The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War

Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World

by Edward B. Rugemer

While many historians look to internal conflict alone to explain the onset of the American Civil War, in The Problem of Emancipation, Edward Bartlett Rugemer places the origins of the war in a transatlantic context. Addressing a huge gap in the historiography of the antebellum United States, he explores the impact of Britain's abolition of slavery in 1834 on the coming of the war and reveals the strong influence of Britain's old Atlantic empire on the United States' politics. He demonstrates how American slaveholders and abolitionists alike borrowed from the antislavery movement developing on the transatlantic stage to fashion contradictory portrayals of abolition that became central to the arguments for and against American slavery. In this ground-breaking study, Rugemer examines how southern and northern American newspapers covered three slave rebellions that preceded British abolition--and how American public opinion shifted radically as a result. For example, American slaveholders learned from the Haitian Revolution and a series of West Indian slave rebellions that abolitionist agitation led to insurrection. When American slaves began reacting to antislavery rhetoric, slaveholders feared the Caribbean pattern of agitation and revolt had spread to the United States. In 1822 after the fierce debates over Missouri, several Charleston slaves conspired to seize their city, and in 1831 Nat Turner led a bloody revolt shortly after William Lloyd Garrison published his radical abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator . Turning fear into action, American slaveholders seized and burned the publications that abolitionists sent southward in the mail, and in the North, the partisans of slavery mobbed abolitionist meetings and silenced the discussion of slavery in Congress. Abolitionists, by contrast, took inspiration from the developments abroad. Leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, and William Ellery Channing used the West Indian emancipation to help advance their position, and members of John Tyler's presidential administration pushed for the annexation of Texas. Believing that the British achieved emancipation by mobilizing the British people with a robust public relations campaign, many African Americans, often joined by white allies, staged annual celebrations of the First of August, the day the Parliament enacted abolition. The celebrations grew and spread throughout the North, facilitating the emergence of an antislavery constituency that bolstered the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Richly researched and skillfully argued, The Problem of Emancipation explores a long-neglected aspect of American slavery and the history of the Atlantic World and bridges a gap in our understanding of the American Civil War.

Genres: Grad School, History

342 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

Edward B. Rugemer is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University.

A historian of slavery and abolition, Ed Rugemer grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and graduated from Fairfield University in 1993. He received his doctorate in History from Boston College in 2005 and joined the faculty at Yale in 2007. His first book The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2008) explores how the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean shaped the coming of the American Civil War. The book won the Avery Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians for the most original book on the Civil War era; the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize from Yale University; and was co-winner of the Francis B. Simkins Award of the Southern Historical Association for the best first book in southern history.

His second book, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2018), explains how organized slave resistance shaped the formation of Atlantic slavery through a comparative history of Jamaica and South Carolina from their colonial origins until the 1830s. The book won the Jerry H. Bentley Book prize of the World History Association, and the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize of the Yale MacMillan Center.

Rugemer’s current projects include editing the Cambridge History of the Caribbean, and a book length project on Charles Douglas, a Scottish migrant to Jamaica in the 1750s who became a resident slaveholder and superintendant of the Moore Town Maroons. Rugemer has also published articles in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Slavery and Abolition, Reviews in American History, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

At Yale, Professor Rugemer teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels on slavery and abolition in the Atlantic World from about 1500 to 1888. Previous to his career as a historian he served as a Jesuit volunteer, teaching at St. George’s College, a Jesuit high-school for boys in downtown Kingston, Jamaica, from 1994-1996. He continues to work with youth as a Little League baseball coach in New Haven.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Context
Where and how long is the civil war era
Role of media and public opinion in slavery, civil war and emancipation
The influence of religion on autonomy and slave insurrection
Abolition as a consciously international and atlantic phenomenon
Royalism vs. republicanism in abolition
- war as a referendum on republicanism
the role of propaganda, conspiracy and fear
the power of ideas and the limits of capitalism as an explanatory device
violence and autonomy in insurrection
a new view of an Atlantic Revolution?
Relationship between emancipation and citizenship, how do we define emancipation
Slavery and modernity

The power of the idea of abolition in the transatlantic context.

Switch from slavery as a necessary evil (everyone has it!) to a positive good (when the English and the French stop having it, we can’t all it a necessary evil

[Kari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid.