The problem of emancipation: The United States and Britain's abolition of slavery

This dissertation offers a re-interpretation of the American struggle over slavery by situating the United States within the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. Through an exploration of various American responses to Britain's abolition of slavery, I argue that British abolition was a critical factor in the coming of the Civil War.;Transatlantic influence began well before the abolition of West Indian slavery in 1834. In 1816, 1823, and 1831 slave rebellions broke out in the British West Indies. Each rebellion followed abolitionist agitation, and West Indian planters blamed the abolitionists in Britain. American newspapers reported these events; most echoed the planters' accusations. These rebellions alerted the South to the danger of abolitionism and shaped the struggle that would come.;British abolition transformed the American debate over slavery. The political press described emancipation as a disaster, sustaining defenses of southern slavery. Abolitionists, however, made considerable efforts to disseminate a positive view of emancipation to influence the public mind. Prominent northerners wrote essays that challenged the anti-abolitionist mainstream and celebrated the expansion of human rights in the British West Indies. These efforts played a critical role in the gradual antislavery turn of northern opinion.;British abolition also inaugurated the most important public ritual of American abolitionism. Throughout the antebellum decades, American abolitionists—black and white—staged annual commemorations of the First of August, the day Parliament's Act of Abolition took effect. First of August celebrations pushed radical abolitionism into the public square. They were central to American abolitionism.;Finally, Britain's abolition of slavery made the American South the last slaveholding region in the Anglo-Atlantic world. It was a major catalyst for the elaboration of proslavery argument, which was conceptualized in a transatlantic frame. Proslavery thought fostered a reactionary political strategy led by southern leaders intent on the defense of American slavery from transatlantic abolitionism. The violent response to radical abolitionism in the 1830s, the annexation of Texas in 1845, and southern secession in 1861 were moments in the prolonged reaction to Britain's abolition of slavery.