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FREE-SOIL HAVENS and the AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT, 1813-1863 a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty O

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FREE-SOIL HAVENS and the AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT, 1813-1863 a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty O BEACONS OF LIBERTY: FREE-SOIL HAVENS AND THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT, 1813-1863 A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Elena K. Abbott, M.A. Washington, DC June 12, 2017 Copyright 2017 by Elena K Abbott All Rights Reserved ! ii BEACONS OF LIBERTY: FREE-SOIL HAVENS AND THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT, 1813-1863 Elena K Abbott, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Adam Rothman, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Beginning in the late eighteenth century, diverse anti-slavery efforts transformed the geography of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world. Haiti, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Upper Canada, Mexico, the newly independent South American nations, and the British West Indies all became havens of free soil, where emancipation laws either immediately or gradually freed enslaved populations. This dissertation argues that these “free-soil havens” had a powerful influence on American anti-slavery culture between 1813 and 1863. As abolitionists battled slaveholders to sway public opinion toward the anti-slavery cause, free-soil havens provided concrete geopolitical spaces through which American slaves, free people, and anti-slavery advocates could imagine alternative possibilities to slavery and racism in the United States. Reading across the rich print culture produced by nineteenth-century politicians, activists, migrants, missionaries, travelers, and newspaper editors, this study illuminates the myriad ways that free-soil havens inspired anti-slavery thought and activism in the United States. Free-soil havens offered destinations for fugitive slaves and free black emigrants, modeled various political and socio-economic outcomes of emancipation, and became familiar symbols of liberty and equality. They produced diplomatic crises challenging the power of American slaveholders and encouraged anti-slavery advocates to fight against American slavery on an international scale. ! iii Each free-soil haven developed its own reputation among slaves, free black activists, and white anti-slavery advocates for its potential to help in the struggle against American slavery. By tracing the geopolitical shifts affecting the reputations and relevance of different free-soil havens to the American anti-slavery movement over a fifty-year period, this study offers a new perspective on the important and familiar narrative of the Underground Railroad. It argues that the Underground Railroad to Canada emerged over time as an identifiable and powerful anti- slavery entity because the British province gained an unshakable (if not always accurate) reputation for being more able to provide security and legal equality than other free-soil havens. Narrating the story of American anti-slavery advocates looking abroad for hope and inspiration as they worked to dismantle slavery in the United States, this dissertation offers the first evaluation of how free-soil havens across the Atlantic world collectively affected a national anti-slavery movement. ! iv This dissertation is dedicated to my wonderful family, friends, and mentors who have made this work possible. For my parents and siblings, who have loved me for a very long time. For David’s parents and siblings, who have loved me as their own. For my wonderful friends, who kept me sane and happy. For Adam, Alison, and Chandra, who gave me boundless support. For Gabrielle and Sharla, who set me on this path. For David, who is my heart. Thank you. ! v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Haiti and West Africa, 1813-1829...........................................................32 Chapter 2: Upper Canada and Mexico, 1829-1835 ...................................................93 Chapter 3: The Abolition of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1834-1838 ............150 Chapter 4: Self-Emancipation and the Promise of Free Soil, 1836-1849..................205 Chapter 5: Free Soil and the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1861...................................261 Conclusion .................................................................................................................318 Appendix: Reference Material...................................................................................333 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................336 ! vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Map of Southwestern Upper Canada/Canada West and the Detroit River Frontier..............................................................................................113 Figure 2: “John Bull’s Monarchy a Refuge from Brother Jonathan’s Slavery”........216 Figure 3: The Underground Railroad in the 19th Century .........................................250 Figure 4. “Freedom to Africa”...................................................................................271 Figure 5. "The Fugitives Are Safe in a Free Land" ...................................................275 Figure 6. “Away to Canada”......................................................................................281 Figure 7. “Beacons of Liberty: A Reference Map of Free Soil and Abolition Beyond U.S. Borders, 1787-1838”.............................................................333 Figure 8. Table of Free-Soil Emigration Streams, 1793-1877 ..................................334 ! vii INTRODUCTION In early 1840, an enslaved man named Madison Washington escaped from Virginia and made his way northward to the British province of Upper Canada (modern-day Ontario). A success story of the so-called Underground Railroad, he lived for several months with Hiram Wilson, a white missionary made famous among anti-slavery advocates for his tireless work on behalf of the fugitive slaves who successfully claimed freedom across the U.S.-Canada border. Now a free man under British law, Washington nevertheless found that he could not live in freedom without his wife, who remained enslaved in Virginia. In 1841, Washington decided to reverse the perilous route he had traveled to secure his freedom the previous year, and returned to the United States. His rescue attempt failed.1 Washington was re-captured and sold to a slave trader, who put him on board the brig Creole alongside 134 other enslaved men, women, and children. Engaged in the United States’ flourishing domestic slave trade which transported thousands of people from states like Virginia in the Upper South to regions of intensive cotton and sugar production in the expanding Deep South and Southwest, the Creole was scheduled to carry Madison Washington and the rest of its cargo from Richmond, Virginia along the Atlantic coast to New Orleans, Louisiana.2 The Creole did not reach its destination. On November 7, 1841, Washington led nineteen of the slaves aboard the Creole in a violent revolt. They overpowered the ship’s crew and commandeered the vessel. Rather than returning to the United States mainland to be hounded as 1 “From the Friend of Man. Madison Washington. Another Chapter in His History.,” The Liberator (Boston, MA), 10 June 1842, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive, accessed October 25, 2016, Gale Document GT3005850453. 2 George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick, The Creole Mutiny: A Tale of Revolt Aboard a Slave Ship (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 3. On the practice, scope, and culture of the American domestic slave trade, see Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ! 1 fugitive slaves and criminals, however, Washington and his compatriots demanded that the Creole be sailed into the port of Nassau on the British island of New Providence (the Bahamas). Washington knew from his time in Canada that Great Britain, which had abolished slavery in 1834, maintained a policy of freeing and protecting slaves who were able to cross into British territory. Indeed, British officials in Nassau immediately freed all but the nineteen leaders of the shipboard rebellion, and, eventually, freed the leaders as well.3 While little is known about their lives after this point, Madison Washington and the freed slaves aboard the Creole were not soon forgotten. The Creole rebellion unfolded at the same time that abolitionism was picking up steam in the United States, with anti-slavery activists pitting themselves against powerful slaveholding interests in an ongoing battle to sway American public opinion toward their cause. The drama of a seafaring rebellion led by a fugitive slave captured the imaginations of anti-slavery advocates, and the fact that British officials opted to free the men, women, and children in accordance with British law caused an uproar among southern slaveholders.4 For American observers both for and against slavery, the event proved in no uncertain terms that the international borders separating slavery and freedom were both permeable and politically significant. A decade later in 1851, a free-born African American woman in her late 20s named Mary Ann Shadd left her family home in Pennsylvania and resettled in Canada West (formerly Upper Canada) after the enactment of the infamous 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. She was horrified by what the new law meant for the safety of free African Americans and for the future of slavery in the 3 Hendrick and Hendrick, The Creole Mutiny, 77–120; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History
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