Atlantic Affinities

Abstract

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.