Slavery in a British Victory of American Revolutionary war?

No one work in particular, but I've done research from various sources over the years; whatever evidence does exist out there tells us that British abolitionism experienced at least a significant, if not *major* boost, after London lost the Colonies. BTW, I don't deny that there were some other factors involved, as well, but that definitely provided a major push, and that can't be ignored.

I disagree. Obviously abolitionism increased after the war, but that's a coincidence; the war just happened to occur at around the same era as the start of the abolitionist movement. From the mid 18th century to the end of the 18th century, Abolitionism went from something practically not talked about, to a major topic among intellectuals, to a serious political movement and topic among all classes. Keep in mind a lot of the ideals expressed in the American Revolution were pure Enlightenment ideals, and Abolitionism was a product of the Enlightenment. The same social movement would produce abolitionism, popular suffrage, anti-absolutism, criminal justice reform, etc. You're mixing up cause and effect with two things that in many ways stemmed from the same source.

To get off topic, obviously the Enlightenment had its limits, and I like to make an argument that Enlightenment ideals paradoxically contributed to the rise of the dehumanization of blacks in the American south, but that's a subject for another time.
 
I disagree. Obviously abolitionism increased after the war, but that's a coincidence; the war just happened to occur at around the same era as the start of the abolitionist movement.

Nope, I'm afraid not. Like I've said before, I don't doubt that the abolitionist movement was just starting to gain *some* ground earlier in the 1770s, but it's not at all a coincidence that they started gaining much, much more traction during the next two decades afterwards. Perhaps it's already been mentioned here, but the British as a whole, both gentry and the common man, were actually fairly humbled to a significant degree for a time, following the loss of the Seaboard Colonies; this allowed for British society to open up to some extent. And guess what? This provided a perfect opportunity for the abolitionists and their allies to have their voices heard: if these upstart Americans could be swayed by the belief in freedom, liberty, and (legal) equality for all free men, why could Britons not accept the same?

From the mid 18th century to the end of the 18th century, Abolitionism went from something practically not talked about, to a major topic among intellectuals, to a serious political movement and topic among all classes.
Yes, that is true, but this does not at all disprove my point.

Keep in mind a lot of the ideals expressed in the American Revolution were pure Enlightenment ideals, and Abolitionism was a product of the Enlightenment. The same social movement would produce abolitionism, popular suffrage, anti-absolutism, criminal justice reform, etc.

You're mixing up cause and effect with two things that in many ways stemmed from the same source.
Not really. I do recognize that abolitionism was definitely around for quite some time before an American revolution was even thought of(IIRC, James Oglethorpe, one of the founders of Georgia actually desired to make his colony free of slavery). But, again, did abolitionism just suddenly surge on it's own circa 1780? Not at all. It did indeed gain a significant boost from the Patriots' victory in the Revolutionary War; even some in Britain itself sympathized with their causes to some extent or another, and not a few did see the victory as another sign that the Enlightenment's time had indeed come, thus, helping the abolitionists and other progressively minded people of that particular era.

To get off topic, obviously the Enlightenment had its limits, and I like to make an argument that Enlightenment ideals paradoxically contributed to the rise of the dehumanization of blacks in the American south, but that's a subject for another time.
TBH, If anything at all, one could quite easily argue that the rise of the oppression of blacks in the Southern U.S. was actually somewhat of a reaction *against* the Enlightenment, or at least certain core aspects of it, but perhaps we should indeed leave that for another day(or via P.M.).
 
but it's not at all a coincidence that they started gaining much, much more traction during the next two decades afterwards.

Citation very much needed.

But, again, did abolitionism just suddenly surge on it's own circa 1780? Not at all. It did indeed gain a significant boost from the Patriots' victory in the Revolutionary War; even some in Britain itself sympathized with their causes to some extent or another, and not a few did see the victory as another sign that the Enlightenment's time had indeed come, thus, helping the abolitionists and other progressively minded people of that particular era.

Once again, did anyone actually explicitly make the connection? Anyone significant and contemporary to the period, preferably?
 
It's worth pointing out here that the British working classes weren't even being represented when abolition came. The Great Reform Act only allowed about 4% of the electorate vote (but in a non-distorted manner), and that electorate overwhelmingly voted to eliminate slavery. If the working classes were included, it would be even stronger.
Not necessarily: there are suggestions that elements of the working classes get quite pissed off by the middle-class interest in antislavery over, say, factory legislation. What the American example might do is persuade the British to extend the franchise lower than they did historically, say to £8 rather than £10, or to replace the old working-class borough freeman franchises with something intended to give representation to the respectable working class (i.e., those who think and act like the middle classes).

I didn't say or imply that British abolitionism was started by the Patriot victory in the War of Independence, but it sure was greatly helped by it!
The thing is, at the moment you appear to be arguing that it's more likely that the South overcomes all the disadvantages of geography and economy to become an industrial powerhouse by the 1830s than it is for the British antipathy to antislavery to become a fully-fledged abolitionist movement. That doesn't seem tenable.

What is there to downplay, Rob? This decision was only applicable in Britain proper.....as the ruling judge intended.
Except that Mansfield deliberately went out of his way to describe slavery as odious and unsupportable by anything other than positive law, giving institutional recognition to antislavery morality. What it shows is how far antislavery attitudes had spread through British society, particularly considering that Mansfield consulted with Blackstone before making the judgement. Taney chose to use the Dred Scott case as an opportunity to deny black people their rights: Mansfield used Somerset as an opportunity to affirm them. Of course, this is highly inconvenient if you're trying to make the case that British antislavery is a product of the Revolution, leaving the only solution as talking in very limited terms about the scope of the judgement rather than the scope of Mansfield's comments in the hope of playing down the attitudes which they display.

This doesn't disprove my point, however.
Again, this doesn't disprove my point.
You know saying it doesn't make it true, right? I'm sure you fell that Edward Long and Samuel Estwick, two leading British slavery apologists, conceding in the aftermath of the Somerset case that slavery is 'repugnant to the spirit of English laws' doesn't disprove your case, or the first plan for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies being published in 1772 by Maurice Morgann, or Adam Smith calling colonial slave-owners "the refuse of the jails of Europe" in 1759, or Robert Robertson complaining in 1741 that "many Gentlemen of Figure... [insist] that to have any Hand in bringing any of the Human Species into *Bondage* is justly execrable, and that all who partake in the Sweets of *Liberty*, shou'd spare for no Cost to procure the same, as far as possible, for the rest of Mankind every where." Which really begs the question of how much evidence for pre-Revolutionary anti-slavery sentiment you'd require before you change your view that there wasn't a critical mass of sentiment prior to 1775.

To *some* extent, yes. But if anything at all, it was the Loyalists who largely freed slaves only in response to the Revolution.
Except the first plan to use freed slaves against their masters was proposed by Commodore John Moore against the French in Guadeloupe in 1759. So the roots of the idea are about 20 years earlier than you claim.

It was *somewhat* more prevalent overall, yes, especially taking the South into account.
It was dramatically more prevalent, even compared to the North- where many states banned free blacks from living or voting. Look into the evidence of Frederick Douglass, Reverend Jeremiah Asher, Reverend Samuel Ringold Ward, William Wells Brown, John Brown, Amanda Smith, or William and Ellen Craft. Did you know Queen Victoria had a black goddaughter?

There's just one problem: Britain was barely considered to be a real immediate threat to the Union, until *after* the South started breaking away.
Sure. Here's some quotes from American newspapers in 1859:
Consistently with national honor, there can be but one conclusion of this arrogant pretention of Great Britain, and we are confidant that our Government will never peaceably yield an inch of soil to this shallow, absurd and preposterous claim of a power, who for hundreds of years have pursued the policy of claiming strong and important military and naval stations, girdling the earth with her strongholds, as witness Gibraltar, Malta, Singapore...
[America] will not now, in the prime of manhood; in the plenitude of strength; justified by treaties; sanctified by every principle of right and necessity; permit the invasion of our soil, the violation of treaties, the planting of British Colonies upon AMERICAN SOIL.
"Our Rights and No Compromise... [Palmerston's government are] the hereditary haters of American progress and influence.... when it does come, that conflict must never cease till the last British soldier is driven from the American continent, either North or South of us."

In fact, I don't see how you can understand American foreign policy (Oregon, Maine, Texas, anti-slave trade measures, Monroe doctrine etc.) without understanding that they perceive Britain as a threat.

Of course, I never actually said "Britain"- what I said was that they feel "the Union is under continual attack from the forces of monarchy and reaction". Britain is one manifestation of that, but inherent in American exceptionalism is the idea that other countries are trying to bring down "the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government".

Unfortunately, I'm afraid that's just not true. Anti-British sentiment played very little of a role in the slavery debate either way.
Sure. Heard of the New York Herald? Circulation of 105,840 copies on 7 November 1860? This is how Douglas Fermer's James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald describes its views.
[1861]: "He accused the British of having saddled America with the Negro in the first place, but having brought him it appeared the worst evil which Britain could inflict on America would be the ruin of her prosperity by fostering the emancipation movement." (p.63)
[1864]: "With increasing ill-temper, the Herald elaborated its pet theory that the Civil War had been caused by the British aristocracy's jealousy of American prosperity. Pre-war British interest in American abolition societies was evidence, Bennett proclaimed, that the anti-slavery movement was merely a tool of an anarchic British conspiracy to destroy the Union. Yet British slavers had first saddled America with the Negro and now, with typical duplicity, 'perfidious Albion' was doing everything in its power to aid the Confederacy. Herald readers were assured that British gold was the sinister root of all America's troubles." (pp.48-9)
There seems to have generally been one newspaper in each major American city which argued that abolitionism was a British plot to split up the United States: Klees' 1999 study cited as examples of these the Cincinatti Inquirer, the Indianapolis Daily State Sentinel, and the Chicago Times.

And, as I pointed out, not really in defense of slavery in that case.
No: in defence of slave ships, active in a trade which the US government had ruled to be piracy fifty years before, just because it's the British trying to crack down on it.

Even though it did not, and by 1860, a majority of Northerners recognized this, hence, why Lincoln was elected.
That would be the Lincoln who was elected to restrict the expansion of slavery, not to abolish it, and at his inaugural said explicitly he wasn't there to oppose it? That, in fact, he would retain slavery if it shored up the Union? This is the man whose election is conclusive proof that the North is moving towards abolitionism, despite the fact that many of the people who voted for him just wanted to keep black people from undercutting the white man's wage in the North?

In fact, it might actually prove to be a stumbling block, if Northerners going after slavery ends up being seen as an attack on fellow Britons....and that is a possibility we can't ignore.
Pretty sure we can: you can't mobilise opinion against another member of the in-group in the way you suggest. In the War of Independence, the colonies appealed to an American identity in opposition to the British: in the Civil War, the Confederacy appealed to a Southern identity in opposition to the North. The slaveowners might try to construct an identity against antislavery Britain and the North, but by definition this is going to be less significant than an American identity built on not being British.



The problem is, this, in all likelihood, is a scenario in which British abolitionism has been stunted to at least some degree, with the loss of the Patriots in the Revolutionary War. (And, as I mentioned earlier, the problem that an attack on slavery *could* potentially be seen as an attack on fellow subjects of the Crown)

There are a few problems with this assumption-mainly, you still haven't taken into account the fact that British abolitionism was actually greatly helped by the loss of the Thirteen Colonies.
I think I've conclusively proved already that British antislavery attitudes are far stronger than you claim, so the main thing to do is contradict the idea that abolitionism results from the War of Independence. Firstly, the link between the language of the rebels and antislavery is far weaker than you claim: for generation after generation, the Americans see no inherent contradiction between "all men are created equal" and applying property qualifications to black voters, banning free blacks from settling in states, et cetera ad nauseam. However, the British belief that slavery is fundamentally immoral requires a far smaller push to turn it into abolitionism: just the belief that it's right to impose British moral customs on the dependent plantation societies in the Americas. This attitude is far more likely to emerge if Britain establishes its suzerainty in the Americas than if it loses the war.

If we grant your assumption that the language does count, then we have two scenarios. In the first, if slavery is America's "original sin" (Madison), and the American rebels lose the war in large part because the British free slaves, why wouldn't former rebels throw themselves into the antislavery cause with far more vigour than they did historically after God has given a clear judgement against it? In the second, if the constitutional question is settled peacefully, what other significant causes do potential rebels have to campaign for than the abolition of slavery? How much more effective would those antislavery advocates be if they could communicate and collaborate freely with British abolitionists? How many more people might Garrison have won over if he didn't have to call for the end of the Union in order to free the slaves?

Bottom line seems to be that (leaving aside the inaccuracies I've highlighted previously) you're too wedded to your interpretation of how abolitionism grew to consider that similar results might have been obtained in a different way.
 
Until the above is provided that's just more unfounded attempts at taking credit for something that happened elsewhere.

Did you not READ what I linked?

"As long as America was ours," wrote abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1788, "there was no chance that a minister would have attended to the groans of the sons and daughters of Africa, however he might feel for their distress."

I mean, this isn't exactly a new idea. There is a reason that many of the abolition societies that popped up in the North tended to include many of the biggest Patriot faction names. You probably won't have any kind of abolition in many of the Northern colonies in a failed or averted revolution, and the movement in Britain will be hamstrung.
 
Did you not READ what I linked?

Fair enough, condition fulfilled, and definitely something to consider.

I mean, this isn't exactly a new idea. There is a reason that many of the abolition societies that popped up in the North tended to include many of the biggest Patriot faction names. You probably won't have any kind of abolition in many of the Northern colonies in a failed or averted revolution, and the movement in Britain will be hamstrung.

It was hamstrung (in both British and French colonies) - by the Coalition wars. Until those were resolved no definite movement had been made on the matter, and America's involvement certainly did not help resolve those wars faster.

The movement got over that setback, and both winner and loser (Britain and France) arrived to very similar policies at its end around the same time.

The movement long predates the American revolution. I see no reason why it wouldn't have gotten over the implied setback of a victorious war over the American rebels either.
 
Not necessarily: there are suggestions that elements of the working classes get quite pissed off by the middle-class interest in antislavery over, say, factory legislation. What the American example might do is persuade the British to extend the franchise lower than they did historically, say to £8 rather than £10, or to replace the old working-class borough freeman franchises with something intended to give representation to the respectable working class (i.e., those who think and act like the middle classes).

I suppose that may be true; it was certainly a problem here in America, up until about 1860.

The thing is, at the moment you appear to be arguing that it's more likely that the South overcomes all the disadvantages of geography and economy to become an industrial powerhouse by the 1830s than it is for the British antipathy to antislavery to become a fully-fledged abolitionist movement. That doesn't seem tenable.
To be fair, I may need to clarify a few things: I did say that the South gaining a significant amount of additional industry compared to OTL was indeed possible, and could present an issue.

I also don't believe that the failure of the Revolution or no Revolution at all would have stopped the abolitionist movement altogether(you and I probably agree on this.); however, considering the OTL circumstances, it does seem likely, sadly, that either scenario would present at least a slight delay in the success of British abolitionism, also depending on other circumstances that follow afterwards.

Except that Mansfield deliberately went out of his way to describe slavery as odious and unsupportable by anything other than positive law, giving institutional recognition to antislavery morality.
That much is true. But he also did not extend his ruling to go beyond Britain's borders as well; had it happened some 20 years or so later, that might be a different story-but in 1772, sadly, the momentum just wasn't there yet. Mansfield no doubt recognized this.

What it shows is how far antislavery attitudes had spread through British society, particularly considering that Mansfield consulted with Blackstone before making the judgement.
It certainly does show that it got the attention of the more enlightened members of the upper class, by then, yes. The same can also be said of those in America circa 1825 as well; but it would be a quarter of a century before it truly started to become mainstream-in Britain's case, it wasn't that much shorter.

Taney chose to use the Dred Scott case as an opportunity to deny black people their rights: Mansfield used Somerset as an opportunity to affirm them.
No disagreement from me in regards to Taney, but I'm not so sure Mansfield was willing to go quite that far; he did affirm the wrongness of slavery, but didn't really go any further than that.

Of course, this is highly inconvenient if you're trying to make the case that British antislavery is a product of the Revolution, leaving the only solution as talking in very limited terms about the scope of the judgement rather than the scope of Mansfield's comments in the hope of playing down the attitudes which they display.
Again, I never said, or intended to imply, even, that British antislavery was entirely a product of the Revolution; in another thread, I even brought up the example of James Oglethorpe, who was one of the founders of Georgia.

You know saying it doesn't make it true, right? I'm sure you fell that Edward Long and Samuel Estwick, two leading British slavery apologists, conceding in the aftermath of the Somerset case that slavery is 'repugnant to the spirit of English laws' doesn't disprove your case, or the first plan for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies being published in 1772 by Maurice Morgann, or Adam Smith calling colonial slave-owners "the refuse of the jails of Europe" in 1759, or Robert Robertson complaining in 1741 that "many Gentlemen of Figure... [insist] that to have any Hand in bringing any of the Human Species into *Bondage* is justly execrable, and that all who partake in the Sweets of *Liberty*, shou'd spare for no Cost to procure the same, as far as possible, for the rest of Mankind every where."
Which does show that the sentiment existed for some time before then, but again, I've never argued otherwise.

Which really begs the question of how much evidence for pre-Revolutionary anti-slavery sentiment you'd require before you change your view that there wasn't a critical mass of sentiment prior to 1775.
Well, considering that the Slave Trade Act wasn't actually passed until 1807, and that slavery as a whole wasn't banned until the mid 1830s, it certainly does strongly indicate that the critical mass of sentiment came sometime after 1775.

Except the first plan to use freed slaves against their masters was proposed by Commodore John Moore against the French in Guadeloupe in 1759. So the roots of the idea are about 20 years earlier than you claim.
Well, okay, didn't know about the Moore incident, but that doesn't really change much in regards to the American Revolution.

It was dramatically more prevalent, even compared to the North- where many states banned free blacks from living or voting. Look into the evidence of Frederick Douglass, Reverend Jeremiah Asher, Reverend Samuel Ringold Ward, William Wells Brown, John Brown, Amanda Smith, or William and Ellen Craft.
It probably helped that, by the 1850s, a substantial portion of British society was fairly sympathetic to African-Americans in general(again, it is true that slavery was seen as bad by most!), and William Brown and Frederick Douglass being abolitionists no doubt gained them rather more respect than they would have gotten otherwise.....but then again, this doesn't mean that racial prejudice was not widespread, merely that it was even lesser than in the Northern U.S.(and far removed from what could be found in the South!)

Did you know Queen Victoria had a black goddaughter?
Which no doubt would have been fairly controversial back in the day, even in the more liberal sections of British society, sad to say. (But it does show that the Queen was fairly progressive in some matters!)

Sure. Here's some quotes from American newspapers in 1859:
Consistently with national honor, there can be but one conclusion of this arrogant pretention of Great Britain, and we are confidant that our Government will never peaceably yield an inch of soil to this shallow, absurd and preposterous claim of a power, who for hundreds of years have pursued the policy of claiming strong and important military and naval stations, girdling the earth with her strongholds, as witness Gibraltar, Malta, Singapore...
[America] will not now, in the prime of manhood; in the plenitude of strength; justified by treaties; sanctified by every principle of right and necessity; permit the invasion of our soil, the violation of treaties, the planting of British Colonies upon AMERICAN SOIL.
"Our Rights and No Compromise... [Palmerston's government are] the hereditary haters of American progress and influence.... when it does come, that conflict must never cease till the last British soldier is driven from the American continent, either North or South of us."
Again, none of this proves your particular contentions about fears regarding Britain playing any major overall role in the slavery debate.....only that it did play a significant role in Manifest Destiny.

In fact, I don't see how you can understand American foreign policy (Oregon, Maine, Texas, anti-slave trade measures, Monroe doctrine etc.) without understanding that they perceive Britain as a threat.
Texas had very little to do with Britain, and rather more with Mexico. You are partly correct about Oregon, at least, but there wasn't much talk about slavery or anti-slavery, as there was the hope of completing Manifest Destiny, one way or the other.

Of course, I never actually said "Britain"- what I said was that they feel "the Union is under continual attack from the forces of monarchy and reaction".
Monarchy? Perhaps so, in the case of Britain themselves. But reaction? I'm sorry, but no, for quite obvious reasons that I need not state, or restate.

Britain is one manifestation of that, but inherent in American exceptionalism is the idea that other countries are trying to bring down "the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government".
And? And?

Sure. Heard of the New York Herald? Circulation of 105,840 copies on 7 November 1860? This is how Douglas Fermer's James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald describes its views.
[1861]: "He accused the British of having saddled America with the Negro in the first place, but having brought him it appeared the worst evil which Britain could inflict on America would be the ruin of her prosperity by fostering the emancipation movement." (p.63)
[1864]: "With increasing ill-temper, the Herald elaborated its pet theory that the Civil War had been caused by the British aristocracy's jealousy of American prosperity. Pre-war British interest in American abolition societies was evidence, Bennett proclaimed, that the anti-slavery movement was merely a tool of an anarchic British conspiracy to destroy the Union. Yet British slavers had first saddled America with the Negro and now, with typical duplicity, 'perfidious Albion' was doing everything in its power to aid the Confederacy. Herald readers were assured that British gold was the sinister root of all America's troubles." (pp.48-9)
There seems to have generally been one newspaper in each major American city which argued that abolitionism was a British plot to split up the United States: Klees' 1999 study cited as examples of these the Cincinatti Inquirer, the Indianapolis Daily State Sentinel, and the Chicago Times.
Sorry, but this isn't *nearly* enough to prove your particular point. I'm not doubting for a moment that there were a fair number of Northern paranoid cranks(perhaps especially people like the Know-Nothings, etc.) who actually believed these rumors, but you seem to be implying that such beliefs were basically widespread; there is no evidence, in the proper context, to suggest that they were, nor is there any evidence anti-British sentiment played any more than a minor role in the overall slavery debate.

No: in defence of slave ships, active in a trade which the US government had ruled to be piracy fifty years before, just because it's the British trying to crack down on it.
Again, there is no solid evidence that backs up this particular claim, though.

That would be the Lincoln who was elected to restrict the expansion of slavery, not to abolish it, and at his inaugural said explicitly he wasn't there to oppose it? That, in fact, he would retain slavery if it shored up the Union?
Truthfully, you have to understand that, like many other politicians, Lincoln often had to softball his agenda in order to play to moderates; in private, he despised slavery with all of his being, although he did initially hope that he could preserve the Union before getting rid of slavery. (His famous quote in that regard is often taken out of context.)

This is the man whose election is conclusive proof that the North is moving towards abolitionism, despite the fact that many of the people who voted for him just wanted to keep black people from undercutting the white man's wage in the North?
Some, yes, but not many; the situation was rather more complex and nuanced than you seem to realize.

Pretty sure we can: you can't mobilise opinion against another member of the in-group in the way you suggest.
You can, under certain circumstances; look at how Southerners who refused to sign up for the Confederate war effort voluntarily were often treated, and that's if they didn't cross the line and fight for the Union.

In the War of Independence, the colonies appealed to an American identity in opposition to the British: in the Civil War, the Confederacy appealed to a Southern identity in opposition to the North.
Yes, true, but how do you believe that this proves your point?

The slaveowners might try to construct an identity against antislavery Britain and the North, but by definition this is going to be less significant than an American identity built on not being British.
Only the South didn't build it's identity on not being British, but by not being "damn Yankees".

I think I've conclusively proved already that British antislavery attitudes are far stronger than you claim,
Unfortunately, Rob, not quite.

so the main thing to do is contradict the idea that abolitionism results from the War of Independence.
Although, as I pointed before, I never once claimed that British abolitionism was borne from the Revolutionary War; merely, that, for various reasons, at least some of them related to the loss of the Colonies, that it did enjoy a significant much-needed boost post-1780.

Firstly, the link between the language of the rebels and antislavery is far weaker than you claim: for generation after generation, the Americans see no inherent contradiction between "all men are created equal" and applying property qualifications to black voters, banning free blacks from settling in states, et cetera ad nauseam.
Many didn't, yes: the sad truth is, the Revolution, great phenomenon that it was, did not exactly change attitudes overnight, and many of these political realities were difficult to overcome(in fact, even some white men couldn't vote until the Jackson era), even if many of the Founders *did* desire to ultimately allow all free men to vote.

However, the British belief that slavery is fundamentally immoral requires a far smaller push to turn it into abolitionism:
*Somewhat* smaller, yes, I'll gladly grant you that. *far* smaller its really pushing it, though.

just the belief that it's right to impose British moral customs on the dependent plantation societies in the Americas.
I'm afraid that's not accurate.

This attitude is far more likely to emerge if Britain establishes its suzerainty in the Americas than if it loses the war.
If we grant your assumption that the language does count, then we have two scenarios. In the first, if slavery is America's "original sin" (Madison), and the American rebels lose the war in large part because the British free slaves,
Which wasn't at all likely to happen, seeing as genuine abolitionism had not yet hit critical mass at that point in time, and that Loyalists only freed slaves(and not all that many! It actually seems possible, to me at least that the Patriots might have freed more overall, though I may be mistaken.) in many cases(such as with Lord Dunmore) to provide additional fighting forces.

why wouldn't former rebels throw themselves into the antislavery cause with far more vigour than they did historically after God has given a clear judgement against it?
The problem with this argument, however, is that, as I'd pointed out earlier, many people in Great Britain who *did* sympathize with the Patriots, saw their victory as a victory for the ideals of the Enlightenment, which many abolitionists took advantage of.

In the second, if the constitutional question is settled peacefully, what other significant causes do potential rebels have to campaign for than the abolition of slavery?
It depends on the scenario. For example, are the colonies still unfairly taxed? Do they not enjoy adequate representation?

How much more effective would those antislavery advocates be if they could communicate and collaborate freely with British abolitionists?
Distance would be a problem, though, as well as local laws in the Southern colonies that might hinder abolitionist publications, etc.

How many more people might Garrison have won over if he didn't have to call for the end of the Union in order to free the slaves?
Who knows? Assuming William Garrison isn't butterflied, it really would depend on the situation that developed after the war.

Bottom line seems to be that.....you're too wedded to your interpretation of how abolitionism grew to consider that similar results might have been obtained in a different way.
As I pointed out earlier, I do recognize that the abolitionist movement was around for quite a while beforehand, and I don't deny that, with the right PODs, there are at least a few different avenues that could have been quite plausibly taken. But we cannot deny that, IOTL, more than a few in Britain, particularly many who'd outright sympathized with the Patriots in North America, saw a bright future for the Enlightenment post 1780; and the abolitionists of the day took that sentiment and ran with it, eventually winning over enough of the public to see their noble aims come to full fruition.

But, to be honest, and I mean no offense, I'm afraid your perspective does seem to be a tad limited in scope, based on what I've read here.
 
Last edited:
I think there is a lot of parallel development in both America and Britain. Prior to ARW it was one cultural space, and certainly abolitionists in Britain proper were unsurprisingly concerned with slavery in British America more than anywhere else. America certainly signed its own anti-Slave trade treaties and had ships assigned to patrol the Atlantic as early as 1819; yet it took America lots and lots more years (and a war) to abolish slavery domestically than Britain, which was already fairly committed to the idea by 1807 and made it into a morally-justifying tool of its own imperialism by 1840.

Why did Britain move so fast on this matter once it got going, when America, starting from a similar position, stalled and dragged its feet, especially following the uninterrupted string of British victories since the end of the ARW? If defeat in the ARW is what it took for Britain to get moving, why can't the same happen to the American colonists, who also have incipient abolitionist movements ready and waiting?

I mean, I just don't see the OTL outcome as a necessity for British abolitionism. There are other ways in which it could be achieved that are also plausible.
 
I think there is a lot of parallel development in both America and Britain. Prior to ARW it was one cultural space, and certainly abolitionists in Britain proper were unsurprisingly concerned with slavery in British America more than anywhere else. America certainly signed its own anti-Slave trade treaties and had ships assigned to patrol the Atlantic as early as 1819; yet it took America lots and lots more years (and a war) to abolish slavery domestically than Britain, which was already fairly committed to the idea by 1807 and made it into a morally-justifying tool of its own imperialism by 1840.

It is true that Britain abolished slavery far earlier than the U.S., did, but, again, if Britain had won, would it necessarily have come around the same date it did IOTL? For reasons that I have elaborated on earlier, I'm not terribly convinced of that.

Why did Britain move so fast on this matter once it got going, when America, starting from a similar position, stalled and dragged its feet, especially following the uninterrupted string of British victories since the end of the ARW?
Well, for one, the Southern Colonies were a primary source of revenue as far as agriculture goes.....the losses no doubt worked out greatly in favor of the abolitionists in the Empire.

If defeat in the ARW is what it took for Britain to get moving, why can't the same happen to the American colonists, who also have incipient abolitionist movements ready and waiting?
The circumstances were a bit different; although, by the way, IIRC, I may have mentioned earlier that there was a piece of legislation, introduced and supported by Thomas Jefferson, no less, that would essentially have outlawed slavery by 1800, in the *whole country*. Had the one representative from New Jersey been present, it might well have gone through.

I mean, I just don't see the OTL outcome as a necessity for British abolitionism. There are other ways in which it could be achieved that are also plausible.
I do agree with you on the basic principle, at least, but my question is, what PODs would be required for there to be either a failed Revolution, or no Revolution at all, and slavery is still banned in all the Empire, including the TTL Colonies, by 1840, or even earlier? Chances are, I'm afraid we might have to back a while for that to have a good chance of working, without taking some gambles, as it were.
 
That much is true. But he also did not extend his ruling to go beyond Britain's borders as well; had it happened some 20 years or so later, that might be a different story-but in 1772, sadly, the momentum just wasn't there yet. Mansfield no doubt recognized this.
No disagreement from me in regards to Taney, but I'm not so sure Mansfield was willing to go quite that far; he did affirm the wrongness of slavery, but didn't really go any further than that.
But Mansfield didn't have the ability to go further: he can't hand out laws for the colonies from the judge's bench, and claiming he could have is to completely misinterpret the role of the case. Claiming the Somerset judgement isn't anti-slavery because Mansfield doesn't free slaves overseas is like claming Dred Scott isn't pro-slavery because Taney didn't announce that all black people in the US were re-enslaved. Mansfield actually makes the most positive anti-slavery statement he could: rather than just saying that in this individual case Somerset is free, he denies the applicability of slavery without positive law.
It certainly does show that it got the attention of the more enlightened members of the upper class, by then, yes.
Your assertion that it's only "enlightened" people who are affected is falsified by my later statement that the foundational assumption of the Somerset judgement was also accepted by those who supported slavery:
Edward Long and Samuel Estwick, two leading British slavery apologists, conceding in the aftermath of the Somerset case that slavery is 'repugnant to the spirit of English laws'
What this demonstrates, which is the reason I quoted it in the first place, is that antislavery attitudes have permeated British society even among the people who are there to support it.
Well, considering that the Slave Trade Act wasn't actually passed until 1807, and that slavery as a whole wasn't banned until the mid 1830s, it certainly does strongly indicate that the critical mass of sentiment came sometime after 1775.
No it doesn't: all it indicates is that the weight of sentiment hadn't yet been converted into support of abolition. However, the fact that it hadn't isn't proof that it couldn't: if Britain had not had to contend with the fragility of its control over its remaining colonial possessions and the expense of war with all the major European powers, the existing widespread antipathy towards slavery in Britain might have been transferred into support for compensated gradual emancipation more quickly than historically. This is what we call alternate history.
Well, okay, didn't know about the Moore incident, but that doesn't really change much in regards to the American Revolution.
Yeah, it does. You played down the strength of British antislavery on the grounds that the Loyalists started freeing slaves only when they started losing, i.e. as a tactic of desperation, in reaction to losing. The fact that it was suggested as a legitimate strategy with which to open a war almost twenty years before falsifies your point and provides further evidence of the strength and breadth of British abolitionist sentiment before the war of independence.
It probably helped that, by the 1850s, a substantial portion of British society was fairly sympathetic to African-Americans in general(again, it is true that slavery was seen as bad by most!), and William Brown and Frederick Douglass being abolitionists no doubt gained them rather more respect than they would have gotten otherwise.....but then again, this doesn't mean that racial prejudice was not widespread, merely that it was even lesser than in the Northern U.S.(and far removed from what could be found in the South!)
If you'd actually "look[ed] into the evidence," rather than just posting "well I suppose this doesn't necessarily disprove my point even though I haven't read what they said", you would have found that most of them argued not just that they were better treated in Britain, but that racial prejudice was almost non-existent there:

Douglass: "having enjoyed nearly two years of equal social privileges in England... never, during the whole time having met with a single word, look or gesture, which gave me the slightest reason to think my colour was an offense to anybody".

William Wells Brown: "the prejudice which I have experienced on all and every occasion in the United States... vanished as soon as I set foot on the soil of Britain"

Rev. Samuel Ringgold Ward: "In this country [England] it is diffficult to understand how little difference is made in the treatment of black men, in respect to their position".

John Brown: "Was pleased to see among the two or three hundred students three coloured young men... there apeared no feeling on part of the whites... except that of companionship and respect... here again were seen young coloured men arm in arm with whites".

Amanda Smith: "no one acted as though I was a black woman"

Joseph Renter-Maxwell: "A resident for more than three years at one of the best colleges in Oxford, I was not once subected to the slightest ridicule or insult, on account of my colour"

Linda Brent: "During all that time [10 months], I never saw the slightest symptom of prejudice against colour".
Which no doubt would have been fairly controversial back in the day, even in the more liberal sections of British society, sad to say. (But it does show that the Queen was fairly progressive in some matters!)
No, it wasn't: it was widely praised. Can you please stop taking the evidence I provide to support my argument and, without knowing anything about it, acting as if it supports yours?
Again, none of this proves your particular contentions about fears regarding Britain playing any major overall role in the slavery debate.....only that it did play a significant role in Manifest Destiny.
Do you remember what we're talking about in this context?
Again, missing the point. Plenty of people in the North, from the New York Herald to Lincoln himself, saw shoring up slavery as the price of keeping the Union together. That phenomenon stems from the perception of outside threats: that the Union is under continual attack from the forces of monarchy and reaction, and that any price is worth paying to keep the great experiment alive. Remove that factor, you remove a major incentive for many in the North to tacitly or overtly support slavery.
Britain was barely considered to be a real immediate threat to the Union, until *after* the South started breaking away.
Lo and behold, a bunch of quotes proving Britain was considered to be a real immediate threat, with nefarious intent - girdling the earth with her strongholds, planting... British Colonies upon AMERICAN SOIL, hereditary haters of American progress and influence - dating from *before* the South started breaking away... and you start talking about slavery again because you've got confused.
Texas had very little to do with Britain, and rather more with Mexico.
President John Tyler, concluding that Texas must not become a satellite of Great Britain, proposed annexation. After some sparring, Houston consented to the negotiation of a treaty of annexation, which was rejected by the United States Senate in June 1844. Annexation then became an issue in the presidential election of 1844; James K. Polk, who favored annexation, was elected. Tyler, feeling the need of haste if British designs were to be circumvented, suggested that annexation be accomplished by a joint resolution offering Texas statehood on certain conditions, the acceptance of which by Texas would complete the merger.[source]
And? And?
This and other comments suggest you're really struggling to understand my argument- possibly because you insist on chopping it up into unmanageable fragments- so let me lay it out again.

In the aftermath of the American War of Independence, the newly-United States began to create a national identity which focused on mythologising the uniqueness of their institutions and presenting the United States the only true flagbearer of the standard of liberty. With this in mind Americans tended to assume an attitude of jealousy and fear towards them on the part of other nations, particularly Britain: they interpreted many actions, such as border or boarding disputes, as attacks on the "Great Experiment". This sense of encirclement, of constant struggle between reaction and liberty, led to an attitude that the primary goal of political life was to maintain the Union. As a result, many individuals in the North were inclined to tacitly or overtly support the institution of slavery as the price of keeping the South within the Union and avoiding its breakup, and to see abolitionism as a foreign doctrine and the abolitionist movement, with its transatlantic links, as being supported by the British in order to divide the Union. Only when the likelihood of enticing the South back into the Union by offering to maintain slavery was outweighed by the likelihood of forcing the South back into the Union by emancipating its slaves did this tactic end. Removing the need to maintain American unity, and the perception of British antislavery as a threat to its integrity, would dramatically speed the process of abolition.
Sorry, but this isn't *nearly* enough to prove your particular point. I'm not doubting for a moment that there were a fair number of Northern paranoid cranks(perhaps especially people like the Know-Nothings, etc.) who actually believed these rumors, but you seem to be implying that such beliefs were basically widespread; there is no evidence, in the proper context, to suggest that they were, nor is there any evidence anti-British sentiment played any more than a minor role in the overall slavery debate.
...what? These views are held by the most widely circulated newspaper in the world, and at least one major newspaper in each of the four cities which Klees used as the basis of a study of Northern political sentiment. The only reason you don't think it's enough is because it doesn't support your argument!

Again, there is no solid evidence that backs up this particular claim, though.
... what? The facts of the case are that the US banned the slave trade, that they refused to allow Britain the right of search and instead signed an agreement to effectively police American slave ships on the West African coast, that they failed to do so, that the British started boarding American-flagged slave ships plying between Cuba and the Gulf, that the US threatened to declare war as a result, and that New York militia regiments volunteered to invade Canada. Again, you're just flat-out denying evidence because it doesn't fit your case.

Truthfully, you have to understand that, like many other politicians, Lincoln often had to softball his agenda in order to play to moderates;
Right. So Lincoln has to pretend not to be an abolitionist to win the North, but his election is a sign that the North's abolitionist.

in private, he despised slavery with all of his being, although he did initially hope that he could preserve the Union before getting rid of slavery. (His famous quote in that regard is often taken out of context.)
Yeah, most especially by you. Lincoln's "I would save the Union" letter is a manifesto for the attitude I described of:
The North was prepared to tolerate slavery as long as it contributed to domestic unity.
Lincoln's attitude towards slavery is clear well before he's a candidate for president: "I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery," in a reaction against the idea that "slavery is to be made a ruling element in our Government". That the importance of the Union is his paramount concern is shown by his statement that "Our friends in the South, who support Buchanan, have five disunion men to one at the North." As late as 1864 he was drafting letters saying that if Jefferson Davis wanted "peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me".

Yes, true, but how do you believe that this proves your point?
If you could at least try and think about the points rather than have me laboriously explain them multiple times, that would really help. The key to resistance is identity: you have to create a shared identity that differs from the people who are attacking, and the British identity simply doesn't work when a push for abolition is led by by British. Kind of the reason why we don't have the United States of West Britain now.

I'm afraid that's not accurate.
Well, Christopher Leslie Brown's Moral Capital thinks it is, and as you can't rationalise your argument beyond a flat denial I think I'll stick with logic and historiography.

The problem with this argument, however, is that, as I'd pointed out earlier, many people in Great Britain who *did* sympathize with the Patriots, saw their victory as a victory for the ideals of the Enlightenment, which many abolitionists took advantage of.
Except that the movement before the war is focused on abolition, and the movement after focused on the slave trade- a dramatically more limited scope, in large part resulting from splits between the British and American antislavery movement following the War of Independence. A single, united society, drawing on the existing antipathy towards slavery in Britain and no longer hampered by the American need to preserve the Union at the price of tolerating slavery, stands a much better prospect of success.

But, to be honest, and I mean no offense, I'm afraid your perspective does seem to be a tad limited in scope, based on what I've read here.
Yeah, I'm done here. I've had enough of citing, quoting and evidencing only for you to show that you haven't engaged either with my arguments or with the facts I've laid before you; of extensive evidence met with "well I don't think that's true"; and snippy sarcasticly patronising comments intended to suggest that the only reason you talk in vague generalities about the topic is because it's so obvious that you're right:
Unfortunately, Rob, not quite.
And? And?
 
That would be the Lincoln who was elected to restrict the expansion of slavery, not to abolish it, and at his inaugural said explicitly he wasn't there to oppose it? That, in fact, he would retain slavery if it shored up the Union? This is the man whose election is conclusive proof that the North is moving towards abolitionism, despite the fact that many of the people who voted for him just wanted to keep black people from undercutting the white man's wage in the North?

Alright, now you've moved far too far in the other direction. The Republican Party's 1856 platform was an opposition to "the twin barbarisms in society, polygamy and slavery." Their motto was "Free labor, free land, free men." There were riots when slave-catchers attempted to remove slaves from New England towns. Nobody but a neo-confederate doubts Lincoln's personal anti-slavery convictions, and most of Lincoln's most infamous statements about preserving slavery if it would preserve the Union were taken during the Civil War while he was preparing to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and should be taken in that light.

Right. So Lincoln has to pretend not to be an abolitionist to win the North, but his election is a sign that the North's abolitionist.

As you've pointed out, there was a conflict between abolitionism and the need to keep the Union together. On the eve of Lincoln's election, northerners were perfectly aware that their country was very close to dissolving. To claim that Lincoln needed to "pretend not to be an abolitionist to win the North" because the North must have been so pro-slavery is disingenuous. The openly hostile to slavery Republican party would not have swept to popularity in the North if abolitionism was unpopular there. What Lincoln could not be seen as was a radical who would rip the nation in two by antagonizing the South over it. You're right, both Lincoln and the North as a whole prioritized keeping the Union together over stamping out slavery every time, but you can't then jump to the conclusion that that must have therefore meant that the North really had pro-slavery sympathies. Much of the Fire-eater's venom for the North in the years leading up to the war came from what they saw as relentless attacks upon "their peculiar institution," and it was this rage against the existence of northern abolitionism that led the South to jump the gun and secede despite not a single law being directed at curtailing Southern slavery where it already existed.

Except the first plan to use freed slaves against their masters was proposed by Commodore John Moore against the French in Guadeloupe in 1759. So the roots of the idea are about 20 years earlier than you claim.
Freeing slaves to fight against their masters was an even older tactic than that, the Spanish used it against British colonies during the War of Jenkin's Ear.

Monarchy? Perhaps so, in the case of Britain themselves. But reaction? I'm sorry, but no, for quite obvious reasons that I need not state, or restate.
Just to add to the discussion, Britain was absolutely seen as a threat, and as the United States's main rival. Relations between the two in the 1840s were best described as "poisonous." The War of 1812 was not a fluke, the two countries could have easily gone to war on at least two other occasions ("Pig War" incident in 1859, and the Trent Affair during the start of the Civil War)

"As long as America was ours," wrote abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1788, "there was no chance that a minister would have attended to the groans of the sons and daughters of Africa, however he might feel for their distress."
This is very interesting, and relevant to this thread, but does nothing to further CaliBoy's argument about abolitionism in Britain. To me the meaning of this statement is clear: It doesn't matter what British public opinion is, or even what the personal opinion of ministers was, as long as the enormously profitable slavery of the American South was attached to the British empire, economics would ensure that abolition didn't happen. I don't think that's entirely true, I think it would eventually happen, but with Southern cotton-production and the British transformation of that cotton into textiles being enclosed into one united system, I think it would be decades before public opinion would be strong enough to challenge the existence of slavery in the latter. Look at the sympathy that there was in Britain for the Confederacy. Yes, a massive proportion of the British public was not sympathetic whatsoever to the Confederacy, but among certain members of the upper classes and the capitalist class that had a financial connection to the South, there was support and sympathy. Now imagine that we're not talking about a foreign country, but a region that's always been British, and has historically been less virulently opposed to British rule than the far northern colonies. I think people underestimate the massive change to the British Empire in every way that would be the consequence of a victory in the ARW.

Still, this is all going to have nothing to do with the grassroots spread of abolitionism in Britain, it would just be countered by the financial reasons against abolitionism.

In the second, if the constitutional question is settled peacefully, what other significant causes do potential rebels have to campaign for than the abolition of slavery?

The constitutional question is massive and it if could have been easily solved, it would have in the 1770s. It essentially strikes at the heart of the nature of the British empire. One imperial parliament would be difficult to the point of being unfeasible. On the other hand, allowing increasing autonomy in any of the British colonies would essentially put an expiration date on the British empire. In the early 1770s people were wondering that if something was not done if America would end up ruling Britain. In addition to contending with that perceived threat, the British would have easily been able to see that if one set of colonies demanded self-government, all of them would. The idea that Parliamentary Supremacy unambiguously also meant unlimited parliamentary supremacy over colonial assemblies came as a direct response to the growing power of the American colonial assemblies, as the legislative authority of Britain over its colonies no longer looked so obvious and self-assured. This idea is the complete opposite of the later idea of granting colonies more autonomy as they became more self-sufficient, and switching to the latter would be a complete reversal of policy.

The decision to adopt a political system of granting increasing powers to the governments in Canada and Australia (The white Self-Governing colonies) came about in large part due to the idea that if those colonies were not granted more autonomy, they would eventually revolt like the American ones had. I can quote directly from parliamentary speeches if you want evidence. The fact that Canada and Australia would eventually become fully independent was accepted as early as 1850, and had been moving in that direction for decades before. With a British win in the ARW, all bets are off.

How much more effective would those antislavery advocates be if they could communicate and collaborate freely with British abolitionists?

Maybe more, but the pro-slavery cotton and sugar-cane lobbies, as well as their associated business partners would also be able to communicate and collaborate freely. How much is Britain going to focus on gaining alternate sources of cotton with the American South in their empire?
 
Last edited:
But Mansfield didn't have the ability to go further: he can't hand out laws for the colonies from the judge's bench, and claiming he could have is to completely misinterpret the role of the case. Claiming the Somerset judgement isn't anti-slavery because Mansfield doesn't free slaves overseas is like claming Dred Scott isn't pro-slavery because Taney didn't announce that all black people in the US were re-enslaved. Mansfield actually makes the most positive anti-slavery statement he could: rather than just saying that in this individual case Somerset is free, he denies the applicability of slavery without positive law.

I don't recall making such a claim, though, TBH. I do realize that he was, in fact, genuinely anti-slavery, but as you yourself would point out, his authority may not have even reached that far.

Your assertion that it's only "enlightened" people who are affected is falsified by my later statement that the foundational assumption of the Somerset judgement was also accepted by those who supported slavery:
What this demonstrates, which is the reason I quoted it in the first place, is that antislavery attitudes have permeated British society even among the people who are there to support it.
Okay, I certainly do accept that there were at least a few cases like this, as you have rightly proven here.

No it doesn't: all it indicates is that the weight of sentiment hadn't yet been converted into support of abolition. However, the fact that it hadn't isn't proof that it couldn't: if Britain had not had to contend with the fragility of its control over its remaining colonial possessions and the expense of war with all the major European powers, the existing widespread antipathy towards slavery in Britain might have been transferred into support for compensated gradual emancipation more quickly than historically. This is what we call alternate history.
That's true, but I can't help but think some of these scenarios posited in this thread are a little too optimistic.

Yeah, it does. You played down the strength of British antislavery on the grounds that the Loyalists started freeing slaves only when they started losing, i.e. as a tactic of desperation, in reaction to losing.
Well, I didn't say it was quite *all* the reason, but it certainly did play a substantial role, along with the perceived need for backup troops for the white Loyalists.

The fact that it was suggested as a legitimate strategy with which to open a war almost twenty years before falsifies your point and provides further evidence of the strength and breadth of British abolitionist sentiment before the war of independence.
While I can admit that you are correct in the way that it was indeed a known strategy for a while before then, it does not necessarily prove that British abolitionist sentiment was yet as strong as you may have believed.

If you'd actually "look[ed] into the evidence," rather than just posting "well I suppose this doesn't necessarily disprove my point even though I haven't read what they said", you would have found that most of them argued not just that they were better treated in Britain, but that racial prejudice was almost non-existent there:
Looking at the quotes below.....

Douglass: "having enjoyed nearly two years of equal social privileges in England... never, during the whole time having met with a single word, look or gesture, which gave me the slightest reason to think my colour was an offense to anybody".

William Wells Brown: "the prejudice which I have experienced on all and every occasion in the United States... vanished as soon as I set foot on the soil of Britain"

Rev. Samuel Ringgold Ward: "In this country [England] it is diffficult to understand how little difference is made in the treatment of black men, in respect to their position".

John Brown: "Was pleased to see among the two or three hundred students three coloured young men... there apeared no feeling on part of the whites... except that of companionship and respect... here again were seen young coloured men arm in arm with whites".

Amanda Smith: "no one acted as though I was a black woman"

Joseph Renter-Maxwell: "A resident for more than three years at one of the best colleges in Oxford, I was not once subected to the slightest ridicule or insult, on account of my colour"

Linda Brent: "During all that time [10 months], I never saw the slightest symptom of prejudice against colour".
And I don't doubt that all of these folks were treated relatively well; it does lead credence to the argument that the British public was more enlightened overall than even New Englanders in the States, I will certainly admit that. But your belief that racial prejudice was "almost non-existent" over there by 1850, however, isn't exactly supported.

No, it wasn't: it was widely praised. Can you please stop taking the evidence I provide to support my argument and, without knowing anything about it, acting as if it supports yours?
I'll look into that: I do find it plausible that at least some Britons probably respected this gesture by the Queen(she was quite popular after all, IIRC), but it can't have happened without some controversy: this was the mid-19th century, after all.

Lo and behold, a bunch of quotes proving Britain was considered to be a real immediate threat, with nefarious intent - girdling the earth with her strongholds, planting... British Colonies upon AMERICAN SOIL, hereditary haters of American progress and influence - dating from *before* the South started breaking away... and you start talking about slavery again because you've got confused.

President John Tyler, concluding that Texas must not become a satellite of Great Britain, proposed annexation. After some sparring, Houston consented to the negotiation of a treaty of annexation, which was rejected by the United States Senate in June 1844. Annexation then became an issue in the presidential election of 1844; James K. Polk, who favored annexation, was elected. Tyler, feeling the need of haste if British designs were to be circumvented, suggested that annexation be accomplished by a joint resolution offering Texas statehood on certain conditions, the acceptance of which by Texas would complete the merger.[source]
Well, okay, but this particular citation has rather more to do with foreign policy than the slavery debate; again, I do not question that Britain was seen as a major threat in that area. But I have not seen anything that supports a widespread Northern acceptance/embrace of slavery simply to poke a stick in Britain's eye, as it were.

In the aftermath of the American War of Independence, the newly-United States began to create a national identity which focused on mythologising the uniqueness of their institutions and presenting the United States the only true flagbearer of the standard of liberty. With this in mind Americans tended to assume an attitude of jealousy and fear towards them on the part of other nations, particularly Britain: they interpreted many actions, such as border or boarding disputes, as attacks on the "Great Experiment". This sense of encirclement, of constant struggle between reaction and liberty, led to an attitude that the primary goal of political life was to maintain the Union.
Okay, and do realize I never once argued against *this* point, because it happens to be true. However, though:

As a result, many individuals in the North were inclined to tacitly or overtly support the institution of slavery as the price of keeping the South within the Union and avoiding its breakup, and to see abolitionism as a foreign doctrine and the abolitionist movement, with its transatlantic links, as being supported by the British in order to divide the Union.
This argument does not take into account the various political nuances that existed at this time, however. I don't deny for a second that there were a few Northerners who absolutely did tacitly support slavery: look at many of the Doughfaces, or most of the Copperheads, like Clement Vallandigham.

Only when the likelihood of enticing the South back into the Union by offering to maintain slavery was outweighed by the likelihood of forcing the South back into the Union by emancipating its slaves did this tactic end. Removing the need to maintain American unity, and the perception of British antislavery as a threat to its integrity, would dramatically speed the process of abolition.

The outbreak of the war certainly got many of the Know-Nothings, Doughfaces, etc. to quiet down. That I don't doubt.

...what? These views are held by the most widely circulated newspaper in the world, and at least one major newspaper in each of the four cities which Klees used as the basis of a study of Northern political sentiment. The only reason you don't think it's enough is because it doesn't support your argument!
It's really not enough to support the implied argument that these beliefs of Northern abolitionism being a puppet of British imperialism were widespread, when they weren't. It does tell us that these rumors *did* see a fair amount of circulation, and were supported or at least allowed to be put out by some powerful institutions, but nothing more.


... what? The facts of the case are that the US banned the slave trade, that they refused to allow Britain the right of search and instead signed an agreement to effectively police American slave ships on the West African coast, that they failed to do so,
that the British started boarding American-flagged slave ships plying between Cuba and the Gulf, that the US threatened to declare war as a result, and that New York militia regiments volunteered to invade Canada. Again, you're just flat-out denying evidence because it doesn't fit your case.
I didn't deny that such things happened. I did, however, question your particular interpretation of why these incidents occurred.

Right. So Lincoln has to pretend not to be an abolitionist to win the North, but his election is a sign that the North's abolitionist.
Of course, I don't deny that abolitionism was not, by any means, the only major reason that Lincoln was elected; there were indeed other issues. But we can't deny that abolitionism did enjoy significant support in many areas of the North by 1860.


Yeah, most especially by you. Lincoln's "I would save the Union" letter is a manifesto for the attitude I described of:

Lincoln's attitude towards slavery is clear well before he's a candidate for president: "I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery," in a reaction against the idea that "slavery is to be made a ruling element in our Government". That the importance of the Union is his paramount concern is shown by his statement that "Our friends in the South, who support Buchanan, have five disunion men to one at the North." As late as 1864 he was drafting letters saying that if Jefferson Davis wanted "peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me".
Okay, and I don't recall saying that he didn't start out that way, initially. But he certainly did end up there eventually!

Well, Christopher Leslie Brown's Moral Capital thinks it is, and as you can't rationalise your argument beyond a flat denial I think I'll stick with logic and historiography.
The problem is, though, unless I'm missing something(granted, I've never read his book), Brown's argument seems to be rather problematic; if it was all about imposing British values on the Colonies, then, going by some of the arguments you've posed, wouldn't that have greatly harmed the movement as a whole?

Except that the movement before the war is focused on abolition, and the movement after focused on the slave trade- a dramatically more limited scope, in large part resulting from splits between the British and American antislavery movement following the War of Independence. A single, united society, drawing on the existing antipathy towards slavery in Britain and no longer hampered by the American need to preserve the Union at the price of tolerating slavery, stands a much better prospect of success.
Perhaps so, but there's no getting around the fact that without that critical opprotunity afforded by the loss of the Colonies, it would become somewhat difficult to achieve total abolition by 1840. Not impossible, mind, but certainly challenging.

Alright, now you've moved far too far in the other direction. The Republican Party's 1856 platform was an opposition to "the twin barbarisms in society, polygamy and slavery." Their motto was "Free labor, free land, free men." There were riots when slave-catchers attempted to remove slaves from New England towns.

Very true, very true. Nobody is denying that prejudice was a real problem even up North, but this shows that there were more than a few people not willing to accept slavery, or tolerate slavers attempting to step beyond their boundaries, as it might be said.

As you've pointed out, there was a conflict between abolitionism and the need to keep the Union together.
That is very true, and was even so to a fair degree in 1860.

On the eve of Lincoln's election, northerners were perfectly aware that their country was very close to dissolving. To claim that Lincoln needed to "pretend not to be an abolitionist to win the North" because the North must have been so pro-slavery is disingenuous. The openly hostile to slavery Republican party would not have swept to popularity in the North if abolitionism was unpopular there. What Lincoln could not be seen as was a radical who would rip the nation in two by antagonizing the South over it. You're right, both Lincoln and the North as a whole prioritized keeping the Union together over stamping out slavery every time, but you can't then jump to the conclusion that that must have therefore meant that the North really had pro-slavery sympathies. Much of the Fire-eater's venom for the North in the years leading up to the war came from what they saw as relentless attacks upon "their peculiar institution," and it was this rage against the existence of northern abolitionism that led the South to jump the gun and secede despite not a single law being directed at curtailing Southern slavery where it already existed.
Also true.

Freeing slaves to fight against their masters was an even older tactic than that, the Spanish used it against British colonies during the War of Jenkin's Ear.
Okay, and that may indeed be true. I don't doubt that. However, though, much of what I've read has incidated that, for the most part, the Loyalists mainly freed slaves as a backup fighting force, and, in part, when they realized that the war wasn't going their way.....which does not, in any sense, disprove the fact that at least some Loyalists did indeed have noble intentions in mind, particularly many of those who guided freedmen to the Canadas and the Maritimes.

Just to add to the discussion, Britain was absolutely seen as a threat, and as the United States's main rival. Relations between the two in the 1840s were best described as "poisonous." The War of 1812 was not a fluke, the two countries could have easily gone to war on at least two other occasions ("Pig War" incident in 1859, and the Trent Affair during the start of the Civil War)
That's true. But Rob C. here seems to have been arguing that *many* Northerners supported slavery against Britain, including as actively against perceived British utopianism.

To me the meaning of this statement is clear: It doesn't matter what British public opinion is, or even what the personal opinion of ministers was, as long as the enormously profitable slavery of the American South was attached to the British empire, economics would ensure that abolition didn't happen.I don't think that's entirely true, I think it would eventually happen, but with Southern cotton-production and the British transformation of that cotton into textiles being enclosed into one united system, I think it would be decades before public opinion would be strong enough to challenge the existence of slavery in the latter.
I agree with the basic premise: as much as I liked reading Mumby's Centuries of Shadow TL, there is absolutely no way slavery could have survived to the present day, thanks to economic realities alone, let alone sociopolitical realities.

Look at the sympathy that there was in Britain for the Confederacy. Yes, a massive proportion of the British public was not sympathetic whatsoever to the Confederacy, but among certain members of the upper classes and the capitalist class that had a financial connection to the South, there was support and sympathy.
This is also true, based on what I've read-a large part of it was due to the largely Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage of most of the Southern elite(but with some Scots-Irish and a few other European ethnicities mixed in, like the Huguenots), but IIRC, at least some Southerners hoped that Britain would intervene in the crisis, thus guaranteeing independence to the C.S.A.

Now imagine that we're not talking about a foreign country, but a region that's always been British, and has historically been less virulently opposed to British rule than the far northern colonies. I think people underestimate the massive change to the British Empire in every way that would be the consequence of a victory in the ARW.
That seems about right to me.

Still, this is all going to have nothing to do with the grassroots spread of abolitionism in Britain, it would just be countered by the financial reasons against abolitionism.
I think there's some truth to that. Much of abolitionism here in the U.S. was a grassroots affair as well.

The constitutional question is massive and it if could have been easily solved, it would have in the 1770s. It essentially strikes at the heart of the nature of the British empire. One imperial parliament would be difficult to the point of being unfeasible. On the other hand, allowing increasing autonomy in any of the British colonies would essentially put an expiration date on the British empire.
Seems about right to me, TBH.

In the early 1770s people were wondering that if something was not done if America would end up ruling Britain.
Hmm....I'm honestly not sure if I've ever heard that before, but it does make some sense, to me at least, given how things turned out IOTL in terms of population, etc. in the real world U.S.

In addition to contending with that perceived threat, the British would have easily been able to see that if one set of colonies demanded self-government, all of them would. The idea that Parliamentary Supremacy unambiguously also meant unlimited parliamentary supremacy over colonial assemblies came as a direct response to the growing power of the American colonial assemblies, as the legislative authority of Britain over its colonies no longer looked so obvious and self-assured. This idea is the complete opposite of the later idea of granting colonies more autonomy as they became more self-sufficient, and switching to the latter would be a complete reversal of policy.
I think the latter idea could have come about rather earlier than IOTL, under the right circumstances.....to be truthful, though, I have not a clue as to what POD could accomplish this by circa 1790 or so.

The decision to adopt a political system of granting increasing powers to the governments in Canada and Australia (The white Self-Governing colonies) came about in large part due to the idea that if those colonies were not granted more autonomy, they would eventually revolt like the American ones had. I can quote directly from parliamentary speeches if you want evidence. The fact that Canada and Australia would eventually become fully independent was accepted as early as 1850, and had been moving in that direction for decades before. With a British win in the ARW, all bets are off.
While I personally believe that Canada would likely eventually be integrated into the rest of British North America, should a union like the C.N.A. of For Want of a Nail come about, Australia seems to be a lot harder to predict, in my view, just thanks to the distance alone.



Maybe more, but the pro-slavery cotton and sugar-cane lobbies, as well as their associated business partners would also be able to communicate and collaborate freely. How much is Britain going to focus on gaining alternate sources of cotton with the American South in their empire?
Unfortunately, this does seem to be quite likely, IMO, and any forays into the Middle East could be significantly delayed; it wasn't until the 1860s that the British began to focus much on Egyptian cotton.

And I am not disagreeing with you...;)

Best,
 
Last edited:
Top