Black Anglophilia; or, The Sociability of Antislavery

In the summer of 1848, English patrons offered Alexander Crummell, then pastor of New York's Church of the Messiah, the opportunity to pursue a university education abroad, in a grand though by no means isolated gesture of British support for black abolitionists. Crummell's choice seems to have inspired some excruciating deliberation, especially in a long letter written to white antislavery partisan John Jay, a letter structured as a numbered dialectical exercise, four points in favor of the offer and two against. Would years in England make Crummell more useful to the abolitionist cause in America? It is an elaborately choreographed show of argument and disputation, before Crummell decides that, since "there is not a learned black minister in the whole U. S.," the potential benefits—"to myself, my people, & my race" ("Alexander Crummell" 143)—practically demand an extended stay abroad.

I find one of Crummell's arguments to Jay particularly compelling, not just because it reminds us of abolition's transatlantic scope, but because it reveals an anxious and adoring language of national wanting that suggests a much wider phenomenon of response to Great Britain. "You know," Crummell explains, "the English English universities are superior to our colleges. An English degree is of great value in America. Shd. I prove a faithful student and pass honorably through an English University. . . would not the learning of an English University in my own person and an English University degree, place me in a position among Amer- ican Clergymen, wh. wd. shame contempt, neutralize caste—yea even command respect & consideration?" ("Alexander Crummell" 143). In so making his case for an "English English" education, Crummell suggests that Britain's place in American antislavery was not just as a provider of sanctuary and capital, but as a repository of less tangible, more imaginary contributions—contributions that are political only by way of a peculiar and involving fascination with "Englishness" itself. "English English," as opposed to what? Wouldn't just "English"—since "our colleges" are not—do? Crummell appears to be after some quality of English national identity that is best stated in the form of a national identity, strictly speaking; the education he receives will be somehow more English than English, and, at the same time, grant him a transitive status back home, a new "position" derived from whatever comes to be most closely associated with England as Americans imagine it. This is not England, but some pure essence of England, and the echoic moment of sheer, elicitory English—of Englishy English—indulges with the same considerable relish as Julian Barnes's England, England, an eponymous theme park in which Big Ben is next to Stonehenge in a moat full of sheep. Crummell, that is, evokes a curiously augmented England—an England with all the attributes of England (dons and gowns, sociability and conversation, tradition and status)—and it is perhaps difficult to understand how just such a class-ridden mix is supposed to "neutralize caste" back home. We ought not be surprised that Crummell's editors gloss this reduplication with an apologetic "sic," as if what we have here is only an instance of semantic prattle, to recall Roland Barthes, and not a canny play to the strictly national insecurity Crummell assumes on his correspondent's behalf. That Jay, just two generations removed from the founding fathers, must implicitly know the social and political "value" of a wholly "English University degree," shows the measure to which nineteenth-century Americans could devote themselves to fantasies of an idealized England that retained an unlikely sense of national priority in the years after independence, despite skirmishes over geopolitical turf, and despite the more usual claims of American nationalism. That Crummell's Cambridge education might possess the power to "shame"—"yea even command respect & consideration"—in America begins to uncover what the black abolitionist abroad had to gain from the "English English."

I want to look closely at the "England" that figures prominently in abolitionist discourse, an...