Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850

Chapter Three. Spreading Liberty to Africa

chapter three Spreading Liberty to Africa Africa, so long forlorn, Jesus now will richly bless, With salvation’s joyful morn, Tidings of delightful grace Every toil-degraded slave, Bow’d beneath oppression’s rod Bleeding clemency shall save; Lead the African to God. —Joshua Marsden, “The Spread of the Gospel” (1810) After slave-trade abolition, Philadelphians and Londoners developed idealizations of Britannia, abolitionist empress of the sea, and Columbia, mother of the white republic, and imagined them saving the African continent from war, paganism , and the interior slave trade. Indeed, Anglo-American redemptive liberty would also “lead the African to God,” as Joshua Marsden, an American Methodist missionary, put it in his hymn, “The Spread of the Gospel.” Marsden’s lyrics were part of an outpouring of post-slave-trade abolition imaginary and documentary performances—poems, stage plays, missionary accounts, travel narratives, and scientific treatises—that saw Africa as a dark continent in need of salvation. Britons and Americans created visions of spreading liberty to Africa that, while different , were both intricately bound up with the way slave-trade abolition served to reconcile supposedly liberal nations with their slaveholding empires. Americans’ imperial fantasy of redeeming Africa through the spread of Christianity and civilization was linked to the fear of slave insurrection and the related impulse to purge the civic polity of black citizens. Britons’ urge to save Africa was, by contrast , grounded in expanding the empire’s naval prowess and on the continued contradiction between abolitionist nation and slaveholding West Indian empire. The American idea of removing blacks went back to Henry Thornton’s Sierra Leone scheme and Thomas Jefferson’s repatriation proposals in his Notes on 88 Slave-Trade Abolition Virginia, which Philadelphians like Thomas Branagan had revisited during the slave-trade abolition debates. In the 1810s and 1820s, Philadelphians and other Americans rephrased this impulse as a desire to spread liberty and Christianity to Africa through evangelical missions and by establishing a colony there of freed African American slaves. While the British also wanted to spread Protestantism via missions in Africa, London playwrights, poets, missionaries, and explorers focused on how British naval power could forcibly prohibit other nations from conducting the transatlantic slave trade, thus celebrating the extension of British liberty to a ravaged continent. After slave-trade abolition, Britons and Americans extolled Britannia and Columbia in her respective Temple of Liberty in much more overtly imperial terms than before. The London-based African Institution, founded in 1807 to replace the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, set as its goal the dismantling of the interior African slave trade as a means of extending Britannia’s “blessings of freedom and civilization to Africa.”1 The Royal Navy, meanwhile, established the West Africa Squadron to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the West African coastline, a strong assertion of Britannia’s naval prowess as “empress of the sea,” as British poet, James Montgomery, described her.2 In the United States, the American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded in 1816 to promote and support the African colony of Liberia for freed African American slaves. One of its founders, Reverend Robert Finley, pronounced that an American colony of free blacks in Africa would “extend the empire of liberty and Christian blessings to surrounding nations.”3 Francis Scott Key, a Baltimore Presbyterian who was closely involved with the establishment of a mission to Africa, invoked the Temple of Liberty when he predicted that removing freed American blacks to Africa would spread Columbia’s civilization to that continent , which would then witness “spires of temples glittering in the sun,” “harbors shaded by the snowy wings of departing and returning commerce,” and the “hum of industry resounding in the streets.”4 After slave-trade abolition, cultural producers on each side of the Atlantic invoked republican Columbia’s and monarchical Britannia’s liberty to promote the redemption of Africa in strikingly similar imperial language, albeit to different ends. In the United States this imperial ethos was compounded by the War of 1812, which engendered a new sense of national greatness.5 Triggered by British restraints on American naval trade neutrality during Britain’s war with Napoleon’s France, Americans and Britons shed blood between 1812 and 1814 over the United States’ insistence on neutral shipping rights, fury over British impressment of American citizens into the Royal Navy, and desire on the part of some Spreading Liberty to Africa 89...