Microsoft Word - Palen_authorcorr [1].docx       1   Journal of the History of Economic Thought 37: 2 (June 2015): 291-304 Free-Trade Ideology and Transatlantic Abolitionism: A Historiography BY Marc-William Palen* This essay seeks to trace the many—and often conflicting—economic ideological interpretations of the transatlantic abolitionist impulse. In particular, it explores the contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism, and highlights the understudied influence of Victorian free-trade ideology within the American abolitionist movement. By bringing together historiographical controversies from the American and British side, the essay calls into question long-standing conceptions regarding the relationship between free trade and abolitionism, and suggests new avenues for research. Contradictions continue to surround the historical intersection of Anglo-American capitalism and slavery. The contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism sits high among them. This historiographical essay seeks to                                                                                                                 * Lecturer in Imperial History, University of Exeter; Research Associate in U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Studies Centre, University of Sydney. I would like to thank Richard Huzzey, Caleb McDaniel, Steve Meardon, and the attendees at Bowdoin’s 2013 symposium, “American Political Economy from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War,” for their comments and suggestions.       2   trace the many—and often conflicting—economic ideological interpretations of the transatlantic abolitionist impulse, including the understudied transnational role of Victorian free-trade ideology. By expanding the survey beyond the national level, the essay suggests as well that long-standing conceptions of free-trade ideology and abolitionism need reconsideration. The transatlantic connection between economic ideology and abolitionism remains unsettled. From the American side, this has arisen in part because there is no consensus concerning the ideological motivations of American abolitionists.1 Some historians have suggested that American abolitionists did not subscribe to classical liberal ideas. For example, while granting that antebellum abolitionists “generally adhered to free trade economic ideas, sometimes radically so,” James L. Huston has argued that “abolitionists possessed a biblical political economy, not a classical liberal one,” a moral impulse that became diluted from the 1830s to the 1850s (2000, p. 488; 1990, p. 614).2 Paul Goodman has similarly portrayed American abolitionism as an oppositional religious response to the era’s relatively unregulated capitalist marketplace: “Abolition was a struggle to impose on social and economic relations the moral principles that were rooted in Christian teachings” (1998, pp. xiv, 140). The typical evangelical historiographical tradition goes even further than these interpretations in suggesting that                                                                                                                 1 For the wide variation in interpretations, see also Huston (2000 and 1990). 2 K. R. M. Short, examining the English intersection of Christianity and antislavery, has drawn similar conclusions; British free trade was “firmly wed to anti-slavery,” and contained “a decidedly religious imprimatur” (1965–66, p. 313).       3   American abolitionists were Christian reformers whose evangelical morality was in inherent opposition to market capitalism.3 Neo-Marxist—or perhaps Marxish, as one historian recently called it (Rockman 2014, p. 447)—interpretations have instead emphasized the close American relationship between free trade and abolitionism in attempting to condemn both as legitimating forces on behalf of the laissez-faire antebellum marketplace; and thus for effectively enslaving the northern working class to industrial capitalism. With a heavy reliance on Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, the anti-slavery impulse is portrayed as a form of cultural imperialism or hegemony, skillfully enacted by way of the marketplace in order to ideologically inculcate the masses into a new industrial era of wage slavery.4 Others still have attempted to reconcile economic ideology and American abolitionism by avoiding the Marxist condemnation of either the humanitarian anti- slavery impulse or the antebellum marketplace. Thomas Haskell, for example, has suggested that the peaceable elements of market transactions sparked a new-found humanitarian sympathy that led to abolitionism. This resultant sense of marketplace responsibility was then extended to a moralistic northeastern sense of responsibility to bring an end to American slavery (Haskell 1985 and 1985b).5 For others, the                                                                                                                 3 See, for instance, Hart (1906, pp. 15, 181, 320); Loveland (1966); Stewart (1976); Mathews (1965); Wyatt-Brown (1969); McKivigan (1984); Schriver (1970); Lesick (1980). For earlier, more critical, evangelical interpretations, see Barnes (1933, pp. 3–16), and Randall (1940). 4 See, for instance, Ashworth (1995, pp. 131–181), Davis (1987), Davis (1975, pp. 45–47), Temperley (1980). 5 See also Ashworth (1987). This interpretation bears some similarity to that of Seymour Drescher concerning the British marketplace. Although granting laissez-faire capitalism and abolitionism were       4   predominantly middle-class abolitionists in the United States subscribed to an economic individualism and anti-institutionalism that at times bordered upon anarchism (Perry 1973; Elkins 1958, pp. 147–157; Forster 2014). For these and many other scholarly works, abolitionists’ extreme laissez-faire capitalist ideas consequently led to strained relations with labor unions.6 Studies of nineteenth-century contract law, in turn, have emphasized the classical liberal motivations of abolitionism (Stanley 1998), and economic historians have only just begun to re-explore the close connection—rather than opposition—between antebellum tariff debates, transatlantic abolitionism, and religious revivalism (Meardon 2008). On the British side of the abolitionist-free trade debate, too, we run into a historiographical quagmire. The questioning of the humanitarian impulse of British abolitionists can, of course, be traced back to the influential work of Eric Williams (1944), who acknowledged the confluence of free-trade ideology and abolitionism in England, but also suggested that declining profits from the transatlantic slave system, not humanitarianism, brought about the end of the British slave trade and Caribbean slavery in the early nineteenth century. This humanitarianism-in-decline motif remains a point of                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           closely connected, Drescher has contended that the market per se did not create the abolitionist humanitarian impulse; working-class social relations also played a big role, as did the rise of evangelism. According to Drescher, British abolitionism was thus born more out of a non-Marxist class struggle stemming from the antebellum capitalist market at moments of high national confidence and optimism, rather than from purely economic relationships or ideology (Drescher 1986 and 2012). 6 See, for instance, Bender, Davis, Haskell, and Ashworth (1992); Foner (1980); Cunliffe (1979); Searle (1998, pp. 64–67); Nye (1963, pp. 246–247); Schmidt (1998); Gerteis (1987, pp. xiv, 63–65); Glickstein (1979); Kraditor (1970, pp. 246–255); Lofton (1948); Fladeland (1984, pp. viii–xi); McKinvigan (1999).       5   historiographical disagreement amid the official British shift to free trade from the 1830s to the 1850s. Some, such as Andrew Lambert, have concluded that British anti-slavery sentiment, even at the governmental level, remained “genuine and heartfelt” even after England’s turn to free trade in the late 1840s (2009, p. 78). Others have instead further questioned the humanitarian motivations of British free traders. The recent work of Simon Morgan, for instance, emphasizes the willingness of the Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL, 1838–1846), a predominantly middle-class English free-trade movement, to work with the slaveholding American South for low reciprocal tariffs. Morgan thus concludes that the free-trade leaders of the ACLL had “subverted anti-slavery’s moral authority” by the mid-1840s (2009, p. 89). Political scientists Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape go so far as to suggest that the British pursuit of free trade from the 1830s onward “actually conflicted with anti-slavery” (1999, p. 636). Enterprising scholarship on the American side has recently been coming at this transatlantic issue from the other side of the political economic spectrum, by instead connecting abolitionism with mercantilism, and slavery with free trade. Matt Karp, for example, links free trade firmly to pro-slavery forces, suggesting that the international trade liberalization of the late 1840s was “an implicit acknowledgement of the primacy of slave-grown agricultural products.” Leaning upon the humanitarianism-in-decline narrative, Karp delves into the international and imperial dimensions of the South’s King Cotton ideology, and points to how southern free-trade advocates like John C. Calhoun correlated British anti-slavery sentiment with mercantilism, and looked with favor upon the English adoption of free trade in 1846 alongside the economic failings wrought by British emancipation and protectionism in the Caribbean. To southern expansionists,       6   according to Karp, these various international developments “reflected a larger ideological transformation. The political economy of slavery and free trade had defeated the rival model of abolition and mercantilism” (Karp 2014a, pp. 37, 39–40). By the 1850s, the European elites’ embrace of “global free trade at the same time as they recoiled from global free labor” only confirmed “the triumph of slavery on the world stage” (Karp, 2014b, p. 420). Walter Johnson similarly explores how the 1837 US economic crisis had “led the defenders of slavery to renew their commitment to free trade” (2013, p. 289), and Charles Sellers and William W. Freehling have touched upon these interrelated issues with respect to the earlier Nullification Crisis (Sellers 1991, p. 320; Freehling 1966, p. 255).7 Brian Schoen, in turn, has demonstrated how Cotton South leaders’ antebellum economic ideas were grounded in a sophisticated, although ultimately flawed, understanding of the global economy. He also grants that antebellum southern slavery had largely become “enmeshed” with the Jeffersonian economic ideology of free trade. However, Schoen also shows that it was “in more subtle, complicated, and less all-consuming ways than have been previously suggested” by uncovering the South’s oft-overlooked growth in popularity of protectionist ideology, blurring the line connecting southern free-trade ideology and slavery (2010, p. 101). John Majewski has also explored this protectionist element within the southern slave economy (2009). Such complexity within antebellum southern economic ideology suggests scholars should remain cautious about conflating in toto pro-slavery sentiment (or anti- slavery sentiment) with the ideology of free trade.                                                                                                                 7 Allen Kaufman (1982) draws similar connections between free trade and slavery.       7   These unsavory interpretations surrounding free-trade ideology and abolitionism are, some argue, further illustrated by the debate over free trade in West Indian sugar after British emancipation in the 1830s. Although some scholars have taken the English free traders at their word when they declared that free trade in the West Indies would advance the anti-slavery cause (Huzzey 2010; Searle 1998, pp. 58–63; Turley 1991, pp. 148–149), most portray this episode as one of amoral, or even immoral, free-trade forces overcoming humanitarian abolitionist calls for Caribbean protectionism.8 According to the latter, by mid-century, one-time humanitarian abolitionists in England were now alleged to have discarded their moral sensibilities in order to maintain their support for the principles (and profits) of British free trade abroad. The transatlantic role of abolitionist consumers in the early- to mid-nineteenth- century marketplace has therefore played a sizeable role in adding to the historiographical confusion surrounding free-trade ideology and abolitionism. For example, the American Free Produce Movement of the 1820s and 1830s at first glance might also be viewed as a protectionist-abolitionist movement, owing to its attempt to boycott slave-produced goods and to encourage instead the consumption of “free labor” goods. But even here, it gets murky, because, as Lawrence B. Glickman points out, the leaders of the movement were also supporters of a “truly free market” that would show free labor to be less expensive and more efficient than slave labor (2004, pp. 894–895, 898). Such classical liberal dimensions can also be found in free-labor consumer boycotts in England, as can                                                                                                                 8 See, among others, Pilgrim (1952, pp. 95–96); Curtin (1954, p. 157); Bolt (1969, p. 20); Temperley (1972, pp. 154–155); Bethell (1970, p. 273); Lorimer (1978, pp. 71, 117); Drescher (2002, p. 166); Hall (2002, pp. 338–339); Davis (2006, pp. 248–249); Morgan (2009).       8   the shifting nature of their moral responsibility (Huzzey 2012b). British anti-slavery boycotters like Joseph Sturge similarly believed in the “ameliorative power of free market capitalism” (Sussman 2000, p. 188) and “the framework of a liberal political economy” (Turley 1991, p. 149), in the long term, at least (Tyrrell 1987, p. 140).9 Contradictory interpretations surrounding the relationship between Anglo- American abolitionism and economic ideology, humanitarianism, and the capitalist marketplace all fall short of explaining the strong transatlantic connections between Victorian free-trade ideology and abolitionism. In contrast to the contention that the dominant abolitionist economic ideology was biblical rather than classical liberal, for instance, many abolitionists did indeed draw ideological inspiration from the latter, in particular the mid-century, cosmopolitan, free-trade ideology derived from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (Howe 1997; Palen 2014a). Famously espoused by Anti-Corn- Law League leader Richard Cobden (1804–1865), this Victorian free-trade ideology correspondingly came to be known as Cobdenism: the belief that international free trade and a foreign policy of non-interventionism would bring about domestic prosperity and world peace. For these believers, free men and free trade were far from disparate goals. And Cobdenites numbered among the leading transatlantic abolitionists. Through a transatlantic exploration of Victorian Cobdenism, rather than the more commonly studied Jeffersonian free-trade tradition of southern slave owners, the classical liberal intersection with abolitionism becomes more pronounced. The fact that, until at least the 1860s, some of the most prominent transatlantic Cobdenites were a regular who’s who of radical abolitionists has, until recently, received surprisingly little attention                                                                                                                 9 See also Searle (1998, pp. 61–63).       9   within abolitionist historiography. New studies have rediscovered the long-dormant transatlantic ties between free trade, Christianity, and abolitionism in the American North and Britain.10 For example, Stephen Meardon (2008) has observed that it was more than coincidental that the evangelical Quaker Joseph Sturge founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 at the same time that Richard Cobden organized the Anti- Corn-Law League—both around six years after the 1833 Emancipation Act at least ostensibly had ended slavery within the British Empire. Rather, Cobden and Sturge were representative of a growing alliance between Anglo-American abolitionism, free-trade ideology, and evangelism.11 Richard Huzzey (2012a) has similarly illustrated how, by the 1840s, the rise of Free-Trade England had not led to the fall of the British anti-slavery movement. The movement had splintered rather than declined; fractured rather than faltered. Though not “a nation of abolitionists,” Huzzey describes how Victorian Britain retained its humanitarian anti-slavery bona fides—and many of its most prominent abolitionist leaders stood at the vanguard of the ACLL fight for free trade. For example, W. Caleb McDaniel has connected more dots between transatlantic free trade and abolitionism, noting, for instance, how women of the ACLL staged free-trade bazaars, which gave direct and indirect encouragement to American abolitionists, and how                                                                                                                 10 This connection drew greater attention in the early twentieth century. In 1938, for example, Frank Klingberg argued, “The crusades for temperance, international peace, cheaper postage, free trade, antislavery, woman’s rights, and new religious movements were not separated by the Atlantic but united by it” (p. 542). Thomas P. Martin similarly drew connections between British free-trade advocacy and the Anglo-American anti-slavery cause (1928). See also Stanley (1983, pp. 82–83). On British Unitarian supporters of antislavery and free trade, see Stange (1984, p. 36). 11 For the latter, see also Yerxa (2012).       10   Garrisonian pacifist Henry Clarke Wright, among others, had developed close ties with the ACLL in their mutual fight against slavery (2013, pp. 122, 165–166). The anti- slavery and free-trade work of Harriet Martineau also fits within this transatlantic network (Midgley 1995, p. 130). As in Free-Trade England, the intersection of Cobdenism, evangelism, and abolitionism finds a similar intellectual pattern in the United States, and the pattern was purposeful. Richard Cobden, John Bright, and other leaders of the ACLL explicitly tied free trade and free labor together for its American anti-slavery audience. Cobden asked his disciples to “remember what has been done in the Anti-Slavery question. Where is the difference between stealing a man and making him labour, on the one hand, or robbing voluntary labourers, on the other, of the fruits of their labour?” (Meardon 2004, p. 212). The ACLL would even begin replacing “repeal” with “abolition,” as the latter contained more effective transatlantic resonance. The ACLL leadership also made sure to present their free-trade movement to international abolitionist correspondents in universalist religious and humanitarian terms. Cobden was quite clear on this point, noting that the league must appeal to “the religious and moral feelings . . . the energies of the Christian World must be drawn forth by the remembrance of Anti-Slavery.”12 Examples abound tying Cobdenism to transatlantic abolitionism. British Cobdenite George Thompson, for example, was sent to the United States to draw abolitionism and free trade more closely together. To aid both the anti-Corn Law and                                                                                                                 12 Morgan (2009, pp. 90–91); Temperley (1972, p. 195); Hilton (1988); Cobden to George Combe, 1 Aug. 1846, Add. MS 43660, Vol. XIV, Richard Cobden Papers; Richard Cobden to Peter Alfred Taylor, 4 May 1840, in Garnett (1910, p. 258). Pickering and Tyrrell (2000) explore this confluence in great detail.       11   anti-slavery movement, firebrand Thompson toured the United States, giving hundreds of speeches emphasizing the moral connections between Anglo-American free trade and abolitionism.13 More radical members of the American abolitionist movement held Thompson and his fellow “British Christians” in high esteem. With the support of their American abolitionist contacts, by the early 1840s, ACLL members like Thompson saw the possibility of an internationalization of free trade, beginning with the repeal of the Corn Laws “as a key” to anti-slavery advancement in America. Although it could not claim an ideological monopoly on Anglo-American abolitionist thought, the transatlantic abolitionist impulse was intimately associated with that of Victorian free-trade ideology.14 Massachusetts Reverend Joshua Leavitt, leader of the anti-slavery Liberty party and editor of the abolitionist Emancipator, was particularly noteworthy for tying American abolitionism to Cobdenism. From the late 1830s onward, Leavitt came to see that overturning the Corn Laws in England would eventually shift British trade from the importation of southern slave-grown cotton to western free-grown wheat. “Our Corn Law project,” he wrote to Liberty party presidential nominee James Birney in 1840, “looks larger to me since my return after seeing the very land where wheat grows. . . . We must go for free trade; the voting abolitionists can all be brought to that . . . and the corn                                                                                                                 13 See Morgan (2009, p. 90); Haynes (2010, pp. 192–199); Hilton (1988, ch. 2); Rice (1968); Thistlethwaite (1959, p. 162); Garrison (1836, pp. iii–xxxiii). 14 See, for instance, Temperley (1972, pp. 192–193); Turley (1991, p. 126); Fladeland (1972, chs. 10–11); Meardon (2008, p. 268).       12   movement will give us the West.”15 With Leavitt’s new-found transatlantic inspiration, he thereafter focused much of his attention on overturning the Corn Laws by developing an American repeal strategy that would aid British manufacturers and northern farmers (suffering from scarce credit after the banking crisis of 1837), all while striking “one of the heaviest blows at slavery, by relieving the free states of their dependence on cotton as the only means of paying their foreign debt.”16 Leavitt further strengthened his transatlantic ties through his correspondence with his English abolitionist friends and through the creation of American anti-Corn Law organizations in the American Northwest and New York, providing much-needed transatlantic moral support for the ACLL and strengthening his connection to Cobdenism (Davis 1990, pp. 180, 196, 202, 204; McPherson 1963). Thompson and Leavitt were not alone in bringing the ACLL’s free-trade fight to American shores, as explored in my forthcoming book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle Over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896. For instance, William Cullen Bryant, former Barnburner Democrat, Free Soiler, poet, abolitionist, uncompromising free trader, and editor of the New York Evening Post, also attended ACLL meetings in London during the 1840s. In admiration for Cobden, Bryant would afterward go on to edit the American edition of Cobden’s Political Writings in                                                                                                                 15 Leavitt to Birney, 1 Oct. 1840, in Dumond (1938, p. 604); Meardon (2008, pp. 268, 273–275, 285–295); Crapol (1986, pp. 92–102). 16 Emancipator, 1 May 1840, p. 2; Davis (1990, p. 171); Morgan (2009, p. 95); Martin (1928,1935, and 1941).       13   1865, and would become an early leader of the subsequent Gilded Age American free- trade movement.17 Arch-abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was himself heavily influenced by George Thompson and other British free traders. As one abolitionist-turned-protectionist friend, Giles Stebbins, recollected, “Garrison and others of the abolitionists whom I greatly respected, inclined to free trade; for their English anti-slavery friends were free traders.” In later years, Garrison became a member and corresponded frequently with the Cobden Club upon its creation in 1866. Expressing his thanks to the club “whose honoured name it bears,” he wrote to them: “I do not hesitate to avow myself to be a free trader to an illimitable extent.”18 Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts maintained particularly close mid- century ties with Cobden and Bright. Sumner first met Cobden in 1838 during a trip to England, and they developed a strong friendship in the decades leading up to and during the Civil War. Sumner duly became a strong advocate of Cobden’s quest for “Universal Peace.” In 1849, Sumner, seeking to inspire his audience of Free Soilers, reminded them of how the ACLL had brought together Tories, Whigs, and Radicals to repeal “the monopoly of the Corn-Laws. . . . In the spirit of these examples, the friends of Freedom have come together . . . to urge them upon the Government, and upon the country.”19 As Meardon observes, “in the broader context of peace and anti-slavery in which Sumner spoke, it was the rhetoric of Cobdenism” (2006, p. 216).                                                                                                                 17 Foner (1995, p. 153); Free-Trader (March 1870): 170; Bigelow (1890, pp. 182–183). 18 Stebbins (1890, p. 194); Morning Post, 7 Sept. 1875, 3. Divisions did exist among Garrisonians regarding West Indies sugar duties (McDaniel 2013). 19 Sumner to Cobden, 12 Feb. 1849, reel 63, Sumner Papers.       14   America’s first Cobdenites were an imposing group of abolitionists with strong transatlantic ties. Other American abolitionist leaders of the postbellum free-trade movement included Henry Ward Beecher, Edward Atkinson, Gamaliel Bradford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Earl Dodge, Parke Godwin, Benjamin Gue, Rowland Hazard, Edward Holton, James Redpath, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Thomas Shearman, Joseph Thompson, Francis Stout, Francis Vincent, Amasa Walker, and Horace White. Long after Cobden’s 1865 death, many of these American radicals would maintain correspondence with Britain’s Cobdenite leadership, and would continue to work toward bringing about Cobden’s universal vision of free trade and peace. These American friends of Cobden and Bright, these American subscribers to Cobdenism, headed the vanguard of Victorian America’s abolitionist and free-trade movements (Palen 2013 and forthcoming). Again, this is not to suggest that all abolitionists were Cobdenites. Transatlantic abolitionists could certainly point to numerous economic nationalists among their ranks, as could southern advocates of slavery. Why this continued disconnect within and between American and British abolitionist historiography? First, because many of the disagreements over the origins or motivations of Anglo-American abolitionism have arisen precisely from a desire to derive an all-encompassing intellectual motivation for abolitionism, even though there were multiple, and sometimes conflicting, ideological motivations for Anglo-American abolitionists.20 Some were driven principally by evangelism; others by pacifism; others by revolutionary Republicanism; others by economic nationalism; others by classical                                                                                                                 20 On the different abolitionist alignments, see, for example, Perry (1973); John R. McKivigan (1980); Friedman (1980); Friedman (1982); Huston (1990, p. 615).       15   liberalism; still more by some combination therein. These disparities do suggest that historians should avoid attempting to completely align a particular economic ideology with anti-slavery, be it market fundamentalism or market loathing. They should accept that there were multiple ideological conceptions of anti-slavery, much as there were multiple conceptions of liberty (Huzzey 2014). Second is the common tendency to halt studies of transatlantic abolitionism in 1865. As Caleb McDaniel has recently suggested, loosening the chronological end points might contain further revelations: “Today the neglected period of anti-slavery in America is not the first third of the nineteenth century, but the last” (2014, p. 85). Later trajectories indicate earlier sympathies. Relying upon the conclusion of the Civil War as end point has skewed American abolitionism, and overlooks the postbellum free-trade fight of former abolitionists to “unshackle” the fetters of American protectionism.21 The previously missed mid-century American influx of Victorian free-trade ideology— Cobdenism—was intimately tied to the antebellum transatlantic abolitionist movement, followed soon thereafter by the controversial politico-ideological struggle over American trade policy after the Civil War. For them, at least, it was but the next logical step in seeking the emancipation of mankind (Palen 2013 and forthcoming). Third, for those antebellum studies that do traipse into the postbellum era, their research has focused largely upon abolitionist work—or the lack thereof—on behalf of civil rights during Reconstruction. Yet, an even closer study of free trade and                                                                                                                 21 Indeed, the rhetoric of antebellum abolitionism permeated the postbellum debate over tariff reform; protectionists and free traders alike frequently employed the language of abolitionism to decry the opposition (Palen forthcoming).       16   abolitionism in the postbellum era sheds added light on why Reconstruction-era civil rights largely failed. Many of these antebellum abolitionist free traders would become the postbellum reformist leaders of the Liberal Republican and Mugwump movements. With the slaves ostensibly freed, these laissez-faire reformers would come to view the federal occupation of the New South with abhorrence, a counterproductive and even immoral abuse of government power, much as they would come to view with disgust the mainstream postbellum Republican adherence to protectionism (Slap 2006; Palen 2013, 2014b, and 2015). The reformists’ laissez-faire faith would correspondingly shift from freeing men to liberalizing American trade. It is here, rather than in the antebellum era, that the case might more persuasively be made that free-trade advocacy led to a declining humanitarian interest in civil liberties for freedmen and freedwomen, as the moralistic condemnation of these former abolitionists shifted from the plight of former slaves to what they considered to be the protectionist enslavement of American trade. Fourth is the common tendency to assume that antebellum abolitionist ideas arose within a national vacuum.22 The global turn within the history of capitalism and abolitionism offers numerous ways of surmounting this historiographical stumbling block.23 Bringing together the global history of capitalism with the global history of ideas (Moyn 2014) certainly looks promising. Comparative approaches to the historical intersection of economic ideology and nineteenth-century abolitionism could similarly                                                                                                                 22 Huston previously observed this parochial turn: that it was “highly unsettling” how intellectual histories of anti-slavery have “focused so closely upon particular aspects of northern culture” as to suggest that the American abolitionist movement “sprang entirely from internal northern developments” (Huston 1990, pp. 609, 619–620). 23 Et al., Huzzey (2011); Johnson (2013); Karp (2011); Allen (2014); Wyman-McCarthy (2014).       17   yield fertile intellectual soil. How, for example, did the Anglo-American story of free- trade ideology and abolitionism compare to that of the Danes, the French, or the Australians (Røge 2013; Almeida 2011; Perry 2014)? And what might happen if such comparative histories of abolitionism and ideology were coupled with McDaniel’s call for an extended chronological framework?24 The recent work of transnational scholarship on Cobdenism, the resurgence of the history of capitalism, and the interdisciplinary “global turn” illuminate that many avenues yet remain available for better understanding the intersection of free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism. REFERENCES Allen, Richard B. 2014. “Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and the Global Origins of the Post-Emancipation Indentured Labor System.” Slavery & Abolition 35 (2): 328–348. Almeida, Joselyn M. 2011. Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890. Farnham: Ashgate. Ashworth, John. 1987. “The Relationship between Capitalism and Humanitarianism.” American Historical Review 92 (Oct.): 813–828. _____. 1995. Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, Volume 1, Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press.                                                                                                                 24 See, for instance, Kaye (2009); Paisley and Lydon (2014).       18   Barnes, Gilbert Hobbs. 1933. The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1944. New York and London: D. Appleton. Bender, Thomas, David Brion Davis, John Haskell, and John Ashworth, eds. 1992. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bethell, Leslie. 1970. The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bigelow, John. 1890. William Cullen Bryant. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin. Birney, James Gillespie. 1938. Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831–1857. Edited by Dwight L. Dumond. Volume II. New York: D. Appleton. Bolt, Christine. 1969. The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction: A Study in Anglo- American Co-Operation, 1833–1877. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crapol, Edward P. 1986. “The Foreign Policy of Antislavery, 1833–1846.” In Lloyd C. Gardner, ed., Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press. Pp. 85-103.       19   Cunliffe, Marcus. 1979. Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context 1830–1860. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Curry, Richard O. 1968. “The Abolitionists and Reconstruction: A Critical Appraisal.” Journal of Southern History 34 (Nov.): 529–532. Curtin, Philip D. 1954. “The British Sugar Duties and West Indian Prosperity.” Journal of Economic History 14 (Spring): 157–164. Davis, David Brion. 1975. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. _____. 1987. “Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony.” American Historical Review 92 (Oct.): 797–812. _____. 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, Hugh. 1990. Joshua Leavitt: Evangelical Abolitionist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.       20   Drescher, Seymour. 1986. Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. _____. 2002. The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor Versus Slavery in British Emancipation. New York and London: Oxford University Press. _____. 2012. “The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism.” Slavery & Abolition 33 (Dec.): 571–593. Elkins, Stanley M. 1958. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eltis, David. 1982. “Abolitionist Perceptions of Society.” In James Walvin, ed., Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Pp. 195- 213. Fladeland, Betty. 1972. Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. _____. 1984. Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.       21   Foner, Eric. 1980. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. _____. 1995. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. New York: Oxford University Press. Forster, Sophia. 2014. “Peculiar Faculty and Peculiar Institution: Ralph Waldo Emerson on Labor and Slavery.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 60 (1): 35–73. Freehling, William W. 1966. Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836. New York: Harper & Row. Friedman, Lawrence J. 1980. “The Gerrit Smith Circle: Abolitionism in the Burned-Over District.” Civil War History 26 (March): 18–36. _____. 1982. Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830– 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garrison, Wm. Lloyd, ed. 1836. Lectures of George Thompson. . . . Also, A Brief History of His Connection with the Anti-Slavery Cause in England. Boston: Isaac Knapp. Gerteis, Louis S. 1987. Morality & Utility in American Antislavery Reform. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.       22   Glickman, Lawrence B. 2004. “'Buy for the Sake of the Slave’: Abolitionism and the Origins of American Consumer Activism.” American Quarterly 56 (Dec.): 889–912. Glickstein, Jonathan A. 1979. “'Poverty is Not Slavery’: American Abolitionists and the Competitive Labor Market.” In Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, pp. 195–218. Goodman, Paul. 1998. Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hall, Catherine. 2002. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hart, Albert Bushnell. 1906. Slavery and Abolition, 1831–1841. New York: Harper & Brothers. Haskell, Thomas. 1985a. “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility.” American Historical Review 90 (April): 339–361. _____. 1985b. “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility.” American Historical Review 90 (June): 547–566.       23   Haynes, Sam W. 2010. Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hilton, Boyd. 1988. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Howe, Anthony. 1997. Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1896. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Huston, James L. 1990. “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse.” Journal of Southern History 56 (Nov.): 609–640. _____. 2000. “Abolitionists, Political Economists, and Capitalism.” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (Autumn): 487–521. _____. 2004. “Economic Landscapes Yet to be Discovered: The Early American Republic and Historians’ Unsubtle Adoption of Political Economy.” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Summer): 219–231. Huzzey, Richard. 2010. “Free Trade, Free Labour, and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain.” Historical Journal 53 (June): 359–379.       24   _____. 2012a. Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. _____. 2012b. “The Moral Geography of British Anti-Slavery Responsibilities.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 22 (Dec.): 111–139. _____. 2014. “Concepts of Liberty: Freedom, Laissez-Faire and the State After Britain’s Abolition of Slavery.” In Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, and Keith McClelland, eds., Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 149–171. Johnson, Walter. 2013. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Karp, Matt. 2011. “This Vast Southern Empire: The South and the Foreign Policy of Slavery, 1833–1861.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. _____. 2014a. “King Cotton, Emperor Slavery: Antebellum Slaveholders and the World Economy.” In David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis, eds., The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War. Charleston: University of South Carolina Press. Pp. 36-55.       25   _____. 2014b. “The World the Slaveholders Craved: Proslavery Internationalism in the 1850s.” In Andrew Shankman, ed., The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land Labor and the Conflict for a Continent. New York: Routledge. Pp. 414-442. Kaufman, Allen. 1982. Capitalism, Slavery, and Republican Values: American Political Economists, 1819–1848. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kaufmann, Chaim D., and Robert A. Pape. 1999. “Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade.” International Organization 53 (Autumn): 631–688. Kaye, Anthony E. 2009. “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World.” Journal of Southern History 75 (Aug.): 627–650. Kinealy, Christine. 2010. Daniel O’Connell and the Anti-Slavery Movement. London: Pickering and Chatto. Klingberg, Frank. 1938. “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Social Reform in England.” American Historical Review 43 (April): 542–552. Kraditor, Aileen S. 1970. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–50. New York: Pantheon Books.       26   Lambert, Andrew. 2009. “Slavery, Free Trade and Naval Strategy, 1840–1860.” In Keith Hamilton and Patrick Salmon, eds., Slavery, Diplomacy, and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807–1975. Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, pp. 65–80. Lesick, Lawrence Thomas. 1980. The Lane Rebels: Evangelicalism and Antislavery in Antebellum American. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Lofton, Williston H. 1948. “Abolition and Labor: Appeal of the Abolitionists to the Northern Working Classes.” Journal of Negro History 33 (July): 249–283. Lorimer, Douglas A. 1978. Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Loveland, Anne C. 1966. “Evangelicalism and ‘Immediate Emancipation’ in American Antislavery Thought.” Journal of Southern History 32 (May): 172–188. Majewski,  John.  2009.  Modernizing  a  Slave  Economy:  The  Economic  Vision  of  the   Confederate  Nation.  Chapel  Hill:  University  of  North  Carolina  Press. Martin, Thomas P. 1928. “The Upper Mississippi Valley in Anglo-American Anti- Slavery and Free Trade Relations: 1837–1842.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 15 (Sept.): 204–220.       27   _____. 1935. “Cotton and Wheat in Anglo-American Trade and Politics, 1846–1852.” Journal of Southern History 1 (Aug.): 293–319. _____. 1941. “Conflicting Cotton Interests at Home and Abroad, 1848–1857.” Journal of Southern History 7 (May): 173–194. Mathews, Donald C. 1965. Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780–1845. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McDaniel, W. Caleb. 2013. The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists & Transatlantic Reform. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. _____. 2014. “The Bonds and Boundaries of Antislavery.” Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (March): 84–105. McKivigan, John R. 1980. “The Antislavery ‘Comeouter’ Sects: A Neglected Dimension of the Abolitionist Movement.” Civil War History 26 (June): 142–160. _____. 1984. The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. _____, ed. 1999. Abolitionism and American Reform. New York: Taylor and Francis.       28   McPherson, James M. 1963. “The Fight against the Gag Rule: Joshua Leavitt and Antislavery Insurgency in the Whig Party, 1839–1842.” Journal of Negro History 48 (July): 177–195. Meardon, Stephen. 2006. “Richard Cobden’s American Quandary: Negotiating Peace, Free Trade, and Anti-Slavery.” In Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan, eds., Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pp. 208-228. _____. 2008. “From Religious Revivalism to Tariff Rancor: Preaching Free Trade and Protection during the Second American Party System.” History of Political Economy 40 (Winter): 265–298. Midgley, Clare. 1995. Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870. London and New York: Routledge. Morgan, Simon. 2009. “The Anti-Corn Law League and British Anti-Slavery in Transatlantic Perspective, 1838–1846.” Historical Journal 52 (Feb.): 87–107. Moyn, Samuel, ed. 2013. Global Intellectual History. New York: Columbia University Press.       29   Nye, Russel B. 1963. Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830–1860. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Paisley, Fiona, and Jane Lydon. 2014. “Australia and Anti-Slavery.” Australian Historical Studies 45 (1): 1–12. Palen, Marc-William. 2013. “Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age: A British Free-Trade Conspiracy?” Diplomatic History 37 (April): 217–247. _____. 2014a. “Adam Smith as Advocate of Empire, c. 1870–1932.” Historical Journal 57 (March): 179–198. _____. 2014b. “Revisiting the Election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877.” In Edward O. Frantz, ed., A Guide to Reconstruction Presidents, 1865–1881. London: Wiley. Pp. 415-430. _____. 2015. “The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890–1913.” Diplomatic History 39 (Jan.): 157–185. _____. Forthcoming. The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle Over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.       30   Perry, Adele. 2014. “Vocabularies of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: The North American Fur-Trade and the Imperial World.” Australian Historical Studies 45 (1): 34–45. Perry, Lewis. 1973. Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Pickering, Paul A., and Alex Tyrrell. 2000. The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti- Corn Law League. London: Leicester University Press. Pilgrim, Elsie. 1952. “Anti-Slavery Sentiment in Great Britain, 1841–1854: Its Nature and Its Decline, with Special Reference to its Influence upon British Policy Towards the Former Slave Colonies.” PhD diss., Cambridge University. Randall, James G. 1940. “The Blundering Generation.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (June): 3–28. Rice, C. Duncan. 1968. “The Anti-Slavery Mission of George Thompson to the United States, 1834–35.” Journal of American Studies 2 (April): 13–31. Rockman, Seth. 2014. “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?” Journal of the Early Republic 34 (Fall): 439–466.       31   Røge, Pernille. 2014. “Why the Danes Got There First—A Trans-Imperial Study of the Abolition of the Danish Slave Trade in 1792.” Slavery & Abolition 35 (Dec.) 576–592. Schmidt, James D. 1998. Free to World: Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, 1815–1880. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Schoen, Brian. 2009. The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics and the Global Origins of the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schriver, Edward O. 1970. Go Free: The Antislavery Impulse in Maine, 1833–1855. Orono, ME: University of Maine Press. Searle, Geoffrey R. 1998. Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Sellers, Charles G. 1991. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press. Short, K. R. M. 1965-66. “English Baptists and the Corn Laws.”Baptist Quarterly 21: 309–320. Slap, Andrew L. 2006. The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era. New York: Fordham University Press.       32   Stange, Douglas C. 1984. British Unitarians against American Slavery, 1833–65. London: Associated University Presses. Stanley, Amy Dru. 1998. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stanley, Brian. 1983. “‘Commerce and Christianity’: Providence Theory, the Missionary Movement, and the Imperialism of Free Trade, 1842–1860.” Historical Journal 26 (March): 71–94. Stebbins, Giles. 1890. Upward Steps of Seventy Years. New York: John H. Lovell. Stewart, James Brewer. 1976. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery. New York: Hill and Wang. Sussman, Charlotte. 2000. Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Temperley, Howard. 1972. British Anti-Slavery, 1833–1870. London: Longman.       33   _____. 1980. “Antislavery as a Form of Cultural Imperialism.” In Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform. Hamden, CT: Dawson, Archon. Pp. 335-350. Thistlethwaite, Frank. 1959. America and the Atlantic Community: Anglo-American Aspects, 1790–1850. New York: Harper. Turley, David. 1991. The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860. London and New York: Taylor and Francis. Tyrrell, Alexander. 1987. Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain. London: C. Helm. Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. 1969. Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University. Wyman-McCarthy, Matthew. 2014. “Rethinking Empire in India and the Atlantic: William Cowper, John Newton, and the Imperial Origins of Evangelical Abolitionism.” Abolition & Slavery 35 (2): 306–327.       34   Yerxa, Donald A., ed. 2012. British Abolitionism and the Question of Moral Progress in History. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.