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Following Whitefield’s death and entombment (and some would say enshrinement) in the Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, MA, his followers worked quickly to preserve his memory. They republished many of his writings and sermons. They printed memoirs. They perpetuated a legacy that continued to defy denominational and geographic boundaries. His tomb became a sight of pilgrimage, including ritualized handling of his skull and removal of trophies from his coffin. In many ways, Whitefield became more powerful as a symbol in death than he was in life.

Toussaint Louverture was defeated by la mort blanche, a phenomenon that incarnates the implacable logic of the slave ship. On February 4, 1794, the Convention proclaimed the general abolition of slavery in the French colonies. Toussaint Louverture, governor for life since 3 July 1801, was captured by French forces on 7 June 1802. Deported aboard the frigate La Créole, Toussaint and his family were kept aboard the frigate Le Héros for more than two months in the port of Brest. Louverture, transported to the prison in Château de Joux on the French-Swiss border, died on 9 April 1803, unable to survive the harsh winter. Efforts have been made to revalorize his memory, despite the inability to locate his remains. The postcolonial memorialization of the hero of the Haitian Revolution would always face an intractable question: how do past heroes square with the contemporary fate of today’s Haiti. The following essay does not answer such a question, but it seeks to provide elements that may move the discussion with the awareness of the pitfalls of postcolonial memorialization.

The Introduction lays out the past and recent historiography to explain the necessity for this book, emphasizing its focus on parliamentary history (poorly understood and generally ignored over the past fifty years), Afro-Brazilian mobilization (here restored to its primacy in the origins and constitution of the movement), and Rio de Janeiro (cockpit of imperial politics). It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the movement’s history chronologically, as something born of the interactions between itself and parliament, the monarch, and the Afro-Brazilian middle class and masses in Rio over time. Finally, it provides a brief account of the contents of each chapter

This chapter describes the most important intellectual development in Douglass’s adult life prior to the Civil War—his evolving views on the U.S. Constitution and the role of violence in the antislavery struggle. The chapter explains how Douglass came to believe that the Constitution was antislavery, not proslavery as he previously believed. The chapter also explains Douglass’s complicated views on the sometimes-appropriate role of violence in liberating slaves. For both topics, the chapter shows how the core convictions of Douglass’s faith shaped his views.

This chapter examines Gilbert’s views about Africa and Africans in the context of his background as the son of an Antiguan slave plantation owner. Gilbert expressed publicly his opposition to the slave trade in 1790, but in The Hurricane this opposition is less evident: the evils of the slave trade are just one symptom of a universal cosmic imbalance. Gilbert’s Methodist father, Nathaniel Gilbert, had avowed the evils of slavery and praised the Africans’ higher spiritual capacity, but he nevertheless retained ownership. As John Wesley’s abolitionist views only became public around the time of Nathaniel’s death in 1774, it was possible for Nathaniel, as a benevolent slave-owner, to be considered a good Methodist. Gilbert came of age at a time when these moral values shifted.

This chapter explores the work of Henry David Thoreau, a figure who celebrates the benefits of extracting oneself from political life. It argues that Thoreau’s writings about exit reveal the possibility of a expressive exit, that is, a departure that is political in and of itself. For Thoreau, leaving a political community had the potential to illuminate the iniquitous, evil political agreements and institutions at its core. Thoreau was centrally concerned with the American institution of slavery; therefore, he frequently linked leaving with abolitionism in his writings. But his writings provide a more general understanding of the potentially disruptive effects of leaving in an expressive and ostentatious way, one that draws public attention to the exit itself and its connection with moral injustice.

Melinda Lawson explores the meaning of national loyalty through the writings of abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips, anti-slavery Congressman George Julian, and President Abraham Lincoln. The author stresses that elite men were moved by notionsof “duty,” compelling them to uphold moral principles in their civic roles. Lawson’s work suggests the challenges men of antislavery conviction faced in a slaveholding republic where the Constitution nurtured the “peculiar institution.” Theirs was not a national loyalty of blind allegiance to the Constitution and the laws. Instead, each of the three held as sacred the ideals of liberty and equality written in the Declaration of Independence. This chapter traces how each man navigated the complicated duties of a true patriot through disunion and war.

This chapter discusses the aftermath of the sale, beginning with the voyage from South Carolina to Rhode Island. The Vernons earned a 17% profit from the voyage, which led them to send the Hare back to Sierra Leone again in November 1755. The formal outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1756 helped to ensure that this voyage would lose money. The section goes on to profile the later lives of the Vernons, Godfrey, Manigault, and Henry Laurens, who purchased 9 captives from the Hare. It concludes with a discussion of the early abolitionist movement, highlighting John Woolman’s visit to Newport just a few years after the voyage.

In the decades on either side of 1800, the geopolitical weakness of the Dutch Republic was exposed, resulting in its collapse at home and significant contraction of its empire. This long and at times revolutionary intermezzo led to the dissolution of the WIC the loss of the Dutch broker function, and – imposed by Britain – the abolition of the slave trade. Antislavery thought had been conspicuously weak in the Republic since the early days of colonization, and virtually absent in its colonies, and publications on the Dutch colonies served to initiate its European readership in the ways money could be and was being made there. At the end of the Napoleonic period, Britain did not return the Guiana colonies it had occupied (Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo), completing a de facto takeover that had begun in the second half of the eighteenth century by British planters and merchants.

This chapter examines Clark’s abolitionist career from 1853 to the end of the Civil War. The chapter’s premise is that the black conventions raised Clark’s consciousness, provided a forum for him to develop his leadership skills, introduced him to a network of other leading African Americans, and fostered his maturation as a leader. It contends that these conventions were one aspect of black abolitionism, while his penning a history of an African American regiment during the Civil War was another. The chapter also examines his relationship with Cincinnati free thinking radicals Moncure Conway and August Willich.

This chapter focuses on the Eleventh Session of Derrida’s Death Penalty seminar. In this session Derrida pauses in his readings of post-Enlightenment abolitionist discourse to turn to the Essais of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French philosopher whose famous tower library he had visited shortly before delivering this lecture on March 22, 2000. Derrida opens the session by quoting Montaigne in a manner he describes as “theatrical” and somewhat “violent,” before announcing: “Since I’m at Montaigne, I’m going to stay a while.” This chapter asks what this “stay at Montaigne” represents for Derrida, how it operates strategically in his deconstruction of the death penalty, and what specific force Montaigne represents for Derrida. The chapter also examines several passages in Montaigne’s Essais not discussed by Derrida in order to see how Montaigne’s Pyrrhonian-style skepticism offers a pre-Enlightenment model of opposition to capital punishment.

In the United States, life without parole (LWOP) has become the leading alternative to the death penalty. However, we have compelling reason to be suspicious what passes for the abolition of the death penalty. If, with the death penalty, we have the calculation of the precise moment a life will end, with LWOP we have a different sort of calculation: however long the life of the accused, that will be length of punishment appropriate to this crime. The only possible life after a sentence of LWOP would be the afterlife of civil and social death. This chapter moves between Derrida’s seminar on the death penalty, his interview “Death Penalties,” and the written reflections of people serving LWOP sentences, particularly Spoon Jackson, and people condemned to die to interrogate the leading “alternative” to the death penalty and to continue the work of thinking deconstructive abolitionism.

In Derrida’s lectures on the death penalty, the United States figures as “both exemplary and exceptional." Derrida acknowledges the racist structure of state violence in the United States, but he does not develop a critical analysis of race or racism. Drawing on the work of incarcerated intellectual Mumia Abu-Jamal, critical race theorists Cheryl Harris and Angela Davis, and contemporary prison abolitionists, this chapter argues that racism is an issue, not only in the particular context of the United States, but also for the logic of the death penalty that Derrida proposes to deconstruct. Derrida’s own account of indemnity, interest, and condemnation is incomplete without a supplementary analysis of black civil death and the construction of whiteness as property. In conclusion, this chapter argues that an abolitionism worthy of the name would have to move beyond the death penalty, towards the (im)possible project of prison abolition and the abolition of white supremacy.

The Maroons evaded blaming Jamaica or Nova Scotia for their perilous situation. Strategically, they focused on the inappropriateness of the severe climate in Nova Scotia: they, as black people, could not live, they wrote, where there are no yams, pineapples or cayenne pepper. The Maroons found a sympathetic audience in abolition advocates who worried that blacks were constitutionally unfit to survive the winters of Canada. A people born in the tropics, they believed, could survive best in another tropical region. Reports on black Americans who had migrated and perished in Sierra Leone in 1787 and 1792 were ignored.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of British-African interaction. It begins with pre-modern interactions which were very sparse. It goes on to focus on slavery as a major starting point in British-African relations. It then proceeds to review abolitionist politics, missionary travels, colonialism, decolonisation, and post-colonialoism. It highlights the centrality of Christianity and liberalism in the ways that the British thought about Africa.

This chapter reviews the major Africa campaigns in Britain: the campaign to abolish slavery, It analyses each campaign as part of a campaign tradition. It does this by connecting the campaign’s efforts to represent Africa through frame analysis. More specifically, the chapter focuses on three forms of framing: diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing. The chapter highlights certain core practices of representation: the boycott, petitions, and the use of propaganda.