Abstract
Eighteen thirty eight marked the beginning of a new period of anti-slavery colonization history for a number of reasons. First, the Birmingham branch of the anti-slavery movement, under Sturge, successfully achieved their goal of the abolition of apprenticeship in the West Indies. This meant that the split between the slave trade and apprenticeship aspects of the British post-abolition anti-slavery movement was temporarily resolved and Buxton would be able to focus humanitarian attention on his campaign against the slave trade in Africa. Second, 1838 saw the establishment of a new Liberian constitution and the unification of the state colonies under a commonwealth system of government, with a commonwealth governor appointed by the ACS. Only Maryland in Liberia retained a separate government under their governor John Russwurm. This gave Liberians a greater say in government and resolved many of their demands. As Commander Andrew Foote noted in his description of the colony at this time ‘the United States government were beginning to realize the expediency of keeping permanently a naval force on the west coast of Africa; and notwithstanding difficulties and apprehensions resting gloomily on the future, Governor Buchannan, on landing with the new constitution, at Monrovia, on the first of April, 1839, seems to have inaugurated a new era for the African race’.1
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Notes
Commander Andrew H. Foote, Africa and the American Flag (New York, 1854/1862), 151–2.
Ronald Hyam, Britian’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914, Third Edition (Hampshire, 2002), 94.
Christopher Brown outlines the intellectual origins of the ‘Civilization, Commerce, and Christianity’ remedy, demonstrating that it emerged from myriad discrete sources, including the Royal Africa Company and Malachy Postlethwayt, Olaudah Equiano, and the preacher John Marrant among others. Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 269–83.
Charles Buxton, ed., Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Baronet. With Selections from His Correspondence (London, 1848), 448.
RHO Buxton Papers, MSS British Empire s444, Russell to Buxton, 20 August 1840; John Gallagher, ‘Fowell Buxton and the New African Policy, 1838–1842’, The Cambridge Historical Journal 10, 1 (1950), 51.
Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana, 1972), 269.
For more on the disputes between the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Convention, see Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaign 1780–1870 (London, 1992), 158–67;
Howard Temperley, British Anti-Slavery 1833–1870 (Charleston, South Carolina, 1972), 85–93.
For more, see, Zoe Laidlaw, ‘Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin’s Critique of Missions and Anti-slavery,’ History Workshop Journal 64, 1 (2007), 152–3.
Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the United States in 1841 (London, 1842), 166.
Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962), 222–3.
Svend E. Holsoe, ‘A Study of Relations between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in Western Liberia, 1821–1847’, African Historical Studies 4, 2 (1971), 350.
Lawrence Howard, ‘American Involvement in Africa South of the Sahara, 1800–1860’, Unpub. Ph.D. Diss., Harvard University, 1956, 45–9.
Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Antislavery Expedition to the River Niger 1841–1842 (New Haven, 1991), 154.
David Killingray, ‘“A Good West Indian, a Good African, and, in Short, a Good Britisher”: Black and British in a Colour-Conscious Empire, 1760–1950’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, 3 (2008), 368.
Hugh G. Soulsby, The Right of Search and the Slave Trade in Anglo-American Relations 1814–1862 (Baltimore, 1933), 41.
Donald L. Canney, Africa Squadron: The U.S. Navy and the Slave Trade, 1842–1861 (Washington, 2006), 18.
Charles Henry Huberich, ed., The Political and Legislative History of Liberia (New York, 1947), 686.
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© 2013 Bronwen Everill
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Everill, B. (2013). Slave Trade Interventionism. In: Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291813_6
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