In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter seven Revolutionary Brotherhood Black Spartacus, Black Hercules, and the Wage Slave In the tumultuous 1840s and 1850s, the antislavery and democratic forces first unleashed in the Atlantic world by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions of the late eighteenth century were further inflamed by radical agitation and sociopolitical unrest. Labor conflicts and economic hardship convulsed London and Philadelphia during these years. Philadelphian white plebeians organized into labor unions and vented their distress into ever-intensifying anti-abolitionist sentiment and violence against the free blacks with whom they competed for jobs. London plebeians continued to channel their discontent into the Chartist movement, which demanded universal suffrage and factory reforms. In 1848, the unrest of the “hungry forties” culminated in a wave of pan-European socialist revolutions that reverberated in near-revolutionary tremors in the urban centers of Great Britain and the United States. Stirred by resurgent revolutionary zeal, radicals in London and Philadelphia resuscitated the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century revolutions to demand fulfillment of their democratic promises for plebeians and slaves. Debates about slavery escalated into transatlantic ferocity with the passage of the United States’ Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850, which mandated the return of escaped slaves to their owners, regardless of where they were captured. The bill enraged American abolitionists and reignited many Britons’ antislavery passions. As these events combined to inflame debates about slavery, liberty, and rights, figurative blacks became the symbolic embodiment of the crises of industrialization, poverty, and labor unrest.1 Writers, playwrights, and politicians analogized and contrasted the rights of industrial “wage slaves” and African chattel slaves. Scholars have tended to emphasize the way prominent nineteenth-century Britons and Americans argued that white “wage slaves” of the factories were far worse off than either the freed former slaves in the British West Indies or the still-enslaved African Americans in the southern United States.2 Those promoting this argument were typically hostile to transatlantic antislavery efforts, which they saw as directing philanthropy away from impoverished industrial workers and needed factory reform. 214 Radical Abolitionism, Revolt, and Revolution The analogy between wage slaves and chattel slaves, however, could go both ways, as some radical labor leaders, writers, and playwrights in both cities used it to plead for a “universal brotherhood” of industrial workers and enslaved blacks. These radicals, echoing Thomas Paine’s 1775 call for a “fraternity of brothers . . . unmindful of distinction” to found an egalitarian republic whose “Temple was Liberty,” called on industrial wage slaves, feudal serfs, and African chattel slaves to rise up together in a movement that would be simultaneously antifeudal, anticapitalist , and antislavery.3 Radical-leaning writers and playwrights in London and Philadelphia argued for this universal brotherhood by retelling stories of the eighteenth-century revolutions to emphasize what they failed to accomplish and demand the revolutionary promise of the “inalienable right” to liberty for the poor and the enslaved. London playwright George Dibdin Pitt and Philadelphian novelist, playwright, lecturer, and labor activist George Lippard were among those who interlinked the causes of white industrial workers and enslaved blacks in imaginative performances of the eighteenth-century revolutions. Pitt’s drama Toussaint L’Ouverture; or, The Black Spartacus (1846), held up its title character as a universalist icon of resistance. And between 1846 and 1848, Lippard performed and published Washington and His Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution, his fictionalized lectures on the American Revolution. The lectures, like his novel, Blanche at Brandywine , which was dramatized at Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum in 1847, valorized blacks as revolutionary heroes of a class-based struggle against oppression. While Pitt and Lippard incorporated minstrel-like traits into their blackface revolutionary heroes, they used them to call for radical and racially inclusive social and economic regeneration instead of exploiting them for racial ridicule. The Black Spartacus: Universalist Hero of Revolutionary Brotherhood George Dibdin Pitt brought together the causes of the urban poor and the enslaved black in Toussaint L’Ouverture; or, the Black Spartacus, which debuted against the backdrop of Chartist agitation for universal male suffrage and renewed antislavery efforts to dismantle slavery in the Americas. Pitt, in-house playwright for the Britannia Theatre in the impoverished East End neighborhood of Hoxton, was a frequent ventriloquist for the urban poor through his politicized dramas, which included The White Slave; or, Murder and Misery (1845), Terry Tyrone (1846)—about the United Irishmen’s revolt of 1798—and Revolution in Paris (1848). The intense class conflict of this era, coupled with economic and political [3.15...

Share