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Chapter 4: American Reform: Transatlantic Inspiration
- University of Virginia Press
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81 In April 1848 the popular Massachusetts poet and essayist James Russell Lowell composed an antislavery essay entitled “Shall We Ever be Republican ?” Lowell answered the question himself, declaring America would never be republican because tolerance of slavery violated moral norms established at the founding of the American republic. “We are afraid,” Lowell declared, “of our own principles.”1 Lowell’s answer to the question, “Shall We Ever be Republican?” thus actually would have better answered the question, “Shall We Ever Again be Republican?” For Lowell slavery was wrong because it was incompatible with the American revolutionary principle of equal opportunity shared by anyone submitting to authority established once the United States gained its independence. Lowell pressed for an end to slavery as an enactment of a previously enunciated political and social philosophy of universal rights. Other antebellum reformers joined Lowell in pressing the United States to enact the defunct philosophical radicalism of the American Revolution toward universal human rights. This was not a new argument by 1848, as historians have shown. But what often has not been recognized is that the European revolutions in 1848, a year that Timothy Messer-Kruse has called “a watershed in the history of American radicalism,” both inspired and embarrassed various American reformers. That year American peace advocates, troubled by war with Mexico and the revolutions in Europe, organized a peace conference in Brussels to meet European pacifists and strategize how to persuade governments to ban war. For American advocates of labor, free and slave, and women, the 1848 revolutions punctuated their own country’s complacency; gave them, at least momentarily, a common vehicle for their domestic agendas; and changed their strategy or direction toward creating an American revolutionary present. American reformers’ reaction to overseas events provides a measure of how much 4. American Reform Transatlantic Inspiration 82 Distant Revolutions they saw themselves as transnational “citizens of the world” and how they saw the role of the United States in participating in a new transatlantic democratic revolution.2 The international and inclusive aspects of American reform predated events of 1848. Quaker antislavery sentiment had arisen on both sides of the Atlantic from the eighteenth century, well before the rise of radical American abolitionism in the 1830s. American antislavery activists took inspiration from the British abolition of slavery in 1833, and British antislavery speakers toured the Northern states. Likewise, American abolitionists went to Europe. Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave, now an abolitionist editor and lecturer, toured Britain to describe the plight of American slaves. William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator carried the mottos “Our Country is the World” and “Universal Emancipation.” Garrison wrote in 1839 that abolitionism had a “republican character,” in that it encouraged “persons of both sexes, and of all classes and complexions— farmers, mechanics, workingmen, ‘niggers,’ women and all.”3 Likewise, an international sisterhood had fermented before 1848. American women’s rights advocates looked to Europeans of the eighteenth century’s age of revolutions, including Judith Sargent Murray, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Olympe de Gouges, and to contemporaries including Elizabeth Pease, Anne Knight, Jeanne Deroin, and Pauline Roland. Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anne Knight first met at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. There, in the wake of male organizers’ decision to prohibit women from speaking at the convention— chauvinism also was transatlantic—Knight began a feminist letter-writing campaign to potential sympathizers in Britain, the United States, and France, while Mott and Stanton conceived of the idea of a convention for women that would come to fruition later in the decade at Seneca Falls, New York. Meanwhile, through socialist newspapers and manifestoes advocating Saint-Simonianism, which called for government ownership of property, distribution of production to individuals according to their vocation , and social and technological progress through women’s participation in all aspects of public life, feminists in America and Europe began to network in the 1820s and to see connections between socialism and the cause of women.4 Historians have shown that American laborers and employers, meanwhile , largely shared republican values of economic independence and so- [54.242.191.214] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:55 GMT) American Reform 83 cial equality into the 1820s. But in the next two decades, partly due to the immigration of English and German radicals, workers in the United States embraced a more oppositional politics and understanding of industrializing social relations. This change bore some similarities to British and French workers’ movements at the time and was partly...