Read The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Online
Authors: David Brion Davis
Tags: #History, #United States, #19th Century, #Social History, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #Slavery
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (54 page)
In short, the slave was “a mere thing”:
—a human brute, dragged down from the condition of a man and ranked with the brute creation. Were there any such in this country? No—not one (hear). They had their rags and their poverty, their hard toiling for a subsistence, as also they had in the Northern states of America, but they had not slavery (cheers). No man could assert over another the right of property—he was free to act—free to go and free to come; but the slave was bound in unending chains—he could not improve, progress was annihilated with him.
Despite his reassuring words about opposing all forms of tyranny and oppression (and, as we will see, he supported and lectured with various Chartists), Douglass’s analysis of American chattel slavery and his protest against extending the concept of slavery to British forms of labor implied some support for the British status quo. According to Douglass,
ignorance
of the true evils of American chattel
slavery prevented many good-hearted Britons from understanding that there was no more similarity between
British and American systems of labor than “between light and darkness.” Britain, in his view, had not only succeeded in emancipating their colonial slaves, but British workers were free from owners intent on their total dehumanization; they were free to act or to come and go as they wished. Though
Douglass ignored crucial aspects of British “
wage slavery,” the audience seemed to approve with “cheers.” Douglass’s long lecture, like a somewhat later one in Sheffield that made similar points, ended with “long-continued cheering” or “much applause”
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There is much conflicting evidence regarding working-class and radical
reform group support for British abolitionists, and this question fits into a long-term past debate among historians over the degree to which abolitionism stimulated and reinforced domestic reform or provided “moral capital” for the ruling classes, unintentionally diverting attention from domestic issues like “wage slavery.” In briefly examining this issue, which provides the larger context for Douglass’s efforts to differentiate chattel slavery from other types of oppression, it is essential to draw a distinction between the period after 1830 in Britain, which was marked by domestic turbulence and a protracted public struggle for a variety of political and economic rights, and the earlier conservative decades, beginning in the late 1790s, when British leaders were obsessed with the radical
French Revolution and
Napoleonic Wars. For
William Wilberforce, James
Stephen, and the other “Saints” and government leaders who succeeded in abolishing the slave trade and moving toward very gradualist antislavery policies, it was essential to maintain a sharp distinction between the evils of the colonial slave world and the ostensibly free institutions that had been imperiled both by French tyranny and English “Jacobins.” The constant comparisons in early abolitionist literature between the agony of black slaves and the smiling, contented life of English “husbandmen” was not fortuitous. Abolitionists repeatedly reminded Britons that the
Somerset decision of 1772 had outlawed slavery in England.
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There was clearly a dramatic change in the 1830s, especially following the Reform Act of 1832 and the harsh New
Poor Law of 1834, as numerous progressive organizations tried to copy the techniques of the incredibly successful abolition movement. Pamphlets, broadsides, and petitions for various causes often included some words opposing slavery or apprenticeship, although antislavery publications seldom
reciprocated. Historians
Betty Fladeland and
Seymour Drescher long ago provided conclusive evidence of strong ties between British abolitionism and movements to expand suffrage, aid the poor, and reduce the hours of workers, especially children, in factories.
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But even Fladeland acknowledges that in the early decades of the nineteenth century abolitionists were “constant targets of the radical press,” which portrayed abolitionist leaders as “pious hypocrites who wrung their hands over the plight of far-off black slaves while at home they eased their consciences by supplying the poor with Bibles instead of bread.”
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Fladeland begins a different essay, which emphasizes the later strong links between abolitionists and
Chartists, by stressing that a reader of workingmen’s newspapers and journals for the 1820s and 1830s “might easily conclude that the working classes’ worst enemies were the members of anti-slavery societies who were dedicated to freeing black slaves in far-off colonies while being blindly insensitive to the exploitation of white workers at home.” Historian
Patricia Hollis argues that from 1823 to the 1840s, “the abolitionist cause attracted little working-class support, much working-class indifference, and considerable working-class hostility.” She adds that “the major labor reform leaders,
William Cobbett,
Richard Oastler, and
Bronterre O’Brien, [despite their opposition to slavery], all excoriated abolitionists as hypocrites, indifferent to poverty and suffering at home…[who] financed their philanthropy abroad by increasing the exploitation of their white ‘slaves’ at home.” From one radical perspective, Britain’s traditional abolitionists sought to impose a Christian, moralistic ethic upon black slaves who would merely be converted into more servile
wage slaves in a capitalist society. Such abolitionists were said to be guilty not only of ignoring the worse plight of British “wage slaves,” but of philosophically and even politically supporting the domestic status quo, a fact dramatized by the well-known emancipationists who supported the incredibly oppressive 1834
Poor Law, which separated family members within the new workhouses.
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This prejudice against certain aspects of the traditional antislavery movement gave added justification to the Chartists’ widespread efforts to raid, disrupt, and take over abolitionist meetings. Following the large-scale armed
rebellion at Newport in 1839, which led to the government’s arrest of hundreds of Chartists, three of whom were convicted of high treason and sentenced to death (later commuted
to transportation for life), the group adopted a policy of attending and interrupting public gatherings of many kinds, ranging from meetings of parish churches to those of the
Anti-
Corn Law League, in attempts to focus public attention on the plight of the poor and disfranchised. But, given their major desire to build on the successful abolitionist
movement, Chartists were especially eager to interrupt and gain some control over such abolitionist meetings as the
Glasgow Emancipation Society in 1840 and the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. These struggles to obtain resolutions on “wage slavery” and manhood suffrage involved bitter disputes and nearly violent confrontations.
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When William Lloyd Garrison came to Britain to attend the 1840 World Convention, he was horrified by the terrible condition of the poor and the oppressive character of a monarchical, aristocratic society, but he was also deeply troubled by the Chartist efforts “to take violent possession of meetings convened expressly for anti-slavery purposes, and to transform their character and design.” As Garrison wrote in
The
Liberator,
“In their struggle to obtain those rights and privileges which belong to them as men, and of which they are now ruthlessly deprived, I sympathize with all my heart, and wish them a speedy and complete victory!” But the Chartists’ behavior at the antislavery meetings “is both dastardly and criminal, and certainly most unwise and impolitic for themselves.”
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Despite these reservations, Garrison’s relations with the Chartist movement in 1840 and 1846 shed light on the ways that Frederick Douglass’s desire to maintain and preserve the unique evil of
chattel slavery could be combined with efforts to relieve the suffering and degradation of other oppressed peoples. In a speech in Glasgow in 1840, Garrison anticipated Douglass’s defense of the unique evil of American chattel slavery:
Although he expressed sympathy for oppressed labor, he insisted that there was a basic and essential difference between a so-called white slave and a real black slave—the difference between oppression and slavery. Whereas the white laborer may be impoverished and exploited, he nevertheless had freedom to work for his employer or to seek work elsewhere. The slave had to do his master’s bidding or suffer the consequences—perhaps even death itself.
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Yet Garrison called for the support of Chartist goals, though in 1840 he was surprised to find little support for the movement. For the first time Garrison was struck by the way narrow-minded abolitionists ignored the suffering and degradation of British workers, and by the fact that “nine-tenths of mankind are living in squalid poverty and abject servitude in order to sustain in idleness and profligacy the one-tenth!” If England “
looked
beautiful,” he told
Samuel J. May upon his return, it was “sitting on a volcano,” as evidenced by the anger evoked by the Chartists.
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When Garrison entered the chapel in Glasgow to speak to a large audience assembled by the Glasgow Emancipation Society, a Chartist handed him a placard entitled “
Have we no white slaves?”
and signed “A WHITE SLAVE.” Garrison put it in his pocket and resolved to read it to the meeting, without even consulting his close friend George Thompson, who introduced him, who led the British wing of Garrisonians, and who in 1842 publicly joined the Chartists. After first emphasizing that “not a single
white
SLAVE can be found” in all the possessions of Great Britain, Garrison went on to ask whether it was not true that there were thousands of British workers both at home and abroad “who are deprived of their just rights—who are grievously oppressed—who are dying, even in the midst of abundance, of actual starvation?” After the audience shouted “YES!” he called on British abolitionists to prove themselves the true friends of suffering humanity abroad “by showing that they were the best friends of suffering humanity at home.” But when he asked whether the abolitionists were in fact carrying out this dual obligation, the response from various parts of the chapel was “No! no! no!” Garrison then expressed deep regret, a hope that this was not true “of all of them,” and gave his reasons for reading the Chartist placard signed “A White Slave.” This support for Chartist goals was then later interrupted by a well-known Chartist from the audience who outraged the audience by trying to make a speech. Garrison wrote that “I, for one, should have had no objection to his being heard; yet he was clearly out of order, and had no just cause to complain of the meeting.”
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Six years later, when Garrison returned to Britain and often spoke in company with Douglass, he sent his wife an account of his addressing a large meeting of “
Moral Suasion Chartists” (also called Moral Force Chartists, as opposed to
Physical Force Chartists), who responded with thunderous and protracted applause that “made
the building quake” and “adopted by acclamation a highly flattering resolution.” Since he did not appear in his “official capacity as an abolitionist,” Garrison felt free to fully identify himself with “all the unpopular reformatory movements in this country,” even if that would alienate some “good society folks.” As he talked to “the workingmen of England,” he knew “that the cause of my enslaved countrymen cannot possibly be injured by my advocacy of the rights of all men, or by my opposition to all tyranny.”
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In retrospect, it appears that the earlier great success of the British antislavery movement depended first on a concentrated focus on the British slave trade, then on emancipating British colonial slaves and apprentices. However, by the late 1830s, when antislavery had permeated British culture, the government was intensifying its efforts to end the international slave trade and some abolitionists had turned not only to global slavery but to domestic oppression of various kinds, a development that foreshadowed the delayed concerns over all forms of coerced labor that arose after the complete outlawing of chattel slavery in the Americas in 1888 and then, aided by the
United Nations in 1962, in the world.
We have already taken note of Joseph Sturge, the wealthy
Quaker
corn merchant and abolitionist leader who probably best dramatizes the later connections between antislavery and radical reform. Having supported a variety of causes as a young man, Sturge in effect retired from work before age forty and devoted his full time to antislavery, temperance, adult education, abolishing the Corn Laws, ending capital punishment, advocating universal manhood suffrage, and aiding the poor in his home city of
Birmingham. In London he was instrumental in founding and managing the
World Anti-Slavery Conventions of 1840 and 1843; he traveled to the
West Indies and testified before parliamentary committees as part of the successful campaign to abolish apprenticeship; and in 1841 he even toured the United States, wanting especially to reinvigorate Quaker antislavery activity and promote more unity among the divided American abolitionists. With respect to the effects of political democracy, Sturge was
impressed by the relative comfort and prosperity of America’s white workers. After being rebuffed by proslavery president
John Tyler, he sent a protest to every member of Congress.
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But it was in 1838 that the
British
abolitionists’ final triumph of ending apprenticeship coincided with the founding of the radical Chartist movement. As the Chartists fought for universal male suffrage—some of them threatening violence, partly in response to violent government repression—they drew constant analogies between the condition of British laborers and chattel slaves. Though totally committed to pacifism and nonviolence,
Sturge supported and worked with the Chartists, believing that universal male
voting provided the key to solving the larger problem of class discrimination and oppression.
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