Free The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis

divine retribution” for a national sin, and that the first day of a Jubilee year would inaugurate continuous progress in the cause of freedom, including the Christianization of the former slaves, some of whom would become missionaries in Africa. Above all, he rejoiced that “Britain’s trans-Atlantic daughter” had already caught the spirit of British philanthropy; and that once America joined Britain in setting “the united example of the entire, peaceful, and final extinction of slavery,—the world will be shamed into imitation.” 2 Yet it is crucial to note that Wardlaw and his audience could simply take it for granted that West Indian blacks would and should continue to perform the same kinds of labor for the same former masters.
    Despite highly conflicting reports in America concerning the response of West Indian blacks to emancipation,Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed Wardlaw’s optimism in an influential speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Jubilee on August 1, 1844. For Emerson, British emancipation was “an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts; a day, which gave the immense fortification of a fact,—of gross history,—to ethical abstractions.” Itespecially impressed Emerson that “the negro population was equal in nobleness to the deed.” Meeting in churches and chapels on the night of July 31, they had welcomed their emancipating moment with prayers and tears of joy, “but there was no riot, no feasting” and, according to one report, “not a single dance … nor so much as a fiddle played.” The next morning, Emerson assured his listeners, “with very few exceptions, every negro on every plantation was in the field at work.” Since the much criticized apprenticeship was also abolished on August 1 in 1838, the second emancipation was easily subsumed in thefirst. LikeWardlaw, Emerson stressed that “other revolutions have been the insurrection of the oppressed; this was the repentance of the tyrant,” the harbinger of a new era, when “the masses” would awaken and apply an absolute moral standard to every public question. 3
    For most free African Americans, the First (or Second) of August soon became a national holiday replacing the Fourth of July, a day of promise when both black and whiteabolitionists could deliver orations and sermons that not only condemned the evils of slavery and racial discrimination but reminded the world that Britain, the tyrant symbolically overthrown every Fourth of July, must still teach white Americans the meaning of freedom.
    FrederickDouglass, who frequently spoke on such holidays, elaborated on this theme in a long address delivered to some three to four thousand blacks and whites in Poughkeepsie, New York, on August 2, 1858:
    How long may we ask, shall it be the standing reproach and shame of the American Government that while England is exerting her mighty power, and her all-pervading influence, to emancipate mankind from Slavery, and to humanize the world, the American Government is taxing its ingenuity, and putting forth its power, to thwart and circumvent this policy of a great and kindred nation? 4
    For Douglass, the profound goal was to make “this ever memorable day” the means of awakening the American people “in the cause of the fettered millions in our own land.” Douglass emphatically argued that theBritish emancipation act was not an “experiment,” contrary to the views of Britain’s colonial secretaryEdward Stanley and the other framers of the law. Instead, according to Douglass, the act “naturally addresses itself to the highest and most ennobling attributes ofhuman nature.” Unequaled in “the annals of the world,” it was “a manifestation of Christian virtue … a confession and a renunciation of profitable sin at great expense, on a grand and commanding scale, by a great nation.” This victory was far from