Abstracts

1Aje Lawrence: ‘Devoted friends of the cause’? Assessing Antislavery Activity among Free South Carolinians of Color

By adopting a micro-historical approach, this chapter seeks to evaluate free South Carolinians of color’s role in the antislavery struggle. The chapter retraces the trajectories of free Charlestonians of color who left the state and shows how life altering events and experiences led them to openly espouse abolitionist views and engage in antislavery activity. As sectional tensions arose, the ideological and legal shift which occurred in South Carolina led to increasingly limited spaces of resistance available to free people of color against the slavery regime. Although retracing how the most radical forms of anti-slavery activity among free South Carolinians of color mainly occurred in the context of exile and of Christian ministry, the chapter nevertheless refrains from offering an all-encompassing and narrow description of the typical free South Carolinian of color anti-slavery activist. On the contrary, it highlights the varying degrees of antislavery commitment among free South Carolinians of color over time and how their abolitionism was framed by racial, social and geographic determinants.

2Ater Renée: Monument and Heritage Tourism: Memorializing Harriet Tubman and Thomas Garrett on the Historic Underground Railroad in Delaware

This chapter considers a monument dedicated to Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad in Wilmington, Delaware: Mario Chiodo’s Unwavering Courage in the Pursuit of Freedom (2012). The multi figure statue of Tubman, the white station master Thomas Garrett (1789–1871), and two freedom seekers celebrates the cooperation between black and white abolitionists in Delaware. Chiodo has translated into bronze the trope of the Black Moses guided by an unseen spiritual power. The artist’s use of nineteenth-century source materials as well as his reliance on a sculptural style rooted in realism and romantic drama points to the problems of visualizing ordinary humans engaged in extraordinary actions. They become mythic figures. Chiodo realized an aged, otherworldly Tubman, an image of a black seer gazing out beyond the everyday world, a force of nature. The sculptor represented Garrett as the bringer of light, a determined white male guide in the physical realm. The commission and installation of the statue reveal the ways in which the City of Wilmington and the State of Delaware have used monumental form tied to heritage tourism to lay claim to the ideals of interracial cooperation along the historic Underground Railroad and to inspire visitors to think about freedom and social justice within the context of their lives in the present.

3Bourhis-Mariotti Claire: The Black Convention Movement, Emigrationism and the Quest for a Black Nationality, 1830–1858

The present chapter discusses the colored conventions movement and the revival of emigrationism in the antebellum era. Emigrationism had started in the late eighteenth century, and even though this renewed interest in emigration peaked in the late 1840s and 1850s, it did in fact develop and reinforce all throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. This chapter shows that this revival coincided with the growth of a nationalist sentiment in the free Black community. Indeed, as the debates over colonization and emigration were raging, the question of emigrating, notably to the black republic of Haiti, became clearly associated with the quest for a ‘black nationality.’

4Caron Nathalie: Abolition in the United States as a Religious Social Movement

One of the objectives of the article is to highlight the dynamics of the intertwining of abolitionist activism and religion. Drawing upon the writings of black and white men and women devoted to the abolition of slavery, the article goes beyond both the arguments that abolition in the United States was a religious movement or that it was a social movement with a significant religious component, to contend that it was a religious social movement. Abolitionism contained a powerful critique of slaveholding Christianity by Christians. It also contained a plan to reform society by removing slavery on the ground that it was a ‘sin.’ Abolitionism encouraged people to make their faith their own, but also to interrogate it. It emboldened some to propose new interpretations of the Scriptures. It inspired many to question the religious institutions and traditions which shaped their lives. Abolitionism fostered new attitudes to religion and gender, facilitated the emergence of alternative systems of beliefs—including secular ones—and emphasized the freedom of choice, thus contributing to the secularization of American society.

5Dessens Nathalie: Free People of Color in Nineteenth Century New Orleans: From Class Consciousness to Radical Atlantic Activism

Relying on the abundant production of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction written in French by free writers of color in nineteenth century New Orleans, the present chapter aims at reassessing the role of these New Orleanians of color in the American fight against slavery and in favor of equal rights for African Americans. This understudied production of an extremely militant group has been rediscovered in the past three decades thanks to the development of a French Atlantic approach to Louisiana history. Despite this rediscovery and reassessment, the connection between the Louisiana movement for Blacks’ freedom and the American abolitionist movement more generally remains to be established. This reintegration requires taking a sidestep from the context of the young American republic and examining their movement in a transnational, especially Atlantic, context. Relying on microanalyses of the nineteenth century free Louisianans of color’s literary production, this chapter argues that the Atlantic lens, or more specifically the Franco-Atlantic lens, enables new interpretations of the early militancy for the abolition of slavery in Louisiana and is a new step towards integrating it in the national narrative of antislavery movements in the United States.

6De Vera Samantha: Black Women in the Antebellum Colored Conventions Movement

This chapter looks at the cumulative efforts of Black women activists in the predominantly male sphere of the Colored Conventions movement, drawing from the archive of the Colored Conventions Project. This essay shows that Black women fought for their inclusion even when Black male leaders resisted what they perceived as the encroachment of women’s issues upon a race-focused movement. By the 1850s, a marked change had occurred. This period witnessed Colored Conventions that had multiple Black women delegates, speakers, and participants. Looking at the first gathering in 1830 to the 1850s conventions, I contend that the Colored Conventions served as a crucial space wherein Black women expanded and reshaped their political role. Black women and some allies—including Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond—increasingly undermined women’s subordinate role in a period when the tide of Women’s Rights movement advanced. But even before the predominantly white Suffrage Movement gained traction, Black women activists such as Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth had been agitating for greater political and public role for themselves. The efforts of the Black women involved and invested in the Colored Conventions movement were in line with the work of Stewart and Truth. Though many of them remain unknown and understudied, their activism is, by no means, negligible. This essay thus seeks to show the foundation upon which Black clubwomen’s activism in the late nineteenth century grew.

7Mareite Thomas: Mexico and Transnational Antislavery Connections in Nineteenth-Century North America

This chapter explores the transnational connections forged between Mexico’s antislavery politics and discourses and the movement for black emancipation in the United States, from the Mexican war for national independence (1810–21) to the US Civil War (1861). Scholarly interpretations of Mexico’s abolition of slavery and antislavery commitment during the nineteenth century have mostly been framed within discrete national limits. By contrast this chapter seeks to provide some insights on the continental dimension of antislavery politics and discourses in Mexico and on how abolitionists in the US North turned Mexico’s official opposition to slavery into a resource for African American emancipation during the antebellum period. Antislavery speeches, pamphlets and press articles in Mexico and the US illuminate the North American significance of Mexico’s official antislavery engagement, and how abolitionists in the northern states of the United States drew inspiration from Mexico’s antislavery politics and discourses, forged antislavery solidarity as well as material and intellectual connections across borders which they used in their own domestic struggle against the so-called ‘peculiar institution.’

8Parfait Claire: Writing and Rewriting the Antislavery Struggle, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement

This essay examines the way the antislavery struggle was depicted in the recollections of former abolitionists and in works of history by African American authors, between Reconstruction and the 1960s. The interpretation of the antislavery movement and the changing reputation of abolitionists, whether black or white, have much to do with the situation of African Americans in American society at a given time. Thus, abolitionists were praised in the years that immediately followed the Civil War and emancipation; memoirs of antislavery activists emphasized the heroic aspect of the enterprise, but these texts are also sites of contests over the memory of the abolitionist movement and more specifically over who should be considered its real leader or leaders. With the end of Reconstruction and the rewriting of slavery as a benign system, abolitionist memory seemed increasingly irrelevant. Abolitionists came to be seen in both mainstream history and popular culture as dangerous fanatics. African American historians produced a counternarrative in which antislavery activists were heroes, but this revision did not take hold until the Civil Rights Movement.

9Power-Greene Ousmane: King Cotton’s Exiles: African American Emigrationism, Abolition, and the British Atlantic World

This chapter examines the long history of Black American emigrationism by tracing its origins in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world up until the Civil War era. Through this exploration, the chapter answers two pivotal questions: First, what role did the British play in Black American emigrationism? Two, in what ways, and under what circumstances, did the British support black American emigrationists? Third, the chapter considers Black American emigrationism within the context of the colonization movement to Liberia and the struggle against slavery in the United States. By answering these questions, the chapter sketches the contours of black emigrationist ideology and action, demonstrating that those who promoted emigration from the US to the Caribbean, Canada, and even West Africa, did so for a variety of reasons.

10Raynaud Claudine: Sojourner Truth or the Black Subject’s Lived Experience

This article contends that the Pentecostal and Perfectionist versions of Sojourner Truth’s evangelical faith were congenial to and sustained her antislavery struggle, her fights for women’s rights, and the other causes she espoused. The chapter probes the delicate task of separating her life-story and the different media she used—the various editions of her Narrative, her cartes de visite, her public addresses—from her anti-slavery fight. It argues that tracing the various milieus in which Sojourner Truth successively found herself helps apprehend the link between her religious fervor and her political commitment to abolitionism and feminism. It first draws attention to her connection to the religious and abolitionist milieu of her New York employers and then to her stay among the abolitionist community of the NAEI. Her Narrative is subsequently analyzed as an integral part of her struggle, while the last section focuses on how she incarnated her anti-slavery discourse, physically as well as verbally, in her public appearances. It concludes on the continuous prevalence of the autobiographical dimension of the sundry testimonies of her slave religious experience that shapes her specific brand of militancy. The insistence of her ‘living life’ (Toni Morrison) as testimony to her call to testify grounds the political import of her interventions.

11Roy Michaël: ‘A System of Lawless Violence’: American Abolitionists, Slavery, and the Law

In their fight against what Frederick Douglass called ‘a system of lawless violence,’ antislavery activists in the United States developed strategies that relied on, confronted, and subverted the law. In this essay I trace the gradual move from legal tactics in the revolutionary ‘first wave’ of abolition to forms of extralegal (and sometimes violent) resistance during the antebellum period or ‘second wave,’ while suggesting that the legal and the extralegal often coexisted in the abolitionist repertoire. They were two sides of the same antislavery coin, I argue, rather than conflicting modes of action that excluded one another. Abolitionists could invoke the law and its language at the same time that they rejected legislation protecting slavery; they both utilized and criticized the law in creative ways that have inspired modern-day activists. Examining US abolitionists’ relationship with the law over the longue durée allows us to complicate the enduring narrative of a transformation of American abolitionism from a conservative, law-abiding movement into a radical, law-defying one.