The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860

David Turley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134977444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book provides a fresh overall account of organised antislavery by focusing on the active minority of abolutionists throughout the country. The analysis of their culture of reform demonstrates the way in which alliances of diverse religious groups roused public opinion and influenced political leaders. The resulting definition of the distinctive `reform mentality' links antislavery to other efforts at moral and social improvement and highlights its contradictory relations to the social effects of industrialization and the growth of liberalism.

1
APPROACH AND CONTEXTS

Antislavery in Britain had a long and fluctuating history as a reform cause; it ultimately commanded the support of leading political and religious figures and the assent of a mass of ordinary citizens as petitioners. In many places it channelled the energies of leading figures in local communities whose passage through antislavery constituted a prominent aspect of their more complex engagement in moral and social improvement. It also contributed to the continuous working out of changing relations of power in particular localities in favour of some and to the detriment of other elements in a growing but heterogeneous middle class. As a subject of study, in other words, antislavery can be appropriately placed in the larger evolution of Britain in the later eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. Only recently, however, has historical writing begun to point in this direction.

When W.H.Lecky argued that the English crusade against slavery ‘may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in this history of nations’ he proposed a view of abolition, emancipation and efforts to suppress the international slave trade which bridged the judgement abolitionists made of their own efforts and a humanitarian historiographical tradition running well into the twentieth century; a tradition which celebrated moral progress in history, achieved by the efforts of virtuous men and women and the influence of religion in public affairs.¹

This tendency to moral and historical complacency met its sharpest challenge in Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944). In Williams’ view abolition and emancipation were nothing to do with moral progress achieved by moral and religious means but the result of changing class relationships in Britain, together with shifts within the political economy of empire. It was an argument based on economic change and its effects which left little room for antislavery reformers in the process of abolition and emancipation, apart from their talents as propagandists. What really mattered for Williams was the conjunction of significant decline in the economies of the British Caribbean after the American Revolution with the shift in Britain towards industrial capitalism, generating a powerful new class attached to laissez-faire and free-labour ideals.

Recent, often brilliant, scholarship has thrown doubt on Williams’ contention about the importance of industrial interests in the process of abolition and emancipation. Nevertheless the tensions between ‘moral’ and ‘material’ factors have remained major concerns of historians studying the end of the British slave trade and slavery. Recent work, however, has suggested that they are not necessarily alternative kinds of explanation. From very different perspectives, the writings of David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher have focused on what importance class and culture have in locating antislavery in a complex picture of the changing economic, social and political order in Britain.²

The present book tries to build on these issues opened up by recent scholarship. Questions of both culture and class are addressed through the study of the active minority—the antislavery reformers, including the parliamentary and national reform leaders but, equally importantly, the zealous provincial reformers whose networks connected one locality with another and linked parliamentary and national reform leaderships to the population at large. For the features of culture and class embodied in the practices and outlook of the reformers themselves present a different sense of antislavery from either the one offered by attention to the national and parliamentary level of reform or the one produced by stressing the quantitative ‘popular’ aspect of antislavery.

This book, then, does not directly tackle the question of why abolition and emancipation occurred. Rather it attempts to understand antislavery as a cultural response to change in both English society and in Britain’s relations with the external world. Culture, in turn, is interpreted as the range of ways of responding to and judging the world within contained limits common to a group. Understanding culture in this way implies two separate but linked questions: firstly, in what terms did antislavery activists understand and engage with a society they wished to win over; and secondly, what structures and forms of behaviour internal to the antislavery movement contributed to the group sense of reformers? The two questions are clearly linked since the reformers’ successful engagement with English society would in part depend upon a clear sense of identity within antislavery groups.

In their efforts to engage with English society, the reformers dealt with a culture which offered a limited number of forms and channels through which to effect change. In order to confer legitimacy on their struggles, reformers had to come to terms with these given forms and channels. Yet to leave the question of the forms available in a culture to initiate change here is both to bypass one property of reform as re/form and court the danger of implying stasis in the formal resources of the culture. At the very least this is implausible in a study of the particularly dynamic decades from the 1780s to the 1860s. Antislavery practice expressed more general innovations in permissible ways of trying to bring about change and sometimes tested the limits of what was considered legitimate (not least by some abolitionists) as in the controversy over popular participation in the early stages of the antislave trade campaign. Eventually antislavery did open up wider forms of engagement with public opinion, a force which became central to its strategy for success. Nevertheless there was no simple linear development towards more democratic practices and structures. Although by the mid-nineteenth century the political and civic culture within which reformers operated was more broadly based than it had been in the 1780s the boundaries of permissible kinds and methods of change had fluctuated and sometimes contracted in the intervening decades. Antislavery shared this history with other reform agitations. In part it was an experience shaped by forces external to Britain. The increasing radicalism of the French Revolution in the early 1790s contributed to a movement in the balance of social and political confidence and initiative in Britain which briefly opened up the possibility of more popular methods of bringing about reform. Rapidly reaction to French radicalism and the consequent outbreak of war closed off again the momentarily greater space for reform activity.³

Within Britain popular Protestantism, its organisational and behavioural developments, was central to the forces which contributed to the space antislavery made for itself in the first half of the nineteenth century. Despite the immersion of antislavery in religious currents which impelled so much reform activity, however, abolitionists had to compete for space and attention with other agitations using a more secular tone or having a more clearly defined social constituency. In their different ways the relations of antislavery to Chartism and to the Anti-Corn Law League, explored in later pages (pp.181–95), make this point. In sum, antislavery developed within a context whose changes over three generations it could do only a modest amount to shape but, up to the 1840s at least, it was both a subject of attraction and an object of competition in its institutional forms, characteristic practices, ideas and support.
It was the substance of the antislavery appeal, a compound of characteristic

It was the substance of the antislavery appeal, a compound of characteristic ideas and feelings projected towards potential converts which animated these forms and practices. The purpose of the appeal was for reformers to gain sufficient influence to secure abolition and later emancipation. Such influence was sought directly in parliament and indirectly through agitation in the country. The position of parliament, with its capacity to regulate commerce and, as the imperial legislature, the sovereign power to end slavery in the colonies if local assemblies were recalcitrant, made the parliamentary political class a crucial target. At the same time abolitionists wanted to arouse public opinion throughout the country. These two targets were connected but separate. The parliamentary and political class constituted a relatively restricted and specialised audience and one very conscious of its position and powers. Abolitionists could expect no straightforward link from convincing the public in the country to the impact of opinion on legislators to consequent antislavery influence by politicians on legislation. Nor could the public in the country be regarded as a homogeneous body. This was likely to mean that there was some variety of emphasis and tone in the antislavery appeal as between parliament and the country. To test how far this was so, chapter 2 on ideology offers a comparative analysis at particularly significant moments in the history of antislavery of the appeal to parliament and the country. Moreover, within the appeal to the country, changes over time have to be registered as do the effects of the reformers’ desire to maximise their appeal. Abolitionists tried to inculcate common ideas and feelings while subgroups within antislavery offered some distinctive dialectical emphases and styles of thought as more likely to appeal to particular constituencies within the population.

As this preliminary sketch of the structure of the antislavery appeal suggests, it has to be seen as the expression in thought and feeling of an alliance, or rather a series of alliances over three generations which formed the antislavery movement. The perspective on antislavery as a series of alliances entails exploring the cohesive factors beyond common intellectual and emotional ground which held reformers together, that is, taking up the question of the internal culture of the movement as distinct from its interaction with the world around it. What kinds of interactions occurred between reformers and what meanings they had; what images abolitionists had of themselves; how they tried to adjust to changes in their circumstances and outlook to maintain their sense of solidarity and how and why they sometimes failed at the cost of internal divisions and conflict are all problems which demand attention. Answers require in part an examination of the more intimate side of the culture of reform, the more informal patterns of behaviour and personal and organisational rituals of antislavery. Relevant here are the family networks and religious affiliations which existed before or developed with antislavery mobilisation and which became the vertebrae of public activity and cooperation. Collaborative activity could become so close as to form intimacies akin to friendship and friendship itself often constituted a basis for reformist action. The element of time also entered the process of group cohesion and definition; antislavery people developed their own version of their own history, created their own historical pantheon and placed themselves in an historical succession. Such a placing, especially in the later years of antislavery, was part of the function of anniversary celebrations and memorial gatherings which were public occasions whose meaning was in part private to the reformers.

The organising concept of an alliance or series of alliances is appropriate too in that antislavery depended heavily upon networks of reformers within particular localities and on their collaboration with similar networks in other communities. Evidence drawn from local reform communities not only underlines the significance of family connection, friendship and religion but exposes how often implicit and sometimes explicit negotiation of antislavery coherence was undertaken or attempted within and between local reform communities in order to further national mobilisation. This dimension is analysed both in relation to particular issues and through locating it in the combinations and divergences of the three religious—intellectual traditions which comprehended virtually all abolitionists from the 1780s to the 1860s—evangelicalism, Rational Dissent (which emerged in the nineteenth century as Unitarianism) and Quakerism. These traditions, it becomes apparent, underpinned and were sustained by only partially congruent social worlds.

The relevance of class in its relation to the culture of antislavery is implied by this last point, but is perhaps best approached by referring back to the earlier sketch of the fields of force, of attraction and repulsion, within which antislavery operated. Even cursory acquaintance with the range of activities of abolitionists reveals how many of them were involved in other religio-philanthropic and social reform efforts. Antislavery was part of a religious, philanthropic and reform complex which embraced missionary activity, temperance, peace, free trade and limited political reform. Juxtaposing and analysing this range of commitments offers entry to the distinctive forms of consciousness, religiosity and behaviour of those middle-class elements comprising a major component of the liberal segment of the bourgeoisie by the mid-nineteenth century. In describing the underlying assumptions of the often influential provincial citizens in this complex—the continuities and breaks in their loyalties across a spectrum of philanthropy and reform—particular attention is focused on how they saw the appropriate balance of liberty and control and the contest of civilisation and barbarism within England and in the wider world. This placing of antislavery allows some judgement about how ideologically paradigmatic it was in defining the outlook of the liberal bourgeoisie in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Equally significant so far as the ideological and social identity of antislavery activists is concerned was the ambivalence or opposition of most of them to agitations which not only drew heavily on popular support but challenged middle-class notions of appropriate relations of power in society and implicitly questioned the adequacy of reformist procedures. To counterpoint the sketch of antislavery embedded within a complex of middle-class philanthropy and reform, chapter 6 examines the relation of abolitionists to the democratic movement of the 1790s and Chartism. It is important, however, to maintain a distinction between the social identity of antislavery activists and the potentially and often actual cross-class character of the antislavery appeal. Frequently present in the articulation of antislavery attitudes and relevant to the appeal both to middle—and working—class audiences was the claim to the legitimacy of antislavery as a patriotic crusade, pursued in the interest of the nation as a whole, when that interest was properly understood. Even at times of political and social crisis in the 1790s and 1840s a minority of abolitionists tried to bridge social and ideological gulfs and to accommodate pressures from largely opposed groups. In less fraught years middleclass reformers secured lower-class support by various means for the antislavery project which they refused to see as limited by class. The process of defining the boundaries of antislavery through tracing the patterns of engagement with and ambivalence and opposition to other contemporary movements for change and of dealing with explicit ideology, underlying assumptions and practice— in toto culture—also therefore necessarily reveals something of the complex class character of the movement’s appeal.

Tensions in antislavery were sometimes acute but would have been less so amongst English abolitionists if many of them had not devel-oped strong links with American reformers. The Anglo-American aspect of antislavery arose both from the transatlantic relations of religious dissent and the increasing attractions of the liberal and democratic features of American society for English reformers. The intensity of this relation was perhaps greater in the case of antislavery than in other strands of philanthropy and reform. It expressed both the reformers’ fear of failure to undertake a universal religious duty in striking at slavery wherever it existed and anxiety at the subversion of American claims to be the very model of the liberal society which the existence of slavery threatened. When the struggle for liberal advance in England commanded widespread loyalty the maintenance of slavery in America appeared an obstacle.

The idiom of antislavery was predominantly religious and religious organisations became an important factor in the power of antislavery. Before exploring the nuances and implications of this, an indication of the changing structural and social characteristics of Protestant religion in England in the later eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries offers preliminary guidance to the organisational and social texture of antislavery.

There were two striking features about organised religion in England in the century between the mid–1700s and the mid–1800s. The first was the great evangelical wave which swept through most denominations gathering support as a proportion of both the religious and the total population; the second the change in the relative strengths of different religious groups which, on one calculation, left the Church of England 50 percent weaker in 1830 than it had been when Methodism originated in the 1740s. Recovery of the Established Church in terms of more buildings and more clergy in the 1830s and 1840s by no means regained all the ground lost earlier.

Denominational competition was a fact of religious life of which leaders and many followers in church, chapel and even meeting-house were conscious, especially as the evangelising impulse gained strength. Methodism formed the leading edge of the great evangelical wave and reached its greatest relative strength by the beginning of the 1840s, though it continued to grow in absolute numbers while remaining distinctly smaller than membership of the Anglican Church. Almost as important as evidence of the power of evangelicalism was the surge in support for Congregationalists and Baptists, becoming especially noticeable in the late eighteenth century and continuing swiftly through to the 1830s in the case of Congregationalists and the following decade in the case of the Baptists.

Even the stirrings of recovery within Anglicanism evident by the 1830s must be attributed in part to the strengthening of the evangelicals. Gilbert calculates that in 1800 perhaps only 10 percent of Anglican clergymen were in the evangelical camp and they, and even prominent lay evangelicals, were often regarded with some suspicion by hierarchy and laity alike as troublesome and ‘Methodistical’. The evangelical impulse however gained strength remarkably after the withdrawal of Wesley’s followers. Evangelical abolitionists within the church were thus part of a rising tendency.⁴

Evangelicalism was none the less paradoxical in its effects. While fuelling the competitive drive between denominations to recruit souls it also potentially provided enough common ground theologically and in perspective on the world to allow co-operative activity with evangelical dissenters, as well as parallel activity in some spheres. Such a blurring of denominational lines in some aspects of righteous activity, including antislavery, also entailed collaboration across lines of social difference at times when the sense of social tension was not too acute. It is an important point that in a society of such material inequalities and consciousness of hierarchy a common commitment to biblicism, the experience of a vital religion and an expansive desire to gather in souls could open up such possibilities. In its early stages, Anglican evangelicalism no doubt ‘derived its leadership and style from the upper classes and strove to avoid all that Methodism emphasized’. Practical initiatives as well as sentiment on particular issues at times and in particular localities crossed these implied social and behavioural barriers. In doing so these activities linked elements of the gentry and the urban middle classes with efforts by humbler social groups whose commitments were to evangelical dissent....

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1: APPROACH AND CONTEXTS
• 2: ARGUMENT AND IDEOLOGY
• 3: MAKING ABOLITIONISTS
• 4: BEING ABOLITIONISTS
• 5: ABOLITIONISTS AND THE MIDDLE-CLASS REFORM COMPLEX
• 6: ANTISLAVERY, RADICALISM AND PATRIOTISM
• 7: THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CONNECTION
• 8: CONCLUSIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY