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This chapter details the broader southern reaction to the abolition mail and petition campaigns crafted by the American Anti-slavery Society. Spreading alarm and producing a call for unity and action, particularly in the lower South, the abolition mail campaign struck many whites in the South as nothing short of a terrorist attack on the region, and the mail and petition campaigns together left more white southerners than ever convinced that, at least on the point of abolition, the South had to meet its critics with one voice.

This chapter examines officers’ contributions to the metropolitan discourses about slavery and abolition taking place in Britain in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Furthering the theme of naval officers playing an important part in the social and cultural history of the West African campaign, it uncovers connections between the Royal Navy and domestic anti-slavery networks, and the extent to which abolitionist societies and interest groups operating in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century forged relationships with naval officers in the field. Officers contributed to this ever-evolving anti-slavery culture: through support of societies and by providing key testimonies and evidence about the unrelenting transatlantic slave trade. Their representations of the slave trade were used to champion the abolitionist cause, as well as the role of the Royal Navy, in parliament, the press and other public arenas.

The final chapter assesses the cultural and political significance of the West Africa squadron and the work of the naval officers involved in its operation, looking at the wider implications of the question of ‘success’ in discussions about the impact of the squadron both at the time of its operation and since. It examines the shifts and changes that took place during the sixty years of the squadron’s operation, including: perceptions of the slave trade and the best methods of suppressing it; the position of the Royal Navy in Britain’s imperial ambitions; and racial and cultural attitudes of Britons towards Africans and ‘others’. This chapter discusses the ways in which notions of duty and professionalism had changed, and how what it meant to be a Royal Navy officer in 1870 had altered as compared to 1807. It asserts the individuality and independence of naval officers, and their engagement with themes of anti-slavery, empire and identity.

Before the Civil War, southern society defined manhood in part by maintaining control of the family. Neither the courts nor society recognized women’s personhood, but rather defined women under coverture as dependents of men. As such, men could employ corporal punishment to family members who did not fulfill their roles. With anti-slavery advocates on the rise, criticisms of the brutality of slave owners were met with the idea of paternal benevolence, which sought to soften the institution of slavery, and this carried over into gender expectations. The temperance movement also drew attention to alcoholic husbands who abused their wives and children. Despite the emergence of some legal challenges to intimate partner violence, abuse remained poorly prosecuted, often ending without conviction. Manhood required the submission of dependents, and womanhood required obedience. These constructs stalled any social or legal challenge to the male privilege of chastisement.

This is the story of a culture war that pitted two mid-Victorian shibboleths against each other. By the 1840s, Britons prided themselves on their opposition to slavery, and were quickly coming to pride themselves no less on their commitment to free trade. Their insatiable appetite for sugar brought these peculiar British values into tension. Thanks to tariff protection, colonial sugar – “free” sugar after Emancipation in the British West Indies in 1833 – enjoyed a near monopoly on the British market. It lost that protection with the 1846 Sugar Duties Act, which opened the British market to Cuban and Brazilian sugar produced by slaves. Slave sugar poured into Britain while fresh slaves poured into Brazil and Cuba, and the British Caribbean fell into socio-economic turmoil. The plantocracy bitterly charged the imperial government of having abandoned not only them, but the freed slaves as well. Rather than being a simple story of how free trade (and the British consumer) beat abolitionism (and the purported interests of former slaves), this is instead a story of how the free trade v. abolition struggle intersected with several other cultural struggles. One is the struggle between planters and sugar monoculture on the one hand and peasant proprietorship and West Indian freedmen on the other. Another is the struggle between planters' socio-economic paternalism and the Whig-liberal government's doctrinaire commitment to “liberating” the consumer. Yet another is a struggle fought out within metropolitan political ranks: one that pitted those who felt abolition could be reconciled with free trade through armed suppression of the slave trade against those who were committed to pacifism and free trade. These struggles ended in a broad stalemate. Free trade's victory over abolition was not as decisive as it might have first seemed. Rather, a balance emerged between them – the sort of uncomfortable truce that ended so many culture wars in the “Age of Equipoise.”

This chapter situates the activities of the West Africa squadron within several interconnected themes and contexts relating to the impact of the Britain’s Abolition Act of 1807. Britain’s abolitionist cause was regarded as an indicator of the national character, dedicated to morality, humanitarianism and freedom, and naval suppression fitted neatly into this narrative. The role of the Royal Navy in enforcing the 1807 Act transformed notions of British identity and evolving ideas of imperialism on the international stage. This chapter positions the book within the existing literature on the nineteenth-century campaign against the transatlantic slave trade, the role of the Royal Navy in the post-Napoleonic Wars period, and the British role in Africa more widely.

Naval officers played a part in a reconfiguration of relations between Britain and West Africa in the early nineteenth century, as British abolitionist ideals and policies were introduced in the colony of Sierra Leone and increasingly rolled out along the coast. This chapter details the role of naval officers in the pursuit of anti-slavery treaties with African rulers, the encouragement of ‘legitimate’ trade (as non-slave-based trade was termed) and assisting increased exploration and missionary efforts. All were tied to the desire to end the slave trade at source in West African societies via the spread of European ideas of ‘civilization’ among African peoples. Officers’ narratives are revealing of increasing British intervention in West Africa, and how economic and strategic advantages for Britain became inextricable from humanitarian incentives.

The chapter examines how naval officers engaged with the cornerstones of the British abolitionist agenda: religion, humanitarianism, morality and concepts of national identity. As most nineteenth-century naval officers came from the middle or upper-middle classes, they were exposed to a culture of anti-slavery sentiment in popular politics, literature and the press. These ideas had a significant impact on how they conceived the nature of their duty as naval personnel and their identity as Britons. Many testimonies of naval suppression offer emotion, insight and conviction regarding the anti-slavery cause, often driven by religious belief, and particularly the rise of evangelicalism in the navy. Yet there was no obligation for naval officers serving on the West Africa squadron to be committed abolitionists. Others held more ambiguous views, particularly as attitudes regarding slavery and race evolved and hardened as the century progressed.

Chapter 2 moves between Britain and the South Atlantic. It investigates the articulations between the Metropolitangovernment and St Helena, and in so doing addresses the balance between text and context, and between the island’s Liberated African Establishment and the world outside. It begins by considering the extent to which events on the island were a matter of public and parliamentary knowledge, finding, in fact, that they largely passed without notice. Interest from the media, parliament and the anti-slavery lobby was limited, enabling governance to be almost entirely conducted behind closed doors in Whitehall. It was nevertheless an acrimonious matter for the various departments involved in this small aspect of colonial governance. Their unresolved debate about whether the island was a fit place to receive liberated Africans led to naval instructions that were continuously in flux, and was in large part responsible for the Establishment’s underlying sense of impermanence.

Chapter 5 explores the political background of the prohibition of the slave trade in 1841 and the process of ending slavery in the Regency. It assesses the interaction between the slave trade and European domination after 1816 when Lord Exmouth liberated the western Mediterranean from corsairing activities and abolished Christian slavery in Tunis and Algiers. By the mid-1830s, the traffic in black slaves from Tunis across the Mediterranean rose in tandem with the establishment of European maritime domination in the Mediterranean, prompting Great Britain to pressure Tunis to abolish both the Saharan slave trade and black slavery. Moreover, the political disequilibrium arising from the 1830 French occupation of Algiers also altered the status quo in Tripoli and Tunis and shaped the abolition process in the Regency. On 24 January 1846 slavery was finally abolished in Tunisia.

This chapter describes the demographic and social landscape of Boston after the Civil War. It explores the Black community’s traditions of political activism and roots in the anti-slavery movement. It highlights the importance of voting to African American conceptions of citizenship and early fights for suffrage.

The abolition of slavery in 1833 was half-hearted: former slaves were still forced to work as “apprentices” for their former owners. The anti-slavery movement was divided between the moderate Members of Parliament, William Wilberforce and Thomas Fowell Buxton, and the more radical out-of-doors movement led by Thomas Clarkson and Joseph Sturge. Sturge revived the out-of-doors movement, allied with Jamaican Baptist minister William Knibb, to overthrow apprenticeship. Out of that struggle the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was born, and this chapter gives pen portraits of its founders and early officers, Sturge, Lord Henry Brougham, John Scoble, Samuel Gurney and Louis Chamerovzow.