William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform

2. EXERCISES IN MEDIA PROSELYTISM: Journalism and Revolutionary Apostolate, 1831–1833

2 exercises in media proselytism Journalism and Revolutionary Apostolate, 1831–1833 The Euro-American world was one marked by movement and flux in the early 1830s, when William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini began their revolutions, the former with the publication of his radical abolitionist paper the Liberator and the latter with the foundation of his democratic nationalist association Young Italy. Each of the two at this point was operating with a focus on his own national context and on the consequences that his radical words and actions would have on it; but they were also both aware of an international dimension within which their struggles clearly fitted and which linked their ideas on radical abolitionism and democratic nationalism to similar and parallel movements outside the United States and Italy. In 1831, while Mazzini became aware of this international dimension as a result of his early exile, Garrison increased his already well-established awareness after his coeditorship of the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Still, for both Garrison and Mazzini, full realization of the significance of the wider milieus —transatlantic in one case, continental in the other—in which they were inserted and in which they operated did not come until a few years later; then, it assumed an increasingly important role in their lives and views. Therefore, it is appropriate to analyze briefly these early-1830s milieus.1 On one hand, the most progressive antislavery forces were creating a network of Atlantic abolitionism that spread throughout the Englishspeaking world to engage more effectively in the struggle to abolish slavery in the British Empire, a struggle that Garrison followed and supported. At the same time, the dislocated activists of the various nationalist movements Exercises in Medi a Prosely tism 41 that had been defeated in the 1820s and in 1830 were meeting, exchanging opinions, and plotting together in a larger and larger gathering of political exiles (including Mazzini) who were coming from all over Europe to live in liberal France. In the late 1820s, the British abolitionist movement, headed by Thomas Fowell Buxton’s Anti-Slavery Society (ASS), achieved some important results , forcing the British Parliament to pass measures that promoted the slaves’ religious instruction, encouraged manumission, and banned the flogging of women. Although these achievements seemed limited, seen in an Atlantic dimension, the planters’ resistance to moving toward emancipation in the British colonies led to a new wave of slave rebellions; the largest of these, the “Baptist War,” occurred in Jamaica in 1831–32 and was almost concurrent with Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia in the summer of 1831. But by then, the abolitionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic, partly as a result of very active transatlantic contacts between radical black abolitionists , were moving in the same direction of transforming the struggle into an immediatist one, that is, one aiming at immediate emancipation as opposed to gradual abolition. This change influenced and radicalized the nascent network of Atlantic abolitionism.2 Within Atlantic abolitionism, it is possible to see a clear link between Garrison’s beginning of the immediatist phase of the American abolitionist movement through publishing the Liberator in 1831, then founding the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) in 1832, and the 1830–31 founding of the radical Agency Committee by the London group of the ASS; the Agency Committee was based on the same principles of combining abolitionism and immediatism, principles likely inspired by Elizabeth Heyrick’s influential pamphlet Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition (1824), which was certainly known to Garrison. Both Garrison’s NEASS—and, later, the American AntiSlavery Society—and the Agency Committee in Britain similarly engaged actively in the spread of abolitionist pamphlets and promoted the signing of petitions. Specifically, the British Agency Committee tried to persuade the British people to support plans and legal measures for the immediate and unconditional emancipation of all the slaves in the British Empire. Thus, the parallels, also chronological, between American abolitionism’s immediatist change and the contemporary British abolitionists’ support of immediatist views and strategies show us how Garrison’s revolution is better understood 42 W illi a m Ll oyd Ga r r ison a nd Giuseppe M a zzini when seen in a broader, Atlantic perspective and how it had an international dimension from the very beginning.3 A similar line of reasoning applies to the international ramifications of and contacts between the different varieties of nationalism and the...