Party, a new departure that took it as axiomatic that the existing two-party system (Whigs/Democrats) was not working. The chapter argues that the Liberty Party had a significant impact on divorcing the federal government from the idea of slavery.

Atlantic Affinities

This Chapter deals with Anglophilia as an animating principle in a lot American anti-slavery thought and practice. It begins with an account of how early anti-slavery activists appropriated Wilberforce, Clarkson and Sharp into their rituals, before moving on to discuss how after 1833 William Lloyd Garrisonian and his supporters deliberately set out to create a continuous link between the British past and the American present, perhaps most evident in the elevation of 1 August (Emancipation Day in the Caribbean) into the American abolitionist calendar. These affinities cut across racial lines. African Americans were just as quick to appropriate figures such as Wilberforce and Clarkson, weaving them into a black protest tradition that elevated abolitionism into a global struggle, even if in doing so they put themselves at personal risk. Anglophilia not only shaped how the American anti-slavery movement should be understood but also how it should be remembered.

The Power of the Word

This Chapter looks at the role of paid anti-slavery agents or lecturers in raising public awareness about slavery. Strictly speaking, the agency system had its origins in Britain but it had its widest impact in the USA. The chapter looks at the growth of the agency system, its organization and size. It then moves on to look in greater detail at the men and women who became agents, among them Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Abby Kelley, Lucy Stone and Susan B Anthony. Rather like civil rights activists during the 1960s, anti-slavery agents were front-line workers whose job it was to create an anti-slavery public and, in the process, sow the seeds of radical political change. It was demanding and sometimes dangerous work but the agency system would prove a vital part of the wider abolitionist effort right up until the eve of the American Civil War.

Singing Abolition

This Chapter deals with a hitherto neglected aspect of anti-slavery opinion building, namely the role of anti-slavery songs. Hundreds of these songs – really abolitionist poems set to popular melodies -- were produced during the nineteenth century, on topics as diverse as the slave experience and contemporary public events. In essence, these were protest songs, designed to inform and inspire. The Chapter also looks at the emergence of anti-slavery performers, chief among them the Hutchinson Family Singers from New Hampshire, who electrified audiences during the 1840s with their performances. In 1846, the Hutchinsons visited Britain where they met with a different reception, their peculiar brand of musical advocacy alienating some section of the British public. The chapter analyses the reasons for this ‘failure’, while concluding with a discussion of spirituals (slave songs) as performed by African American visitors to the UK, among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

Introduction

This is the third book in a trilogy that began with Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery (1995).1 Two broad themes have been at the heart of this endeavour. The first is opinion-building. Popular Politics sought to answer a simple question: how did eighteenth-century activists turn an idea into a successful popular movement? Creating a constituency for abolition, especially at a period when transatlantic slavery was considered a necessary adjunct of empire, demanded skill and ingenuity. It also required highly developed organizational skills and an eye for business. Anti-slavery activists cleverly exploited an expanding consumer society to push their ideas and values, as well as their insistent demands, from the periphery to the centre of public debate. In the process, they helped to make abolition fashionable, Josiah Wedgwood’s famous cameo of the kneeling slave being an obvious case in point. Cheap disposable literature, inertia selling and the innovative use of images and image-making, all excited an interest in anti-slavery that found expression in mass petitioning and the emergence of the first modern reform movement. By shifting attention away from the narrow confines of Westminster, ...

Consuming Abolition

This Chapter explores the complex relationship between anti-slavery activity and consumerism. It begins with a discussion of the resonance and meaning of anti-slavery artefacts, from Wedgwood’s famous cameo of the kneeling slave to ceramics, needlework and fabrics. It then goes on to discuss the significance of the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar, not least as a successful commercial enterprise. The Bazaar, however, was in many ways a victim of its own success, leading its organisers to abandon it in favour of a subscription system. The same was true of the huge popular success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). ‘Tom’ became a fad or ‘mania’ but in doing so became divorced form his original (anti-slavery) context. By placing consumerism in a wider perspective, this chapter probes the sometimes-difficult relationship between consumerism and anti-slavery, highlighting the threats as well as the opportunities.