Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray, and: The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray, and: The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield Padraic X. Scanlan (bio) Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles, by Hannah-Rose Murray; pp. xvi + 372. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £47.99, $61.99. The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865, by J. R. Oldfield; pp. xiii + 210. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020, £24.99, $54.99. "I am hardly black enough," Frederick Douglass wrote to a friend in 1846, during a speaking tour of the United Kingdom, "for British taste" (qtd. in Murray 140). Douglass, famously the most photographed person in the nineteenth century, understood that he needed to curate his image carefully for overwhelmingly white British audiences. Many Britons were patriotic abolitionists, finding in the end of the British slave trade in 1807 and of colonial slavery in most of the British empire in 1834 incontrovertible evidence of British moral superiority and imperial virtue. At the same time, Victorian ideas of "civilization" and of Britain's obligation to spread it throughout the colonized world placed white Britons at the pinnacle of an imagined racial and cultural hierarchy. Two new books on abolitionism, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray and The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield, use the transatlantic culture of antislavery that Black American lecturers in Britain exemplified to explore the relationship between Britain after the end of slavery in the Caribbean and the United States before the Civil War. Murray's work attends carefully and thoughtfully to the forms of self-presentation and rhetorical strategies that Black orators on tour adopted to reach their audiences. Oldfield's book offers new insights into the internal organization and material culture of mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American abolitionism. However, where Murray shows how and why Black Americans flattered British audiences to make their arguments, Oldfield is content—much like British audiences in the 1840s and 1850s—to take that flattery at face value. Advocates of Freedom is rooted in archives assembled as part of an impressive effort, led by Murray, to collect, catalogue, and map itineraries followed by Black American activists and lecturers in Britain from the mid-1830s to the turn of the twentieth century. Building [End Page 309] support among the British public for American abolition required, Murray argues, a careful rhetorical strategy of "adaptive resistance" (7). Black activists who visited Britain turned to their advantage the wearying experience of being unable to avoid seeing representations of themselves in a culture grounded in white supremacy. Black Americans understood the successes of British abolition, but also its limits. British imperial emancipation, as Eric Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), was incomplete. Slavery made capitalism in the eighteenth-century British empire. The antislavery movement succeeded as British capitalists and their representatives in Parliament came to prefer free trade and exploitative wage labor to imperial protection for Caribbean sugar and enslaved labor. Enslaved people led three major rebellions in the British empire in the decades before emancipation: in Barbados in 1816, in British Guiana in 1823, and in Jamaica over Christmas and New Year's Day in 1831–32. Each rebellion was influenced by British antislavery; enslaved rebels believed that British troops would come to their aid against the colonial slaveholding elite and help them to claim freedom and land. But to many abolitionist leaders in Britain, and particularly to William Wilberforce, these rebellions were scandalous. The path to emancipation in the British empire—as opposed to revolutionary Haiti, for example—was supposed to be gradual and preserve imperial power in the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. As Murray puts it, British antislavery folded into a Victorian "ideology that focused on (white) and Western principles of civilization, reform and morality." Britain was "a nation defined by liberty" whose sacrifices had "heroically bestowed freedom upon the enslaved" (50). Black American orators and performers had to balance what Murray calls "assimilation...