Kindling Backfires: Cultivating a National Antislavery Movement, 1836–1838

‘Kindling Backfires’ introduces the reader to a cohort of 70 white abolitionists who could be counted as members of the upwardly mobile, evangelical middle class in the USA of the 1830s. Instead of beginning in 1816 with the rise of the American Colonization Society and other voluntary reform associations, this study focuses on the roughly two-year period of greatest coordinated effort by 70 abolitionist agents to craft a national antislavery movement, 1836–1838. This brief period coincided with the largest expansion in numbers of local societies and enrollment of new members achieved by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS). The limited role of women as agents – and their essential role as the most active of recruits – also receives study. Finally, the myriad forms of opposition to the agency, from rowdy mobs to sexual scandal to national economic recession are plumbed as their cumulative effect compelled the AA-SS to discontinue most of their agents' commissions in late 1837.     

Cape Verde at the End of Atlantic Slavery

This article situates the Cape Verde islands in the last half-century of Atlantic slavery. It concentrates on the final decades of bondage in Cape Verde, abolished selectively in 1857 and in totality in 1878, set within a longer period that began with international conventions prohibiting slave trafficking north of the equator and ended with the imperfect end of Atlantic slavery in the 1880s. Several dynamic forces, I argue, gave the Cape Verde archipelago an outsized role in Atlantic slavery's uneven decline and destruction. Some of these forces – the enforcement of anti-trafficking conventions, British abolitionist activity, the eclipsing of enslaved by free-labour in transatlantic labour flows – should be categorised as local echoes of a larger Atlantic narrative. Yet, in Cape Verde, we also find a dynamic admixture of phenomena – ecological crisis, epidemic disease, the advent of South Atlantic steamship service, experimentations in free soil, and imperial renewal – that projected the archipelago into and onto a wider nineteenth-century world made by enslavement and its destruction.     

Lionel Smith in Barbados, 1833–1836: imperialist and abolitionist rhetoric in emancipation-era Caribbean governance

After 20 years of service in the British Army in India, Sir Lionel Smith, KCB (1777–1842) was appointed Governor of Barbados and Governor General of the Windward Islands in order to enact the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. During his three-year tenure, Smith relied on two major rhetorical strategies to advocate for the rights of free Afro-Barbadians and enslaved/apprenticed people. In general, Smith invoked utilitarian arguments, derived from his experience in India, when presenting free Afro-Barbadian men’s demands for equal voting rights, but also resorted to a more humanitarian mode, characteristic of abolitionist rhetoric, when arguing for judicial system reforms that would benefit enslaved and apprenticed people. This essay analyzes the ways in which Smith’s positions resonated with or diverged from those of the Colonial Office, and from those of Barbadian people of color, based on correspondence with the Colonial Office, including two documents written by free men of color, and one by an apprentice. Although Smith was eager to apply the British colonial policy he experienced in India to the impending social changes in the West Indies, the Colonial Office was not as willing to draw these parallels, responding more enthusiastically to Smith’s use of abolitionist rhetoric.     

Locating Masterframes in History: An Analysis of the Religious Masterframe of the Abolition Movement and its Influence on Movement Trajectory

Abstract Critiqued as being a-historical, current social movement theorists argue for a more dynamic, theoretical model that focuses on processes within historical contexts ( McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, 2001 ). This paper seeks to apply existing social movement theory on framing to the historically, embedded case of the American abolitionist movement. Specifically, this paper analyzes the influence of the adopted religious masterframe of the abolitionist movement on the trajectory of the movement through a case study of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS). Prior to the Civil War, the good versus evil framework encouraged by the religious masterframe effectively mobilized movement followers against slavery. However, with Emancipation and the onset of the muddled political environment of Reconstruction, the religious masterframe no longer resonated well with the changed context or mustered the same degree of support. Attempts to alter the masterframe to a rights-based masterframe compromised the integrity of the movement's framing process. Ultimately, the movement dissolved, unable to remedy their collective action frame with the new political reality.     

Frank Travels: Space,Power and Slave Mobility in the British Leeward Islands,c. 1700–1730

By tracing the regional and trans-Atlantic travels of an enslaved man named Frank, this article examines the relationship between slave mobility, space and power in the British Leeward Islands from 1700 to 1730. Comprising Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, Saint Kitts and several of the Virgin Islands, the British Leewards rest in close proximity to each other. In turn, plantation slaves like Frank lived in a world where acculturation to slavery involved adapting to an archipelagic context. Relying on private letters sent between Frank's plantation manager and his absentee owner, colonial legislation and government correspondence, this article argues that the geography of the Leeward archipelago shaped master–slave relations in the region and, in turn, influenced the ways slaves used their knowledge of the environment as a source of power and even liberation.     

Enlightenment,Scientific Exploration and Abolitionism: Anders Sparrman's and Carl Bernhard Wadström's Colonial Encounters in Senegal, 1787–1788 and the British Abolitionist Movement

By the late eighteenth century, leading British abolitionists credited two Swedish scholars – Anders Sparrman and Carl Bernhard Wadström – with important contributions to the breakthrough of the British abolitionist movement. After witnessing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade during a journey to Senegal, both scholars came to be explicit critics of this trade. In this article, I argue that the two Swedes contributed to the abolitionist cause particularly because of their status as academic scholars. This enabled a science-based rhetoric to complement the sentimental rhetoric of most other abolitionists at the time.     

‘Outcasts from the world’: same-sex sexuality,authority, and belonging in post-emancipation Jamaica

In 1839, Jamaican plantation attorney Alexander Grant sued missionaries John Stainsby and Samuel Oughton for slander; they had accused Grant of ‘lewd and indecent practices’ with enslaved and apprenticed men. Missionaries and abolitionist supporters on one side, and Grant and the plantocracy on the other, used the scandal to challenge their opponents’ suitability to shape post-emancipation society. The trials show that sex – and same-sex sexuality – was central to the contest for social authority. Several freedmen testified that Grant had coerced them into sexual interactions. Grappling with archival silences, the essay considers how the admissions affected their sense of masculinity and communal belonging.     

Slave dealers,women, pregnancy,and abortion: The story of a circassian slave‐girl in mid‐nineteenth century Cairo

Revd Richard Price was one of the leading intellectual lights of Rational Dissent in late eighteenth-century Britain and was prominent in campaigns for religious and parliamentary reform. Hailed as an ‘Apostle of Liberty’ by the American and French Revolutionaries, Price was also an early subscriber to the Abolition Society in London. While prominent among British Enlightenment figures he had, however, a low profile as an abolitionist and is seldom mentioned in scholarship on abolition. This study discusses the nature of Price's antislavery and his relationship with Americans such as Thomas Jefferson. It sheds more light on the degree to which the emergence of abolitionism depended upon circumstances and how well it combined with other aims and priorities.     

Review essay - The Road to 1848: Interpreting French Anti-Slavery

Author: JENNINGS, LAWRENCE C.; French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848; Author: KIELSTRA, PAUL MICHAEL; The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-48     

‘Book don’t feed our children’: Nonconformist missionaries and the British and Foreign School Society in the development of elementary education in the British West Indies before and after emancipation

This study examines the ways in which Nonconformist missionaries joined with the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) to provide elementary instruction to enslaved and emancipated children in the nineteenth-century British West Indies. Using predominantly untapped historical sources from the BFSS archive’s newly catalogued West Indian collection, this article seeks to address a long-standing historiographic gap regarding the pedagogic methods and practices employed by Nonconformist missionaries in the British Caribbean. In so doing, it highlights the combined impact that local conditions and global currents of missionary and educational fervour had on establishing an effective elementary system during the emancipation era.     

So bad,so good: Slavery in the Southern United States

Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia. BETTY WOOD. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995. x. 247 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). ISBN 1–878822–37–3; ISBN 0–8203–1667–9.

Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South. Edited by LARRY E. HUDSON, Jr. Rochester, NY, University of Rochester Press, 1994. xiii, 241pp. $19.95. ISBN 1–878822–38–1.     

Responding to Empire: Liberal Nationalism and Imperial Decline in Scotland and Québec1

Abstract This article emphasises the role of empire in explaining the emergence of “liberal nationalism” in Scotland and Québec in the early twentieth century. That period witnessed a relative decline in the British Empire's geopolitical standing. In response British governments implemented policies which sought to redress its decline. The article focuses on three policies – the South African War, tariff reform and imperial defence – and the response of the Young Scots' Society and the self‐ascribed Nationalistes. Both groups espoused a “liberal nationalism”. Yet their liberal nationalism was expressed differently: emphasis was placed on “liberal” in Scotland, and on “nationalism” in Québec, reflecting contrasting relationships with empire.     

The New Slave Narrative and the Illegibility of Modern Slavery

This paper argues that the first-person narratives of human trafficking that have been published since 1991 should be considered as the reemergence of the slave narrative. The paper outlines the contours of the slave narrative's revival, suggesting that the genre found fertile ground in the 1990s and 2000s through a confluence of diverse cultural forces – reinvigorated abolitionist advocacy, heightened public fluency in the discourses of slavery and rights, an expanded media terrain that encourages first-person testimony and post-9/11 cultural anxieties. This environment promoted the development of survivor testimony that would act as ‘flesh and blood' examples of the largely hidden and illegible human rights violation of modern slavery. Slave narrators face a crisis of legibility resulting from public scepticism regarding modern slavery, but what emerges from the public requirements for evidence is a generic tendency against the voyeuristic demands for the bodily detail and towards narrative strategies of displacement that direct attention towards external authorities and experiences. These strategies allow survivors to maintain control over their exposure in their life narratives, and thereby revise and interrogate the spectacular expectations promoted by many human rights projects.     

Slave Suicide,Abolition and the Problem of Resistance

Shifting calculations about the political palatability of representing slave suicide in American abolitionist print culture reveal the extent to which debates about agency, power and consent – and thus about self-destruction – lay at the heart of that new nation's struggle over the future of slavery. Was a slave's suicide an act of principled resistance to tyranny that challenged the hypocrisy of the revolutionary settlement? Or was it a measure of abject victimhood that begged for humanitarian intervention? That representations of black suicide oscillated so dramatically between these opposing interpretive frameworks testifies to deep divides between moderates and militants, and between whites and blacks, as to who had the power to bring slavery to its knees.     

Peter's War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution

The emergence of the British abolitionist movement has often been conceived as a direct response to the trauma of the American Revolutionary War. There is little evidence that the British public embraced abolitionism as a response to such a loss – either politically, culturally or psychologically. On the contrary, British anti-slavery mobilisation against the slave trade emerged and flourished in moments of national optimism and confidence. It is therefore as important to understand the contextual pressures that operated in accounting for the emergence of this powerful political movement as it is to understand the motives and methods of its entrepreneurs.     

Brésil: Quatre siècles d'esclavage. Nouvelles questions,nouvelles recherches

This essay stresses the importance of the humoural medical tradition and its lay reiterations in popular eighteenth-century British works on slavery, abolition and illness. In particular, it examines the popular medical concept of ‘seasoning’ and how contemporaries applied it to enslaved African bodies. Seasoning became a common talking point during the British abolition debate as both sides stressed different aspects of humoural theory to make their arguments. While numerous historians have used seasoning as an analytical term to explore the impact of movement on the enslaved, this essay rehabilitates its historical medical meaning and traces how abolition politics affected that meaning.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviewed in this article Reply to David McNamari's review of School Organisation and Pupil Irwolvement The Child's Right to Play by Arvid Bengtsson Poverty, Inequality and Class Structure edited by Dorothy Wedderburn Elites and Power in British Society edited by P. Stanvrorth and A. Giddens Research into Retailing and Distribution edited by D. Thorpe Public Housing in Europe and America edited by J. S. Fuerst Fact in Fiction: The Use of Literature in the Systematic Study of Society by Joan Rockwell Nursing in Contemporary Society by Una Madean The First Shop Stewards' Movement by James Hinton Pitmen, Preachers and Politics: The Effects of Methodism in a Durham Mining Community by Robert Moore Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society: Selected Writings edited with an Introduction by Robert N. Bellah Deviance and Social Control edited by Pajil Rock and Mary Mclntosh Traditiondtism, Conservatism and British Political Culture by Bob Jessop The Intemationd Urban Crisis by Thomas L. Blair Black Migrants: White Natives by Daniel Lawrence The Family: An Introducton by J. Ross Eshleman     

A usable body: coaxing the body into and out of captivity at the museum

The visual logic of ‘black’ identity as a social and historical fact is presented at museums depicting the transformation of enslaved Africans to racial citizens. I focus on the work of the body in narrating this transition at a black history museum: the historical object on display – the captive African and later the US citizen – and the imagined visitor moving through the physical space of the museum. I consider the visual treatment of the enslaved body in captivity as broken, bowed, beaten and often nude in contrast to the post-abolition period when the body is positioned as erect, individuated, self-possessed and always clothed. I also discuss how the imagined visitor’s body is oriented both to the narratives on display and to the built environment of the museum itself.     

‘When he gets among his Countrymen,they tell him that he is free’: Slave Trade Abolition,Indentured Africans and a Royal Commission

The 1807 Act to abolish the British slave trade determined that those Africans seized by the British navy from illegally operating slave ships would be enlisted into the armed forces or indentured for a maximum of 14 years. In 1821, a Royal Commission was sent to the West Indies to investigate the ‘state’ and ‘condition’ of those Africans who had been indentured under the Act. This article focuses on the work of the Commission – as it became riven by a personal and political dispute – in Tortola. It pays particular attention to the testimonies of the indentured Africans documented in the records. Their dissident narratives further disrupted the inquiry as they refused to answer to either redemptive abolitionism or instrumental political economy – the overlapping discourses framing the ways in which alternatives to enslaved labour were conceptualised during the 1820s.