The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (52 page)

When Paul arrived in Britain, abolitionists had obtained enormous public support for immediate West Indian emancipation, and British interest in the United States had turned to debates over the alleged antislavery character of the American
Colonization Society and
African American colonization. Distressed by the growing attacks from American abolitionists, led as we have seen by African Americans, the ACS in 1831 shrewdly commissioned
Elliott Cresson, a Quaker philanthropist and ardent supporter of colonization, to visit Britain and persuade abolitionists and humanitarians that the ACS represented the most realistic path to slave emancipation in America. Like even William Lloyd Garrison, Nathaniel Paul had originally been somewhat open to the missionary and antislavery potentialities of African colonization, but by 1832 he had come to see the ACS as a barrier to slave emancipation and a vicious source of racial prejudice. He therefore joined the passionate British abolitionist
Charles Stuart in trying to counter Cresson’s crusade to raise funds and validate the colonization cause.
¹⁹

Captain Charles Stuart, a retired British officer who had served in India and had then become principal of the Utica Academy in upstate New York, became extremely influential in the Anglo-American antislavery cause. The work he wrote in his initial campaign against
Elliott Cresson helped inspire Garrison to write his 1832 landmark,
Thoughts on African Colonization.
²⁰

Along with his crucial role in finally overcoming Cresson, whose arguments in 1831 had greatly impressed
Wilberforce and even persuaded
Thomas Clarkson to write a commendation of the ACS and its work in
Liberia, Stuart was instrumental in converting to the antislavery cause a man who would become one of the foremost
American abolitionists. When living in New York’s “
Burned-Over District” in the 1820s, during
Charles Grandison Finney’s
Great Religious Revival, Stuart, a devout Presbyterian, became a loving father figure for
Theodore Dwight Weld, who would later become a leading abolitionist lecturer, author of the most important abolitionist book, and an adviser to
John Quincy Adams’s congressional campaign against “
gagging” antislavery petitions. In March and June of 1831, Stuart helped to transform “his beloved Theodore” by sending him letters and publications imploring him to engage his soul “in the Sacred cause of Negro emancipation” and expressing profound gratitude to God “that as we continue guilty of [slavery], he can refrain from fairly breaking up the world beneath our feet, and dashing us into sudden hell.”
²¹

By the time Garrison arrived in Britain in the summer of 1833, Cresson had been so damaged by the attacks of Stuart,
Paul, and
James Cropper, a pioneer British abolitionist and wealthy Liverpool merchant, that he was writing desperate letters to the ACS complaining about their proslavery statements (exposed in Stuart’s pamphlets) and lack of response to Garrison’s book. Paul, who as a minister had easy access to pulpits throughout the British Isles, quickly discovered that his dark skin color was a key asset and that British humanitarians would look upon blacks as the most legitimate, convincing, and knowledgeable proponents of American abolition. Indeed, Cresson soon pleaded with the leaders of the American Colonization Society to find a black man who could counteract Paul’s impact. Moreover, Paul represented a
black colony in Canada that was in some ways a competitor with Liberia, but that was also a refuge from the kind of militant racism fostered by white colonizationists. Paul even played a crucial role in getting the current leadership of the British abolition movement to sign a document condemning the ACS; he even helped persuade Wilberforce to sign the “Protest” just before
he died. According to Garrison’s account of their meeting,
Paul’s evidence of free-black opposition finally convinced
Clarkson to declare his neutrality on colonization after realizing he had been misled by Cresson.
²²

In 1833, Paul married an Englishwoman, a fact which, coupled with his enthusiastic response to British slave emancipation and the appeal of working with other abolitionists, encouraged him to remain in Britain until 1836. Paul no doubt realized that when he and his wife returned to the United States, they would be subjected to great prejudice as an interracial couple. As it turned out, they were unable to find a place to live together, and Garrison arranged for Mrs. Paul to live in Northampton, at the home of Garrison’s father-in-law, for one year, while Nathaniel was on a speaking tour.
²³
Though Paul succeeded in raising thousands of dollars in Britain and even lent money to Garrison, he outraged the Wilberforce community by spending and charging even more than he received. He therefore returned to Albany, where he became the pastor of a Baptist church and continued to condemn racial prejudice and call for black moral uplift and improvement until he died in 1839 at age forty-six.
²⁴

In April 1833, after a year of successful lecturing in Britain, Paul wrote an important letter to
William Lloyd Garrison. By the time the letter appeared in
The
Liberator,
Garrison had arrived in Britain and joined Paul on an extensive tour to defeat Cresson, who finally returned to America in the fall of 1833. In his letter, Paul could joyfully report that “the voice of this nation is loud and incessant against the system of slavery. Its death warrant is sealed, so far as it relates to the British
West Indies.” He modestly concluded by saying that his lecture tours had been successful and that his arguments had received “decided approbation from all classes of people.” He had even had breakfast twice with “the venerable Wilberforce” and had met “the patriotic Clarkson,” both “Angels of liberty.” But the decisive point related to Britain’s answer to America’s “hypocritical pretenders to humanity and religion, who are continually crying out, ‘What shall we do with our black and colored people?’ ”
²⁵
Since Paul felt a deep bond to America, based in part on the fact that his father had been a
Revolutionary War veteran and an eminent leader and Baptist minister in Boston, he rejoiced, while also expressing anger, in the discovery that Britain presented a spectacular answer to America’s great racist question “what shall we do with them?”

Like large numbers of future African American visitors, Paul was astonished and immensely gratified by the British treatment of a man of color. The widespread acceptance in America of some form of colonization depended on the conviction that white prejudice was so strong and entrenched that the two races could never live together with any prospect of peace or equality. Yet, for Paul and his successors, the tolerance they encountered in England, Ireland, and Scotland not only exposed the hollow hypocrisy of American claims of freedom and democracy but seemed to prove that the crushing white prejudice they met at home could be overcome. With this in mind, they continued to dramatize the contrast between America and Britain as thousands of Britons flocked to hear their rapturous odes to British tolerance, compassion, and humanitarianism. Just as Britain took the momentous and risky step of emancipating some 800,000 colonial slaves, Nathaniel Paul and subsequent black speakers, including many
fugitive slaves, reinforced the righteousness of the cause. Even as increasing doubts arose about the economic consequences of emancipation, black abolitionists could continue to reassure British audiences concerning the justice of freeing human beings like themselves. And Paul’s list of situations in which he was treated as an equal, as a “gentleman,” implied a kind of democratic acceptance that cloaked the issue of social class. In America, race had long superseded class. In Britain, despite a highly structured class system that included levels of respect and contempt, African American abolitionists, even fugitive slaves, received remarkable respect apart from class, even as racism began to emerge in the late 1840s and 1850s.

After
Garrison arrived in Britain in 1833, he joined Nathaniel Paul on a tour, rebutting the claims of Elliot
Cresson that the ACS was primarily dedicated to slave emancipation. Paul and Garrison often spoke together, as at a public meeting held in London’s Exeter Hall on July 13, attended by two thousand people and featuring speeches by prominent abolitionists intended “to expose the real character and objects of the
American Colonization Society and to promote the cause of universal emancipation.”

Cresson, called “an apostate Quaker” by Paul, had tried to defame Garrison as a “convicted libeler” who had been convicted and thrown into prison in the United States. Paul, first emphasizing the importance of his own dark complexion, contended that Garrison had “suffered forty-nine days incarceration in a prison in the city of
Baltimore, in the State of Maryland, because he had the hardihood to engage in defence of the suffering slaves in that State.” Paul then noted that in a supposed “land of freedom and equality,” the laws of America were so “exceedingly liberal” that they allowed a thriving trade in “the souls and bodies of our fellow creatures.” “Mr. Garrison had the impudence, the unblushing effrontery to state, in a public newspaper, that this traffic was a direct violation of the laws of God, and contrary to the principles of human nature. (Cheers) This was the crime of which he was convicted.” Indeed, Paul went on,
Wilberforce,
Clarkson,
Buxton, and the abolitionists present in the room would all have been “indicted, convicted, and thrown into prison if they had resided in Maryland and “pursued the course they have adopted in this country.” As a final stab against Cresson and the ACS, before turning to a detailed denunciation of the racism and hypocrisy of colonization, Paul added that the “Court and Jury would have convicted the whole Anti-Slavery Society of this country, and would have transported them all to
Liberia as the punishment of their crimes (Laughter and loud cheers).”
²⁷

As
R. J. M. Blackett shows, Nathaniel Paul’s role in overcoming British support of the ACS prepared the way for succeeding African American abolitionists’ efforts in Britain to build a
cordon or “antislavery wall” around the United States, so that, as
Frederick Douglass put it, “wherever a slaveholder went, he might be looked down upon as a man-stealing, cradle-robbing, and woman-stripping monster, and that he might see reproof and detestation on every hand.”
²⁸
The blacks’ goal of exposing the evils of American slavery and racism
brought a unity to their otherwise diverse interests as well as to the fractured Anglo-American
abolitionist movement, enabling some supporters and opponents of political abolitionism (Garrisonians) to work together. As Blackett observes, the building and preservation of the antislavery cordon for more than thirty years required a pragmatic mentality as well as “skill, determination, and consummate diplomacy on the part of black Americans. As products of American slavery and discrimination, they brought an authenticity, a legitimacy, to the international movement that their white co-workers could never claim. They were the bona fide representatives of millions of oppressed human beings.”
²⁹

If the African American abolitionists gave a certain unity to Anglo-American antislavery movements, they also provided a certain unity to their highly diversified audiences. When fugitive slave
Samuel Ringgold Ward toured Britain in the mid-1850s, he found that within a month of his arrival “I had been upon the platforms of the Bible Tract, Sunday School, Missionary, Temperance, and Peace, as well as the Anti-Slavery Societies.”
³⁰

One must remember that
British abolitionists achieved their
goals
of colonial slave emancipation in 1834 and of ending apprenticeship in 1838. But the spectacular success of the British abolitionist movement then furnished a model and incentive for a wide range of other causes.
Joseph Sturge, the wealthy
Quaker who helped found the radical
Agency Committee in 1831 and then led the campaign against apprenticeship, went on in 1839 to help found the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (today known as Anti-Slavery International), dedicated to worldwide slave emancipation. Officials in the BFASS also served in the
British Peace Society, the
Aborigines Protection Society, and other reform organizations. Sturge himself, a pacifist and teetotaler, supported the liberal
Anti-
Corn Law League and radical workers’
Chartist movement, helped found the
National Complete Suffrage Union for universal male enfranchisement, and tried to broker an alliance between the bourgeois Anti-Corn Law League and the Chartists—a movement born as an alliance of factory workers, artisans, and middle-class radical reformers determined to democratize the British political system.
³¹

In short, the sympathetic crowds that cheered the black American abolitionists, including crowds of working-class laborers, arrived with highly diverse interests. But they all opposed “slavery” and were
reassured by the African Americans that their own nation had not only achieved a high level of racial tolerance but had set a model for the world in abolishing a deeply rooted social evil. Later questions about the economic failure of that action only highlighted the national achievement of moral justice. But there was clearly a conflict or at least tension between Sturge’s merging of antislavery with
Chartist outrage over domestic suffering and injustice, and the way African American abolitionists celebrated a monarchic nation that treated them as equal human beings and that led the world in abolishing a unique and unparalleled evil. As we will see later, Frederick Douglass repeatedly stressed the
uniqueness of chattel slavery, arguing that there was no more similarity between examples of
British domestic oppression and American slavery “than there was between light and darkness.” We will later need to examine the fact that British abolitionism could exercise this dual character, both promoting broader moral progress and unintentionally supporting the status quo.