The Problem of Slavery and Progress in American Foreign Relations, 1833-1844 Steven Heath Mitton Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 The free world confronted: the problem of slavery and progress in American foreign relations, 1833-1844 Steven Heath Mitton Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Mitton, Steven Heath, "The free world confronted: the problem of slavery and progress in American foreign relations, 1833-1844" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 973. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/973 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THE FREE WORLD CONFRONTED: THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY AND PROGRESS IN AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1833 - 1844 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Steven Heath Mitton B.A., Western State College of Colorado, 1993 M.A., University of Texas at Arlington, 1995 May, 2005 ©Copyright 2005 Steven Heath Mitton All rights reserved ii For my mother, TO MY PARENTS Mitchell Lee Mitton iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For their helpful assistance I wish to thank the staffs of the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the several additional repositories listed in the References, and the libraries of Louisiana State University and the University of Texas at Arlington. It is my pleasure also to thank the LSU Department of History and Graduate School for their generous financial assistance. In addition to funding research, that assistance permitted study with Gaines M. Foster, William J. Cooper Jr., Anne Loveland, and John C. Rodrigue, specialists of the American South; Civil War historian Charles W. Royster; James E. Lewis Jr., a scholar of early-American foreign policy who directed early stages of this research; British historian Meredith Veldman, and Latin Americanist Stanley E. Hilton. I am indebted also to Seymour Drescher, Robert W. Fogel, Gavin Wright, James M. McPherson, and Robert J. Gavin for lending rare or unpublished scholarship; H. Arnold Barton, for researching Sweden’s National Library while in Stockholm; and the several additional scholars and researchers mentioned in the notes. Earlier, while at the University of Texas at Arlington, I was fortunate to work with Joyce S. Goldberg, a specialist of nineteenth-century American foreign relations, and Stephen E. Maizlish, whose seminar on antebellum politics introduced me to the labyrinth of slavery, progress, and international relations. To my delight, Profs. Foster, Cooper, Royster, and Veldman welcomed the topic. Indebted for their encouragement and service on my dissertation committee, I have, indeed, accumulated debts to Prof. Foster far beyond measure. On at least two occasions—first at the beginning of my research, when by unfortunate circumstance I found myself in need of a new dissertation director, then again near the end, after my research exceeded time limits stipulated by university guidelines—Prof. Foster weighed in with crucial support and faith in my ideas. Hopeful the final product approaches what he envisioned, I am thankful for his friendship and direction. The untiring support and considerations of my family also benefited my research immeasurably. Certainly without the encouragement and love of my wife, Nicole, who deserves all the gratitude I can hope to express and probably far more, this dissertation never would have seen its end. iv PREFACE The experiment in West India has failed . The condition of England at this time calls for the sympathy of the world. DUFF GREEN TO Abel P. Upshur, April 28, 1842 Green Papers, UNC The war of Great Britain with China is a branch of that war against Slavery which she has undertaken and is now waging throughout the globe . It is the cause of human freedom—a glorious and blessed cause! Are we to be the antagonist champions? JOHN QUINCY ADAMS TO Richard Rush, Dec. 30, 1842 Adams Papers, MHS (Emphasis in original) I had a quarter of an hour’s conversation with [Caleb] Cushing, and told him there was a war now in parturition between Freedom and Slavery throughout the globe; that it would be a war for the abolition of slavery, at the head of which would be Great Britain; that in this war I could take no part—I was going off the stage . and I conjured him, as he cherished his own and his country’s honor, not to commit himself, in this great controversy, to the side of slavery and to return to the cause of liberty, from which he had not yet irrevocably strayed. He heard me without taking offence, but apparently without conviction. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS Diary, February 15, 1843 Adams Papers, MHS Few terms stand more in need of introduction to American historiography than the Great Experiment. The free labor system that replaced slavery in the British West Indies after passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 has rarely been recognized as an experiment by scholars of antebellum America. Far from it, British abolition is often presumed to have entailed little or no risk. Not by coincidence, existing scholarship of antebellum America makes little mention of a global war for the abolition of slavery. v Among American scholars, present understanding of British abolition has been shaped largely by Marxism, the argument of slavery’s inviability, and free-labor ideology—three of the most prominent historiographical interpretations of the twentieth century. Marxist interpretations, especially Eric Williams’ immensely influential Capitalism and Slavery (1944), rendered slavery superfluous by advancements in Western capitalism, specifically the Industrial Revolution. While Williams stopped short of arguing slavery destined to unprofitability, non-Marxist scholars often took that step. Consistent with a faith prevalent in the middle decades of the twentieth century—that material and moral progress was one and the same—scholars influenced in part by the slavery studies of Ulrich B. Phillips argued that slavery was inviable or economically obsolescent, destined, so to speak, to die a natural economic death at the hands of human progress and the Industrial Revolution. Besides providing the keystone of the Blundering Generation School—an interpretation prevalent in the middle decades of the twentieth century, whose adherents argued that the American Civil War was fought by a blundering generation who failed to recognize slavery was destined to obsolescence— the presumption of inviability implies that slavery was a liability best ended sooner than later. An argument consistent with the Williams thesis that the British found slavery superfluous and therefore abolished it at little or no risk, inviability arguments were further corroborated by scholars who perceived the emergence of a free labor ideology during the nineteenth century. From the strength of the arguments of Eric Foner and the evidence of a thriving free-labor ideology in the antebellum American North, the presumption emerged that the British shared a faith in free (or wage) labor that led them to abolish slavery in the confidence that wage labor was more profitable than slavery. As with the Williams and inviability arguments, the logic of free-labor ideology suggested that the British foresaw and incurred no risk by abolishing West Indian slavery. vi A conspicuous pattern in American historiography emerged from these beliefs that the British benefited, or at least incurred little risk, by abolition. If presumed to have redounded to Britain’s advantage, abolition would have left British policymakers with little or no economic incentive to promote the abolition of slavery elsewhere. Indeed, they would have perceived disincentive by strict economic logic. However much the British public might wish to promote slavery’s abolition for moral reasons, moral suasion absent economic incentive is no recipe for earnestness. Scholars therefore have often concluded that British antislavery objectives were toothless, a conclusion that stood in stark contrast to the perceptions of numerous antebellum Americans, among them Duff Green and John Quincy Adams. Finding the existence of a global war for the abolition of slavery difficult to believe, especially one headed by Great Britain, scholars concluded that antebellum Americans must have been mistaken in their perceptions of earnest British belligerence. Explaining away such claims by southern slaveholders—in particular Green, John C. Calhoun, and Abel P. Upshur—scholars simply neglected those of the northerner Adams. As a result, readers of existing scholarship of antebellum America will encounter explanations that Jacksonian-era Americans suffered from anxiety, paranoia, even Anglophobia. They will read that Jacksonian Americans were duplicitous, quick to fabricate images of foreign threats in order to mobilize domestic interests in self-serving ways. They will learn that honor or political insecurities rendered antebellum Americans hypersensitive, producing exaggerations of threats that may in fact have been genuine but not as genuine as claimed. In short, readers encounter most every explanation except one: acceptance of antebellum

Load more