The American Abolitionist Movement and Contacts with the Caribbean - Essay Example

The American Abolitionist Movement and Contacts with the Caribbean What are the American abolitionists’ views on emancipation for the ex-Caribbean slave? Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men even worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites… Years have passed away since then… In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem… The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. W.E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk In his widely celebrated speech in 1844, honoring the slavery’s abolition in the British West Indies, Ralph Waldo Emerson placed emphasis on America’s refusal to think about the repercussions of slavery. He asked, oratorically, “What if it cost a few unpleasant scenes on the coast of Africa?” In the Americas, the consequences of slavery could be sidestepped or ignored by people in the North, provided that the goods produced through slavery, such as tobacco, coffee, and sugar, were outstanding or of high quality. But the Caribbean had been very much of a boon for the slave-owners of America, and was barely fully isolated from the United States to ignore. As highlighted by Edward Rugemer at the beginning of his pursuit of the Caribbean bases of American abolitionism, “the United States was never a self-contained entity moved solely by the internal dynamics of American society… [it] was firmly embedded in an Anglo-Atlantic world that transcended the political boundaries of nation-states.” Without a doubt, the borders of America were naturally penetrable, allowing an entry of people, knowledge and, gradually, abolitionist sentiments alongside the trading circulation that connected the British West Indies’ colonies to the U.S. Such strengthened an intercontinental standpoint initially based on the slave trade, but it shifted toward disagreements over abolition of slavery by the 1830s. For that reason, any effort to understand the advent of the Civil War cannot separate the inner realities of political discourse and abolitionist tension in America from their wider intercontinental perspective; the American people of the 19th century could not sidestep the repercussions of abolitionist movement in the West Indies. As Rugemer argues, “White America’s problem with black emancipation had Caribbean roots”. American abolitionists could glance over the Atlantic for a perfect example of how to effectively mobilize against slavery. British abolitionists joined up in 1833 and worked together to make legal reforms that demanded progressive emancipation in the Caribbean slave colonies of Great Britain happen. This event was sufficient to motivate American abolitionists to convene in 1833 in Philadelphia and establish the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). American abolitionist did not merely regard the British West Indies as an example of emancipation; several of them relocated there to achieve the social order they could not yet build in their own society. The firsthand accounts the missionaries wrote disclose the core ideas of American evangelical abolitionism, views expressed in their duty to post-emancipation Jamaica. Evangelical abolitionists in the U.S. held the belief that churches must reprimand, correct, and control immoral slave-owners, and the abolitionist ‘come outers’ abandoned religious associations and churches that declined to prohibit slave-owners from their hierarchies. Religious connections had also unified American abolitionists with black revolutionaries because they held in common a dedication to uprightness, goodness, and morals, even though, as James Brewer Stewart has claimed, they advocated racial enrichment efforts for somewhat different justifications. A stronger attack on slavery developed from the millenarian and revolutionary sectors of Protestantism in the 17th and 18th centuries. Nearly all these groups condemned slavery, yet the most traditional of them, the Quakers, had been profoundly engaged in slavery in the Americas. The internal conflict between their traditions, practices, and beliefs pushed the Quakers to assault slavery in the 1770s. Ultimately, even the economic defenses of slavery began to be questioned. Adam Smith, in his book The Wealth of Nations, proclaimed that slavery was a relic or leftover in modern society and unable to outdo or surpass free labor. In the Caribbean, which was a slave society governed by the master class, the transition toward freedom occurred at a gradual way. Protestant organizations, which were quite successful in the English abolitionist campaign, were also crucial in the U.S. However, the early drive of these movements disintegrated itself in the emancipation of slaves and removal of trade in the northern colonies. A forward attack on the plantation slave system of the southern colonies did not emerge until the 19th century. According to Rugemer, the wider perspective of much of the media analysis of slavery developed from the 1791 Saint-Domingue rebellion and the founding of Haiti in 1804; particularly the explanation of this episode in the writings of Bryan Edwards. The Historical Survey of the French Colony of St. Domingo by Edwards “became the standard proslavery interpretation of the Haitian Revolution throughout the antebellum period.” His recognition of abolitionist campaigning as the core root of the revolution heightened the anxieties of both British and American slave-owners that abolitionists were treacherous rebels, in contrast to the abolitionist view which asserted “that insurrections arose from the injustice and brutality of slavery and that rebellions were punishments for the sin of slaveholding.” Confounding, and influencing the responses of both the white people and the slaves themselves to the Haitian Revolution, the subsequent Demerara revolution in 1823 and the Barbados’s Easter Rebellion in 1816 was the theme of the movement of the slaves, and the apparent bolstering of the abolitionist view by means of Evangelical missionaries. Thus, by the 1820s, slave-owners in the United States were not just aware of the Edwards argument but were convinced by the cases of other slave rebellions, such as that in 1822 in Charleston, that there was an underlying connection between slave revolt and abolitionist campaigning. (2) For the ex-Caribbean master class? In 1823, the British Parliament and British abolitionists made a decision that even though the abolition of slavery was appropriate and favorable in the long run, it must not take place until the slaves, who were seen unsuitable for abrupt emancipation, had been enriched or developed in capability. They had though decided that there must be a certain progress in how slaves were handled or approached. At that point the earlier British Caribbean colonies were granted autonomy and self-rule and the British Government started to pressure them to endorse laws amending several of the most blatant violence and injustice of the regime. This was intensely loathed. In Jamaica there was support for separation from Britain and union with the U.S. Current studies have shown that, since the 1770s, a more and more articulate and triumphant American abolitionists pushed the master class or slave-owners and their supporters to take up an equally absolute and ordered justification of Atlantic slave regimes. They became preemptive and vigorous in their assaults on abolitionist philosophy, creating a systematic justification of slavery that involved clearly racially prejudiced defenses. Furthermore, the American abolitionists stated that the master class stressed the commercial worth of the Caribbean slave trade to the nation and asserted that they had the privilege, as the Crown’s free peoples, to hold onto their properties in human beings and to enact their own businesses and concerns. Because there was a solid intellectual agreement in Britain against the ideology of slavery by the finale of the 19th century, the point that slavery was not eradicated until 1807 and that the emancipation of slaves took place only in the 1830s proves the impact of the master class’s defense mechanism, delaying tactics, and power. The victory of the master class in such regard was somewhat due to what American abolitionists has referred to as “the distracting imagery of benevolent intentions” in a self-centered justification of an oppressive and abusive system. British perception of the planter class was dominated by derision and jealousy. In the widespread urban perception, the character of slave culture in the West Indies linked the white people to the region’s wastefulness, extravagance, and lack of self-discipline. For example, in the widely known 1770 British play about a planter stopping over at the city, The West Indian, the major character reaches London with “rum and sugar enough… to make all the water in the Thames into punch”, reveals that “my passions are my masters”, and is characterized as possessing “strong animal spirits” and as a “hair-brain’d spark who does nothing like other people.” Such types of characterizations of white people in the West Indies emerged in a situation where “Empire was, in a very real sense, the frontier of the nation”—a period where being ‘English’ was frequently viewed as being “tentative and contingent”. American abolitionists’ interpretation of the way of life and culture in the West Indies was influenced by such representations. American abolitionist ideology focused greatly on the notion that the master class was an immoral and distinct group of individuals. According to David Brion Davis, a “conceptual differentiation” arose in the thoughts of these abolitionists, differentiating a ‘free world’ standard and a ‘slave world’ abnormality. Other scholars have supported this argument, explaining that American abolitionist thought involved the characterization of West Indian slave colonies as ‘not English’, deviant societies that needed urban benevolent guidance. They also emphasized that, even though the abolitionists focused on the slaves, the character of the white West Indian master class was also a center of conflicting abolitionist and slaveholder debates. Despite how the systems and lifestyles of the master class in the Caribbean were dissimilar from the master class in Britain, they were fond of thinking of themselves as trustworthy, dedicated British advocates abroad. This master class and the West Indian escapees residing in Britain did not desire to be viewed as un-English oppressors who had declined from decent urban norms of behavior and manner. The objective of the master class was thus to tone down the assumption that there were major distinctions between life in Britain and life in the Caribbean. They carried this out in part because it was a means to justify the slave trade to the British public and in part because they knew that living in a site of contact between the Caribbean and Britain created uneasy issues about the supposed threats of cultural transformation and slippage. For the master class in the Caribbean, life was focused on generating income or profit by abusing the labor power of slaves. Simultaneously, numerous of them tried to imitate the British cultural setting, in part to attempt to alleviate their own anxieties about the transformational or life-changing impact of the distinction and distance from Europe of the colonies wherein they resided. The Jamaica Magazine, for instance, a bulletin initially published in 1812, tried to compete with the urbane, educated magazines of the metropolis, which the originators of the Jamaica Magazine believed “contributed to inspire a correct and elegant literary taste”. They declared that this was “one of the most infallible signs of the progress of civilization and polished manners among a people”. American abolitionists have shown how the Caribbean master class was part of a wider cultural market and that this persuaded them to adopt the language of benevolence, humanity, and progress to defend the institution of slavery to the rest of the world and to themselves. Thus, white southerners tamed their characterizations of slavery. The representative of the Jamaican House of Assembly, Richard Barrett, proclaimed through writing in 1833 that the Jamaican planters “are Englishmen; their literature is English”. He tried to inform his British audience that this had an impact on the attitude and perception of slave-owners. He stated that those “in Jamaica sympathize with their friends in England” as regards their consideration for the slaves’ wellbeing. Despite this, when the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Edward Stanley, proclaimed the Emancipation Bill to Parliament, he unmistakably revealed that, irrespective of the planters’ assumptions and the government’s expectations, none had been accomplished by Caribbean slave-owners, “which may fairly be characterized as a step towards the ultimate extinction of the system.” Similar to the other members of the master class, Barrett conveyed a racially prejudiced and traditional perception, claiming that it was a necessity for the white people to supervise the black people and force them to work. People like Barrett did this in part because they wanted to disprove the belief of the American abolitionists that they had declined from decent British norms of behavior, trying to compel their audience to view them as they view themselves, not as lethargic tyrants, but as hard-working and dependable Britons. The master class of the Caribbean thus adopted the language of their liberal and progressive adversaries to attempt to defend and strengthen traditions or processes rooted in deprivation, exploitation, and oppression. Read More