Freedom Burning

Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain

Richard Huzzey

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801451089
• eBook ISBN: 9780801465376
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

After Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1834, Victorians adopted a creed of "anti-slavery" as a vital part of their national identity and sense of moral superiority to other civilizations. The British government used diplomacy, pressure, and violence to suppress the slave trade, while the Royal Navy enforced abolition worldwide and an anxious public debated the true responsibilities of an anti-slavery nation. This crusade was far from altruistic or compassionate, but Richard Huzzey argues that it forged national debates and political culture long after the famous abolitionist campaigns of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson had faded into memory. These anti-slavery passions shaped racist and imperialist prejudices, new forms of coerced labor, and the expansion of colonial possessions.In a sweeping narrative that spans the globe, Freedom Burning explores the intersection of philanthropic, imperial, and economic interests that underlay Britain's anti-slavery zeal— from London to Liberia, the Sudan to South Africa, Canada to the Caribbean, and the British East India Company to the Confederate States of America. Through careful attention to popular culture, official records, and private papers, Huzzey rewrites the history of the British Empire and a century-long effort to end the global trade in human lives.

1

An Anti-Slavery Nation

Dispel the blue haze,
Golden fountain of morn!
With meridian blaze
The wide ocean adorn!
The sunlight has touched thy glad shores, Caribee!
And day now illumines the Isles of the Free!

DAWN ON the morning of 1 August 1834 brought a kind of freedom to the enslaved women, men, and children of the British West Indies. As the sun rose, the Emancipation Act of the previous year made them free—legally free, at least. Patriotic prose, images, and poetry depicted the dawn of their freedom. Composed by the anti-slavery publisher Josiah Conder, the above lines are typical of the celebration and self-satisfaction expressed by British abolitionists, politicians, and newspapermen. The “meridian blaze” of liberty had finally drenched the sugar colonies in light and warmth equal to the midday sun, he believed.1 Contemporaries understood emancipation as the climax of a spasmodic fifty-year campaign by humanitarian reformers who had skillfully mobilized popular support by means of petitions, consumer boycotts, and political pressure on the House of Commons. In 1807 the slave trade had been abolished, but emancipation in the sugar colonies waited until the 1830s, following further public agitation.

What happened to Britain’s enthusiasm for anti-slavery after this celebrated emancipation? This book argues that it did not collapse in the face of Victorian racism, imperialism, or indifference, even if the contradictions, hypocrisies, and shortcomings of British anti-slavery became more visible and so presented an image of decline. This chapter and the next will show how variety and diversity hid, in plain sight, the breadth of anti-slavery sentiment in Victorian culture. Within British society, anti-slavery could be claimed or rejected as a relevant precedent for particular reform movements depending on what individual Briton assumed “anti-slavery” to entail. Moreover, anti-slavery ideas shaped the use and abuse of British power by successive governments, who deployed unequalled force to establish a world free from slavery. Such a world was morally and materially desirable, though Britons disagreed enormously over how, when, and why their nation should act to promote anti-slavery. In the midst of these conflicts, anti-slavery policies favoring imperial expansion triumphed, and I shall explain why anti-slavery ideology failed to halt—and indeed encouraged—hardening attitudes toward Africans’ racial capacity and political sovereignty. A basic consensus against slavery broke down on the particulars of almost any practical question; this being the case, why did certain answers triumph over others?

An attempt to understand and explain anti-slavery politics does not mean a simplistic search for moral condemnation or vindication. Rather, the relationship between anti-slavery and imperial power helps explain Victorian foreign and colonial policies as well as the context of domestic politics, revealing why particular interpretations of anti-slavery triumphed and others did not. The bulk of historical research on British anti-slavery concludes before Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837 and so ignores this question. Historians have pored over the popular and parliamentary campaigns that made this freedom possible and have begun to document the human experience of enslaved Africans in the middle passage. Scholars have also examined the realities of life for black freed people in the West Indies and the gross injustices they continued to suffer after the legal abolition of slavery. Africanists have recovered the history of a continent from the perspective of its indigenous peoples, slowly uncovering the human experiences that lie behind the silences and assumptions of Western sources.2 A focus on the legacies of anti-slavery enthusiasm that framed British attitudes comes at a cost. The voices of Africans and the enslaved appear only fleetingly because they were largely excluded from British politics and policymaking—the notable exceptions being black abolitionists lecturing in Britain and those Africans whose actions disrupted the best-laid plans of the colonizers.

Linda Colley has suggested that “abolitionism became one of the vital underpinnings of British supremacy in the Victorian era” but historians have largely focused on explaining the motives for abolition and emancipation rather than the implications afterward.3 Freedom Burning charts the political conflicts that emerged over what it meant to be an anti-slavery nation in a world where slavery still openly existed and investigates exactly what this “supremacy” meant (and whose supremacy it was). This uncertainty meant that there was more than a little “blue haze” over what was required for “the Isles of the Free” in the years after Conder’s 1834 poem had heralded the “golden fountain of morn”.

The era can be viewed as a period of anti-slavery decline—a decline indicated by the fading influence of anti-slavery societies, by the rise of racial thinking, by the stirrings of imperialism, and by the apathy of many Britons toward the cause of the North in the American Civil War. This has been the dominant view of historians, who have located the dotage and decline of British anti-slavery sentiment in the first decade of Victoria’s reign, as fratricide replaced crusade.4 However, judging the health of anti-slavery sympathies from the institutional survival of abolitionist organizations is a mistake. There was nothing as cohesive as an “anti-slavery movement” in Victorian Britain. A broader examination of society is reveals that organizations such as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) represented only a portion of anti-slavery opinion.

Historical research has slowly begun to pick apart the complex network of interests and agendas that made up the “anti-slavery movement” before 1834 and to understand it as a shifting patchwork of alliances.5 A focus on anti-slavery societies distorts the fate of anti-slavery ideas after West Indian emancipation; if the abolitionist societies were in decline, it does not follow that British anti-slavery sentiment was necessarily in decline too. To study the history of free trade after 1846 through the institutional fate of Britain’s Anti-Corn Law League would strike historians as very curious. Doing the equivalent for the history of anti-slavery is looking for signs of life in all the wrong places.6 A national abolitionist society was no longer the principal vehicle for anti-slavery ideas. Instead, it was an era of anti-slavery pluralism, and it was no longer obvious which policies best advanced the nation’s opposition to slavery.

Unless, like Victorians, we wish to reserve the epithet “anti-slavery” for some favored methods and techniques, it makes sense to take seriously anti-slavery in all its chaotic and pluralist forms. As historian Howard Temperley notes, the epithet “abolitionist” could also apply to “a host of individuals and groups—for example those British Ministers, government officials and naval personnel who gave their energies (and sometimes their lives too) in the struggle against slavery.” He is right to invoke a metaphor that the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson described in his 1808 history of slave-trade abolition. In his youth, Clarkson saw diverse campaigners as tributaries uniting in a great anti-slavery river, cascading toward a sea of freedom. Clarkson lived long enough to see British anti-slavery sentiment split, after 1833, from one river into numerous estuaries, streams, and puddles, muddily emptying into quite different destinations (although he would have found it too painful to adapt his metaphor to reflect this fact).7 This diversity should not blind us to the continued influence of anti-slavery ideology in Victorian Britain.

“Ideology” is a key term here—and one that refers to the family of ideas regarding the wrongfulness of slavery. Describing anti-slavery as an ideology recognizes the variety of opinions, methods, and definitions that could be accommodated around a core set of beliefs. Before 1834, antipathy toward slavery had transformed into anti-slavery as a political idea pursued through legal intervention. Differences and nuances could be contained beneath the wider, unifying world view of opposing the ownership of human beings—an ideology of anti-slavery. Rather like a solar system or an atom, an ideology has a core orbited by different bodies of ideas and practices.8 Ideologies are therefore “imaginative maps drawing together facts that themselves may be disputed. They are collectively produced and collectively consumed, though the latter happens in unpredictable ways, and that collective nature makes them public property.”9 This approach works well for Victorian anti-slavery, where opposition to the ownership of humans was the core of the ideology, but there could be disagreements over the racial equality or inequality of Africans to Europeans, the use of tariff barriers to promote free labor, or the morality of compensating slaveholders for emancipation. Groups of anti-slavery supporters, approaching the question of chattel bondage from varied perspectives, assumed different collections of beliefs. Anti-slavery was, however, a coherent ideology insofar as it saw the social norm of slavery as inimical to the national good (be that good defined by prosperity, godliness, or honor).10 This “ideology” is therefore distinguished from both the rigor of a single political philosophy and the autonomy of a particular idea; it is instead a belief system for viewing the world.

If such scholarly theorizing seems foreign to the past we are considering, it should not do so. In 1872, Bartle Frere, a colonial official and anti-slavery advocate, used a similar metaphor when he regretted that “many atoms, and very influential atoms” would “tell you all these new fangled theories” of race. He remarked, however, that among the public a more generous, traditional attitude to anti-slavery remained.11 Frere’s model was a little simplistic, as many people—including himself—combined anti-slavery sentiment with racial prejudices, even when they did not subscribe to pessimistic scientific theories. Still, what matters here is his attention to the ways that issues such as race could cut across anti-slavery (as he defined it); he described society as clusters of beliefs. His atomic metaphor is useful, since it lends itself to understanding how Britons could find themselves allies in one anti-slavery controversy and enemies in another.

Therefore, “anti-slavery” can be defined as opposition to slavery rather than as the particular policy prescriptions or methods of any one faction. Before August 1834, anti-slavery campaigners operated successfully despite a wide range of expectations, methods, and purposes. Without any clear agenda to unite strands of anti-slavery opinion in the Victorian period, differences became more obvious. A brief study of events between emancipation and Victoria’s coronation on 28 June 1838 will help explain why.

DIVISION AND DIVERSITY

On the day of West Indian emancipation, the London-based Anti-Slavery Society instructed the British public that “a day of such vast moment to the welfare of one part of the empire, and to the honour of the whole, ought not to pass unnoticed.”12 In the glow of victory it was possible for abolitionists to forget their internal disagreements over whether it was right that planters received £20 million in financial compensation and freed people suffered a period of compulsory work.13 These disputes set aside, on the evening of emancipation day the anti-slavery elite gathered for a feast in Freemasons’ Tavern to toast their success. Beyond self-satisfaction, neither the parliamentary leaders of the emancipation struggle nor the British public at large had any great sense of what an anti-slavery nation should do next; the Anti-Slavery Society had no plan to rally support for abolitionist movements in Europe or the Americas.

A group of radical campaigners calling themselves the Agency Society differed from their elders and betters on this, and they would become a leading force in the Victorian BFASS. Frustrated with the caution of parliamentary leaders such as Thomas Fowell Buxton, these men had declared independence from the Anti-Slavery Society in the summer of 1832, wanting to pursue more vigorous agitation against pro-slavery MPs seeking reelection.14 It is debatable whether “an Antislavery House [was] returned by an Antislavery public for the first time” in the 1832 elections thanks to them, as some members claimed.15 However, members of the Agency Society certainly were far more focused than their Anti-Slavery Society collaborators in seeking a new cause after the death of West Indian slavery. In February 1834, six months before the emancipation celebrations, they had reorganized themselves as the British and Foreign Society for the Universal Abolition of Negro Slavery and the Slave Trade. This new group intended to support abolitionist groups abroad and advance the cause of global emancipation. They were mostly campaigners who, unlike the anti-slavery establishment, rejected patience and compromise with the government’s cautious ministers in the early 1830s.16

Differences over the speed or nature of anti-slavery policies originated in the abolition and emancipation campaigns. A majority vote for the 1833 Emancipation Act represented both more and less than it first seems. On the one hand, for all the measure’s timidity and uncertainty, debate in Parliament reflected a change in how slavery could be discussed by British politicians. Even those who opposed an act for immediate emancipation had grudgingly adopted the language of anti-slavery. The Tory Sir Robert Peel insisted, during the emancipation debate, that his gradualism was founded on a desire to avoid “the grave responsibility of having, by a precipitate attempt to ameliorate the condition of our own slaves, aggravated the hardships of those who were exposed to a more bitter fate in other parts of the world.” Acting too quickly could lead to disaster, discrediting amelioration and emancipation, he suggested. Peel felt able to criticize the emancipation bill only in t...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Prologue
• 1. An Anti-Slavery Nation
• 2. Uncle Tom’s Britain
• 3. The Anti-Slavery State
• 4. Britons’ Unreal Freedom
• 5. Power, Prosperity, and Liberty
• 6. Africa Burning
• 7. The Anti-Slavery Empire
• 8. Ideologies of Freedom
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography