Centre for the Study of International Slavery: 'Anglo-American Abolitionism and the Union War, 1861-1862'

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, American and British abolitionists joined in a unified critique of the United States and its chattel slavery system. Transatlantic reformers, from William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to George Thompson and Harriet Martineau, castigated the American political system for enshrining and protecting the peculiar institution. The onset of the American Civil War in April 1861, however, created a rift between many American and British antislavery activists. Drawn by the promise of a Union war against the slavery-powered Confederacy, leading American abolitionists joined the Northern pro-war coalition. They muffled their public criticism of the Lincoln Administration and joined in displays of Northern chauvinism. Such behavior brought American abolitionists into conflict with their British counterparts. With a few exceptions, including Thompson, British abolitionists believed that their antebellum stances on the immorality of the United States government still held. The Lincoln Administration in 1861-1862, after all, was fighting a war to preserve the Union, rather than to free the slaves. American and British abolitionists thus engaged in a prolonged war of words over the antislavery utility of the Union war--and, by implication, over the natures of their own reformist identities.