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

easy or undemanding; Douglass underscored the power of the selfish and “Satanic” interests and the repeated earlier defeats inParliament and out of Parliament. 5
    What finally made success possible was the spread of abolition sentiment “from individuals to multitudes all over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” In response to this united voice of the nation, the British Parliament “calmly” proceeded “to dissolve the relation of master and slave,” and “on the morning of the 1st of August 1834, eight hundred thousand colored members of the human family were instantly declared free, emancipated.” “They had been ranked, as our slaves are, with the beasts of the field, rated with bales of goods and barrels of rum, driven before the taskmaster’s lash.” “But all at once they learn that their bondage is ended, the taskmaster is dismissed, the whips and chains are buried, they are no longer slaves.” Douglass accepted abolitionist reports that the freed slaves had then “staggered and fell down, rose up, ran about, shouted, laughed, cried, sung.” 6
    But in 1858, as America moved toward theCivil War, Douglass was especially concerned with including a response to the widespread British and American consensus that British West Indian emancipation had been a shockingeconomic failure. The London
Times
had editorialized in 1857,
    Confessedly, taking that grand summary view of the question which we cannot help taking after a quarter of a century, the process was a failure: it destroyed an immense property, ruined thousands of good families, degraded the Negroes still lower than they were, and, after all, increased the mass of Slavery in less scrupulous hands. 7
    Employing irony, Douglass “admitted” that “in some respects” (from the slaveholders’ perspective) it had failed—that is, the British had failed to impose a repressive substitute for slavery and had failed to prevent former slaves and their descendants from creating their own farms and employments and from achieving civil rights or even becoming jurors and legislators. 8
    Douglass was here responding to the undeniable fact thatemancipation had led to a sharp decline in the production ofWest Indian plantations, especially in larger colonies like Jamaica, where many freed blacks were able to obtain their own land and depend on at least subsistence agriculture. He even acknowledged Britain’s dependence on the importation of thousands of so-called East IndianCoolies to replace the ex-slaves who had left the plantations. But for Douglass the preservation of the plantation system was not a priority. The priority was the condition and welfare of the former slaves, which had clearly been vastly improved in the twenty years since theabolition of apprenticeship.
    Douglass was well aware that even by 1858 antislavery was still far from becoming a “united voice” of the Northern American states and that this contrast with Britain had raised immense obstacles to the idea of America simply following the British example. Apart from public opinion, the British Parliament had had almost complete control over the colonies. The American Congress was bound by a Constitution that protected states’ rights, and slaveholders retained immense power in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Moreover, a deep tradition of Anglophobia played into the hands of opponents of abolitionism, who were able to portray the reformers as subversive agents of a British plot to divide and destroy the antimonarchic republic.
    When noted British abolitionists likeCharles Stuart andGeorge Thompson came to the North in the 1830s, hoping to rally popular support by applying the successful British lecturing techniques, they were often met by hostile and even dangerous mobs—which also victimized many American abolitionist speakers. According to Thompson, in “this heaven-favored, but mob-cursed land,” public opinion had by the mid-1830s