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

become a “
demon of oppression.
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    Thus, in 1834, not long before British Emancipation Day, Charles Stuart joined an abolitionist meeting in Middletown, Connecticut, which
TheLiberator
described as “cogent, temperate, and solemn.” Stuart had convertedTheodore Dwight Weld, a chief architect of the American antislavery movement, to the abolitionist cause, and was celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic for such seminal works as
The West India Question: Immediate Emancipation Safe and Practical.
But after an angry mob confronted and interrupted the meeting, a U.S. Navy lieutenant challenged Stuart to a duel and proclaimed him a liar andcoward. Then the mob threw eggs, attacked and injured some speakers, andthreatened to tar and feather Stuart and a colleague before aid finally came from a sheriff and some members of the nearby Wesleyan college.
    As Stuart andThompson discovered, the “public sphere” of the United States was drastically different from that in Britain, whereabolitionists faced little if any public hostility and had for decades succeeded in mobilizing mass support from a spectrum of social classes. Nevertheless, the British and American antislavery movements were intricately interconnected, and speakers like Stuart and Thompson did travel widely and make an impression. The American reformers’ obsession with petitioning Congress, despite no likelihood of success, was largely the result of the highly successful British petition campaigns to end the slave trade, emancipate British slaves, and end the apprenticeship system. American abolitionists greatly benefited from the vibrant transatlantic abolitionist print culture and also found significant British financial, moral, and religious support for their cause from the 1830s to the Civil War. And this tradition of popular antislavery support, some of it even from the British working class, played a key role in preventing Britain from following its economic self-interest by intervening in the war and recognizing thecotton-producing Confederacy.

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    The second broad point I mentioned, that America’s Emancipation Proclamation and especially theThirteenth,Fourteenth, andFifteenth Amendments represent the climax and turning point of the Age of Emancipation, is illuminated byJames Oakes’s recent revisionist book on the destruction of slavery in the American Civil War. 24
    Oakes shows, contrary to many standard accounts, thatLincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not appear as a sudden, radical action, totally out of the blue. For more than a year, Lincoln’sRepublican administration did remain committed to a supposed constitutional ban on interference with slavery in the
existing
slaveholding states. But they were determined from the first to move toward the ultimate extinction of slavery, first by establishing an antislavery “cordon of freedom” around the South that would contain and undermine the institution; and second, by using the doctrine of “military necessity” to free tens of thousands of slaves—so-called contrabands—whofled behind Union lines. Republican leaders drew upon the antislavery arguments of John QuincyAdams as well as leading abolitionists and were convinced that since chattel bondage violated natural and international law and was unrecognized by theConstitution, which defined slaves as “persons held in service,” not property, it was restricted within the boundaries of specific Southern states. In 1862 they thus banned slavery on the high seas and in all territories “where the national government has exclusive jurisdiction.” And in early 1862, while applying pressure on the four slaveholdingBorder States that remained within the Union, they required a new state,West Virginia, to abolish slavery as a condition for admission to the Union.
    Contrary to many conventional accounts, the Republicans’First andSecondConfiscation Acts freed enormous numbers of slaves and led directly to Lincoln’s