1Eighteen forty-eight was a memorable year on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, various revolutions took place all over the continent. “The springtime of the peoples” started in France in February before spreading to Italy, Hungary and Germany in particular.1 Yet in many ways the year 1848 was also a turning point in the history of the United States.2 On February 2—only a few days before the French people rose against Louis-Philippe’s regime and toppled the July Monarchy—the American government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which put an end to two years of war against Mexico. The United States won a decisive victory over its neighboring country by expanding its national territory by 1.3 million square kilometers. This military success, however, led to increased domestic tensions, as Americans became more and more divided over the issue of the extension of slavery in the newly acquired territories (the so-called Mexican Cession).3 On the one hand, a feeling of triumphalism confirmed the idea that the United States was realizing its “Manifest Destiny,” as John L. O’Sullivan first called it in 1845.4 On the other, territorial expansion sharpened divisions within political parties. The two-party system started crumbling as the polarization of the debates over slavery led the two major political groups—the Democratic Party and the Whig Party—to split. In mid-1848, the Free Soil Party was created by antislavery Whigs and Democrats as well as former members of the Liberty Party, an antislavery third party founded in 1840. The presidential election that took place in November 1848 was therefore a bitter struggle over the intertwined issues of expansion and slavery.5

2It was in this very tense national context that Americans reacted to the French revolution that occurred on February, 22, 23 and 24, 1848, which led to the proclamation of the Second Republic in France. Although the European revolutionary wave did not cross the Atlantic, Americans nonetheless showed some genuine interest for those revolutions generally and the events occurring in France in specific. In the United States, the national press and Congress largely commented on the progress of liberty in France, and numerous celebrations were organized throughout the country to pay tribute to the French revolutionaries. Most were official affairs aimed at gathering the whole population of a city in honor of the consensual values of liberty and popular sovereignty defended by the French. At the margins of these popular gatherings, American abolitionists organized their own celebrations to rejoice about what they considered to be the most significant achievement of the “February revolution”—the abolition of colonial slavery by the French provisional government in March 1848. This decision awoke fears of contagion in the South of the United States, but was largely applauded by abolitionists, who hoped to achieve similar results in their own country.6

3Likewise, Britain was spared the European revolutionary impulse but the British extensively debated the stakes of the French revolution in their newspapers, correspondence, sermons, literary works, and political cartoons.7 Perhaps on account of the liberal reforms that they had adopted over the previous two decades, the British were generally confident in their national stability.8 In March 1848, the London Times commented: “We possess those things which other nations are everywhere demanding at the gates of the Palace or the door of the Legislature!”9 Fifteen years after Britain had abolished slavery in its colonies, however, British abolitionists, who had embarked on an international crusade against slavery, took satisfaction in the positive implications that the French abolition decree might have on the antislavery cause round the world.

4In the wake of previous historians of abolition, I wish to demonstrate the necessity to look at abolitionism in a transnational perspective by focusing on the connections between antislavery activists in France, the United States, and Great Britain in the context of the French decree of emancipation of 1848.10 Abolitionists in the three countries worked to advance their cause by looking at each other, trying to help one another and using each other’s experience in order to capitalize on their mutual achievements. In this essay I first explore how the French abolition of 1848 came about, emphasizing the role played by British abolitionists in pushing their French counterparts towards immediate emancipation. Then I examine how British abolitionists interpreted the decision to abolish slavery in France and its consequences worldwide. Lastly, I investigate the extent to which American abolitionists used this event and the contemporary spirit of transatlantic solidarity for the antislavery cause to give momentum to their own movement in the United States.

The French abolition of 1848 and its British influences

5On April 27, 1848, the new French provisional government adopted a decree that went as follows: “Considering that slavery is an attack against human dignity […]; that it is a flagrant violation of the republican dogma: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity […] Slavery is completely abolished in the French colonies and possessions.”11 Although it also stipulated that former slave owners would have to be financially compensated, this decree of abolition was one of the chief social achievements of the February revolution, together with the recognition of the “right to work” and the creation of the National Workshops. It led to the emancipation of about 250,000 slaves and gave freedpeople citizenship rights. The commission in charge of preparing the decree was chaired by Victor Schœlcher who, after spending years studying slavery in Cuba, the West Indies and Senegal, had managed to convince François Arago, the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, to abolish slavery immediately.12 The decision was meant to apply even beyond the French colonies, as Article 8 of the decree specified that all French citizens, including those who lived abroad, were forbidden to own, buy or sell slaves. An additional clause provided that all French slaveholders were expected to free their slaves within three years or they would be deprived of their citizenship. This caused a “crisis of allegiance” for French nationals living in Louisiana in particular, many of whom considered applying for American citizenship to continue enjoying the economic opportunities of the local slaveholding society.13

6Although this historical milestone might look like a hasty decision taken by a handful of revolutionaries recently brought to power, the decree was actually the culmination of a long process. In 1802, only a few years after the first abolition of 1794, First Consul Napoleon had reintroduced slavery in the French colonies. The second and definitive abolition of slavery in 1848 thus crowned the efforts of generations of French abolitionists who had been involved in benevolent societies such as the Society of Christian Morals in the 1820s and, more importantly, the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery (Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage) founded in 1834. Members of this society had spent fourteen years fighting against the inertia of the July Monarchy on the issue of slavery. Only measures designed to “ease” or partially “alleviate” the slaves’ living and working conditions were adopted over that period, such as the Mackau laws in 1845 which granted slaves a few rights—for instance, the right to marry, own property or receive some education.14

7Undoubtedly, the fact that five out of eleven members of the French provisional government were also key figures of the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery helped move forward the abolitionist agenda.15 Nevertheless, the agency of British abolitionists should not be overlooked. As Nelly Schmidt has shown, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) played a significant role in effecting a shift in French abolitionists’ strategy from gradualism to immediatism.16 Indeed, after Britain emancipated its slaves in 1833, British antislavery activists founded the BFASS in 1839 as they believed that it was their “religious duty” to assist and promote the efforts of abolitionists abroad. Members such as Joseph Sturge, secretary John Scoble and treasurer George William Alexander went on missions across Europe in the 1840s, denouncing the uselessness of transitory alleviating measures. They actively supported the cause of immediate abolition in France by providing valuable logistical and strategic help on the ground. French abolitionists duly made use of the financial assistance they received from the BFASS to publish their brochures and newspapers—such as L’Abolitioniste français [sic], created in 1844—and launch petition campaigns. British abolitionists corresponded with and visited their French counterparts—Guillaume de Félice, Cyrille Bissette and François-André Isambert among others—on a regular basis. They often attended meetings organized by the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery, and tried to act as “mediators” or “coordinators” for the European abolitionist movements.17 By and large, their goal was to have a moral influence on abolitionist groups abroad so that other countries might follow in Britain’s footsteps.

8One of the best examples of the BFASS’s efforts to advance its cause globally is the organization of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in June 1840, which attracted delegates from around the world, notably from Britain, Ireland, France and the United States. Old ties were strengthened during the convention between American abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison (who had visited Britain in the early 1830s), Henry B. Stanton and James G. Birney, and British reformers such as George Thompson, who had been on an antislavery lecture tour in the United States in the mid-1830s, and Elizabeth Pease, an abolitionist who was a “central operator in the Garrisonians’ network of transatlantic correspondence.” New transatlantic friendships were also forged in London. American antislavery activists met William H. Ashurst, a wealthy English lawyer who introduced them to his London circle of radical Unitarians; they found valuable sympathizers to their cause like Richard D. Webb, a Quaker abolitionist from Dublin who would later print the Irish editions of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.18

9While historians have often stressed the central role of Britain as a hub for abolitionists from all over the world, Paris was also a place where French, British and American antislavery activists would meet, especially around 1848. Maria Weston Chapman, a founding member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and co-editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard (the official organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society) between 1844 and 1848, moved to Paris in 1848 with her children to give them a European education. There she joined European abolitionist circles and organized meetings for antislavery activists. Her house even became a salon for abolitionists and radical thinkers in Paris. She hosted key figures of the movement such as Victor Schœlcher and Alphonse de Lamartine and introduced them to other reformers she counted among her acquaintances. In her letters, some of which were published in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, Chapman commented on the French revolution of 1848, stressing its social dimension. She was also a keen observer of the feminist agitation that developed in the aftermath of the February events in France. She attended lectures on women’s rights by Ernest Legouvé and considered translating them into English for American readers. Chapman used the friendship ties she established while living in France in order to provide European contributors for the Liberty Bell, an antislavery gift book that she edited between 1839 and 1858, as Claire Parfait’s essay in this volume documents. Victor Schœlcher, Gustave de Beaumont (Alexis de Tocqueville’s travel companion in the United States in the early 1830s and the author of the 1835 novel Marie, ou l’Esclavage aux États-Unis), and Ernest Legouvé were part of the “distinguished collection of French authors” whose essays featured in the Liberty Bell.19 Pieces by de Tocqueville himself, Émile de Girardin, Harriet Martineau, Carnot, Nikolai Turgenev (a distant relative of the novelist) and others were also included.20

The British reaction to the French abolition decree

10The reaction of British abolitionists to the French abolition decree of 1848 was of course very enthusiastic. The BFASS sent an address to François Arago to express its “highest satisfaction” with the decision of the French provisional government to abolish slavery.21 British abolitionists also praised the decree with “devout thankfulness” in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, the weekly magazine published in London by the BFASS to centralize news about the antislavery cause in the world and denounce the illegal slave trade: “How unfeignedly we rejoice in this, we can find no language to describe.”22 They regarded the French abolition as a very promising sign for the future: “It is impossible to foretell the results which will follow the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. One thing, however, is certain, it will hasten the downfall of the atrocious institution throughout the world.”23 In his opening speech at the annual meeting of the BFASS on May 22, 1848, George William Alexander congratulated himself on “these encouraging circumstances” and “most sincerely [thanked] the members of the late provisional government for that great act.”24 The following speaker, Edward Pale, added that British abolitionists should take credit for it as “he believed that the happy results which had occurred in France were to be attributed, in great measure, to the influence exerted upon that country by the Anti-slavery Society.”25 The Anti-Slavery Reporter also reminded its readers that these activists “had labored long to bring the leading abolitionists of France up to the doctrine of emancipation and entire abolition.”26 British abolitionists argued that their “French friends” had “profited by [their] experience” and were glad that, thanks to this “wise and righteous […] act of justice and humanity,” Britain and France were now “one in securing the universal abolition of slavery and the slave trade.”27 Alphonse de Lamartine himself acknowledged the indebtedness of the French toward Britain:

We should have believed that we had gained a selfish liberty, a guilty liberty, if we had maintained the benefits of it for ourselves alone. We therefore hastened to proclaim liberty of all our brethren, and we congratulate ourselves on being, in this respect, in harmony with the noble sentiments of England, which a long time ago freed the black race in her colonies.28

11Finally, the progress of the antislavery cause in France made British abolitionists feel more optimistic about the situation in the United States. They predicted that the “peculiar institution,” as slavery was euphemistically called there, would be a decisive issue both in this election year and in the decades to come: “One of two things appears inevitable—either that slavery will be abolished or the Union be dissolved. Both parties expect that. The question of Abolition is now linked with every election in the United States.”29 British abolitionists singled out two encouraging signs in 1848 for the cause of abolition in that country. First, they rejoiced about the growing popularity of the Liberty Party, which they described as a “revolution” and a promise of “speedy triumph to their cause.” But they also looked favorably at the influx of European exiles, who were emigrating in numbers to the United States in the wake of the springtime of the peoples. Indeed, after the failure of their national revolutions to bring about the democratic reforms they had supported, many Europeans, like the German revolutionary Carl Schurz or the French utopian socialist Victor Considérant, preferred to flee their country and became political refugees in America.30 British abolitionists thus predicted that Texas in particular would be “threatened with freedom” as “European settlers, especially those from Germany,” might “rapidly [add] to the number of its free voters,” and “exert political and social influence to overthrow slavery.”31 “The hopes of our friends in the United States greatly predominates over their fears,” the Anti-Slavery Reporter concluded.32 As Mischa Honeck has recently demonstrated, the connections and exchanges between German-speaking Forty-Eighters and American abolitionists certainly helped to advance the antislavery cause in the United States.33

American abolitionists and the French abolition

12In her recent history of abolition, Manisha Sinha has traced the contours of a nineteenth-century “abolitionist international.” American abolitionists, she writes, “developed a transnational appeal seeking to harness progressive international forces against slavery.”34 A good illustration of such transnational interconnectedness is the impact that the French revolution of 1848 and subsequent abolition of slavery had on the abolitionist movement in the United States.

13In the American antislavery press, the French revolution was usually described in binary terms as the confrontation between Louis-Philippe’s tyrannical power and the interests of an oppressed people. For American abolitionists, such an opposition resonated with the fight of the “friends of liberty” against what was commonly called the “Slave Power.” In the North Star, Frederick Douglass placed “the slave-owners of America” on an equal footing with the “despots of Europe” and described them as “American tyrants.”35 A similar parallel was made by a reader of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in a letter to the editor, Sydney Howard Gay: “There is in the United States, the same ugly hateful spirit, though wearing another shape, which has swayed the old world.”36 A resolution adopted at a meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society on May 9, 1848 in New York shows that political and evangelical abolitionists saw eye to eye with Garrisonians in their understanding of the revolution: “That we sympathise alike with nations and individuals who cast off the shackles of oppression, and resolve to be free; and hold in detestation tyrannical power, whether exercised at the head of a nation or of a plantation.”37 Just like the French people, American slaves might well decide to rise against their oppressors, Douglass concluded: “We warn the slaveholder to learn anew, that human nature is still human nature and that the time may not be distant when an illustration of the fact may be afforded nearer home than Paris.”38

14From the standpoint of American abolitionists, the French revolutionary events of 1848 revealed the misguidance and vices of America as opposed to the virtues and progress of France towards liberty. Antislavery activists stressed such differences in an effort to undermine the dominant nationalist rhetoric painting the United States as a model republic. At the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1848, Douglass provocatively expressed admiration for the antislavery ethos of a nation often described as heretical and unreligious, while denouncing the American Christian faith that tolerated the servitude of blacks: “I go for that infidelity […] which strikes the chains from the limbs of our brethren […]. I sympathize with that infidelity that speak to them in language like this: friends! brothers! Men! ”39 France was even taken as a model for the United States: “France is Infidel—America is Christian—Will Christian America follow the example of infidel France, or are Humanity and Freedom to gain more from infidelity than Christianity?”40 American abolitionists unanimously commended the consistency of the French revolutionaries, who granted republican liberty to all, and contrasted it with their country’s contradictions: “What a rebuke is thus given to our own Republican slavery?—to hoary Senators, planning the extension of human bondage.”41

15A few days after the reception of the news of the French revolution in the United States, a timely event highlighted these contradictions. In the night of April 15, 1848, seventy-seven slaves attempted to escape from Washington, DC, on the schooner Pearl. Orchestrated by white abolitionist William L. Chaplin, this large-scale slave rescue eventually failed when the Pearl was overtaken and captured by a steamer. All of the fugitives were sent back to their masters and later sold south.42 The Pearl incident, which was extensively discussed in the antislavery press, exemplified the differences between France and the United States regarding slavery. American abolitionists used the event to contrast the contemporary emancipation in France with the ongoing fugitive slave hunt in America. In a letter published in the Liberator under the title “The American Republic a Liar and a Hypocrite,” Henry Clarke Wright denounced the paradox at the heart of the Americans’ behavior: “The very men who had just been shouting over the downfall of despotism in France, sent word to Baltimore, on a flash of lightning, ordering out armed men to head those fugitives, and bring them back to hopeless bondage!”43

16Yet the Pearl incident also proved that the spirit of liberty championed by the French could be imported to the United States. In an article entitled “The Spirit of Liberty Contagious,” Garrison explained that the popular celebrations that had taken place in Washington after the February revolution had encouraged the slaves of that city to rebel and try to escape.44 With slavery now permanently defeated in the French colonies, the American antislavery cause was likely to gain momentum: “These signs of the times are not to be mistaken. Democracy and Slavery are on the eve of their great battle.”45 American antislavery activists believed not only that French and American abolitionism were contiguous, but also that the revolutionary fervor ignited in one nation would soon reach the other: “A revolution now cannot be confined to the place or the people where it may commence, but flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart, from land to land, till it has traversed the globe.”46 The fall of the monarchy in France, Douglass wrote in the North Star, simultaneously aroused the fear of the “guilty slaveholder” and caused “a terrible noise […] from the galling chains of fettered millions in [America], a ray of hope [having penetrated] the lowest confines of American slave prisons.”47 In the Liberator, Garrison argued that the extension of slavery in the territories acquired after the Mexican War could be checked thanks to the influence of the European spirit of liberty. “Every revolution in Europe re-acts [sic] upon America,” went Massachusetts antislavery politician Stephen C. Phillips. “As chain after chain is broken there, it becomes the more difficult to rivet new chains here.”48 The French abolition decree was thus a source of hope for American slaves. It paved the way for complete emancipation in the United States: “Their decree of Emancipation will make even the chains of Carolina lighter, and hasten the day when our soil shall be untrodden by a slave.”49 For American abolitionists, the universal dimension of the revolutionary spirit of 1848 and the interconnectedness of the antislavery cause on both sides of the Atlantic confirmed that history was going in the right direction. Transcendentalist reformer Theodore Parker shared his optimism with his audience at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in May 1848: “We are certain of success; the spirit of the age is on our side.”50

17The European revolutions and the French abolition of 1848 proved to be a source of exhilaration and inspiration for American abolitionists. This particular context stimulated the transatlantic circulation of ideas and reinforced the transnational dimension of abolitionism. Such a global demonstration of solidarity, however, had limitations. At the same time that they established connections between French emancipation and their own movement in the United States, abolitionists like Garrison, Douglass and Parker took some critical distance with the French example. As Françoise Charras has noted, references to the French abolition of 1848 gradually disappeared from Douglass’s writings and speeches as he came to regard the slave rebellion in Haiti and the French Revolution of 1789 as “archetypes of revolution and abolition.” What he now viewed as a peaceful and rational form of abolition conflicted with his advocacy of slave resistance in the 1850s, with which the insurrection in Saint-Domingue better accorded.51 Although Douglass seems not to have been aware of it, slaves did resist—often violently—during the decade preceding the adoption of the French abolition decree. Tensions escalated in the French West Indies as a result of the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s. Many slaves in Martinique rebelled and tried to reach the island of Saint Lucia, which was under British control. As historians have revealed, the 1848 abolition was not just granted by benevolent whites to helpless blacks.52 Slave resistance in the colonies and the active involvement in French abolitionism of free persons of color like Cyrille Bissette prove that the agency of black people cannot be ignored.53

18Other Garrisonian abolitionists pointed out that social reform in France was achieved through government action rather than grassroots mobilization. In his speech at a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Boston in April 1848, Theodore Parker compared the respective methods of social reformers in France and in the United States and noted: “Here, all comes from the people. […] There all comes from the Government.”54 Such a statement illustrates the distrust towards political action that characterized Garrisonian abolitionists.55 It could also be understood as a call to action and mass mobilization for the American people, a key agent of the antislavery cause in the United States according to Parker. Although they congratulated the French for their historic decision, some American antislavery activists were therefore reluctant to take a similar route toward abolition and rather supported non-political action.