1Between May and October 1851, more than six million people visited the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in Hyde Park, London. Generally regarded as the first in a series of world’s fairs that became commonplace in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Great Exhibition was intended to showcase the highest technological, scientific and artistic achievements from around the world in the spectacular glass and iron structure of the newly built Crystal Palace. Among the items on display in the United States department of the exhibition were firearms, locks, and agricultural implements—as well as “specimens of Indian corn and wheat” from Maryland, “samples of manufactured tobacco” from Virginia and Missouri, and “specimens of cotton” from South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama.1 Nowhere was there any reference to the more than three million enslaved men and women who toiled in the fields of the American South to produce these crops and whose forced labor fueled the growth of American capitalism, in large part through the cultivation of cotton.2

2Black and white abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic felt that this amounted to a lie by omission. In a letter to Irish social reformer James Haughton dated February 1851, Henry Clarke Wright, a white abolitionist and pacifist in the United States, had noted, in characteristically provocative style, that “there is one specimen of human ingenuity and industry which distinguishes this Republic from all other nations, and that is—American Slavery.” Slavery, Wright continued, should be given pride of place in the American section of the Great Exhibition: instruments of torture such as whips and manacles should be exhibited, a copy of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 put into the hand of every visitor, and a slave auction recreated on the spot.3 While enthusiastic about the event as a whole, fugitive slave turned antislavery lecturer William Wells Brown also pointed out the contradictions of the American exhibition in his own theatrical way. He targeted one of the few works of art on display, a white marble statue of a nude girl in chains—Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave—which he felt “eclipsed the American slave from public view.”4 On June 21, Brown visited the Crystal Palace with a party of British and American abolitionist friends and deposited at the foot of the statue a cartoon recently published in Punch, showing a black female Virginia slave identified as a “companion” to Powers’s original. The cartoon was soon removed by an incensed American visitor.5 Josiah Henson, another former slave who had settled in Canada, planned to exhibit boards of black walnut lumber in the Canadian section. Because the boards had been transported on an American ship, they were exhibited in the American department, against Henson’s objections. As a sign of protest, Henson had the following message painted in large white letters on the tops of his boards: “This is theproduct of theindustry of a Fugitive Slavefrom the United States, whose residence is Dawn, Canada.”6 French abolitionists joined their English-speaking counterparts in exposing the dark underside of the exhibition. “Too often apparent wealth conceals frightful social miseries,” wrote Victor Schœlcher, the main force behind the abolition of French colonial slavery in 1848. He went on:

We wish for no other proof of this than the one which the Southern States of the American Union will afford. Let these States but send to London a specimen of their varied industry, and we shall have a perfect picture of their manners. Alongside of their magnificent cottons and beautiful sugars we shall have, before our eyes, hideous specimens of whips with knotted thongs, of iron collars, of heavy chains, and of collars with long spikes of iron, and little bells appended, by means of which they obtain the labor of their three million of Slaves.

3Just like Wright before him, Schœlcher contended that the “monstrous iniquities” of slavery were part and parcel of American economic prosperity.7

4 Thus the Great Exhibition, a truly transnational event in and of itself, also marked a moment when abolitionists in the United States, England, Ireland, France and Canada joined forces to denounce the persistence of the American South’s “peculiar institution.” They engaged in a long-distance conversation on slavery and its evils that had been ongoing since the end of the eighteenth century, despite local differences in terms of ideologies and strategies. In Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution, J.R. Oldfield has argued that “the early abolitionist movement is best understood as an international movement that rested on dense networks that linked activists in large metropolitan centres such as Paris and London with those in more remote outposts such as Washington, Pennsylvania.”8 Focusing on a later period in Building an Antislavery Wall, R. J. M. Blackett has shown that African American abolitionists such as William Wells Brown and Josiah Henson, Frederick Douglass and William and Ellen Craft, were instrumental in bringing the antislavery cause to the British Isles. They were interested in “erecting a moral cordon around America that would isolate her from the international community.”9 More recently, scholars have broadened the geographic and ideological reach of American abolitionism. In The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, W. Caleb McDaniel has emphasized how followers of white activist William Lloyd Garrison— “Garrisonian” abolitionists—developed networks of intellectual exchange with reformers and liberal thinkers in Europe, including Chartists, Irish nationalists, and Italian revolutionaries.10 There emerged from that spirit of democratic cooperation across borders what Manisha Sinha calls an “abolitionist international.”11 While attentive to the specificities of national contexts, the essays in Undoing Slavery situate American abolitionism in a transnational framework, pointing out how slaves running away to Canada, free African Americans emigrating to Haiti and activists meeting in a Paris salon all influenced the fate of slavery in the United States. They highlight the complex geographies of the abolition movement.

5Contributors to the volume also attend to the development and evolutions of abolitionism over the longue durée. It is now commonly admitted that abolitionist sentiment in the United States did not suddenly emerge on January 1, 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of The Liberator, as twentieth-century historians of abolition have sometimes implied. There may not have been a “movement” to speak of before the antebellum period, but there were strong antislavery voices to be heard from the American Revolution onwards. Historians such as Richard Newman, Ira Berlin, Patrick Rael and Manisha Sinha have noted that abolition was a long and protracted process, spanning close to a century. Most have adopted the “first” and “second wave” model, succinctly summed up by Rael:

Abolition [in the United States] took place in two general waves. The first was the “neglected” period of antislavery agitation, which was triggered by the American Revolution and which we may say lasted until 1827, by which time eventual freedom had been provided for almost all African Americans in the North. The second wave we might call the “radical” period, which lasted from the founding of immediate abolition by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831 through the end of the Civil War. Any complete view must understand the abolition of slavery in the United States through this longer temporal lens, exploring both periods and their connection to each other.12

6Recent biographies of pioneering antislavery activists have tended to go backward in time in search for expression of radical abolitionist views. Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, Richard Allen and Warner Mifflin are only some of the early abolitionists whose lives and works have been examined over the last decade.13 In his new biography of Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay, Marcus Rediker has recovered the shock tactics used by Lay to denounce slavery; an autodidact, Lay published in 1738 “one of the world’s first books to demand the abolition of slavery,” All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, in which he made the case for immediate, unconditional, uncompensated emancipation one full century before William Lloyd Garrison.14 The essays in this volume take into account the new periodization of abolitionism, occasionally troubling it even further: in her analysis of abolition and women’s rights, Hélène Quanquin proposes to think “counter-historically,” from the vantage point of Reconstruction. Each contribution, in fact, establishes its own chronology. Taken together, the essays reveal that different agendas, options and strategies—the attack against the slave trade, the use of fiction against slavery, emigration to Haiti—were considered at various moments, sometimes intersecting, sometimes not.

7Special emphasis is also placed in Undoing Slavery on the varied print culture of abolition. Numerous anthologies of antislavery writings have come out recently that reveal the diverse genres and modes of expression used by abolitionists as well as the enduring relevance of the written word to the campaign against slavery. With Pamphlets of Protest, Richard Newman, Patrick Rael and Phillip Lapsansky have brought new life to a long neglected tradition of black pamphleteering bridging the two waves of abolition, from Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in the late eighteenth century to Martin Delany and J. Theodore Holly in the mid-nineteenth century.15 Countless collections of slave narratives have been published, one of them as part of the “Library of America,” a sure sign that the narratives of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and Harriet Jacobs— “the movement literature of abolition” according to Manisha Sinha—are now firmly grounded in the American literary canon.16 Marcus Wood and James Basker have stressed in The Poetry of Slavery and Amazing Grace respectively how the poetic mode was a powerful vehicle for expressing antislavery feeling; women in particular could use poetry to articulate antislavery opinions that may have been deemed inappropriate under a more explicitly polemical form.17 Pamphlets, slave narratives and poems—as well as newspaper articles, novels, plays and children’s stories—all meet in Basker’s excellent 2012 anthology, American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation, which extends the periodization of American abolition well before the revolutionary “first wave,” as its title indicates. The following essays testify to the variety of abolitionist print culture, taking as their sources and objects antislavery gift books such as the Liberty Bell, printed orations on the abolition of the slave trade, antislavery almanacs and guides to Haiti. Moving from the textual to the visual, Sandrine Ferré-Rode explores representations of the Underground Railroad in contemporary abolitionist iconography as well as in a twentieth-century TV show. Facing a Slave Power that strove to obfuscate the sordid realities of slavery—a supposedly benevolent institution that provided blacks with “all the comforts and necessaries of life,” according to a slavery apologist18—abolitionists consistently relied on words and images to reveal to the public how the system actually worked.

8Undoing slavery, however, involved more than just publishing pamphlets, giving lectures or signing petitions. It presupposed the resistance of the enslaved themselves—running away from slavery, fomenting revolts, suing for freedom. No one has more forcefully argued for the “proximate and contiguous” connection between slave resistance and abolition than Manisha Sinha in her monumental The Slave’s Cause: AHistory of Abolition.19 Published in 2016, Sinha’s book skillfully weaves together various scholarly traditions. It draws from more than a century of black historiography, from early twentieth-century essays published in the Journal of Negro History to Benjamin Quarles’s seminal Black Abolitionists; it harks back to scholarship produced during and after the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when historians started reappraising the abolitionists, casting them as progressive precursors in essay collections such as Martin Duberman’s The Antislavery Vanguard and Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman’s Antislavery Reconsidered; it takes stock of recent works from Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood and Richard Newman’s The Transformation of American Abolitionism to Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer’s Prophets of Protest and W. Caleb McDaniel’s The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, which together have brought back into view the radical potential of abolition.20 Simultaneously, Sinha has returned to the vast archive of abolitionism and offered new interpretations of the nature and meaning of what antislavery politician Charles Sumner called “the anti-slavery enterprise.”21 Discarding the dominant picture of abolitionists as “bourgeois reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism,” she has reimagined the abolition movement as a radical, interracial movement of men and women—often of humble origins—who fought not only against slavery and racism but also against other forms of oppression and exploitation in the United States and abroad.22 Our current understanding of what abolition was, who abolitionists were and what they believed in owes much to The Slave’s Cause.

9 The seven essays in Undoing Slavery address various aspects of the American struggle against slavery and the slave trade in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. In “The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Its Afterlives in North American Abolitionist Print Culture,” Marie-Jeanne Rossignol focuses on the abolition of the slave trade in the United States and elsewhere in the Atlantic world. She shows how Anthony Benezet set the terms of the anti-slave trade argument in books such as Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771) and explores why his rhetoric was later taken up by white and black abolitionists in the United States, even after the slave trade was abolished in 1808. Moving forward in time, Claire Bourhis-Mariotti traces the concurrent emergence of two antagonistic movements—colonization and emigration—in “African American Emigrationists and the Voluntary Emigration Movement to Haiti, 1804-1862.” While critical of the American Colonization Society’s plan to resettle American-born blacks to Africa, several African American leaders advocated relocation to Haiti in the face of growing racism in the United States. Bourhis-Mariotti presents the debates over emigration among black intellectuals and explains how the two waves of emigration to Haiti in the early 1820s and late 1850s took place. In “Competing Narratives: The Underground Railroad to Canada in Historiographical Perspective,” Sandrine Ferré-Rode also focuses on black mobility, though of a different kind. Taking as her starting point an episode in the “Heritage Minutes” series, a TV show devoted to “enhancing awareness of Canadian history and citizenship,” she discusses recent trends in the historiography of the Underground Railroad in an effort to complicate the representation of Canada as a haven for escaped slaves. Among other things, she analyzes the intertextual echoes between the “Heritage Minute” and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel discussed at length by Claire Parfait in “Fiction and the Debate over Slavery.” In her piece, Parfait offers a panorama of antislavery fiction before and after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestseller in 1852, confirming the transformative power of the novel. In an essay that also briefly discusses Uncle Tom, “‘Printers were almost afraid to set up the types’: Publishing and Circulating Antislavery Literature in Antebellum America,” Michaël Roy examines the complex dynamics of antislavery publishing. In an environment that was generally hostile to the publication and circulation of antislavery literature, abolitionists had to create their own alternative publishing infrastructures to get their writings into print and circulate them as widely as possible. As Yohanna Alimi-Levy further documents in “‘The spirit of the age is on our side’: 1848 and the Abolitionist Cause in France, the United States and Great Britain,” some of that print culture was produced on foreign soil: the cosmopolitan table of contents of the Liberty Bell—with contributors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Martineau, Victor Schœlcher and Nikolai Turgenev—was a reflection of the transnational nature of American abolitionism. Alimi-Levy is particularly interested in the connections between antislavery activists in France, the United States, and Great Britain at the time of the abolition of slavery in French colonies; in the closing section of her essay, she points out some of the obstacles to the transatlantic circulation of abolitionist ideology. In the last essay of the collection, “Abolition and Women’s Rights Before and After the Civil War: Continuities and Discontinuities,” Hélène Quanquin brings us back to the United States but extends the chronological scope of the volume. She argues that “the rupturing of Garrisonian abolitionism” during Reconstruction, especially as regards the question of women’s rights, was not an entirely unexpected phenomenon: it should be interpreted in the light of tensions that had already been present among abolitionists before the Civil War.

10The history of American abolitionism has been thoroughly reexamined over the past twenty years. It is a history that now includes African Americans, free and enslaved, as well as elite and ordinary women. Proper attention has been paid to the visual and print culture of abolition, while the chronology of the movement has been considerably extended. At least two possible avenues of research suggest themselves for the future. First, Reconstruction has to be taken into account to provide a full assessment of the impact of abolitionism. Though Garrison stopped publishing the Liberator after the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, other historic black and white activists kept fighting to prevent the reestablishment of “slavery by another name” throughout the 1870s.23 Second, the complex legacy of the Haitian Revolution still needs to be fully integrated into the intellectual history of transnational abolitionism, just as a new historiography—more complex and sometimes more critical— emerges on the construction of the Haitian state during and after the Revolution, and its commitment to antislavery.24