Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

William Knibb, who less than two years earlier had watched ‘the monster’ die in Jamaica.1 Knibb’s companions were Edward Barrett and Henry Beckford, two black abolitionist campaigners who were described in the notes that accompany Haydon’s painting only as ‘liberated slaves’,

Britain’s female abolitionists, despite their critical importance to the workings and funding of the movement were refused permission to speak.

brushed all concerns aside declaring, ‘This Convention occupies a moral elevation from which it may look down on any throne on the face of the earth . . .’

So confident were free African Americans of Britain’s commitment to abolitionism that all British visitors to the US were presumed to be opposed to slavery and warmly embraced by delegations of black Americans, whether they deserved such plaudits or not.14

When the nineteen leaders were tried for piracy, the court ruled that they had been illegally held in slavery and their use of force to effect their freedom was justified.

Daniel O’Connell, the architect of Catholic Emancipation, who spoke on the first day of the conference, was careful to draw a distinction between American slaveholders and ‘the honest citizens of America’.

American slavery was to be undermined economically by being undercut by cheaper goods from India and elsewhere that were produced by free labour,

John Bull and his American equivalent Brother Jonathan – a figure long since supplanted by Uncle Sam – had a relationship, in the mid-nineteenth century, that was in different ways as ‘special’ as that of the mid-twentieth.

They brought to Britain what were in effect dispatches from the front lines of the global abolition battle.

African Americans brought a raw authenticity to the campaign and became some of its most successful recruiting sergeants.

In March 1849, twenty-seven hours after entering the box, and having narrowly escaped suffocation, he arrived in Philadelphia, at the home of a sympathetic Quaker abolitionist. ‘I had risen as it were from the dead’, Brown later wrote.

Brown repeated the feat by having himself successfully posted from Leeds to Bradford in the same box.22

The African Americans were drawn to Britain by what the historian Richard Blackett called the nation’s ‘moral prestige’,25 and came to regard the country as a pulpit, a sanctuary from which they could preach against the sins of American slavery

neck collars and chains – some of which were manufactured in Britain even after British abolition, an uncomfortable fact which they made abundantly clear.

In 1850 the numbers travelling to Britain increased when in that summer the US Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act.

Those who arrived with skills or were simply lucky found work and became black Victorians, mostly marrying white British women,

His account reveals how British racism could force black immigrants into marginal and temporary work in entertainment and manual labour.

British newspapers liked to draw particular attention to the warmth with which black abolitionists were greeted by British audiences in contrast to the abuses they had suffered at the hands of Southern planters.

These nuanced, granular details remain useful for historians of slavery today. Other passages explained the laws that underpinned the slave system and the economics of cotton cultivation.

In Britain, Douglass was also free from the schisms and disputes within American abolitionism and became more of his own man, determined to forge his own alliances.

Slavery anywhere was a challenge to moral people everywhere, he argued. Humanity was an indivisible brotherhood and ‘when any part of that brotherhood is trampled into dust,’ he proclaimed, ‘all should spring at once to the rescue, and for their instant deliverance’.

On 29 October the two women arranged a meeting of abolitionists in Edinburgh, at which they began a campaign to purchase his freedom.

it was not to compensate the slave-holder, but to release me from his power; not to establish my natural right to freedom, but to release me from all legal liabilities, to slavery.’34

Britain was largely free from racial prejudice are broadly representative of those of the other African Americans who toured the country in this period.

British racism was mild in comparison to the strains they had known in the United States, and was therefore deemed to be not worth reporting.

In 1852 Henry Box Brown was the victim of an incredibly vicious and racialized attack by the Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Herald, which dismissed his audiences as the ‘shoeless daughters of the slums and alleys’ and him as a ‘bejewelled and oily negro’. Brown sued the editor and won £100 in damages.38

Scoble was passionately committed to stand up for black people but, so it seems, not to stand beside one.

if they would be willing to be placed next to a black man, and recorded a tally of those who objected and those who, like the radical moralist William Lloyd Garrison, declared themselves happy to be painted shoulder to shoulder with Beckford.

That Victorian capacity for being passionately committed to anti-slavery as both a moral principle and an article of British national identity while at the same time holding old racial ideas and dabbling in new ones can be seen in the writings of one of the most famous men of the age, Charles Dickens.

However, Dickens’ vivid heartfelt denunciation of American slavery exists on the same pages as his highly derogatory racialized descriptions of the black people he encountered.

The book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the author, the American abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her letter to Prince Albert, despite the overdose of meek humility, was arguably as brilliant a work of emotional manipulation as the novel it accompanied.

Tom is the simplistic and saintly figure that Stowe intended him to be, but also the embodiment of the stereotype of Africans that had emerged from within transatlantic abolitionism; honest, childlike, uncomplicated and deeply imbued in the Christian message.

The brutality of the punishment scenes was seen as so shocking that Stowe was repeatedly accused of exaggeration.

‘slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes of art. A work which should represent it strictly as it is, would be a work which could not be read’

“Hallo, there! What’s the matter? Are you sick, or reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” ’52

Uncle Tom did more to damage the reputation of America abroad and shine a light on Southern slavery than any other feature of the transatlantic abolitionist campaign.

To tap into this new interest anti-slavery speakers began to refract their own personal experiences and readings from their own slave narratives through references to famous passages in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

It was later in the nineteenth century that the name Jim Crow was appropriated as shorthand for the system of segregation and violent repression that condemned African Americans to spend a century in the wilderness, between the Civil War of the 1860s and civil rights campaigns of the 1960s.

In 1836, at the height of British abolitionism, three years after the passage of the Emancipation Act and four years before the World Anti-Slavery Convention, Jim Crow came to Britain.

From the 1830s to the 1850s white men in blackface delivered anti-slavery speeches from the stages of British theatres and music halls, in the same acts in which they rolled their eyes and crudely imitated black dancing, during their high-speed comic routines.

The historian Robert Nowatzki speculates as to whether blackface minstrelsy, for all its racism, ‘may have done more to stir up anti-slavery sentiment among the British working classes than formal anti-slavery campaigning was able to do’.

I don’t know a Welsh one, but one of the street nigger-singers is a real black, an African.’

The brothers played a part in sparking a banjo craze in the late nineteenth century that saw the instrument become a favourite among the rich and the aristocratic. It’s believed that the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, took banjo lessons from James Bohee.67

The Fisk Jubilee Singers, thanks to their ever-changing line-up, survived into the twentieth century and gramophone recordings of their singing exist.

Karl Marx, then resident in London, was said to have sung minstrel songs and taught them to his children.

‘Your old nigger—C.D’.69 He deployed that word – so repugnant to us today – as a term of endearment, using it to playfully imply that his love for his wife was so great that he was her slave.

In anti-slavery circles he was feted and celebrated, as he had been in the 1840s. But he noted a change. Britain of the late 1850s felt distinctly less welcoming than thirteen years earlier.

he sensed not just a decline in anti-slavery sentiment but a rise in racism. A harsher, less sympathetic attitude towards black people was in evidence.

overwhelmed by newly emergent racial ideas. The capacities of black people, intellectual, spiritual and political, were increasingly being called into question by new supposedly scientific ideas about race and the capacities of the various branches of humanity.

Yet for all its failings this enormous global undertaking cost Britain both blood and treasure. It was an early example of what we today would call a ‘humanitarian intervention’