Uprooted Emancipators: Transatlantic Abolitionism and the Politics of Belonging

Abstract

The scene unfolding before a group of American sailors who had intercepted a Portuguese slave ship in the South Atlantic could not have been more ghastly. African men and women, wrenched from their native shores, languished handcuffed on deck, covered in filth and tranquilized with rum. Attempts to speak with the terrified blacks bore no fruit until Philip Nolan, a decommissioned naval officer and participant in the rescue operation, managed to explain to the captives in broken Spanish that they need not fear their liberators. Nolan had all possible reason to pride himself on bringing this dramatic intervention to a happy conclusion. Yet his abolitionist heroism did little to soothe his troubled mind. While the Africans would be returned safely to their families, Nolan, who had forsaken his nation in a fit of anger, remained doomed to spending the rest of his life on the high seas, without permission to ever set foot on his native soil again. Stripped of his homeland, the exiled mariner found no comfort in an abstract humanity. His fate was to live and die as the notorious “Man without a Country.”¹