"As a nation, the English are our friends": The emergence of African American politics in the British Atlantic World, 1772-1861

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 1003-1028

  Gosse, Van ^a  

^a MARSHALL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 54349129118     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.4.1003     Document Type: Review

References (145)

1. David Walker, David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. and with a new introduction by Peter P. Hinks (University Park, Pa., 2000), 43. This is a reprint of the third edition of Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, from 1830; the passage is marked "Addition."
2. Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, Pa., 1997), is the most complete account of Walker's life, correcting many previous assertions.
3. Simon Schama reduces it to "a sentimental notion of British freedom"; see Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (London, 2005), 13.
4. More useful is James Brewer Stewart, "Boston, Abolition, and the Atlantic World, 1820-1861," in Donald M. Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 101-125, stressing Walker's role in an abolitionist culture that was "irrevocably anglophile, subversively patriotic, and based on an African American view of history's moral direction" (111).
5. Thomas Bender, "Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives," in Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 8.
6. The major exception is the chapter titled "Duet with John Bull" in Benjamin Quarles's seminal Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969).
7. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855), 409, 417.
8. Following the 1823 Demerara revolt in Guyana, about 250 rebel slaves were executed, as Walker apparently knew; see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988), 428-430. A footnote in the Appeal's third edition passionately denounces the injustice of white rule in Jamaica.
9. See David Walker's Appeal, ed. Hinks, 66.
10. The Appeal's first edition in mid-1829 did not include this emphatic praise of England. Walker's sudden avowal was likely spurred by the welcome offered by British authorities to free blacks facing expulsion from Cincinnati, since abolitionist newspapers had reported on those negotiations in July, August, and September 1829. See William H. Pease and Jane Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (Madison, Wis., 1963), 172 nn. 1 and 2, and also p. 52 of the Appeal's third edition, where Walker refers to slaves escaping to Canada ("Among the English, our real friends and benefactors"), and p. 58 ("If any of us see fit to go away, go to those who have been for many years, and are now our greatest earthly friends and benefactors-the English").
11. Slavery remained technically legal in Britain and most of Canada until the 1833 Emancipation Act. For a summary of de facto abolition in the four Canadian provinces, see William Renwick Riddell, Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario, "General Observations," Journal of Negro History 5, no. 3 (July 1920): 376-377. Riddell represents Canada's blend of racial liberalism and national pride; between 1919 and 1932, he published fourteen articles in the Journal of Negro History documenting the history of slavery in Canada.
12. The reasons for this silence are obvious: any mention of black men fighting for Britain validated the notion of a slavish fifth column. Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, where the British had landed during the Revolution, freeing numerous slaves.
13. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York, 1997), 125-126.
14. See David Walker's Appeal, ed. Hinks, 87-88, for a speech to the Massachusetts General Colored Association,
15. printed in Freedom's Journal on December 19, 1828: "That we have very good friends yea, very good, among that body [referring to "our white breathren and friends"], perhaps none but a few of those who have, ever read at all will deny; and that many of them have gone, and will go, all lengths for our good, is evident, from the very works of the great, the good, and the godlike Granville Sharpe [sic], Wilberforce, Lundy, and the truly patriotic and lamented Mr. Ashmun, late Colonial Agent of Liberia." Walker here mentions both Englishmen and Americans, including Benjamin Lundy, editor of The Genius of Universal Emancipation.
16. See J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester, 1995).
17. See chap. 10, "Antislavery and the Conflict of Laws," in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 469-522;
18. also William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), 42-44, on the connection between Somerset and the famous Massachusetts cases ending slavery in the 1780s.
19. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn., 1997), 63-65, stresses Mansfield's finding that without the positive law pioneered by Virginia's 1661 codification of Negro slavery, involuntary lifetime servitude could not exist in England proper.
20. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 39, 34-35.
21. See David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004), 198-202.
22. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006),101.
23. Schama, Rough Crossings, 17-18.
24. Walker did pay attention to Thomas Jefferson, but focused his anger on the spurious scientific racialism of Notes on the State of Virginia.
25. Schama, Rough Crossings, 21-22, notes that Hutchinson and Gage received five different petitions in 1773-1774, and cites a 1775 Georgia advertisement for a runaway slave that says he had tried "to board a vessel for Great Britain from the knowledge he has of the late determination of the Somerset case" (25).
26. Ibid., 72.
27. See chap. 5, "Free Virginians versus Slaves and Governor Dunmore," in Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 143, for how "rising aspirations among blacks and mounting fears among whites" set the South on the road to independence.
28. Clinton's 1779 proclamation promised "to every Negro who shall desert the Rebel Standard full security to follow within the Lines any occupation which he may think proper"; see Arnett G. Lindsay, "Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Great Britain Bearing on the Return of Negro Slaves, 1783-1828," Journal of Negro History 5, no. 4 (October 1920): 393 n. 6, for the full text.
29. Washington is quoted in Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 113-114.
30. See Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J., 1991), although she does concede that "For the vast majority of slaves who actively participated in the Revolution, the arrival of the British army was a liberating moment" (118).
31. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2007);
32. Pybus, "Jefferson's Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 2 (April 2005): 243-264;
33. Brown, Moral Capital.
34. See Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 28-29, on the enormous demand for black labor in wartime New York City.
35. Ibid., 58-59, 66, 77-78, 148, for instances where British generals recognized the claims of reciprocal loyalty, even long after the war was over.
36. Pybus, "Jefferson's Faulty Math," offers the most careful accounting of the fate of the liberated slaves. Through careful extrapolation, she arrives at the figure of 20,000 fugitives reaching British lines, and further estimates that 8,000 to 10,000 of the 12,000 survivors departed at the war's end for Canada, Britain itself, and the Caribbean colonies.
37. Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 38. Pybus asserts that "Their evacuation of America would have to be the most significant act of emancipation in early American history."
38. Similarly, Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 23, describes the response to British military emancipation as "the greatest slave rebellion in North American history."
39. Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 104-105, on how both Lord Cornwallis after Yorktown and William Pitt in the 1790s, when negotiating with Americans, bestowed this redemption on themselves.
40. Brown, Moral Capital, 298, vividly captures the "pleasure" felt by these men in "posturing as liberators."
41. Ibid., 312.
42. Quoted in Schama, Rough Crossings, 146 n. 17, 148.
43. One of the "Birch passes," so-called because they were signed by Brigadier General Birch, is reproduced as an illustration in Graham Hodges, ed., The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution (New York, 1996).
44. See W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz, "Atlantic Revolutions: Slavery and Freedom in Newport, Rhode Island, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the Era of the American Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999), 354-355, where he describes how a Nova Scotia jury in 1791 sentenced a white American to jail because it found that he had tried to sell a black woman and her children who were "free persons and subjects of King George."
45. See Frank A. Cassell, "Slaves of the Chesapeake Bay Area and the War of 1812," Journal of Negro History 57, no. 2 (April 1972): 144-155, which demonstrates that memories of earlier English emancipations remained strong. As the British navy raided the Eastern Shore, slaves organized parties to aid them as "spies, guides, messengers and laborers," and eventually uniformed soldiers (144).
46. Lindsay, "Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Great Britain," 418-419.
47. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1954; repr., Millwood, N.Y., 1973), 109.
48. Ibid., 144, for a chart listing this vast diplomatic effort.
49. See Jerome Reich, "The Slave Trade at the Congress of Vienna: A Study in English Public Opinion," Journal of Negro History 53, no. 2 (April 1968): 129-143, documenting how British abolitionists lobbied the tsar and the king of Prussia seeking immediate abolition of the slave trade by France.
50. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 134-135, 149.
51. See Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001), on official America's blind eye toward massive participation in the trade.
52. R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1983), 107.
53. See Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven, Conn., 1971), 233 for the derivation of the figure of 60,000 and the actual census figures, and 240 for his estimate that "by 1860 the black population of Canada West alone may have reached forty thousand, three-quarters of whom had been or were fugitive slaves or their children."
54. Frederick Douglass' Paper, September 3, 1852;
55. Martin Delany, "Political Destiny of the Colored Race, on the American Continent," in Proceedings of the National Emigration Convention of Colored People, Held at Cleveland, Ohio, August 24, 1854 (Pittsburgh, 1854),
56. quoted in Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860 (New York, 2001), 239.
57. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 247.
58. Harvey Amani Whitfield, "The Development of Black Refugee Identity in Nova Scotia, 1813-1850," Left History 10, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 21, documenting how they were integrated into local politics and ostentatiously celebrated their Britishness.
59. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 149-152;
60. also Martineau, Writings on Slavery and the American Civil War, 34 (from Retrospect of Western Travel [1838]): "they exceedingly dread the barest mention of the annexation of Canada to the United States."
61. A Description of William Wells Brown's Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave, from His Birth in Slavery to His Death or His Escape to His First Home of Freedom on British Soil (London, n.d. [1849]), 37.
62. Provincial Freeman, May 12, 1855, an article by "A Descendant of the African Race," probably Shadd Cary, evaluating the two major parties. On September 22 of that year, she (or he) stressed that the free people of color must always favor Conservatives as "composed . . . of materials, that are incapable of a general course of procedure, that will favour cast [sic], because of complexional differences," since they are "the Constitutional party of our much envied country . . . true to the general interest, and loyal to the Crown"; on December 22, the Freeman endorsed Colonel John Prince, "The English Gentleman," as a candidate for the Provincial Parliament, on the grounds that he was "a true Patriot and Conservative," and was "thoroughly hated by the yankees."
63. Ibid., March 28, 1857.
64. See Jason H. Silverman, Unwelcome Guests: Canada West's Response to American Fugitive Slaves, 1800-1865 (Millwood, N.Y., 1985), which documents discrimination that "permeated all levels of black life" (viii), although generally "the black refugees benefited from proper legal proceedings wherein their rights as free men, equal with whites under Canadian law, were protected" (43).
65. Speech of Samuel Ringgold Ward to the Colonial Missionary Society, May 9, 1853, in C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 1: The British Isles, 1830-1865 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 336-337.
66. See Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 102, on how the British chargé in Washington told Adams that the fugitives "by their residence in Canada, become free, whatever may have been their former condition in this country, and should any attempt be made to infringe upon this right of freedom," they could go before judges and expect full satisfaction.
67. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 168-173. In two cases where local officials complied with American requests, they were sanctioned.
68. Ibid., 155-157.
69. As Winks has pointed out, this comment appeared in many different forms. The earliest version is in the Proceedings of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Convention, Held at Putnam, on the Twenty-Second, Twenty-Third, and Twenty-Fourth of April, 1835 ([New York], 1835), 18-19, which reproduced a "Statement in regard to Cincinnati" from the Anti-Slavery Committee of Lane Seminary. It reported that following the efforts of city authorities to expel free blacks, a delegation went to Canada seeking land, and "returned with a favorable answer. The reply of Sir James Colebrook, Governor of Upper Canada, is characteristic of a nobleminded man. 'Tell the Republicans . . .' "
70. This was repeated in William Jay, Condition of the Free People of Color of the United States (1838; repr., New York, 1969), 377-378.
71. It also appeared in The Colored American, March 7, 1840,
72. reprinted from The Anti-Slavery Examiner. In 1838, Harriet Martineau published a slightly different version in "The Martyr Age of the United States," omitting the wonderfully sardonic "royalist";
73. see Martineau, Writings on Slavery and the American Civil War, ed. Deborah Anna Logan (Dekalb, Ill., 2002), 47. All four versions misidentify the lieutenant governor as Colebrook. As with Somerset, what matters is how this reported comment was understood.
74. See Patrick Brode, The Odyssey of John Anderson (Toronto, 1989).
75. Quoted in ibid., 76.
76. Speech of John Anderson in London, July 2, 1861, in Ripley, The British Isles, 494.
77. See Edward D. Jervey and C. Harold Huber, "The Creole Affair," Journal of Negro History 65, no. 3 (Summer 1980): 196-211.
78. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 204-205.
79. Ibid., 13-15, 17, 25-26.
80. Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Anti-Slavery Cooperation (Urbana, Ill., 1972), 351-352.
81. Ibid., 44.
82. Richard H. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), 26, 96-97.
83. Paul drew upon earlier precedents, from the poet Phillis Wheatley's tour of London in the 1770s, during which she was escorted by Granville Sharp, to Paul Cuffe's visit in 1811. Paul's brother, the Reverend Thomas Paul, Sr., had visited England in 1815, representing the Baptist Missionary Society of Massachusetts, and was "lionized by abolitionists"; see Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York, 1982), 483.
84. Blackett, Building an Anti-Slavery Wall, 47-67.
85. Ibid., 58.
86. See Alasdair Pettinger, "Send Back the Money: Douglass and the Free Church of Scotland," in Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens, Ga., 1999), 33, for Douglass's March speech, in which he depicted his old master selling the young Frederick to raise money for the Free Church.
87. Brougham was famous for his July 1830 speech in the Lords, launching the final campaign for West Indian emancipation: "There is a law . . . the same throughout the world, the same at all times . . . written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they will reject with indignation the wild and guilty phantasy that man can hold property in man!" Quoted in Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 196.
88. All quotations but one are from the Manchester Weekly Advertiser, July 21, 1860,
89. quoted in Blackett, Building an Anti-Slavery Wall, 33.
90. Details, including Delany's response to Brougham, are from his account; see Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (Boston, 1868),
91. quoted in Robert R. Levine, Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 358-361.
92. Cass to Dallas, September 11, 1860, quoted in Blackett, Building an Anti-Slavery Wall, 38.
93. Nor was this the first humiliation of an American minister. In 1838, the Irish parliamentary leader Daniel O'Connell had publicly damned Minister Andrew Stevenson, labeling him a "slave breeder"; see Howard Temperley, "The O'Connell-Stevenson Contretemps: A Reflection of the Anglo-American Slavery Issue," Journal of Negro History 47, no. 4 (October 1962): 217-233.
94. Between 1830 and 1840, 326 slaves from four American ships were freed in Bermuda or the Bahamas; see Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 102-107, on the diplomatic battles over these emancipations. The British paid compensation only for those freed before 1833. On the 1842-1843 imbroglio over Texas (during which the foreign secretary avowed "the well-known policy and wish of the British Government to abolish slavery everywhere," declaring "abolition in Texas . . . very desirable"),
95. see William Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York, 1990), esp. 355-417.
96. On British efforts in Hawaii, see Merze Tate, "Slavery and Racism as Deterrents to the Annexation of Hawaii, 1854-1855," Journal of Negro History 47, no. 1 (January 1962): 1-18.
97. Fladeland, Men and Brothers, 315.
98. For Anglophobia as a popular phenomenon in the 1830s, see Leonard I. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (London, 1970), 62-71. The abolitionist Arthur Tappan became the "symbol of a well-planned British plot to destroy the American way of life" (65).
99. Regarding the South, the chapter titled "From Anglophobia to New Anglophobia" in Kenneth Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, Md., 1985), illuminates how "traditional Southern anxieties" about England "underwent a slow transformation into a fear of New England and the North" (108), becoming "perhaps the central . . . ingredient in the movement of Southern nationalism" (120).
100. See Craig M. Simpson, A Good Southerner: The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985). The quotation is from an 1842 congressional speech attacking Liberty Party presidential candidate James Birney.
101. New York Times, December 6, 1859,
102. a summary of Wise's address, reprinted from the New-York Herald.
103. For instance, the New York activist Jeremiah Powers said at a January 1860 meeting: "Henry A. Wise . . . when he was speaking of that great man-I mean the nigger, Frederick Douglass-I use the American term-(laughter) . . . he spoke of him as of any other man, because he knew the power of that man's argument, and his ability, and he quailed before it. He said if he had known what vessel Douglass was in he would have gone after him. It would have taken more soldiers than he had in the murder of John Brown to have induced him to have gone after Frederick Douglass. (Great applause.)." Quoted in the Weekly Anglo-African, January 28, 1860.
104. See Joe Bassette Wilkins, Jr., "Window on Freedom: The South's Response to the Emancipation of the Slaves in the British West Indies, 1833-1861" (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1977), on the obsessive interest in Jamaica post-1834.
105. The Christian Recorder, May 12, 1866.
106. The Colored American, May 22, 1841.
107. Frederick Douglass' Paper, August 5, 1853,
108. reprinting an article by "E." in The National Era.
109. For representative uses of this trope, see Charles Lenox Remond's speech at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, The North Star, June 23, 1848;
110. also letter in ibid., August 11, 1848, describing black fugitives in Mercer County, Ohio ("a cheering onward to repose 'under the Mane of the British Lion,' attends");
111. ibid., May 11, 1849, on Madison Washington in Canada, "nestled in the mane of the British Lion";
112. ibid., September 28, 1849, on an "Indignation Meeting" of white abolitionists referring to "the jaws and paws of the British Lion";
113. ibid., April 10, 1851, a letter ("God bless that lion! May her neck grow thick with mane for the slave to settle in");
114. Frederick Douglass' Paper, July 24, 1851, a letter from England ("The American Eagle . . . dares not attempt to seize them beneath the protection of the British Lion");
115. ibid., October 2, 1851, another letter ("the British Lion still promises protection to those unfortunates");
116. ibid., February 12, 1852, an angry letter to the New York Herald, on "why the colored people go to Canada . . . [they] feel themselves secure in life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness under the 'British Lion' ");
117. ibid., September 3, 1852, Douglass in Ontario ("We wished to see the men who . . . found protection in the mane of the British Lion");
118. ibid., October 22, 1852, Douglass at the Massachusetts Free Democratic Convention ("Our citizens are compelled to fly from a Republic to a Monarchy for liberty . . . to the paw of the British Lion");
119. ibid., March 11, 1853, Douglass's roman à clef about Madison Washington of The Creole, "The Heroic Slave, Part II" ("I nestle in the mane of the British lion, protected by his mighty paw");
120. ibid., April 27, 1855, a letter from Australia ("a goodly number of our suffering brethren . . . [have] taken shelter under the lion's paw").
121. Simpson was a well-known black poet who lived in Zanesville, Ohio, where he taught, preached, and ran a store. Vicki L. Eaklor, American Antislavery Songs: A Collection and Analysis (New York, 1988), 367-376, 384-388, 396-397, lists numerous songs about the Canadian refuge, including ten by Simpson, such as "Queen Victoria Conversing with Her Slave Children."
122. Frederick Douglass' Paper, December 14, 1855. Earlier, he baited Mitchel as a "monkey compared to a lion . . . too confident of his power to recognize his inferiority";
123. ibid., April 21, 1854.
124. Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London, 1978), offers the most complete explanation for the waning of abolition and the philanthropic impulse.
125. See R. J. M. Blackett, "Cracks in the Antislavery Wall: Frederick Douglass's Second Visit to England (1859-1860) and the Coming of the Civil War," in Rice and Crawford, Liberating Sojourn, 188-189, on the "disturbing signs of a loss of interest."
126. Liberator, August 13, 1858.
127. "Address of Colored Citizens of Boston to the Prince of Wales, October 18, 1860," quoted in Annie Heloise Abel and Frank J. Klingberg, eds., A Side-Light on Anglo-American Relations, 1839-1858 (Washington, D.C., 1927) , 1 n. 1.
128. See R. J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, La., 2001), on how the anti-slavery consensus fell apart in the face of claims for southern self-determination.
129. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 399.
130. See Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolition as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), with essays by David Brion Davis, Thomas L. Haskell, and John Ashworth;
131. also Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977),
132. and Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1987).
133. Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (Harlow, 2000), 95: "large segments of British public, journalistic and government opinion regarded the famine as a heaven-sent opportunity to stamp out Irish laziness, ingratitude, violence and ignorance."
134. John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England,
135. quoted in Brown, Moral Capital, 8.
136. Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Antislavery Labours in the United States, Canada & England (1855; repr., New York, 1968), 251, 291, 295, 300.
137. Brown, Moral Capital.
138. Matthew Mason, "The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 3 (July 2002): 665-696, demonstrates how battlefield emancipations in 1812-1814 exacerbated the competition to be "standard bearers of human liberation" (666), leading to angry diplomatic exchanges and a pamphlet war over whether England freed slaves at all.
139. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave Trade, 136.
140. Andrew Porter, "Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism, " in Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), 198, 204.
141. Quoted in C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 4: The United States, 1847-1858 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 357.
142. Bender, "Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives," 3.
143. One notes that before the Civil War, the word "state" itself was always capitalized when referring to a specific polity. Smith, Civic Ideals, powerfully historicizes the contested character of citizenship and thus state formation in the early republic, as an antidote to the continuing influence of nationalist histories. See also Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), 163, for the argument that the largest consequence of Reconstruction, "the substance of its historic task," was "asserting the supremacy of the national state" in "an enterprise of national unification."
144. See Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), for an especially acute analysis of this fundamental shift in the direction of slavery hard on the heels of the Revolution.
145. Jay to Birney, April 20, 1840, in Dwight L. Dumond, ed., Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831-1857, 2 vols. (New York, 1966), 1: 559.