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"On the cusp of the American Civil War, a new generation of reformers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Robison Delany and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, took the lead in the antislavery struggle. Frustrated by political defeats, a more aggressive slave power, and the inability of early abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison to rid the nation of slavery, the New Romantics crafted fresh, often more combative, approaches to the peculiar institution. Contrary to what many scholars have argued, however, they did not reject Romantic reform in the process. Instead, the New Romantics roamed widely through Romantic modes of thought, embracing not only the immediatism and perfectionism pioneered by Garrisonians but also new motifs and doctrines, including sentimentalism, self-culture, martial heroism, Romantic racialism, and Manifest Destiny. This book tells the story of how antebellum America's most important intellectual current, Romanticism, shaped the coming and course of the nation's bloodiest--and most revolutionary--conflict"--

Cover -- CONTENTS -- Preface to the Paperback Edition -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Liberty Party, 1840-1848 -- 1 The Formation of the Liberty Party -- 2 The Liberty Party Takes Shape: Early Development and the Election of 1844 -- 3 A Period of Uncertainty and Confusion, 1845-1846 -- 4 The Move to Free Soil, 1847-1848 -- 5 New England -- 6 The Middle States -- 7 The Old Northwest -- 8 The Liberty Party Appeal -- 9 African Americans and the Liberty Party -- 10 The Liberty Party Membership -- 11 The Garrisonians, the Liberty Party, and the Abolition Movement in the 1840s -- Afterword -- Appendix A. Votes in Major Statewide Races, 1840-1848 -- Appendix B. Banner Liberty Counties, 1844 -- Appendix C. National Liberty Party Platform, 1844 -- Appendix D. Liberty Membership -- Notes -- Index.

In this illuminating study, Gelien Matthews demonstrates how slave rebellions in the British West Indies influenced the tactics of abolitionists in England and how the rhetoric and actions of the abolitionists emboldened slaves. Moving between the world of the British Parliament and the realm of Caribbean plantations, Matthews reveals a transatlantic dialectic of antislavery agitation and slave insurrection that eventually influenced the dismantling of slavery in British-held territories. Focusing on slave revolts that took place in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, and in Jamaica in 1831-32, Matthews identifies four key aspects in British abolitionist propaganda regarding Caribbean slavery: the denial that antislavery activism prompted slave revolts, the attempt to understand and recount slave uprisings from the slaves' perspectives, the portrayal of slave rebels as victims of armed suppressors and as agents of the antislavery movement, and the presentation of revolts as a rationale against the continuance of slavery. She makes shrewd use of previously overlooked publications of British abolitionists to prove that their language changed over time in response to slave uprisings. Historians previously have examined the economic, religious, and political bases for slavery's abolishment in the Caribbean, but Matthews here emphasizes the agency of slaves in the march toward freedom. Her compelling work is a valuable analytical tool in the interpretation of abolition in North America, uncovering the important connections between rebellious slaves on one side of the Atlantic and abolitionists on the other side.

Explores the Civil War and the anti-slavery movement, specifically highlighting the plan to help abolish slavery by surrounding the slave states with territories of freedom and discusses the possibility of what could have been a more peaceful alternative to the war

"Between 1808 and 1867, the British navy's Atlantic squadrons seized nearly two thousand slave ships, 're-capturing' almost two hundred thousand enslaved people and resettling them as liberated Africans across sites from Sierra Leone and Cape Colony to the West Indies, Brazil, Cuba, and beyond. In this wide-ranging study, Maeve Ryan explores the set of imperial experiments that took shape as British authorities sought to order and instrumentalise the liberated Africans, and examines the dual discourses of compassion and control that evolved around a people expected to repay the debt of their salvation. Ryan traces the ideas that shaped 'disposal' policies towards liberated Africans, and the forms of resistance and accommodation that characterized their responses. This book demonstrates the impact of interventionist experiments on the lives of the liberated people, on the evolution of a British antislavery 'world system,' and on the emergence of modern understandings of refuge, asylum, and humanitarian governance."--

A history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone and how the British used its success to justify colonialism in Africa.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface to the Paperback Edition -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. Slavery, Property, and Emancipation in Revolutionary America -- 2. The Federal Convention and the Curse of Heaven -- 3. Slavery, Antislavery, and the Struggle for Ratification -- 4. To the Missouri Crisis -- 5. Antislavery, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index.

African slavery was pervasive in Spain's Atlantic empire yet remained in the margins of the imperial economy until the end of the eighteenth century when the plantation revolution in the Caribbean colonies put the slave traffic and the plantation at the center of colonial exploitation and conflict. The international group of scholars brought together in this volume explain Spain's role as a colonial pioneer in the Atlantic world and its latecomer status as a slave-trading, plantation-based empire. These contributors map the broad contours and transformations of slave-trafficking, the planta

Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- I. Initial Interactions -- 1. First Encounters -- 2. Provision of Necessities -- 3. Seeking New Privileges -- II. Later Developments -- 4. Emancipation -- 5. Providing Necessities for More -- 6. Wage Labor -- 7. Church and Community -- 8. Education -- 9. Freedpeople and Reformers at the War's End -- Appendix A -- Appendix B -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.