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Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems In ABOLITIONISTS AND WORKING-CLASS PROBLEMS IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRIALIZATION By the same author JAMES GILLESPIE BIRNEY: Slaveholder to Abolitionist MEN AND BROTHERS: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation ABOLITIONISTS AND WORKING-CLASS PROBLEMS IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRIALIZATION BETTY FLADELAND M MACMILLAN © Betty Fladeland 1984 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1984 978-0-333-36207-5 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1984 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fladeland, Betty Abolitionists and working-class problems in the age of industrialization 1. Slavery - Great Britain - Anti-slavery movements I. Title 322.4'4'0941 HT1163 ISBN 978-1-349-06999-6 ISBN 978-1-349-06997-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-06997-2 Contents Acknowledgements VI Introduction Vll 1 Granville Sharp 1 2 A Quartet of Liverpudlians: William Rathbone, William Roscoe, James Currie and Edward Rushton 17 3 Joseph Sturge 49 4 Harriet Martineau 74 5 T. Perronet Thompson 93 6 Patrick Brewster and Henry Solly 111 7 Joseph Barker 132 Epilogue 171 Notes 176 Index 223 v Acknowledgements I should like to thank several colleagues in the field of antislavery research who have either directed me to materials, shared their own, or read and criticized these essays: the late Roger Anstey, Richard Blackett, Merton Dillon, Seymour Drescher, George Shepperson, Nicholas Spence, Fiona Spiers, Clare Taylor, James Walvin and John A. Woods. I should also like to thank the staff members of the British Library (including the Newspaper Library in Colindale and the Library of Political and Economic Science), Dr Williams's Library, the Friends House Library, University College Library and the Public Record Office, all in London; the Rhodes House and Bodleian Libraries in Oxford; Cambridge University Library; Birmingham Reference Library; the John Rylands and University of Manchester Libraries in Manchester; the Central Libraries and Harold Cohen Library in Liverpool; the Mitchell and University of Glasgow Libraries in Glasgow; the University of Edinburgh Library; the University of Hull Library; York Minster Library; the Record Office, Cumbria County; the Boston Public Library Manuscripts Division and Massachusetts Historical Library in Boston; the Historical Library of Pennsylvania; the State Historical Library of Nebraska; Duke University Library; and the Huntington Library. I especially wish to thank Mr Charles Holliday of the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University. Vl Introduction A question of some concern to current historians of the British and American antislavery movements is the degree of working­ class involvement in those causes. The issue appears as a recurring theme in several of the essays in a recently published volume edited by Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, Anti­ S lavery, Religion, and Reform (1980), and also in Slavery and British Society 1776-1846 (1982), edited by James Walvin. 1 Thomas Clarkson himself raised the point initially when he wrote of the large numbers of people who signed petitions against the slave trade and joined in boycotts of slave-grown sugar. 2 But there the matter rested for more than a hundred years without much attention being paid to it. The earliest works on the American movement, which were published at the turn of the century by A. B. Hart, Alice D. Adams and Mary Locke, did not address the question of mass involvement. The same was true of the standard histories of the British movement by Sir Reginald Coupland, Frank J. Klingberg and William L. Mathieson and of American studies by Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, which revived interest in the subject of antislavery among American historians. 3 For the most part, even the succeeding generation of historians of antislavery did not give much thought to the question, but generally accepted as a 'given' that the movements were initiated, led and supported by the middle classes. 4 Aspects which received the most attention were the impact of evangelicalism and the Enlightenment on antislavery attitudes, antislavery as a political issue, and the question of economic determinism. 5 Yet, some spadework on popular support, including that of the working classes, had begun in the 1950s and 1960s. Bernard Mandel's Labor: Free and Slave. Workingmen and the Anti­ Slavery Movement in the United States presented the relationship between abolitionists and workers as largely negative. In Britain several people writing theses explored the topic and found Vll Vlll Introduction decidedly positive connections, especially E. M. Hunt in 'The North of England Agitation for the Abolition of the Slave Trade 1780-1800', and James Walvin in 'English Democratic Societies and Popular Radicalism 1791-1800'. Gloria Clare Taylor pointed out the role of the Scottish churches in disseminating antislavery doctrine to all classes, and more recently Douglas Riach has emphasized the organized attempts of the Dublin abolitionists to reach the working populace. 6 Building on those foundations, several scholars, both British and American, are currently addressing the problem. Richard Blackett has just completed a study of black American abolitionists' missions to Britain in which he reveals the degree to which they attracted working-class audiences in the thousands. James Walvin has carried forward his initial exploration of the subject to the reform campaign of 1832, and Seymour Drescher has contrasted the degree of mass support for the British movement with the lack of it in France. He argues that as long as the antislavery movement remained elitist, slavery 'pursued its unhampered course', but was abolished when abolitionism became 'a vehicle adopted by underrepresented and dynamic social, regional, and religious groups'. 7 Patricia Hollis, on the other hand, has concluded that the British antislavery movement 'failed to forge a working-class constituency', at least prior to George Thompson's Anti-Slavery League of 1846, and that 'anti­ slavery leaders preferred to acquire a more reputable con­ stituency than that of working men'. 8 Alan Kraut, Edward Magdol and John Jentz are among those using quantitative techniques to analyse working-class participation in American antislavery organizations. They have found positive, active involvement to a surprising degree. 9 The obverse side of the question of working-class interest in the antislavery cause is that of abolitionists' concern with working­ class movements. Perhaps it is not surprising how a widespread acceptance of the idea that abolition was largely a conservative, middle-class reform tended to perpetuate the old Dickensian stereotype of emancipationists as a collection of Mrs Jellybys who were oblivious to the fact that exploited white labour at home needed emancipation just as did black slaves in the West Indies or in a far-off section of the United States. Even when historians began to recognize abolitionists as interested in broad-based reform with many interrelated movements, they almost always Introduction IX depicted them, along with reformers in general, as paternalistic, usually evangelical, do-gooders motivated by the need for social control but unhampered by any deep concern for the rights of the working classes. 10 However, Ernest M. Howse in Saints in Politics defended the Clapham Sect as men who though they 'unmis­ takably and inevitably' were men of their own times, yet in many ways were ahead of their times. Frank Thistlethwaite in The Anglo-Amen"can Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century pointed out that eventually the more 'practical spirits' among the abolitionists 'turned their energies toward linking antislavery to broader political issues' including, in Britain, Chartism and the anti-Corn Law fight. 11 In his seminal volumes on the intellectual origins and development of antislavery thought, David Brion Davis, while considering the possibility that antislavery 'bred a new sensitivity to social oppression', emphasizes even more the idea of social control and the degree to which the antislavery movement supported the contemporary social order. He sees this not only as an inadvertent result but also as a conscious aim of the antislavery leaders. In citing abolitionists' defences of the existing social and economic structure, particularly their rationalisations of current labour conditions, he tends to resurrect the old stereotype: 'Abol­ itionists could contemplate a revolutionary change in status precisely because they were not considering the upward mobility of workers, but rather the rise of distant Negroes to the level of humanity.'12 My impression is that they were, consciously, advocating the upward mobility of the working classes but not solely, and often not primarily, from an economic viewpoint. Civil liberties, political rights and educational opportunity were of equal importance in their vision of the just and good society. Davis was, of course, dealing with the early period of abolition (in which support for the status quo may have been truer than I think it was later), and his evidence is drawn to a large extent from the positions of Wilberforce, James Stephen, Granville Sharp and their colleagues of the revolutionary era. As is apparent in my first essay, I disagree with him on Granville Sharp, and believe that one can find many others of the same period who do not fit so neatly into the category of upholders of the status quo. 1 ~ To illustrate, one has only to name Major John Cartwright, Thomas Hardy, Tom Paine, Capel Lofft, Thomas Walker, Christopher Wyvill and Richard Price- all antislavery and political radicals. X Introduction Indeed, Roger Anstey held that even Wilberforce had the potential for 'a more modern syndrome'. Although Wilberforce voted for what Will Cobbett termed the 'gagging and dungeoning' bills, he supported Pitt's abortive reform bill of 1785, subsequent bills to curtail election corruption, and Peel's factory acts of 1802 and 1818. He advocated the expenditure of public as well as private monies to relieve the poor and carry out prison reform.
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